Irish fiction more than ever seems preoccupied with extremes and a determined redefinition. Tradition retains its appeal possibly because of new nostalgia as the rural voice has become distant, or at least certainly muted by the brash new urban confidence and individuality bordering on defiance. William Trevor has always been something of an outsider. If it sounds all too familiar an Irish literary story describing him as more revered abroad than at home, it is because he left that home more than 40 years ago. There are those who argue he is not an Irish writer. Trevor's lengthy self-exile has left his critics convinced his Ireland no longer exists.
For his admirers, Trevor at 72 is among the finest writers in the world and as a master of the short story, standing equal to V.S. Pritchett and John Cheever. The distance that appears to have become a weakness for some readers is in fact among Trevor's great strengths and it serves his formal, rather impersonal prose. Yet within his genius for nuance and understatement lies the difficulty of assessing Trevor. Far from operating within a closed universe of his own invention, his elusiveness as a writer owes a great deal to his diversity of setting and voice. Far from being filtered through a remote, all-seeing authorial voice, Trevor's fiction is orchestrated by a multiplicity of viewpoints. His characters are believable, his dialogue that of a writer who listens closely.
Little goes unnoticed by him, a scratch on an eyelid, the colour of a coat, the wistfulness of an ageing beauty. It is also interesting that for a writer whose authorial detachment is integral to his work, his vision is strongly shaped by a view that the modern society is alienated, disconnected and at the mercy of an unfair, probably corrupt class system. Trevor maintains he is not a political writer, his use of class is cultural and ultimately more about the absence of justice. His interest in love and marriage, also among his enduring themes, is pursued at its blackest.
Twelve years have passed since I first met William Trevor in a smart Viennese-style cake shop in London. Then he made no mystery of his art. His opinion hasn't changed. "I just write stories." There is no coy pose, no affectation, no torment either. "Stories are glimpses. I don't analyse what I write. I just write." Trevor has always abided by the belief his job is to write. His new book of stories The Hill Bachelors is as good as anything he has written, Against the Odds and the title story are among his best. Both have Irish settings. Writing is his job but it has never become a chore.
This time there are no fancy pastries, no hovering waitresses with foreign accents. Trevor waits in the late afternoon sunlight by a window in the small arrivals area of Exeter airport. Tweed jacket, no hat. His characteristic expression of thoughtful concern resides on an older face which, though no more heavily lined than it was then, is thinner, more frail. But he has a surprising, sudden smile that is broad, often earthy. He is a gentle, kindly if restless man with a subtle sense of humour often bordering on the surreal.
Despite it being a Saturday, Exeter seems quiet, the motorists display an old world civility but perhaps this seems so only by comparison with the new aggression of Irish drivers intent on driving through rather than merely beyond the car in front. Trevor is calm, alert to practicalities. It is easy to imagine him handling a crisis as if it were a maths problem. His accent remains that of a Protestant Irishman clearly still capable of being surprised by England and the English. Curiosity is, he feels, vital for a fiction writer. As a "lace curtain" or "poor Protestant" and one who often found himself attending Catholic schools, Trevor agrees he is most definitely not Anglo-Irish. In Italy, he feels comfortable about attending Mass but as a Protestant he understands the feeling of being in a minority. At my local church the average congregation is six with a tape recording of the hymns. "That's the sort of Protestant I am," he says, "one of the six with the tape." Provincial Ireland is a place he knows well. Detail is crucial, a brand name or a style of dress, down to spelling whiskey "with an `e' if it's in Ireland, without if the story is in England."
His small-town upbringing and the contrasting culture inherited from a west of Ireland father and a mother from Armagh has left him with a wide-ranging cultural sensibility capable of grasping Ireland's Anglo-Irish Protestant heritage as well as the native Irish tradition. He is both stranger and insider to both, just as he has remained an insider outsider in England and has now become one in Italy where he has set many stories. Trevor needs this sense of strangeness. Yet at the heart of this strangeness is his understanding. He does not accept he has lost touch with Ireland. "I've never lost touch," he says mildly, "because I have always gone there. I know Ireland. I go over all the time. I'm often in Dublin." A fear of cosiness as a writer dogs him. "I like the edginess of being an outsider. I feel secure about Ireland as a person but not as a writer."
Within minutes of leaving Exeter, dominated by its majestic medieval cathedral and also possessing a surviving framework of much-restored Roman walls, Trevor is driving through a countryside worthy of Hardy. He greets each question as if it were an object of interest. Trevor looks at his younger self and initially does not create a picture of relentless ambition. He was not driven by ambition. "I just wanted to be a clerk in the Bank of Ireland." It sounds a reasonable aim. His father rose to the position of bank manager. In the course of his career Trevor's father, James William Cox, a Roscommon man "who liked to tell stories rather than jokes - stories about people or events that amused him . . . drank anything he was offered and had a flair for picking winners, acquired a skill for guessing which farmers to lend money to . . ."
As his son, born William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, Co Cork in 1928, recalls, Cox senior, who didn't read much, was liked by the townspeople he lived among and was "popular with country people because he understood them".
Much has been made of the impact his father's constant moves as a bank manager had on Trevor and his brother and sister. The young Trevor Cox attended 13 schools in provincial towns such as Skibbereen, Tipperary, Wexford and Youghal before eventually arriving in 1941 aged 13 at Sandford Park School, in Dublin. Two years later he was on the move again, this time to St Columba's College and from there went to Trinity College. As a child he had lived the life of "a middle-class gypsy". He seems to respect place, yet as he says, "I have no roots." The move to England was a logical one at a time when many of his peers set off for America. "I didn't go to America, because I didn't think of going there." Nor did he leave Ireland for Britain directly on graduating from Trinity. "I went half way."
Having spent a year in Dublin, he then taught for two years in a boys' school in Armagh. He moved to the English midlands in 1953, teaching art for another two years before settling in the southwest, Devon, where he concentrated on sculpting. As he drives through the landscape, he seems almost neutral. Not quite resigned but certainly not lamenting his lot, he neither enthuses about his surroundings nor seems to take them for granted. "I never think of 47 years of living in England, I never really settled. I never feel I belong here." Such feelings have helped keep him aware.
Home is a country mill. Comfortable and surrounded partly by garden as well as a sloping field on a slight rise where sheep graze, William Trevor, or Trevor, as his wife, Jane, calls him, lives in discreet order. The Cox home is essentially a large cottage, parts of which are old style with thick walls, narrow landings and an aura of tradition, while other sections are quite modern. It is very pretty and also practical. The actual mill building houses a large courtyard and a range of interesting old buildings is one side of the lane leading to the main house. Jane Cox is lively, interested; she is also capable, very organised and far more English than her husband. Both admit to being hard of hearing. They have two grown sons. A walk-in cupboard near the kitchen has an impressive collection of Marx Brothers and Woody Allen movies.
Books have a presence throughout the house. Trevor's study is a small book-lined room. Several postcards of one of his favourite artists, the American Edward Hopper, are propped up on his shelves, leaning against books. He gives me a fine Folio edition of the short stories of Katherine Mansfield to which he has contributed an introduction. It begins, "of all literary forms, the short story belongs most unequivocally to the modern age. Chekhov had been in at the birth, Joyce presided over the years of adolescence, the Americans inherited. By the time Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway reached out for it, the modern form had come to stay." For the Americans the form is perfect. "I see America as being without a past. It is a young country." Trevor is a shrewd reader, he is insightful but not intimidating and smiles when unlike most short writers he does not claim a particular devotion to Chekhov. "I was always interested in the idea of a story well told. When I was young I read writers like Somerset Maugham and A.J. Cronin." He still admires them because of their attention to story and selects Graham Greene and V.S. "or Victor" Pritchett as important to him. Trevor praises Sean O'Faolain, adding it is a shame he is currently underestimated. While Dubliners "is the best of Joyce".
Trevor has won the Whitbread Novel of the Year with three very different books - The Children of Dynmouth (1976), in which a misfit youth blackmails individuals living in small English seaside in to secure props for the gruesome one-man show he intended putting on; Fools of Fortune (1983) marks an important turning point in Trevor's exploration of Anglo-Ireland in conflict with England; Felicia's Journey (1995), which also won the overall Whitbread Book of the Year, brings a young Irish girl tracking her worthless boyfriend to England where she runs into the sinister but pathetic catering manager Hilditch, the most extraordinary of Trevor's monsters. One of the many ironies and contradictions about Trevor, who has been wrongly seen as offering a genteel counter to the powerfully emotive rural vision of John McGahern, is that although a recognisable Trevor world certainly exists, he is also adventurous and unpredictable. Little ever is as it initially appears, killers and mad people share his stage as often as misfits, victimised losers and the shadow men and women lurking on the fringes.
Unlike many male writers, he writes well from a woman's viewpoint; Elizabeth Alone (1973) brings together four women who have met in a London hospital ward. Between them their experiences explore several of his favoured themes; failed love, sexual repression, hopeless marriages, ageing, religious fanaticism as well as alienation and loneliness. While many of his stories are heartbreaking, particularly the doomed romance endured and sustained by the innocent young Mary Louise Dallon in Trevor's moving 1991 Booker contender Reading Turgenev, he can also be funny. Mrs DigbyHunter in O Fat White Women, one of his many disappointed wives, has her own method of survival. "On the short grass of the lawn, tucked out of sight beneath her deck-chair was a small box of Terry's All Gold chocolates, and on her lap, open at page eight, lay a paperback novel by her second favourite writer of historical fiction."
His characters speak with the voice of the Irish farm and his authorial vision describes a family returning to the remote farm of their childhood for their father's funeral. "His brothers wore black ties, his sisters were in mourning of a kind, not entirely, because that could wait till later. Mena looked pregnant again. Kevin had a bald patch now. Aidan took off the glasses he had worn to drive. Their suitcases weren't heavy. You could tell there was no intention to stay longer than was necessary." But there is also Trevor's feel for the grim west London suburbs, gloomy bed-sits and seaside towns. When The Old Boys, his second novel - usually referred to as his debut - was published in 1964, it won him the first of his literary prizes and seemed to establish him in the minds of London reviewers as an English writer with a flair for irony. The Boarding House (1965) and The Love Department (1966) followed. Trevor became a full-time writer. On the publication of his second volume of stories, The Ballroom of Romance (1972), he won the position he enjoys today. The title story is a harrowingly realistic account of unmarried, middle-aged children. The resigned Bridie waits upon her widower father and waits for a husband from among the pathetic local bachelors led by Bowser Egan, all aware they can't marry until their widowed mothers die.
It is a story Trevor stands by. The title story of his new collection has a similar theme, yet is very different. It is true to Trevor's subtle unpredictability. The publication of The Collected Stories in 1992 was an event, following an outstanding collection, Family Sins, the previous year. Yet, since then, he has published an excellent collection, After Rain (1996) dominated by Lost Ground, a remarkable story about Northern Ireland. As Trevor says, "It's about what happens to a family." Although Felicia's Journey was slow, by Trevor's standards, to win an audience, it did very well following the Whitbread win. If there were doubts about the heroine as a stock victim from 1950s Ireland, Trevor's bluntly topical English midlands convinced. Death in Summer, (1998) with its unnerving account of three deaths underlined his interest in the thriller genre. It is also one of his best novels. When his blackness is pointed out to him, and the often sinister twists in his work, Trevor replies with a smile.
For all the stories he has written, all the small lives exposed, the moments of private agonies recorded, he remains a storyteller. There is no end to the characters he sees as real people. You must believe in the stories and the individuals, he says. Whereas so many writers urge the need to write about what you know, Trevor has always maintained, "You mustn't write about what you know. You must use your imagination. Fiction is an act of the imagination." When he walks into his study each morning at 7 a.m., it is as if he has an appointment with a cast of individuals. "Sometimes a character appears and you know that this time, it isn't right. But they might come again."
There is no desperation, no urgency. He still has a lot to write, but if he is driven he conceals it well. How does he feel about age? "It happens all of a sudden. You are going along and others are older than you, others are younger. Then all of a sudden when you're 60, or maybe 65, you suddenly realise, `Ah, I'm old' that's the way it happens."
William Trevor's collection of stories, The Hill Bachelors, is published by Viking (£15 in UK)