Murnane Gerald - A Million Windows

We have another use for the fictional texts of Henry James: we use them as an exercise, a sort of parlour game, on evenings when our writing has tired us. We choose a set number of pages from the one text, say the pages of The Golden Bowl numbered from 100 to 150 inclusive in the Penguin edition of 1966. Then we compete during a given time, which is never less than an hour, to find in those pages the greatest number of passages in which the seeming third-person narrator reveals, by even as little as a word or a phrase, that he is, in fact, a first-person narrator, or, to use the terms of the passage quoted above, that behind the thoroughly interested witness or reporter stands always a sort of ghostly narrator such as is found often in James’s works but seldom elsewhere.

We could hardly be said to read the texts while we search. We perform a sort of scanning, alert always to key words of phrases more often, though not always, likely to appear at the beginnings of sentences. While I was making notes for this paragraph in this present work of fiction, I found, during an hour spent in scanning the fifty-one pages mentioned above, four examples of what I was looking for. On page 111 I found this passage: ‘We share this world, none the less, for the hour, with Mr Verver…’ I found this on page 130: ‘That, none the less, was but a flicker; what made the real difference, as I have hinted, was his mute passage with Maggie.’ I found this on the very next page: ‘So much mute communication was doubtless, all this time, marvellous, and we may confess to having read into the scene, prematurely, a critical character that took longer to develop.’ Finally, I found on page 135 the following passage, which might well be subject to dispute: ‘The extent to which they enjoyed their indifference to any judgement of their want of ceremony, what did that of itself speak but for the way that, as a rule, they almost equally had others on their mind?’

We could hardly be called a demonstrative group but sometimes, late of an evening, when one of us has learned that he was the only one of all of us to have identified a certain brief passage of self-conscious narration, so to call it, in fifty or a hundred pages of the fiction of the Master, as some of us choose to call him, he, the lone identifier, will raise his glass of beer and will utter the sort of cry more likely to be heard when a football match or a horse-race is close to its end, mostly, we others suppose, in order to celebrate his prowess as a student of fictional narration but also, we like to hope, as a tribute to the richness of texts properly narrated.

Some of us play what might be called textual games not only in competition with one another but also alone and in private. One of us has sometimes mentioned an elaborate game that he first devised as a young man, hardly more than a boy, in order to decide the positions of various imaginary racehorses, so to call them, at successive points during imaginary races, so to call them, and, finally, at the winning post. The deviser of the game is mostly reticent about it. We know that he has played his game during most of his life, although we do not know how much of his time he devotes to it and how much more fiction he might have written if he had never been seduced by the game. We do not know, for example, when one of us sees him from the lawns below standing at his window and staring far past us for a few moments before returning to his desk — we do not know whether we have caught him straining to visualise one after another possible ending to some or another half-run horse-race in his mind or struggling to arrange the ending to some or another half-composed sentence of fiction in his mind. Nor do we know, when we hear from our corridor, as sometimes happens, the repeated thumping of his fist on his desk-top, whether he is celebrating his having composed, after much struggle, a sentence comprising numerous clauses or the arrival at the winning-post and ahead of its opponents of a horse that had been buried in the ruck at the home-turn. We know that the outcome of each race depends on the occurrence of certain letters or punctuation marks or even of certain common words in passages of prose chosen by the player of the game. We had assumed until recently that these passages were chosen at random, but we were lately told by the deviser of the game that he chooses his decisive passages in strict sequence from the opening page onwards of the nineteenth-century novel The Cloister and the Hearth , by Charles Reade. He had stolen an edition of this book, so he once told me, from a dusty upstairs library managed by a group of grey-haired women. Or, the book had been the last that he had borrowed from the meagre stock in the library and he had been too busy or too lazy to return it, so he told me on another occasion. His having kept the book may, in fact, be connected with a certain image of a dark-haired young woman, hardly more than a girl, in a duotone illustration among the preliminary pages of the book, which image, so he once told one of us in an unguarded moment, was the image of the daughter of a certain trainer of racehorses in a district of mostly level grassy countryside in the imaginary world, so to call it, where his imaginary races are decided.

This is almost all that we know about our colleague and his game-playing, which is probably no more odd than any other of the textual diversions that occupy some of us in private. What I find curious is that the man in question has read only a small part of the text of The Cloister and the Hearth and will die long before he has read to the end of it, so he has told several of us. He began to devise the elaborate rules and stratagems for his game during the first days after he had brought home from the library the book that he was never to return, and he had decided to read the text only during the hours while the game was going forward. A single race might take a whole afternoon or a whole evening to be decided and to have its results recorded in detail in the ledgers where he stores such things. But a race needs for its running only a few paragraphs of prose. Even if he were to give up writing and reading fiction and to keep mostly to his room, he would never learn the fictional fate, so to call it, of the dark-haired fictional young woman denoted by an image in the duotone illustration mentioned, and even the dark-haired daughter of the trainer of racehorses would grow older by no more than a few years during the remainder of his life.

The other of the two known game-players among us talks openly and often about his game. He devised the first, primitive version of the game when he was a young man, hardly more than a boy, much given to daydreaming about sexual adventures, so to call them, and to masturbating while images of such adventures passed through his mind. He was continually dissatisfied with the contents of his image-adventures, so to call them. The image-females were always too compliant and too obliging. He might have said about them what an undiscerning critic or reviewer might write about certain characters in some of another book under review: he might have said that the females were not convincing. As a first effort towards making the females more so, he introduced the element of chance into his sexual fantasies, so to call them. He arranged to have two possible outcomes for each attempt on his part (I mean, of course, on the part of his imagined counterpart in the fantasy) to advance his cause, so to call it. If he attempted, for example, to kiss a certain female, the two possible outcomes were that she would permit him to do so and that she would not so permit him. Which of the possible outcomes became the actual, so to call it, was determined by the number of letters, whether odd or even, in a word or a phrase that he chose for the purpose. The word or phrase had to be chosen in haste, lest he be able to estimate in advance whether it contained an odd number of letters, and would therefore result in an unfavourable outcome, or an even number leading to a favourable outcome. As a means of preventing himself from calling on a word or phrase that he knew to have an even number of letters, he took to choosing in haste a word or phrase connected with the scene in mind. If, for example, he and a female personage were imagined as being together on a deserted beach, he might decide without hesitation on the phrase brief bathing-costume or the phrase bare sunburned shoulders and then set about learning what he genuinely did not know, which was whether the phrase comprised an odd or an even number of letters. (If he had visualised the second of the two phrases quoted as having a comma between the two adjectives, the comma who would have been counted as a letter.) This practice satisfied him only until he found himself developing the skill of being able to estimate the number of letters in phrases of several words even while he was composing them.