OTHER BOOKS BY GERALD MURNANE
TAMARISK ROW
A LIFETIME ON CLOUDS
THE PLAINS
LANDSCAPE WITH LANDSCAPE
INLAND
VELVET WATERS
EMERALD BLUE
INVISIBLE YET ENDURING LILACS
BARLEY PATCH
A HISTORY OF BOOKS
FIRST US EDITION PUBLISHED IN 2016 BY
DAVID R. GODINE, PUBLISHER
POST OFFICE BOX 450
JAFFREY, NEW HAMPSHIRE 03452
© GERALD MURNANE, 2014
FIRST PUBLISHED IN 2014
FROM THE WRITING & SOCIETY RESEARCH CENTRE
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY
BY THE GIRAMONDO PUBLISHING COMPANY
DESIGNED BY HARRY WILLIAMSON
TYPESET BY ANDREW DAVIES
IN 10/17 PT BASKERVILLE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE USED OR REPRODUCED IN ANY MANNER WHATSOEVER WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT IN THE CASE OF BRIEF EXCERPTS EMBODIED IN CRITICAL ARTICLES AND REVIEWS. FOR INFORMATION CONTACT DAVID R. GODINE, PUBLISHER, 15 COURT SQUARE, SUITE 320, BOSTON, MA 02108.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
MURNANE, GERALD, 1939-
A MILLION WINDOWS / GERALD MURNANE.
PAGES ; CM
HARDCOVER ISBN 978-1-56792-555-5 (HARDCOVER : ACID-FREE PAPER)
EBOOK ISBN 978-1-56792-579-1
1. STORYTELLING--TECHNIQUE--FICTION.
2. INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS--FICTION.
3. AUTHORSHIP--FICTION. 4. TRUST--FICTION. I. TITLE.
PR9619.3.M76M55 2015
823’.914–DC23
2015024979
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million…
HENRY JAMES
The single holland blind in his room was still drawn down in late afternoon, although he would have got out of his bed and would have washed and dressed at first light. At the moment when he became a personage in this work of fiction, I supposed him to be seated at his small desk with his back to the glowing blind and to be reading, by the light of a desk-lamp, a sentence that he had written, perhaps only a few minutes earlier, at the head of a blank page. The sentence was his remembered version of a quotation, so to call it, that he had read long before. He recalls, or so I suppose, that the author of the sentence was a male person from an earlier century but he cannot recall the name of the author. The sentence is as follows: All our troubles arise from our being unwilling to keep to our room.
One of the commonest devices used by writers of fiction is the withholding of essential information. Much faulty fiction seems to derive from its author’s having been overly influenced by films, and yet I have to admit that authors were withholding information from readers long before the first film-scripts were written. Long before cameras could record such scenes, solitary characters were reported as sitting in quiet rooms or trudging across lonely landscapes at the beginnings of works of fiction while the readers of those works looked forward to learning, all in good time, the names of those characters, their histories, and even their motives and deepest feelings. The narrator of this work of fiction wants no reader of the previous paragraph to look forward to learning any such details in connection with the personage mentioned there.
How many years have passed since I last watched a film – since I last walked out of some or other cinema ashamed at having wasted an afternoon or an evening and bothered already by the first of the clusters of false images that would occur to me again and again in coming weeks – false because their source was not my mind but sequences of shapes and colours displayed in the visible world as though objects and surfaces were all? And yet, when young I had hoped for much from films. I had hoped to see, in black-and-white scenery arranged by persons with mostly European names, visible, memorable signs from what I would have called, at that time, the world of imagination, as though it was a place I had yet to discover. One of the European names was a certain Swedish name, and that same name took my eye on the day before I began this work of fiction and while I was turning the pages of a weekly news-magazine from some or another year in the 1980s. One of the pages was headed CINEMA, and I would have turned the page without reading it if the Swedish name had not taken my eye. I gathered from the little I read that the Swede, late in his career, had directed, if that is the correct word, a film set in a castle many a room of which was occupied by one or another chief character from one or another of the many films directed by the Swede in earlier years.
I read once that the writer of fiction Henry James got much enjoyment from hearing from fellow-guests at dinner-parties anecdotes that he later made use of in his fiction. James, however, as soon as he had decided that something he was hearing would later be of use to him, begged his informant not to go further; not to reveal the outcome of what was being recounted. At a certain point, James had seemingly got all the ingredients he needed for a work of fiction and preferred to devise his own outcome rather than merely report the actual. When I closed the pages of the weekly news-magazine as soon as I had learned what is reported in the previous paragraph and without having learned who are the occupants of the castle or what takes place when they meet together, assuming that they do so meet, then I resembled Henry James in my not wanting to learn more than a few ingredients, so to call them, but unlike James I was not yet aware that I had acquired my ingredients. My only reaction at the time was to admire the Swede for what I took to be a considerable achievement and to read no further about him and his film lest I learn that my admiration was misplaced. His achievement, so I supposed, was his having discovered, late in life, that a true work of art in no way depends for its justification on its seeming connections with the place that many call the real world and I call the visible world.
I would have watched several of the Swede’s films during the 1960s, which was the last decade when I still hoped to learn from films. After I had written the previous sentence, I set about recalling whatever images I could recall from those films. I recalled
