If William Trevor (1928-2016) was around for his 95th birthday on May 24, he would have spun a yarn or two because it has long been recognised that the Irish “delight in stories of whatever kind”. In the Introduction to The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, which Trevor edited, the novelist and short story writer explained that stories have a way of pressing themselves into Irish conversation, both as entertainment and as a form of communication. “For centuries they have been offered to strangers: tall stories, simple stories, stories of extraordinary deeds, of mysteries and wonders, of gentleness, love, cruelty and violence.”
Not surprisingly, for his own short stories, gathered in The Collected Stories, and novels such as Two Lives, Felicia’s Journey, or his early tomes The Old Boys and The Love Department, he drew from everywhere. The Irish masters like James Joyce and Frank O’ Connor and the Russian great Chekov inspired him to write about the everyday and the underdog. Following in the best tradition of the modern short story, Trevor made his stories withhold as much information as they revealed, but they also provided readers with a glimpse of a larger, complicated world.
The Collected Stories by William Trevor
Lonely and eccentric
Experiences in his own life — his family was Protestant in a country where the majority faith is Catholic — added layers and depth to his work. He has written on anxieties of urban life (in stories such as A Meeting in Middle Age, Access to the Children, The Table, and Angels at the Ritz) and the loneliness of rural communities. In The Ballroom of Romance, Trevor narrates the story of Bridie who looks after her disabled father in their family farm, miles from the nearest town. She is 36 years old, and the only break from her routines and daily chores is a weekly visit to a wayside dance hall. There are only a handful of bachelors around and she wonders about Dano Ryan, who plays the drums. But the promise of love fails and she would have cried, had tears not been a luxury on the farm, “like flowers would be in the fields where the mangolds grew, or fresh whitewash in the scullery”. The story ends with Bridie thinking about who she would marry “because it would be lonesome being by herself in the farmhouse” when her father is gone.
Lonely, eccentric individuals who struggle to make sense of their surroundings find a place in his stories. It could be a classroom (A School Story) or a home (A Happy Family) in which a mother goes back to an imaginary friend of her childhood and slowly loses her mind. When she is taken away to an institution, her husband finds it difficult to explain it to the children. “Mummy’s never ill,” they point out, and he can’t help thinking, “…only death could make the house seem so empty, and death was easier to understand.”
Trevor has considered Ireland’s history in his stories as well. The News from Ireland is set in the 19th century and is about a family of landed Irish Protestants who find themselves to be “strangers and visitors” in their country of origin.
Following in the best tradition of the modern short story, Trevor made his stories withhold as much information as they revealed, but they also provided readers with a glimpse of a larger, complicated world.
The long and short of it
His craft is admired by other short story practitioners, including the Canadian great and Nobel laureate Alice Munro. As Margaret Atwood says in her essay on Munro: “Like the characters of William Trevor, her [Munro’s] characters live intensely within narrow boundaries, springing as they do from a time when you made what you had from what others might consider to be very meagre materials. Yet those narrow boundaries can’t hold: reality shimmers, perceptions dissolve... [there’s a] queasy sensation of walking on a cliff’s edge.”
Irish writer Eve Patten points out that Trevor’s “governing concern remains with the individual and the insuperable odds faced in any attempt to find happiness or fulfilment.”
Stories, far more than novels, cast spells in Ireland, and Trevor has ensured that his tales will enchant the world and other writers forever.
sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in
