Being part of William Trevor’s stories Patrick Cox
On the eve of the publication of William Trevor’s last book, his son Patrick Cox reveals how the master teller of tales wove fact into fiction
Acouple of summers ago, before my father, William Trevor, died, I took my family to Mitchelstown in County Cork, the town where he was born in 1928. I’d been there only once before, on a family holiday. Dad had driven us through the town, stopping for just a couple of minutes to point out his childhood home on Upper Cork Street.
‘A good business town,’ he’d said of Mitchelstown, quoting someone from his past. That was his verdict of most Irish towns we’d drive through. As a child, he had lived in several of them. As an adult, he set stories in many more.
We parked in the main square, where, in 2004, a sculpture had been dedicated to Dad. From there, we walked past Dorans Knitwear, Blueberries Bakery and the Riverview Chinese restaurant. And past the Bank of Ireland where Dad’s father had worked.
There is nothing exceptional about Dad’s first home (pictured) — nothing but for a blue plaque commemorating his early life there. But the ordinariness of the place was a smokescreen. When we arrived at this modest terraced house, we discovered his old home had become a Buddhist temple.
A couple of monks in orange robes were standing outside. We exchanged pleasantries. They informed us, in broken English, that they were there on mission from Thailand. When we told them what brought us there — of our emotional claim to the house — they seemed unmoved, even when we pointed to the plaque. Still, they were happy to pose for photos.
Telling Dad about this encounter was bittersweet. Small-town Ireland, a favourite canvas of his, was moving on, albeit producing fabulous new material. But by then, Dad, too, was moving on. It was just a few months before his death in 2016, and he was no longer able to write.
I grew up going to places and meeting people who would later end up in Dad’s stories. The people were
usually transformed into fictionalised versions of themselves. But some people were recognisable to us, his immediate family, even after Dad had altered their circumstances. Occasionally, there was no alteration. I remember one schoolchild’s real nickname was directly lifted; it was too good to be improved upon.
Dad has often been described as a writer generous to his characters. But he was also attracted to petty monsters. I came to realise that writing fiction could be a delicious revenge on these people whose real identities sometimes revealed themselves to us.
To me, of course, he was never William Trevor; not just because he was Dad, but also because his real name was William Trevor Cox. When I read his story In Isfahan which he wrote after visiting Iran in the late 1960s, I was reminded of things that didn’t appear in the story: the Marmite sandwiches my mother made him for his trip, and a postcard he sent me from Iran, or somewhere along the way, of Batman and Robin in the Batmobile.
When I read Cheating at Canasta, I thought of the canasta set I’d bought my parents some years before as a joke gift. I never thought they’d end up playing the card game every afternoon as they sipped Darjeeling tea by the fireside in their rural Devon home. An earlier story, Another Christmas, describes a domestic accident: a child, sitting close to a fireplace, gets a speck of coal in her eye; her mother rushes her to hospital in the middle of the night. The version of that story my mother tells accentuates her own panic and her child’s tears — my tears.
Familiar references abound, too, in Last Stories, the new collection to be published on what would have been Dad’s ninetieth birthday. The book includes several short stories published for the first time. In one, Dad namechecks a city in Moldova, a place I’m certain he’d never heard of — except that I’d spent several months there. A school is named, with a slight spelling adjustment, after a Massachusetts town Dad had recently visited. These are shared memories. The stories themselves, though — the plots, the cruelty, the tenderness, the despair — are his own.
Dad wasn’t one to discuss his stories as he was writing them, or even afterwards. He would show drafts to my mother, his first reader, but never to my brother or to me. When I moved to the United States, he would send me his novels and short story collections as they came out, sometimes with self-deprecating notes: ‘This is how I waste my time.’
It was only at the very end, when he was trying to work out an order for the stories collected in Last Stories that he sought my help. Even then, his needs were administrative rather than creative. I helped him with the order, which changed a bit over time. He let me read the stories, and listened when I told him I thought they were complete.
While it’s wonderful to see these final stories published, it’s strange to think the book will arrive in the post without one of Dad’s notes.
‘Last Stories’ by William Trevor is published on 24th May (Viking)
Review by Cressida Connolly p68