Now aged nearly 80, master storyteller William Trevor never rereads or analyses his past work. In a rare interview with Irish TimesLiterary Correspondent, Eileen Battersby, he explains that he is too busy finding out what happens to 'these people who somehow live in my head'.
CURIOSITY. WILLIAM TREVOR, a man not given to dissecting the business of writing knows the source of his art: curiosity. "I have always found myself wondering about the why, the where. I look at people and I begin wondering, guessing. Who are they? Where have they come from? What are they talking about? Are they married to each other? Oh no, they aren't. Overheard conversations are great."
If there is a single clue to Trevor's genius, it lies in his interest in people. Without being voyeuristic, he is interested in the tiny battles that make up a life, in the struggles that create an individual, that thing that happened, our failures, our sins, our regrets.
One month short of his 80th birthday, Trevor gazes around the Dublin hotel and comments in his beautiful, familiar voice, with its soft Irish accent, on the changes. He is remarkable: modest, gracious, witty, a magician without malice, apparently at ease with himself and the world, yet never complacent, always slightly at a remove. In the kindliest way, he seems to see everything, to notice the slightest gesture. He has watched and listened closely, and this attention to the detail of life has made him internationally acknowledged as one of the finest writers of all time.
Sitting beside him on a sofa near a window through which the full grey light of a dull morning wanders over his wonderful face, it is impossible to shake the feeling that this now elderly man is that rare thing, a real writer. Not a celebrity, not a showman, not a professional novelist churning out the words, but a natural storyteller alert to the moment, the subtle revelation.
"I'm always working," he says. "I go into my room and there they are, these people who somehow live in my head, and their stories come out. I never know what is going to happen, so I write to find out."
He smiles as if it is all great fun. There is no ego, no agenda, no torment, just an abiding belief in the power of the short story. "I really feel it is the most demanding art form. It is so exciting, so intense. The thing I love about it is its limitations. In a good story you shouldn't be able to take even one word out, every word must count."
The novel - "what the Americans call 'the long journey' " - is for him a relaxation. "I'm a short-story writer who writes a novel occasionally. I've always written stories while I have been writing a novel. The stories are harder," he says with a smile.
And still they come, these marvellous, truthful, often bleak, at times sinister, stories. "I get up early, I always have, but now I get up early and there are those few hours when the brain is very sharp, as sharp as when you were a child. It's only a few hours, then I get tired and that's it for the day."
There is no bitterness, no complaint. Age is not an affliction, it is "just something that happens, if you're lucky, everything begins to work less well". All he wants is his continued independence, living with his wife, Jane, in their mill in the Devon countryside.
Dublin's sky appears to be at war with itself, hints of sunshine vying with the threat of rain, as Trevor arrives in the hotel lounge, tweed hat in his hand and a mackintosh over his arm. He looks like a countryman, not overly thrilled about being up in the city for the day, although he is delighted to have been honoured this week with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature at the Irish Book Awards.
He has never liked interviews. "I'm not good at them," he says. "There isn't all that much to me. I just write. I'm the work. I'm the stories."
To date he has written 13 novels, two volumes of novellas and 11 collections of short stories, the most recent of which, Cheating at Canasta, was published last year. He mentions the William Trevor symposium that is continuing today at Trinity College Dublin. "I couldn't go it. I couldn't be there while people were discussing my work."
It is difficult for him to talk about it. "I write a story and then it is done," he says. "Once I've finished a story, I know what happened, so I move on. I don't reread my work. I only did that when I was adapting a story for television. But talking about it . . ."
Suddenly I understand what he means - discussing a text almost reduces a story to taking it apart as if it were a car.
ALTHOUGH HE LEFT Ireland more than 50 years ago, in 1953, he remains an Irish writer, albeit one with an impressive range. "I never wanted to go away," he says. "I left because I couldn't get a job. Well, I had a teaching job in Armagh, but I wanted to go down south and there was no work. You were either over-educated or not qualified, that's what it was like then."
When The Old Boyswas published in 1964, it was widely assumed to be the work of an Englishman, so brilliant was its evocation of the English class system at work.
"I've never settled in England, I'm still a stranger," Trevor says. Stranger? How about outsider? "Yes, an outsider. I went to England and everything was so different, so unlike Ireland. Now the two countries are much closer, but then England was strange, it was somewhere to explore. It also put Ireland at a distance. If I had stayed here, I might not have been able to write about it."
The edginess of being an outsider where he lives and at a remove from what he knows has proved valuable. Trevor has often been unfairly criticised for having lost touch with Ireland, for writing about an Ireland that no longer exists.
"I am very in touch with Ireland," he says. "I read The Irish Timesa couple of times a week." His sister lives in Dublin, although his brother who emigrated about 10 years after Trevor, also lives in England. Another misconception is that he is Anglo-Irish; he is an Irish Protestant, no more, no less.
But, make no mistake, William Trevor knows Ireland - his childhood saw to that.
"We were always on the move," he says. "I was always changing school. It didn't seem to matter to my parents that I always seemed to be starting at mid-term. I was always trying to catch up. I'm not all that well-educated."
But the differing backgrounds of his Armagh mother and his Boyle, Co Roscommon father, as well as the endless moving around (courtesy of his bank official father's career), gave him a wide-ranging knowledge of small-town Ireland with its contrasting Protestant and Catholic sensibilities.
"My father finally became a bank manager, but it took a lot of moves. Shall I give you the list?" he asks with some glee. "Born in Mitchelstown. Skibbereen, Tipperary, Youghal, Wexford town, Enniscorthy, Galway - I didn't stay in Galway long because then I was sent to school in Dublin."
At 13 he was sent to Sandford Park in Ranelagh and then, two years later, he arrived at St Columba's College in Rathfarnham, Co Dublin. "I gave my first editions to them," he says, and mentions that in his day "there were only boys". His art teacher was the sculptor, Oisín Kelly. "He encouraged me at sculpting. I used to cycle to his house on Sundays."
A few minutes earlier, Trevor had reminded me of the first time we met.
"I remember you arrived on a bike," he says. "I thought you had cycled in from the airport."
Well, I hadn't, only from the then London office of The Irish Times. That interview, marking Trevor's 60th birthday, took place 20 years ago, almost to the day, in a Viennese-style cake shop in a rainy West End. Then, as now, he made no mystery of his art: "I just write stories. Stories are glimpses. I don't analyse what I write."
IN 2000, ON the publication of an outstanding collection, The Hill Bachelors, Trevor met me at Exeter Airport and drove us to the mill, which stands on about 40 acres. The Trevors' house is a large cottage, traditional with modern sections added on. When Trevor is not writing, he has more than enough physical work to keep him busy, maintaining the house and gardens. He says he is reclusive, but he is lively company, very informed and quick-witted. In Devon, he gave me a book, not one of his own but a collection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield. He has always been a careful reader.
"When I'm writing a novel I tend to read biography," he says. "Have you read that new one on Hardy? It's very good. I like Hardy. I also love Dickens. I reread him, I'm a great rereader. The thing about Dickens is that there is so much, he is so good on character, on dialogue. Every time you read him, you see something new. I'm rereading Patrick Hamilton at the moment, I think he's much underrated. I think Hangover Square is probably his best - he's very good."
Looking back to his time as a sculptor, he says: "Well, I was really one of those who wanted to be a writer. But then I found that there were other boys at school [in Columba's] who were interested in writing as well. I didn't want to become part of a literary clique, so that's why I became interested in sculpting. I've always loved working in wood, carving."
At Trinity College Dublin, he studied history. "That happened because I had thought I had wanted to be a doctor, and very quickly, after a day, I discovered I didn't," he says. "So I went to my tutor and decided on history, mainly because at that time if you wanted to do English you had to do a language as well, and I was never very good at languages. Now I wish I'd done Italian - as it turned out, we've spent a lot of time there." Does he speak good Italian? "Well, restaurant Italian."
On leaving Trinity it seemed he was about to become involved in a lettering business with a friend.
"I did the letters on one of the war memorials down in St Ann's Church in Dawson Street," he says.
Having decided against going into business, he moved to England and spent some time as an advertising copywriter. The success of The Old Boys enabled him to resign "before I was asked to leave".
Sculpting began to change for him - "I moved on from people and became more abstract" - but the abstract shapes coming from his hands began to take second place to the need to use language. The people in his head had begun to take over. They wanted their stories written. They still do. "I'll keep on writing stories as long as I'm here," Trevor says.
The Collected Stories, a magnificent collection of 85 stories, was published in 1992.
"I think there is going to be a second one of those," he says. "There is always something about a character that makes them interesting. Even Hilditch [the desperate, menacing and ultimately pathetic Mr Hilditch in Felicia's Journey(1994)] or those boys who drown the old dog, that act remains with them [Folie á Deux, from Cheating at Canasta].
"I love mystery. I think mystery is what makes life exciting, interesting. There's the mystery about God, about what happens. I like mystery."
The international symposium honouring William Trevor opened yesterday and continues today at Trinity College Dublin, starting at 10 am in the Thomas Davis Theatre, with talks by Dolores McKenna, Amanda Piesse, Michael Parker, Eamonn Hughes and John Wilson Foster. The event, which is free, closes with a screening of director Pat O'Connor's adaptation of Trevor'sThe Ballroom of Romance , followed by an interview with O'Connor by Ruth Barton from TCD.