Irish Short Story Month Year 3
March 1 to March 31
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William Trevor
County Cork
Resources
If you were to somehow be able to poll the serious short story readers of the world as to who the greatest living practitioner of the form was, I think Alice Munro would come in first with William Trevor (1928) as a strong second. Both are worthy of a Nobel Prize. In both cases I have read far to little of their work.
During Irish Short Story Week Year One I posted on his "Men of Ireland" and "Woman of the House". In ISSW2 I posted on a great story centering on a priest, "Death in Jerusalem". He has won lots of awards for his many novels and short stories. William Trevor: The Collected Stories is 1280 pages. I have a copy of Selected Stories: William Trevor which contains a bit more than a third of his stories. (The date of this publication is 2009 and that is the date I attribute to the story. I know it was published earlier but I do not have the date. I have said this before but to anyone who will edit a collection of short stories in the future, please put the date and the original place of publication somewhere in the collection.)
"The Potato Dealer" deals with many of the basic themes of Irish literature, as expounded by Declan Kiberd in Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation and the social forces at work in the country as detailed in Occasions for Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland by Diarmaid Ferriter. Kiberd tells us that one the most important theme of modern Irish literature is that of the weak or missing father. Their are three fathers in "The Potato Dealer". A young unmarried pregnant woman and her mother have lived with the mother's unmarried brother ever since her husband died. This is our first missing father, taken by an early death. The girl fell in love with and was impregnated by a "summer curate". A young man working in the parish for the summer only. He left without ever knowing he was to be a father and perhaps this is doubly a weak father in that he was seen as a father to the people he ministered to. The uncle and the girl's mother are deeply in scorn for what the girl has done. Premarital sex was seen as great sin and an out of wedlock child would bring down disgrace on the extended family. The uncle has a solution. He feels a local potato dealer he knows will marry the girl for money. He approaches the man and he right away knows he will do it but he bargains. He is in need of a new truck for his business and that is the motivating factor. Once the baby is born people will maybe say she was conceived before the marriage but marriage will wipe away the stain of that. He moves on the farm and is told, he is a decent hardworking man, that he will if he keeps it up one day inherit the farm. Everyone including the daughter Ellen who soon comes will think the potato dealer is the father. They never share a room with his wife and he never so much as embraces her but he does not have much interest in such things so he is OK with this. All of the emotions are constrained in this story. This is what Ferriter talks about a lot. He also talks about the forces that kept many men from marrying young. People keep their emotions in check for so long that in time they almost do not have them. This does lead to tishe explosive potential for violence. Marriages are treated as business deals. He is a kind of father to the girl. She for sure thinks he is her father and their is love between them. He asks her about her school work when she comes home. His wife cannot get over her love for the curate and she wants to reveal the family secret to her daughter. So we have three weak or missing father: The one that died, the one that skipped town and the potato dealer, who actually is not a bad father, or is as good a one as he can be.
Trevor's portray of the emotions at play as the story winds down show his great skill as a story teller and the depth of his brilliant understand of people. He takes us very deeply into the below the surface emotions of the characters, ones they may not even know they have. You will wonder, or at least I did, if what the mother did was right or not.
I think maybe one reason I have not read more of William Trevor's stories is that they require time to digest, you cannot just rush through 1000 pages of them like you would a bag of potato chips.
Mel u
During Irish Short Story Week Year One I posted on his "Men of Ireland" and "Woman of the House". In ISSW2 I posted on a great story centering on a priest, "Death in Jerusalem". He has won lots of awards for his many novels and short stories. William Trevor: The Collected Stories is 1280 pages. I have a copy of Selected Stories: William Trevor which contains a bit more than a third of his stories. (The date of this publication is 2009 and that is the date I attribute to the story. I know it was published earlier but I do not have the date. I have said this before but to anyone who will edit a collection of short stories in the future, please put the date and the original place of publication somewhere in the collection.)
"The Potato Dealer" deals with many of the basic themes of Irish literature, as expounded by Declan Kiberd in Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation and the social forces at work in the country as detailed in Occasions for Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland by Diarmaid Ferriter. Kiberd tells us that one the most important theme of modern Irish literature is that of the weak or missing father. Their are three fathers in "The Potato Dealer". A young unmarried pregnant woman and her mother have lived with the mother's unmarried brother ever since her husband died. This is our first missing father, taken by an early death. The girl fell in love with and was impregnated by a "summer curate". A young man working in the parish for the summer only. He left without ever knowing he was to be a father and perhaps this is doubly a weak father in that he was seen as a father to the people he ministered to. The uncle and the girl's mother are deeply in scorn for what the girl has done. Premarital sex was seen as great sin and an out of wedlock child would bring down disgrace on the extended family. The uncle has a solution. He feels a local potato dealer he knows will marry the girl for money. He approaches the man and he right away knows he will do it but he bargains. He is in need of a new truck for his business and that is the motivating factor. Once the baby is born people will maybe say she was conceived before the marriage but marriage will wipe away the stain of that. He moves on the farm and is told, he is a decent hardworking man, that he will if he keeps it up one day inherit the farm. Everyone including the daughter Ellen who soon comes will think the potato dealer is the father. They never share a room with his wife and he never so much as embraces her but he does not have much interest in such things so he is OK with this. All of the emotions are constrained in this story. This is what Ferriter talks about a lot. He also talks about the forces that kept many men from marrying young. People keep their emotions in check for so long that in time they almost do not have them. This does lead to tishe explosive potential for violence. Marriages are treated as business deals. He is a kind of father to the girl. She for sure thinks he is her father and their is love between them. He asks her about her school work when she comes home. His wife cannot get over her love for the curate and she wants to reveal the family secret to her daughter. So we have three weak or missing father: The one that died, the one that skipped town and the potato dealer, who actually is not a bad father, or is as good a one as he can be.
Trevor's portray of the emotions at play as the story winds down show his great skill as a story teller and the depth of his brilliant understand of people. He takes us very deeply into the below the surface emotions of the characters, ones they may not even know they have. You will wonder, or at least I did, if what the mother did was right or not.
I think maybe one reason I have not read more of William Trevor's stories is that they require time to digest, you cannot just rush through 1000 pages of them like you would a bag of potato chips.
Mel u
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