Trevor has an abiding fondness for a certain kind of gothic tale featuring a character who is tortured from a young age by a delusion that lasts their entire life. “The Raising of Elvira Tremlett” is another story in the collection of this variety, among several others, including but not limited to: “Mrs. Acland’s Ghosts,” “Matilda’s England,” “The Original Sins of Edward Tripp,” and “The Death of Peggy Meehan.” Writing those out, I notice that they all follow the same naming convention— “A Character’s Problem” or “The Problem of a Character”—and the prepositional/possessive quality often foretells the stories’ narrative tone as well. This is a labored way of saying these kinds of stories—with the exception of “Matilda’s England”—are somewhat dull and not my favorite genre of Trevoriana.
“The Raising of Elvira Tremlett” concerns a nameless narrator describing his childhood and household: his mother and hard-drinking father, womanizing uncle, two older brothers, and two younger sisters. His father and uncle run a successful auto repair shop which the brothers are expected to work at and take over. His sister Effie, who is plain but has a head for numbers, will do the shop’s books, and his pretty sister Kitty will marry well. This leaves the narrator, the black sheep of the family, who is not good at much of anything, feels small and excluded, and develops an imaginary friend named Elvira Tremlett, a British girl who perished 80 years before and whose grave he visits. Elvira goes from friend to lover in the narrator’s mind as he moves through adolescence, and he understandably unnerves his family when he talks with her—notably in one scene, by thanking her for informing him of his true parentage (he imagines that he is actually his uncle’s son, a hypothetical that would explain his excluded status). The delusions sour—Elvira begins visiting him a wizened crone, resentful of his “raising” her from the dead—and he is eventually put in an asylum, the place from which he tells this story. We learn at the end that his story has become a kind of folk tale in his town: the boy who became haunted by a little English girl and went mad.
This précis sounds more interesting than the story itself was to read. I might attribute my boredom to the general preponderance of this premise in Trevor’s stories. Trevor is the master of setting up and managing characters’ delusions, and using delusionality as a narrative engine. In the case of a story like “Access to the Children,” in which we understand both the cause and effect of the delusion, it works marvelously and to shattering effect. But I am less fond of the stories in which the delusion seems to come from nowhere, in which a character’s childhood circumstances cause them to become haunted and go mad, as in the case of “The Death of Peggy Meehan,” wherein the narrator becomes erotically obsessed with the memory of a dead schoolmate. I find this type of story unconvincing. Do people develop strange beliefs and delusions that dog them throughout their days? Yes. Does it happen in this frankly melodramatic manner? In my estimation, no. And this type of paper-thin gothic melodrama feels especially substanceless sequenced directly after a piece of gutting psychological acuity like “Lovers of Their Time.”
This story, and others like it, feels indulgent on Trevor’s part, a kind of empty-calorie treat he allows himself from time to time, and it’s interesting to wonder why. In a sense, I suppose, this kind of tale offers a magnification of the usual elements: the sexless and friendless loner and the delusion that allows them to cope with the hard terms of their life. Stories like “The Raising of Elvira Tremlett” reveal the outer bounds of this set-up’s effectiveness, and also the necessity of the story making contact with the real, or “real,” world.
Needless to say, this is also a matter of personal taste. This genre of story feels to me like an ancient relative to the modern vogue for neat psychological/traumatic explanation of character behavior. I am forever, in my classes, suggesting that students not tie their stories in a bow by telling us (usually at the end) what harm they suffered as a child and/or what psychological problem they suffer from because of it. My objection to this tendency, whether in the current mode or Trevor’s gothic version, is that it’s boring. I want literature to enlarge my sense of humanity, of human variation and behavioral potential. There is, paradoxically, a crucial lack of mystery in these gothic mysteries.
Next time around, “Flights of Fancy.”
The post The William Trevor Reader: “The Raising of Elvira Tremlett” appeared first on The Millions.
Source : The William Trevor Reader: “The Raising of Elvira Tremlett”
