Irish Tales

As Trevor reports it, his stories “are essentially about people,” but that formula does not reach down to the deepest level of his work. Much of Trevor’s work, in fact, consists of stories about stories — about the narratives that we make of our lives. At the end of a tale, Trevor’s characters often achieve a moment of recognition. But the tricky and subtle thing is that this recognition is not exactly of the “meaning” of what has happened. It is rather a recognition by the protagonists of their own stories — of what will give form to their feelings and provide them with the words by which they will recount it. Often a Trevor protagonist resolves events by determining no longer to lie to herself (Trevor is particularly acute about the feelings of women), while nevertheless keeping the “story,” her feelings, a secret.

In one of the stories in The Hill Bachelors, for instance, a malicious practical joke leads a newspaper to publish a professor’s obituary. Fearing he will be hurt and thinking it simply a mistake that will be retracted in later editions, the professor’s wife conceals that page of the paper from him. He is thus bewildered in the afternoon by his colleagues’ remarks at a regular sherry party given by the master of the college.

But finally he is told what has happened. And after the party, he stops off in a pub and gets drunk for the first time in his life. When he comes home, his wife tries to apologize for her well-meaning deception, but he forestalls her with a bit of speculation (which involves her personally) as to why the obituary was made. The story ends when he “holds her as he did the day he first confessed his adoration.”

“Death of a Professor” is the masterpiece in The Hill Bachelors. Like most of Trevor’s stories, it has no plot in the conventional sense. Instead — with a typical Trevor device of never telling the reader what the premature obituary actually said — the story is devoted both to his wife’s and colleagues’ reactions and to the professor’s own ruminations on what the obituary should have mentioned: “the orderly precision that enhances his work and affects him as a husband,” and “his wife was younger by sixteen years . . . as lovely in her day as Marilyn Monroe.”

In addition to his story collections, Trevor has written twelve novels, fifteen radio plays, and some forty television plays (mostly adaptations of his stories). The man seems never to have suffered writer’s block. Born in Ireland in 1928, Trevor has been publishing prize-winning and best-selling fiction in Britain for almost half a century. Born a Protestant Irishman and married to an Englishwoman, he has lived in England for forty years — emigration from depressed Ireland a necessity in the 1950s for graduates of Trinity College Dublin.

He started as a sculptor, but despite some success he became disappointed with the modernist style his pieces were assuming and devoted more time to his fiction. He wrote his first short stories while he was employed by a London advertising agency, and he now lives in Devon, in England’s west country. Nonetheless, Trevor’s writing comes from the well-developed tradition of the short story in Ireland, which essentially began with George Moore and flowered with James Joyce, Liam O’Flaherty, Sean O’Faolain, and Frank O’Connor.

Quite why Trevor’s fiction has not found the same level of popularity in the United States that it enjoys in England and Ireland remains a mystery. It may have something to do with his decidedly ambiguous slant on life. But it probably has more to do with the interesting plotlessness of his stories.

Unlike novels, short stories are not required to have plots (although they often do, as writers from O. Henry to Jorge Luis Borges have demonstrated). Trevor hardly ever puts his characters into much more action than a stroll home, a bus ride, or an evening meal. But in this, Trevor falls squarely in a classic tradition of the short story, manifesting the single action, unified mood, and economy of means established by Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, and — especially for understanding Trevor — Anton Chekhov. Trevor’s stories typically present his protagonists’ characters at a moment in time in which a previous event (sometimes events) brings them to a flash of recognition about their own lives.

Thus even the titles in The Hill Bachelors point to the essence of the stories. Half are set in England, half in Ireland, but nationality is not particularly important to most of the stories. “Three People,” for instance, shows a woman, her father, and their handyman bound to each other by the handyman’s having provided an alibi for the woman in the death of her disabled sister. “Of the Cloth” shows an Anglican priest realizing he has a bond with the local Catholic priest whose church is suffering the same diminution as the Anglican’s once powerful Church of Ireland.

In “Good News,” a child picked for a screen part undertakes to conceal from her ambitious mother the sexual abuse she realizes she must endure to keep the part. “A Friend in the Trade” focuses on the moment at which an eccentric and troublesome antiquarian goes too far and is dropped by the couple in whose house he has been welcome for thirty years, reverting to being only an acquaintance — while the wife of the house (who knows he loves her) grieves, “Who will listen to him now? Who’ll watch him talking to the air?” Even his misfits Trevor treats with sympathy.

“Le Visiteur” tells of a lonely Englishman in France visiting his godparents. Back at his hotel, he imagines having an affair with a woman at another table in the dining room — who does, in fact, take him to her bed. But it turns out she merely wishes to humiliate her vulgar, drunken husband. Left alone, the visitor comes to the realization that the woman behaved as she did because, for her and her husband, the scene was a part of “how they lived, . . . it was how they belonged to one another, not that he understood.”

“In “Against the Odds,” a Belfast woman, experiencing the “benign infection” of the current cease-fire in Northern Ireland, calls off her swindle of a turkey farmer and goes back to marry him. In “The Telephone Game,” a young German woman realizes the Englishman she will marry in the morning has childish cruelty in his character. And in “The Hill Bachelors,” a young man takes over his widowed mother’s farm, where no girl these days would want to follow him as his wife. He “harbored no resentment”; he accepted that, “enduring, unchanging, the hills had waited for him, claiming one of their own.”

At first blush, these might seem like the height of modernist art, the story as artifact and icon. But Trevor is not a modernist: “I don’t write in metaphors.” His stories are dense with details of the physical worlds that his characters inhabit, and one of the greatest pleasures of reading Trevor stems from the unmetaphoric richness that complements his grasp of psychological dilemma. In his introduction to the Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, Trevor characterizes the short story as “the distillation of an essence. It may be laid down that it has to have a point, that it must be going somewhere, that it dare not be vague. But art has its own way of defying both definitions and rules.”

Trevor’s “distillation of an essence” sometimes confuses readers who seek to give his stories more plot, more action, more narrative. Reviewing The Hill Bachelors in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani recently (and wrongly) wrote that the hill bachelor “must choose between his love for a woman and his obligations to his widowed mother”; that the turkey farmer finds himself “made the butt of a cruel swindle” by the Belfast woman; and that the professor learns “what the world really thinks of him when his obituary is prematurely published.”

It’s true, of course, that Trevor can be indirect and difficult: The impossible story “Low Sunday, 1950” is the closest the author has verged on self-parody; it beats me who in this tale is doing what to whom, or when, or why. The temptation in reading Trevor is to think that he intends only to show unhappiness and confusion, a world in which romantic fantasies give way only to resignation.

Trevor himself would disagree. Asked if he believes in “grace in people’s lives,” he replied, “I’m a God-botherer. Most of my fiction seems to do that. I’m definitely on the side of the Christians.” Indeed, he added, “Life can be melancholy, but that is not the same as depressing. If life were depressing, it would be intolerable.” It may be that “no storyteller of any worth can be happy,” but “no story of any worth can afford to be given over to gloom.”

Much that is bad does happen to the characters in Trevor’s stories, often by coincidence, that great motor of fiction. And the cause of these coincidences is the author’s sense that “I don’t think one has any sort of feeling of controlling one’s destiny.” But it is precisely because they live in a chaotic world filled with accident — precisely because they are not in full control of their destiny — that what matters is the character of his characters. What matters is the heroism they show in taking on their own stories, or the cowardice they show in refusing to recognize themselves as the protagonists of the tales they use to explain their lives. What matters is not their stories, but — in William Trevor’s hands — the story of their stories.

Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University.