The William Trevor Reader: “Children of the Headmaster”

As I near the end of this project—one essay to go!—I find myself searching for simple truths about Trevor’s canon that I have not repeated ad nauseam over the last two years. Reading “Children of the Headmaster,” I was struck by Trevor’s presentation of yet another ruinously proud, mildly sadistic, and borderline incompetent central male figure; my mind reached back for sympathetic male characters in the previous 83 stories and, in fact, found precious few. The Trevoeuvre is filled with fools, failures, and outright villains. It would actually be easier to name the men who are not horrible: Mr. Dukelow in “A Choice of Butchers,” Francis in “Death in Jerusalem,” and Davy Toome in “Honeymoon in Tramore”—the list dwindles sharply thereafter.

Mr. Arbuary (great name, btw, combining “arbitrary” and “actuary” to suggest the man’s brittle officiousness) in “Children of the Headmaster” is the head of a fledgling boarding school he and Mrs. Arbuary started after receiving an unexpected bequest from Mrs. Arbuary’s aunt. Mr. Arbuary had an unexceptional police career in Hong Kong, and the money allowed him to start over, putting his belief in the superiority of the disciplined old ways into action and, of course, centralizing himself as a person of importance and authority. The students find him risible despite the success of the school, calling him “Cuthbert” behind his back, and Mrs. Arbuary “The Hen,” owing to her nervous unhappiness in this new, unhappy venture. Mr. Arbuary’s son Jonathan, enrolled in the school and all too aware of the mockery of his family—including the sexual targeting of his three sisters—wants to communicate to his hapless father the position he’s put them all in, but standing in the man’s office, watching Cuthbert wreathed by pompous pipe smoke as he plans the semester, Jonathan finds himself unable to stand up to his father.

“Children of the Headmaster” is a direct descendent of “The Grass Widows,” another headmaster tale and perhaps the apotheosis of Trevor’s view of the male species. One resists calling William Trevor a feminist—his view of male/female relationships is resolutely apolitical and almost premodern, and, to be fair, his women tend to be terrible themselves: vain, venal, anxious, grasping, and often in complete despair. It might be more fair to say that Trevor’s body of work issues a kind of blanket vote of no-confidence in men: on the male project, on the male ego, on male desire, on the patriarchy, big business, marriage, fatherhood—indeed, virtually anything directly correlated with men and what men want is weighed and found wanting in Trevor’s minutely sensitive authorial palm.

The closest a male protagonist really gets to sympathetic in the Trevoeuvre is pathetic. Davy Toome, in “Honeymoon at Tramore,” is perhaps the best version of a man The Collected has to offer. Davy is sensitive, kind, and fully aware of his station. An orphan plucked from a home, with no horizons and no illusions: this is the ideal Trevor man. As I have written about many times, Trevor’s stories often end with the destruction of illusions, and so a man with no pretenses about himself, indeed, a man with no hopes, is the purest and gentlest form masculinity can assume. Hope always presents itself as delusion in the Trevoeuvre, and delusion–given masculine energy and prerogative–is almost always toxic. Women are safeguarded from this particular form of banal villainy for the simple fact that—due to both actual sexual politics and the fact that Trevor’s stories always feel set around 1954 or so—they usually have little authority, no real way to enact their grasping, misguided egos as cruelty. Mrs. Arbuary, “The Hen,” can only watch her husband and despair—hearing about the transfer of a student’s father to another country, she fantasizes idly about the failure of his miserable life’s lone success:

With a bit of luck, all the other parents might give notice also. Again, and again, that very afternoon, the telephone might ring, and the news would be that father after father had been posted to distant parts. The school would close.