As I mentioned in a previous installment, there’s a compelling argument to be made—I’m making it, in other words—that William Trevor’s fiction is essentially queer fiction. His characters are usually outsiders in some way—economically, culturally, religiously, and more often than not, sexually. They are lifelong virgins, perverse fetishists, religious-erotic obsessives, self-loathing fantasists, or several of the above; when Trevor writes about a straight, sexually mainstream character, as in “Angels at the Ritz” or “Lovers of Their Time,” it is almost always in the context of infidelity. And as in the case of “The Grass Widows,” straight married life is depicted, at best, as grimly stultifying. One of the really interesting things about this project has been to realize that the old codger in the fisherman’s hat was producing a body of quietly transgressive work that takes as one of its main subjects and themes the violence of heteronormativity.
That said, for all its arguable queerness, the Trevor canon does not feature many explicitly gay characters. “Flights of Fancy” is the second in the collection and the first to feature a homosexual protagonist: Sarah Machaen is 47, plain and single, never married and never sexually touched. She works as an executive secretary for a successful man at a company that manufactures high-end lighting fixtures and makes good money. She has friends she enjoys visiting, has interests and pursuits—in many ways, hers is a good life. But she is lonely, of course, and that loneliness is given dramatic form in the person of Sandra Pond. Sandra, a low-level employee at the company, introduces herself to Sarah at the annual Christmas party. Sandra demands they drink together, talks about hating the men at the company (who do seem uniformly awful), and then leaves. The exchange is intense and unsettling, and it becomes clarified when, several weeks later, Sandra drops a letter off for Sarah explaining that she’s a lesbian, and she thought Sarah was, as well. Sarah, of course, likely is a lesbian, on a deeply repressed level, and she cannot prevent herself from having titular “flights of fancy” about the girl. The story ends with Sandra following Sarah to a shop and apologizing, and Sarah almost, but not quite, asking the girl to coffee.
The really touching aspect of this story is that Sarah’s motivation goes beyond repressed homosexuality—Sandra wants her and Sarah wants to be wanted. She will be old soon, without having ever experienced love or sexual expression. In one of her so-called flights of fancy, she imagines being undressed by Sandra Pond:
“I really do love you, Sarah,” the slack voice said, as it had said in the letter, as no other voice had ever said. The passion had a cloying kind of headiness about it, like drunkenness. It was adoration, the girl said, whispering now: it was adoration for every inch of skin and every single hair that grew from Sarah’s body and every light in her eyes, and the beauty of her plainness.
Trevor’s penchant for depictions of lifelong delusion—a narrative tic that sometimes feels forced—works well in this piece, given how repressed many people 50 years ago were about homosexuality. Entire lives were spent, wasted, in concealment, from others and from oneself. It is, in fact, a curious aspect of mid-twentieth century fiction, how much of the best of it was powered by (homo)sexual repression. From Iris Murdoch’s The Bell to The Talented Mr. Ripley to L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between—many of my favorite books from this era draw great energy, as Trevor does in “Flights of Fancy,” from the power of unexpressed sexuality. Few things provide more narrative tension and motivation than the bottling up of sexuality, but the larger point is that as writers, we should be alert and responsive to these places of withholding. Great fiction thrives on secrets and secret-keeping, the secrets we keep from others and most crucially, from ourselves.
The post The William Trevor Reader: “Flights of Fancy” appeared first on The Millions.
