The Awesome Power of the Past
LEMMONS, PHILIP
The Awesome Power of the Past Angels at the Ritz By William Trevor Viking. 253 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Philip Lemmons A superficial description of William Trevor's third collection of short...
...It was worse than being murdered in their beds...
...So much topicality suggests the ephemeral...
...Ashburton entices two teenagers to restore an overgrown tennis court...
...In this case the future is safe: The wedding is nothing special, and will evoke no fond recollections...
...Trevor offers only one glimpse of how the past may sometimes be deprived of its terrible power...
...In fact, Trevor is more concerned with the past than with the present...
...The Distant Past" concerns the Middletons, an old, unmarried Protestant brother and sister in Ireland...
...It is hardly surprising, then, that Teresa doesn't wish to recapture the past but to disarm it by purging it of self-deception...
...What's more, Trevor is notably up-to-the-minute in his liberal use of trade names...
...Nothing inherent in the Middletons' relationships with the townspeople changes, but events across the border damage the local tourist trade...
...His people are so meticulously drawn that they are obliged to feel the tiny reverberations of current events and fashions...
...His lonely characters, vulnerable to personal histories, real or invented, and to events that only seem safely distant, are as true and alive as any in recent fiction...
...A shopkeeper who once locked them in an upstairs room and waited below to shoot the expected British solders, now has come to regard the Middletons as a quaint part of the community...
...finally, on the evening of August 31, 1939...
...Mrs...
...I remember my father's leathery skin and his smile, and the way he used to shout at the sheepdogs, and the men, Joe and Arthur, sitting on the yellow stubble, drinking tea out of a bottle, on a day hay had been cut...
...Into the 1970s, they continue to stand up when the radio plays "God Save the Queen" and to speak of Ireland as a member of the Commonwealth...
...When the men go off to fight the Germans once more, the tennis court will return to its unplayable state...
...The children cut, trim, roll, and mark...
...In "The Tennis Court," for example, Matilda says of her childhood, "Looking back on it now, there was a lot of happiness, although perhaps not more than many families experience...
...Ashburton gives a tennis party...
...I remember my mother baking in the kitchen, flour all over her plump arms, and tiny beads of sweat on her forehead, because the kitchen was always hot...
...For Trevor, however, it is incidental to character...
...In "Teresa's Wedding," a young woman forced by pregnancy into a loveless marriage surveys the remnants of her wedding celebration: confetti, cake and the rest...
...It will be as if the same grass has reappeared and the new war is but the ghost of the old, returned to haunt the whole of Europe...
...Yet they are based on illusion, and we cannot help feeling that she is merely providing the nostalgic basis for future unhappiness...
...Neither marriage, nor children, nor wife-swapping, nor anything else seems to provide a release—except perhaps some return to the past, like the one symbolized by the make-believe playmates, George, Alice and Isabel, in "Mrs...
...Then comes the outbreak of violence in Ulster...
...Acland's Ghosts," about a mad housewife and her imaginary companions, could be either a feminist case study or a nod to the recent vogue of the occult...
...She feels "that she and Artie might make some kind of marriage together because there was nothing that could be destroyed, no magic or anything else...
...Here, the tennis court perfectly represents all the peacetime amenities that must perish by wartime neglect...
...Ashburton's husband lost his sanity in World War I; the court has stood idle since then, and the grass is a yard high...
...Townspeople even exchange pleasantries with them about the bygone troubles...
...This is small solace compared to Proust's temps retrouve, but Trevor's vision has a beauty and a power of its own...
...With cigarettes and cake and jam, ancient Mrs...
...The author's reserved, exact prose lets him handle this and other potentially sentimental themes and situations without a trace of bathos...
...Acland's Ghosts...
...Trevor has a masterly gift for carefully tracing the effects of large, remote events on the lives of ordinary individuals...
...In "The Tennis Court," the distant past shows its power once again...
...As economic conditions worsen, old memories revive and, eventually, no one speaks to the Middletons...
...Trevor's use of metaphor is sparing but skillful...
...The present, by contrast, tends to be a time of intense loneliness for Trevor's people...
...In Trevor's world the past recaptured may mean a chorus of happy childhood reminiscences signifying a lonely life now, or the return of imaginary childhood companions as symptoms of madness...
...Because of the distant past, they would die friendless," they realize...
...Reviewed by Philip Lemmons A superficial description of William Trevor's third collection of short fiction might give the impression that the author is preoccupied with some of the more widely discussed social upheavals of the last decade...
...Afternoon Dancing" gets in a word about interracial sexual attractions, and "The Distant Past" examines the effects of terrorism in Ulster on people in the Republic of Ireland...
...Stubbornly loyal to England, the Middletons drive into town with a Union Jack in the window of their Ford Anglia on the day of Elizabeth II's coronation...
...A story on wife-swapping in suburbia and another on extramarital affairs in corporate offices both treat aspects of The New Morality...
...He is obsessed with the power of our recolleotions to dominate us: His characters regard what happened long ago as somehow fuller and more vital than the moment being lived...
...Everything seems either dismal or happy in restrospeot" Like the other characters in this volume, Matilda goes on to make her nostalgia precise and uniquely her own: "and the happiness in the farm-house is what I think of first whenever I think now of that particular past...
...In Isfahan" introduces another dimension of Trevor's scheme: It shows us a woman in the act of forming happy memories...
...Enjoyment dies when news comes of the German invasion of Poland...
...They devote themselves to the preservation of Carraveagh, the decaying family home for which neither has attempted to produce an heir...
Vol. 59 • August 1976 • No. 17
