A Million Windows (19 page)

‘You'll have to be strong, son,' she replied. ‘Your pa has gone to heaven.'

This paragraph has been written for the benefit of any person who may have picked up this work of fiction in a bookshop or in any other surroundings and who may have opened the work at this page and who may have read immediately afterwards the previous two lines and may then have assumed that other similar lines appear on many of the surrounding pages. No other such
lines appear anywhere in this work of fiction or in any of the works of fiction written in this out-of-the-way corridor of this vast building. We who have found our way to this outpost, as it might be called – we not only consider dialogue, as it is called, the crudest of the many devices used by those writers of fiction whose chief aim is to have their readers believe they are not reading a work of fiction, but we ourselves have it as
our
chief aim that our readers should be continually mindful that what they are reading is nothing else
but
fiction.

And yet...how often are we obliged to write those words after an expression of a forthright belief? Perhaps forty years ago, when I was still forming my judgements in many matters, I read of a writer whose novels, as they were called, consisted almost wholly of dialogue. I recall her name, which was Ivy Compton-Burnett, and that she was an eccentric female solitary. Did I learn also that she lived alone in a house of two, or perhaps three, storeys in the English countryside? Or, am I too much influenced by what I have in mind while I write these pages? Certainly, I read one of her works of fiction, which consisted, sure enough, of dialogue and little else. Not surprisingly, I have forgotten almost everything that I experienced while I read the work. I have not forgotten, however, a mental image of a large house of stone, almost as imposing as the wing where I sit writing these words. The house is occupied by an uncertain number of personages, many of whom seem to be siblings or near-relations and unmarried. These personages seem to meet up with one another at unpredictable times and to discuss, among other
matters, difficulties between themselves and their parents. At other times, they seem to wander through the house of stone, talking at length but often as though to themselves. One such personage is named Horace. He is the only personage whose name I recall. He may also be the only personage who seemed, while I read, to be more than a mere utterer of dialogue, so to call it. Horace is reported in the text as having spoken the only words that I recall from the whole book of fiction. He speaks the words, as I recall, on one of the occasions when a number of personages are reported as trying to explain to one another why they are obliged to live under such harsh conditions. One of them is reported as saying something such as ‘Oh, well, a man's a man.' Horace is then reported as saying something such as ‘That is not so. I am not.'

One of those two who formerly taught writing in universities once made what he calls a detailed study of the subject-matter of all the pieces of fiction that had earned from him, during the previous two years, the grade of High Distinction. He had already observed, before he began his study, that almost every piece of fiction that impressed him, regardless of the manner of its narration, included what he chose to call a chief character and a lesser character and that the interest of the fiction arose out of the dealings between these two. When he began his study, the teacher had not yet decided how to classify the many sorts of chief character and lesser character that he was likely to find.
He supposed that he might classify the characters first according to their gender and then according to their relatedness with one another, as, for example, wife and husband, mother and son, friend and friend, and the like. He was only a little way into his study when he decided that all such relationships were divisible into two groups only: relationships determined by blood and those otherwise determined. He then set about separating the pieces of fiction under study according to this division. The results surprised him somewhat. He had expected that a majority of the pieces would have included characters from the second of the two groups, but the opposite was the result. In nearly two thirds of the pieces of fiction that had impressed him during the two years past, the most prominent characters were blood-relations. It then occurred to him that he could further divide these pairs of characters into two groups. In one group were those pairs whose relationship might be called vertical, as, for example, parents and children, while the other group comprised those related horizontally, as, for example, siblings or cousins. Again, one group outnumbered the other, this time even more so: in about four fifths of the pieces, the relationship between the chief characters was the so-called vertical.

I heard about this study long ago, and I recalled it recently when I was conducting what might be called a simple study of my own. Some of us, of course, can never be induced, even during long drinking-sessions, to reveal any detail of their latest fictional projects, their works-in-hand. Others talk freely about their writerly tasks, even if only, as some of them claim, so that
their talking will rid them of what was fit only for gossip and will leave them with the deep, stubborn matter needed for giving shape to sentences and paragraphs. The reported subject-matter of two such projects deserves to be included in this, my own latest work. Of course, I have seen not a single page of either project, but I am so used to assembling texts-in-the-mind from scant impressions that the following paragraphs may seem as though I lately read the originals or even wrote them.

The first-person narrator of the first of the two projects claims, in its first pages, to recall the details of certain Sunday afternoons, perhaps fifty years earlier, in a large house of stone with a spacious formal garden in a provincial city on the south-west coast of the state in which he was born. The discerning reader will have been pleased to note the verb
claims
in the previous sentence and will have understood rightly that the piece of fiction is far from being one of those so-called re-creations of the past that are written in the present tense, presumably so that the reader will be required to do no more than to watch a sort of filmic mental imagery while his or her eyes scan the text. No, the narrator not only
claims
to recall certain details but also reflects on them, which tells me that the author of the text is in favour of considered narration as I defined it in the third paragraph of the sixth section of this present work of fiction. The first-person narrator of the text in question reflects on some of the impressions made on him during the Sunday afternoons mentioned when he was a visitor in the large house of stone and when it was visited also by four other persons.

The head of the house of stone was the widowed mother of the father of the narrator. The other persons living in the house were one of the three sons and three of the four daughters of the widow, and were, of course, an uncle and three aunts of the narrator. None of these four persons had ever married. The son had courted several young women but had not persisted for long in his courtships. One of the daughters had been courted, but her suitor had not persisted for long. During the years when the piece of fiction was set, so to speak, all four single persons might have been described as approaching middle age and might have been considered likely to remain single. The narrator, being what I call a strong and a consciously knowledgeable narrator, is able to inform his reader, at an early point in the narration, that the four single persons would, in fact, remain single throughout their lives, even though the action of the fiction takes place, so to speak, long before the lives of the four have ended.

The four other visitors mentioned in a recent paragraph were three brothers and a sister, all of whom might have been described as middle-aged. Their mother had been a sister of the father of the four single residents of the house of stone, meaning that the eight were all first cousins. None of the four visitors had ever married. The narrator did not know whether or not any of the three men-visitors had ever conducted a courtship or the single woman-visitor had been courted, but he supposed that all four were likely to remain always single and, as the narrator did not hesitate to inform the reader, his supposition had later been proved correct. The four visitors, like the four residents, lived
together in a large house although with no parent for company, both of their parents having died long before. Another difference between the two groups of four was that the house where the visitors lived was of brick rather than of stone and was far larger than the stone house, being of two storeys with dormer windows in the upper storey. The large house of brick was at a distance from the house of stone and was at a distance also from the coast. The dormer windows of the house of brick overlooked mostly level grassy countryside on the southern margins of the extensive plains in the south-west of the state where all nine of the fictional personages, together with the narrator, had been born.

On the few Sunday afternoons that the narrator claimed to recall, he was a young man, hardly more than a boy, sitting quietly in the background in the dining-room of the house of stone while his widowed grandmother and his three unmarried aunts cleared the table after the midday meal and served tea. (The persons in the dining-room abstained almost wholly from alcohol, although not from any religious conviction.) The talk would have been lively enough during the meal, but while they drank tea the eight cousins reached the peak of their achievements as wits and conversationalists, or so it seemed at the time to the narrator. He, in the person of the narrator of the fiction, reported a few of the anecdotes and exchanges that he claimed to recall. (He reported them of course, always indirectly and in summary; he was writing fiction and not a script for the cinema or the theatre.) He acknowledged that his reports could not bring to the mind of even a discerning reader the mood, so to
call it, that overhung the dining-table on those long-ago Sundays in the house of stone. But he reminded his readers that such was not his task; that he was narrating a piece of true fiction and was required to do no more and no less than to report the contents of his mind, among which were his recollections of how he had seemed to feel on those Sundays. And about those recollections he wrote eloquently enough for me.

Their being unmarried allowed the eight cousins more time and more energy to stand apart from their social setting, so to call it, and to see more clearly and to comment more sharply on the follies of their neighbours and their acquaintances. They even dared, they who might never have fallen in love, to mock – although not too unkindly – the troubles, as they saw them, of those who courted or were courted. Above all, they who were comparatively prosperous, having only themselves to provide for, scorned what they called materialism, which meant for them mostly the advertising of goods for which they had no need. Only one item of human behaviour was never mentioned and seldom even hinted at during the exchanges that stayed in the mind of the narrator for perhaps fifty years. Every person in the room seemed at pains to avoid any sort of acknowledgement of what might be called sexuality.

The young man, hardly more than a boy, who sat in the background mostly admired the persons who kept up their banter around the dining table. He even came close, at times, he for whom sexuality and falling in love seemed cruel punishments rather than any sort of pleasure – he even came close to wanting
to become one of them: to saving all the effort that he expended on searching for images of sexually provoking females or actual dark-haired females suitable for falling in love with and to converting that effort into the sort of energy that would give rise continually to jokes and witticisms and to his feeling that he had escaped from the turmoil that beset most persons and was free to look down, as it were, from an upper window and across a mostly level grassy landscape, at the wretches who lusted after one another or fell in love with one another.

Only a few years after the young man, hardly more than a boy, had felt as was reported above, he felt far otherwise. He had gone back to falling in love and to relieving his sexual urges, so to call them, and he considered the persons who had slapped their thighs and had shrieked and laughed around the dining table to be mental cripples. His, the narrator's, having set out to write the piece of fiction summarised in these paragraphs, came from a suspicion, if not a change of heart, that had occurred to him in recent years. If he was not quite ready to believe it, then he suspected, at the time when he was older by several years than the oldest of the unmarrieds had been when he had first sat among them, that those who had thumped the table and had guffawed were not at all to be pitied or condemned; that they might have sensed, early in life, that so much was at risk if ever they should fall in love, let alone make sexual contact with another – so much was at risk that they had better remain heart-whole, to use that allusive term. He suspected that they had decided, early in life, that no one was to be trusted.