The Side Story

MANY READERS BELIEVE WILLIAM TREVOR deserves the Nobel Prize for literature. But the Irish story-writer is not a smiling public man like Seamus Heaney, who seems as comfortable penning literary essays or lecturing at Harvard as he is writing poems. Trevor’s public statements are few and far between. Indeed, even when he does allow an interview, he is usually nothing more than genial and reticent.

But there’s a reason for this. In his fiction, Trevor has a compulsion to “tell other people’s stories for them” rather than to deliver his own judgments, whether literary or political. The short stories in his latest collection, A Bit on the Side, render action primarily through the memories and imaginations of his characters as they make sense of their lives by refashioning their own narratives. “Stories about stories” carries a threat of the formulaic, but Trevor offers a profound insight into the stories with which we craft our own lives, both for ourselves and for others. Now in his seventies, Trevor still has a mind teeming with new characters whose narratives he teases out in an understated yet beautifully crafted prose.

So, in his title story, “A Bit on the Side,” Trevor glimpses “in the plate-glass of a department-store window” the “stylishness” of an adulterous relationship. Readers never discover the names of the lovers because the author represents them with the pronominal “he” and “she,” which makes them simultaneously anonymous and intimate. Trevor explores the feelings of the lovers, but we also remain conscious that we are–like the waitress, cabdriver, music students, beggar, and art museum guides who are given bit parts–on the outside looking in.

The slight plot concerns the woman’s sensing a change in the man’s attitude. Trevor is on record explaining that he likes to rewrite his stories in different ways, and in “A Bit on the Side” he revisits adulterous territory he had mapped in stories from the 1970s, “Office Romances” and “Lovers of Their Time.” This new pair of lovers starts out, as usual, with no more than another “office romance.” But this pair has far finer feelings than the sundry adulterers in “Office Romances.”

Amid the routines of the lovers’ meetings–Trevor shows exquisitely how human circumstances are consecrated by habit–Trevor’s adulterer finds that he catches contempt in the eyes of all who see him with his mistress. They see her as “his bit on the side.” “I can’t bear it that they think that,” he says. To which she replies, “It doesn’t matter what people think.” So close is their relationship that no rancor intrudes into the disagreement. The woman reflects that the man feels “trapped by [her] divorce”–a cleverly devised asymmetry on Trevor’s part. To the woman her lover’s “family remained mysterious,” the provider primarily of his limp sandwiches. The center of consciousness is mainly that of the woman, as she wrestles with the man’s discomfort.

Into some of the stories Trevor introduces gothic elements. In “Sitting with the Dead,” there’s the just-widowed Protestant Irishwoman avoiding “the carnal remains [upstairs] of the man who was at last at peace,” her surly and irreligious horse-breeder husband. Her unhappy memories of twenty-three years of difficult marriage crystallize during an unanticipated visit by two Catholic sisters from the Legion of Mary, who came to sit with the husband as he dies. In “On the Streets,” there’s the fifty-one-year-old cockney office-cleaner Cheryl–“shabby in a maroon coat that once she’d been delighted to own and now disliked”–bothered by an ex-husband, a petty criminal who claims to have murdered a woman. The banality of the circumstances will make the reader anxious about what has actually transpired. In “Traditions” Trevor investigates an eerie mystery–seven tame jackdaws, kept by seven youths near their boarding school, have had their necks wrung–and he shows how one youth and a middle-aged maid (whom he believes responsible for the killing) envision, independently, the sexual relationship they seem destined to have.

In “Big Bucks,” John Michael leaves his girlfriend Fina behind in a fishing village on the west coast of Ireland when he travels to America as an illegal immigrant in order to make his fortune so he can come back and marry her. “Big Bucks” doesn’t work out as one expects, but it is psychologically unerring.

In “An Evening Out,” Trevor follows an unsuitable couple through a blind date arranged by the “Bryanston Square Introduction Bureau.” Nothing much happens; yet the conclusion is quietly startling. In “Graillis’s Legacy” and “Rose Wept” there is an assortment of lovers, musing from unusual perspectives upon extramarital liaisons. In the first story, Graillis’s wife and the other woman are both dead, and Graillis, a small-town Irish librarian, reflects upon a platonic affair during which books were discussed. In “Rose Wept,” Trevor examines acts of adultery by the wife of a private tutor from the perspective of his last pupil, the eighteen-year-old Rose who, at the end of the story, “wept for all her young life before her, and other glimpses and other betrayals.”

Trevor has an uncanny gift for working his own mind into female psychology and the stories that he fashions from that gift are well-represented in A Bit on the Side. Trevor has explained that “when people ask me why I have written so much about women, it is out of curiosity about women, because I am not a woman.” Trevor struck one interviewer “as eavesdropping on the conversation of a couple at a corner table behind us” in a small hotel. Indeed, he says his

For a collection aimed at wide sales in America, Trevor’s title is particularly wry. “A bit on the side”–an old-fashioned, usually jocular, English phrase for an adulterous affair–has little currency on this side of the Atlantic. The monosyllabic idiom–unfamiliar to most Americans–has almost become more intriguing as a riddle than for its extracurricular meaning. By choosing it as a title, Trevor surely pays droll tribute to his own undimmed creativity and for the results delivered upon what must seem, increasingly, borrowed time. Trevor’s own marriage of fifty years has, by every account, been remarkably happy, and he received an honorary knighthood in 2002 for his services to literature. Another collection of stories about the vicissitudes of ordinary people’s lives must indeed seem like “a bit on the side.”

SIX OF THE TWELVE STORIES in A Bit on the Side are about Ireland, where Trevor has roved increasingly in his fiction. Trevor may have received a British knighthood, but he still identifies himself as an Irishman. Remarkable changes in contemporary Ireland–its sexual revolution, its Celtic tiger economy, its discomfort with immigration, the travails of its Catholic Church, and so on–might now seem to have robbed Trevor of a familiar territory in which he had previously found what he needed in order to explore human experiences of entrapment. But his rural or small-town settings–rendered with a fine documentary accuracy–have always only provided a cue for exploring human emotions that can be understood on both sides of the Irish Channel and on both sides of the Atlantic.

In “Justina’s Priest,” Father Clohessy claims that in Ireland “now there was money where there’d been poverty, ambition where there’d been humility.” Nothing much happens in “Justina’s Priest”–Trevor’s stories can attain a high degree of plotlessness. Justina is a young learning-disabled woman who will not, it appears, visit Dublin to see her old schoolfriend Breda who may now, so one character thinks to himself, be working as a prostitute. Father Clohessy remembers how, in these changing times, Breda’s T-shirt had not so long ago invited sexual congress (in describing the shirt, Trevor uses a four-letter word he has never used before). Such crudities in the town further dispirit a priest who “wondered if he had become prey to despair, the worst sin of all in the canon that was especially a priest’s.”

Just after remembering Breda’s T-shirt, he realizes he is unable to apologize to his respectful parishioners for the church’s sexual scandals: “He could not blame them if in his sermons he didn’t know what to say to them any more.” It is the sweet-tempered Justina–who volunteers to polish the brass, mop the floors, and clean the candle-holders–who might just save Father Clohessy.

Not able to see Justina well through the screen of the confessional, Father Clohessy imagines her face as she is absolved of her sins at the end of the story: “Then happiness would break in that face that saw God in his own.” The story has begun with Justina Casey–“sinless as ever”–at the end of an earlier confession, leaving the church. The symbolism of the story’s conclusion which involves the priest imagining the lineaments of her face and faith (where they can barely be descried) is double-edged: On the one hand, faith is always a mystery that can be known only in the imagination; on the other hand, seemingly only the mentally challenged in Ireland have such faith anymore. Of such indeterminacy Trevor is a master.

“I’M ALWAYS SAYING that my books are religious,” Trevor has remarked, adding that “nobody ever believes me.” We should start. For example, St. Justina saved Cyprian from despair. If Trevor does not invoke dogmatic theology like James Joyce and Flannery O’Connor, his fiction is full of local epiphanies. Consider the conclusions to “The Dancing Master’s Music” and to “Sacred Statues.”

“The Dancing Master’s Music” is the simplest, but most haunting, story in the collection. Because it begins with what appears to be a large, Edwardian-sort of cast in a Stately Home–the social comedy in the servants’ hall is brilliantly observed–we are startled to find that it ends in the present. Fourteen-year-old Brigid Ranahan has just been taken on as a scullery maid, and for mysterious reasons the Anglo-Irish owner of the house decides that the visiting Italian dancing master will perform a piano concert for the staff in the drawing room.

It is Brigid’s first time upstairs; she “had never seen a portrait before.” Most of the staff are bored or restless, but Brigid is transported. The music stays with her always. The years pass, the house crumbles, and an unmarried Brigid attains the age of Old Mary, who had sat with her at the concert. In the last, intricate sentence of the story Brigid realizes that the music “would be there when she was gone, the marvel in her life a ghost for the place.”

In “Sacred Statues,” a poor young man with a gift for sculpting wrestles with a stalled career in the Irish countryside. Unable to cope with the responsibilities of his family, he takes a job as a road worker. The center of consciousness in the story is, however, that of his fertile wife, who strives to ensure that her husband will create in wood just as she does in flesh.

At the end of the story, she scrutinizes in his workshop the “undisguised tranquillity” of the saints he has carved: “Touched by it, lost in its peace, she sensed their resignation too. The world, not she, had failed.” A religious epiphany? Trevor is often charged with pessimism, but here the dreams of a character are left undiminished by the world’s intractability.

“My fiction,” Trevor diffidently explains, “may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.” Still, in A Bit on the Side Trevor again illuminates the mysteries of the human condition. Mystery works at several levels. The author casts himself as no more than a messenger-boy. He himself enjoys reading thrillers and mysteries, customarily citing them rather than any single author as his major influence. His own short stories are mysteries insofar as we must, gradually and gently, unpick the secrets of a life or of a relationship. Set in the present but evoking a complex past that needs disentangling, the stories show the vagaries of chance and the mysteries of “love.”

The formula of having characters spin their own yarns always threatens to fall over into the formulaic. That it so rarely does bears witness to the author’s skill. Trevor has been telling these stories for nearly half a century. That his essential formula of having characters tell their own stories hasn’t changed alerts us to the gift of a writer who is the best short-story writer at work in the world today.

Hugh Ormsby-Lennon is a professor of English at Villanova University and author of the newly published Fools of Fiction: Reading William Trevor’s Stories.