He's a real glimmer man
Carole Angier
EXCURSIONS IN THE REAL WORLD by William Trevor Hutchinson, £16.99, pp.200 Some real passion must have brought William Trevor's parents together, but that was by definition before he was born. By the time he knew them they lived in sepa- rate worlds, yoked together but not con- nected. His father was simple, his mother complicated; in a series of small dull Irish towns she kept herself going by inventing dramas.
I don't know if this is a general rule (though I fear so), but his parents seem to have given William Trevor his model of the world. In that model reality is a dull provincial place 'on the edge of things', and real life, real excitement, is elsewhere. It is in the past, like his parents' love, or in a pair of illicit lovers glimpsed on the promenade. It's in the cinema — perhaps the greatest influence on him, we learn here, but already know from his novels (e.g. the marvellous Nights at the Alexandra.) It's in distant cities, in secrets, in dreams.
Trevor didn't mind his exile, in fact he welcomed it, because exile is the perfect state for a writer. In this collection of auto- biographical essays he celebrates dullness, and the art of compensation.
His first home, Mitchelstown, lay below mountains 'as though someone had sat on it'; it was a step up to Youghal, 'once mild- ly fashionable'. His favourite place in Ire- land now is the Nire Valley, empty, rocky and cold; in England it's Gloucestershire, whose beauty is `undramatic'; 'as if con- stantly aware that life owes much to sheep'.
His favourite time is 'Out of Season' (the title of one of the best essays), his favourite people out of place. He's that rare thing, a writer who writes best out of love; and there are wonderful portraits here, as in his fiction, of failures, misfits, oddities. There is his first headmaster, who was more childish than his pupils, but 'did no harm. No one was frightened when he roared'; and his housemaster, the amazingly named Frig Alit, who 'died as he lived: somewhere else at the time'. There's his first boss, Marchant Smith of the advertising agency Notley's, who employed so many poets — Peter Porter, Peter Redgrove, Gavin Ewart — that Notley's was known as the 'nest of singing birds'; and his friend Long Stewart, who always looked as though he belonged in a better place. Best of all, there are obscure, unhappy women who (like his mother) live secretly exciting lives: like the Warden's wife in the essay named after her, whose improbable passion her hus- band's sex-obsessed pupils never guess; or the old lady playing the fruit machines in 'Out of Season', who turns off her hus- band's deaf-aid so that he won't know when she's won the jackpot.
Trevor loves these people and places because they leave room for mystery, for imagination — in other words, for fiction, where he really lives. He makes these auto- biographical 'excursions in the real world' with evident reluctance; and he presents them with deprecation, as mere leftovers from his novels.
That is quite misleading. The book is best when it's straight autobiography: that is, until 1960, about two-thirds of the way through. The last nine or ten essays are more general, and feel like makeweights. They're about famous writers (Yeats, Beck- ett) and big cities (London, New York) — subjects that are too successful in life for Trevor. Perhaps, too, Excursions in the Real World doesn't altogether escape the prob- lems of pieces collected but not conceived together: you begin to notice certain tricks, or habits, of style (e.g. portraits built up from unrelated facts — that parental model again!) But of course William Trevor writes autobiography just as well as fiction — and in much the same way. I can't think why he didn't use these characters and scenes for his novels. They already have the power of images: all those couples with their unshared lives; himself at 12, taking the worst journey of his life on a bike called the Golden Eagle; Mr Finnegan the 'glimmer man', whose job was to detect the illegal tapping of gas, and who 'kept a watchful eye, not just on the gas pipes but on life itself.'
William Trevor is a glimmer man him- self, keeping a watchful eye on life. In one of these essays he meets a colonic surgeon whose hands shake; it doesn't matter, he assures Trevor, the stomach's big, there's plenty of room. Unlike the eye: 'There's no margin of error,' he says, 'for an eye man.' With his watchfulness, and his cinematic style, Trevor is definitely an eye man too. Luckily, his hand has hardly a tremor.
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