William Trevor

Revaluations

Paul Delaney, Michael Parker

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784993573
• eBook ISBN: 9781526112385
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

William Trevor: Revaluations offers a comprehensive examination of the oeuvre of one of the most accomplished and celebrated practitioners writing in the English language: the author of fifteen novels, three novellas and eleven volumes of short stories, as well as plays, radio and TV adaptations and film screenplays.Drawing on the talents of a team of distinguished international scholars, this volume shines a critical light on Trevor's core concerns with individuality and the family, and cultural and national identity, extending significantly the scope of current scholarship. Essays scrutinise the author's prolonged concern with domestic, communal and national violence, his interrogation of patterns of inheritance and ideological heritage, and the impact of the past on choices his characters make. William Trevor: Revaluations is a groundbreaking collection of essays, and will also be seen as a definitive introduction to the work of a major contemporary novelist and short-story writer.

Part One

1

Learnt by heart: William Trevor and reading

Hermione Lee

This essay proposes to look at the reading that goes on in some of the novels and stories of William Trevor, and to see what can be deduced from that about his work. It starts in Quincunx House, a 100-year-old house in Essex in which three generations of one family have lived. It is now owned by Thaddeus Davenant, who is remembering his parents, his English father and Polish mother.

In winter they sat and watched the rain or played chess by the fire, their two bent heads reflected in the looking-glass that stretches the length of the mantelpiece. Reflected still are the spines of books on old teak shelves, The Essays of Elia and Eliana Lamb embossed and tooled, F.L. Hall’s History of the Indian Empire, the Reverent W.R. Trace’s Portrait of a Clergyman, being Anecdotes and Reminiscences, Daudier’s Fly Fishing, Great Scenes from the Courts, A Century of Horror Tales. All of Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë is there, all of George Eliot and the Waverley novels, Sir Percy Keane’s Diary of an Edwardian Hell-Raiser, all of Thackeray and Dickens. The romantic works of Mrs Audrey Stone and Marietta Kay Templeton are there in their cheaper editions, and Murder in Mock Street and The Mystery of the Milestone and The Casebook of Philippe Plurot. ‘We must not sell the things’, his mother said the day his father died (DS 24–5).

‘We must not sell the things’ is a refrain that runs through many of Trevor’s family stories; and, as in this example, from Death in Summer (1998), ‘the things’ are in large part the books, which, apparently randomly listed, make up a sense of a culture, a period, a class. In his autobiographical essays, though they are much more about people and places than they are about reading, the books in the house signify a whole way of life. Childhood information, outside school, came from films, and a motley collection of reading:

My sister’s schoolgirl paperbacks stifled the tedium of doing nothing, and when that small library was exhausted there were detective stories set among the nightclubs of Mayfair or in sleeping Gloucestershire villages. The only available books about Ireland were Jimín, in Irish, at school, and Knocknagow by Charles Kickham, which I abandoned after the first paragraph (ERW xv).

His parents’ ill-matched marriage is summed up by the difference in their reading:

My mother … was a great reader: Philip Gibbs, Francis Brett Young, A.J. Cronin, Robert Hichens. In the succession of small towns where we lived she borrowed their books, in brown-paper jackets from the nuns at the convent, or from a branch of the Argosy circulating library, usually to be found at the back of a sweetshop … My father hardly read at all (ERW 20).

Trevor often uses books in this way as cultural wallpaper. The long years that Lucy Gault spends in a sealed-in limbo in the Big House, which her parents have left, believing her to be dead, are partly spent in reading:

‘D’you know how many books there are at Lahardane?’

‘No.’

‘There are four thousand and twenty-seven. So old, some of them, they’re falling to bits. Others have never been opened. Do you know how many I’ve read? Can you guess?’

Ralph shook his head.

‘Five hundred and twelve. Last night, for the second time, I finished Vanity Fair …

It has taken me years to read all those books’ (SLG 103).

One of the books she reads in these long years of semi-solitude and waiting is Florence MacCarthy by Lady Morgan (SLG 126). Lady Morgan, the sociable, adventurous, intrepid, theatrical author of The Wild Irish Girl and other early nineteenth-century ‘Irish tales’, provides a vivid, energetic Anglo-Irish contrast to Lucy’s moribund, sidelined life in the Big House. As with an old lady called Mrs Abercrombie, in ‘Last Wishes’ (CS 483), reading Butler’s Lives of the Saints, in her Gloucestershire mansion where nothing must ever be changed, or the Irish nurse in the woman’s hospital in Elizabeth Alone (1973), who insists that all her lady patients read the improving 1886 autobiography of Lady Augusta Haptree, a heroic London philanthropist, a particular title is sometimes singled out to suggest, or to contrast with, a way of thinking or a way of life.

Grown-up children – like Thaddeus Davenant in Death in Summer – often retain a memory of a parent reading a particular book. So Matilda, in the long story ‘Matilda’s England’, keeps a memory of her parents in the English farm of her childhood, and of her mother’s reading of a popular novel of 1905 by a forgotten author, Robert Smythe Hichens:

My father was asleep with last Saturday’s weekly paper on his knee, my mother was reading one of the books from the bookcase in the dining-room we never used, probably The Garden of Allah, which was her favourite. The two sheepdogs were asleep under the table (CS 538).

It is a memory that seems idyllic until it begins to become apparent that the narrator is fixated on the past in a terribly damaging way, like so many of Trevor’s protagonists.

Libraries in a Big House, parents reading by the fire, a farmhouse full of old books, these seem like the typical furniture of a William Trevor novel or story. But though he often returns to such scenarios, he is not defined by them. Felicia, the runaway small-town Irish girl on her dangerous quest for her lover in Felicia’s Journey (1994) was brought up, in small-town poverty, by a patriot Irish father whose great-grandmother – now a demented ninety-nine-year-old lady with whom she has to share a room – was briefly married to a revolutionary hero, shot in the ‘ancient cause’ (FJ 25) of Ireland’s freedom. Again and again Felicia’s father takes her through his books of clippings, the obituaries of the three local heroes, ‘a handwritten copy of Patrick Pearse’s proclamation of a provisional government, dated 24 April 1916 … columns of newsprint [telling] of the firing of the General Post Office … of Roger Casement’s landing … of the shelling of Liberty Hall … Mass cards of the local patriots … an article about the old penal laws … The Soldier’s Song in its entirety’. These clippings have been pasted into ‘three heavy volumes of wallpaper pattern books that Multilly of the hardware had let him have when their contents went out of date’ (FJ 26), so that the clippings and documents and photographs are mixed in with the patterns of dahlias and roses, dots and stripes. The heroic revolutionary stories they tell are as historical – and as remote to Felicia – as the out-of-fashion wallpaper patterns. These texts are, literally, the wallpaper of the characters’ lives.

Apart from his clippings and his newspaper, Felicia’s father does not read, and nor do most of the other characters in Felicia’s Journey, a novel of hungry, struggling, marginal, underprivileged lives in Ireland and the English Midlands. Far more people do not read than do, in William Trevor’s work. Like some of the writers he most admires, Chekhov, Dickens, or Ford Madox Ford, and like other great story-tellers of his generation such as V.S. Pritchett or Eudora Welty, Trevor has the art of climbing right inside the minds and characters – without the slightest sense of effort or of condescension – who have no literary interests or literary language. All the same, their heads are full of texts. They read obituaries, racing tips, agony columns, advertisements, religious tracts, crossword clues: ‘Unladylike assortment of calumnies’, nine letters; ‘There’s none of the Old Adam in a cardinal (6)’ (‘A Dream of Butterflies’, CS 693). They read old diaries – the plot of The Silence in the Garden is driven along by them – and love letters, crucially, in The Story of Lucy Gault. They read newspapers, which feature everywhere in his stories. In Ireland it might be the Irish Herald or a local paper like the Tullamore Tribune (BS 92), in England the Sunday Telegraph or the Daily Telegraph. The couple who have left Ireland for London in ‘Being Stolen From’ read the Cork Weekly Examiner to ‘keep them in touch’ (CS 810). Newspapers are often in the heads of Trevor’s loopy, deranged characters – like Edward in The Love Department (1966) imagining that the task he has been assigned will achieve national prominence: ‘A Very Fine Murderer, a newspaper would pro-nounce; Useful to the Nation. The headlines dazzled Edward’s mind and caused him to feel giddy’ (LD 190). The psychopath in Felicia’s Journey reads the Daily Telegraph from cover to cover: ‘foreign news, financial, a column about television programmes he has not seen, the gossip pages’ (FJ 188). Matilda, going crazy in the house which dominated her childhood, takes against her husband’s way of reading the papers: ‘He had a way of turning the pages of a newspaper, one page and then another, until finally he pored over the obituaries and the little advertisements. I didn’t like the way he did that’ (‘Matilda’s England’, CS 582). The doomed Protestant boy called Milton, in the powerful story ‘Lost Ground’, who has seen a vision of a saint in his father’s orchard, wants to preach his vision but is locked up and murdered by his own family, has hardly any resources other than his own imagination, jigsaw puzzles and the local paper: ‘Milton had never been much of a one for reading, had never read a book from cover to cover. Sometimes when his mother brought his food she left him the weekly newspaper and he read about the towns it gave news of, and the different rural neighbourhoods, one of which was his own’ (AR 174).

The language of newspapers can betray and distort reality, as when a snooping feature-writer and photographer from a London paper come to investigate and write up a local murder case in ‘Events at Drimaghleen’, and those whose lives have been shattered by the tragedy find themselves turned into the materials of condescending, sensationalist British journalism: ‘These simple farm folk of Europe’s most western island form limited rural communities that all too often turn in on themselves’ (CS 1099).

Trevor’s characters are often ‘turned in on themselves’, strange, extreme, at odds with the world. When newspaper headlines or cuttings filter through their minds it is often a sign of an obsessive or cut-offpersonality. The same is true of technical, specialised literary genres, which Trevor sometimes infiltrates into his stories to show a warped, unsocialised or alien mind at work. In My House in Umbria (1991), the romantic novelist who tells the story, whose life revolves around fantasy, curiosity, drink and garrulous, intimate conversations, comes up against the dry technical language of an entomologist’s books. Opening a volume in his room called The Case for Differentia she sees a collection of words ‘brandished threateningly’:

Empirical, behavioural, delimit, cognitive, validation, determinism, re-endorsement. Can this be designated an urban environment, a question posed, followed by the statement that a quarter of the ‘given population’ are first-generation immigrants. From what I could gather these were ants, not human beings. I closed the volume hastily (TL 344).

The story pits her romantic language of cliché and escapism against this scientific collecting of data, suggesting that both kinds of language might be equally inadequate for considering human beings. The psychopath in Felicia’s Journey, when he is not reading the Daily Telegraph, visits the public library to consult medical books to see if he can account for his state of mind, and reads:

Delusional insanity is not preceded by either maniacal or melancholic symptoms, and is not necessarily accompanied by any failure of the reasoning capacity. In the early stage the patient is introspective and uncommunicative, rarely telling his thoughts but brooding and worrying over them in secret. After this stage has lasted for a longer or shorter time the delusions become fixed and are generally of a disagreeable kind (FJ 190).

Trevor puts such extracts inside the characters’ reading lives, and does not pass any authorial judgment on them. But the associations he makes with such specialist, analytical literature always suggests that it is a danger zone. The dry, unpleasant older husband in Elizabeth Alone, who has no interest in reading the novels she was brought up on, prefers textbooks on anthropology and archaeology: ‘He’d suggested that she should read books about the Achaemenians and reports on the integration of the central African tribes that interested him. Dutifully she did so, but when she once suggested that he might like to glance through Wives and Daughters, which he’d never read, he said he didn’t think it would much involve him’ (EA 11). The lonely, sensitive and peculiar Alban Roche in Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971), an orphaned exile from Ireland who works in a London pet shop, and is a prime suspect in the disappearance of a young girl, is addicted to books on animal biology:

In the metazoa … each cell, while still performing the basic functions, is additionally specialized for a more particular function … The ventral wall of the abdomen is soft and distensible … The mouth is terminal and the upper lip is divided, thus exposing the front (incisor) teeth (MGB 71).

For the lonely misfit, such systematic language can be consolatory; for the reader of the novel or story, it often works as a red light, signalling human incompetence. Helena, the girl in ‘Her Mother’s Daughter’, is sacrificed by her chilly and unaffectionate mother to her father’s work as a lexicographer.

The words he liked to bring up at meal-times had rare meanings, sometimes five or six, but these, though worthy of record, had often to be dismissed on what he called the journey to the centre of interest. ‘Fluxion, Helena, is the rate at which a flowing motion increases its magnitude. The Latin fluxionem. Now flux, Helena, is different’ (CS 993).

After her father’s death, her mother sits alone in a dark room and continues his work, neglecting and dismissing her daughter, and resisting the flux – or the fluxion – of ordinary life. When Helena finally escapes from her fixed, loveless childhood home she leaves her dead parents’ life’s work behind in a cardboard box, to be casually destroyed. In order to free herself, she becomes one of many characters in Trevor who ignore the lingering commandment, ‘We must not sell’ – or get rid of – ‘the things’. But nothing can get rid of the bitterness and lack of human sympathy she has inherited.

In contrast to clinical or technical texts, which are often suspect in Trevor’s work, other kinds of reading are used to create a sense of warmth, affection or emotion. Trevor is very interested in popular literature and how certain genres run through people’s lives like tunes or family memories. There are several examples of schoolgirl storybooks, affectionately remembered. In Elizabeth Alone, Elizabeth remembers chattering w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Bibliography and filmography
• Index