William Trevor told us stories that both hurt and healed

Harris

WILLIAM Trevor, John McGahern and Frank O’Connor are my three favourite Irish short story writers, but not simply for literary reasons.

All three writers helped widen my horizons beyond nationalism. Geography helped history, too.

Frank O’Connor wrote about Cork city, where I was born, and republicans, among whom I was reared.

John McGahern wrote of rural Roscommon, my mother’s county, where violent survivors of the War of Independence try to assert a dying authority over their families.

But William Trevor, who died last week, gave me most food for thought in recent years, for three reasons.

First, my father’s business brought him to Trevor’s three provincial towns: Mitchelstown, Youghal, and Skibbereen.

Second, this also brought him into contact with Trevor’s principal cast of characters — provincial, middle class, Protestant, struggling to survive in a struggling State.

My father, like John McGahern’s father as he recounts in his Memoir, “was greatly impressed by Protestants. He considered them superior in every way to the general run of his fellow Catholics, less devious, morally more correct, more honest, better mannered, and much more abstemious”.

Finally, in recent years, I took Trevor as a literary companion on my excursions into the contested history of the travails of rural Irish Protestants during and after the War of Independence.

Trevor could write as well about Irish Catholics as Irish Protestants. But, naturally, he had a special feel for the class position of provincial Protestants.

As he put it: “Poor Protestants in Ireland are a sliver of people caught between the past Georgian Ireland with its great houses and all the rest of it.”

Trevor’s stories helped dispel the delusion — still common among Roman Catholics — that all Protestants were well got.

Even so, in my excursions among West Cork Protestants in the late 1970s, while researching my Famine play Souper Sullivan, I was still taken aback by how little some of them lived on.

And I was equally taken aback by how little Protestants in RTE (Dick Hill, the sole exception, was a fellow Corkman) seemed to know of the tribal historical pressures on their co-religionists in rural areas.

But John McGahern’s sharp eye did not miss the poverty of his Protestant neighbour Andy Moroney. In his Memoir, he records: “Andy drew up for petrol at the first filling station. I noticed then how low the gauge was, but not until years later did it occur to me that Andy hadn’t the money for either a boarding house or a meal until the lambs were sold.”

Given the paramount importance of Trevor’s Protestant background to his most powerful stories, I found both the Irish Times and RTE reports somewhat reticent about his religion.

Indeed, the RTE news bulletin I heard did not mention it at all — although Sean Rock’s superb Arena programme comprehensively covered Trevor’s Protestant hinterland.

But I was baffled when only one of the 25 writers asked to pay tribute to Trevor referred to either the religious or political hinterland of his writings.

They might claim that Trevor was careful to avoid any political categorisation. But his novels Fools of Fortune and The Story of Lucy Gault are saturated with political themes rooted in a past that goes back to World War I.

As for short stories, his own personal selection dispels any lingering doubt about his preoccupation with how the sectarian divisions of the past continue to pollute the present.

In 1979, Poolbeg asked Trevor to select 11 short stories. The Ballroom of Romance was one of them. But two of them, The Distant Past and Attracta, have disturbing sectarian themes and subtexts.

The Irish Times obituary circumspectly observed that Trevor, as a Protestant, was “somewhat” of an outsider. The New York Times, more accurately, said he was “inevitably” an outsider.

The Irish Times was careful to tell us he was happy in the Loreto convent school, but that he found the Protestant school in Skibbereen “less pleasant”.

But at least one Protestant teacher in Skibbereen in the 1930s had her own sorrows. The daughter of RIC Constable Alexander Clarke, the last RIC man to die on duty, was still mourning her father;, shot down, unarmed, without pity as he made his way home, just a few minutes before the Truce of July 11, 1921.

Tribal nationalists take me to task for publicising such IRA killings. Just as Polish nationalists condemn those who recall the Polish pogrom against the Jews of Jedwabne in July 1941.

But as nationalist fever sweeps Europe, it has never been so necessary to recall that the IRA committed sectarian crimes in the name of nationalism.

Furthermore, as we face into six years of remembering ambush and atrocity, the political temperature will rise here, as it did during H Blocks.

This will not bother Dublin Protestants but in some parts of rural Ireland there is already some trepidation about how high that temperature might rise.

During H Blocks, the windows of isolated Protestant churches in the southwest and in border counties were broken, bullets were sent through the post, anonymous letters were sent to alleged “grabbers”.

These tribal torments may be remote from members of the Church of Ireland in Dublin. But a rural Protestant sense of being held hostage for historical events goes back to the War of Independence.

Trevor’s moving story, The Distant Past, traces that hard history through three acts in the lives of the Protestant Middletons.

Two siblings, a brother and sister, live in a dying house, stranded by history, 60 miles from the Border.

During the War of Independence they were held at gunpoint by the local IRA chief Fat Driscoll. But now, in the 1960s, any animosity towards them has “seeped away”.

So they slowly relax into a jocose relationship with the butcher, Fat Driscoll, and the once-divisive events of the past become a common bond.

Fat reminisces cheerfully: “‘Will you ever forget it, Mr Middleton, I’d ha’ run like a rabbit if you’d lifted a finger at me.’ Fat Driscoll would laugh then, rocking back on his heels.”

But Fat stops laughing in the 1970s when the first bombs go off in Belfast. Because of the Troubles, tourists avoid the town.

Trevor writes: “As anger rose in the town at the loss of fortune, so there rose also the kind of talk there had been in the distant past.”

The childless, elderly siblings now know that they will not just die in poverty, but will die with no neighbour to mourn them.

“Because of the distant past they would die friendless. It was worse than being murdered in their beds.”

Finally, and still linked to Trevor territory, condolences to my former RTE colleague Sean O Mealoid on the death of his father, Padraig O Mealoid.

Sean produced Cork’s Bloody Secret, the first television programme to publicise the killings in the Bandon Valley in 1922.

‘Trevor’s tales dispelled the delusion, common among Catholics, that all Protestants were well got’