Cathedral Connection

“Then, for the forty minutes that were theirs, they spoke of love…” – “A Bit on the Side,” William Trevor

Dear All Souls Book Group,

A couple of Book Group members have asked for some orienting words about the Trevor stories we’ll be discussing this coming Monday, “A Bit on the Side” and “The Children.”  I’m happy to share a couple of my (still forming) observations, although I'll make them brief, since the meeting is only two days away.  In this post I'll also try briefly to summarize some of the discoveries that have come out of our (now) three discussions about William Trevor's short fiction.

I guess the first thing to say is that both stories, "A Bit on the Side," and "The Children," offer a fresh perspective on love, which is really the only reason I thought to pair them.  By the end of “A Bit on the Side,” Trevor will have actually found a way to “arrest” the exquisiteness shared by the two lovers, reserving it from the destruction of time, and giving us, his readers, the chance to consider love anew: the miracle of its ever happening; the artfulness of its forms, an art whose authority only the lovers may grant; its singular power, also known only by those who are inside it.  One thing I might direct your attention to in “A Bit on the Side” is the density of quotidian detail -- her raincoat; his briefcase; his sandwiches; her salad; the particulars involved in arranging meetings and keeping them; tube tickets; work frustrations/ work demands; her shoes; his cigarettes; the weather, and so on.  The values of the story inhere in these details as much as in whatever the lovers do or say, and there’s something “really interesting” about that. (I'm being vague so you can tell me what the interest is.)  What do you think?

So, too, by the last paragraph of “The Children,” we’ll have a very different sense of what “matters” in the love between these people -- the word "matters" is the story's -- than the one with which we began.  And here, too, the adult protagonists will have acted ahead of love, cheating it its due, and without realizing it – without being cheaters, if you will (both Teresa and Robert I think we could safely describe as responsible.)  Robert's recognition at the end of the story -- that a child's love for her mother might matter more than Robert's for Teresa, or Teresa's for Robert -- classes him with those other Trevor characters of “high standards,” as we said a couple of meetings back: Mallory, in “Cheating at Canasta,” and Harriet, in “After Rain.”  These exceptionally sensitive protagonists expect of themselves honor in their encounter with life, honor of regard, honor even in the way they build their most personal memories.  

Also -- and this is something else we've been talking about -- Trevor's story characters have a complexity you don't often find in short fiction.  They don't yield to judgment or pigeonholing, or even to thoughtful (psycho) analysis.  In these last meetings I think we've also seen how intimately they are bound to their relations.  Alicia and Catherine in "Widows"; Mallory and Julia in "Cheating at Canasta"; Odo and Charlotte and Timothy in "Timothy's Birthday"; Hester and Bartholomew in "Faith": in each of these relationships the "other" is carried very deeply inside, though not, it should be said, only in a limiting way.  Inspiration remains very much a possibility for them, despite circumstances that may force their dependence on one another, such as age, limited economic opportunity, and/or failing health. 

Another shared preoccupation of several of the Trevor stories we've read so far: the vulnerability of human perception to changes in the physical field, especially the visual field.  Here I'm thinking of the “watery sunshine” you see in several of Trevor’s stories, a momentary arrangement of light briefly illuminating a truth.  The paintings in Trevor’s later stories “arrest” these moments, giving the characters that look at them the chance to reflect on experience as immersion in experience rarely does.  Although there are no paintings in “A Bit on the Side,” there is one arrested image in it, preserved apart from -- I want to say "above" -- the ongoingness of the story.  This image is in the story's last paragraph, and is worth reviewing before coming to our meeting on Monday.  Another common feature of "A Bit on the Side" and some of the other Trevor stories we've read so far: the shift to an omniscient point of view in its last paragraph.  “After Rain,” “Widows,” “Cheating at Canasta” and “Timothy’s Birthday" also end in the omniscient point of view.  It is as though another intelligence has stepped in to state the contents of a shared thought, or, if the story treats only one character, to show a quality of his or hers, usually a good one -- a sensitivity, a kindness, an acuity, etc.  -- that the character him or herself does not see.  

Lastly, I want to underscore the word "reticence" in the last paragraph of "A Bit on the Side."  Reticence is for many of Trevor's characters a way of comporting oneself -- really a way of life.  And it isn't to be confused with stuffiness or censoriousness or self-abnegation. Odo and Charlotte, in "Timothy's Birthday," I think we could describe as reticent -- it is their reticence that has them accepting the limits of what they can do in the wake of the "vicissitude" that was Eddie, and even what they can do on behalf of their son.  Julia, in "Cheating at Canasta," is reticent on the subject of people she and Mallory don't really know.  Remember what she says (in memory) to Mallory at Harry's Bar, this as he is conjecturing about the couple whose argument he can overhear?  "Now, we don't know one single bit of that."  Harriet, in "After Rain," we could also describe as "reticent."  Had she not been so she might not have seen -- seen -- that the encounter between Mary and the angel in the painting she looks at toward the end of the story takes place "after rain."  Even Mary I think we could describe as reticent.  What if reticence were part of her grace?  Reticence has intelligence in it - realism, discernment, scale.  What might describing Mary as "reticent" lead us to see?

These observations are big and generalizing and they may not be right.  So you tell me what’s right when we meet.  I look forward to it.

Emilie