My wife, who was his long-term literary agent, told me that he liked to sit on park benches and eavesdrop on conversations but that he never wanted to listen to a whole story, so would get up and move on as soon as he had heard the small amount he needed to trigger his further imaginings. Was he knighted? Did they make a South Bank Show about him? I met him once, in 1999, after he won the David Cohen prize, but was left with only a strong impression of courtliness, charm and reserve. But I can’t think of any public statement he made, or any cause he publicly adhered to, or any time when the non-literary pages of newspapers were interested in him.
I know that he was of southern Irish Protestant stock that his real name was Trevor Cox that he worked in the same advertising agency as the poet Peter Porter that he took holidays on Porquerolles, a Mediterranean island with no vehicular traffic and that he shared the Irish short story writer’s traditional fate of being called “an Irish Chekhov”. W illiam Trevor is one major writer about whose life I know only odd scraps yet this feels appropriate.
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