Biography
William Trevor’s fertile imagination can scarcely be summed up in two adjectives, but if one were so limited, then “gothic” and “elegiac” would do very well. Though not an experimentalist, he has developed a flexible narrative form that conveys a wide variety of attitudes, shifts of tone, speaking voices, and descriptive passages that, while not pretending to rival the accomplishments of his master, James Joyce, have succeeded in establishing Trevor as a leading fiction writer on both sides of the Atlantic. Born William Trevor Cox in a small town in County Cork, Ireland, Trevor was educated in a haphazard way until he entered St. Columba’s College in Dublin in 1942. In 1950 he earned his baccalaureate from Trinity College and for the next decade or so eked out a living teaching school while working as a sculptor. Although one of his sculptures won a prize in 1952, he gave up sculpting a few years afterward in favor of writing. Meanwhile, he had left Ireland for England, where he eventually made his home in Devonshire after teaching in Rugby and Taunton and then working in advertising in London.{$S[A]Cox, William Trevor;Trevor, William}
Moving to England was motivated strictly by economics, as work was hard to find in Ireland after graduation from Trinity College. Nevertheless, Trevor evidently found the English social and intellectual climate congenial, which explains his continued residence. More important, he found there a singular advantage to his writing, the advantage one enjoys as an acute observer of a culture different from one’s own. Hence, his early stories and novels treat English subjects and involve English men and women; only later did he begin to focus upon his native Ireland. Perhaps the advantage of living away from his homeland for an extended period gave him the perspective he felt he needed. In any event, while books such as The Old Boys and The Children of Dynmouth deal impressively with English themes and English characters, short stories such as “Attracta” in Lovers of Their Time, and Other Stories and the title story in The News from Ireland, and Other Stories reveal Trevor’s sure handling of Irish subjects, in both historical and contemporary settings.
The gothic aspect of Trevor’s imagination shows itself in the assemblage of misfits, oddballs, and eccentrics that populate almost all of his fiction. Studdy and Nurse Clock in The Boarding-House also demonstrate its sinister side. Bitter rivals and indeed enemies, they link up in an unholy alliance to become the sole beneficiaries of an unusual bequest, but they are ultimately thwarted by their own greed and a failure to grasp the warped intelligence of those they are trying to cheat. Young Timothy Gedge, by contrast, seems to understand only too well the weaknesses of his victims, as he tries to insinuate himself into their lives. If like Studdy he is a confidence man, his youth and his loneliness combine to make him finally a creature more pathetic than wicked, though Trevor does not underestimate the potential—and real—evil of which Gedge is capable.
The presence of evil in the world and the inability of many human beings to communicate effectively with one another explain the sadness, or the elegiac quality, that colors so much of Trevor’s work. Nights at the Alexandra develops this quality to an extraordinary degree. The keynote sounds with the opening short paragraph: “I am a fifty-eight-year-old provincial. I have no children. I have never married.” This statement is the unintended legacy that Alexandra Messinger, an Englishwoman married to a German, leaves young Harry. She and her husband have fled from Nazi Germany and are living in...
(This entire section contains 977 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
a small Irish town during the “Emergency” (as the Irish called World War II). Told from the vantage point of many years later,Nights at the Alexandra recounts the story of a youngster who, badly misunderstood by his parents and siblings, becomes a loner. Much taken by the beautiful, mysterious but kindly woman many years her husband’s junior, Harry defies parental orders not to visit with the strangers and ultimately elects to work in Herr Messinger’s newly erected cinema instead of his father’s lumberyard. Built despite wartime shortages and named for Frau Messinger, the cinema is her husband’s gift to her and to the town. When it finally opens, however, Frau Messinger has died and her husband leaves the town and Cloverhill, the home where Harry visited them, forever. The illness is never named or explained, but it doubtless derives in part from an early heartbreak Frau Messinger experienced, the inability to give her husband a child, her deep sense of gratitude to him for his love and devotion, and in general the profound isolation she finds in these alien surroundings. “We can live without anything but love, Harry,” she says at one point. “Always remember that.” Yet though she has love, she dies, and dying, she takes with her any chance Harry may have to love, though he lives on.
Trevor has written plays for stage and television, many of them adapted from his own stories or novels. He believes short stories lend themselves better to films than novels do, but he has adapted both for radio and television, including “Beyond the Pale,” “Voices from the Past,” “The Love of a Good Woman,” “Matilda’s England,” Elizabeth Alone, and “The Ballroom of Romance.”
Widely regarded as one of the finest storytellers and craftsmen writing in English, Trevor has been the recipient of numerous awards. Among these are the Royal Society of Literature Award, the Allied Irish Banks’ Prize for Literature, and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction. His novel The Story of Lucy Gault was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2002. He is also a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and has been named an honorary Commander, Order of the British Empire.