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William Trevor: A sculptor of words

By
FRANK SHOULDICE
,
Irish America Magazine
Published Monday, September 28, 2009, 4:15 PM
Updated Monday, September 28, 2009, 4:15 PM
Read more: William Trevor, Books and Literature, Media, Ireland


One of the greatest Irish writers of his time, William Trevor
One of the greatest Irish writers of his time, William Trevor

For writer William Trevor there comes a moment when it’s time to stop. Whether drafting a novel or a short story he arrives at a moment of completion, the point at which all work is done. He will have written, rewritten and reworked elements of the story numerous times, agonized over plot, fussed with characters, toyed with the rhythm and flow of sentences and made a final arbitration on every contentious word. And in the end, if he feels that everything fits like it should, it’s time to just let go.

Having typed the manuscript on blue pages using a manual Olivetti typewriter, he will close it and pass the finished draft to his literary agent for release into the conveyance of international publishing. It will be proofread one more time before the manuscript returns as a printed book but after that the author will not look at it again. “I’m never tempted to go back – there’s not an awful lot of point in doing so really,” he says, sounding more like midwife than mother. “You know you’re finished writing a book when you’re getting bored stiff with it.”

Novelists are highly diligent before committing to print but William Trevor is especially fastidious in his attention to detail. Clare Alexander, former publisher at Viking, remarked that Trevor’s “process of writing and revising was a private one, more so perhaps than with any other writer I have known.”

Readers will be quite unaware of the care he takes of his art. It passes off as a casual fluency, like a consummate performer whose dedication to rehearsal offstage makes his performance onstage look beguilingly simple. Almost effortless.

Now aged 81 years, the Cork-born author is doing publicity interviews for his latest novel, “Love and Summer”. Set in mid-century rural Ireland, it revisits favored Chekhovian themes – the fragility of marriage, the burden of religious and societal convention and the aching impossibility of love.

A slim novel, running at 212 pages, “Love and Summer” feels like an extended short story, a pocket-sized love drama ripe with desire and longing. Trevor creates a claustrophobic universe out of small town Ireland, but in early stages of drafting the book, he goes far beyond the doomed tryst of protagonists Ellie and Florian. In his mind he plots and creates the full continuum of their lives. Only when he sees the whole picture will he decide where their story should end in print. And so he usually writes far longer than the published book will actually go.

“I do an awful lot of rewriting,” he admits. “And I amass an enormous amount of paper compared to the amount of paper that ends up in finished form on the bookshelves. It’s not that the story marks the end of the road for the characters. They have got to go on living in the mind of the reader.

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