William Trevor

William Trevor, watchful master of the short story, dies aged 88

Writers pay tribute to three-time winner of the Whitbread prize who was ‘at his best the equal of Chekhov’

Sian Cain
Monday 21 November 2016

The Irish author William Trevor, one of the greatest short story writers of the last century, has died at the age of 88.

Trevor, the author of more than 15 novels and many more short stories, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize four times, most recently for The Story of Lucy Gault in 2002, the same year he was awarded an honorary knighthood for his services to literature. He also won the Whitbread prize three times and frequently contributed short stories to The New Yorker magazine.

His skill with the form drew comparisons with Chekhov, Maupassant and James Joyce. In a 1975 review of William Trevor’s short-story collection Angels at the Ritz, Graham Greene described it as “one of the best collections, if not the best since James Joyce’s Dubliners.”

Writers across Ireland were quick to pay tribute to an author who was described by Anne Enright as “a master craftsman … watchful, unsentimental, alert to frailty and malice”

Booker-winning novelist John Banville said: “I knew William Trevor only a little, but liked him very much, and admired him even more. His natural reticence, allied to his sense of the absurd, perhaps prevented him from attracting the international renown that he deserved – I cannot think of anyone less likely as a ‘celebrity’.

“He is one of the great short-story writers, at his best the equal of Chekhov. So fine are his stories that they rather overshadow the novels, which is a pity, for at least one of them, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, I consider to be a masterpiece, inexplicably neglected.”

The novelist Roddy Doyle told the Irish Times: “The man – the work - was brilliant, elegant, surprising, reliable, precise, stark, often sad, sometimes funny, shocking and even frightening. His big houses were great; his small ones were wonderful too. The angst was bang-on, and so were all the other emotions and states. Every word mattered, every sentence was its own big house.”

As news spread internationally, Joyce Carol Oates was among the first to respond, tweeting: “William Trevor, one of the great short story writers. beautifully composed, lyrical, understated prose.”

Born in 1928 in Mitchelstown, County Cork, William Trevor Cox attended St Columba’s College in Dublin and studied history at Trinity College, Dublin. His father worked for the Bank of Ireland and, on Desert Island Discs in 1980, he described how his family had trailed around County Cork “like middle class gypsies” as his father was promoted from one town to another.

By the time he arrived at university he was more interested in sculpture than history. “My presence at Trinity was a rather lackadaisical affair,” he told interviewer Roy Plomley.

In 1952, he married his college sweetheart Jane, to whom he dedicated many of his books.

After moving from Ireland to the Midlands in England, Trevor worked as an art teacher and then as a sculptor – “rather like Jude the Obscure without the talent” as he once described himself. It was not until he began working at a London advertising agency that he began to write.

His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, which he subsequently disowned and refused to have reissued, was published in 1958. He would later describe The Old Boys, which was published in 1962 and won the Hawthornden prize, as his first book.

Many of Trevor’s early works were set in rundown, post-second-world-war London. In the mid-1970s, he turned his eye to his native Ireland, particularly the tensions between the Anglo-Irish gentry and the Catholic population. His depiction of smalltown life never touched upon cliché. As John Updike noted in a 1981 review: “Mr. Trevor knows, and dramatizes, two principal truths about low life: it never utterly lies down, but persists in asserting claims and values of its own derivation; and it cannot be fenced off and disowned by the fortunate.”

In a 1989 interview, Trevor compared writing short stories to impressionist art. “I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist 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 of 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,” he said.

Chris Power, surveying his short stories for the Guardian, said: “Like Joyce (and to a lesser extent, Chekhov), Trevor contrives to bury his own voice within that of his characters... the skill with which Trevor applies this technique is perhaps his greatest achievement as a writer; the irony is that he does it so well it’s virtually invisible.”

His novel The Story of Lucy Gault, was widely praised by critics – Hermione Lee called it “gravely beautiful, subtle and haunting” – but it lost out to Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi at the 2002 Man Booker. His last novel, Love and Summer, reached the longlist stage for the prize in 2009.

Trevor was awarded a CBE in 1977 for his services to literature, and was made a Companion of Literature in 1994.

In 2015, he was elected Saoi of Aosdána, an honour previously bestowed on writers including Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. Irish president Michael Higgins paid tribute to Trevor as “a writer of world renown, of great distinction, of towering achievements, of elegance and grace.”

He enjoyed solitude and lived for many years in a secluded house in Devon, and would visit Ireland and Italy frequently. He is survived by his wife Jane and their two sons, Patrick and Dominic.

THE GUARDIAN