I have been away from computers and
newspapers for a week, far from the madding crowd, celebrating the Thanksgiving
holiday with my family in a mountain cabin.
I was therefore saddened to learn on my return home when I read the
Sunday Los Angeles Times that one of
my very favorite short story writers, William Trevor, had died on Nov. 20, at
the age of 88.
Author Scott Bradfield wrote a perceptive
tribute to Trevor for the LA Times, noting
quite rightly that Trevor's temperament was better suited to the short story
than to the novel, quoting Trevor's remark, "I'm a short story writer,
really, who happens to write novels. Not the other way around."
Bradfield says that for Trevor each short
story is an experiment in form, and requires far more concentration than any
"shaggy, Pulitzer-worthy novel; this is because each story is not an analysis
or explanation of our world but rather only a perfect expression of
itself." Bradfield quoted Trevor, who told The Paris Review:
"If the novel is like an
intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionistic painting.
It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out
just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total
exclusion on meaninglessness. Life, on
the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short
story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art."
I have written about Trevor's stories several
times on this blog, for which you can search if you are of a mind to, but here
are a few additional comments on one of his last collections, A Bit on the Side.
Trevor’s twelve stories here, seven of which
appeared in The New Yorker, reaffirm that he always had a profound
understanding of the complexity of what makes people do what they do and an
unerring ability to use language to suggest that intimate intricacy.
For example, in the title story, a mature
couple who has been having an affair reaches that moment of terrible relief
when it must end. Explanations are
exchanged, excuses made, and it all seems so apparent. But it isn’t.
As in all great short stories, from Chekhov
to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William
Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the
language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd.
“Big Bucks” seems like a traditional Irish
emigration story. The young man goes to
America to get work, while the young woman waits for him to send for her. As usual, work is hard to find, communication
is difficult, and it seems the man has forgotten. But it’s not that conventional. She begins to realizes that what held them
together was not love, whatever that is, but the shared goal of going to
America.
In “Sitting with the Dead,” a woman whose
cold and uncaring husband has just died, must entertain two professional
comforters, to whom she spills her secret hatred for the man. But, it is not that straightforward, and they
know that the dead they have been sitting with is she.
In “Sacred Statues,” a woman whose husband
has some artistic talent but must get by as a simple laborer can’t understand
why she, who has children easily, cannot sell her unborn baby to a childless neighbor to give her husband a
chance. And although the reason seems
obvious, as usual in Trevor’s stories, it is not.
These are not cultural examinations of either
the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the European Union, but rather
profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and
mysteries of the heart.
Even when Trevor writes a story with a social
or historical context, it is levered on the personal. In “Justina’s Priest,” the loosening hold of
the Catholic Church on modern Ireland is revealed in one old priest’s clinging
to the simple-minded devotion of one young woman. And in “The Dancing-Master’s Music,” the
whole history of peasant Ireland’s dreadful dependence on England’s Big House
mastery is suggested by one young scullery maid’s romantic memory of distant
music.
In Trevor’s stories, what deeply matters
cannot be openly articulated. In “Traditions,” a long standing secret at a
boy’s school is fueled by mutual fantasy.
In “An Evening Out,” a couple on an arranged date fulfills each other’s
needs in sly, unsavory ways. In
“Solitude,” a secret not meant to be seen and a tragedy not meant to take place
haunts a woman all her life in Ancient Mariner fashion.
These are luminous, restrained stories. Every one of them deserves to be read and
reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored. They fill the reader with awe at the
complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.
We will miss him.
