Excursions in the Real World

"These two writers were my mentors. It was a year of great loss. Both of them are in my own book in an essential way. They’re not on every page but they are a presence throughout. Knowing their lives a little, I read their books and I have a kind of understanding of why they’ve made certain decisions about how to approach their writing. Both their books are labelled as ‘memoirs’, and with William Trevor’s Excursions in the Real World , the one who is taking the excursions that are ostensibly the subject of the book is the author himself. And yet if you read the book from beginning to end, you get only a few glimpses of him. A lot of the essays in the memoir are about others. It’s a little like Chekhov for me: it’s the writer watching the world, listening to the world and to the people, with sympathetic eyes and ears. “ It’s like two worlds are colliding – the one world that is the ‘real’ world and the other that is the woman’s imagination ” For instance, the essay about Ted Hughes’s lover, Assia Wevill – it’s almost a little gossipy, but Trevor had a good relationship with her before she died. The essay is a really fine portrait of the woman, and at no point does Trevor say ‘I had a really close friendship with this woman, and I experienced the loss of her’; many other writers would have done that, they would have made that – themselves – part of the story. But for Trevor, the person he is writing about is much more important that the person who is writing. It’s true that in the early chapters he writes a lot about real people as though they are fictional characters – the school warden’s wife is a good example. I think he accepted that he would never know any characters – real or fictional – enough and so he felt freer. Often writers think they know, or need to know, everything about a person before they can write about him or her, but with Trevor it’s different. That chapter about the warden’s wife, a woman who on the surface is leading a tedious life but who has this secret passion for horse racing, is incredible – how it ends with this extreme thundering of hooves. It’s like two worlds are colliding – the one world that is the ‘real’ world and the other that is the woman’s imagination. The conflict between the external world and the internal landscape of the person’s mind is exactly what Trevor does so well in his short stories. His characters are often more complex than they are seen as being by secondary characters in their own narratives – and that is exactly the same for real people with complex internal lives. And, again, like Chekhov, at the end of Trevor’s book, even though you haven’t got a clear story of the author’s own life – we hardly know anything about the facts of it – you still come away with a good sense of who the man is. You know how he looks at the world, how he functions in it. I think that’s the closest I can come to defining ‘anti-memoir’. That’s quite a Trevor-like thing to do. If you know his short stories and essays well you do see echoes between them. For instance, in the Assia Wevill essay, there’s a bit about an advertisement for a table, or a really minor detail like that, and that detail appeared in a short story Trevor published around the same time. My point is that, even if we didn’t have this book, we would still have various components of the man, and be able to guess at the sort of things he noticed and that meant something to him. You get a real sense of the author from reading his fiction, but in Excursions – and this is why I’m so happy we do have the book – he gives us just a little bit more of himself. And I think that’s why he’s so quick to say, ‘Oh, don’t treat it so seriously.’"