For this week’s installment, I want to talk about alcohol—its role in Trevor’s fiction and fiction in general. Without bothering to thumb back through The Collected to check, I would estimate that alcohol appears in 80 to 90 percent of the stories and features dramatically in maybe a third of them, possibly more. By “features dramatically,” I mean that alcohol somehow causes characters to behave in ways they wouldn’t otherwise, that it drives character action. Offhand, “Kinkies,” “The Mark-2 Wife,” “The Ballroom of Romance,” “The Original Sins of Edward Tripp,” “The Day We Got Drunk on Cake,” “The Penthouse Apartment,” “The General’s Day,” “Memories of Youghal,” and “Access to the Children” all in one way or another turn on a character behaving erratically under the influence. And, forgive the national stereotyping, most of these stories, fittingly, take place in Ireland.
When I was an undergrad, a writing teacher of mine once delivered a polemic against using alcohol in stories. This rant was likely incited by a short story workshop of mine, as I was very into whiskey-soaked southern male authors at the time: namely, the quintessential trio of Larry, Barry, and Harry (McMurtry, Hannah, and Crews, respectively). My teacher said, essentially, that it is lazy, and false, to use alcohol as motivation. Motivation must come from the character themselves. Alcohol might be an amplifier or inhibitor, but it cannot be motivation.
In Trevor’s stories, alcohol mostly used as either delusion-fuel or delusion-solvent. “Access to the Children” provides a powerful example of the former as, over the course of the story, Malcolmson drinks himself into a state of sufficient dimness to be able to accept his fantasies as real. An example of the latter might be “The Mark-2 Wife,” in which Anna speed-drinks her way into a kind of horrible communicative lucidity about her husband’s infidelity. In both cases, the delusions exist prior to the drink, ready to be alternately enlarged or expunged. This, I think, is crucial—his characters don’t develop or dissolve their fantasies because of alcohol, but alcohol is the catalyst for these moments to occur.
This week’s story, “Office Romances,” contains both versions of the role of alcohol, in the forms of Angela Hosford and Pam Ivygale. Angela, the story’s main character, has just been hired as a secretary at the firm C.S. & E., and is taken out to the office’s pub by Gordon Spelle, one of the owners. There, she meets the middle-aged Miss Ivygale, her immediate superior, and Miss Ivygale’s longtime lover, Alec Hemp, another C.S. & E. higher-up. Over the course of the night, everyone gets extremely drunk, the married Mr. Spelle hits on Angela, and Mr. Hemp goes home with Miss Ivygale. The next day, at work, Mr. Spelle professes his love to Angela, who has sex with him in Miss Ivygale’s office. We leave Angela at the pub that evening, sitting beside Miss Ivygale—Mr. Spelle and Hemp having gone home to their wives—and find the two women in respective moods of delusional joy and undeluded misery.
With his usual aplomb, Trevor slips us into the consciousness of Pam Ivygale who is given the honor of delivering the Trevorian coup-de-grace:
And in the end, when Angela asked Miss Ivygale why it was that Gordon Spelle had picked her out, Miss Ivygale replied that it was because Gordon Spelle loved her. What else could she say? Miss Ivygale asked herself. How could she say that everyone knew Gordon Spelle chose girls who were unattractive because he believed such girls, deprived of sex for long periods at a time, were an easier bet?
Angela drunkenly exclaims “Oh, it’s beautiful!” and the narration continues:
Miss Ivygale did not say anything in reply. She was fifty and Angela was twenty-six: that made a difference where knowing what was beautiful was concerned. The thing about Gordon Spelle was that with the worst possible motives he performed an act of charity for the girls who were his victims. He gave them self-esteem and memories to fall back on… in a way, it was [beautiful] compared with what she had herself. She’d been aware for twenty-three years of being used by the man she loved: self-esteem and memories were better than knowing that, no matter how falsely they came.
We end with Miss Ivygale ordering another round for them, cementing their respective realities. As is usual in Trevor, delusion is posited as superior to realism. Miss Ivygale’s point-of-view is, I think, the authorial point-of-view. In Trevor’s stories, characters are never better off for seeing things clearly. After all, Angela Hosford cannot much change her circumstances materially: she is unattractive, uneducated, and timid. The months at C.S. &E. during which she will be allowed the fantasy of the elegant Gordon Spelle very well might be the most romantic months of her life, a memory she can take with her as her life proceeds in whatever dismal manner it will. In the absence of options and agency, what we have is fantasy, and drinks.
Up next: “Mr. McNamara!”
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