SOURCE: Sänger, Wolfgang R. “The ‘Favourite Russian Novelist’ in William Trevor's Reading Turgenev: A Postmodern Tribute to Realism.” Irish University Review 27, no. 1 (spring-summer 1997): 182-98.

A title such as Reading Turgenev must kindle vastly different expectations in different readers, but they are very likely to include well-read or bookish characters of genuine or pretentious intellectuality and a real or pseudo-cultured background of unspecified nationality. The first pages of the short novel, creating an image of “a woman, not yet fifty-seven, slight and seeming frail, eats carefully at a table in the corner”¹ do nothing to contradict such expectations: her solitary position, the coherent argument running through her mind, the placid superiority with which she ignores adverse comments of “the others”, all mark her out as a potential Turgenev reader under any of the imaginary categories above.

The confirmation would seem complete when the lady casually pronounces the name of a character central to one of Turgenev's novels, Insarov.² However, this reference at the end of the first brief chapter, which is set in an asylum for the mentally disturbed, calls for an adjustment in our expectations. The lady who largely appears to have lost contact with the world around her is speaking of Insarov as if he were a person alive in her world: “I thought you might be Insarov. When I heard I had a visitor I said to myself it must be Insarov” (p. 2). Also, a narrative present has been established in this opening chapter, and the reader is given to understand that its world is contemporary Ireland.

There is nothing in what we have read so far, let alone the title of the novel, to prepare us for the world confronting us in the second chapter; we are taken straight back to the period of The Ballroom of Romance,³ back to the culturally isolated and socially deprived world of provincial Ireland in the mid-fifties, a time when small farmers struggled at subsistence level, when the lack of employment drove the young men to emigration, leaving the slower ones and the women to take care of the aged and the failing farms. Add to this a cultural climate pervaded by deep distrust of anything foreign, in particular Russian, and we are looking at a world where nothing would seem further from anyone's mind than reading Turgenev, and indeed, we find just one (negative) reference to reading and none whatever to Turgenev and his writings in the next eighty-five pages.

The second chapter, as are all those with even numbers, is longer and, as we have seen, takes the reader back into the past. Events are narrated in the manner characteristic of Trevor's short stories: a supremely omniscient narrator reveals details selected with the utmost economy, at times as thoughts or reflections of a (any) chosen character, often through dialogue, and, of course, by straightforward narration—but always withholding enough to keep the reader partly guessing, leaving gaps that will soon be filled with the benefit of hindsight, because the narrative movement is swift, and the fit of the missing piece is precise. The story of the past is that of a marriage of convenience, an intervening love affair, and the consequences. Elmer Quarry is paunchy and thirty-five when he proposes marriage to Mary Louise Dallon, an “agreeable looking girl” (p. 7) with “the look of a child … in her features” (p. 5). His choice is less determined y Mary Louise's Protestant descent, her looks or her youth, than by the knowledge that she is not “experienced in going out with men” (p. 35), thus matching his own inexperience with women. Also, hers “isn't much of a family” (p. 18) so that he, as the inheritor of Quarry's drapery, will be the dominant partner. Mary Louise, living a few miles out of town on a farm which barely supports the family and provides the bleakest of outlooks for her own future, marries Elmer “out of impatience and boredom” (p. 103) and because she “wants to be in the town” (p. 191). Although neither her family nor anyone in the town have illusions about its nature, the marriage is acceptable by its ostensible purpose, namely to provide an heir to the drapery. One of the gaps left open to conjecture will be closed later by the information that the marriage remains unconsummated due to the total lack of experience of both partners.

Only Rose and Matilda, Elmer's elder spinster sisters and the command centre of the Quarry household, see no reason at all to accept the marriage. They have understood that the business is in decline and are resigned to seeing themselves and their brother as the end of the family line: “Why should the status quo in the house above the shop … be disturbed?” (p. 7). Unable to prevent the marriage, they unite against the intruder in harsh criticism and denunciation designed to demolish the young woman's self-confidence and to denigrate her in the eyes of her husband. Mary Louise does not fight back, and Elmer is no match for his sisters, neither verbally nor mentally. After a year of this, Mary Louise begins to despair of establishing a genuine bond with her husband whilst Elmer starts drifting into a drinking habit.

It is in this phase of her life that Mary Louise meets Robert again, “the cousin with whom, for a while at school, she had imagined she was in love” (p. 73). He is an invalid living in the care of his mother, Aunt Emmeline, in a country house that has seen better days: “Robert's father had died without leaving much behind” (p. 75). Robert, fond of Mary Louise since their school days, but condemned by his illness to a solitary life, is eager to share his thoughts and feelings with her. Mary Louise, just as solitary in her marriage and in desperate need of a sympathetic listener, makes Robert her confidant. His intellectual interests, his drawing and reading reveal to her glimpses of worlds she had never thought or dreamt of, the novels of Turgenev among them:

‘Do you ever read Russian novels?’ he suddenly asked …

She shook her head.

‘I have a favourite Russian novelist,’ he said.

(p. 87)

They have one short summer—the year is 1957—of idyllic readings of Turgenev, of confiding in each other ever more freely, of letting this secret but singularly trustful and innocent relationship flower into self-acknowledged love, before Robert dies. That summer has changed Mary Louise's outlook on her own life completely. With a new-found self-assurance, a calm singlemindedness impervious to any argument, a non-aggressive perseverance, she gradually manages her complete withdrawal from the daily life of the Quarry household and shop. Her refuge is an attic of the house which is patiently furnished and stocked with every memento of Robert that she can lay her hands on: his clothes, his father's watch and, of course, his books. She no longer fears the sisters and has “ceased to wish to please her husband” (p. 138).

While Elmer, who is sliding into alcoholism, sees no harm in his wife's behaviour, Rose and Matilda are sure Mary Louise is mad and start a campaign to have her put away where “she'll be with her kind” (p. 172). Elmer's opposition can only defer that step until the revelation that Mary Louise has bought rat poison is followed by unequivocal evidence that the Wednesday-evening rissoles have been tampered with: “a virulent shade of green tinged the centre of each” (p. 197). After three years of her luckless marriage, at the age of twenty-five, Mary Louise is taken to the lunatic asylum; it must have been in the winter of 1958/59. And here we get the first view of her, in the narrative present of the first chapter, 1990 approximately, and we witness her slow and reluctant departure from the asylum. From the beginning of the novel, the narration of past events has been regularly interrupted by brief interchapters (uneven numbers) relating the present situation, thus constantly juxtaposing past and present.

At the same time, the interchapters are designed to give the reader impressions of what happened in those thirty-one years. This is done in a totally different style: scenes are created in deliberately blurred outline, apparently random moments with a suggestion of repetitiveness evoke a very slow movement of time. The narrator presents characters more from the outside, recording what they say rather than what they think. We are faced with a narrative technique which Trevor described as “withholding as much information as is released”⁴—if not more. Thus the identity of the woman in the asylum and the relationship between past events and present situation remain veiled for a sizeable portion of the novel. For the progressive integration of the interchapters in our understanding of the plot, the benefit of hindsight accrues at a much later point; the actual convergence of the two strands of narrative, of past and present, is not achieved before the penultimate chapter (29) of the novel: the remaining twelve pages are narrated, like the interchapters, in the present tense.

By then we have learned that Mary Louise has enjoyed preferential treatment in the institution due to Elmer's faithful payments for her place, his unflagging concern and regular visits. We realise that she assumes the disguise of being out of touch, of not understanding, when it suits her, and that she has never taken the medication prescribed. We understand that she has lost all interest in the world ‘outside’ and found contentment where she is; she has no wish to leave the place. Eventually we learn that Elmer's sisters, as antagonistic as ever, refuse all contact with Mary Louise, and that it is Elmer's charge alone to care for his wife: he personally prepares her attic for the homecoming.

The narrative scheme of the novel is such that the departure of Mary Louise for the asylum and her return from there, each in its separate strand of narrative, follow closely on one-another: the point of convergence of the two strands is marked by Mary Louise's statement: “I am back in town.” (p. 210). It is this ingenious time pattern of the narrative that enables the reader's expectation to bridge the wide gap between the appearance of the Russian novelist in Trevor's story and the initial allusion to his work by the naming of Insarov: that which, in the first chapter, had been a harking back to a reading experience in the past of a character, has generated in the reader the expectancy of a future encounter that, sooner or later, will come to pass—in this case rather later, as we have seen.

.....

The encounter with the novels of Turgenev gives a new dimension to Mary Louise's life; it does the same to Trevor's novel. In the story the name of Robert's favourite novelist is mentioned almost as an afterthought; the titles of the three books he possesses are never given; but we soon find allusions, quotations and brief passages woven into Trevor's text. They are introduced naturally enough into the narrative, as for instance when Robert starts reading to Mary Louise:

It was time for her to go, but instead she watched him, opening the book, smiling, turning a page or two, … and then beginning:

‘A gentleman in the early forties, wearing check trousers and a dusty overcoat, came out on to low porch of the coaching inn …’

(p. 90)

It is the opening sentence—as registered gratefully by the reader keen on identification—of Fathers and Sons,⁵ and at this point the charm of Turgenev's prose still adheres to the person reading more than to the story:

She believed she had never listened to a voice as beautiful. Delight caressed each word he uttered, gentleness or vigour matched phrase and sentence. If all he'd read was a timetable she would have been entranced.

(p. 90)

The first visible effects the readings have on Mary Louise are that the experience of sharing invites confidence on her part, and that the stories about love, happiness and suffering make her aware of her own story and encourage her to share it:

It seemed natural that her cousin should become Mary Louise's confidant. In September 1957, two years after her wedding, she told him the details of the courtship there'd been …, of the engagement and the journey on the wedding day by train and bus …

… Mary Louise's confidences were offered in the graveyard, among the Attridge headstones.

(p. 100)

More profoundly, however, in the course of that summer, as the readings become a regular feature of their meetings, the novels become part of the very essence of the relationship; the fragments, quotes and allusions no longer require explanatory introductions, they are seen to have been assimilated completely into Mary Louise's processes of thought and perception. This effect is evoked with consummate skill on the level of setting and atmosphere in a passage, in which the borderlines between scenes in Turgenev's fictional world and the ‘real’-life situation of the readings have all but vanished:

In the quiet of the graveyard he read to her. She lay on her back, watching small white clouds drifting slowly across the curve of the sky. … ‘Are you asleep?’ he sometimes interrupted himself to ask, but she never was. She was seeing in her mind's eye Pavel Petrovich's study, … Her cousin's voice curtly issued Arkady's orders … ‘Madame will see you in half an hour,’ a butler said. Swallows flew high, bees hummed in the lilac. A peasant with a patch on his shoulder trotted a white pony through an evening's shadows. Sprigs of fuchsia decorated the hair of a woman in black.

It was a coolness creeping into the graveyard that caused him, every week, to close whichever book he'd brought.

(p. 95)

It is interesting to note that the intensely summery atmosphere of the scene, corresponds closely with the weather conditions prevailing in all of Turgenev's works, just as the “evening shadows” in the image from Fathers and Sons⁶ corresponds to the “coolness creeping into the graveyard. But this is not just creating an atmosphere and enhancing it by suitable reading, or inversely enhancing the atmosphere of the story by carefully choosing the setting for the reading: it is rather an interpenetration of the world of the novels and that of Mary Louise and Robert; the images of the mind's eye and perceptions of the physical world are inextricably entwined.

The full impact that Robert's favourite books have on Mary Louise's life is only revealed by his death. In the first months of grief, remembering fragments of the novels gives back to her a sensation of his presence:

Soon after she turned out of the avenue she heard an echo of her cousin's voice.

‘One hot summer day in 1853 two young men lay in the shade of a tall lime tree by the River Moskva, not far from Kountsovo …’⁷

(p. 122)

Although these echoes initially do little to console her, they gradually become more real to her as she joins her own voice to them going in unison over passages he had loved in what can only be called an incantation:

in her attic she made an enemy of God because all she had left was the echo of her cousin's voice—the way he had of pronouncing certain words, the timbre of his intonations, the images his voice conveyed.

‘I dreamed I was sad and sometimes cried. But through the tears and the melancholy, inspired by the music of the verse or the beauty of the evening, there always rose upwards, like the grasses of early spring, shoots of happy feeling …’⁸

Again and again his voice repeated it. Hers now joined in. For these were words they must learn by heart, he'd said.

(p. 127)

As she remembers and re-reads the three novels her cousin has read to her, they draw Mary Louise into their world in the same measure as she withdraws from the one she has been inhabiting:

More and more she kept to the kitchen during mealtimes…

‘Bersenev took a droshky going back to Moscow and went in search of Insarov. But it took him a long time to find the Bulgarian because Insarov had moved to new lodgings …’⁹

His search dulled the ornaments of the Quarrys' dining-room … But when she listened now, eating alone in the kitchen, she often heard the sound of Bersenev's droshky. Without closing her eyes, there was the brick façade of the house where Insarov lodged.

(p. 139)

Again we observe the pervading of one reality by another, and it is with conscious enjoyment that Mary Louise now induces the mingling of fictional and ‘real’-life worlds boldly refashioning her life and Robert's in images supplied by the novels:

In the locked attic, or crouched among the Attridge graves, Mary Louise delighted in the intimacies death could not touch, any more than it could touch the love story of Yelena and Insarov. A legacy came to Robert from some distant relative of his father's: he was no longer poor. … When they married they travelled in Italy and France. They sat outside a café by the sea, watching the people strolling by … They drank white wine.

Without closing her eyes, Mary Louise could see the flare of the gas jets …

(p. 141)

The allusion to the love story of Yelena and Insarov reveals that it is not just mundane background and images that Turgenev's novels furnish to Mary Louise; she finds in them, and particularly in the love story of On the Eve, confirmation of a conviction she had begun to form early in her relationship with Robert. Just before the first reading the thought occurs to her that love, even a short moment of it, will lend reality to a whole life: “Something had been there, between them, something real—even if only for a week or two … Yet a week or two was surely enough: that seemed so now” (p. 90). As tentatively as the idea takes shape here, it is explicitly elaborated in Mary Louise's reflections when it has undergone thirty-one years of testing in the asylum:

Sister Hannah's the wise one. A person's life isn't orderly, Sister Hannah maintains; it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present's hardly there; the future doesn't exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

(p. 161)

And only a reader who shares that conviction can come to the conclusion that death could not touch the love story of Yelena and Insarov.

.....

Similarly, the dimension added to Trevor's novel by bringing in Turgenev is not just a matter of textual elements, that is, images, jokes, comparisons, lyrical passages and so on, but, following up the clues these provide, the reader is rewarded by amplification of themes, enhancement of meaning. The very titles of two of Robert's books, First Love and Fathers and Sons, highlight themes of Trevor's story. The latter title, easily identified, strikes a note which, even without knowledge of the book, may echo in the reader's mind when Robert shares with Mary Louise his sense of loss for never having known his father, and may amplify the poignancy of his longing which persists to the last moment of his life when, in a dream: “He put his arm around his cousin's waist and as they walked on the strand they talked about his father. In that moment Robert died” (p. 107). The titles are, of course, only signposts pointing the way to a complex network of intertextual correspondences. There are echoes, it would seem, in the sketchy characterisation of Robert's father: “the money hadn't lasted because the man … was a gambler. ‘Charm to burn,’ Mr Dallon used to say, and—unlike the money—the charm had lasted to the end” (p. 74), echoes recalling from Fathers and Sons the sketch of the imposing Madame Odintsov's father, “who had been well known for his handsome looks, his speculations and his gambling propensities. … He had ended up by completely ruining himself at cards.”¹⁰

Both of these men have left next to nothing to their children, but in both cases there is no thought of resentment. Anna Sergeyevna remembers her father with affection: “She had been very fond of her reprobate but good-natured father”.¹¹ But Robert humorously muses about his: “If he had remembered the soldiers were still in the house he'd have tried to sell them too. I wish I had known him” (p. 85). A much larger and explicit reference to a Turgenev text is Louise's comparison of her own with the love story of Yelena and Insarov. That story resembles the one of Mary Louise and Robert in that the lovers have only a few months to discover and love each other; their happiness is overshadowed by illness and cut short by Insarov's death. Yelena, finding it impossible to face life without Insarov, commits herself “to the cause which he followed all his life” hoping to find death.¹² With this tragic gesture Yelena fades from view, the narrator leaving the question unanswered: “whether she has already played out her small part in life—whether that ferment of the spirit is at rest at last, and the turn of death has come”. The fatalism of this ending is emphasised by the narrator's subsequent reflection:

But death is like a fisherman who, having caught a fish in his net, leaves it in the water for a time; the fish continues to swim about, but all the while the net is round it, and the fisherman will snatch it out in his own good time.¹³

This thought is echoed at the end of Trevor's novel too, but with the significant difference that Mary Louise is the one who turns it over in her mind, after thirty-one years of a life nourished by her own brief love story; she passes it on to the clergyman who has become the only sharer of the secrets of her love story:

She remembers her cousin reading the bit that likened death to a fisherman. … If he feels inclined, the fisherman keeps the caught fish in the water, still swimming although it's netted.

(p. 220)

The most significant correspondence between Trevor's text and any one of Turgenev's is surely to be found in the shaping of the women characters. If Trevor is impressed with Turgenev's portrayal of women, he shares this feeling with one of his forerunners in novel-writing, the creator of Emma Bovary. Gustave Flaubert wrote to his friend Turgenev, with the characterisation of Yelena (On the Eve) and Zinochka (First Love) in mind: “The creation of women is one of your strong points. They are both ideal and real” (March 1863).¹⁴ Like his nineteenth-century fellow-novelists, William Trevor achieves mastery in the portrayal of women, and nowhere is his affinity to them more conspicuous than in this: the creation of ordinary and extraordinary, but always deeply convincing women figures who very credibly live through some of the most incredible stories. Also, as in practically all of Turgenev's stories, female characters tend to be the centre of attention of Trevor's narratives.

But there are differences: “The female character who appears in Turgenev is almost always full of enigmatic, mysterious enticing beauty. Moreover she stands in contradiction to the surrounding milieu”, the Russian critic Vladimir Fisher wrote in 1920.¹⁵ The grand entrance that Turgenev provides for his important female characters is a first step towards idealising them and qualifying them for roles of genuine “heroines”. Witness for instance the arrival of Madame Odintsov at the governor's ball in Fathers and Sons, which is also her “entrance” into the novel:

‘Madame Odintsov has arrived’.

Arkady glanced round and saw a tall woman in a black dress standing near the door. He was struck by the dignity of her carriage. Her bare arms hung gracefully beside her slim waist; … her clear eyes looked out from under a rather prominent white forehead with a tranquil and intelligent expression … and a scarcely perceptible smile played on her lips. A sort of affectionate and gentle strength radiated from her face.

… Bazarov also noticed Madame Odintsov.

‘What a striking figure,’ he said. ‘Not a bit like the other females’.¹⁶

With the concrete example of Mary Louise before our eyes, the contrast in Trevor's method is obvious. We have, in turn, the casual introduction: “A woman, not yet fifty-seven, slight and seeming frail, eats carefully at a table in a corner” (p. 1), or “Mary Louise Dallon retained in her features the look of a child” (p. 4). Then the description emphasising the commonplace:

In an oval face her blue eyes had a child's wide innocence. Her fair brown hair was soft and curled without inducement. … Once in her life she was told she was beautiful, but laughed when the statement was made: she saw ordinariness in her bedroom looking-glass.

… Miss Mullover had once taught Mary Louise, and would have retained a memory only of a lively child had it not been for the same child's sudden interest, at ten, in Joan of Arc. … Miss Mullover wondered for a while if the child possessed depths she had overlooked: an imagination that would one day bear fruit.

(p. 4)

And, further, the emphasis on harmony between character and milieu: “But Mary Louise left the schoolroom with no greater ambition than to work in the local chemist's shop. … Circumstances obliged her to stay at home, helping in the farmhouse” (p. 4).

Whereas the looks and qualities of Trevor's characters are sparsely described and often, as shown by the examples above, registered as subjective impressions of another character, Turgenev usually supplies his heroine's history and characterisation in an expository manner with the authority of the omniscient narrator who knows more about her than she does herself. Here is his sketch of (Y)Elena in On the Eve:

Not long past her twentieth birthday, she was a tall girl, with a dark pallid complexion, and her large grey eyes, under arched eyebrows, were flecked round with tiny freckles; her forehead and nose were quite straight, her mouth was firmly closed, her chin rather pointed. … In everything about her, in the alert and rather nervous expression of her face, in her clear but changeable eyes, in her strained-looking smile and quiet uneven voice there was something tense and electric, something impulsive and hasty. …

Weakness of character made her indignant, stupidity angered her, a lie she would not forgive ‘as long as she lived’. Nothing would make her give way in her demands. …

Every impression was imprinted sharply on her soul; life, for her, was no light matter.¹⁷

It is evident from this quotation that Elena is much better equipped to meet the fate that is in store for her than is Mary Louise. In fact, the characterisation of Turgenev's heroines seems to be conceived in such a way as to make whatever is going to happen to them the fulfilment of what their personalities foreshadow or demand. In sharp contrast to this, the personality and qualities ascribed to Mary Louise at the outset, such as her childlike innocence, cannot be seen to contain even the germ of her reaction to the encounter with love and death that is in store for her. Instead, she is allowed to unfold her personality, to grow with the experience she undergoes, aided perhaps by a depth she did have after all, although Miss Mullover did not find it: an imagination that would one day bear fruit. It is such depth of imagination, never before called upon, which enables Mary Louise to share spontaneously Robert's world, and the fruit brought forth by that sharing is love. Characteristically, Mary Louise, unused to analysing her own feelings, does not recognise it. Only the grief on Robert's death makes her realise: “‘I love you, Robert,’ she whispered, knowing what she had not known in the last hours of his lifetime” (p. 113). The contrast with Elena is striking: a number of comparatively brief and in no way intimate contacts with Insarov initiate a process of self-analysis which, after seven pages of diary entries, culminates in the revelation: “I've found the word, it came to me like a flash of light. God have mercy on me! I love him!”¹⁸

Now that Dimitri is dead I shall remain true to his memory, and to the cause which he followed all his life. I shall probably not survive all this—so much the better. I have been brought to the edge of an abyss and I must go down into it. Fate did not unite us for nothing; … now it is his turn to call me after him. I sought happiness, perhaps I shall find death.¹⁹

This is the last the reader hears from Elena, the farewell letter to her parents which is a rephrasing of the question which one critic calls “the central thesis of Turgenev's philosophy of life: whether man has any right to personal happiness in defiance of the impersonal destiny which makes him no more than a creature of a single day, born yesterday and already dead tomorrow”.²⁰ Elena's answer is fatalistic acceptance.

Grieving over Robert's death, Mary Louise at first also wishes to die, but she gradually realises that Robert's love has given a value to her life which she must preserve. Like Elena, she cannot face again the life that resembled death which she had lived before she knew Robert, but, unlike Turgenev's heroine, she has no thought of leaving it all to fate, nor is there any pondering of a philosophy of life. Instead she begins to build a life of her own on the only real foundation she has: the love between Robert and herself. She does this by finding sanctuary in the world Robert had opened up for her, making it more and ore impregnable to intrusion from the world around her. The clergyman, her confidant, having been entrusted with her entire life story understands:

Inviting her into the world of a novelist had been her cousin's courtship, all he could manage, as much as she could accept. Yet passion came, like consummation in the end. For thirty-one years she'd clung to a refuge in which her love affair could spread itself, a safe house offering sanctuary. For thirty-one years she passed as mad and was at peace.

He smiles, recalling how she giggled when she told him that she had never opened the Rodenkil. … She had bought the Rodenkil from her husband's friend on purpose. She stained the rissoles green with the Stephens' ink she'd taken from her cousin's bedroom.

(pp. 220-21)

At the time of these reflections, Mary Louise's sanctuary has become her attic again, as advised by the nurse. She feels safe there now, as her sisters-in-law have sworn to ignore her presence completely, and her husband never intrudes further on her solitude than is needed to push a tray of food through the door. Elmer, though much run-down by his drinking, faithfully takes care of his wife because he believes that she is “better these days”. But the mention of her love to her cousin as well as her wish to be buried with Robert he takes for ramblings of a disturbed mind. Mary Louise, seeing no point in clearing up this error, wears him down with the same quiet insistence employed so successfully before, until he promises to have Robert's remains transferred to the graveyard with the Attridge graves and to commission a single gravestone leaving a space for Mary Louise's name next to Robert's. The final view Trevor offers of her, through the eyes of the clergyman, is this:

He watches as she walks away. Prosperous, she strikes him as just for a moment … a fragile figure, yet prosperous in her love. …

She'll outlive the Quarrys, the clergyman reflects, and sees her differently: old and alone, moving about from room to room in the house above the shop. ‘I have arranged it,’ his own voice promises, the least he can surely do.

There is the funeral, and then the lovers lie together.

(pp. 221-22)

It was the last favour she had requested of Elmer: “All I want is to be buried with him” (p. 211), and it is duly to be granted: “he promised that the matter was well in hand” (p. 216).

.....

The abundance of references and allusions in William Trevor's fiction to the writings of James Joyce, in particular to the stories of Dubliners, is not to be overlooked and has received due notice. However, whether we consider the echoes from “A Painful Case” reverberating in “A Meeting in Middle Age”,²¹ or the unmistakable re-casting of the characters of “A Little Cloud” in “Music”, or the explicit extension of “Two Gallants” in title and story of “Two More Gallants”,²² we come to see that Trevor never simply borrows and uses anything from Joyce, but the references become points of departure for thoughts and work processes very much his own. Thus, by the attention and care bestowed on Trevor's ‘quotes’ from Joyce, they become tributes, if often ironic ones, to the great artificer. They demonstrate that Trevor's relationship with his antecedents in novel-writing is self-confident, and “free from the anxiety of influence”,²³ there is no need to minimise the debt generally owed to the bold experimentation of the modernists, particularly to Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Both debt and tribute are evident in Trevor's careful adaptation of narrative techniques evolved by their experiments, such as the merging of his narrative voice with multiple centres of consciousness, or his very own brand of epiphanies, or characteristic juxtapositions and parallelisms.²⁴

Similarly, the explicit reference in the title of Reading Turgenev, as well as the manifold correspondences with the novels of the great Russian suggest an acknowledgement and a tribute of Trevor's to his own as well as the modernists' realist antecedents: tribute to the writer whom Henry James praised as “the novelist's novelist”, and acknowledgement of “an artistic influence extraordinarily valuable and ineradicably established”.²⁵ Judging by one of the more conspicuous features of William Trevor's art, namely his tendency to be brief and to use as few words as possible, he must have seen a kindred spirit at work in Turgenev who, in his best writings, achieved the utmost economy and compression. Both writers won first praise and lasting fame for their short stories, and the novels which are considered their masterpieces are far from voluminous. Trevor's precept that the short story “tells as little as it dares”, is matched by Turgenev's idea and practice of saying no more than is needed: “le secret d'ennuyer est celui de tout dire”, he warned.²⁶ Henry James's expression of admiration for Turgenev may be equally applied to William Trevor:

His great external mark is probably his concision: an ideal he never threw over … and that he often applied with a rare felicity. He has masterpieces of a few pages; his perfect things are sometimes his least prolonged.²⁷

In fact, Turgenev, due to his faithful adherence to the conventions of realism—Elena's diary entry representing self-analysis and her farewell letter marking her ‘exit’ from the novel may serve as examples here—could never aspire to the degree of compression Trevor achieves by using the narrative tools fashioned from the modernist revolt against realist conventions.

More profoundly, Trevor's attitude to the function of real life experience for the writer resembles that of Turgenev who considered reality no more than a starting point, not something to be reproduced detail by detail. Writing about the projection of his personal experience into a fictional character, Trevor declares:

There's no point in rejecting reality just for the sake of it.

This bringing together the person and the writer is an element in the professional's craft. A more fundamental one, and more difficult, is prising them apart in the first place …

And when he insists that:

The writer's stance is different. He needs space and cool; sentiment is suspect. Awkward questions, posed to himself, are his stock-in-trade …²⁸

he is postulating that the writer should represent reality as he in fact sees it, not as, for personal reasons, he would wish to see or ignore it. The effect of this self-imposed objectivity is felt by any reader who, for instance, has empathised with Attracta's message and has had to witness the futility of her efforts to get it across.²⁹ We feel it following Mary Louise through the stages of Elmer's ‘courtship’. In this unflinching authorial stance Trevor again is following a principle that was one of Turgenev's art as well: “It is the objectivity of Turgenev's attitude that is the primary characteristic of his realism and it is for this purpose that he hides himself. … His aim is to be dispassionate, leaving the axes to grind themselves.”³⁰ Only, as far as ‘hiding himself’ is concerned, Trevor is much more consistent than his great realist antecedent. He simply would not interrupt the interior monologue of a character by an authorial aside such as, “Elena did not know that every man's happiness is founded on the unhappiness of another”.³¹ Nor does he ever step out of the wings to wrap up his story as is typical for Turgenev: “This would seem to be the end. But perhaps some of our readers would care to know what each of the characters we have introduced is doing now, at the present moment”.³² The narrative voice in Trevor's novels and stories tends to remain indistinguishable from what is going on in some character's head—just as we heard it merge with the reflections of the clergyman at the end of Reading Turgenev.

The deepest kinship between the two novelists is to be found, it seems, in the view of the world their fiction projects. We only have to recall the reflections on Elena's “small part in life” or the simile of death and the fisherman in On the Eve (above, p. 190) to realise the fatalism underlying that story and as Vladimir Fisher points out, all of Turgenev's writings: “In Turgenev there are no people who forge their own happiness: all are blamelessly guilty, lucky without reason. All are doomed.”³³ One could add that the lucky ones are very few and far between and say the same of Trevor's stories and novels—on first impulse. And with the ending of “The Ballroom of Romance” or “The Distant Past”³⁴ in mind, that judgement makes sense. However, we soon have to admit that it is only half the truth; we are aware of something in the portrayal of Trevor's ‘doomed’ that sets them apart from those of Turgenev which stems from a distinctive quality in Trevor's detachment: the humour of it. Trevor's view of the world does not turn “optimistic because of his frequent comic elements”, as a recent critic would have it,³⁵ but its pessimism is tempered by the comic element, while Turgenev's remains unmitigated. Thus, the humour in Mary Louise's revelation of how she engineered her escape from the Quarry household by creatively entering into Rose and Matilda's malevolent plan (above, p. 193) is appreciated not by the clergyman alone. It does not, however, make his final vision of Mary Louise's future an optimistic one.

Concerning human happiness in the conventional sense, we read about the Dallons: “happiness. … It was not a word that naturally belonged to their vocabulary” (p. 124), and most of Trevor's characters never know what it means. Yet, unlike Elena who is left to her unanswerable doubts, most of them are allowed the consolation of some experiences on which to base their faith in humanity. For Attracta it is:

‘… the small, remarkable thing that happened in this town. …’

… it mattered when monsters did not remain monsters forever. It wasn't much to put against the last bleak moments of Penelope Vade, but it was something for all that.

Few die, like Penelope Vade, “in despair, with no faith left in human life”,³⁶ but few achieve the maximum Trevor's characters can hope for: peace. Some of those few have to go out of their minds to achieve it;³⁷ Mary Louise is allowed to find peace in “a life … as mysterious as an act of God, her innocence and her boundless love arbitrarily there” (p. 220). For Turgenev such unbounded love was an ideal forever unattainable; William Trevor, by creating this woman who is actually gifted with it, affirms the value that ranks highest throughout his fiction—the ability to love.

Reading Turgenev is not a re-writing of any one text of Turgenev's. However, when reading Trevor's story, what kept insinuating itself into this reader's mind was a novel not written by Turgenev but by a friend who closely shared his essential principles of composition and his view of the world, namely Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Of course, there is no claim attached to this that Trevor's express model for Mary Louise Dallon was Emma Bovary, but, as Francis Doherty convincingly argues with reference to “A Meeting in Middle Age”, “these things have a way of being triggered unconsciously”.³⁸ A multitude of apparent analogies suggest themselves: the farm, the longing for life “in the town”, the entrapment in small-town life, the obtuse and incommunicative husband, the love affair, and so on. But they all end, when followed up, in disconcerting divergences; for example, Emma's use of poison to achieve her escape by suicide.

The same is true for the most intriguing correspondence between the two novels: they each make a statement about the effects of literature on a person's life. In both novels the lives of the ‘heroines’ are not just influenced but shaped, from a certain point on, by their reading. Flaubert makes sure the reader comprehends the relationship between Emma's reading and her life: “She remembered the heroines of the books she had read, and that lyrical legion of adulteresses began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. She was becoming a part of her own imaginings”.³⁹ Emma's imaginings feed on the world of illusions and irresponsible passions retailed in the romances she has read, which Flaubert mocks mercilessly in his memorable tirade about this “the refuse of old lending libraries”.⁴⁰ His “story of provincial life” recounts the stages of Emma's corruption and moral disintegration owing to her inability to recognise what life actually has to offer her. Flaubert saw himself as “exorcising the romantic demons that hover about literature”.⁴¹

We have observed how, in Trevor's novel, Mary Louise also becomes “part of her own imaginings”. Only her imagination has been captured by a world informed by the values of a disillusioned realist, and she learns to perceive the real value in her own life. Seeing that Trevor regards the reading of realistic fiction as potentially life-supporting, while Flaubert depicts the consumption of romance as overwhelmingly destructive, it might be argued that we are looking at a deep-running correspondence indeed.

Notes

1. William Trevor, Two Lives: Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 1. Subsequent quotations will be referred to by page number in the article.

2. Ivan Turgenev, On the Eve (1860).

3. William Trevor, The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories (London: Bodley Head, 1972).

4. William Trevor, ed., The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. xiv.

5. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1862).

6. Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, pp. 130-31.

7. Ivan Turgenev, On the Eve (1859), trans. Gilbert Gardiner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 21.

8. Ivan Turgenev, First Love (1860), trans. Isaiah Berlin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 23.

9. Turgenev, On the Eve, p. 57. (The translation used here is at variance with the one Trevor quotes; cf. n. 18.)

10. Fathers and Sons, p. 152.

11. Ibid., p. 166.

12. On the Eve, p. 228.

13. Ibid., p. 229.

14. Barbara Beaumont, ed. and trans., Flaubert and Turgenev: A Friendship in Letters (London: Athlone Press, 1985), Introduction, p. 34.

15. Excerpt from Tvorchestvo Turgeneva, ed. N. Rozanov and Yu. M. Sokolov (Moscow, 1920), trans. David A. Lowe, in Critical Essays on Ivan Turgenev (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989), p. 52.

16. Fathers and Sons, pp. 147 ff.

17. The quotations inserted in Trevor's text spell the name as Yelena throughout; the edition used here gives the spelling as Elena; the quotation is taken from pp. 52-3 of that edition.

18. On the Eve, p. 122.

19. Ibid., p. 228.

20. Richard Freeborn, Turgenev: The Novelist's Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 110.

21. Francis Doherty, “William Trevor's ‘A Meeting in Middle Age’ and Romantic Irony”, in Journal of the Short Story in English, No. 16 (Angers: Presses de l'Université, Spring 1991), pp. 19-28.

22. See W. Trevor, “A Meeting in Middle Age”, in The Day We Got Drunk On Cake And Other Stories (1967); “Music” and “Two More Gallants”, in The News from Ireland and Other Stories (1986).

23. Gregory A. Schirmer, William Trevor: A Study of his Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 136.

24. Compare Schirmer, p. 9; also: Malcolm Bradbury, “William Trevor's Dubliners”, in No, Not Bloomsbury (London: Arrow Books, 1989), pp. 326-29.

25. Henry James, The House of Fiction (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957), p. 170.

26. Trevor, introduction, Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, p. xiv; Turgenev, Letter to L. Ya. Stech'kina, May 1878, quoted in R. Freeborn (1960), p. 185.

27. Henry James, The House of Fiction, p. 171.

28. William Trevor, Excursions in the Real World (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1994), p. xii.

29. William Trevor, “Attracta”, in The Distant Past and Other Stories (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1979).

30. R. Freeborn, Turgenev: The Novelist's Novelist, pp. 48-9.

31. On the Eve, p. 217.

32. Fathers and Sons, p. 292.

33. In Critical Essays on Ivan Turgenev, p. 50.

34. W. Trevor: both stories in The Distant Past and Other Stories (1979).

35. Kristin Morrison, William Trevor (New York: Twayne, 1993), p. 143.

36. W. Trevor, “Attracta” in The Distant Past, pp. 122-23.

37. Cf. “Children, Celibates and Holy Fools”, Chapter Eight of K. Morrison, William Trevor.

38. F. Doherty, “William Trevor's ‘A Meeting in Middle Age’ and Romantic Irony”, p. 28.

39. G. Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856-7), trans. Alan Russell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950).

40. Ibid., p. 50.

41. Ibid., Introduction by Alan Russell, p. 8.