NONFICTION - Feb. 13, 1994

EXCURSIONS IN THE REAL WORLD: Memoirs by William Trevor. (Knopf: $23.) You’ll pick your own favorites in this collection of memories from Trevor’s life as a schoolboy in Dublin, a teacher at a questionable prep school, a copywriter and a traveler. And damn if he hasn’t got an Irishman’s double vision: one eye on the horizon and one eye on the change in your pocket. One piece in particular, “New York, 1973,” exemplifies this ability to be everywhere all at once, to see things going on downtown, uptown, crosstown, in Central Park and in the Chemical Bank on Delancy Street. You’re reeling through a New York day and Trevor somehow gets you into a taxi going from P.J. Clarke’s to a hotel near Times Square, wondering about the difference between what you want and what you’ve got. His portraits, particularly of women, from Siri von Essen, the wife of August Strindberg, to Assai, confused in love, to Sarzy, whose heart was in the right place, to the headmaster’s wife with a double life, are so full of tenderness and the essential goodness of people in their secret hearts that they add to the point of living. But with all this bustle and movement, Trevor’s memories of Ireland are surprisingly chaste and slow. It is, in fact, as though he were writing about his mother, staring out the window, chin in hand.