William Trevor: ‘An acute observer with an outsider’s eye for detail’

This is the news cycle, now, when a great writer dies. On Monday, just after 3pm, Penguin Ireland announces, on Twitter, the sad passing of William Trevor, at 88 years old. Thirty minutes later email and phone requests are sent out by Irish and British media for tributes and comment. At 6pm, the Irish Times online publishes an impressive roll call of Irish writers who pay real and heartfelt homage to someone whose work has clearly meant so much. There is no hesitation. Everyone is at their desk. Each author highlights an aspect of Trevor’s work that mirrors their own hopes and concerns, and a picture emerges of a writer who, in the faceted transparency of his prose, allows us to see an entire tradition. An hour later, the obituaries, lurking for some months – or years, perhaps – are published alongside critical appraisal and appreciations across the English speaking world. The news is four hours old, the day is not yet over. It is difficult to think of the poor man’s mortal self and the fact that he is gone through the many tributes now calling his work to mind.

The words that writers use about Trevor are full of yearning. He is described as wise, scrupulous, tactful, eloquent, a master craftsman. There is a regretful sense that, despite his great achievement, he was not placed at the centre of the Irish literary consciousness. Like many great writers he was an outsider, and as such was free, for the most part, from the struggle with language that besets and enlivens many of our best writers on the page.

Ireland is a wretched country when it comes to knowing where people are from, how they are “got” (well or badly), what their name means and what it meant 200 years ago. These days, this knowledge is mostly latent, but it still exists: we are sectarians and snobs on a minute level, constantly sifting and sorting people into one or other historical identity and the whole business can be tedious enough, if you are on the receiving end of it.

I am a “lace curtain” Protestant, Trevor said of himself – as if a small-town Irishman who sported a tweed fishing hat could ever be a Catholic (no, he just couldn’t). Trevor’s father worked in the bank, as did his mother, before marriage. In those days, bank workers moved around from town to town, always at an angle to the local population, whose business they knew to the last pound note. The Trevors were doubly estranged for being, not just Protestant, but the wrong kind of Protestant, because they did not belong to the old establishment of landed gentry.

What is a writer to do with such a series of social double binds? Trevor left Ireland because, by his own account, he could not find a job there, and he lived in England for most of his adult life. “I don’t really feel those divisions any more than really I feel, in literary terms, the division between Ireland and England. I feel that writers of fiction do belong in a no man’s land some place and I certainly feel I do.”

He was, in that no man’s land, completely at home in the English language. He had no need of metaphor; the push in his sentences is towards the apposite phrase and he repeatedly gives the reader the satisfaction of finding it. His approach is described as “egoless”, as though writing were, at its best, an exercise in modesty – a service to the character and to the story which exist, in some essential way, without him. Trevor was interested in fate, as though this is something over which, in his stories, he had no control. This allowed him to own the work and disown it, both at the same time, and shifts the focus to the formal beauty of the narrative shapes he made.

People ask novelists what their novel is “about”, a question that is seldom asked of the short story writer, who is obliged to talk, endlessly, about the joys and limitations of the form. Trevor saw himself primarily as a writer of short stories and his work fits neatly into this discussion, despite the fact that his pages are dense with social content. His observations of English suburban life as well as those of small town Ireland are so acute as to verge on the satirical. He had the eye of an outsider for the smallest detail, and irony did not escape him.

Trevor’s Irish characters live small lives, and they often get smaller. Who can forget Bridie, at the end of “The Ballroom of Romance”, realising she will settle for Bowser Egan, because when her father dies, she will be alone in the farmhouse? In “The Dressmaker’s Child”, Cathal is obliged to sleep with a woman whose daughter he may have hit with his car. Although he is not at fault he has only himself to blame, suffering as he does from all the guilt and none of the consolations of his religion. Cecilia in “Downstairs in Fitzgeralds” realises she does not know which of two men may be her father, and she manages to find a balance between belief and disbelief, love and loss. Trevor brings these characters, trembling, to a point of ambiguity or impossibility. When Cathal returns to a weeping statue of the Virgin that he had previously mocked, “He knelt, and asked for nothing.” There is a kind of redemption in this, in the realisation of our human frailty. The characters are also redeemed by Trevor’s tender and forensic gaze. His writerly compassion releases a sigh of happiness in the reader that might as well be one of resignation.

When he was presented with a life-time achievement award in Dublin in 2008, Trevor, who had a mischievous streak, agreed with me that these things take an enormous amount of the writer’s time, “and you can’t use any of it”. You cannot write about award ceremonies. They take you away from the desk for many precious hours and give you nothing to work with, when you sit back down to it. For a writer like Trevor, this felt like going home empty handed.

If you needed to get permission to publish one of his stories, as I once did, you wrote him a letter. You sent this letter to his home address in Devon and, a week or so later, you would receive a handwritten reply. And so it happened. I opened a small envelope and there it was, permission graciously granted. And there was something slightly magical about this process, as though the postal system had only recently been invented.

It would be easy to get nostalgic for this kind of life and its perfect pace. It would be nice to get time to mourn the man before the public business of remembering the great writer begins. These days, the public business starts within minutes of the news of his passing. But when the call went out to Irish writers last Monday afternoon, one thing had not changed: they were all at their desks, the place where Trevor knew he belonged.