Murnane Gerald - A Million Windows

The subject-matter of a work of true fiction may be understood as extending infinitely backwards and forwards, for want of better terms to denote the twin axes of what I called earlier the narrative dimension. The same subject-matter may also be understood as extending infinitely sideways in opposite directions, and again I use words less than appropriate for concepts seldom written about. Had I been more mindful of this when I began the fifth section of this work, then I might well have written such as the following.

He had been attracted, during his long lifetime, by hundreds, perhaps thousands of female faces. He had no doubt that if ever he were to visit one or another parlour or reception room where visitors were received in the distant wing that was said to be occupied mostly by females — he had no doubt that he would see there during his first visit one at least of the sort of female whose face would cause him to suppose, before he knew her name or the least detail about her, that she might be better disposed towards him and less bothered by his peculiar ways than many another of her gender and age-group. He had long ago given up trying to define, or even to isolate, the features of the faces that drew him. He recognised, however, that the hair framing the face was more likely to be dark than otherwise. This, then, was all that he knew about her whom he was likely to see in the distant wing, wherever it might have been: that her hair was dark. And although he had not the least intention of visiting the place, he was readily able to foresee what would happen if he did so: his looking at her for what he believed was no longer than some or another man might have looked at some or another woman who held no interest for him but his learning soon afterwards from her way of looking at him that he had given himself away yet again, by looking either more often or more intently than he had been aware, and that she had learned about him already what he hoped she might not learn until much later, if at all.

He had never been able to make sense of the theories popular during his time for their seeming to explain the workings of the mind. In this, as in every other field that interested him, he trusted in his concern for particulars and for details. What others might have called meaning he called connectedness , and he trusted that he would one day see (revelation being for him always a visual matter) among the multitudes of details that he thought of as his life or as his experience faint lines seeming to link what he had never previously thought of as being linked and the emergence of a rudimentary pattern, which word had always been one of his favourites.

He had forgotten, of course, many of the dark-haired females. He recalled most clearly those from his earliest and his latest years. The very latest and, so he had promised himself, the last had been young enough to have been his granddaughter if he and his children had not been the human equivalents of those animals that his farmer-grandfather had called shy breeders . He, the personage in the upper room, had wanted only to exchange handwritten letters with the dark-haired woman. He foresaw a correspondence lasting for year after year in which two oddly matched persons came gradually to learn how closely they stood as readers of one another’s handwriting, but in her third letter she had rebuked him for something that she claimed was inappropriate in an exchange between what she called an older writer and a younger reader. He had been so stung by her words that he had never afterwards dared to look at his copy of the offending letter or even of his subsequent hasty letter of apology. Each wrote once or twice more until she claimed not to have anything more worth writing about, which claim seemed to him absurd, although he believed he understood why she made it.

The subject-matter of the previous paragraphs may be thought of as being the contents of a handwritten or typewritten text composed by some or another fictional personage in some or another upper room of a house of two or, perhaps, three storeys. Most fiction has never been published, and even a published piece of fiction may be only a small part of a far-reaching unpublished text and an even farther-reaching collection of notes and jottings. The three paragraphs above, and several that will shortly appear below, may be thought of as reporting some of what might once have formed part of some or another published work of fiction if only they had been written at the time. Or, the same paragraphs may be thought of as a report of fictional events likely to have involved certain personages in a certain published work of fiction but in fictional places never mentioned in the published text and during fictional hours or days never reported by the narrator.

The first of the dark-haired females had taken his eye during his eighth year. She, being one of his classmates, would have been of the same age. She had a strange-sounding surname that he had never before heard, and he knew only the sound of it until thirty years later when he met a man of the same name and understood that it was French. If the boy had read the name before he had first heard it, he could never have known how to pronounce it. (Of course, as soon as he had first heard her surname, he visualised a written version of it, as he did with all words heard for the first time, but he never saw anywhere but in his mind his unwieldy private word and he felt sure that he had got it wrongly.) Words, both written and sounded, mattered greatly to him, even in his childhood, and his not knowing, for as long as he was interested in the dark-haired girl, how her surname was spelled was very much a part of her attractiveness. She arrived at his school at the beginning of the year and was gone before the end of it. He has class photographs for some of his years at primary school but not for her year, and yet he recalls her clearly. He has no memory of any words spoken between them but he can easily call to mind her scrutinising him, usually from the middle distance. Her face would hardly attract him nowadays, but he was stirred whenever she turned it towards him and stared as though trying to get his measure. Surely she knew that she was his girlfriend, in the language of that time and place; even if they had never spoken, she had surely learned as much from his own staring. Perhaps he had sent a message through one of her girlfriends, but such messages were always answered, even if with insults, and he would hardly have forgotten any hint that he had once received of her feelings towards him. And now he recalls that he once followed her homewards in order to learn where she lived. He recalls not so much his walking, one hot afternoon (in February or March?), out of the gravel schoolyard by way of the gate that he had never before used and his following the dark-haired girl at a distance along a road that led in the opposite direction from his own neighbourhood, but his overhearing his mother telling the woman from two houses away what he had done and the two women then laughing together. This puzzles him more than any other of his memories: that he could have confided to his mother not only his having followed the dark-haired girl but even his being interested in her.

His mother herself was dark-haired, as were four of her six sisters. Three of those four had faintly olive skin. Once, as a young man, he had studied his mother’s family tree, hoping to learn the source of the dark colouring, but the surnames alone told him nothing; all were English, all of his mother’s eight great-grandparents having been born in either Devon or Cumberland. He supposed there might have been dark-haired descendants of the Celts still living in Devon in recent centuries or that a gipsy from the Lake District might have married into one of his ancestral families of small landholders and tradesmen. In this, as in many other matters, he preferred speculation to research.