This might receive my vote for the worst story in the collection so far. A number of other candidates spring to mind, many of them of the “People Losing Their Shit at a Party” variety, perhaps just because of the preponderance of that type. “The Blue Dress” should probably be awarded points for at least trying something new, but its execution might be the weakest.
We begin in narrative confusion with the narrator—we come to learn his name is Terris—imprisoned in some kind of room. He briefly talks about women, about political intrigue, Pope Boniface VIII, then goes on to tell the story of his romance with a young woman named Dorothea. Terris, it transpires, was a journalist, and he meets Dorothea while in Bath, where he has come for the funeral of the mother of his ex-wife—his ex-wife, Felicity, who hates him, who cheated on him and mocked his presumably journalistic compulsion to find out secrets. Terris courts Dorothea and meets her parents, the Lysarths, and her protective younger brothers. He intuits something odd about the family, a staginess explained later by Dorothea’s revelation of the story of Agnes Kemp, a girl who died at the family’s house when Dorothea was a child, falling from a forbidden beech tree. Terris gets taken away with Dorothea’s offhanded comment about having hated Agnes Kemp, imagining a vivid scenario in which Dorothea pushes her from the tree, A Separate Peace-style, while the brothers watch, a crime afterward abetted by Dr. Lysarth and covered up until now.
The story ends abruptly, soon after this imagining, and the reader is left to assume what must have happened, some version of Terris becoming increasingly obsessed with his betrothed’s past, getting married to her in spite of it, and eventually having the breakdown that finds him declared unfit by her or her protective family, leaving him in a dismal psychiatric dungeon to write down these tales that no one will read, let alone believe. I found the elision of this inevitable second half both peculiar and relieving—given the progression of several other similar stories in the Collected, I could see it coming and did not relish the imagined denouement. It strikes me that Trevor did not relish writing it, either, and that he got out at the very first opportunity, probably a good move.
This may sound harsh—it may just be the unpleasant refractory mood I’m in after reading this story—but it sometimes strikes me that for a writer justly celebrated for his fine-tuned sense of human psychology, William Trevor was actually pretty bad at writing about mental illness. More than a handful of stories in the Collected depend on versions of insanity that feel pulled from some Victorian monograph about hysteria or melancholia. He is especially prone to positing characters who suffer ruination on account of some decades-long idée fixe. Likewise, he is fond of the asylum, prisons physical or imagined, oubliettes where these unfortunates are stuck for the remainder of their lives. Many of these are stories written and set in the nineteen-eighties and later, making these gothic flourishes even more anachronistic. This is not to say that mentally ill people were (or are) treated humanely in the modern era, just that the Arkham Asylum routine simply does not feel historically accurate, let alone convincing.
None of it, for me, convinces. I do not believe in these mad lifelong delusions. They strike me as, more than anything, a convenient narrative conceit, and a grandiose magnification of Trevor’s preoccupation with the smaller delusions that allow people to survive their difficult lives. The latter is the thematic mainstay of his best fiction, really most of his fiction, and so I suppose what I’m complaining about here are the places where this theme gets away from him, or perhaps when he overindulges the impulse. In the case of “The Blue Dress,” I simply cannot see where an otherwise seemingly sane and well-employed middle-aged journalist would, by virtue of a single story and image, become a kind of Fortunato immured in the walls of his memory. I cannot see it, and judging by this story’s lack of follow-through, I think Trevor could not, either.
This will be the last installment of the William Trevor Reader for 2022. I am taking December off to make room for a month’s worth of delightful Year in Readings. Thanks to everyone who has been following this project—we’ll start up again in 2023 with “The Teddy-bears’ Picnic.”
