"A Meeting in Middle Age"
Episode one
They tritely say that all journeys begin with a single step, and so we begin this journey through William Trevor’s The Collected Stories with “A Meeting in Middle Age.” Summary: as the title would suggest, a middle-aged man, Mr. Mileson, and a middle-aged woman, Mrs. da Tanka, meet. It becomes clear as the story progresses, that Mr. Mileson has been hired by her solicitor to pretend to be Mrs. da Tanka's lover, so as to expedite an embarrassment-free divorce from her wealthy and influential husband. They travel by train, get a hotel, get drunk and eat dinner, are rude to their waiter, have a long and horrible and insulting fight, and part ways after the return train.
I had a strong suspicion, reading “A Meeting in Middle Age,” that in the past, I’d never made it all the way through the story, perhaps jumping ship after the first page or two. Trevor, in many ways, seems to have appeared on the literary scene fully formed, but this feels like an early effort, clunky for a writer known signally for his lack of clunk. The narrative flits back and forth between Mr. Mileson’s and Mrs. da Tankas’s consciousnesses—a technique Trevor often employs, but in this story, with a nervy unsettled quality like a butterfly refusing to land. The proceedings are additionally clouded by Mr. Mileson’s somewhat dislocated thoughts about his family home, the lease of which he recently let expire as a bachelor with no children. Given the agitated hostility between the principals, the disorientation of the story is arguably intentional, a case of form following function, but the reading experience still suffers. For a fairly short story, it’s difficult to figure out what’s going on.
There are probably also two minor extrinsic reasons for this: one, the mid-century British divorce laws being negotiated in this story are alien and arcane, difficult to intuit. Two, the name Mrs. da Tanka is so odd as to prove—for me—slightly distracting, an additional bit of weirdness compounding the general disorientation.
While "A Meeting in Middle Age" is arguably not the most accomplished story in the Collected, you still get many of the Trevor signatures here: bachelorhood and spinsterhood, folies a deux, the ceaseless encroaching of age, pervading loneliness, and a certain pervading horniness underscoring the pervading loneliness. My impression of Trevor’s reputation in 2021, to the extent that he has one, is of a staid Irishness/Britishness, elegant and understated and perhaps a little boring. The actual is something else—Trevor is very underestimated in the perviness department, and I mean this as a compliment. The specter of sexual frustration, and its expression in the odd momentary leer or ogling, is a productive counterpoint to an otherwise almost impossibly stateliness.
"In 1931," we are told, somewhat out of the blue, "Mr. Mileson had committed fornication with the maid in his parents' house. It was the only occasion, and he was glad that adultery was not expected of him with Mrs. da Tanka. In it, she would be be more experienced than he, and he did not relish the implication. The grill-room was lush and vulgar."
The ending, too, is the archetypal Trevor ending: Mileson returns to his tiny new apartment, and the narrative camera lands on a five-bob note sitting beside the sink, the sum he was paid for his trouble. Trevor’s fiction is very often about diminishment and the acceptance of diminishment—these five pounds represent Mr. Mileson's reduced future, and the story's muted sigh as he does his washing up is perhaps the signature Trevorian tone.
I have tended to think of Trevor's body of work as a monolith, but reading this first story, I'm reminded that, of course, he changed over his decades of work. One of the things I'm looking forward to now, in the course of this project, is reckoning with and tracking the growth of an artist who seems to have sprung full-grown from some obscure literary God's head.
Next week, I’ll be discussing “Access to the Children"—one of Trevor’s best, and one of my all-time favorites stories by any writer. See you then!
I'm curious as to what you make of Mr. Mileson and Mrs. da Tanka's final exchange--about cow-parsley--and their respective thoughts that accompany it. A missed opportunity for connection/meaning amid a rather bitter encounter? And the possibility (my gut inference) that the five-pound cheque (not a five-bob note) on the mantelpiece will consequently remain uncashed? As the story ends I sense something of new self-knowledge rather than diminishment.
I'm excited to find this series of reviews, even if I'm a bit late to the party. I have been an avid reader of William Trevor for many years, and I'm looking forward to this excuse to read through his Collected Stories. The huge volume, printed in 1990, is one I remember borrowing from my mother many years ago. Last year she passed away, and one of the few possessions of hers I took from her empty house was this book, so it reminds me of her.
Anyway, getting down to the first story in the Collected Stories, "A Meeting in Middle Age", I have to say I found it unpleasant. This is surely intentional, because the whole idea of planning an affair, in order to have legal grounds for divorce, is sordid in itself. The added disagreeableness of Mrs. Da Tanka compounds this. Trevor does everything he can to make the reader feel disgust at the situation, from the vulgar grill-room where they have dinner, to the realisation that Mrs. Da Tanka is more overweight than she looks with her clothes on.
There are some details I don't understand. Why did the author choose Da Tanka as the name of the woman? I have no idea where this name is from, or if the woman is supposed to be foreign. It was off-putting for me. Some have commented that it is hard to follow what's going on, with the author switching from one train of thought to another. I didn't find it too bad, because I'm used to how Trevor uses his characters' thoughts to push the narrative forward.
I can't say I enjoyed it, but it isn't supposed to be enjoyable. I generally don't like art to express ugliness, because in my mind that defeats its purpose. If we feel repulsed by a story, why bother to read it in the first place? As far as it goes, the story effectively conveys a sad, sordid meeting of two people in middle age, but it doesn't move me, except making me feel slightly sick, which is not a feeling I relish. I expect far more in the stories to come.