'Kilmalough won't know itself': William Trevor's 'The Ballroom of Romance' as Cold War Fiction

Abstract

Despite the recent attention of historians to the influence of Cold War politics in and on Ireland, literary scholarship has been more reticent when it comes to reading mid-century Irish writing as part of a broader international field of Cold War fiction. While some work has been conducted to situate individual writers, such as Samuel Beckett and John Banville, within an international political milieu, this essay proposes that the Cold War had a much broader impact on Irish writing than has previously been considered. This essay wades into the possibilities of this proposed area of interest through a reading of the Cold War political undercurrents moving within William Trevor’s 1972 short story ‘The Ballroom of Romance’. The story of Bridie’s disappointing evening in the eponymous dancehall has largely been read as an examination of rural disillusionment within an Ireland facing economic and cultural stagnation. Yet American influence suffuses the story. On the one hand, that influence can be felt in the presence of American cultural importation, or ‘soft power’; on the other hand, that influence can be found in the allusions to the shift in Irish economic policy in the mid-twentieth century away from protectionism and towards foreign investment. The most prominent dream amongst the locals who gather at the Ballroom of Romance – the rumours of American investment in a concrete factory in Kilmalough – places Trevor’s story firmly within the politics of global capitalism at the height of the Cold War in the early 1970s. Recognising that ‘Americanisation’ is bound up with Cold War policy affords the opportunity to read the dreams of rural Ireland within the context of global politics – and the failure of these dreams suggests that the reach of Trevor’s criticism need not necessarily be limited to boundaries of county and nation.