A Million Windows (13 page)

He was mostly deprived of books during his schooldays. The few books in his parents' house were of little interest to him. No school that he attended was equipped with a library. Even his secondary school, in a suburb that would have been called
middle-class, had not even a shelf of books in any classroom. In his fifteenth year, he learned that a circulating library for young persons had been recently established in an upstairs room in the shopping centre near his school. When he registered himself as a borrower, he was made uneasy by several prominent signboards announcing that the library was a project of the ladies' committee of the local branch of the Liberal Party. He understood that his parents voted for the Labor Party, as had
their
parents, and regarded the Liberals as the party of the oppressors, and so he felt obliged to tell his father who it was who had made available the books that he, the borrower, had begun to bring home. His father was at once suspicious and for some weeks inspected every book but decided in time that they were harmless. Even he, the borrower, was at first wary of the mostly white-haired women who registered his borrowings and returnings and was relieved that they did not preach to him on political topics.

The library was quite unlike any of the places that go by that name nowadays. It occupied a large room above a shop in a street of shops. The only items of furniture were the table where the white-haired women sat and the shelves around the walls where books were stored. There was nowhere any sort of poster or what might be called nowadays a promotional display. He, the chief character of these paragraphs, could not recall in later years having seen any picture books or non-fiction books in the library, although this may be due to his having been interested only in the collection of fiction. This comprised many hundreds of titles, all with cloth covers and all second-hand. Despite his feeling in
great need of books, he mostly struggled to find a volume of interest to him. He believes nowadays that he visited the library for only a few months before deciding that he had read every book with a claim on him. He recalls having read every volume he could find with Robert Louis Stevenson as its author and still recalls a few of his experiences as a reader of them. He recalls likewise several books by Charles Dickens. He recalls the fact of his having read
Lorna Doone
, by an author whose name he long ago forgot, but of his experience as a reader of the book he recalls nothing, although he seems to recall, from the few hours after he had borrowed the book but before he had begun to read it, his looking forward to reading about the setting, so to call it, of the narrative, which setting, or so he believed, was remote moorland. Finally, he recalls his having read a number of books by an author whose name appeared on the books as
D.K. Broster
and who may have been a woman, or so he was told by someone many years afterwards. From the many hours that he must have spent in reading those books, all of which he believes to have been of the kind often called historical fiction, he recalls only a few moments that he has sometimes recalled during the sixty years since those moments passed. He seems to recall that he was reading at the time a book with the title
The Flight of the Heron
. He certainly recalls that the historical setting, so to call it, of the book in question was the Vendean War, so to call it, which took place in the south-west of France during the first years after the Revolution. He recalls that the chief character of the book was a young man, probably an aristocrat and certainly a devout Roman
Catholic, as were most of the rebels taking part in the so-called war. He, the man recalling, felt little sympathy that he can recall for the chief character, who seemed to him too virtuous and proper. And yet, after sixty years during which he forgot all else that he may have experienced while reading several books by D.K. Broster, he still recalls his reading, towards the end of the book, a report of the chief character's learning from a letter, and at a time when the Vendean forces were hard pressed, that the young woman with whom he had been for long in love and with whom he had had, or so he supposed, an understanding – the young woman had married or had betrothed herself to another man. From one or another of the pages of text towards the end of the book, he, the man recalling, is able to recall an actual phrase. The third-person narrator, claiming to have access to the thoughts and feelings of the chief character, and using almost the very technique that I called earlier
double voicing
, reports that the young woman mentioned had for long been to the young man
his guiding star
, or it may have been
his shining star
.

And yet, along with the few fragments that are all he has preserved from the many hours when he looked along shelf after shelf in the drab upper room, first taking down and then looking into and then mostly replacing the one after another of the books in their dull-coloured cloth-and-boards, from the many hours when he sat or stood in some or another railway carriage, staring at the opened pages in front of him or glancing, whenever he turned a page, at some or another young woman, hardly more than a girl, who sat or stood nearby but always looking back at the
pages before she returned his glance, and from the many hours of an evening after he had washed or dried the tea dishes with his brother and had done his homework at the wooden kitchen table with linoleum glued to its top and had sat until his bedtime at the same table with his library book open in front of him – along with those few fragments, he has been aware during the past sixty years of a certain personage, so to call her, who first appeared to him while he was reading a certain book of fiction borrowed from the upper room: a personage worthy to be called, if he were to use the language of false poetry such as was used by D.K. Broster, his own guiding star or shining star.

I would be misleading the reader if I were to report that Torfrida is a character in a work of fiction with the title
Hereward the Wake
by Charles Kingsley. I am able to state as a fact that he who deals, of course, not in facts but in fictional truths once read the book of that name, which book, so he seems to recall, even contained a duotone reproduction of a portrait of a fair-haired female person, which portrait was intended, surely, to suggest to the reader what would have been the appearance of a female character, so to call her, mentioned often in the adjacent pages of text if that character had been an actual person. But I am able to state as well that the personage known to him during the past sixty years as Torfrida appears to him as a young woman, hardly more than a girl, with dark hair and lacking altogether the fictional history of the fictional character in the work of fiction by Charles Kingsley.

What does he, researcher among works of fiction never
published or never even projected – what does he recall from his having read the work of fiction
Hereward the Wake
? He recalls that Hereward the Wake is the leader of a band of English rebelling against the Normans soon after their conquest of England; that the stronghold of the rebels is in the fen districts; that Hereward marries Torfrida when both are young but that he later has another woman as his consort, after he and Torfrida have separated. He, the researcher, as I call him, believes he recalls also that Torfrida has her first sight of Hereward when she looks down at him from the window of an upper room. Of all that must have passed through his mind during the many hours while he read the hundreds of pages between the maroon-coloured covers of the bulky borrowed book, he recalls nothing more. And yet, at some time while he read, he became acquainted, as it were, with the image of a dark-haired female ghost-above-the-pages who was to haunt him during the remainder of his life, to use the terms most favoured by the writer mentioned in the previous section of this work of fiction.

He would find it difficult to include Torfrida as even a ghostly character in any sort of fictional writing. She came to him without any seeming history, although her mere presence is powerful enough to suggest to him numerous possibilities in both her past and her future. Rather than struggling to write about her, he is mostly content to accept her existence as incontrovertible proof that the reading and the writing of fiction are much more than a mere transaction during which one person causes another person to see in mind a sort of shadowy film; that the whole
enterprise of fiction exists mostly to enable her and numerous others of her kind to flit from place to place in mind after mind as though many a fictional text is a mere bridge or stairway raised for their convenience of travel.

No one in this wing owns to being a poet. Several may have written one or more poems, but whether or not any such occasional poet has sought publication, no published poem can be traced back to these dusty corridors and mostly silent rooms. Poets we may not claim to be, but some of us will sometimes discuss at length the differences or the likenesses between sentences and verses or between paragraphs and stanzas; what purpose, if any, is served by the use of metaphors; whether or not a sentence can be said to have a rhythm even though it lacks for metre; and many other such matters. We discuss these things freely even though none of us calls himself a poet, and we find it curious that these topics are of interest to us but are never raised in a certain corridor in the wing adjoining ours. Some of us lunch or dine or carouse sometimes in that corridor, although few of us feel at home there. Among ourselves, we call the occupants of that corridor the renegade poets. They were young men when to be young and to be declaiming poems in public places was to feel oneself at the bubbling centre of a spring that would soon become a torrent and would cleanse the world, as one or another of them might have written at the time. But soon, a change occurred in the upper atmosphere
where the winds of fashion arise, and those winds began to blow in a different direction, to put the matter poetically again, and many who had looked forward to changing the world found this particular change hard to bear, this passing of the craze for poetry, and so they took to writing novels, as they called their newest works, many of which might have passed for scripts of documentary films, with themselves and their disorderly lives for subject-matter. Those of us who consort sometimes with the renegades long ago gave up asking them to explain their changing from fashionable poets to equally fashionable novelists. The renegades seem to have learned long ago the advantages of evasiveness or, perhaps, of using expressions such as
beautifully written
or
moving
or
powerful
in order to hide their ignorance of the craft of fiction. Most of us believe them to have written their pretend-filmscripts from the same motive that drove them three and more decades ago, to declaim their poetic protests: from a wish to be entitled to swagger, especially in the presence of female persons. And some of us, when drunk, have even put to the renegades, as though in jest, what most of us long ago decided, namely that their turning from poetry to prose was of hardly any moment, given that what they had called poetry was no more than badly punctuated prose arranged in lines of arbitrary length.

We happen to have among us one who freely admits to being a failed poet, although he reminds us often that he had taken up and had later abandoned poetry before the decades when the renegades were most prolific. As a very young man, so he once
told us, he had believed in metaphor as some persons believe in religious creeds or political manifestos. He had even hoped to get from the contemplation of metaphor what some so-called mystics are said to get from their contemplation of the divine or the ultimate. Unlike the renegades, our failed poet is by no means evasive when asked why he turned from poetry to prose, but when he sets out to explain his apostacy or conversion he uses an odd-seeming comparison. He likens poetry to whisky or gin and prose to beer, which is his only drink. He says the amount of alcohol in a given volume of beer constitutes a sort of perfect proportion or golden mean whereas whisky and other spirits are akin to poisons, with a potency out of all proportion to their volume. Poets, he says, are distillers while we writers of prose are brewers, and he strives while he writes to turn out sentence after sentence the meaning of which will keep his reader in a heightened state of awareness for hour after hour whereas the poet that he had once wanted to be might have had
his
reader fall forward, before long, to the table, seeing double after a surfeit of metaphors.

Our turncoat, as we sometimes call him in jest, counts among the unwritten pieces that he may yet write as supplements to his few brief published works a fictional account of certain events from his twenty-second year, one of them being his meeting up with a certain dark-haired young woman who, if ever he had tried to compare and to quantify the differing looks and features of all the dark-haired girls and young women he had taken note of, would have been one of the first among them. At the time
of their meeting, he was a teacher in a primary school in an inner suburb of the city where he had been born. He worked conscientiously as a teacher but he was planning to resign at the end of the year, when his contract would have expired. He intended to work afterwards at menial jobs that would cause him none of the nervous stress, as he called it, that his teaching caused and would allow him to spend much of his free time writing poetry. He had no girlfriend at the time. He had had a girlfriend for a few months several years before, but he had bored her with his talk of books and poetry and he resented her wanting to go to dances or to cinemas. He felt much in need of a girlfriend but he could never have approached any of the young female teachers at his school, who talked in the staffroom mostly about television programs. He looked forward to acquiring a girlfriend from among the young female poets who would attend one of the literary gatherings that took place, so he had heard, at the time of publication of each number of the quarterly magazine to which he sent most of his poems. All of his poems had been politely returned to him by the editor of the magazine, but in the margin of one of the poems the editor had written a favourable comment. He, the young poet, expected soon to have one or more of his poems published and to meet at the literary gathering soon afterwards a female equivalent of himself and to begin with her the discussion and the exchanges of letters that would lead to their becoming boyfriend and girlfriend.