William Trevor
William Trevor was an esteemed Irish author known for his rich, imaginative storytelling that often blended gothic and elegiac elements. Born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1928, he received a varied education and initially pursued a career as a sculptor before turning to writing in the late 1950s. His literary career took off with the novel "The Old Boys," which garnered critical acclaim and established him as a significant figure in fiction across both Ireland and England. Trevor's works frequently explore themes of isolation, communication failures, and the presence of evil, often featuring complex characters set against the backdrop of small towns. He authored numerous novels and short stories, with notable titles including "The Story of Lucy Gault" and "Love and Summer." Throughout his career, Trevor received multiple accolades, including the Whitbread Prize and several Booker Prize nominations. He was also honored with an honorary knighthood and the title of Saoi by the Irish president. Trevor passed away in 2016 at the age of eighty-eight, leaving behind a legacy as one of the finest English-language storytellers of his time.
William Trevor
Writer
- Born: May 24, 1928
- Birthplace: Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland
- Died: November 20, 2016
- Place of death: Somerset, England
Irish short-story writer, novelist, and playwright
Biography
William Trevor’s fertile imagination can scarcely be summed up in two adjectives, but if one were so limited, then "gothic" and "elegiac" would do very well. Though not an experimentalist, he developed a flexible narrative form that allowed him to convey a wide variety of attitudes, shifts of tone, speaking voices, and descriptive passages that, while not pretending to rival the accomplishments of his master, James Joyce, nevertheless succeeded in establishing Trevor as a leading fiction writer on both sides of the Atlantic from the mid-twentieth century into the first decades of the twentieth. He has been compared to other champions of the short story, including Anton Chekov, W. Somerset Maugham, and V. S. Pritchett.
Born William Trevor Cox in a small town in County Cork, Ireland, Trevor was educated in a haphazard way until he entered St. Columba’s College in Dublin in 1942. In 1950 he earned his baccalaureate from Trinity College and for the next decade or so eked out a living teaching school while working as a sculptor. Although one of his sculptures won a prize in 1952, he gave up sculpting a few years afterward in favor of writing. That same year he married Jane Ryan, with whom he would have two sons. Soon he left Ireland for England, where he eventually made his home in Devonshire after teaching in Rugby and Taunton and then working in advertising in London. His first novel, a comedy called A Standard of Behaviour, was released in 1958, but he would later disown it and consider The Old Boys (1964), which first brought him critical attention and won the Hawthornden Prize, as his true first work.
Moving to England was motivated strictly by economics, as work was hard to find in Ireland after graduation from Trinity College. Nevertheless, Trevor evidently found the English social and intellectual climate congenial, which explained his continued residence. More important, he found there a singular advantage to his writing, the advantage one enjoys as an acute observer of a culture different from one’s own. Hence, his early stories and novels treat English subjects and involve English men and women; only later did he begin to focus upon his native Ireland. Perhaps the advantage of living away from his homeland for an extended period gave him the perspective he felt he needed. In any event, while books such as The Old Boys and The Children of Dynmouth (1976) and stories including "Going Home" (1972) and "Angels at the Ritz" (1975) deal impressively with English themes and English characters, short stories such as "Attracta" in Lovers of Their Time, and Other Stories (1978) and the title story in The News from Ireland, and Other Stories (1986) reveal Trevor’s sure handling of Irish subjects, in both historical and contemporary settings. The story "Death in Jerusalem" (1978) also focuses on Irish and Irish American characters while expanding the setting as those characters travel to Jerusalem.
The gothic aspect of Trevor’s imagination shows itself in the assemblage of misfits, oddballs, and eccentrics that populate almost all of his fiction. Studdy and Nurse Clock in The Boarding-House (1965) also demonstrate its sinister side. Bitter rivals and indeed enemies, they link up in an unholy alliance to become the sole beneficiaries of an unusual bequest, but they are ultimately thwarted by their own greed and a failure to grasp the warped intelligence of those they are trying to cheat. Young Timothy Gedge, by contrast, seems to understand only too well the weaknesses of his victims, as he tries to insinuate himself into their lives. If, like Studdy, he is a confidence man, his youth and his loneliness combine to make him finally a creature more pathetic than wicked, though Trevor does not underestimate the potential—and real—evil of which Gedge is capable.
The presence of evil in the world and the inability of many human beings to communicate effectively with one another explain the sadness, or the elegiac quality, that colors so much of Trevor’s work. Nights at the Alexandra (1987) develops this quality to an extraordinary degree. The keynote sounds with the opening short paragraph: "I am a fifty-eight-year-old provincial. I have no children. I have never married." This statement is the unintended legacy that Alexandra Messinger, an Englishwoman married to a German, leaves young Harry. She and her husband have fled from Nazi Germany and are living in a small Irish town during the "Emergency" (as the Irish called World War II). Told from the vantage point of many years later, Nights at the Alexandra recounts the story of a youngster who, badly misunderstood by his parents and siblings, becomes a loner. Much taken by the beautiful, mysterious but kindly woman many years her husband’s junior, Harry defies parental orders not to visit with the strangers and ultimately elects to work in Herr Messinger’s newly erected cinema instead of his father’s lumberyard. Built despite wartime shortages and named for Frau Messinger, the cinema is her husband’s gift to her and to the town. When it finally opens, however, Frau Messinger has died and her husband leaves the town and Cloverhill, the home where Harry visited them, forever. The illness is never named or explained, but it doubtless derives in part from an early heartbreak Frau Messinger experienced, the inability to give her husband a child, her deep sense of gratitude to him for his love and devotion, and in general the profound isolation she finds in these alien surroundings. "We can live without anything but love, Harry," she says at one point. "Always remember that." Yet though she has love, she dies, and dying, she takes with her any chance Harry may have to love, though he lives on.
Trevor has written plays for stage and television, many of them adapted from his own stories or novels. He believed short stories lend themselves better to films than novels do, but he has adapted both for radio and television, including "Beyond the Pale" (1981), "Matilda’s England" (1978), Elizabeth Alone (1973), and "The Ballroom of Romance" (1972).
Continuing to write into the twenty-first century, Trevor published both novels and short stories on similar themes. Along with the novels The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) and Love and Summer (2009), he published the short story collections The Hill Bachelors (2000), A Bit on the Side (2004), Cheating at Canasta (2007), and Selected Stories (2010). As in his previous works, the everyday characters of these stories typically face bleak situations in small towns in Ireland or England.
Widely regarded as one of the finest storytellers of his time writing in English, Trevor was the recipient of numerous awards. Among these were the Royal Society of Literature Award, the Allied Irish Banks’ Prize for Literature, and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction (three times). He was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize on four occasions, including for the novel The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), and was also long-listed for the award for the novel Love and Summer in 2009. Trevor was a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and was named an honorary Commander, Order of the British Empire for his "services to literature" in 1977. This was followed by recognition as a Companion of Literature in 1994 and an honorary knighthood in 2002. In 2015, he was awarded the honor of Saoi by Ireland's president.
For years Trevor lived in relative isolation in Devon, England, while often traveling to Ireland. On November 20, 2016, Trevor died at the age of eighty-eight at his home. He was survived by his wife and two sons.
Bibliography
Bonaccorso, Richard. "William Trevor’s Martyrs for Truth." Studies in Short Fiction 34 (1997): 113–18. Print.
Cain, Sian. "William Trevor, Watchful Master of the Short Story, Dies Aged 88." The Guardian, 21 Nov. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/21/irish-writer-william-trevor-dies-aged-88. Accessed 6 Dec. 2016.
Corrigan, Maureen. "William Trevor: A Short-Story Master's Life Work." Rev. of Selected Stories, by William Trevor. NPR. NPR, 10 Jan. 2011. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.
Fitzgerald-Hoyt, Mary. "The Influence of Italy in the Writings of William Trevor and Julia O’Faolain." Notes on Modern Irish Literature 2 (1990): 61–67. Print.
Gitzen, Julian. "The Truth-Tellers of William Trevor." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 21.1 (1979): 59–72. Print.
Grimes, William. "William Trevor, Writer Who Evoked the Struggles of Ordinary Life, is Dead at 88." The New York Times, 21 Nov. 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/books/william-trevor-dead.html. Accessed 6 Dec. 2016.
Haughey, Jim. "Joyce and Trevor’s Dubliners: The Legacy of Colonialism." Studies in Short Fiction 32 (1995): 355–65. Print.
MacKenna, Dolores. William Trevor: The Writer and His Work. Dublin: New Island, 1999. Print.
McKie, Andrew. "Strictness and Susceptibility." Spectator. Spectator, 20 Jan. 2010. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.
Morrison, Kristin. William Trevor. New York: Twayne, 1993. Print.
Paulson, Suzanne Morrow. William Trevor: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Print.
Rhodes, Robert E. "William Trevor’s Stories of the Troubles." In Contemporary Irish Writing. Ed. James D. Brophy and Raymond D. Porter. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Print.
Schiff, Stephen. "The Shadows of William Trevor." New Yorker 68.45 (1992/1993): 158–63. Print.
Schirmer, Gregory A. William Trevor: A Study in His Fiction. London: Routledge, 1990. Print.
Trevor, William. "A Clearer Vision of Ireland." Guardian 23 Apr. 1992: 25. Print.