I first encountered the work of the Irish writer William Trevor, who died this week, at the age of eighty-eight, in one of his masterwork short stories, “The News from Ireland.” This was more than twenty years ago, when I was a graduate student, but I can still summon the emotional jolt, and the riveting sense of fiction’s possibilities that Trevor’s humane, wry, frank, and often melancholy worldview excited in me.
The first sentences of the story go like this:
In those few unassuming lines, one can see so much of what made Trevor unsurpassable. With barely an effort, he conjures a time and place and the particular knot of social mores that the story will spend its pages untangling. The gentle condescension of the short opening phrase conveys not the author’s own prejudice about the butler and the cook but a sense of how they are viewed by people who rank above them; we know the world we have stepped into is one where the constraints of social status are unyielding. But, with the fleetness and economy that are the hallmarks of his fiction, Trevor also narrows his focus to tell us how Miss Fogarty defends herself against her low station in life—with pretense and innuendo, and perhaps a dollop of self-delusion. It’s a magician’s trick. A sleight of hand. You barely realize what has happened and suddenly there you are, in the mid-nineteenth century on an Irish estate during the tyrannical years of the potato famine, immersed in a story of ordinary people quietly wrestling with fate.
This is the trick that Trevor pulled off again and again, with each story and novel he wrote in the course of his decades-long career. He drew us into the lives of English and Irish shopkeepers and farmers, priests and parishioners, and even those who, by dint of circumstance or carefully curated effort, ascended a rung or two on the hierarchy. And although his work very much reflected the prevailing political and religious mores of its settings, it did not focus on the large sweep of history. Instead, Trevor settled his gaze on private yearnings and small, wayward impulses: stories about siblings scuffling over small-bore inheritances, about lost love, about minor duplicities, and, always, about the press and passage of time.
In the interviews he sat for—and Trevor was no fan of the public side of the writing life—he talked about his sense of himself as an outsider. Born into what he called a “lace-curtain Protestant” home to unhappily married parents, he moved often as a boy and attended an assortment of schools. Although he was a great reader with ambitions to write, he did not, at first, take up that life. Instead, he taught school and tried his hand as a sculptor. When that failed to produce income for his family, he took a job as an advertising copywriter, and during the dull hours of that occupation he wrote stories. This semi-itinerant background put him in the position of outsider, a vantage he felt it necessary to occupy as a writer. In a 1989 interview with the _Paris Review _at his home in Devon, England, where he settled with his wife, he said, “There was a certain amount of ‘cutawayness’ that has been a help. Certainly it feels like that, looking back at this very small group of not well-off Irish Protestants. Displaced persons in a way—which is really very similar to what a writer should be, whether he likes it or not.”
Trevor was not a flashy writer, and yet his work explodes with style. In “Three People,” a middle-aged woman lives with her father in a typical Trevorian setting—an unremarkable home in an undistinguished town. At the story’s beginning, a man comes to paint the bathroom. The dialogue is nearly comic in its banality:
And yet, as the story progresses, and we learn that, as a younger woman, Vera killed her disabled sister in this very house, and that these three people—Vera, Sidney, and Vera’s father—collude in the lie that has kept Vera out of jail, we begin to understand the repressed meaning in those opening remarks. The attention given to unlocking the door—one can practically hear a writing instructor tell his or her student to dispense with the shoe leather—is essential, hinting at how Vera and her father have shut themselves away since the murder (“We did not look out”) and also at the secret the trio holds. Trevor reveals the truth of the murder slowly, through a rhythmic and precise series of scenes that take us back and forth in time. This is no author’s gambit to keep a reader’s interest, although it does. Instead, the characters are pulled inescapably back into memory in the course of their daily activities. They do not remember for our reading pleasure. They remember when the suppressed drama and desire of their present moment makes it impossible for them to deny the past.
Trevor’s characters do not like to reveal themselves, and what is left unsaid holds as much weight as what is expressed. He is, above all, an author of human consciousness, and many of his stories end as a character becomes aware of the sacrifice he has made in order to shoulder guilt and shame, and to make way for the possibility of hope. It is in these moments of revelation that the most ordinary life takes on a kind of grandeur.
In photographs of Trevor as an older man, he is often clothed in sensible tweed or a raincoat. His face is lined, his eyes squinting as if he has looked at the world around him long and hard for many years. His smile is a line that barely lifts at the corners, an expression that suggests compassion and bemusement and perhaps a healthy dose of perplexed curiosity. How fortunate we are that he looked so carefully—that he found the foibles and hardships and small joys of life infused with equal measures of faith and foreboding, and that he was moved to spend his life telling us about it.
