The William Trevor Reader: “Mr. Tennyson”

This is a slight one, though nice, I think. The plot summary can be delivered in the space of two sentences: Mr. Tennyson, an English teacher, is notorious for an affair he once had with one of his students, Sarah Spence, and is rumored to have had others. Jenny, the main character, wants to be Mr. Tennyson’s next affair, but she is rebuffed, just as she rebuffs the love of a boy who loves her. The story creates little parallel lines of rejections, and of people made ridiculous by their love: just as Sarah Spence makes Mr. Tennyson ridiculous, he makes Jenny ridiculous; just as Mr. Tennyson makes Jenny ridiculous, she makes her paramour Chinny Martin ridiculous, and so on. The point of the story—i.e. that everyone is someone’s fool, and that Jenny does not yet understand this—is extremely simple, but the brevity of the piece works to its advantage; its seven pages has the aesthetic effect of a good watercolor, a few deftly executed lines conveying scene and (downcast) mood. 

With relatively little to interpret, I want to examine a small move Trevor makes, and what its purpose in “Mr. Tennyson” might be. In the course of describing Jenny’s home life, Trevor introduces us to her parents. They discuss Jenny’s moodiness and the narrative gives us this paragraph:

He sighed. He was a painter and decorator, with his own business, Jenny was their only child. There’d been four miscarriages, all of which might have been boys, which naturally were what he wanted, with the business. He’d have to sell it one day, but it didn’t matter all that much when you thought about it. Having miscarriages was worse than selling a business, more depressing really. A woman’s lot was harder than a man’s, he’d decided long ago.

This paragraph is noteworthy, in the first place, for the move into the POV of Jenny’s father. As I have discussed in previous installments, Trevor is virtually sui generis in his ability and willingness to travel in and out of various characters’ minds in third person, flitting here and there like a butterfly in a strong breeze. This move is particularly interesting when the narrative takes place almost entirely in one character’s mind, but not quite, as is the case with “Mr. Tennyson.” That we are otherwise limited to Jenny’s POV makes the brief view through he father’s eyes mildly jarring in a way it is not in a story with more catholicity of perspective. Why does Trevor do this?

One interpretation would be that Jenny’s father’s surprising empathy obliquely, or perhaps not so obliquely, comments on the relative lack of empathy in the story, especially on the part of Mr. Tennyson. Mr. Tennyson, as he tells Jenny, is still in love with Sarah Spence, who had an abortion and is now away at university. We are given to know that he tacitly encourages crushes among his girl students, so he can talk to them, and to feel better about himself; in a similar fashion, Chinny Martin’s protestations of anguished and unwanted love make Jenny feel better, as well. But Jenny is 16 and Mr. Tennyson is 40. He has been made immature by his affair—“silly with his silly love,” as Jenny thinks of Chinny’s advances. Our little sojourn in Jenny’s father’s head gives us the perspective of an adult human, who has, in contrast, been given something like wisdom by the experience of loving another person.