TREVOR, William

Nationality: Irish. Born: Mitchelstown, County Cork, 24 May 1928. Education: St. Columba's College, Dublin, 1942-46; Trinity College, Dublin, B.A. 1950. Family: Married Jane Ryan in 1952; two sons. Career: History teacher, Armagh, Northern Ireland, 1951-53; art teacher, Rugby, England, 1953-55; sculptor in Somerset, 1955-60; advertising copywriter, Notley's, London, 1960-64. Lives in Devon, England. Awards: Transatlantic Review prize, for fiction, 1964; Hawthornden prize, for fiction, 1965; Society of Authors travelling fellowship, 1972; Allied Irish Banks prize, for fiction, 1976; Heinemann award, for fiction, 1976; Whitbread Award, 1976, 1983, Book of the Year, 1994; Irish Community prize, 1979; BAFTA award, for television play, 1983; Sunday Express Book of the Year, 1994. D. Litt.: University of Exeter, 1984; Trinity College, Dublin, 1986; D. Litt.: Queen's University, Belfast, 1989; National University, Cork, 1990. Member: Irish Academy of Letters. C.B.E. (Commander, Order of the British Empire), 1977. Agent: Peters Fraser and Dunlop Group, 503-504 The Chambers, Chelsea Harbour, Lots Road, London SW10 0FX, England; or, Sterling Lord Literistic Inc., 1 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10010, U.S.A.

Publications

Novels

A Standard of Behaviour. London, Hutchinson, 1958.

The Old Boys. London, Bodley Head, and New York, Viking Press, 1964.

The Boarding-House. London, Bodley Head, and New York, VikingPress, 1965.

The Love Department. London, Bodley Head, 1966; New York, Viking Press, 1967.

Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel. London, Bodley Head, 1969; NewYork, Viking Press, 1970.

Miss Gomez and the Brethren. London, Bodley Head, 1971.

Elizabeth Alone. London, Bodley Head, 1973; New York, VikingPress, 1974.

The Children of Dynmouth. London, Bodley Head, 1976; New York, Viking Press, 1977.

Other People's Worlds. London, Bodley Head, 1980; New York, Viking Press, 1981.

Fools of Fortune. London, Bodley Head, and New York, VikingPress, 1983.

The Silence in the Garden. London, Bodley Head, and New York, Viking, 1988.

Two Lives (includes Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria ).London and New York, Viking, 1991.

Juliet's Story. New York, Simon & Schuster Books for YoungReaders, 1994.

Felicia's Journey. London and New York, Viking, 1995.

After Rain. New York, Viking, 1996.

Death in Summer. New York, Viking, 1998.

The Hill Bachelors. New York, Viking, 2000.

Short Stories

The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories. London, BodleyHead, 1967; New York, Viking Press, 1968.

Penguin Modern Stories 8, with others. London, Penguin, 1971.

The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories. London, Bodley Head, and New York, Viking Press, 1972.

The Last Lunch of the Season. London, Covent Garden Press, 1973.

Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories. London, Bodley Head, 1975;New York, Viking Press, 1976.

Lovers of Their Time and Other Stories. London, Bodley Head, 1978;New York, Viking Press, 1979.

The Distant Past and Other Stories. Dublin, Poolbeg Press, 1979.

Beyond the Pale and Other Stories. London, Bodley Head, 1981;New York, Viking Press, 1982.

The Stories of William Trevor. London and New York, Penguin, 1983.

The News from Ireland and Other Stories. London, Bodley Head, andNew York, Viking, 1986.

Nights at the Alexandra (novella). London, Century Hutchinson, andNew York, Harper, 1987.

Family Sins and Other Stories. London, Bodley Head, and New York, Viking, 1990.

Trio: Three Stories from Cheltenham (novellas, with Jane Gardam and Rose Tremain). London, Penguin Books, 1993.

Outside Ireland: Selected Stories. London, Penguin Books, 1995.

Cocktails at Doney's and Other Stories, edited by Giles Gordon. London, Bloomsbury, 1996.

Ireland: Selected Stories. New York, Penguin Books, 1998.

Plays

The Elephant's Foot (produced Nottingham, 1965).

The Girl (televised 1967; produced London, 1968). London, French, 1968.

A Night with Mrs. da Tanka (televised 1968; produced London, 1972). London, French, 1972.

Going Home (broadcast 1970; produced London, 1972). London, French, 1972.

The Old Boys, adaptation of his own novel (produced London, 1971).London, Davis Poynter, 1971.

A Perfect Relationship (broadcast 1973; produced London, 1973).London, Burnham House, 1976.

The 57th Saturday (produced London, 1973).

Marriages (produced London, 1973). London, French, 1973.

Scenes from an Album (broadcast 1975; produced Dublin, 1981).Dublin, Co-op, 1981.

Beyond the Pale (broadcast 1980). Published in Best Radio Plays of 1980, London, Eyre Methuen, 1981.

Autumn Sunshine adaptation of his own story (televised 1981; broadcast 1982). Published in Best Radio Plays of 1982, London, Methuen, 1983.

Radio Plays:

The Penthouse Apartment, 1968; Going Home, 1970;The Boarding House, from his own novel, 1971; A Perfect Relationship, 1973; Scenes from an Album, 1975; Attracta, 1977; Beyond the Pale, 1980; The Blue Dress, 1981; Travellers, 1982; Autumn Sunshine, 1982; The News from Ireland, from his own story, 1986; Events at Drimaghleen, 1988; Running Away, 1988.

Television Plays:

The Baby-Sitter, 1965; Walk's End, 1966; The Girl, 1967; A Night with Mrs. da Tanka, 1968; The Mark-2 Wife, 1969; The Italian Table, 1970; The Grass Widows, 1971; O Fat White Woman, 1972; The Schoolroom, 1972; Access to the Children, 1973; The General's Day, 1973; Miss Fanshawe's Story, 1973; An Imaginative Woman, from a story by Thomas Hardy, 1973; Love Affair, 1974; Eleanor, 1974; Mrs. Acland's Ghosts, 1975; The Statue and the Rose, 1975; Two Gentle People, from a story by Graham Greene, 1975; The Nicest Man in the World, 1976; Afternoon Dancing, 1976; The Love of a Good Woman, from his own story, 1976; The Girl Who Saw a Tiger, 1976; Last Wishes, 1978; Another Weekend, 1978; Memories, 1978; Matilda's England, 1979; The Old Curiosity Shop, from the novel by Dickens, 1979; Secret Orchards, from works by J.R. Ackerley and Diana Petre, 1980; The Happy Autumn Fields, from a story by Elizabeth Bowen, 1980; Elizabeth Alone, from his own novel, 1981; Autumn Sunshine, from his own story, 1981; The Ballroom of Romance, from his own story, 1982; Mrs. Silly (All for Love series), 1983; One of Ourselves, 1983; Broken Homes, from his own story, 1985; The Children of Dynmouth, from his own novel, 1987; August Saturday, from his own novel, 1990; Events at Drimaleen, from his own story, 1992.

Other

Old School Ties (miscellany). London, Lemon Tree Press, 1976.

A Writer's Ireland: Landscape in Literature. London, Thames andHudson, and New York, Viking, 1984.

Excursions in the Real World. London, Hutchinson, and New York, Knopf, 1994.

Editor, The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories. Oxford and NewYork, Oxford University Press, 1989.

Manuscript Collections: University of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Critical Studies:

"William Trevor's System of Correspondences," in Massachusetts Review (Amherst), Autumn 1987, and William Trevor, New York, Twayne, 1993, both by Kristin Morrison; William Trevor: A Study of His Fiction by Gregory A. Schirmer, London, Routledge, 1990; William Trevor: A Study of the Short Fiction by Suzanne Morrow Paulson, New York, Twayne, 1993; William Trevor: The Writer and His Work by Dolores MacKenna. Dublin, New Island, 1999.

William Trevor's celebrated writing career has largely been spent exploring the intersection of corruption and the human heart. His interest in moral vagaries and deluded, vulnerable characters speak to readers often through dark humor and acerbic perception. With over 30 published works—including fiction, short stories and non-fiction—Trevor is considered one of the greatest living short story writers and novelists, and his last few novels, especially, have been highly acclaimed.

Trevor's early works, dating back into the 1960s, mark a blooming affection for characters in bad relationships and down-andout-predicaments. The Old Boys and The Boarding-House are filled with colorful characters drawn from London life. But these eccentricities are not the sort to be taken lightly. They sometimes disguise motives that set characters against one another in wicked and often-comical fashion. The comedy tends to disguise the kinds of evil that ultimately show through—a mask that Trevor becomes more concerned with in his later fiction. Mr. Jaraby's ambition to become president of the Old Boys Association of his school is hardly diabolical, and the extent to which he is willing to go to insure his election is as funny as it is outlandish. But as we learn more and more about him and his ambition, aspects of his private life—particularly his attitude towards his wife and son—reveal a sinister side to his nature that even his worst enemy, Mr. Nox, does not suspect. At the end, defeated in ways he had not anticipated, Mr. Jaraby is left alone with his wife who, though she counsels hope, rightly questions, "Has hell begun, is that it?" and urges, "Come now, how shall we prove we are not dead?"

William Wagner Bird's death at the beginning of The Boarding-House provides one answer to Mrs. Jaraby's question. He leaves a will that bequeaths his boarding-house, occupied by an odd assortment of individuals of both sexes, to two of its most vigorous enemies, Studdy and Nurse Clock, both of them senior residents. Studdy is a petty con artist whose success in stealing one of Nurse Clock's elderly patients away from her has heightened the rivalry and ugliness between the pair. The specific condition of the bequest—that they make no changes in the residents or staff—puts them in an awkward position, but not for long. Like many of Trevor's less reputable characters, they are extremely acquisitive and quickly see that they have more to gain by working together than by working against each other. Unholy alliance though it may be, they systematically try to rid themselves of those strange and solitary inmates in whose hearts Mr. Bird believed he had kindled some comfort by bringing them together in his "great institution in the south-western suburbs of London." By attempting to disrupt the careful arrangement Bird had created and cultivated, they finally destroy everything else, as from his grave Mr. Bird takes his revenge—in the person of a deranged and dispossessed resident who believes he is taking revenge on him.

Timothy Gedge in The Children of Dynmouth is a younger version of Mr. Studdy, and, being younger, displays the causes of his behavior more clearly. An unwanted child, neglected at home by his working mother and sister and abandoned by his father, Gedge finds in others' lives not so much vicarious pleasures as sources of information and feelings that feed his diseased imagination. These help him to blackmail various townspeople, even those once kindly disposed towards him. While his demands are seemingly innocuous—a wedding dress, a dog's-tooth suit, a discarded tin bath—his means to secure those ends are entirely vicious, masked by a false heartiness and cheer that belie his true feelings. Ironically—and Trevor is a master of irony—what he invents to piece out his knowledge often comes close to the truth, close enough in any case to cause considerable anguish and hurt, for example, to Commander and Mrs. Abigail, who for years—ever since they first got married—have been living a lie; or to Stephen and Kate, whose parents—Stephen's father and Kate's mother—have just been married and are off on a honeymoon, leaving their children to begin a difficult adjustment to a new family life. In these and other relationships, Gedge pretends to a friendship that none of the others feels, and that tends to drive him into greater fantasies—and greater invasions of their privacy. His worse invasions, however, are those of the human heart—until he is stopped by someone who recognizes what he is doing and whose wife, through understanding Gedge's plight, puts away her own discontents and concerns herself more fully with her family's future—and his, too.

This somewhat upbeat ending should not be overemphasized—though subsequent novels also show an effort to overcome despair and pathos, optimism is always very qualified in Trevor's fiction and very hard-won, as his many short stories also reveal. Other People's Worlds and Fools of Fortune, give a good idea of just how high the costs can be. Francis Tyte, another descendant of Studdy in Trevor's own rogue's gallery, is a very attractive young man who works as an actor in bit parts and in making commercials. Even more than Timothy Gedge, he has been victimized in his youth by a male boarder in his parents' home, a debt-collector who draws Francis into what one of his later benefactors aptly describes as a "bitter world." Since that time, Francis has also turned into a debt-collector of sorts, like Studdy and Gedge reaping from others what he regards as his due. Already married to an elderly dressmaker in Folkestone who has thrown him out, he later meets Julia, 14 years his senior, who becomes infatuated with him and agrees to marry him and give him her jewelry. Their Italian honeymoon lasts a single day, during which Francis tells Julia everything, including the daughter he has fathered with Doris Smith, a poor shopgirl in Fulham, 12 years earlier. He absconds with the jewels and is not heard from again. But Julia is drawn into Dorrie Smith's world as well as Francis's other circles, including that of the aged parents he has long since abandoned in a retirement home. Despite the humiliation and despondency she naturally suffers because of her folly, Julia becomes more and more deeply involved in the shambles of others' lives Francis has left behind him. Once a devout Catholic, she nearly loses her faith altogether. But Dorrie's joy in more than one sense finally becomes Francis's own, as Gedge becomes Lavinia Featherston's. Drawn into other people's worlds and the messes they contain, she learns to value more her own, but not with smugness. The pain she has experienced has made her invulnerable to that and more truly compassionate than she had ever been before.

Fools of Fortune deepens the focus and the tone displayed in all of these novels, as Trevor resorts to first-person narrative and tells a story of revenge and retribution from several points of view. His eccentrics are still present, but here subordinated to their proper functions in a novel that spans the present century and deals with the perennial conflict between the Irish and their erstwhile British masters. Actually, the narrative goes back to the 19th century, when Irish Protestant William Quinton married English Anna Woodcombe and brought her to live in Kilneagh, County Cork. Two generations later, when for the third time a Quinton had taken a Woodcombe for his bride, Kilneagh is burned down by Black and Tans under the leadership of a Liverpool sergeant named Rudnick. Young Willie and his widowed mother survive the ordeal, but when years afterward Eve Quinton commits suicide—an alcoholic, she never recovered from the disaster—Willie decides to exact his revenge upon Rudnick. Just before he does so, he falls in love with yet another Woodcombe, Marianne, and fathers a child. But he is forced to spend most of the rest of his life in lonely exile, while Marianne and their daughter Imelda are taken in by Willie's aging aunts at what is left of Kilneagh. Anglo-Irish himself, Trevor has for many years lived in England and only occasionally attempted to treat the people and the landscapes of his native land in his fiction. In his short story "Attracta," about an elderly Protestant schoolteacher in a village near Cork, he sketched out some of the same themes he developed more fully in Fools of Fortune. But in "Matilda's England" he shows how the atrocities of the past and their impact upon the present are by no means limited to a single time or place or series of events.

Two more recent works, The Silence in the Garden, and his novella, Nights at the Alexandra, tend to bear out this trend. Both are set in Ireland, where Trevor grew up, and both reflect the elegiac tone that has grown more pronounced in his later work. Nights at the Alexandra looks back to the boyhood of a 58-year-old bachelor and the strange infatuation he felt for a beautiful and rather mysterious woman, Frau Messinger, an Englishwoman married to a German and brought to live in Ireland as World War II began. Isolated from the rest of the townsfolk in their home, Cloverhill, Frau Messinger befriends Harry, the narrator, who quickly falls under her spell. To provide some entertainment for his wife as well as for the townsfolk, Herr Messinger decides to establish a cinema, but it takes a long time to build, and meanwhile Frau Messinger falls ill. She dies shortly after the cinema opens and Harry is employed by her husband to help run it. Eventually he inherits the movie house, which at first was extremely popular. As the customers gradually stop coming, he closes it, just as Cloverhill is closed up when Herr Messinger leaves after his wife's death, and Harry is left to look after the boarded windows and her grave. In the end, he refuses to take a good offer for the place from a business partnership that would turn it into a furniture store.

The Silence in the Garden is a more complex and fully developed novel that uses several narrative techniques, including flash-backs and diary entries. Futile and misdirected love are part of the story, but so are senseless violence, superstition, family pride, and war. The novel is related from several viewpoints: the spinster Sarah Pollexfen's, a poor relation who comes to work at Carriglas, first as a governess, later as a companion to family duenna, old Mrs. Rolleston; Tom, son of the parlor maid (later cook) Brigid, whose intended husband, the butler Linchy, was killed in a Black and Tan ambush intended for the Rolleston men, Lionel and John James; Villana, granddaughter of Mrs. Rolleston, whose engagement to Sarah's brother, Hugh, is suddenly and mysteriously broken off shortly after Linchy's murder. Other Rollestons and townsfolk populate the novel; for example, Colonel Rolleston, Mrs. Rolleston's son and Villana's father, killed at Passchendaele; his sons, Lionel and John James; Finnamore Balt, the pedantic and elderly lawyer who eventually marries Villana; Mrs. Moledy, a widow who runs a boarding house, where she carries on a long liaison with John James, her "king," and who puts in an uninvited and comical appearance at Villana and Finnamore's wedding at Carriglas.

But the real protagonist of the novel is Ireland and her long unhappy history of Protestant landowners and Catholic servants and tenant farmers. If during the Great Famine an earlier generation of Rollestons had taken pity and forgiven rents, the later generation is still largely despised. As an example, when a bridge is proposed and built between the mainland and the island on which Carriglas is situated, it is named after Cornelius Dowley, the man responsible for Linchy's death but otherwise regarded as a hero of the struggle against the British. Over the course of the present century, Carriglas falls into disuse and disrepair, as one by one the Rollestons die out or leave, and only Tom is left. He inherits what is left of the estate, the old house whose value lies mainly in the valuable lead of its roof, and a little land—too little to make farming profitable. Although his would-be fiance, Esmeralda Coyne, thinks it would make a good resort hotel, Tom shows little interest in her or her idea, and the novel ends, like Nights at the Alexandra, with Tom likely to remain a bachelor and the old house steadily disintegrating.

In Death in Summer, Trevor creates a suspenseful tale ripe with elegant language and a subtlety readers have come to expect. Thaddeus Davenant has buried his wife, Letitia, who died in a freak accident. Letitia was a compassionate soul, though her nature was lost on Thaddeus, who married the woman for her money. His true and only affection is for his baby. After many interviews with less-thanqualified nannies, he even agrees to let Letitia's mother move in rather than risk any mishaps with his child. Though Thaddeus is a chilly sort, he manages to gain the affection of Pettie, one of the many nannies rejected for a position in Thaddeus's home. Pettie seems to be the oppositional force to Thaddeus's wintry nature. Having been deprived of love as a girl, she is ravenous for it now with Thaddeus. But is her affection so strong that she would kidnap the one person Thaddeus does love? Trevor's literary teeth are sharper than ever, and he is one of the top heirs to the Anglo-Irish tradition in fiction that has provided a wealth of talent. Trevor's legacy, both in its penchant for human evil and his gentle, luscious prose, make him a writer of insight and remarkable compassion.

—Jay L. Halio,

updated by Maureen Aitken

TREVOR, William

Pseudonym for William Trevor Cox. Nationality: Irish. Born: Mitchelstown, County Cork, 24 May 1928. Education: St. Columba's College, Dublin, 1942-46; Trinity College, Dublin, B.A. 1950. Family: Married Jane Ryan in 1952; two sons. Career: Teacher, Armagh, Northern Ireland, 1951-53; art teacher, Rugby, England, 1953-55; sculptor in Somerset, 1955-60; advertising copywriter, Notley's, London, 1960-64. Lives in Devon. Awards: Transatlantic Review prize, for fiction, 1964; Hawthornden prize, for fiction, 1965; Society of Authors traveling fellowship, 1972; Allied Irish Banks prize, for fiction, 1976; Heinemann award, for fiction, 1976; Whitbread award, 1976, 1983; Irish Community prize, 1979; Jacob award, for television play, 1983; Hudson Review Bennett prize; Sunday Express Book of the Year, 1995; Whitbread Book of the Year, 1995. D.Litt.: University of Exeter, 1984; Trinity College, Dublin, 1986; Queen's University, Belfast, 1989; National University, Cork, 1990. C.B.E. (Commander, Order of the British Empire), 1977; Companion of Literature, 1994. Member: Irish Academy of Letters.

Publications

Short Stories

The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories. 1967.

The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories. 1972.

The Last Lunch of the Season (story). 1973.

Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories. 1975.

Lovers of Their Time and Other Stories. 1978.

The Distant Past and Other Stories. 1979.

Beyond the Pale and Other Stories. 1981.

The Stories. 1983.

The News from Ireland and Other Stories. 1986.

Nights at the Alexandra (novella). 1987.

Family Sins and Other Stories. 1990.

Two Lives (includes Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria). 1991.

The Collected Stories. 1992.

After Rain. 1996.

Novels

A Standard of Behaviour. 1958.

The Old Boys. 1964.

The Boarding-House. 1965.

The Love Department. 1966.

Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel. 1969.

Miss Gomez and the Brethren. 1971.

Elizabeth Alone. 1973.

The Children of Dynmouth. 1976.

Other People's Worlds. 1980.

Fools of Fortune. 1983.

The Silence in the Garden. 1988.

Felicia's Journey. 1994.

Death in Summer. 1998.

Plays

The Elephant's Foot (produced 1965).

The Girl (televised 1967; produced 1968). 1968.

A Night with Mrs. da Tanka (televised 1968; produced 1972). 1972.

Going Home (broadcast 1970; produced 1972). 1972.

The Old Boys, from his own novel (produced 1971). 1971.

A Perfect Relationship (broadcast 1973; produced 1973). 1976.

The 57th Saturday (produced 1973).

Marriages (produced 1973). 1973.

Scenes from an Album (broadcast 1975; produced 1981). 1981.

Beyond the Pale (broadcast 1980). In Best Radio Plays of 1980, 1981.

Autumn Sunshine from his own story (televised 1981; broadcast 1982). In Best Radio Plays of 1982, 1983.

Radio Plays:

The Penthouse Apartment, 1968; Going Home, 1970; The Boarding House, from his own novel, 1971; A Perfect Relationship, 1973; Scenes from an Album, 1975; Attracta, 1977; Beyond the Pale, 1980; The Blue Dress, 1981; Travellers, 1982; Autumn Sunshine, 1982; The News from Ireland, from his own story, 1986; Events at Drimaghleen, 1988; Running Away, 1988; Mr. McNamara, 1995; The Piano Tuner's Wives, 1997.

Television Plays:

The Baby-Sitter, 1965; Walk's End, 1966; The Girl, 1967; A Night with Mrs. da Tanka, 1968; The Mark-2 Wife, 1969; The Italian Table, 1970; The Grass Widows, 1971; O Fat White Woman, 1972; The Schoolroom, 1972; Access to the Children, 1973; The General's Day, 1973; Miss Fanshawe's Story, 1973; An Imaginative Woman, from a story by Thomas Hardy, 1973; Love Affair, 1974; Eleanor, 1974; Mrs. Acland's Ghosts, 1975; The Statue and the Rose, 1975; Two Gentle People, from a story by Graham Greene, 1975; The Nicest Man in the World, 1976; Afternoon Dancing, 1976; Voices from the Past, 1976; Newcomers, 1976; The Love of a Good Woman, from his own story, 1976; The Girl Who Saw a Tiger, 1976; Last Wishes, 1978; Another Weekend, 1978; Memories, 1978; Matilda's England, 1979; The Old Curiosity Shop, from the novel by Dickens, 1979; Secret Orchards, from works by J.R. Ackerley and Diana Petre, 1980; The Happy Autumn Fields, from a story by Elizabeth Bowen, 1980; Elizabeth Alone, from his own novel, 1981; Autumn Sunshine, from his own story, 1981; The Ballroom of Romance, from his own story, 1982; Mrs. Silly (All for Love series), 1983; One of Ourselves, 1983; Aunt Suzanne, 1984; Broken Homes, from his own story, 1985; The Children of Dynmouth, from his own novel, 1987; Beyond the Pale, 1989; August Saturday, from his own story, 1990; Events at Drimaghleen, from his own story, 1991.

Other

Old School Ties (miscellany). 1976.

A Writer's Ireland: Landscape in Literature. 1984.

Juliet's Story (for children). 1991.

Excursions in the Real World (essays). 1993.

Editor, The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories. 1989.

Critical Studies:

"Trevor's System of Correspondences" by Kristin Morrison, in Massachusetts Review, Autumn 1987; Trevor: A Study of His Fiction by Gregory A. Schirmer, 1990; William Trevor, A Study of the Short Fiction by Suzanne Morron Paulson, 1993; William Trevor by Kristin Morrison, 1993; William Trevor: The Writer and the Man by Dolores MacKenna, 1997.

"The Table," the opening tale of William Trevor's first collection, is typical of the characters, situations, and themes to be found in many of his stories. Mr. Jeffs, from whose point of view the story is narrated, is a social outsider, a rapacious Jew living alone amid the furniture he buys and sells who unexpectedly becomes involved in the marital problems of a customer, whom he accuses of refusing to face the truth of her husband's infidelity. Miss Winton, the elderly spinster wrongly accused of damaging a luxury flat in "The Penthouse Apartment," is another solitary figure who attempts "to speak the truth," not so much to vindicate herself as "to promote understanding" between the occupants and their spiteful caretaker, but "no one bothers to listen." Edward Tripp, in another early story, is equally unsuccessful when he tries to confess "the honest truth" about his sister, who he believes is punishing him for the tricks he played on her when they were children Instead of giving him the comfort and understanding he seeks, however, his neighbor tells him that it is no concern of hers.

Failure of human sympathy is also the theme of the ironically entitled "A Meeting of Middle Age," in which an aggressive divorcée sets out to humiliate the timid bachelor hired to act as her corespondent. The tale is typical, too, of Trevor's way of building a story around an encounter or confrontation between a single man and an unhappily married woman ("In Isfahan" and "A Complicated Nature"), in which the man's sexual and other inadequacies are revealed. In "Raymond Bamber and Mrs. Fitch," for example, a shy, repressed bachelor rejects the "awkward truths" spoken by the drunken woman he meets at a cocktail party. Ignoring the evidence of his eyes and ears about her husband's infidelity, Bamber accuses Mrs. Fitch of "transferring the truth about herself to other people," ironically unaware that this is precisely what he himself is guilty of doing.

Like John Updike's, many of Trevor's finest stories anatomize failed or ailing marriages together with the self-deceptions and pretenses of the parties involved. In "The Grass Widows," for instance, a headmaster's wife, angered by years of selfish neglect, urges the newly wed wife of one of her husband's protégés to leave him on their honeymoon. Mrs. Angusthorpe's decision to speak out for the first time in her married life is motivated less by a desire to prevent Daphne from repeating her own mistake than by the opportunity it gives her of registering a "small triumph" over her domineering husband. Daphne, however, is unable or unwilling to see the truth about her marriage. "It's different for us," she says at the end, a claim undermined by what we are actually shown of the young couple's relationship.

In "Angels at the Ritz" Trevor explores the sexual games played by those who live "in the outer suburb" in order to revive their "wilting marriages." At the same time he presents a bleak picture of the kind of moral compromises that people make in their middle years. This story again features two couples, one of whom sets out to seduce the other by exploiting their long friendship and shared past. Trevor's narrative mastery is seen not only in the way he keeps both seductions going simultaneously by deftly cutting between them but also in his handling of the tale's dominant image, the song that gives the story its title. This sentimental reminder of their younger innocence, which both the Ryders use in their attempt to seduce the Dillards, becomes for Polly Dillard a moral index of the extent to which the two couples have "fallen" during the intervening years. Although it is clear to Polly how the others have fallen, it is not until the end of the story, when she finds herself unable to ask her husband not to return to the Ryders' party "because the request seemed fussy," that she realizes the nature of her own lapse—the "middle-age calmness" with which she is prepared to accept without protest or complaint her best friend's treachery and her husband's infidelity.

One character who does speak out against her best friend's treachery, her husband's infidelity, and her own blindness is Cynthia Strafe at the end of "Beyond the Pale," Trevor's most ambitious treatment of the theme of self-deception. For the truth that Cynthia's companions refuse to face—in their comfortable belief that the Troubles in Northern Ireland have nothing to do with them any more than the fate of the Belfast couple whose tragic story Cynthia relates—is political and historical as well as personal. "England," she claims, "has always had its pales." The story's moral theme is also cleverly dramatized by Trevor's choice of Strafe's mistress as its unreliable narrator, since she ironically exposes herself as a smug, selfish, and hypocritical self-deceiver—"the voice," according to G. A. Schirmer, "of everything that Trevor is writing against."

No one listens to Cynthia any more than to the elderly Protestant schoolmistress in "Attracta." The woman loses her job when she tries to share with her pupils the story of how her parents' murderers sought to atone for their act of violence by befriending her and "the gleam of hope" it contains of escape from the deadly cycle of sectarian hatred. Attracta fails, not because her listeners are insulted from terrorist bloodshed, but because this is all too familiar a part of their lives. Without the kind of imaginative sympathy shown by Cynthia and Attracta, however, the truth can destroy rather then heal, as Trevor demonstrates in "Torridge" or "Another Christmas," where Dermot's insistence that IRA violence is the consequence of the oppression of generations of Ulster Catholics alienates both his kindly English landlord and his own wife. Not that Trevor discounts the importance of history; it is, he points out, inescapable in a country like Ireland. What he opposes is the way history is twisted by fanatics like Harold in "Autumn Sunshine" or Fogarty in "The News from Ireland" in order to justify the perpetuation of violence.

—Graeme Roberts

See the essay on "The Ballroom of Romance."

William Trevor

William Trevor (born 1928), whose life and fictional settings were divided between his native Ireland and his adopted England, was a successful novelist, television dramatist, playwright, and, above all, master of the short story.

William Trevor Cox was born an Irish Protestant on May 24, 1928, in County Cork, the son of a bank manager. He attended 13 different provincial schools before settling in at St. Columbia's College in Dublin from 1942 to 1946. He next matriculated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he received a B.A. in history in 1950; he then taught history at a school in Armagh, Northern Ireland, from 1950 to 1952.

Until the age of 22 Trevor had never been out of Ireland, but two years later (1952) the depressed national economy impelled him to leave permanently and to take up residence in England. That same year he married Jane Ryan, with whom he had two sons. He taught art at Rugby from 1952 to 1956 and at Taunton from 1956 to 1960. During his tenure as an art instructor he took up sculpting; however, despite winning an award for one of his pieces, he was dissatisfied with his work and turned to writing.

Novels and Plays

His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour (1958), was undistinguished and gave little evidence of a major talent. From 1960 to 1965 Trevor worked in London as an advertising copywriter, during which time he completed his second novel, The Old Boys (1964), which won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize. The Old Boys deals with the eccentricities and petty rivalries of a minor English public school's alumni association. The critical and commercial success of the novel encouraged Trevor to adapt it first for television and next, very successfully, for the stage (the play, in 1971, starred Sir Michael Redgrave); it also enabled Trevor to quit his advertising job, take residence in a small Devon village outside of London, and devote himself fully to his writing.

The Boarding House (1965) continued Trevor's novelistic interest in eccentrics, this time in a strange assortment of lodgers who plot against and generally bedevil each other. The Love Department (1966), which departs from the gentility of the earlier novels, is the story of a sexual pervert and the fortuitous justice that overtakes him. Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel (1969) and Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971) typify Trevor's moral concerns as they explore the disparity between people's barren lives and their spiritual needs. Elizabeth Alone (1973) represents a shift from Trevor's accustomed bizarre types; the quite normal title character, in a hospital for a hysterectomy, meets three women whose frustrated lives parallel her own.

In the early 1970s Trevor enjoyed enormous success in theater and television; in 1973 alone he had three plays performed on the London stage and three dramas produced for television. His next novel, The Children of Dynmouth (1976), deals with a moral miscreant, 15-year-old Timothy Gedge, who spies on and blackmails the inhabitants of a small coastal resort. Partly on the occasion of the novel and partly for his career as a whole, Trevor received in 1976 the Royal Society of Literature Award, the Whitbread Award, and the Allied Irish Banks Award, and the following year he was presented with the ultimate honor, an Order of the British Empire.

Other People's Worlds (1980) is perhaps Trevor's most interesting novel, though it suffers a loss of momentum in its second half. It deals with a psychopathic con man, Francis Tyte, who deceives and cheats his new wife, then deserts her; the last half of the novel is then concerned with the heroine's efforts to reconcile herself to evil in God's scheme of things, but the theme is insufficiently compelling to compensate the reader for the loss of the novel's most interesting character, Francis, and the demonic energy he had supplied. Fools of Fortune (1983) is a turbulent family chronicle set in Ireland, a novel of murder, revenge, and reconciliation. His next novel was The Silence In The Garden (1989), winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award. This was followed by Two Lives (1991), comprising the novellas of Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria, named by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year.

Short Stories Outshine Novels

Some writers of fiction excel equally in the long and short forms (Hemingway, Greene, I. B. Singer, for example); others show little interest in or aptitude for the shorter form (Waugh, Camus). Still others have realized the apotheosis of their art only in the shorter form (K. A. Porter, F. O'Connor). It is to this latter group that Trevor belongs, not because the novels aren't good, but because the stories are so much better.

The Day We Got Drunk on Cake (1967), his first and weakest collection, is similar to the novels in that it deals with lives that are lonely and cultureless, with people, most often women, victimized by their confusions, obsessions, and fantasies.

The Ballroom of Romance (1972), Trevor's second short story collection, shows a big advance in his mastery of the form. American novelist Paul Theroux saw a thematic thread in the stories, a "brittle or urgent femininity thwarted by rather boorish maleness." Typically, the heroines of the title story and of "Nice Day at School" yearn for love and romance even as their hopes are being dashed by the coarseness and insensitivity of the available menfolk.

Angels at the Ritz (1973) was hailed by Graham Greene as perhaps the best short story collection since Joyce's Dubliners (1914). Two of its finest stories, "Last Wishes" and "The Tennis Court, " deal poignantly with impending death and changing social fashions. The title story concerns a couple who barely resist the enticements of a suburban wife-swapping party and thereby retain some vestige of unfashionable idealism; the story is uncharacteristic of Trevor in its concluding note of affirmation. Another superb story, "In Isfahan, " dramatizes a holiday encounter that fails to flower into romance; the reasons for the man's reticence are kept ambiguous, but he is movingly aware that, despite the woman's touch of vulgarity, she is humanly superior to him.

Angels was hard to improve upon, but Trevor surpassed himself with Lovers of Their Time (1978), which contains at least three masterpieces. "Broken Homes" portrays the harrowing desecration of an octogenarian's home by two homeless teenagers, a boy and a girl, who have been sent over on a refurbishing mission by a well-intentioned social agency. The story's title faintly suggests the allegorical theme: the socially deprived victimizing the physically helpless. "Torridge" is an ingenious attack on the built-in bully system of English public schools and the adult philistinism they inevitably promote: the cruelty of the story's schoolboys, long forgotten as they've turned into smug bourgeois, is jolted to memory by a chance reunion. The decent title character, who in the intervening years has become a homosexual, serves as the catalyst who exposes the rest of the group's social and sexual dishonesty. The collection's title story is a bittersweet tale of timid, gentle lovers, one of whom is unhappily married, who conduct their clandestine affair, unbeknownst to the management, rent-free in a posh hotel. The idyll and their chance for happiness, however, are shattered by the man's shrewdly cynical wife.

In the 1980s Trevor sustained his level of short story excellence with Beyond the Pale (1981) and The News from Ireland and Other Stories (1986) and, beginning in 1985, with a series of stories published in The New Yorker, including After Rain. The Collected Stories (1992) was recognized as one of the best books of the year.

Trevor's achievement, especially in the short story, was formidable: he illuminated the darker corners of contemporary English and Irish life and he did so in a compassionate, wryly humorous way that almost never slipped into sentimentality. His acknowledged influences were Thomas Hardy ("where all my gloom came from"), Evelyn Waugh, and Anthony Powell. He was a subtle prose stylist whose dialogue was ceremonious rather than idiomatic. His settings were more often England than Ireland, but in either culture he captured a feeling of loss and failure, spiked with a longing for a past that was admittedly oppressive but in any case preferable to the wasteland of the present. Probably the most striking aspect of Trevor's art was that his sparkling narrative effects were fashioned from unspectacular lives and situations; he was a transmuter, a writer who mined gold from garden-variety rock. He lived in Devon, England.

Further Reading

Gregory A. Schirmer published a biographical work, William Trevor: A Study of His Fiction (London, Rutledge, 1990), which covers many of Trevor's major writings. As yet there is no all-encompassing biography of Trevor, but reviews and critiques of his work abound. Among the more interesting are John Updike's "Worlds and Worlds, " New Yorker (March 23, 1981); Peter Kemp's "Cosiness and Carnage, " The London Times Literary Supplement (October 16, 1981); Ted Solotaroff's "The Dark Souls of Ordinary People, " New York Times Book Review (February 21, 1982); and Anatole Broyard's negative report on Trevor, "Books of the Times: 'Beyond the Pale', " New York Times (February 3, 1982). □

TREVOR, William

TREVOR, William. (William Trevor Cox). Irish, b. 1928. Genres: Novels, Plays/Screenplays, Novellas/Short stories. Career: History Teacher, Armagh, Northern Ireland, 1951-53; Art Teacher, Rugby, England, 1953-55; sculptor in Somerset, 1955-60; advertising copywriter, London, 1960-64. Publications: A Standard of Behaviour, 1958; The Old Boys, 1964; The Boarding House, 1965; The Love Department, 1966; The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories, 1967; The Girl (play), 1968; Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel, 1969; Miss Gomez and the Brethren, 1971; The Old Boys (play), 1971; The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories, 1972; Going Home (play), 1972; A Night with Mrs. Da Tanka (play), 1972; The Last Lunch of the Season, 1973; Elizabeth Alone, 1974; Marriages (play), 1974; Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories, 1975; The Children of Dynmouth, 1976; Lovers of Their Time and Other Stories, 1978; The Distant Past, 1979; Other People's Worlds, 1980; Beyond the Pale, 1981; Scenes from an Album (play), 1981; Fools of Fortune, 1983; The Stories of William Trevor, 1983; A Writer's Ireland: Landscape in Literature, 1984; The News from Ireland and Other Stories, 1986; Nights at the Alexandra, 1987; The Silence in the Garden, 1988; (ed.) The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, 1989; Family Sins and Other Stories, 1990; Two Lives, 1991; William Trevor: The Collected Stories, 1991; Juliet's Story, 1991; Excursions in the Real World: Memoirs, 1994; Felicia's Journey, 1995; Outside Ireland: Selected Stories, 1995; After Rain (stories), 1996; Cocktails at Doney's and Other Stories, 1996; Reading Turgenev, 1997; Ireland: Selected Stories, 1998; Death in Summer, 1998; The Hill Bachelors, 2000; The Story of Lucy Gault (novel), 2002. Address: c/o PFD, Drury House, 34-43 Russell Street, London WC2B 5HA, England.