Finding Ireland: A Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture

William Trevor: “They Were As Good As We Were”

William Trevor: “They Were As Good As We Were” The fictions, careers, and milieux of Somerville and Ross, then Elizabeth Bowen, and finally William Trevor provide a history in brief of the Anglo-Irish from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Trevor was born and raised a Protestant in provincial Ireland, went to school there, attended Trinity College, Dublin; a quarter of the pieces from his Collected Stories are set in Ireland or are peopled with Irish characters living abroad, usually in England. He himself has for many years lived and written in Devon. The term “AngloIrish ” usually calls to mind either the early-twentieth-century members and descendants of the Protestant Ascendancy, such asYeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge—prime movers in the Irish Literary Revival; or it brings to mind the fiction written by Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, and more recently, Molly Keane. A somewhat imprecise Celtic mythologizing tendency is evoked in the case of the Revival; decrepit country houses, hunt balls, and a Faulknerian preoccupation with lineage in the other writers mentioned. Bowen was a master of a somewhat neurasthenic inwardness associated with the last years of the Ascendancy . Tillinghast pt 2 8/20/08 3:25 PM Page 124 Even after distinguishing the differences among the writers I have mentioned, to associate Trevor with the milieu conjured up by the term “Anglo-Irish” can be misleading. For one thing, the Anglo-Irish tradition itself has become increasingly attenuated since the nineteenth century. As early as the 1860s, in Somerville and Ross’s early days, Gladstone’s disestablishment of the (Protestant) Church of Ireland and his Land Acts— and later those of Balfour—in response to the agitations associated with Parnell, together with Conservative adoption of land reform policies, drastically liberalized the landlord-and-tenant system that had ruled the island since the Tudors revoked the legitimacy of the native Irish nobility, forcing them to swear fealty to and draw their legitimacy from the Crown. The history of Ireland after the land reform movement was one of Protestant flight to England, North America, and elsewhere in the face of an Ireland that increasingly defined itself, especially under deValera’s Irish Republic, as Gaelic, agrarian, and Catholic. These were the attenuated conditions in which Elizabeth Bowen wrote. The Protestants who have remained in the Irish Republic since her time are an isolated remnant. (The terms “Protestant” and “Catholic,” of course, imply social distinctions as much as matters of faith.) Trevor’s understanding of the lives of Irish Protestants may be seen as emblematic of a broader identification with an element of humanity psychologically marginalized, passed-over, alienated. And since Trevor’s characters and settings are in fact often English rather than Irish, he might more accurately though more long-windedly be identified as “Protestant-Irish and English.” Yet Trevor’s Irish characters and situations have never excluded the Catholic Irish, so he is by no means “Anglo-Irish” in the way that Bowen was. Trevor’s fiction candidly recognizes that until quite recently, life for the majority of those who live in Ireland, particularly in the provinces, has been an unending struggle to make ends meet within a farming economy that offers little diversion. Bridie, in Trevor’s early story “The 125 Tillinghast pt 2 8/20/08 3:25 PM Page 125 Ballroom of Romance,” cares for her widowed father who is handicapped with an amputated leg, on a small farm like so many in the country. The narrowness of this life, particularly back in the 1940s and ’50s, is from an American point of view almost impossible to grasp. As drab as life in the nearby town is, Bridie still fantasizes about it: “The town had a cinema called the Electric, and a fishand -chip shop where people met at night, eating chips out of a newspaper on the pavement outside. In the evenings, sitting in the farmhouse with her father, she often thought about the town, imagining the shop-windows lit up to display their goods and the sweet-shops still open so that people could purchase chocolates or fruit to take with them to the Electric cinema. But the town was eleven miles away, which was too far to cycle, there and back, for an evening’s entertainment.” Instead she cycles once a week to a roadhouse called the Ballroom of Romance, to dance and socialize with the same crowd of...