William Trevor

William Trevor Cox FRSL KBE (published as William Trevor; 24 May 1928 – 20 November 2016) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, playwright, and television dramatist. Although he remained an Irish citizen, he and his wife in 1952 moved to England, where their two sons were born and where he worked as a teacher, sculptor, and copywriter for an advertising agency. In 1964 he became a full time writer. In 1976 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). He was appointed in 1979 Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and in 2002 Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE). In 1994 the Royal Society of Literature awarded him the title Companion of Literature. William Trevor’s 12-story collection Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories (1975) was praised by Peter Ackroyd. Graham Greene judged the collection the best book of short stories since James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914).

Quotes

... I liked teaching math best because I don’t have a natural way with figures and therefore had sympathy with the children who didn’t either. And I greatly respected the ones who did possess that aptitude. My skill in art and English made me impatient, and I found those subjects rather dreary to teach as a result. “Why are the art room walls covered with pictures of such ugly women?” a headmaster asked me once. “And why have some of them got those horrible cigarette butts hanging out of their nostrils?” I explained that I had asked the children to paint the ugliest woman they could think of. Unfortunately, almost all of them had looked no further than the headmaster’s wife. I like that devilish thing in children.
- as quoted by Mira Stout in: (Spring 1989) "William Trevor, The Art of Fiction No. 108, Interviewed by Mira Stout". The Paris Review (110).

You have to walk to get to know a city; it was then — in the Dublin of the 1940s — that I first discovered that. Harcourt Street was a staid row of unlicensed hotels, politely elbowing one another for attention; Henry Street was famous for its sausage shop. The Mansion House set the tone for Dawson Street, and Charlemont Street offered a display of corns, extracted from the footsore: The Walker's Friend, a notice said. Marrowbone Lane and Lad Lane and Lady Lane, Ebenezer Terrace and Morning Star Road: all of them had an echo of a lost significance.
- Excursions in the Real World. Hutchinson. 1993. p. 77. ISBN 9780091770860. (200 pages; 1st part of quote; last part of quote)

... The way I think I write is by creating the actual raw material of fiction first of all, rather rapidly, very quickly, and then this has to be turned into a story or novel. I get quite a lot of manuscripts that people send me, young people asking me what I think of them. And almost all of them are still raw material which hasn’t been pushed or stretched or chopped up in order to give it form. What they’ve done is just to start the job but they haven’t completed it. You have to start with a mess, which is rather like the mess we all live in in the world, you know. You start with that mess and you really have got to create for yourself in your fiction. And then, the next thing you do is to make that palatable for the reader. The reader is terribly, terribly important because without the reader, as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing. It’s a kind of relationship, sometimes almost a friendship.
- as quoted by Constanza del Río-Álvaro in: (15 March 2006) "Talking with William Trevor: ‘It all comes naturally now’": 119–124.

Trevor is not a benign writer. There has always been a frightening, uncomfortable, cruel side to his work, particularly in his sensationalist appetite (which he shares with one of his great predecessors, Elizabeth Bowen, who gets a mention here) for seedy criminals, sadists, and confidence-tricksters. In this volume, some tame jackdaws have their necks wrung, a girl pushes her mother's lover down two flights of stairs, a maniac pursues his estranged wife with a fantasy of revenge, and a con man replies to a series of onely-hearts ads to get himself a driver and a free meal.
- Hermione Lee, (11 June 2004) "Review. Old Ireland, far hence. Hermione Lee admires the depth, beauty and tenderness of William Trevor's A Bit on the Side". The Guardian.

... He drew us into the lives of English and Irish shopkeepers and farmers, priests and parishioners, and even those who, by dint of circumstance or carefully curated effort, ascended a rung or two on the hierarchy. And although his work very much reflected the prevailing political and religious mores of its settings, it did not focus on the large sweep of history. Instead, Trevor settled his gaze on private yearnings and small, wayward impulses: stories about siblings scuffling over small-bore inheritances, about lost love, about minor duplicities, and, always, about the press and passage of time.
- Marisa Silver, (November 23, 2016) "William Trevor's Quiet Explosions". The New Yorker.