Trevor and Parker: Self-Interest as Subject, Essay Example

As acknowledged masters of the short story form, William Trevor and Dorothy Parker reflect vastly disparate worlds. Their epochs, backgrounds and styles differ in virtually all aspects of their work, yet the commonality of achieving excellence in a genuine reflection of human dilemma remains evident. Parker’s earlier and exclusively New York-based reign as a writer was characterized by cosmopolitan archness and drollery; Trevor’s ongoing and expansive body of short story work far more subtly seeks to expose surprising depths within the most ordinary of lives. The two authors nonetheless strove to highlight truth, in their respective fashions.

Famed for her comic turns in the medium, Parker occasionally ventured into dramatic terrain in her stories, and ‘Big Blonde’ stands out as perhaps her most successful effort. It is with her story, ‘Mr. Durant’, however, that we are concerned. In this early short work, Parker takes the reader through an evening in the life of the title character. He is a modestly successful businessman, married and a father, and he is set out before us from the start as a calculated and utterly self-absorbed man. The body of the story reveals his inner musings on a recently averted disaster; having impregnated a girl at his office, he was confounded by her romantics leanings and less than cooperative in removing this new obstacle from Mr. Durant’s carefully preserved life. When the girl, Rose, reveals her condition to him, he “…wished to God that he had never seen her. He explained this desire to her” (Parker 67).

Ultimately, the situation is neatly attended to and the remainder of the story concerns itself with a more minor demonstration of Durant’s emotional tyranny, as he prepares to lie to his children about the disappearance of the puppy he has led them to believe they can keep. The tale concludes with the hero exulting in his skills at maintaining his equanimity in a world which demands much of him.

Also revolving around self-interest, though with a far broader scope, William Trevor’s ‘A Dream of Butterflies’ tells the story of a British couple unwillingly visited, time and again, by a leading physician. This doctor has been trying desperately to purchase a local home to serve as a residence for the mentally distressed women in his care; the town has resisted this and nearly driven him away, yet he senses a sympathy within the wife he so continually tries to persuade. In her thoughts she is kind, and fair: “You could not build a wall around a pretty village and say that nothing unpleasant should be permitted in it” (Trevor 702). The story concludes with the doctor’s imminent victory. This couple, the weak link, will enable the asylum. True to a larger reality, the man and wife so compliant hate the doctor for bringing them to this humanity, as they know they will be reviled in the town by lifelong friends.

Both stories center around selfishness of a kind. Mr. Durant is a cruel and manipulative man who sincerely believes himself to be otherwise; the villagers in Trevor’s story are not monstrous, but they are so desperate to hold onto their ideal way of life that they devise rationales to excuse the blatant self-interest motivating their obstinacy. Thus do both stories treat an issue of universal appeal, that of pursuing selfish ends, and to what extent such a pursuit may be justified. The difference between them, and why Trevor succeeds where Parker fails, lies both in each writer’s goals and degree of talent.

It is no slur to assert that Parker was, first and foremost, a humorist, and one who specialized in sarcasm. Her life and her work are inextricably linked, and the surviving representation of both is a study in satire and cynicism. She almost always kept things light in her work because she feared venturing into a Thackeray terrain, where satire must rise to the levels of real literature. By rarely trying too hard, she shielded herself from criticisms of going too far.

Parker, however, was a true cynic, and a moralist lives in the heart of the cynic. ‘Mr. Durant’ is cold but it is not lifeless, and the life is achieves is through the author’s obvious disdain for her hero. She never insults him, but she so clearly despises him, and perhaps for no mysterious reasons:  “One of Parker’s biographers, Marion Meade, claims that the character of Mr. Durant is based on Charles MacArthur, a lover of Parker’s who left her after she became pregnant…” (Pettit 326).  Whatever the cause, she so unfailingly presents him as an abomination of a man that her aim falls short. In ‘Mr. Durant’, Dorothy Parker created a deft and skillfully done exercise in composition, but one that is too one-dimensional to appeal to much more in the way of sensibility than an equal dislike of the title character. Effect is had, but a universal and more profound chord is never touched.

William Trevor, however, distinguished and with decades of honing his craft behind him, opens up entire galaxies within ‘A Dream of Butterflies’, and manages to convey a sense of all the many layers composing what we so ordinarily perceive as simple self-interest. If there is a single hallmark to be seen in Trevor, it is that nothing is quite as plain as you would believe it to be. Astonishingly, he accomplishes this expansion of scope through the most diminutive of landscapes, and with the fewest characters.

His story takes the reader with exquisite subtlety through stages of understanding. An elderly couple is eager to sell their home and move to warm climate; a prestigious doctor wants badly to take the home for his patients; the town desires nothing change; and the central couple in the scenario want nothing more than to appease, and do the right thing by everybody. It is in fact their lack of self-interest that places them in the most difficult position. All the other players possess agendas, and by no means ‘selfish’ ones. Each sincerely believes in the rightness of what they want. This is real and human complexity, and it demands an artist of Trevor’s gifts to translate it effectively and movingly. It also requires diligence; Trevor himself states, “I find that in a lot of my stories I’m investigating the same theme to see what happens a second or third, or fourth and fifth, time” (Malcolm, Malcolm 485).

If universality of appeal, the power to touch many, is a criterion of short story excellence, it must follow that degree of artistry of the writer ultimately dictates the range of the power. In ‘Mr. Durant’, Dorothy Parker puts forth a precisely carved slice of self-interest and leaves it there to be seen as, in this instance, it horribly is. Trevor, the higher artist, unfolds. He describes a scenario which could be drawn in equally broad strokes, but he is incapable of not examining further, and in compelling the reader to more deeply consider how self-interest, on a scale grand or small, motivates all of us.

Score = 72

This is a surprisingly sophisticated discussion of these two authors…but it is not entirely consistent with the assignment. One of the works (not both) should clarify how it is in line with Samuel Johnson’s “just representation of general nature” (and you do not mention Johnson or cite his statement—which is the catalyst for the discussion); the second work is supposed NOT to be consistent with Johnson’s requirement for a work that would “please many and please long”…but might, in your opinion, still accomplish that.

Works Cited

Malcolm, Cheryl Alexander, and David Malcolm. A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2008. Print.

Parker, Dorothy  The Portable Dorothy Parker. New York, NY: Viking, 1944. Print.

Pettit, Rhonda S.  The Critical Waltz: Essays on the Work of Dorothy Parker.  2005. Cranbury,  NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005. Print.

Trevor, William The Collected Stories of William Trevor. New York, NY: Penguin, 1992. Print.