William Trevor: A Celebration

The RTÉ Radio programme 'William Trevor: a celebration', broadcast last night, can be heard on the RTE Player here (after the News etc at about 5:20).

An excellent hour's listening, it includes sections by Christine Dwyer Hickey on My House in Umbria, John Banville on Mrs Eckdorf at O'Neill's Hotel, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne on Reading Turgenev, and Dolores McKenna on The Old Boys, as well as clips from Trevor himself in the RTÉ archives.

William Trevor evening

As part of the College's Arts Week, on Thursday 23rd March we held an event to mark the life and writings of William Trevor, Old Columban.  The guest of honour was the novelist Joseph O'Connor (pictured), who talked about writing in general, and Trevor's writing in particular, after reading beautifully to the audience Trevor's great short story 'Another Christmas'.

This was preceded by a talk by Julian Girdham, Head of the English Department, on Trevor's connections with and writing about the College, which can be read here.

William Trevor Remembered

Tonight in the Big Schoolroom at 8pm, as part of the College's annual Arts Week, there will be an event to remember the great Old Columban novelist, William Trevor.  The novelist Joseph O'Connor will read one of Trevor's short stories and talk about him, and the Head of the English Department, Julian Girdham, will give an account of Trevor's writings about schools and the College in particular.  The event is open to the public, and there is no charge for entry.

If you haven't been to the College before, here are directions.

Here is Mira Stout's great interview with Trevor in the Paris Review in 1989.

Below, a fascinating interview with William Trevor by Mike Murphy on RTE in 2000.

Remembering William Trevor

The most distinguished Old Columban writer, William Trevor, died in November 2016, aged 88. The College will celebrate his achievements in an event during Arts Week which is open to all-comers. We are delighted that the novelist Joseph O'Connor, who is also the Frank McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick, will read from and comment on Trevor's work. There will also be a short talk by the Head of the English Department and Sub-Warden Julian Girdham on William Trevor's connections with and writings about St Columba's.

All are welcome to attend this event, in the Big Schoolroom on Thursday 23rd March at 8pm, and to join us for a glass of wine afterwards. There is no charge for entry.

SCC Book Club

The next choice for the pupils' Book Club is Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses, on Tuesday 7th March in the Library at 1.20pm. See Mrs Donnelly with any queries.

And on the topic of Book Clubs, the next choice is William Trevor's Reading Turgenev from Two Lives, for discussion on the evening of Tuesday 28th February (more here on William Trevor before long).

William Trevor

 The most distinguished of all Old Columban writers (indeed, of OCs generally), William Trevor (his real surname was Cox), died last week. In many writings he remembered the College, and in this interview with Mike Murphy as part of John Bowman's RTE Radio archive programme yesterday (starting at 15:12), he reminisced about the College ("a very good school indeed"). More references appear in a novel such as Fools of Fortune, the biographical collection Excursions in the Real World, and in shorter pieces such as 'Leaving School'. He kept up his interest in the school throughout his life.

Worth reading in the press since:

• Irish writers give their reactions in the Irish Times, including Kevin Barry, Joseph O'Connor and Mary Morrissey.
• Also in the Irish Times, Denis Sampson on the novel Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel and Eileen Battersby on a 'world-class writer'.
• In the Guardian, Christina Paterson: "In times like these, art has the power to make us feel less alone."
• Novelist Anne Enright: "He was, in that no man’s land, completely at home in the English language. He had no need of metaphor; the push in his sentences is towards the apposite phrase and he repeatedly gives the reader the satisfaction of finding it"
• In the New Yorker, Marisa Silver on 'William Trevor's Quiet Explosions': "How fortunate we are that he looked so carefully—that he found the foibles and hardships and small joys of life infused with equal measures of faith and foreboding, and that he was moved to spend his life telling us about it."
• An old one: a fine Paris Review interview.

William Trevor on 'Arts Tonight'

The most recent podcast from RTE Radio 1's 'Arts Tonight' is an interesting and detailed discussion about William Trevor, and can be heard via podcast or by listening again via the RTE site here. Trevor himself is heard from the Reading the Future series.

Vincent Woods talks abour Trevor's work with his biographer Dolores McKenna and Eibhear Walshe of UCC, including his most recent novel, Love and Summer, which we recommended here. St Columba's is also mentioned (he attended here as a pupil from 1944 to 1946 under his real name, Trevor Cox), and The Story of Lucy Gault is discussed (our VI form are studying it for the Leaving Certificate).

Summer Recommendation 4 : Love and Summer

Old Columban William Trevor's first novel since The Story of Lucy Gault seven years ago is on this year's Man Booker Prize longlist. Love and Summer starts On a June evening some years after the middle of the last century Mrs Eileen Connulty passed through the town of Rathmoye: from Number 4 The Square to Magennis Street, into Hurley Lane, along Irish Street, across Cloughjordan Road to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. Her night was spent there.

That opening is almost deliberately downbeat and un-interesting, but it turns out to be a gentle tease, and also to hit on two of the driving ideas of the book, and indeed of all Trevor's work: place and time. As with so many of Trevor's novels, individuals struggle to fulfil themselves in the stultifying environments; in the new book, farmer's wife Ellie is a particularly tragic figure, and her sympathetically-drawn husband could come from McGahern or Kavanagh.

Love and Summer shares many of the preoccupations of Lucy Gault, which we're studying for next year's Leaving Certificate, but unlike the earlier novel it's more tightly focussed in time and place, staying in Rathmoye over the course of that summer and not attempting Lucy Gault's great reach. And while Lucy Gault slowly dies away in images of forgiveness and calm, Love and Summer leaves its characters - and us - in raw abandonment.

The book is just 212 pages long, but in its emotional wisdom, narrative drive, structural elegance and beautiful prose it's far bigger in every way than most modern fiction.

You can read the start of the novel on the Irish Times site here. Sebastian Barry's review in the Guardian is here, in which he points out that Trevor is a writer, writing like a sculptor, in that he creates a mass of material and then happily, passionately, brilliantly takes away, takes away, swirl of sentence by swirl of sentence.

William Trevor Films

The forthcoming Kilkenny Arts Festival (7th to 16th August) is featuring the works of Old Columban William Trevor, as seen on the cinema and TV screen. The screenings are on Saturday 8th August in the Set Theatre in John Street: Hidden Ground (a 1990 BBC documentary on Trevor), Felicia's Journey, Access to the Children and The Ballroom of Romance. Colm Tóibín introduces the day. Full details (and online booking) here.

Yesterday Evening

We marked William Trevor's 80th birthday yesterday evening (the actual birthday is later in the week), with a gathering of friends, parents, visitors and pupils. After a reception in Whitehall, Ninian Falkiner (former Head of History) gave a brief talk on the history of the College, visiting the Dining Hall, Cloisters and Chapel (pictured left) on the way.

Then we met in the upper room of the Cadogan Music Building, and listened to a thoroughly absorbing talk by Ian Steepe on Trevor's connection with St Columba's as seen through his writing. He began by reading from and discussing the essay 'Leaving School' which was first published in the London Magazine in 1964, and also examined the short stories 'A School Story' (from The Day We Got Drunk on Cake), 'Going Home' (from The Ballroom of Romance) and two versions of headmasters' wives - 'The Warden's Wife' from the 1993 biographical sketch collection Excursions in the Real World, and the wife in the short story 'O Fat White Woman'.

After the talk there was a good deal of discussion about Trevor's writing, and then plenty of time spent chatting in the exhibition of first editions, other books, and extracts set up by our Librarian, Tom McConville.

William Trevor this evening

There is a handful of places left at our William Trevor celebration this evening (upstairs in the Cadogan Music Building). Full details here.

Here's our timeline of William Trevor's life and works (widget from Dipity; click on the 'flags' at the bottom of the line for more details, and zoom in and out using the slider at the top)

William Trevor

Next week we will mark William Trevor Cox's 80th birthday with a tour and talk (Monday 19th, from 7pm, full details here).

Meanwhile, VI former Lewis Mathews, who will shortly be tackling his Leaving Certificate, has written an essay on two of Trevor's books based on schools : the early novel The Old Boys, and the Old School Ties, a 1970s collection of fictional and autobiographical pieces (now out of print) :-

I enormously enjoyed reading The Old Boys. Although one could use words such as mordant, gruesome or disturbing to describe the novel I found myself at times hysterical, driven to laughter by Trevor’s black humour. Whatever you say about this book, it is funny, albeit in the darkest of ways. As in the Ivy Compton-Burnett novels that Trevor is alleged to have perused when writing The Old Boys, a large amount of the humour comes from the characters talking to each other with exaggerated formality in hilarious dialogues.

Read Lewis's full essay here.

William Trevor at 80

We are delighted to announce our own celebration of the work of William Trevor, in the week of his 80th birthday later in May. On Monday 19th May, there will be a talk (with discussion) on Trevor's work by Old Columban Ian Steepe (himself a former English teacher) in the College. This will be preceded by a wine reception at 7pm in the main house, and a short tour of the College's older buildings by archivist and former history teacher Ninian Falkiner. Visitors can thus get a sense of the environment which strongly influenced much of William Trevor's writing.

Places for this event are open to the public, and are free, but are limited and must be pre-booked, either through the College office at 01-490 6791 or by email through scc 'dot' english 'at' yahoo 'dot' ie (fill in correct format). More details are available here.

Today we go on a weekend Exodus break, resuming on Tuesday morning.

William Trevor at 80

There is much on the airwaves and in the press at the moment about our most distinguished Old Columban writer, William Trevor, who will be 80 next month. We are planning our own celebration of this event - more here before long.

On Sunday, John Bowman's RTE Radio 1 Sunday morning programme replayed a clip of Trevor being interviewed by Andy O'Mahony about his book Landscape in Literature (1984).

If you click on the episode from Sunday 13th, you can hear him talk with Mike Murphy about his education, including discussion of St Columba's. He remembers thinking before arriving from Sandford Park that SCC boys would 'speak strangely', but then found that the school was socially 'pleasantly mixed'. He says that, having mocked the school (fairly gently), he now remembers it 'with affection' and thinks 'it was a very good school indeed', largely because during the War 'the staff were interesting men'. He goes on to talk in much detail about the profound influence that the then art teacher, the great Irish sculptor Oisin Kelly, had on his life.

On Thursday at the Mansion House William Trevor will be receive the Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature at the Irish Book Awards. Also, at the weekend the author is the subject of a symposium at the Oscar Wilde Centre in TCD (here).

TY Extended Essay Reading

Over the next couple of weeks we'll be posting lots of book recommendations by our Transition Year pupils, who are currently well into the reading part of their Extended Essay projects.

Sophie Kyd-Rebenburg has read Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses :- 'I really like the story-line. It's about a boy and a girl who grow up together being best friends, but as their childhood comes to an end, realize that they have developed a much stronger relationship - love. The problem is, Calem is a Nought and Sephy is a Cross, and their families hate each other ... It's an interesting and enjoyable book because it shows that love is always there, no matter how big the difference between skin colour and wealth is. It grabs you when there is a lot of tension and even sadness.'
(Blackman's website is here.)

Tom Guinness has read The Old Boys, by Old Columban William Trevor : 'It is about a group of past pupils, whose school remains unknown, who form a committee called the Old Boys. Many, especially Mr Nox and Mr Jaraby, are trying to get the title of President of the Committee. This drives them to sabotage and blackmail. It also makes them partly crazy! I like the twists and turns of this book, such as Mr Turtle's proposal and his sudden death. The author portrays the emotions of the other characters very well. It is also in a setting which everyone knows well, a school.'

William Trevor books

Our most distinguished Old Columban author, the novelist and short story writer William Trevor (whose real surname is Cox), recently kindly donated to our Library signed first editions of several of his books, including The Old Boys, Cheating at Canasta, Felicia's Journey, The Children of Dynmouth, A Bit on the Side, The Story of Lucy Gault and After Rain. Another donated novel is Fools of Fortune, sections of which are set in the College. William Trevor has also written about SCC in his memoirs, Excursions in the Real World.

Cheating at Canasta

Our most distinguished Old Columban author, William Trevor, has just published his 11th book of short stories, Cheating at Canasta. In The Times, Neil Mukherjee writes that :-
True to such maturity and control, the stories are suffused with radiant and effortless majesty; a comprehensive ease of speaking about spaces in the human heart and mind that remains out of reach for most writers (continued here).

In the Literary Review, Cressida Connolly says :-
William Trevor does not flinch from horror and darkness, yet nor does he sensationalise these things. Evil may be inadvertent, or clumsy: it is never elegant or just; or even, of itself, very interesting. Its purpose, in his stories, is to test the moral limits of his characters. What is of interest to him is not the crimes themselves but the way in which they affect, change and damage people. He gives no easy answers. Redemption is not the point; a sort of desperate, unspoken atonement is more likely. Only love is noble, but it lacks the power to save a life. A husband plays cards with his wife, who is in a home, with Alzheimer's: tenderly, he cheats in order to let her win; it is her one remaining pleasure (here).

William Trevor festival

Next weekend Leitrim Cinemobile and the Irish Film Institute are presenting a short festival of films from the works of the most distinguished Old Columban writer, William Trevor. He was at the College from 1944 to 1946 (his real name being William Trevor Cox), and the school features in some of his writing.