A Million Windows (16 page)

On the rare occasions when we discuss authors such as Charles Dickens, we seem to agree that we lack for something that writers of fiction seemed formerly to possess. And yet, if we have lost something, so to speak, we have also gained something. We may be unable to exercise over our fictional personages the sort of control that Dickens and others exercised over their characters, but we are able to turn that same lack of control to our advantage and to learn from our own subject-matter, so to call it, in somewhat the same way that our readers are presumed to learn from our writing.

Subject-matter
and
writing
...if any of us, long ago, believed that these two are identical or that one cannot be claimed to exist without the other, then he would have owned to his error soon after he had begun those simple-seeming exercises in introspection devised at our first meetings by those of us hoping to learn, for example, why most fictional personages seem to behave unpredictably and not even as foreseen by those called, for convenience, their authors. Perhaps because I had never observed myself to do anything that might be called
thinking
, I was at once absorbed by the exercises and learned much from them. That which taught me most required each of us, while writing a suitable passage in his current work, to scrutinise the behaviour, so to call it, of some or another personage, so to call him or her, at some or another moment, so to call it, about to be recorded in writing. The matters at issue were as follows: could the writer predict with certainty how the personage was about to behave? and, if not, could the personage be said to
stand, in relation to the writer, in any way differently from some or another man or woman in the building where the writer sat writing or in the mostly level grassy countryside visible from his upper window in the building?

As I reported above, I have never seemed able to do whatever it is that other persons seem to do whenever they think or claim to be thinking. I am capable only of seeing and feeling, although I can see and feel, of course, in both the visible and the invisible worlds. Being thus disabled, I was obliged to try to answer the two questions mentioned above only by the most painstaking observation and certainly not by any rational means, whatever that phrase might denote. The sort of observation needed came easily to me. I had always considered myself the least observant of persons in the visible world, but the invisible parts of me proved able to see with acuity in the invisible world, or so I might put the matter. In summary, I learned that I have no apparent control over what sort of fictional personage might appear to me while I try to compose some or another piece of fiction. Nor am I able to decide what such a personage might do or might want to do in the invisible space surrounding him or her. All I can do is to select. This is no easy task, but I am mostly able, while struggling to keep in mind what I can only call an instinctive desire on my part to arrange the densest possible concentration of meaning on the fewest possible pages – I am mostly able to confine myself to reporting what I, whether as implied author or narrator, see fit to report.

My research, so to call it, taught me also something that
Charles Dickens and his like may not have been aware of while they planned the behaviour of those they probably called their characters. I learned how little is ever reported in fiction of all that a fictional personage is able to do or say. After having compared notes with a few like-minded residents hereabouts, I decided that I had been justified on the many occasions from as long ago as my childhood when I had wanted to read or to write – if not on paper then in my mind – the hitherto unread and unwritten reports of all that took place during the many days, weeks, or even years when certain fictional personages maintained their fictional existence although no writer had reported any detail of it.

It was no part of my research, as I call it, but often, while I was trying to hold in mind some or another personage about whom not a single word had as yet been written, I found myself speculating yet again on a matter mentioned earlier in this work of fiction. I have never been able to comprehend how the entity called in common speech
time
could be said to exist separately from the entity known likewise as
space
. To put this differently: I am unable to believe in
time
in the same way that some persons are unable to believe in a personal god. Nor does the word
space
denote for me mere extension. For me, what the word
space
denotes is hardly different from what is denoted by the word
mind
, and whenever I perform one or another of the exercises mentioned earlier, which is to say, whenever I read with due attention some or another passage of what I call true fiction or considered narration, then I become aware that the space
between each sentence and its subject-matter may well reach endlessly in directions unknown to me.

Two men from our loose circle, so to call it, held for some years full-time positions as teachers of creative writing in universities. Perhaps I should have written just then that two of us admit to having held such positions, and that others of us may prefer not so to admit. And yet, I could hardly credit that any of us would fear from his fellows the quiet contempt that some groups in far parts of this building are said to hold for anyone who formerly earned money from teaching others to write. There are corridors, so I have heard, where residents are accorded respect in proportion to the tens of thousands of copies of their books sold or the numbers of their books adapted for film or even the number of literary prizes awarded them. Most of us hereabouts have always considered our occasional royalty payments as bonuses or small treats while we supported ourselves and our families by working at whatever jobs we were capable of.

Our two worked at their teaching in rather different ways, so we have heard from them. One was resolved to disabuse his students of any notion that the writing of fiction is a delicate procedure to be undertaken only in silence and isolation by a naturally sensitive person in a heightened state of alertness. This teacher, in one of his first classes each year, after having read to his students several passages in which one or another biographer of D.H. Lawrence reported his writing page after page of some
or another work of fiction in the main room of the rented quarters where he and his companion lived for the time being, while the room was noisy with the conversation of the friends and admirers who seemed often to surround Lawrence, and while he himself often, and without looking up from his writing, took part in the conversation. The teacher would then stand at the whiteboard in front of his students and would begin writing with a felt-tipped pen, often pausing to amend or to erase words or phrases or whole sentences. Whenever he thus paused, he explained to the students what had caused him to pause and why he was amending or erasing. What he was writing, so he assured the students, comprised the latest hundred words and more of the work of fiction that he was then writing for publication, and he would dismiss them ten minutes early so that he could transcribe for his later use the words of his that he had written in their presence.

Our other teacher claims that he could never write so much as a sentence of fiction in the presence of another person, let alone a class of students. He writes fiction, so he says, for a few readers of good will, or perhaps for only one such reader whom he wishes never to meet but only to approach by means of his writing. Not only could he never have written fiction in front of his students, but he spoke to them about his own writing only if they had first questioned him about it. When he wanted to promote class discussions about the theory of fictional narration, as he called it, perhaps pompously, as we sometimes accuse him, although he answers that any means is justified if it earns respect for the craft
of fiction – when he wanted to promote discussion, he would put before his students some of the large collection of statements that he had gathered from the writings of writers themselves or from a famous series of published interviews with writers. (It was this collection that provided me with the epigraph for this present work of fiction.)

The two teachers had used very different methods for assessing the pieces of fiction written by their students. The first man relied mostly on comments made first by the student-author and then by his or her fellows during a detailed classroom discussion of each piece. At the beginning of each discussion, the author would criticise his or her piece and would then award the piece one of the so-called grades required by the university. (The teacher believed that this practice developed in each student the ability to read his or her own fiction as a discerning reader might read it.) The piece was then read by the class and afterwards discussed. Each member of the class was required to award the piece a grade. Finally, the teacher commented on the piece and awarded it a grade. The final, or official, grade was the average of all grades awarded by the class-members, the third multiple of the author's grade, and the sixth multiple of the teacher's grade.

The other man had allowed classroom discussion of each piece but he had always removed the author's name from the piece before it was photocopied for reading in class. Discerning readers in each class learned in time to identify many authors from their distinctive styles or from the recurring subjects of their pieces, but no member of a class was allowed to address any comment
to the author of a piece – all comments had to be written in the margins of the text as though addressed to a presumed author unlikely to be met with. The teacher himself wrote comments in the margins of each piece and would always announce his opinion of each piece to the class, but only the author of the piece learned – in writing – the grade awarded to the piece, which grade was decided by the teacher alone before he had heard any comments from anyone. He sometimes supposed that the course might be more effective if the students were never permitted to meet with each other or even with him, so that they knew each other only as the writers or the readers of certain fictional texts. His teaching methods were in keeping with his belief that the best sort of fiction had for its author not the flesh-and-blood being who might acknowledge in a classroom discussion that he or she had written this or that piece but a presumed personage whose characteristics might be something of a mystery to the flesh-and-blood being and were best recognised by a discerning reader. It was to this personage, this deep and writerly version of the author named on the title-page, that the second of the two teachers had always directed the many comments that he wrote on his students' fiction. He would never have denied that he sometimes had in mind, while he wrote the comments, an image of the author as he or she might have appeared in the classroom but he would have insisted that his words were not such as should be spoken to the person of that appearance but suitable only to be read in private by the personage responsible for his or her writing.

He had among his students each year many who were called
officially mature-age. Many of these were of his own age or older and were often the writers of the most impressive fiction. He had heard or had read of teachers in universities who had affairs with students but he had been faithfully married for nearly twenty years and was made weary by the mere thought of the deceit and the subterfuge that he would have to practise during such an affair, and he easily put off the few female students whom he supposed were signalling their interest in him. Each year, when he met his new students for the first time, he would feel himself attracted by the mere appearance of one or two of the so-called mature-age women, but he took care afterwards to deal with them no differently than he dealt with the others, which policy was usually made easier for him after those who had attracted him by their looks had failed to impress him by their writing, as almost always happened.

During his fifth year of being a teacher, he met up with circumstances the very opposite of those described in the previous sentence. The woman of all his mature-age students who attracted him most by her appearance and her deportment was also the one of all his students, whether male or female, who most impressed him by her writing. He tried to deal with her as he dealt with all his students, and according to what she told him afterwards he had mostly succeeded. Sometimes, after he had written some or another comment in the margins of some or another piece of her fiction, he felt sure that he must by now have told more than he had wanted to tell her, but even in this, so she also told him later, he had mostly succeeded also: she had found
in his written words hardly more than she might have expected to find in the words of someone won over as a reader.

On the evening after the last meeting of the class that included the woman mentioned, she and her classmates, most of them mature-age, invited him to join them for drinks. The weather was very warm, and they sat under trees in semi-darkness near the cafeteria. He and she were among the last few to leave. She had drunk little, so he had observed during the evening, but he had drunk much. All of the students present had finished their undergraduate courses and expected to meet again seldom, if at all. Men and women, their teacher included, embraced one another before going their separate ways. As she later told him, he had misread her behaviour during their last minutes together, and yet he had not, so it later seemed, misread the letter that she had sent him soon after he had written to her as a result of his misreading.