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William Trevor: the Writer and His Work
Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1999 by Michael L. Storey
by Dolores MacKenna. Dublin: New Island Books, 1999; Chester Springs, Pennsylvania: Dufour Editions, 1999. 250 pages. $18.95 paper.
As William Trevor's long and lustrous writing career moves into its final stages (he's in his mid-70s, though still very productive), certain intriguing questions about him emerge: Is Trevor foremost a novelist who also happens to write short stories, or is he a short-story writer who expands story material into novels? Should he be considered a British writer whose best work is about English life, or do his Irish stories and novels place him primarily in the tradition of Joyce and others Irish writers? Is his view of life overwhelmingly bleak and despairing, or does his fiction ultimately evoke a sense of hope? Dolores MacKenna's fine study of Trevor offers both explicit and implicit answers to these and other questions about the writer.
Two of MacKenna's main points are that Trevor is a moralist whose best work is about the nature of evil, guilt and madness, and that his perspective is that of an outsider, an "all-seeing observer of people." Trevor's particular interest in evil, MacKenna shows, is not so much its heinous acts as its ordinariness: the way in which it is perpetrated by ordinary people and "often emanates from circumstances in which the human need for love has been either unfulfilled or violated." She explores this theme in a range of stories and novels, including "Miss Smith," "Mrs Acland's Ghosts," "The Raising of Elvira Tremlett," "Lost Ground," Miss Gomez and the Brethren, The Children of Dynmouth, Felicia's Journey, and Death in Summer.
MacKenna is not the first critic to show through formal analysis that Trevor's perspective is that of an outsider, but she also suggests, by way of a historical sketch of his family, that this perspective emanates from the circumstances of his ancestry and family life. The Cox family (Trevor was born William Trevor Cox) came from County Roscommon in western Ireland, where people with that name were often Gaelic Catholic in origin, not Anglo-Irish Protestant. (Mac an Choiligh, literally "son of the cock," was anglicized to Cocks or Cox or spelled phonetically McQuilly.) For political and economic reasons, Trevor's ancestors converted to the faith of the ruling Protestants in the eighteenth century and thereby became absorbed into the Anglo-Irish community. However, despite the traditional religious divide in Ireland, the family had Catholic friends and considered themselves Irish, though they did not actively support the nationalist movement.
Trevor's father was raised in the South and his mother, also Protestant, in the North (her ancestors had come from Scotland). The family moved often, a result of his father's frequent transfers for his bank work, living in small towns (which provided Trevor with much material for his fiction). Trevor was, consequently, educated in a variety of schools, including Catholic convent schools. After he married in the early 1950s, he and his wife moved to England, where they have lived for the last half century.
MacKenna suggests that Trevor's ability to look at his characters, their motives, and their actions with an outsider's objectivity, yet also with the sympathetic understanding of an insider, stems from this heritage of ancestors on both sides of the Irish ethnic, religious and political divide; from his own lived experience of frequently moving into a town or a school as an outsider, becoming a member of that community, and then moving out again; and from looking at Ireland from both inside the country and from the perspective of England.
This ancestral sketch also shines some light on the question of Trevor's British/Irish orientation, if only to suggest that he is quite comfortable with both. A good many of his novels and stories, particularly early ones such as The Old Boys, The Boarding House, and the stories of The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, are written about English life. Much of his later fiction deals with Irish life, including the most salient aspect of it in the last 30 years--the Troubles. MacKenna devotes chapters 4 and 5 to Trevor's Irish fiction. In analyzing such novels as Fools of Fortune, The Silence in the Garden, and Felicia's Journey, as well as his stories of the Troubles, "Attracta," "The Distant Past," and "Beyond the Pale," she shows a writer "with the objectivity of an outsider, but with a native's appreciation of [Ireland's] social and political complexities."
MacKenna places Trevor in the Irish short-story tradition of O'Connor, O'Faolain and Joyce. She dwells particularly on the similarities of his short fiction to Joyce's Dubliners, noting how "the tang of corruption" is found in the stories of both writers, and how Trevor's characters, like Joyce's, often "move towards a revelation or epiphany which is moral, spiritual or social." She also makes a convincing claim that Trevor's interest in the nature of evil, guilt and madness led him, instinctively if not deliberately, to adopt a muted version of the Gothic machinery of the Irish Gothic masters, Maturin, LeFanu, and Stoker.
