A C T A U N I V E R S I T A T I S L O D Z I E N S I S
FO LIA L IT T E R A R IA A N G L IC A 5, 2002
A d a m S u m e ra
WILLIAM TREVOR’S SHORT STORIES ABOUT IRELAND
William Trevor is the pen name o f William Trevor Cox, born in M itchelstown in Co. Cork in 1928, a son of Protestant parents living in Catholic Ireland. He started his literary career in the late 1950s. H e has been active both as a playwright and an author of fiction, being prolific in both genres; a num ber o f his works exist in two forms: as short stories and plays (sometimes radio plays or television plays), for example, The M ark-2 Wife or The Grass Widows.
As a fiction writer, Trevor has written both novels and short stories. It is, however, m ostly due to the latter that he has gained his position in the contem porary British writing. Some critics treat him as one o f the m ost im portant short story writers on the Isles after W orld W ar II, together with A lan Sillitoe and M uriel Spark,1 or V. S. Pritchett.2 R obert Nye goes as far as to call him “a poet of prose fictions.” 3 Penny Perrick observes th at his stories “ are as addictive as Irish oysters; you’ll always crave ju st one m ore.” 4
T revor’s characters are m ostly either English or Irish. He does not seem to have any particular favourite location: it can be L ondon or D ublin or some small town or village in England or Ireland, but it can also be Jerusalem or Isfahan. It is rather his interest in a particular kind of characters that connects his short stories. He shows sympathy for people who cannot cope with problems o f life, who lose in the eternal battle against one’s fate. He also dwells on the difficulties in com m unicating with other people and in understanding other persons’ intentions, thoughts and feelings. There is w arm th perm eating his tales; though preserving a narrative distance, he is on his characters’ side. He seems to follow the view of one
1 Cf. e.g. G iles G ord on, “M asters in M iniature,” The Times, 27 D ecem ber 1997. 2 Robert Towers, “G leeful M isanthropy,” The N ew York Times, 2 October 1983. 3 Robert N ye, “Breathing Life,” The Times, 17 October 1996.
o f his characters, Frances, from “A utum n Sunshine” : “ It was weakness in people, she said, that m ade them what they were as m uch as strength did .” 5 One o f the m ost striking features of T revor’s short stories is the fact th at in spite of being really short - rarely exceeding ten printed pages - they create the impression o f plenty; m any of them seem to have enough m aterial to fill a short novel. It happens due to T revor’s amassing details. Sometimes the reader comes across m any rem arks on items th at m ight seem irrelevant to the m ain stream of the story - and yet it is they th at create the effect of richness. Due to them, the reader becomes as involved in a wide web o f events as if he were reading a novel. Let us take for example a scene from the story “A utum n Sunshine.” C anon M oran, the m ain character of this tale, receives a letter from his daughter who has left his rectory to go to England. Between the inform ation th at the letter has arrived and the passage telling us about its contents we witness the following scene in which postm an Slattery participates:
‘Isn ’t that a great bit o f weather, Canon?’ Slattery remarked, winding dow n the w indow o f the van and passing out the three envelopes. ‘W e’re set for a while, would you say?’
‘I h op e so, certainly.’ ‘A h , w e surely are, sir.’
T he conversation continued for a few m om ents longer, as it did whenever Slattery came to the rectory. The postm an was youn g and easy-going, not lon g the successor to old M r O ’Brien, w h o’d been m aking the round on a bicycle when the M orans first came to the rectory in 1952. M r O ’Brien used to talk about his garden; Slattery talked about fishing, and often brought a share o f his catch to the rectory.
‘It’s a great time o f year for it,’ he said now , ‘except for the darkness com in g in.’ Canon M oran smiled and nodded; the van turned round on the gravel, du st rising behind it as it m oved swiftly dow n the avenue to the road. Everyone said Slattery drove to o fast (769-770).
The postm an will not reappear in the tale, so the passage m ight seem to be redundant. It could be partly defended on the basis th at it tells us something about the leisurely way o f living at the rectory. Such a reasoning, however, would miss the point: its m ain function is to create connections to what is, so to say, beyond the edges of the short story: there are narrative possibilities th at could be pursued. The story presented to the reader is only one of m any th at could be told.
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From am ong alm ost sixty short stories collected in the om nibus edition The Stories o f William Trevor, comprising in fact five of his books {The
5 W illiam Trevor, The S tories o f William Trevor (Harmondsworth: Penguin B ooks, 1983), p. 771. Subsequent page references will be m ade in the text.
D ay We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories [1967], The Ballroom o f Romance and Other Stories [1972], Angels at the R itz and Other Stories [1975], Lovers o f Their Time and Other Stories [1978] and Beyond the Pale and Other Stories [1981]), the present paper will concentrate on four that deal with problems connected with Ireland’s past and present. Ireland appears in several tales but mostly it is little m ore than a picturesque background to the events described there, as in “The G rass W idows” or “Teresa’s W edding.” However, in those four it becomes im portant indeed.6 “The D istant Past” tells the story o f an elderly Unionist couple, the M iddletons, living a few miles from a small Irish town am ong Catholic neighbours. In a short retrospective introduction we are told that since the twenties the M iddletons had lived a quiet life growing a few cows and hens. Despite the political changes around them they stuck to their views:
Tw ice a week, on Fridays and Sundays, the M iddletons journeyed into the tow n, first o f all in a trap and later in a Ford A nglia car. In the shops and elsewhere they m ade, quite gently, n o secret o f their continuing loyalty to the past. T hey attended on Sundays St Patrick’s Protestant Church, a place that matched their m ood , for prayers were still said there for the K ing w hose sovereignty their country had denied. The revolutionary regime would n ot last, they quietly informed the Reverend Packham: what sense was there in green-painted pillar-boxes and a language that n ob ody understood? (345).
However, nobody seemed to mind their attitude:
In the Reverend Bradshaw’s presence they rose to their feet when the BBC played ‘G od Save the K in g,’ and on the day o f the coronation o f Queen Elizabeth II they drove into the tow n with a small U n ion Jack propped up in the back w indow o f their Ford Anglia. ‘Bedad, you’re a holy terror, M r M iddleton!’ Fat D riscoll laughingly exclaimed, noticing the flag as he lifted a tray o f pork-steaks from the display sh elf (346).
Butcher F a t Driscoll was closely involved in the M iddletons’ lives: at the time o f the changes he came to their house with a gun, locked them in their room upstairs and waited to shoot British soldiers should they come there. The soldiers did not come, and the M iddletons kept buying their m eat from F a t Driscoll; and he was glad to give them some mince for their dog when they came shopping, pretending that otherwise he would have throw n it away.
This peaceful living together of people with so different views is fairly natural to those involved but when seen from outside, it causes astonishment:
T he visitors w ho came to the town heard about the M iddletons and were impressed. It w as a pleasant wonder, m ore than one o f them remarked, that old w ounds could heal
6 The stories discussed were originally published in the follow ing collections: “T he D istan t Past” - Angels a t the R itz and O ther Stories; “A nother Christmas” and “A ttracta” - Lovers
so com pletely, that the M iddletons continued in their loyalty to the past and that, in spite o f it, they were respected in the tow n (348).
However, the idyll was not to last for ever. W hen the M iddletons were in their mid-sixties the Troubles started. Soon the first British soldiers landed in N orthern Ireland. Though the small town was some sixty miles from the border, w hat was going on in the N orth did not rem ain w ithout influence:
O n Fridays, only som etimes at first, there was a silence when the M iddletons appeared. It was as though, going back nearly twenty years, people remembered the U n ion Jack in the w indow o f their car and saw it n ow in a different light. It w asn’t som ething to laugh at any more, nor were certain words that the M iddletons had gently spoken, nor were they themselves just an old, peculiar couple. Slowly the change crept about, all around them in the town, until Fat D riscoll didn’t wish it to be remembered that he had ever given them mince for their dog. H e had stood with a gun in the enem y’s house, waiting for soldiers so that soldiers might be killed: it was better that people should remember that (350).
It m ight be tem pting to treat this situation as a starting point for a m ore general reflection on the situation in Ireland. However, Trevor continues the limited perspective focusing on the elderly couple. By con centrating on their isolation from their form er friends, caused by the m utual enmity up north, he m akes the story m uch m ore effective:
N o w and again, he thought, he would drive slow ly into the tow n , to buy groceries and m eat with the m oney they had saved, and to face the silence that w ould sourly thicken as their own tw o deaths came closer and death increased in another part o f the island. She felt him thinking that and she knew that he was right. Because o f the distan t past they would die friendless. It was worse than being murdered in their beds (351).
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A nother version o f the process o f estrangement caused by the indirect influence of the T roubles can be found in the short story “ A nother C hristm as.” N orah and D erm ot, an Irish Catholic couple, live in London. They left Ireland twenty-one years before, and D erm ot worked as a m eter- reader with N orth Tham es Gas ever since they settled in London. In m aking their hom e in England, they had uprooted themselves. W hen reflecting on the impossibility of returning to Ireland, N orah thinks:
I f she hadn’t said they should go to England, if she hadn’t wanted to work in a London shop, they w ou ld n’t be caught in the trap they’d made for them selves. Their children spoke with L ondon accents, Patrick and Brendan [their eldest children] worked for English firms and would m ake their hom es in England. Patrick had married an English girl. T hey were C atholics and they had Irish nam es, yet h o m e for them w as n ot W aterford (492).
F o r a long time the family had had good relations with their English landlord, M r Joyce. He used to join them on Christm as D ay but it seems he will n o t this year. This is extraordinary because he sat with them every Friday evening and this did not change even when Irish bom bs exploded in Birmingham and Guildford:
T he bom bings were discussed after the N ew s, the Tower o f London bom b, the bom b in the bus, and all the others. ‘M aniacs,’ M r Joyce said and nob ody contradicted him (492).
A change came after a com m ent m ade by D erm ot following a television report on new outrage:
. . . D erm ot had added that they m ustn’t o f course forget w hat the C atholics in the N orth had suffered. The bom bs were a crime but it didn’t d o to forget that the crime w ould not be there if generations o f Catholics in the N orth had n ot been treated as animals. T here’d been a silence then, a difficult kind o f silence which [Norah had] broken herself. A ll that w as in the past, she’d said hastily, in a rush, noth in g in the past or the present or anywhere else could justify the killing o f innocent people. Even so, D erm ot had added, it didn’t d o to avoid the truth. Mr Joyce had n ot said anything (493).
N orah feels that M r Joyce must have taken this statement as a justification o f the killings:
Everyone knew that the C atholics in the North had suffered, that generations o f injustice had been twisted in to the shape o f a cause. But you couldn’t say it to an old m an who had hardly been outside Fulham in his life. Y ou couldn’t say it because when you did it sounded like an excuse for murder (ibid.).
She thinks they should m ake it clear to everybody that they are against any acts o f terrorism but she cannot find the courage to do it. Unable to convince her husband who cannot see her point, she wonders whether
. . . in twelve m onths’ time, when another Christmas came, he w ould still be cycling from house to hou se to read gas meters. Or would people have objected, requesting a meter-reader who was n ot Irish? A n objection to a man with an Irish accent was dow n-to-earth and ordinary. It didn’t belong in the same category as crime begetting crime or G od wanting som ething to be know n, or in the category o f truth and conscience. In the present circumstances the objection would be understandable and fair. It seemed even right that it should be m ade, for it was a man with an Irish accent in w hom the w orst had been brought out by the troubles that had com e, w h o was guilty o f a cruelty n o one would have believed him capable o f (494).
The short story, written in the third person but entirely from the perspective of N orah, ends with her reflection on D erm ot and herself: “ She would feel ashamed o f him, and o f h e rse lf’ (495). Yet the reader’s feeling seems to be different: it is rather that one m ust wonder why suddenly the Irish seem to have become a separate category o f people. The sentence
“A n objection to a m an with an Irish accent was dow n-to-earth and ordinary,” implying th at a group o f people have suddenly become outcasts, will ring in the reader’s ears long after the story has been finished. Its m atter-of-fact suggestion o f mass responsibility m ust cause a protest on the reader’s part.
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In “A ttracta” Trevor deals m ore openly with atrocities in N orthern Ireland. A ttracta is an elderly Protestant teacher working in a village not far from Cork. One day she reads in a newspaper about the death of Penelope Vade. Some time before, Penelope Vade’s husband, an army officer, had been cruelly killed; in fact, his m urderers had cut his head off, packed it in a biscuit-tin filled with cotton-wool to absorb blood and posted it to his wife. Trying to show that she was not defeated by that act o f cruelty, Penelope went to Belfast and joined the W om en’s Peace M ovem ent there. This gesture was publicly reported and it enraged her husband’s m urderers. A group of seven m en came to her flat and gang raped her. In desperation, she committed suicide.
This m acabre story m akes A ttracta remember her own life: her m other and father died when she was only three years old.
T he tragedy had occurred in darkness, at night: her parents had accidentally becom e involved with an ambush m eant for the Black and Tan soldiers w h o were in force in the area at the time (598).
She was brought up by her aunt, but nobody in the whole town was kinder to her than M r Devereux. She spent every Saturday afternoon with him, being also taken care of by his housekeeper, Geraldine Carey. It was only later th at she found out about the past of the two persons when M r Puree, a court clerk who had know n her parents, revealed to her facts about them that, as he hoped, would end the girl’s adm iration for the two Catholics:
‘There was nothing Devereux w ouldn’t d o, there w as nothing the w om an w ould n’t do either. T hey’d put b oob y traps dow n and it didn’t matter w ho got killed. T h ey’d am bush the British soldiers when the soldiers didn’t have a chance’ (599).
The change they underwent, the fact that they were so kind and friendly to her, has m ade A ttracta believe that there is faith in life, that thanks to G o d ’s mercy men m ay finally improve. This is w hat she tries to explain to the children in her class but she fails:
T o the children she appeared to be talking n ow to herself. She w as old, a few o f them silently considered; that was it. She did n’t appear to understand that alm ost every day there was the kind o f vengeance she spoke o f reported on the television. B loodshed was w holesale, girls were tarred and left for dead, children no older than they were armed w ith guns (604).
It seems that the times have changed, that the old hope is not valid any more:
T he gleam o f hope she’d offered had been to o slight to be o f use, irrelevant in the horror they took for granted, as part o f life (605).
Paradoxically, for the children A ttracta’s story is nothing special because they face atrocities on television every day. Their parents, however, cannot tolerate the fact that she has told their children the shocking story of a decapitation and a group rape. As a result of their attitude, A ttracta has to leave the school. F o r different reasons, she has n ot been able to succeed in comm unicating her idea o f forgiveness to those two groups of the Irish people - the young ones and the adult ones.
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The m ain character of “Autum n Sunshine” is Canon M oran, a clergyman o f the Church of Ireland, living in a village in Co. W exford. His wife has died, and his daughters have started their own lives. One o f them , Deirdre, comes to visit him to introduce to him her fiancé, H arold. H arold, an Englishm an with a strong Cockney accent, turns out to be fascinated by Irish history. There is more than that: as Canon M oran observes, “Fascinated by Ireland, H arold hated his own country” (775). H e criticises alm ost everything he sees there, sometimes forgetting that some o f this criticism could be levelled at Ireland as well. However, what really turns C anon M oran against H arold is the latter’s attitude tow ards the story o f K insella’s Barn. It happened at the end o f the eighteenth century:
In M arch 1798 an incident had taken place in K insella’s Barn, which at that time had just been a barn. Tw elve men and wom en, accused o f harbouring insurgents, had been tied together with ropes at the com mand o f a Sergeant James. T hey had been led through the village o f Baharbawn, the Sergeant’s soldiers on horseback on either side o f the procession, the Sergeant him self bringing up the rear. Designed as an act o f education, an exam ple to the inhabitants o f Baharbawn and the country people around, the twelve had been herded into a b am owned by a farmer called K insella and there burned to death. Kinsella, w ho had played no part either in the harbouring o f insurgents or in the execution o f the twelve, w as afterwards murdered by his own farm labourers (777-778).
While C anon M oran treats the story as a kind o f local legend, H arold believes it to be a fact. He also insists th at Kinsella’s death was an act
o f justice. M oran realizes that his attitude can be explained in quite a simple way:
H arold w as an Englishm an w ho had espoused a cause because it was one through which the status qu o in his own country might be dam aged. Similar such Englishm en, read abou t in newspapers, stirred in the clergym an’s mind: men from Ealing and Liverpool and W olverham pton w ho had changed their nam es to Irish nam es, who had even learned the Irish language, in order to ingratiate themselves with the new Irish revolutionaries. Such m en dealt out death and chaos, announcing that their conscience insisted on it (779).
Disturbed by H arold ’s point o f view, C anon M oran speaks about K insella’s Barn during his sermon on the following day: “He tried to m ake the point that one horro r should not fuel another, th at passing time contained its own forgiveness” (779).
C anon realizes what H arold ’s problem is:
H arold w as the same kind o f m an as Sergeant James had been: it didn’t matter that they were on different sides. Sergeant James . . . had ravaged a country that existed then for its spoils, and his m ost celebrated crime was neatly at hand so that another Englishm an could make matters worse by attempting to m ake amends. In Harold’s view the trouble had always been that these acts o f war and murder died beneath the weight o f print in history book s, and were forgotten. But history could be rewritten, and for that K insella’s Barn w as an inspiration: H arold had journeyed to it as people m ake journeys to holy places (781).
The only consolation for C anon M oran are the words of his dead wife who seems to be saying: “H aro ld ’s just a talker. . . . N ot at all like Sergeant Jam es” (782).
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All these four short stories discussed put people and hum an conflicts into the foreground; m ore general rem arks form only comm ents on the events (although the comments are quite im portant). R obert Nye rem arks th at “T revor has claims to be considered the m ost honest observer of contem porary Ireland at work in fiction today. N o t for him the kind of overwriting which some would think inevitable in this context. It is just that he sets down about his native land a num ber of things which seem true to life, as well as strange to a foreigner.” 7
C h aracters appearing in th e short stories have often problem s in comm unicating with one another, in understanding the others’ situation - and this m ay also include the particular situation o f Irish people. W hat is m ore, they are often victims o f external circumstances, o f being involved in the web of history and in the consequences of historical events. Special
stress is put on all kinds o f negative results the violence in N orthern Ireland m ay have, especially for the Irish, not necessarily only those living there. William Trevor believes in the ideals o f forgiveness but he also shows the Irish people’s m istrust of comforters who try to help them from outside.
Departm ent o f English Literature and Culture U niversity o f Ł ódź
