SOURCE: "Belonging Nowhere, Seeing Everywhere: William Trevor and the Art of Distance," in The Hollins Critic, Vol. XXX, No. 4, October, 1993, pp. 1-11.

[In the following essay, Core provides an overview of Trevor's work, discussing recurring themes and Trevor's critical reception.]

As a writer one doesn't belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale. Because society and people are our meat, one doesn't really belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

                              —William Trevor (1993)

No one has had a closer vision, or a hand at once more ironic and more tender, for the individual figure. He sees it with all its minutest signs and tricks—all its heredity of idiosyncrasies, all its particulars of weakness and strength, of ugliness and beauty, of oddity and charm; and yet it is of his essence that he sees it in the general flood of life, steeped in its relations and contacts, struggling or submerged.

                   —Henry James, "Turgenev" (1897)

At the age of sixty-five William Trevor has written some twenty books of fiction that for range of effect—philosophical density, exactness of style and idiom, variety of character, comic depth, and tragic intensity—have been unequalled among contemporary writers of English fiction since the death of Patrick White. Trevor is a precise workman, as befits the sculptor that he was in early life; his fiction does not sprawl and heave and occasionally founder as does that of, say, White or Faulkner; and because he does not take huge risks and gamble his literary capital on big, ambitious, and complicated novels such as Riders in the Chariot and Absalom, Absalom!, he probably won't win a Nobel prize despite the considerable measure of his achievement. Trevor has earned continuing recognition in Ireland and England, including a C.B.E.; but he remains relatively neglected in the United States, despite having been awarded a Bennett prize by the Hudson Review in 1990 and having regularly appeared in the New Yorker and Harper's for some years.

In the thirty years of his publishing career Trevor has never lacked an audience. The Old Boys (1964), his first novel, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and it won the Hawthornden prize in England. The ensuing years have brought more honors and a growing critical recognition, but it puzzles me that Trevor's star is not in a still greater ascendant. One reason is that he isn't a flashy writer, nor a self-promoter. And he hasn't reached his proper audience in this country partly because the English dramatizations of his fiction have seldom, if ever, been broadcast on PBS.

Trevor's second collected stories (1992) did make a great impression in the U.S. The Times Book Review ran a long and brilliant piece by Reynolds Price in February 1993. This big book, which contains about ninety stories, deserves a place on the same shelf of short fiction with Frank O'Connor and Elizabeth Bowen, Ernest Hemingway and Eudora Welty, A. E. Coppard and V. S. Pritchett. Now that Miss Welty and Sir Victor have quit publishing fiction, Trevor stands as the best writer of short fiction in the English language. ("The modern short story deals in moments and subtleties and shadows of grey," he has written. "It tells as little as it dares.")

No one in his right mind would argue that, say, John Updike is William Trevor's equal; and his countryman John McGahern, who has occasionally rivaled Trevor in such superb stories as "The Country Funeral," is much more uneven in his short fiction, which hiccoughs from sketches and anecdotes to fully realized stories. McGahern's collected stories (1992) include only a dozen or so works that measure up to Trevor's consistently higher standard and achievement.

This brings us to the matter of William Trevor's nationality. There would be little question of where his real sympathies lie, even had he not settled the matter. "I am Irish absolutely to the last vein in my body." Ireland, he continues, is "the country you put first, the country you feel strongest about, the country that you actually love." But, he adds, "If I had stayed in Ireland …, I certainly wouldn't have written. I needed the distance in order to write."

William Trevor began his writing career with two splendid comedies about London—The Old Boys (1964) and The Boarding-House (1965). These were struck in the vein of Jonsonian humor that runs through Dickens to the early Waugh. Trevor hasn't abandoned this mode, which in his hands never descends to caricature; but he has moved a great distance from it in the succeeding decades. The reason that his characters have grown more complex and sympathetic may be inferred from an observation he made with asperity to Stephen Schiff when Schiff was writing about Trevor for the New Yorker (January 4, 1993). (This piece is itself Jonsonian in its maker's delineations of Trevor's physiognomy.) "The thing I hate most of all is the pigeonholing of people…. I don't believe in the black-and-white; I believe in the gray shadows, the murkiness, the not quite knowing, and the fact that you can't ever say 'old spinster' or 'dirty old man.'" (What Trevor has said of Pritchett's characters applies equally well to his own: "As real people do, they resist the labels of good or bad; they are decent on their day, some experiencing more of those days than others do.") Although many figures of this kind—apparent stereotypes—appear in both The Old Boys and The Boarding-House and although they are flat characters for the most part, their portraits, limned thirty years ago, do not violate the axiom that Trevor has recently declared, for he has followed it from the beginning.

To say, for instance, that any of the unmarried women in The Boarding-House—Nurse Clock, Rose Cave, Gallelty, Miss Clericot—is simply or only a spinster is to do great violence to Trevor's delicate portraiture, especially the characterization of Nurse Clock. The same applies to the more numerous cast of ageing men, from Studdy, a petty blackmailer and thief; to Major Eele, whose taste for pornography far outruns his impulse for romance; to Tome Obd, a mad Nigerian; to Mr Scribbin, whose only delight is listening to records that reproduce the sounds of trains. This teeming cast of eccentrics and misfits, male and female, could comfortably and believably have appeared in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair or Dickens's Bleak House.

Trevor, like most first-rate writers, often takes risks that would stop a lesser and more finicky artist in his or her tracks. In The Boarding-House he has written a novel without a protagonist—unless, and mark this, that figure is the owner of the boardinghouse, William Wagner Bird, who is the presiding intelligence in this novel (through the agency of his journals—and through his ghostly presence). What is remarkable about that, you may be thinking. The oddity is that Bird dies in the opening scene of the novel. He leaves the boardinghouse to Nurse Clock and Mr Studdy, who are enemies and are completely unalike and greatly at odds. But for a long period they are forced to become confederates to circumvent Bird's will and change the boardinghouse into a toney nursing home—after they have sacked most of the boarders. Studdy, a wretch and a parasite, is the closest figure to the novel's antagonist. After absorbing a few setbacks, he comes off nearly scot free as the action ends. Mr Obd, after being thwarted in his protracted courtship of an English woman and having experienced Blakean visions of his late landlord, kills himself and very nearly incinerates all the other boarders. The comedy turns very dark and ends in pathos, which is the way a story or novel by Trevor usually concludes, regardless of how light-hearted or hilarious its action has been earlier.

One lingers in considering a character like Studdy because, as Trevor has said of Pritchett's similar figures, "from their modest foothold on the periphery they rarely inaugurate events, and influence their own destiny through occasional, glancing swipes." It is such people who fascinate Trevor—seemingly ordinary folk who become uncommon when he takes a long hard look at them and reveals their natures to us. The flat characters of the early novels have much in common with the more complicated and complex people who regularly populate the stories because as Trevor develops as a writer he accomplishes what he says of the good story—that it" economically peels off surfaces." He hit his natural stride by the seventies as the stories reprinted in The Ballroom of Romance (1972), Angels at the Ritz (1975), and Lovers of Their Time (1978) abundantly demonstrate. In such first-rate stories as "In Isfahan," "Angels at the Ritz," "Matilda's England," and "Torridge" Trevor shows his mastery of the form. "He manages to stuff a short story with as much emotional incident as most people cram into a novel, without ever straining the tale's skin," Schiff shrewdly remarks.

The complexities and complications of Trevor's characters have tended to multiply and thicken as the years have passed. Consider, for example, Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel (1969), which naturally proceeded from The Boarding-House and is a darker and richer version of the same experience. Reduced to its essentials and oversimplified, that experience involves the overlapping lives of people living on the margins of society—and thrown together in the urban version of a drydocked ship of fools. In a boardinghouse or a hotel like O'Neill's the sad voyage of life for a long-term resident may not end until insanity or death has done its work.

Trevor is still more fascinated with the effects that a boarding school exerts on its masters and pupils, as The Old Boys makes plain. None of the old boys in that novel has grown up; and the protracted adolescence of Jaraby, Sole and Cridley, Nox, Turtle, Ponders, and the others is at first amusing but becomes pathetic. This theme regularly recurs in Trevor's fiction: sometimes, as in "A School Story," "Torridge," and "Children of the Headmaster," it is the principal theme propelling the action; on other occasions, as in "Going Home," "The Grass Widows," and "The Third Party," the boarding-school theme is more nearly a leitmotif, a matter playing in the story's background, not generating its action, as the principals endeavor to struggle through the day and find a modicum of satisfaction.

Within the boarding school lurk many possibilities that illumine the complications of life in the wider—and, one might presume—the more responsible world of action and liability. But the preoccupations of boys often carry over into mature life—or what passes for it, as a story such as "Torridge" dazzlingly reveals. (Schools are incubators for infantilism and protracted adolescence.) Torridge, an unlikely butt but one all the same, has been endlessly patronized and satirized and belittled by three of his fellow students. Years later, when these "normal" chaps get together with their families for a regular reunion, one of them impulsively invites Torridge. It turns out that he, who volunteers that he is homosexual, is also the most nearly normal and human of the whole sorry lot of old boys. His series of revelations about the school leaves the other men and their families deeply shaken. "The silence continued as the conversation of Torridge haunted the dinner table. He haunted it himself…. Then Mrs Arrowsmith suddenly wept and the Wiltshire twins wept and Mrs Wiltshire comforted them. The Arrowsmith girl got up and walked away, and Mrs Mace-Hamilton turned to the three men and said they should be ashamed of themselves, allowing this to happen."

Here, as usual, the quiet understated style of Trevor secures the dramatic point better than a gaudier and more assertive prose would. It would be instructive to dwell upon Trevor's exact idioms of conversation and of description, the way that he marks his characters with conversational tics (Torridge keeps saying "As a matter of fact" as he reveals one unpalatable fact after another in rapid-fire succession), the simple but precise diction, the occasional clinching metaphor, the representative items and details. Let us consider this descriptive passage from the same story: "Mrs Arrowsmith was thin as a knife, fashionably dressed in a shade of ash-grey that reflected her ash-grey hair. She smoked perpetually…. Mrs Wiltshire was small. Shyness caused her to coil herself up in the presence of other people so that she resembled a ball. Tonight she was in pink, a faded shade. Mrs Mace-Hamilton was carelessly plump, a large woman attired in a carelessly chosen dress that had begonias on it. She rather frightened Mrs Wiltshire. Mrs Arrowsmith found her trying." Note how easily and exactly the description moves into drama, which is to say that Trevor here shows us not merely three women together but a geometry of relations.

We are reminded of the old-fashioned novelists like Dickens and Hardy, but such a Victorian novelist would be much more lavish and pile up far more details. Trevor's details are those of the sculptor and painter that he once was: they are chosen to be representative, not comprehensive or exhaustive. He is so sure of himself and so practiced and easy in his execution that he can deliberately repeat such commonplace words as ash-grey and carelessly. And even here, in a passage that would seem neutral, humor creeps in, with Mrs Wiltshire's ball-like dimensions contrasting with the carefree plumpness of Mrs Mace-Hamilton upholstered in her frumpy dress patterned with begonias. It is the formidable Mrs Mace-Hamilton, not her vulnerable counterpart, who reproves the three old boys and bullies, one of whom is her husband.

Homosexuality of every stripe appears in Trevor's fiction. We are not surprised that it is especially important in the stories and novels about public schools, but it threads its way through much of his other fiction as well. For instance the old commander in The Children of Dynmouth (1976) is a repressed homosexual, and the antagonist of this novel, who is but an adolescent boy, realizes this fact although the commander's wife has not. This is one of Timothy Gedge's most startling revelations as he inveigles himself into the lives of the citizens of Dynmouth, including those of Commander and Mrs Abigail; and having no identity or life of his own, Timothy spies upon various families. Timothy, however, is not a reliable observer, for he thinks that he witnessed a murder which in fact was an accident—or, more probably, a suicide.

When the Anglican priest in Dynmouth, Quentin Featherston, puts together everything of significance involving Timothy's knowledge and his delusions about what he has witnessed, including the rogering of his own mother, Featherston explains to one of Timothy's victims, Kate, a younger child: "There was a pattern of greys, half-tones and shadows. People moved in the greyness and made of themselves heroes or villains, but the truth was that heroes and villains were unreal. The high drama of casting out devils would establish Timothy Gedge as a monster…. But Timothy Gedge couldn't be dismissed as easily as that…. [He] was as ordinary as anyone else, but the ill fortune of circumstances or nature made ordinary people eccentric and lent them colour in the greyness. And the colour was protection because ill fortune weakened its victims and made them vulnerable." (Timothy, who always wears yellow, is the victim of bad luck and is very vulnerable.) But Kate, the strong and intelligent little girl, does not believe the priest. Before we too dismiss Featherston as a sentimental psychologist or sociologist, we should remember that his beliefs about human nature are close to Trevor's own. Such sympathy as Featherston's enables this author to respond to every shade of humanity and inhumanity, including homosexuals, voyeurs, obsessed and demented souls, misfits and failures of every kind and station, and outright criminals (blackmailers, arsonists, thieves, murderers).

Such a figure appears in "Gilbert's Mother" (Harper's, May 1993). In our advanced times he would be called dysfunctional, but that is not the half of it. Gilbert, who has murdered several young women, could be an older version of Timothy; but Timothy is estranged from his mother while Gilbert has been cosseted by his. (Both characters have lost their fathers at an early age.) This story turns on the mother's dawning awareness of her son's criminality as he has gone from car theft to murder. Gilbert is an English version of the Son of Sam—and a thief and arsonist as well. Gilbert's nervous mother agonizes about whether she should report him to the police, but we—and she—know that she will not. "No one would ever understand the mystery of his existence," she thinks, "or the unshed tears they shared."

Murder of a different sort drives the action of both Fools of Fortune (1983) and The Silence in the Garden (1988), both of which devolve from the continuing sectarian violence in Ireland from the Easter Rising until the present day. Trevor reveals the barbarities of the Black and Tans as well as the IRA; but, far more important, he also reveals the festering psychic wounds that senseless barbarity leaves in its wake. "Vengeance breeding vengeance." Such, too, is the theme of "Attracta," one of his most powerful stories: indeed Pritchett thinks it the best in Lovers of Their Time. Attracta, an elderly Protestant schoolmistress whose life has been all but ruined by her parents' accidental deaths in an ambush—and by her reflecting upon their deaths and those of a young English couple in Belfast—gradually but inexorably runs off the rails. The Englishman, a soldier, is decapitated by his murderers, who send his head through the post to his young bride, who, until the package arrives, knows not of his death. She, having gone to Belfast, is raped by his murderers and kills herself. As the story ends, Attracta has lost her livelihood for trying to awaken her charges' moral awareness. The story powerfully conveys "what is going on in the backs of the minds of all the people in the town, of whatever faction: of how all. except one or two bigots, are helplessly trying to evade or forget the evils that entangle them," as Pritchett perceives. Attracta, in contrast, sees in a moment of searing revelation: "In all a lifetime I learnt nothing. And I taught nothing either." The pathos is wrenching and recalls similar moments in Fools of Fortune and The Silence in the Garden, neither of which succeeds so well as "Attracta."

In both novels and elsewhere (as in "Beyond the Pale") Trevor seems off his form when he becomes enmeshed in the coils of the troubles endlessly unfolding in Ireland, as Bruce Allen has complained in "William Trevor and Other People's Worlds" (Sewanee Review, winter 1993). Although Allen overstates his case, one is inclined to agree that Trevor is at his best when he writes about "the individual at war with himself, his nearest and dearest, his community, and what, in a more innocent time, we might have called his soul."

In any event most readers will agree that William Trevor's essential country is the Irish village. "An Irish village on market day in a … Trevor story can come to life with the crowding abundance of Dickens's London." as Reynolds Price observes. I do not agree, however, with Price that Trevor's stories of London life tend to be shallow and vapid. He writes persuasively about London as well as Dublin and various foreign places, especially Italy. As is by now well known, Trevor grew up in a long succession of small towns and villages in Ireland, where his father worked as a bank manager; and he knows this life with minute exactness. He seems even more sympathetic to and at home with farms and farming communities than with the small town, as one of his best stories, "The Ballroom of Romance," demonstrates vividly.

The irony of Bridie's situation is that she is stuck with her father, a crippled widower, when she would like to be in town. In the town she talks with old acquaintances who are married or working. "'You're lucky to be peaceful in the hills,' they said to Bridie, 'instead of stuck in a hole like this.'" But Bridie is trapped in her narrow round, just as they are. "The Ballroom of Romance" illustrates Pritchett's acute insight that "Trevor quietly settles into giving complete life histories, not for documentary reasons, but to show people changing and unaware of the shock they are preparing for themselves." In this situation Bridie is more self-aware than the usual figure in Trevor's fictive world. As the story closes, she sees herself marrying Bowser Egan, even though "he would always be drinking" and would be "lazy and useless" and profligate. It is a bleak revelation about a life teetering on the edge of defeat; yet we admire Bridie for her steadfast loyalty to her father and for her ability to deal with life's privations and reversals, of which she has confronted more than her share. This Saturday night will be her last at the Ballroom of Romance: now she will wait for her father to die and Bowser Egan's mother to die and Bowser himself to court her at last, not merely run into her at the dance hall on Saturday night.

In Trevor's fiction, romance is ordinarily this bleak and unrewarding. The artificiality of dance halls and the snatched moments within them, whether in the city ("Afternoon Dancing") or the country, is frustrating for all concerned. Seldom does romance flower there or anywhere else in Trevor's world; and rarely does romance, no matter how urgent, have its way for more than a summer's day. That is but one moral of "Lovers of Their Time," my favorite of Trevor's many splendid stories. Norman Britt and his lover, Marie, carry on their affair of some years in the grand second-floor bathroom of an opulent railroad hotel. "Romance ruled their brief sojourns, and love sanctified—or so they believed—the passion of their physical intimacy. Love excused their eccentricity." But, finally, the romance grinds to a halt: Norman returns to his promiscuous wife, and Marie marries another man after she and Norman have lived with her mother, who treats Norman as a boarder. In the background we hear the jejune songs of Elvis Presley and the Beatles "celebrating a bathroom love." The unnatural romances adumbrated in "Office Romances" are even harsher—and in "Mulvihill's Memorial" still more wretched. And in Trevor seldom does romance flicker more than occasionally in even the best marriages, as "Mr McNamara," "Angels at the Ritz," "Mags," and The Children of Dynmouth reveal with chilling finality. The respite from the taxing realities of single life that marriage seems to promise evaporates quickly, so quickly in fact that in Trevor's fiction marriages often go unconsummated even though they may quietly continue, like so many bad habits, for years until a reversal occurs.

In "Mags" a middle-aged couple painfully discovers that her childhood friend Mags, who has come to help her with the children and stayed until death, has consumed their marriage, leaving little besides her own dowdy clothes. Mags, the "innocent predator," has changed their marriage forever. In Reading Turgenev (one of the paired novels of Two Lives) the young wife is driven to madness by her cold unmarried sisters-in-law and her inept husband, and romance for her is but a sad interlude with her cousin, a dreamer who dies early after living a life of fantasy. The woman herself gradually retreats into fantasy and then is institutionalized. Yet that is not the whole story: the other side is that Elmer Quarry and his sisters believe they were nearly poisoned by that young woman, Elmer's trying wife, Mary Louise—and that they, for all their failings, are far from being wicked. In the end we sympathize with them, particularly Elmer, whose many domestic frustrations have made him an alcoholic. He continues to coddle his wife as she returns to live in his attic and persists in her singular love affair with the memory of her cousin Robert. Reading Turgenev is Trevor's most acute study of madness, but that subject runs through much of his fiction, beginning with The Boarding-House and Mrs Eckdorf and running through "The Raising of Elvira Tremlett" to this new novel. Madness in Trevor's fiction could easily be the subject of a Ph.D. thesis in English literature—or, better yet, in abnormal psychology.

The failure of romance, the theme of Other People's Worlds, need not always lead to madness. Julia Ferndale, a likeable widow, is bilked by Francis Tyte, a smooth confidence man, after their wedding when in middle age she foolishly risks all for love. Francis is by no means an innocent predator, even though he is another of Trevor's halfhearted villains and parasites. Julia sensibly cuts her losses and returns to her good life in a village. The startling contrasts between the village life of Julia and the seedy world of Francis, a member of the homosexual demimonde in the city, are as strongly presented as nearly anything that Trevor has published. This novel stands, with both parts of Two Lives, as one of his best, which is to say one of the most ambitious and fully realized. The early novels are far more limited, and some of the later ones, particularly Fools of Fortune and The Silence in the Garden, are too cramped and crowded within the narrow space that Trevor allows himself. The reader who wants to sample William Trevor's fiction might well begin with Angels at the Ritz and Other People's Worlds.

My unabashed advocacy of Trevor's fiction (which extends to his other writing, especially A Writer's Ireland) is seldom tinged with negative criticism such as I have just declared. I do wish that he were less casual about his titles. Reading Turgenev is a silly title for a novel otherwise so artful and subtle, and his editor should have said so. Mrs Eckdorf at O'Neill's Hotel is merely descriptive, and many of his stories bear such mechanical titles. I am bothered by his run-on sentences: save for these comma splices, his punctuation neatly registers the nuances of his insight into suffering humanity. Obviously I am not the person to carp about William Trevor but the one to celebrate his tender and ironic depiction of character caught in the vise of circumstance.

The critics of the future will investigate William Trevor's characters, situations, places, and themes; they will linger over the subtleties of his unvarnished prose, the old-fashioned and innovative techniques that he employs, including the great chances that he takes (such as sudden and jolting shifts in point of view and in time); they will wonder about his religion and politics; they will speculate about the unhappiness of his parents and wonder if that wound drove him to bend the bow of his art; they will ask themselves if his natural mode is the story or the short novel or the novel (I cannot answer this simple question); they will marvel that a traveler has learned foreign cultures and customs so well and ask how Trevor can write almost as surely about, say, Umbria as London or an Irish village; they will chronicle the use of Irish legend and history in his fiction; they will scratch their heads about the names he assigns to his figures, major and minor; they will try to discover the sources of his art and, in doing so, they will be forced to consider Henry James, F. M. Ford, Joyce Cary, and Elizabeth Bowen among many others; they will make weather almost as heavy of his use of popular culture, especially films and music; and they will have to measure his range as a man of letters—as critic, editor, and dramatist as well as fictionist.

Few, if any, of them will be so intelligently responsive as the best of his critics to this point, critics who include not only those I have cited, especially V. S. Pritchett and Reynolds Price, but Elizabeth Spencer, Graham Greene, and still others who have responded to him with great sensitivity and insight. Consider Price once more: "Trevor's vision is deeply, but though never entirely, comic. However bleak the present and future of a given human life, the salient nearness of a vital ongoing world of rocks and fields, ocean and shore, will throw an enormous inhuman yardstick up against that one sad life and let us see the unreadable smile of time and fate." Let the last word be Pritchett's: "As his master Chekhov did, William Trevor simply, patiently, truthfully allows life to present itself, without preaching; he is the master of the small moments of conscience that worry away at the human imagination and our passions."

Postscript: Since I wrote this essay in May, two books by and about William Trevor have been published. Suzanne Morrow Paulson's William Trevor appears in Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction series. Part 1 is devoted to her readings of various stories; and although the critic cannot resist indulging herself in such foolishness as gender codes and intersubjectivity, the commentaries are usually helpful. Part 2 contains two good interviews and a little criticism by Trevor himself; in part 3 some sound criticism of his fiction is reprinted, but such hands as V. S. Pritchett and Elizabeth Spencer are missing in action. The bibliography is solid and useful.

Trevor's Excursions in the Real World appeared in London bookshops in August; it will be published in the U.S. by Knopf. This collection contains some of the superb pieces that have been seen recently in the New Yorker, especially "Field of Battle." Most of these occasional essays are struck in the reminiscent mode, but there are a few critical pieces such as a wonderful celebration of Somerville and Ross. The most memorable pieces are the sketches of actual people that constitute the bulk of the book—such personal reports as "Miss Quirke" and "Old Bull." Trevor is not so good an essayist as a maker of fiction, but his essays are well worth reading and rereading, especially for the insight they afford into his fiction—and, less often, in this retiring man's own temperament and life.