Old school ties

by William Trevor

146 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

William Trevor, KBE grew up in various provincial towns and attended a number of schools, graduating from Trinity College, in Dublin, with a degree in history. He first exercised his artistry as a sculptor, working as a teacher in Northern Ireland and then emigrated to England in search of work when the school went bankrupt. He could have returned to Ireland once he became a successful writer, he said, "but by then I had become a wanderer, and one way and another, I just stayed in England ... I hated leaving Ireland. I was very bitter at the time. But, had it not happened, I think I might never have written at all."

In 1958 Trevor published his first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, to little critical success. Two years later, he abandoned sculpting completely, feeling his work had become too abstract, and found a job writing copy for a London advertising agency. 'This was absurd,' he said. 'They would give me four lines or so to write and four or five days to write it in. It was so boring. But they had given me this typewriter to work on, so I just started writing stories. I sometimes think all the people who were missing in my sculpture gushed out into the stories.' He published several short stories, then his second and third novels, which both won the Hawthornden Prize (established in 1919 by Alice Warrender and named after William Drummond of Hawthornden, the Hawthornden Prize is one of the UK's oldest literary awards). A number of other prizes followed, and Trevor began working full-time as a writer in 1965.

Since then, Trevor has published nearly 40 novels, short story collections, plays, and collections of nonfiction. He has won three Whitbread Awards, a PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1977 Trevor was appointed an honorary (he holds Irish, not British, citizenship) Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to literature and in 2002 he was elevated to honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE). Since he began writing, William Trevor regularly spends half the year in Italy or Switzerland, often visiting Ireland in the other half. He lived in Devon, in South West England, on an old mill surrounded by 40 acres of land.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the flyleaf on the cover of the 1976 Lemon Tree hardback edition of this book:

"William Trevor admits to an obsession with schools, and certainly the horrors and accidendental pleasures of the classroom and dorm is a theme he has returned to again and again in his enormously successful books and TV plays.

"OLD SCHOOL TIES is a unique collection of William Trevor's school writings. A fascinating blend of fiction and fact, it combines stories and episodes fro the Trevor novels, with hitherto unpublished material on the author's own school days both as a pupil and as reluctant prep school master. The reader is cordially invited to renew acquaintances with such memorable pedagogues as the eminently severe Mr. Dowse from THE OLD BOYS, and the pottily punitive crammer, Digby Hunter, from O FAT WHITE WOMAN: not to mention the highly liberal Mr . O'Hennessy from THE CHILDREN OF DYNMOUTH. At the same time OLD SCHOOL TIES will introduce you to many new Trevor characters, fictional and real (in the extra-ordinary world of school the dividing line is often perilously thin). In fact in the INSATIABLE ROACHE-QUINN, the centre-piece of this volume, you will encounter a character with all the qualifications for immortality in the literature of schools.

"If you loved your school days-or look back on them with undiluted horror-OLD SCHOOL TIES is compulsory reading."

I have quoted so extensively from the book's synopsis because there is none on GR and when I bought a copy I thought I was buying a collection of Trevor's short stories with a school setting-this is not such a collection. This is something different - if William Trevor was younger or was writing in French this might have been hailed as an early work of Meta fiction because of its use of fiction to illuminate episodes from Trevor's real life and experience - as it is English reviewers more properly saw it as a mixture of memoir and quotes from his fiction not a new literary form.

I found this short work vastly entertaining - the only problem is that almost any writing about English prep schools (for those who don't know the difference between UK and USA prep schools I suggest making use of Google) is that Evelyn Waugh in 'Decline and Fall so definitively caricatured an institution always perilously close to the absurd that all writing, even memoir writing like Trevor's 'The Insatiable Roache-Quinn' cannot compete.

The real pity is that this collection of school tales was compiled before Trevor wrote, or at least published 'Torridge' one of three best bits of writing on English boarding school life (the others are 'Lord Dismiss Us' by Michael Campbell and 'The Old Boys' by Patrick Gale).

If you already know and enjoy Trevor's work then you must add this to your bookshelves. If you have yet to discover Trevor - and he writes brilliantly on much more than schools - search out his novels and short story collections - you a great treats in store once you do.

For reference in my reviews: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/bo...