William Trevor

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William Trevor, 1982. (credit: Mark Gerson)

(born May 24, 1928, Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ire.) Irish writer. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he worked as a teacher, sculptor, and advertising copywriter before moving to England to write fiction full-time. His works, noted for their exquisite characterizations and finely tuned irony, focus largely on the psychology of eccentrics and outcasts. Trevor's second novel, The Old Boys (1964), tells the story of an "old boys" committee whose aging members plot against each other. His later novels include Felicia's Journey (1994) and Death in Summer (1998). He is perhaps best known for his acclaimed collections of wry and often macabre short stories.

For more information on William Trevor, visit Britannica.com.

Cox, William Ruffin (1832-1919) Confederate army officer and politician, born at Scotland Neck, North Carolina. Cox served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1880-86) and as secretary of the Senate (1893-1900). One of Robert E. Lee's generals, Cox began as a major during the Peninsular Campaign (1862). He fought in the Seven Days' battles; at South Mountain, Antietam, and Fredericksburg (all 1862). Cox received eleven wounds during the Civil War, including five at Chancellorsville (1863) when his regiment suffered 75 percent casualties in fifteen minutes. Cox led the army's last attack before Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

William Trevor (born 1928), whose life and fictional settings were divided between his native Ireland and his adopted England, was a successful novelist, television dramatist, playwright, and, above all, master of the short story.

William Trevor Cox was born an Irish Protestant on May 24, 1928, in County Cork, the son of a bank manager. He attended 13 different provincial schools before settling in at St. Columbia's College in Dublin from 1942 to 1946. He next matriculated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he received a B.A. in history in 1950; he then taught history at a school in Armagh, Northern Ireland, from 1950 to 1952.

Until the age of 22 Trevor had never been out of Ireland, but two years later (1952) the depressed national economy impelled him to leave permanently and to take up residence in England. That same year he married Jane Ryan, with whom he had two sons. He taught art at Rugby from 1952 to 1956 and at Taunton from 1956 to 1960. During his tenure as an art instructor he took up sculpting; however, despite winning an award for one of his pieces, he was dissatisfied with his work and turned to writing.

Novels and Plays

His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour (1958), was undistinguished and gave little evidence of a major talent. From 1960 to 1965 Trevor worked in London as an advertising copywriter, during which time he completed his second novel, The Old Boys (1964), which won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize. The Old Boys deals with the eccentricities and petty rivalries of a minor English public school's alumni association. The critical and commercial success of the novel encouraged Trevor to adapt it first for television and next, very successfully, for the stage (the play, in 1971, starred Sir Michael Redgrave); it also enabled Trevor to quit his advertising job, take residence in a small Devon village outside of London, and devote himself fully to his writing.

The Boarding House (1965) continued Trevor's novelistic interest in eccentrics, this time in a strange assortment of lodgers who plot against and generally bedevil each other. The Love Department (1966), which departs from the gentility of the earlier novels, is the story of a sexual pervert and the fortuitous justice that overtakes him. Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel (1969) and Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971) typify Trevor's moral concerns as they explore the disparity between people's barren lives and their spiritual needs. Elizabeth Alone (1973) represents a shift from Trevor's accustomed bizarre types; the quite normal title character, in a hospital for a hysterectomy, meets three women whose frustrated lives parallel her own.

In the early 1970s Trevor enjoyed enormous success in theater and television; in 1973 alone he had three plays performed on the London stage and three dramas produced for television. His next novel, The Children of Dynmouth (1976), deals with a moral miscreant, 15-year-old Timothy Gedge, who spies on and blackmails the inhabitants of a small coastal resort. Partly on the occasion of the novel and partly for his career as a whole, Trevor received in 1976 the Royal Society of Literature Award, the Whitbread Award, and the Allied Irish Banks Award, and the following year he was presented with the ultimate honor, an Order of the British Empire.

Other People's Worlds (1980) is perhaps Trevor's most interesting novel, though it suffers a loss of momentum in its second half. It deals with a psychopathic con man, Francis Tyte, who deceives and cheats his new wife, then deserts her; the last half of the novel is then concerned with the heroine's efforts to reconcile herself to evil in God's scheme of things, but the theme is insufficiently compelling to compensate the reader for the loss of the novel's most interesting character, Francis, and the demonic energy he had supplied. Fools of Fortune (1983) is a turbulent family chronicle set in Ireland, a novel of murder, revenge, and reconciliation. His next novel was The Silence In The Garden (1989), winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award. This was followed by Two Lives (1991), comprising the novellas of Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria, named by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year.

Short Stories Outshine Novels

Some writers of fiction excel equally in the long and short forms (Hemingway, Greene, I. B. Singer, for example); others show little interest in or aptitude for the shorter form (Waugh, Camus). Still others have realized the apotheosis of their art only in the shorter form (K. A. Porter, F. O'Connor). It is to this latter group that Trevor belongs, not because the novels aren't good, but because the stories are so much better.

The Day We Got Drunk on Cake (1967), his first and weakest collection, is similar to the novels in that it deals with lives that are lonely and cultureless, with people, most often women, victimized by their confusions, obsessions, and fantasies.

The Ballroom of Romance (1972), Trevor's second short story collection, shows a big advance in his mastery of the form. American novelist Paul Theroux saw a thematic thread in the stories, a "brittle or urgent femininity thwarted by rather boorish maleness." Typically, the heroines of the title story and of "Nice Day at School" yearn for love and romance even as their hopes are being dashed by the coarseness and insensitivity of the available menfolk.

Angels at the Ritz (1973) was hailed by Graham Greene as perhaps the best short story collection since Joyce's Dubliners (1914). Two of its finest stories, "Last Wishes" and "The Tennis Court, " deal poignantly with impending death and changing social fashions. The title story concerns a couple who barely resist the enticements of a suburban wife-swapping party and thereby retain some vestige of unfashionable idealism; the story is uncharacteristic of Trevor in its concluding note of affirmation. Another superb story, "In Isfahan, " dramatizes a holiday encounter that fails to flower into romance; the reasons for the man's reticence are kept ambiguous, but he is movingly aware that, despite the woman's touch of vulgarity, she is humanly superior to him.

Angels was hard to improve upon, but Trevor surpassed himself with Lovers of Their Time (1978), which contains at least three masterpieces. "Broken Homes" portrays the harrowing desecration of an octogenarian's home by two homeless teenagers, a boy and a girl, who have been sent over on a refurbishing mission by a well-intentioned social agency. The story's title faintly suggests the allegorical theme: the socially deprived victimizing the physically helpless. "Torridge" is an ingenious attack on the built-in bully system of English public schools and the adult philistinism they inevitably promote: the cruelty of the story's schoolboys, long forgotten as they've turned into smug bourgeois, is jolted to memory by a chance reunion. The decent title character, who in the intervening years has become a homosexual, serves as the catalyst who exposes the rest of the group's social and sexual dishonesty. The collection's title story is a bittersweet tale of timid, gentle lovers, one of whom is unhappily married, who conduct their clandestine affair, unbeknownst to the management, rent-free in a posh hotel. The idyll and their chance for happiness, however, are shattered by the man's shrewdly cynical wife.

In the 1980s Trevor sustained his level of short story excellence with Beyond the Pale (1981) and The News from Ireland and Other Stories (1986) and, beginning in 1985, with a series of stories published in The New Yorker, including After Rain. The Collected Stories (1992) was recognized as one of the best books of the year.

Trevor's achievement, especially in the short story, was formidable: he illuminated the darker corners of contemporary English and Irish life and he did so in a compassionate, wryly humorous way that almost never slipped into sentimentality. His acknowledged influences were Thomas Hardy ("where all my gloom came from"), Evelyn Waugh, and Anthony Powell. He was a subtle prose stylist whose dialogue was ceremonious rather than idiomatic. His settings were more often England than Ireland, but in either culture he captured a feeling of loss and failure, spiked with a longing for a past that was admittedly oppressive but in any case preferable to the wasteland of the present. Probably the most striking aspect of Trevor's art was that his sparkling narrative effects were fashioned from unspectacular lives and situations; he was a transmuter, a writer who mined gold from garden-variety rock. He lived in Devon, England.

Further Reading

Gregory A. Schirmer published a biographical work, William Trevor: A Study of His Fiction (London, Rutledge, 1990), which covers many of Trevor's major writings. As yet there is no all-encompassing biography of Trevor, but reviews and critiques of his work abound. Among the more interesting are John Updike's "Worlds and Worlds, " New Yorker (March 23, 1981); Peter Kemp's "Cosiness and Carnage, " The London Times Literary Supplement (October 16, 1981); Ted Solotaroff's "The Dark Souls of Ordinary People, " New York Times Book Review (February 21, 1982); and Anatole Broyard's negative report on Trevor, "Books of the Times: 'Beyond the Pale', " New York Times (February 3, 1982).

Trevor, William (pseudonym of William Trevor Cox) (1928- ), short-story writer and novelist. Born the son of a bank official in Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, he attended St Columba's College in Dublin, then TCD. After teaching for a time, he turned to sculpture and started writing when he tired of modern abstraction, producing his first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, in 1958. Trevor's talent for the depiction of eccentrics is evident in The Old Boys (1964), and since then he has been a prolific writer of black comedies. Besides Basil Jaraby, a child-molester in The Old Boys, the gallery of nasty characters figured in Trevor's fiction includes Septimus Tuam in The Love Department (1966), Timothy Gedge in The Children of Dynmouth (1976), and Francis Tyte, the villain of Other People's Worlds (1980). In the 1980s Trevor devoted a number of novels to Irish political violence. Among these, Fools of Fortune (1983) and The Silence in the Garden (1988) encapsulate the turbulence of historical experience. Similar issues are explored in a number of short stories such as ‘Beyond the Pale’ and ‘Attracta’. Some other short stories have been televised successfully: of these, The Ballroom of Romance, title-story of a 1972 collection, was hugely popular. Two Lives (1990) was a pair of novellas. Felicia's Journey (1994) recounts the fate of a girl from the Irish midlands who falls into the hands of a sexual psychopath. The Collected Stories appeared in 1992. Excursions in the Real World (1993) is a book of memoirs; other works include Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel (1969), Elizabeth Alone (1973), and Death in Summer (1998).

Lawyer and well-known British psychical investigator in the days preceding the foundation of the Society for Psychical Re-search. Cox was born in 1809 in Taunton, England, and educated there. Cox's career in psychical research was concentrated during the last decade of his life. He was a member of the investigating committee of the London Dialectical Society, which published its famous Report on Spiritualism in 1871. He did not accept the "spirit" hypothesis and in its stead argued for the existence of a psychic force that would explain many forms of psychic phenomena. His idea was explained in a booklet, Spiritualism Scientifically Examined with Proofs of the Existence of a Psychic Force (1872), and in a larger work, The Mechanism of Man: An Answer to the Question "What Am I?" (1876). For systematic research into the mystery of psychic phenomena, he founded, in 1875, the Psychological Society for Great Britain.

Cox is most remembered for his work with William Crookes in his first experiments with D. D. Home. He was a shrewd and most capable investigator and well aware of most of the tricks used by fraudulent mediums in the production of fake materialization phenomena. Cox was supportive of Home's medium-ship and shared his opinions in a letter to Crookes: "In the investigations in which you so kindly assisted me there was nothing of this precaution and mystery. You sat with me anywhere, at any time, in my garden, and in my house; by day and by night; but always, with one memorable exception, in full light. You objected to no tests; on the contrary you invited them. I was permitted the full use of all my senses. The experiments were made in every form ingenuity could devise, and you were as desirous to learn the truth and the meaning of it as I was. You sat alone with me, and things were done which, if four confederates had been present, their united efforts could not have accomplished. Sometimes there were phenomena, sometimes there were none. When they occurred they were often such as no human hand could have produced without the machinery of the Egyptian Hall [the scene of conjuring magician J. N. Maskelyne's shows]. But these were in my own drawing-room, and library, and gardens, where no mechanism was possible. In this manner it was that I arrived at the conviction— opposed to all my prejudices and preconceptions—that there are forces about us of some kind, having both power and intelligence, but imperceptible to our senses, except under some imperfectly known conditions…."

However, he was highly critical of Florence Cook and Mary Showers. Cox's letter to the medium D. D. Home, published in Home's Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism (1877), is thought to refer to these two mediums. He was present on the occasion in which Cook and Showers appeared in what was supposed to be a joint materialization. He noted that both materialized forms were solid flesh and breathed and perspired.

Cox died at his home in Middlesex, England, on November 24, 1879.

Sources:

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Cox, Edward W. The Mechanism of Man: An Answer to the Question "What Am I?" London: Longman, 1876.

——. What Am I?: A Popular Introduction to Mental Philosophy and Psychology. London: Longman, 1974.

Dingwall, E. J. The Critic's Dilemma: Further Comments on Some Nineteenth Century Investigations. Dewsbury, England: The Author, 1966.

Hall, Trevor H. Florence Cook & William Crookes: A Footnote to an Enquiry. London: Tomorrow Publications Ltd., 1963.

——. The Spiritualists: The Story of Florence Cook and William Crookes. New York: Helix Press, 1962.

For the Victoria Cross recipient, see William Spottiswoode Trevor.

William Trevor
Born	William Trevor Cox 24 May 1928(1928-05-24) Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland
Occupation	novelist, short-story writer
Language	English
Nationality	Irish
Notable award(s)	Aosdána, Whitbread Prize, Hawthornden Prize for Literature

William Trevor, KBE (born 24 May 1928) is an Irish author and playwright.

Trevor has resided in England since the 1950s. Over the course of his long career he has written several novels and hundreds of short stories. He is best-known for his short stories. ^[1]. He has won the Whitbread Prize three times and has been nominated five times for the Booker Prize, most recently for his novel Love and Summer (2009). Tim Adams, a staff writer for The Observer, described him as "widely believed to be the most astute observer of the human condition currently writing in fiction".^[2]

Contents 1 Biography 2 Works and themes 3 Awards and distinctions 4 Prizes 5 Legacies 6 Bibliography 6.1 Novels and novellas 6.2 Short story collections 6.3 Drama 6.4 Children's Books 6.5 Non-fiction 6.6 As editor 7 References 8 Sources 9 External links

Biography

Born as William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland to a middle-class Protestant family, he moved several times to other provincial towns, including Skibbereen, Tipperary, Youghal and Enniscorthy due to his father's work as a bank official. He was educated at St. Columba's College, Dublin, and at Trinity College, Dublin, from which he received a degree in history. Trevor worked as a wood carver after his graduation from Trinity College, supplementing his income by teaching. He married Jane Ryan in 1952 and emigrated to England two years later, working as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, was published in 1958, but had little critical success. In 1964, at the age of 36, Trevor won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature for The Old Boys. The win encouraged Trevor to become a full-time writer. Trevor and his family moved to Devon in England, where he has resided ever since. Despite having spent most of his life in England, he considers himself to be "Irish in every vein".^{[citation needed]}

Works and themes

He has written several collections of short stories that were well-received. His short stories often follow a Chekhovian pattern. The characters in Trevor's work are usually marginalised members of society: children, old people, single middle-aged men and women, or the unhappily married. Those who cannot accept the reality of their lives create their own alternative worlds into which they retreat. A number of the stories use elements of the Gothic convention to explore the nature of evil and its connection with madness. Trevor has acknowledged the influence of James Joyce on his short-story writing, and "the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal" can be detected in his work.^{[citation needed]}, but the overall impression is not of gloominess, since, particularly in the early work, the author's wry humour offers the reader a tragicomic version of the world. He has adapted much of his work for stage, television and radio. In 1999, Felicia's Journey was made into a film by Atom Egoyan.

Trevor's stories are set in both England and Ireland; they range from black comedies to tales based on Irish history and politics. Common themes in his works are the tensions between Protestant landowners and Catholic tenants. His early books are peopled by eccentrics who speak in a pedantically formal manner and engage in hilariously comic activities that are recounted by a detached narrative voice. Instead of one central figure, the novels feature several protagonists of equal importance, drawn together by an institutional setting, which acts as a convergence point for their individual stories. The later novels are thematically and technically more complex. The operation of grace in the world is explored, and several narrative voices are used to view the same events from different angles. Unreliable narrators and different perspectives reflect the fragmentation and uncertainty of modern life. Trevor has also explored the decaying institution of the "Big House" in his novels Fools of Fortune and The Story of Lucy Gault.^{[citation needed]}

Awards and distinctions

Trevor is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and Aosdána. He was awarded an honorary CBE in 1977 for "services to literature", and was made a Companion of Literature in 1994.^[3] In 2002 he received an honorary knighthood in recognition of his services to literature.^[4]

Prizes

• 1964: Hawthornden Prize for Literature for The Old Boys
• 1964: Hawthornden Prize for Literature for The Boarding House
• 1970: Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize
• 1975: Royal Society of Literature for Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories
• 1976: Whitbread Award for The Children of Dynmouth
  • Allied Irish Banks Prize for fiction
  • Heinemann Award for Fiction
  • Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
• 1980: Giles Cooper Award for Beyond the Pale
• 1982: Giles Cooper Award for Autumn Sunshine
• 1982: Jacob's Award for TV adaptation of The Ballroom of Romance
• 1983: Whitbread Prize for Fools of Fortune
• 1991: Reading Turgenev was shortlisted for the Booker Prize
• 1994: Whitbread Prize Best Novel for Felicia's Journey
• 1999: David Cohen Prize by the Arts Council of England in recognition of his work.
• 2001: Irish Literature Prize
• 2002: The Story of Lucy Gault was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award
• 2003: Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award at the Listowel Writers' Week
• 2008: Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature

Legacies

A monument to Trevor – a bronze sculpture by Liam Lavery and Eithne Ring in the form of a lectern, with an open book incorporating an image of the writer and a quotation, as well as the titles of his three Whitbread Prize-winning works, and two others of significance – was unveiled in Trevor's native Mitchelstown on 25 August 2004.

On 23 May 2008, the eve of his 80th birthday, a commemorative plaque, indicating the house on Upper Cork Street, Mitchelstown where Trevor was born, was unveiled by Louis McRedmond.^{[citation needed]}

In 2002, non-American authors became eligible to compete for the prestigious O. Henry Awards. To date Trevor has won the award four times – for his stories "Sacred Statues" (2002), "The Dressmaker's Child" (2006), "The Room" (2007), a juror favourite of that year, and for "Folie à Deux" (2008), making his third consecutive appearance.

Bibliography

Novels and novellas

• A Standard of Behaviour (Hutchinson, 1958)
• The Old Boys (Bodley Head, 1964)
• The Boarding House (Bodley Head, 1965)
• The Love Department (Bodley Head, 1966)
• Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel (Bodley Head, 1969)
• Miss Gomez and the Brethren (Bodley Head, 1971)
• Elizabeth Alone (Bodley Head, 1973)
• The Children of Dynmouth (Bodley Head, 1976)
• The Distant Past (Poolbeg Press, 1979)
• Other People's Worlds (Bodley Head, 1980)
• Fools of Fortune (Bodley Head, 1983)
• Nights at the Alexandra (Hutchinson, 1987)
• The Silence in the Garden (Bodley Head, 1988)
• Two Lives (Viking Press, 1991)
• Felicia's Journey (Viking, 1994)
• Death in Summer (Viking, 1998)
• The Story of Lucy Gault (Viking, 2002)
• Love and Summer (Viking, 2009)

Short story collections

• The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1967)
• The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1972)
• Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1975)
• Lovers of their Time (Bodley Head, 1978)
• Beyond the Pale (Bodley Head, 1981)
• The Stories of William Trevor (Penguin, 1983)
• The News from Ireland and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1986)
• Family Sins and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1989)
• Outside Ireland: Selected Stories (Viking, 1992)
• The Collected Stories (Penguin, 1993, 2003)
• After Rain (Viking, 1996)
• Cocktails an Doney's (Bloomsbury Classics, 1996)^[5]
• The Hill Bachelors (Viking, 2000)
• A Bit On the Side (Viking, 2004)
• Cheating At Canasta (Viking, 2007)
• Bodily Secrets (Penguin Great Loves, 2007; new selection of several stories from earlier collections)

Drama

• The Old Boys (Davis-Poynter, 1971)
• A Night with Mrs da Tanka (Samuel French, 1972)
• Going Home (Samuel French, 1972)
• Marriages (Samuel French, 1973)
• Scenes from an Album (Co-Op Books (Dublin), 1981)

Children's Books

• Juliet's Story (Bodley Head, 1992)

Non-fiction

• A Writer's Ireland: Landscape in Literature (Thames & Hudson, 1984)
• Excursions in the Real World: Memoirs (Hutchinson, 1993)

As editor

• The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (Oxford University Press, 1989)

References

1. ^ The Guardian (UK)
2. ^ Ibid.
3. ^ Royal Society of Literature
4. ^ Department for Culture, Media and Sport
5. ^ http://www.borders.co.uk/book/cocktails-at-doneys-bloomsbury-classic-s/437707/

Sources

• Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt: William Trevor – Re-imagining Ireland, Liffey Press, Dublin 2003; ISBN 978-1904148067
• Dolores MacKenna: William Trevor – The Writer and His Work, New Island Books, Dublin 1999; ISBN 978-1874597742
• Tom McAlindon: Tragedy, history, and myth: William Trevor's Fools of Fortune. (Critical Essay); in: Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies, 2003
• Kristin Morrison: William Trevor, Twayne; New York 1993; ISBN 978-0805770322
• Hugh Ormsby-Lennon: Fools of Fiction – Reading William Trevor's Stories, Maunsel& Co., Dublin 2004; ISBN 978-1930901216
• Gregory A. Schirmer: William Trevor – A Study of His Fiction, Routledge, London 1990; ISBN 978-0415044936

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: William Trevor

• Trevor page at Contemporary Writers site
• William Trevor Resource
• Read Ireland's Trevor page
• William Trevor Stories in The New Yorker archives

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