Murnane Gerald - A Million Windows

During his fifth year of being a teacher, he met up with circumstances the very opposite of those described in the previous sentence. The woman of all his mature-age students who attracted him most by her appearance and her deportment was also the one of all his students, whether male or female, who most impressed him by her writing. He tried to deal with her as he dealt with all his students, and according to what she told him afterwards he had mostly succeeded. Sometimes, after he had written some or another comment in the margins of some or another piece of her fiction, he felt sure that he must by now have told more than he had wanted to tell her, but even in this, so she also told him later, he had mostly succeeded also: she had found in his written words hardly more than she might have expected to find in the words of someone won over as a reader.

On the evening after the last meeting of the class that included the woman mentioned, she and her classmates, most of them mature-age, invited him to join them for drinks. The weather was very warm, and they sat under trees in semi-darkness near the cafeteria. He and she were among the last few to leave. She had drunk little, so he had observed during the evening, but he had drunk much. All of the students present had finished their undergraduate courses and expected to meet again seldom, if at all. Men and women, their teacher included, embraced one another before going their separate ways. As she later told him, he had misread her behaviour during their last minutes together, and yet he had not, so it later seemed, misread the letter that she had sent him soon after he had written to her as a result of his misreading.

They met occasionally in a hotel lounge near the building where she worked in an inner suburb, and they wrote, each of them, long letters as though trying to outdo one another in writing. Sometimes their letters included speculations about the future but they were more often concerned to interpret the past. After a certain time, she decided that they had written enough, although he felt as though much, much more demanded to be written. The few occasions when they were alone together seemed to bring her joy but they brought him nothing of the kind, which is all that he cares to report in writing about those occasions. On the last such occasion, he and she spent an afternoon in a large house of mud-brick in hilly, forested countryside north-east of the capital city. Before that day, each had talked sometimes of leaving his or her family: she her husband and daughter; he his wife and two sons. The house of mud-brick would be empty for a year while the owners were in Europe, and he and she might have spent their first year together on a forested hillside not far from the terminus of a suburban railway line. During the afternoon in the mud-brick house, each came to acknowledge that they would not meet again although they might well write to one another for many more years, which, in fact, they did.

He still recalls many of the details that occurred to him while he read for the first time a piece of fiction of hers written while she was his student and awarded by him the highest possible grade. He learned from her comments during the classroom discussion that the fiction, as he had supposed, was drawn from the author’s experience, which was a guarded form of words often used in the writing class to warn readers against supposing the text in question to be mere autobiography. The chief character of the piece of fiction is a young woman, hardly more than a girl, who spent her early years in a bleak district in the north-east of England before leaving home to live and work in London. She arrives in London at a time during the late 1960s when the city is sometimes called Swinging London.

The only piece of his own published fiction that might be understood as connected with her has for its fictional setting a house on a forested hillside where a group of writers of fiction is attending a series of writers’ workshops in which they read and comment on one another’s fiction. The writers taking part bind themselves by the strictest of rules. No one speaks to another during their days together in the house. During workshop sessions, all comments, even those made by the supervisor, are written in silence and later distributed as photocopies. No one looks into the face of another or signals to another or groans or sighs or laughs in the hearing of another. Anyone breaking any of these or other such rules is expelled at once from the house. In the early paragraphs of the piece of fiction, the first-person narrator seems several times to refer to the recent expulsion from the house of a female person for whom the rules were seemingly too much to bear.

Even one or another discerning reader might have supposed by now that we live permanently up here in our out-of-the-way eyrie. While it would be possible for a certain sort of writer to make his home here, and a few are rumoured to have tried from time to time, everyone that I know in this corridor and those few from lower corridors whom I speak to sometimes in the grounds — each of them has another sort of home elsewhere; has a wife, perhaps, or children or grandchildren and cares and concerns very different from those that trouble him while he sits at his desk behind his upper window.

Do we never write about those concerns, those children, or those wives? I suspect that most of us do so write, although we hardly ever discuss that writing or offer it for publication. We have not only desks in our rooms but filing cabinets: solid, steel, old-fashioned filing cabinets with locks and keys. If I surmise rightly, then many a filing cabinet will be unlocked one day in accordance with the Last Will of the man who sat for much of his life at the desk nearby — many a filing cabinet will be unlocked and many a page will be found there of a sort of writing rather different from that which covers most of the pages of this work of fiction. What did the writing-students say often of their pieces, according to the narrator of the previous section? ‘This fiction is drawn from the author’s experience.’

But why are we so reticent? Has not many a well-known writer seemed to make a sort of fiction out of his hating his father or divorcing his wife or watching his child endure a fatal illness? I believe us to be not so much reticent as properly respectful of, or even in awe of, what most of us hereabouts call true fiction. Even though none of us would claim to understand the matter, we sense that true fiction, the sort of fiction that we go on trying to write during year after year in this building, could never include the mere jottings of a person seeming to recall some or another painful experience of not long before. We sense that true fiction is more likely to include what was overlooked or ignored or barely seen or felt at the time of its occurrence but comes continually to mind ten or twenty years afterwards not on account of its having long ago provoked passion or pain but because of its appearing to be part of a pattern of meaning that extends over much of a lifetime.

Perhaps that is why we return continually to this towering monstrosity, as it surely appears to some who see it from a distance and never know what goes on in its many wings and behind its many windows. Perhaps that is why each of us looks up often while he steers his car across the mostly level countryside hereabouts, waiting to see the glowing of late sunlight in the windows of his true home. Perhaps each of us, whenever he returns yet again to his upper room and passes the row of locked filing cabinets on his way to his desk — perhaps each of us hears in mind at such a time not the cautious phrases of some or another posthumous biography but the manifold rhythms of one after another subordinate clause in quite another sort of book. Perhaps each of us is driven most urgently not by his wanting to be the subject of some or another biography and not even by his wanting to be the author of some or another memorable volume but by his wanting to grasp the paradox that has exercised him during much of his lifetime: by his wanting to understand how the so-called actual and the so-called possible — what he did and what he only dreamed of doing — come finally to be indistinguishable in the sort of text that we call true fiction.