Nights at the Alexandra

WILLIAM TREVOR

William Trevor, the acclaimed Anglo-Irish short story writer, novelist, and dramatist, was born on May 24, 1928, in Mitchelstown, County Cork, of middle-class Protestant parents. He experienced an unsettled childhood; his family relocated frequently throughout the south of Ireland. He attended a variety of schools before entering St. Columba’s College, Dublin, in 1942. “That constant moving has left me something of an outsider and a loner,” reflected Trevor. “I never think of a particular home in Ireland, but always of Ireland itself as being home.” Shortly after graduating in 1950 from Trinity College, Dublin, he accepted a position teaching art in England and later abandoned a successful career as a sculptor to pursue writing. A member of the Irish Academy of Letters, Trevor was named honorary Commander of the British Empire in 1977 in recognition of his services to literature. In 1992 he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, and in 1999 he was awarded the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime of literary achievement. William Trevor lives in Devon, England.

“Trevor is one of the very best writers of our era,” judged The Washington Post Book World. He made an auspicious literary debut in 1964 with the publication of The Old Boys, a satire about English public schools that earned him the Hawthornden Prize for Literature. He soon consolidated his reputation with The Boarding-House (1965), a sprawling Dickensian tale centered around a group of misfits who share lodgings in suburban London, and The Love Department (1966), a contemporary moral fable about love and marriage. Trevor’s next three novels, Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969), Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971), and Elizabeth Alone (1973), reflect his fascination with the lives of women. He garnered the Whitbread Literary Award for both The Children of Dynmouth (1976), the tale of a small seaside town that is harshly exposed by the prurient curiosity of a sadistic teenager, and Fools of Fortune (1983), his first full-length treatment of the Anglo-Irish conflict. Other novels include Other People's Worlds (1980), a compassionate portrait of a talented sociopath and his victims; The Silence in the Garden (1988), an unraveling of Ireland’s cruel secrets; Felicia’s Journey (1994), a chilling psychological thriller that won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award; and Death in Summer (1998), a sympathetic depiction of the sadness and damage that lie at the heart of some lives. In addition he has written Nights at the Alexandra (1987), the tender story of a provincial Irish town in the 1940s, and Two Lives (1991), comprising the paired novellas My House in Umbria and Reading Turgenev, which was short-listed for the 1991 Booker Prize. “ Two Lives demonstrates the grace and assurance of a writer at the peak of his powers,” said Anne Tyler. Juliet’s Story, his first novel for children, was published in 1991. “I think of Trevor as being among the best writers we have in English,” declared Mary Gordon. And novelist Thomas Flanagan observed: “William Trevor is wonderful, lyrical, hilarious when he wants to be, graced with endless powers of laconic and precise observation, shamefully charming, and, in the end, heartbreaking.”

Trevor has earned equal praise for his short stories, many of which have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines. “There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world,” said The Wall Street Journal, and V. S. Pritchett deemed Trevor “one of the finest short story writers at present writing in the Anglo-Irish modes.” His many collections of short fiction include The Day We Got Drunk on Cake (1967), The Ballroom of Romance (1972), Angels at the Ritz (1975), Lovers of Their Time (1978), Beyond the Pale [\9 81), The News from Ireland (1986), Family Sins (1990), After Rain (1996), and The Hill Bachelors (2000). “Trevor is probably the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language,” stated The New Yorker upon publication of The Collected Stories (1992), his magnum opus of short fiction. “His sixties stories have a wondrous sense of sixtiesness, of youth-quake and space-out and sexual abandon; his seventies stories darken and brood, and the cloud that hangs over them is often the troubles in Northern Ireland, which cleave relationships hundreds of miles away as surely as a newly revealed adultery. His more recent stories take him to the past, often an Irish past, and Trevor increasingly seems to take the long view, watching the way family curses infect generations, the way national curses continue over centuries.” And Reynolds Price noted: “With this new immense collection, William Trevor has filed in serene selftrust the results of years of work of impeccable strength and a piercing profundity that’s very seldom surpassed in short fiction.”

“William Trevor is an extraordinarily mellifluous writer, seemingly incapable of composing an ungraceful sentence,” said The New York Times Book Review. Though best known for his novels and short stories he has also published A Writer's Ireland (1984), an informal history of Irish literary achievement, and Excursions in the Real World (1993), a volume of memoirs. His several plays, which have been staged in both London and Dublin, include The Old Boys (1971), Going Home (1972), Marriages (1973), and Scenes from an Album (1981). “I don’t know who now has most right to claim Mr. Trevor, England or Ireland,” said John Fowles. “It is clear to me that his excellence comes from a happy marriage of central values in both traditions. Art of this solidity and quality cannot be written from inside frontiers. It is, in the best sense of the word, international.”

“Trevor amazes me with the variety of his subjects,” remarked novelist and critic Doris Grumbach. “What a good writer, what a superb story-teller, and he has gone on for so long being so good.” The Sunday Telegraph (London) noted: “Trevor writes of the piercing tragedies and grand dramas of everyday life in a tone through which the echoes of Chekhov and Maupassant are clearly audible. Like theirs, Trevor’s view of the world is melancholy and unsparing. . . . But like them, too, his work is supported by a fundamental optimism, a belief in the indomitability of the human spirit and rare sustaining power of love.” V. S. Pritchett agreed: “As his master Chekhov did, William Trevor simply, patiently, truthfully allows life to present itself, without preaching; he is the master of the small movements of conscience that worry away at the human imagination and our passions.” The Boston Globe hailed him as “one of the finest writers now at work in our language,” and The Washington Post Book World concluded: “To be a master of the story and a master of the novel is a distinction achieved by precious few writers, but such a master is William Trevor.”