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| William Trevor |
William Trevor
(1928 - 2016)
William Trevor, original name William Trevor Cox, (born May 24, 1928, Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland—died November 20, 2016, Somerset, England), Irish writer who was noted for his wry and often macabre short stories and novels.
In 1950 Trevor graduated from Trinity College Dublin, and he subsequently began teaching in Northern Ireland and working as a sculptor. In 1954 he moved to England, where he initially taught art. He later settled in London, and in the early 1960s he worked as an advertising copywriter. During this time Trevor began publishing novels and short stories. A Standard of Behaviour, his first novel, was published in 1958 to little fanfare. However, his next book, The Old Boys (1964), earned critical acclaim and was the recipient of Britain’s Hawthornden Prize. Its success led Trevor to move to Devon, England, and write full-time.
Trevor’s subsequent novels included The Boarding-House (1965), Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969), Elizabeth Alone (1973), The Children of Dynmouth (1976), and Fools of Fortune (1983). The latter two both won the Whitbread Literary Award for novels. In addition, Felicia’s Journey (1994) was named the Whitbread Book of the Year. Reading Turgenev (1991) and The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) were both short-listed for the Booker Prize. His last novel, Love and Summer, was published in 2009.
Trevor also wrote a number of highly acclaimed collections of short stories, notably The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, and Other Stories (1967); The Ballroom of Romance, and Other Stories (1972), which became a modern classic and was made into an award-winning television play in 1982; Angels at the Ritz, and Other Stories (1975); The Hill Bachelors (2000); Cheating at Canasta (2007); and Last Stories (2018), his final collection. These are typically bleak tales featuring moments of reckoning in which characters can no longer seek refuge in the fantasies and illusions that had previously made their lives bearable.
A number of works by Trevor were adapted for the screen, most notably Felicia’s Journey, the film version of which was directed by Atom Egoyan and released in 1999. Influenced by the writings of James Joyce and Charles Dickens, Trevor possessed a keen skill for characterization and irony. His works for the most part focused on the psychology of eccentrics and outcasts. In 2002 he received the Irish PEN Award for outstanding contribution to Irish literature.
BRITANNICA |
| William Trevor |
Punters tip Trevor for Nobel honour
October 10, 2012
VETERAN Irish novelist and short story writer William Trevor (left) has shot up in the betting for this year's Nobel Prize in Literature , writes John Spain.
According to Ladbrokes, Trevor was initially 100/1 in the betting, but two weeks ago this was slashed to 10/1 as literary punters piled on the bets.
This week, the odds on Trevor tightened further to 7/1, putting him in second place behind Japanese author Haruki Murakami, the 2/1 favourite.
Ladbrokes said the Irish author appears to be the subject of a long-odds gamble in the race to win this year's prize, which will be announced tomorrow.
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| William Trevor |
William Trevor: Irish writers pay tribute
John Banville, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Joseph O’Connor, Kevin Barry, Roddy Doyle and more salute the late author
Bernard O'Donoghue
Through my now lengthy reading lifetime, there is a small number of Irish writers (or any writers) whose every new book I awaited with impatient eagerness. From The Old Boys in the nineteen-sixties onwards, William Trevor was at the head of them, both his short stories and novels. I read The Children of Dynmouth - a book in the great tradition of dark masterpieces masquerading as a story about children - on the Cork-Swansea ferry; I read The Distant Past on holiday in Italy, with its desolate tracing of how political conflict puts a strain on communal relations. Derek Mahon’s genteel Widow of Kinsale wants to ‘re-read for ever / the novels of William Trevor / that lovely man’. Trevor felt the pulse of every sector in Irish life, from the Anglo-Irish to the dancehall-goers, exploited servant-girls, hill bachelors and commercial travellers. Was it just coincidence that he grew up in County Cork, the home territory of the great exponents of the Irish short story, O’Connor and O’Faolain? The strength of all his writing was an unshowy perfection of style, through which he expressed his unerring instinct for fairness. His total lack of self-importance allowed him to express what was important in the world around him. He was one of the greatest writers about justice and suffering, disguised as an ordinary person.
Bernard O’Donoghue is a poet and Oxford academic. His latest collection is The Seasons of Cullen Church
Roy Foster
William Trevor was celebrated as the laureate of bits of left-over Ireland, but he also conjured up with equal authority and eloquence the world of dusty lounge bars in seedy parts of central London, and the underbelly of life out-of-season towns on England’s south coast. Like his fellow Cork writer Elizabeth Bowen, he exoticised strange parts of middle England; like her, he had an equal mastery of the short story and novel forms. For all his affinity with the great Russians, his vision had a larky, surreal, often menacing quality, leaning towards the sinister and grand guignol.:evident in novels such as The Children of Dynmouth and Miss Gomez and the Brethren no less than the stories in Angels at the Ritz. And in ‘Attracta’ he wrote one of the most harrowing reflections of the Northern troubles. I was on the jury that awarded him the 1998 David Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement in writing; receiving it, he was as subtle, charming, modest and mischievous as you would expect, But he knew his worth and his lifetime’s achievement was indeed matchless.
Polly Devlin
The first time I met him for lunch in Durrant’s Hotel in Marylebone where he stayed when he came to London we sat for quite a long time in the same lounge at the same time quietly and anxiously waiting for each other. He is one of the few Irish prose writers who seems to have a point after Joyce - John McGahern and Nuala O’Faolain are among the happy few, and he is often coupled with Chekhov; but since I read Ballroom of Romance over thirty years ago for me he has been no-one but himself. This seemingly modest writer is full of subdued violence about the pain of what happens. In the course of a quiet narrative his prose can blow the heart open. His stories are compelling, tragic and often comic, and are related with oblique instructive symmetry that reveals more than first meets the eye. He once called the short story the art of the glimpse but it’s a remark typical of his sometimes sly subtlety- his glimpse is often a profound stare into a tectonic fault, as in Auden’s line the crack in the tea-cup opens a lane to the land of the dead. He walked those lanes and I’m grieved he has walked his last one now.
Danielle McLaughlin
I have a treasured signed copy of ‘Cheating at Canasta’ that William Trevor sent me in 2012. Not only was he an astoundingly brilliant writer, he was also generous in his support of emerging writers and sponsored the prize money for the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Competition which I was fortunate enough to win that year. The award meant a lot to me as a writer just starting out and I’m deeply grateful to William Trevor and saddened to learn of his passing. I read and adored ‘Love and Summer’, but it’s his short stories that I’m more familiar with. They are truly magnificent, and I don’t know that I can describe them in a way that does them justice, except maybe to say that there’s immense grace and fluidity and precision in Trevor’s writing, his characters are exquisitely nuanced, the storytelling pure genius.
Mary Morrissy
William Trevor’s deference as a writer was his greatest attribute. His presence on the page was so tactful that he was barely there. Yet the worlds he created, particularly but not confined to his short fiction, were claustrophobically complete, his characters forensically observed and their atmosphere ─ tender, serene, bleak or comic ─ gently persistent. I admire his English stories, in particular, where he turned that beady eye of his on the polite rhythms of the suburbs.
He wasn’t a joiner and he actively shunned the limelight. “I like to hang about the shadows of the world as a writer and as a person,” he said. The centre of things, he added, was a place to watch, not something to be involved in.
Mary Morrissy’s latest collection of stories is Prosperity Drive
Eilis Ni Dhuibhne
The great Irish short story writers of the 20th century fall into surprisingly neat generational groups. Sean O Faolain, Frank O’Connor, and Mary Lavin were born around the start of the century. A generation on, came William Trevor, John McGahern, and Edna O’Brien, who were all born around 1930. Does the writing of these co-evals, one of whom died yesterday, have anything in common? Yes. Of course. Their subject matter is the lives of Irish country people, of individuals in their communities, in their landscapes. And, each in their own unique voice, write a lyrical alluring prose which is as accessible as it is profound.
William Trevor created his own country. Trevorland. We know this territory: we think we have lived in it, but where we have lived is in the world William Trevor constructed: a market town which has seen more prosperous days somewhere in North Cork or the south Tipperary. A draper’s shop stocked with the lisle stockings and flannel nighties, a comfortable hotel on Main Street, with red roses round the door and the smell of roast beef floating into the street. A picture house, of course – the symbol of delight, and escape, and the great wide world. Trevorland is populated with philistine bankers and solicitors and petty merchants - and, always, lost among them, a wistful romantic girl, a young man with the soul of an artist, a woman with a past. These outsiders struggle to breathe in the stifling boredom and conservatism of it all. Usually, the quiet attempt of the dreamer to escape from the clutches of the town, or to find fulfilment even in the smothering soft rain end in failure. There is no escape. The community, like the soft insidious blankets of rain, smother romance and dreams.
William Trevor wrote the most perfect short stories. His prose is clear as glass, elegant as a swaying silver birch on the edge of a mirror lake. His characters live on the page, as alive as anyone we encounter in ‘real life’. We hear their hearts beating; we see the hope in their eyes. Trevor always had a story to tell and he told it simply, without fuss – the greatest art is often simple, and does not need to draw attention to its beauty, its depth.
He was one of our greatest writers.
John Banville
William Trevor was one of the great short-story writers, at his best the equal of Chekhov and Babel. But we should also celebrate his novels, in particular Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, an inexplicably neglected twentieth-century masterpiece. His prose style was so subtle as to seem hardly a style at all, and his sympathy for, an empathy with, life’s wounded ones was sincere and affecting. His death is a heavy loss to Irish letters and to world literature.
John Banville’s latest work is Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir
Anne Enright
William Trevor was a complete gentleman and full of mischief: at least that is how I thought of him when we met some years ago. I found him to be an irresistible mix of good manners and badness, in the Irish sense of the word – there was little that escaped him. His stories are formally beautiful and, at the same time, interested in the smallness of human lives. He was, as a writer, watchful, unsentimental, alert to frailty and malice. A master craftsman, he was, above all, interested in loneliness, particularly the loneliness found between social classes. In the Irish stories especially, he caught the last of a fading ascendancy and set it, in a kind of twilight, on the page.
Anne Enright is the Laureate of Irish Fiction
Colm Tóibín
Kevin Barry
William Trevor is stranger than we think - he has somehow developed a reputation as a kind of domestic realist but in fact he just as often writes in the gothic tradition, and he is at his best when he’s at his eeriest. I have a particular regard for some of the very strange, very slender novels of the early 1970s; The Children of Dynmouth, in particular, has a very creepy waft to it, and it was very prescient in describing the odd atmospheric energies that were starting to develop around small English towns and suburbs.
And of course I admire any writer who persists in making short fictions throughout his career. It’s not always the most glamorous or most rewarding sector, but it is one of the most difficult and impenetrable forms: it takes a lifetime’s work to get close to its mysteries, and he gave it that. Also, he always carried himself with immense dignity, and thus was an example to the rest of us.
Kevin Barry’s latest novel is Beatlebone
Margaret Kelleher
In recent years we’ve seen a welcome resurgence of interest in writing and reading short stories but William Trevor was the constant and most elegant master of the form over an astounding five decades of writing. The elegiac beauty of his novels such as The Silence in the Garden and The Story of Lucy Gault - sometimes ‘boxed’ into the category of ‘Big House’ fiction - will, for their tender and nuanced portraits of communities in decline, be recommended from reader to reader for generations to come. And Trevor was also a wonderfully astute literary commentator. A personal favourite comes from a Paris Review interview when asked to define the short story: ‘I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time.’
Margaret Kelleher is chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, University College Dublin
John Boyne
A few years ago, my then partner gave me a beautiful two-volume hardback and slip-cased edition of William Trevor’s Collected Stories for Christmas. It’s one (or two) of the most beautiful books that I own and stands beside a dozen other William Trevor volumes on my shelves. Writers often get asked which authors they return to again and again, their comfort books if you will, the ones that make them remember why fiction matters. William Trevor, I have answered on countless occasions. His stories. Any of them.
John Boyne's latest novel is The Boy at the Top of the Mountain
Martina Evans
William Trevor’s great stories well up from the deep in an unending seam that taps into personal memory and a greater consciousness so that when you read them, you feel that these things are real, they have happened. There is nothing forced, no whiff of research. He has said that his sense of tragedy came from childhood which along with dreams is the source of all poetry according to Rilke. He drank from that well for decades and miraculously, it never ran dry. Graham Greene has spoken of the compost of memory from which writers create. I imagine Trevor’s compost pile as big as County Cork where he spent his formative years and where his best most charged writing is set although I may be biased.
Martina Evans’ latest collection is Windows of Graceland. She is from Co Cork
Donal Ryan
What sad news. My sister got cross with me once for not reading enough of his work. You have to, she said, you just have to, and she was right. He was as good as a writer can be: he seemed to live a creative life dedicated to the understanding of individual truths and the nature of difference, to the stories concealed by silence. His work was often hilariously funny and deeply moving. I loved the lofty, didactic, completely dishonest voices he sometimes used, and the comedy he revealed in the tensions created by differences real and perceived. He never stopped feeling that most essential thing to writers: wonder. He never stopped asking, How would that person see the world?
Donal Ryan’s latest novel is All We Shall Know
Joseph O’Connor
William Trevor was a gentle and courteous man, a peerless writer, a laureate of the settled sadness of so many Irish lives. In his beautiful novel, Love and Summer, he writes: “Although they were more than brother and sister, having been born in the same few minutes, they had never shared a resemblance. In childhood they had been close companions but often now did not communicate with one another for weeks on end, though less through not being on speaking terms than having nothing to say.”
His prose gave a voice to the people who have nothing to say, who live in the rainstorms of emotion but don’t have a language to express it. An assiduous stylist as well as a clear-eyed and humane storyteller, he never wasted a word or deployed a flashy metaphor. His prose doesn’t try to wow you. It stirs deeper recognitions. He has a way of not describing but incarnating characters on the page, often through silence, the realities he opts not to reveal. So alive with a kind of underground water of heart and empathy, yet so understated and layered, too, his short stories and novels will always be valued by people who love fiction.
Joseph O’Connor is McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick
Peter Fallon
Almost 40 years ago I edited, with Andrew Carpenter, a book called The Writers (O’Brien, 1980) which presented new work by writers we’d invited to take part in a series of readings in London as part of A Sense of Ireland. William Trevor contributed his characteristically elegant, lucid prose in a story called Autumn Sunshine set in a rectory near Enniscorthy. As so often, he remembered and recreated Ireland from his home in Devon.
We met at the Poetry Society in Earl’s Court when, after his reading, I commended him and then thought to add, But you must be an old hand at this. And he responded, I’ve never been asked to do this before. This is the first reading I’ve ever given. He was 52.
I won’t pretend I knew him well but I was happy to attend when he and the marvelous Edna O’Brien were conferred with the torcs of Saoithe and I’m happy now to acknowledge the consummate art of a courteous man. Despite the regularity of his output its standard never dipped.
Peter Fallon’s recent collection, Strong, My Love appeared in 2014. He has recently completed Deeds and Their Days (after Hesiod)
Dermot Bolger
William Trevor was a master craftsman whose restrained and subtle probing into the heart of the human condition I grew to admire ever more deeply over the years, as I came to a greater understanding of how deftly he unlocked the most secretive of emotions, in a unobtrusive turn of phrase or delicately understated shift of tone. This meant that, having seemingly presented you with the familiar, he then adroitly pitched you into the unknown: into layers of disappointment, resignation or unspoken love lodged so deeply in his characters’ hearts that they were barely aware of it. It was not so much that Trevor had no time for pyrotechnics, as that he had no need for them – being blessed with an uncanny ability to blast his way to the heart of things in quiet, restrained and yet emotionally devastating short stories and novels.
Dermot Bolger’s latest novel is The Lonely Sea and Sky
Roddy Doyle
Years ago, when I was in my early 20s and before I started writing, I was killing time in Hodges Figges when I overheard a conversation between a man selling books for Penguin and a man who worked there.
‘Talk to me about William Trevor,’ said the Hodges Figges man.
‘Big houses – angst,’ said the Penguin rep.
I waited for more. But there was no more.
I eventually read William Trevor – I think I’ve read all of his novels and published stories – and I know now that there was a lot more. The man – the work - was brilliant, elegant, surprising, reliable, precise, stark, often sad, sometimes funny, shocking and even frightening. His big houses were great; his small ones were wonderful too. The angst was bang-on, and so were all the other emotions and states. Every word mattered, every sentence was its own big house.
I met him once, very briefly. He smiled and told me he’d liked The Van, and left me feeling very special.
Roddy Doyle's latest novel is The Guts
Neil Hegarty
In his short story At Olivehill, from the collection Cheating at Canasta (2007), William Trevor focuses on a once well-to-do Irish Catholic family. They had kept their land with cunning through the penal times: but now, in Celtic Tiger Ireland, they must turn their fields and woods into a golf course in order to survive financially.
Trevor challenges us to empathise: after all, this family is of a certain stripe in Ireland; its members still own their lands, their house has a maid. Yet we do empathise: the grief of the family matriarch Mollie as the diggers turn meadow and bluebell wood into sterile fairway and green is all too recognisable; at story’s end, she draws her curtains and confines herself to one room. And she understands the present and the past: ‘Persecution had become an ugly twist of circumstance, more suited to the times. Merciless and unrelenting, what was visited on the family could be borne, as before it had been.’
‘At Olivehill’ connects to a deep past, but is rooted in a modern milieu, in environmental concerns, in the loss of a collective history in the name of progress. It exemplifies Trevor’s work in being both specific and universal: we are offered the merest glimpse of a life – and in that glimpse, we find everything.
Neil Hegarty's debut novel, Inch Levels, was published earlier this year
Katherine A Powers
William Trevor was peerless among writers of short stories and in the first rank of novelists. Though he left Ireland in the 1950s, his writing continued to portray, both chillingly and compassionately, the human condition as it manifested itself in the drear, guilt-laden land of his birth and youth, a country “drained of its energy by centuries of disaffection” (as he once put it). His writing had the quiet force of absolute precision in describing loss, loneliness, estrangement, betrayal, endurance, and expiation. Somehow all this brought joy, as did his mordant wit. I hope that readers' sensibilities remain finely calibrated enough in the years to come to continue to appreciate this great writer's genius.
Katherine A Powers is on the Board of the (U.S.) National Book Critics Circle and is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life – The Letters of JF Powers, 1942-1963
Antony Farrell
We salute a great writer, elegiast and chronicler of those in-between worlds of Irish and English psyches, like his contemporary Jennifer Johnston. Devon-based like Sean O'Casey for most of his working life, where he tuned in to RTE Radio One every day, he truly merits that over-burdened adjective Chekhovian. Lilliput laments his passing.
Antony Farrell is the publisher of Lilliput Press
Eibhear Walshe
For many reasons, William Trevor will be reckoned as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth and twenty first century but I think his work as the gifted inheritor of the Big House novel tradition will be seen as one of his greatest achievements. In his sparse, beautifully judged, elegiac novel, the Story of Lucy Gault, ( 2002), Trevor extended the range of a powerful literary mode, continuing on with the writings of Edgeworth, Moore, Somerville and Ross and his most significant predecessor, Elizabeth Bowen and bringing the story of the beleaguered Anglo-Irish family, the lost child and the abandoned house right up to this century. Also, for anyone who writes novels, or teaches creative writing, Reading Turgenev is simply a perfect novel to contemplate, apparently artless but achieving a sharpness and an intensity of emotion and loss in the clear lines of the developing narrative. And in both novels, the inner life of books, the way in which his characters live though the life of the imagination is captured as few other writers can. I remember the pleasure in buying a new William Trevor collection of short stories, and am grateful for the feeling of anticipation of each new book brought, knowing that they would never disappoint. And they never did.
Eibhear Walshe lectures in English at University College Cork
Ciaran Carty
William Trevor was one of the most courteous writers I ever met. He told me that he had no roots at all, he never knew where to say he came from: his father moved from town to town all over Ireland while working his way up from bank clerk to manager. Perhaps this is why so many of his stories, among the greatest in Irish literature, feature characters who were conditioned by where they came from: Trevor seemed to experience through them an imagined sense place of his own.
Ciaran Carty is editor of Hennessy New Irish Writing. William Trevor with Elizabeth Bowen was the first judge of the Hennessy Literary Awards in 1971
Ruth Hegarty
William Trevor is of a different generation to me. As a teenager what I read of him was of rural towns and of older men and women. It was in theory very different to a Dublin southside teenager’s upbringing. But I read and reread him because he knew how it was, how people felt. As Bridie put it in A Ballroom of Romance ‘One way or another it wasn’t difficult to be a figure of fun in the ballroom’. In that single short story he captured the awkwardness, the hope and the fears of dating and being out and about in the world. And the crushing disappointments of banal life.
On behalf of Publishing Ireland I’d like to salute him for his major contribution to literature and his influence on film and theatre and give my condolences to his family.
Ruth Hegarty, Publishing Ireland
George O'Brien
One of the first things that I associate with William Trevor is self-effacement. His pen-name itself suggests it, and the plainness of his prose, with its typically unobtrusive gradations of tone and viewpoint, are – paradoxically – expressions of it as well. It’s as if he keeps at a respectful distance from his characters, allowing them to have the full run of their natures, wherever that may take them. More often than not, it takes them into unwelcome places, finds them more exposed to the consequences of their fallen selves, than they’ve been before. And even so, the author’s detachment remains the same. This constancy isn’t just writerly professionalism, although it might be related to the sense of obligation and responsibility that professionalism implies. It’s a kind of disciplined tolerance, a way of saying that Trevor himself can live with his creations. And in this tolerance a case is made, in however oblique and understated a manner, for acceptance, fellow-feeling, reconciliation and similar humane values that his work gently insists must never quite go out of style.
George O'Brien is professor of English at Georgetown University in Washington
Yiyun Li
William Trevor is a major influence for me. I learned writing—and writing in English—by reading him. In fact, I would not have become a writer at all had I not discovered his work.
In September 2008 I traveled to East Sussex, England, to listen to William Trevor give a rare public reading at Small Wonder, a short-story festival. Later, at Lewes station, waiting for the train to London, Trevor told his wife Jane and me about an old man at the end of the long book-signing queue. The man had come not for Trevor’s signature, but to thank him. His wife had loved Trevor’s stories, and when she had become sick, he had read to her. It was a Trevor story he had been reading to her as she was dying. “I was about to cry when he told me this,” Trevor said, his blue eyes misty with a tender sadness. “Now that,” he said to me, “is a good reason to write stories.”
Writers seem to belong to two kinds. There are those who insist on taking center stage. These writers may be brilliant, or didactic, or eccentric, or arrogant, but in any case a reader is told to take a seat: his job is to be dazzled, to be awed, even to be intimidated or bullied into passive acceptance. And then there are those rare writers - Chekhov, for instance, and William Trevor - whose egolessness makes us forget that we are reading a master’s creation; rather, it’s more like living through the story along with the characters, whose pains, flaws, follies and predicaments are ours, too.
William Trevor is a beautiful writer - and a beautiful reader, too, as one can hear from this recording. But what is extraordinary, above all, is his kindness - to his characters, whom, he told me once, he couldn’t forget even years after creating them; to his readers, including the old man and his dying wife; to his and Jane’s garden, which he often writes about with bemused pride; and to a young writer like me, who’s forever indebted to him.
A few years ago, I visited Trevor at his home in Devon. It was early spring- February, though warm and sunny - and a few flowers in the garden had begun to blossom. At lunch time, Trevor placed me on the side of the table facing the window, so that I could see the flowers outside. He sat down and arose again, pulling the curtain ever so slightly. This way, he explained to me, I could enjoy the garden without the sun shining into my eyes.
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| William Trevor |
William Trevor, my father: ‘Writing was what kept him going’
Son of the late author on how his father worked in the morning, gardened in the afternoon and hosted some huge parties at the weekends
Dad spent his last four and a half decades living in the Devon countryside. Mum was his constant companion, as well as – for 15 or 16 years – a beautiful, much-loved but rather stupid red setter called Rory. Dad’s way of life, which mainly involved writing in the morning and gardening in the afternoon, was deliberately quiet – the right conditions for the work was what mattered. In the 1980s and 1990s, lengthy breaks – on occasion, months at a time – were spent in Italy. However, that time abroad was not a holiday and the work never really stopped. In Italy, as elsewhere, settings were borrowed, conversations imagined or eavesdropped on.
Dad was rarely upset in any way that lasted. He didn’t talk much about his work to my brother and me, but writing was what kept him going. He needed it. The only time I knew him to be unhappy was near the end, when he couldn’t write any longer.
Before settling in Devon, we had lived in London, staying at Mum’s parents’ place – a three-storey house with a small garden on the edge of Putney. Dad wrote his first novels (or at least, ones he was satisfied with) during that period, including The Old Boys (published in 1964) and The Love Department (published in 1966), as well as the short story collection, The Day We Got Drunk On Cake (published in 1967). Initially, novels and short stories were written while he held down a regular job as a copywriter at a Soho advertising agency. It was the sort of organisation which probably no longer exists. Home to a number of aspiring poets and novelists, the boss turned a blind eye to his employees doing their own thing on the firm’s time.
After a while Dad left advertising – he said he was no good at it – and used a tiny upstairs room at home to write. Pretty much everything was regarded as potential material. Quite regularly in the early works, characters were based on real people, several rather close to home. They tended to be humorous figures, often with unusual or exaggerated mannerisms. Occasionally, I noticed Mum – in other ways a big fan of Dad’s writing – nervously reading the proof of a new novel or story, worried a barely-disguised acquaintance was about to feature.
The parties
Looking back on those London days, we seem to have had a happy, quite ordinary, middle-class way of life. One occasion at our house stands out: a huge party, or it certainly seemed so through my five-year-old eyes. It took place about a year before we left London for good. Apart from my brother, I was the only child there and I have a distinct recollection of it being too crowded to get up the stairs. Everyone seemed bizarrely good humoured. Friends of my parents, who played in a jazz group, had finished a gig locally, and performed an impromptu second gig at the party. At one point, I wondered why a man and a woman had been discovered together in a cupboard, both apparently there for some time. In answer to questions on that subject Dad simply smiled.
Much later, I asked if he missed the late 1960s London scene. I mentioned the party. Everyone seemed to have had a wonderful time, I said. “Yes,” Dad said, a little mischievously. “A couple of marriages fell by the wayside that evening.”
In Devon, we lived first in a huge, falling-down pile near Honiton. Here, in summer, Dad would type outside if the weather was good. There were rules of a sort about disturbing him (making a racket in the morning was frowned upon) but it was left to Mum to enforce them
For a while in Devon, the London world wasn’t left behind completely. My parents’ friends would visit, often in groups at the weekend. Sometimes, I would ask my own school friends in Exeter about adults they knew and it seemed that my parents attracted a rather different sort. My father appeared quite down to earth to me – all my life, in fact. Invariably, he was polite. But he was amused and interested in lively, unusual or simply bad behaviour of others – and we saw a bit of that during those Devon weekends.
Once or twice it went too far, even for Dad. In the mid 1970s, a flashily-dressed man, about 25, turned up for a Devon weekend. He was part of a group who knew each other and must have had something to do with publishing. He drove a sports car – immediately attractive to me, aged 10 or so. Shortly after arrival, he took my brother and I into nearby fields and taught us to fire the pistol he’d casually produced from a bag. During the weekend, he also found time to seduce the French au pair. He was not invited again, although over the years Dad – who could be quite forgiving, particularly if someone had provided him with a good story – would occasionally wonder what had happened to the flashily-dressed man with the pistol and sports car.
Easily distracted
At that first West Country house, Dad turned part of the garden into a grass tennis court. A net was bought and white painted lines marked out. The bounce wasn’t terribly true, even after the purchase of a roller. Nonetheless, I loved playing and our red setter loved jumping over the net, usually mid-point. Dad would play tennis too, but was easily distracted. I suspect his mind was more on The Ballroom Of Romance’s Bridie or Timothy Gedge, the teenage blackmailer in The Children of Dynmouth than anything I hit from the back of the court. In fact, he found an effective method of shortening the rallies. When receiving my not-very-strong serve, Dad had the infuriating habit of positioning himself at the net rather than the base line, a tactic which enabled him to volley an immediate winner. He enjoyed telling me there was nothing in the rules of the game to stop this, although I remain unsure. It certainly speeded up the game.
A love of watching tennis remained to the end. In recent years, he and Mum would tell me in detail about the latest match they’d watched on television. Roger Federer always a great favourite. Some of Dad’s other heroes – introduced to me as a child – are still my heroes. One Christmas, almost in passing, he said I might like James Cagney gangster movies – and I, aged nine, was entranced. Two or three years later he said something similar about PG Wodehouse, as he produced a copy of The Inimitable Jeeves. About the same time, we watched Some Like It Hot together, and Monty Python’s original TV shows.
Much later, Dad approved of my choice of career – as a defence barrister in criminal law in London – if only because it provided a decent source of stories. He enjoyed hearing about silver-tongued handlers of stolen goods and charming fraudsters. Most of all he loved tales of pompous judges encouraging a prosecution victory, but defeated by a jury having none of it. Often, he encouraged me to mess with the truth a bit. “Wouldn’t it work a little better if your man had said such and such?” he’d say. “Wouldn’t that ring truer with your jury? Could you not put that forward?”
Many of my memories of Dad are English ones from London and Devon. But he remained Irish through and through from his own very precise memories of a childhood spent entirely in Ireland to a lifetime supporting the national rugby team. One of the last times I saw him smile, two weeks before he died and when he was quite unwell, was when I told him that the Irish had that day finally beaten the All Blacks after more than a century of trying.
Last Stories by William Trevor is published by Viking today, May 24th (on what would have been his 90th birthday). Most of the stories have not been previously published. The International Literature Festival Dublin is hosting an event, Celebrating William Trevor: John Banville, Dermot Bolger, Roy Foster, Yiyun Li and Danielle McLaughlin, this evening. To book tickets, please go to http://ilfdublin.com/events/celebrating-william-trevor
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| William Trevor Photograph by Jane Bown |
Born as William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland, to a middle-class Protestant family, he moved several times to other provincial towns, including Skibbereen, Tipperary, Youghal and Enniscorthy, as a result of his father's work as a bank official.
He was educated at St. Columba's College in Dublin, and at Trinity College, Dublin, from which he received a degree in history. Trevor worked as a sculptor under the name Trevor Cox after his graduation from Trinity College, supplementing his income by teaching. He married Jane Ryan in 1952 and emigrated to Great Britain two years later, working as a copywriter for an advertising agency. It was during this time that he and his wife had their first son.
His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, was published in 1958, but had little critical success. He later disowned this work and refused to have it republished.In 1964, at the age of 36, Trevor won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature for The Old Boys. The win encouraged Trevor to become a full-time writer.
He and his family moved to Devon in South West England, where he resided until his death. In 2002, he made honorary KBE for services to literature. Despite having spent most of his life in England, he considered himself to be "Irish in every vein".
William Trevor died peacefully in his sleep during the early hours of 21 November 2016, at his home. He was 88 years old.
Works and themes
He wrote several collections of short stories that were well received. His short stories often follow a Chekhovian pattern. The characters in Trevor's work are typically marginalised members of society: children, the elderly, single middle-aged men and women, or the unhappily married. Those who cannot accept the reality of their lives create their own alternative worlds into which they retreat. A number of the stories use Gothic elements to explore the nature of evil and its connection to madness. Trevor acknowledged the influence of James Joyce on his short-story writing, and "the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal" can be detected in his work, but the overall impression is not of gloominess, since, particularly in his early work, the author's wry humour offers the reader a tragicomic version of the world. He adapted much of his work for stage, television and radio. In 1990, Fools of Fortune was made into a film directed by Pat O'Connor, along with a 1999 film adaptation of Felicia's Journey, which was directed by Atom Egoyan.
Trevor's stories are set in both England and Ireland; they range from black comedies to tales based on Irish history and politics. Common themes in his works are the tensions between Protestant (usually Church of Ireland) landowners and Catholic tenants. His early books are peopled by eccentrics who speak in a pedantically formal manner and engage in hilariously comic activities that are recounted by a detached narrative voice. Instead of one central figure, the novels feature several protagonists of equal importance, drawn together by an institutional setting, which acts as a convergence point for their individual stories. The later novels are thematically and technically more complex. The operation of grace in the world is explored, and several narrative voices are used to view the same events from different angles. Unreliable narrators and different perspectives reflect the fragmentation and uncertainty of modern life. Trevor also explored the decaying institution of the "Big House" in his novels Fools of Fortune and The Story of Lucy Gault.
Awards and honours
Trevor was a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and Aosdána. He was awarded an honorary CBE in 1977 for "services to literature", and was made a Companion of Literature in 1994. In 2002 he received an honorary KBE in recognition of his services to literature.
Trevor was nominated for the Booker Prize five times, making the shortlist in 1970, 1976, 1991 and 2002, and the longlist in 2009. He won the Whitbread Prize three times and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature once.
Since 2002, when non-American authors became eligible to compete for the O. Henry Award, Trevor won the award four times, for his stories Sacred Statues (2002), The Dressmaker's Child (2006), The Room (2007), a juror favourite of that year, and Folie à Deux (2008).
Trevor was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2011.
Recognition
Legacies
A monument to William Trevor was unveiled in Trevor's native Mitchelstown on 25 August 2004. It is a bronze sculpture by Liam Lavery and Eithne Ring in the form of a lectern, with an open book incorporating an image of the writer and a quotation, as well as the titles of his three Whitbread Prize-winning works, and two others of significance.
On 23 May 2008, the eve of his 80th birthday, a commemorative plaque, indicating the house on Upper Cork Street, Mitchelstown where Trevor was born, was unveiled by Louis McRedmond.
Novels and novellas
- Trevor, William (1958). A standard of behaviour. Hutchinson.
- The Old Boys (Bodley Head, 1964)
- The Boarding House (Bodley Head, 1965)
- The Love Department (Bodley Head, 1966)
- Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel (Bodley Head, 1969)
- Miss Gomez and the Brethren (Bodley Head, 1971)
- Elizabeth Alone (Bodley Head, 1973)
- The Children of Dynmouth (Bodley Head, 1976)
- The Distant Past (Poolbeg Press, 1979)
- Other People's Worlds (Bodley Head, 1980)
- Fools of Fortune (Bodley Head, 1983)
- Nights at the Alexandra (Hutchinson, 1987)
- The Silence in the Garden (Bodley Head, 1988)
- Two Lives (the two novellas Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria) (Viking Press, 1991)
- Felicia's Journey (Viking, 1994)
- Death in Summer (Viking, 1998)
- The Story of Lucy Gault (Viking, 2002)
- Love and Summer (Viking, 2009)
- The Dressmaker's Child (Penguin Books)
Short story collections
- The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1967)
- The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1972)
- The Last Lunch of the Season (Covent Garden Press, 1973)
- Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1975)
- Lovers of their Time (Bodley Head, 1978)
- Beyond the Pale (Bodley Head, 1981)
- The Stories of William Trevor (Penguin, 1983)
- The News from Ireland and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1986)
- Family Sins and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1989)
- Outside Ireland: Selected Stories (Viking, 1992)
- The Collected Stories (Viking, 1992; Penguin, 1993, 2003)
- After Rain (Viking, 1996)
- Cocktails at Doney's (Bloomsbury Classics, 1996)
- The Hill Bachelors (Viking, 2000)
- A Bit On the Side (Viking, 2004)
- Cheating at Canasta (Viking, 2007)
- Bodily Secrets (Penguin Great Loves, 2007; new selection of stories from earlier collections)
- The Collected Stories (Viking, 2009),"
- Selected Stories (Viking, 2010), listed as "the second volume of his collected stories" -02206-9.
- Last Stories (Viking, 2018)
Drama
- Play for Today: O Fat White Woman (1971, adaptation from short story)
- The Old Boys (Davis-Poynter, 1971)
- A Night with Mrs da Tanka (Samuel French, 1972)
- Going Home (Samuel French, 1972)
- Marriages (Samuel French, 1973)
- The Ballroom of Romance (Pat O’Connor, 1982)
- Going Home (Samuel French, 1972)
Children's books
- Juliet's Story (The O'Brien Press, Dublin, 1991)
- Juliet's Story (Bodley Head, 1992)
Non-fiction
- A Writer's Ireland: Landscape in Literature (Thames & Hudson, 1984)
- Trevor, William (1993). Excursions in the real world : memoirs. Hutchinson.
As editor
- The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (Oxford University Press, 1989)
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