Two Lives offers two novels in one volume. It confirms William Trevor as a writer blessed with a Third Eye when it comes to the observation of human dealings as if confirmation were needed of his master’s touch.
He sees all that is possible in the lives of ordinary people: he sees the bright flashes, all the dark shades, the very extraordinariness of it all.
The first of the novels is Reading Turgenev, a witching though harrowing tale about Mary Louise Dallon, a poor Irish Protestant farm girl who chooses marriage to the much older Elmer Quarry, a shopkeeper of some means.
She does this rather than risk ending her days tied to a small farm, with the prospect of only her brother and sister for company.
Elmer has little intent to harm, but such is the meanness of his imagination that he has a great capacity to weaken the fragile threads by which Mary Louise clutches at her fantasies of married life.
It is 1955.
Things are changing. The world is ready to rock and roll.
Films in the local cinema bring fantastic visions of romance. Mary Louise Dallon and Elmer Quarry cannot even consummate their marriage. And Mary Louise, Mr. Quarry’s choice to continue the family line for the best practical reasons, is persecuted by his two older sisters who resent her invasion of their territory.
Elmer takes to the drink. Mary Louise takes to the company of Robert, her sickly young cousin who tells her he has always loved her, as he reads her Turgenev in an abandoned graveyard.
What might have been… if only. If only. If only Mary Louise had known enough to choose a different path. The reading of Turgenev gives her a brief, and (chastely) pure, acquaintance with love. Then tragedy strikes, and Mary Louise finds the only way out. Escape comes through the remembrance of Turgenev, love’s voice to her. Reading Turgenev: she has nothing else to hold on to. Naturally, “they” decide that she is strange….
Reading Turgenev is stylistically perfect, a compassionate exploration of a possibly pathetic life. Yet, it never condescends – Trevor is much too knowing about the solitariness and fantastical nature of all human existence to overplay the potential for pathos in this story.
Instead, with delicate strokes, he paints vignettes of great humor and farce, all the while that Mary Louise Dallon, pain-bound, is unwinding in the telling. For mad in love is she.
A certain kind of loving and another kind of madness are the subjects in My House in Umbria, the second of the two novels. Here, too, there is love to be found within the covers of books.
In My House in Umbria, the story told is that of Mrs. Emily Delahunty (sometimes known as Gloria Grey, and other times as Ann Johns), a woman of a certain comfortable image who is shocked back into a confrontation with her far from comfortable past when she becomes one of the victims of a terrorist bomb on the train in which she is traveling.
In convalescence she takes a group of other survivors into her home, an idyll paid for out of her successful labors as a writer of romantic fiction. In that make-believe world Mrs. Delahunty has had the scope to create romantic lives. The real thing is harder to conjure, as she learns painfully.
Thematically, these books are related, both of them exploring through the lives of two women, different kinds of love-hunger, different kinds of love-ache. But they stand on their own, for each in its turn is a treasure of Trevor at his best; each is a self-contained work of grace and power.
William Trevor gets to the heart of the matter. In Reading Turgenev, he writes, “A person’s life isn’t orderly, Sister Hannah maintains; it runs all over the place, in and out through time. The present’s hardly there; the future doesn’t exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.”
Two Lives by William Trevor, published by Viking, $21.95, hardback.
The Mayo Anthology
County Mayo in the West of Ireland is one of the wonders of the world. So wrote William Makepeace Thackeray. Anyone with the least familiarity with the place would concur, but let’s keep it a secret, lest Mayo succumb to the woes of too much “tourist development.”
Now comes something truly wonderful from Mayo, courtesy — would you believe – of Mayo County Council. It is The Mayo Anthology, a collection of poems, stories, essays and memoirs by people who have some connection with Mayo, or with the West of Ireland. This is the second such anthology; the first was edited by short story writer and novelist Val Mulk-Erns in 1988 as a forum for people from Mayo or living in the county, whose work had not yet been published.
Poet Richard Murphy, who is editor of the second anthology, explains in his introduction that the series was the brainchild of Mayo County Librarian, Pat McMahon – “as a way of encouraging people to write, or discovering literary talent in the West.” The proof of that ambition is in this volume which contains some remarkable writing by new talents such as Geraldine Mulgrew, 24 years old and a native of Castlebar, and another Castlebar native, Ernie Sweeney.
But what makes this such a rich collection is the inclusion of prose and poetry by well-known authors. Their work is included on the basis that it relates to life in the West. And Murphy explains, “I’d prefer to think of this anthology as a country fair at which all sorts of produce from the region are available, and where readers can pick and choose what they like best.” Thus, along with the new work, we can read from such established writers as Eilis Dillon, Thomas Kilroy, Paul Durcan, Seamus Heaney, John F. Deane, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Michael Longley and Murphy himself.
You know, one of Mayo’s more recently acknowledged formidable daughters, President Mary Robinson, has given a great fillib to community organizations and self-help groups around Ireland. This anthology stands as a wonderful response by Mayo County Council to the artistic riches of the county, and a self-help initiative to be cherished.
Copies of the anthology ($18 each) can be ordered with bank drafts or checks from Mayo County Library, The Mall, Castlebar, Co. Mayo, Ireland. I would recommend it unreservedly as a gift for people with connections to the county.
— Melissa Devine
The Mayo Anthology. Price: $18 (includes postage). Available from: Mayo County Library, The Mall, Castlebar, Co. Mayo, Ireland.
The Eternal Outsider
I’m the eternal outsider,
I watched you build Rome:
I saw you plant your vineyard
On the ashes of my home.
You built your Mayan temple
To imitate the sun:
I mined your gold, I lugged your rocks,
Your structures I still shun.
I’m the nettle in your garden,
The laughter in your church,
The drunken shout at midnight,
The spark that ends your search.
You can pass your resolutions
Of union, church and state,
But stinking drains spread sickness,
And putrid laws breed hate.
Plant the hills with pine trees,
Like school-books, ruled and lined:
The energy of growing things,
Works best when well confined.
You can’t contain the weather,
Can’t bubble-pack the sea,
People are an awkward shape.
You’ll never contain me.
This poem by Jan Malpas is included in The Mayo Anthology. Malpas, who is English, moved to Mayo in 1972.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the December/January 1991 issue of Irish America. The purchasing and contact information may be outdated. ♦
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