The beauty of customary phenomena is that they have a temporal duration limited to the historical moment in which they occur. Once that moment is over, they change in meaning, or fall into disgrace and are forgotten. Typically, this doesn’t happen without a reason. For this reason, if you were to ask a guy in the middle of the street today what the noun, but also the sound, corresponds to “trilby”, a hat would answer, even ugly if desired: it has a truncated conical shape, the short brim lowered at the front and raised at the back; it has come back into fashion a few years ago and we really don’t understand the reasons, given that it gives everyone the cool look (in the fifties it was Monsieur Hulot’s hatthere is no need to add anything else).
The protagonist of George du Maurier’s novel gave her name to the popular hat. This remains of the first bestseller in history
The English define it as a “gentleman’s fedora”, and the singular fact is that both, fedora and trilby, owe their name to the costume of the theatrical adaptation of a very successful text from the end of the 19th century: Fedora from a written drama by Victorien Sardou for Sarah Bernhardt, who at the time had already entered the queer phase of her clothing, which she generally designed with the help of some great tailor of the time, often Charles Frederick Worth; Trilby from the name of the protagonist, and from the title, of the first truly popular bestseller in history. It was written by George du Maurier, grandfather of Daphne, future author of “Rebecca” and “Cousin Rachel”, who in his youth had been a painter of high hopes and little money in Paris and in his more mature age, also due to the loss of his sight left-eyed, author of satirical cartoons and costumes for “Punch”. He came to writing at an even older age and in poor health, obviously drawing on the vivid memories of youth: if an entire generation was seduced by the myth of bohème it was not only through the stories of Henri Murger which inspired Giacomo Puccini, but for this novel which, two years before the opera was staged, sold two hundred thousand copies in the United States alone, an enormity in a largely illiterate country without even the money to change your shirt, giving rise to a true “trilbymania”. The hat is the last vestige of this, along with a significant amount of racist stereotypes about Jews, minorities and, it goes without saying, women, which, combined with the unforgettable quality of the writing, make “Trilby” the perfect example of a Victorian popular novel which no longer makes sense to read today, unless you want to verify how social and ethnic prejudice arises and forms.
“Trilby” gives life to Svengali, the evil, dirty, cunning and manipulative Ashkenazi Jew, obviously equipped with a Lombrosian hooked nose
It is one of the many texts that codifies the implacable impossibility of redemption for a poor and “fallen” woman, as they said then, but it is in particular the novel that gives life to Svengali, the evil, dirty, cunning and manipulator, obviously equipped with a Lombrosian hooked nose, traces of which still exist even in American legal jargon: a “svengali” is the action of someone who, finding himself in a position of superiority, controls subordinate people with malicious intent. Its author depicts it in the book as a hairy spider. In Italy, incredibly but also fortunately, no one had felt the need to translate this text from the time of its first publication in 1894 until a month ago, when Gallucci editore, founded by former colleague Carlo dell’Espresso, distributed it in translation by Pierdomenico Baccalario, very successful author of children’s books also under the pseudonym of Ulysses Moore, so much so that the majority of bookshops, generally managed by non-readers like the vast majority of his customers, have placed this concentration of mystifications among the albums with ducklings and pigs with twisted tails. When I asked for a copy at the bookshop of the Auditorium in Rome while I was waiting for Semyon Bychkov to conduct Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, the clerk who was looking for its location on the computer, a rare case of a literature expert, looked at me desolate. We only have one copy, he said before handing it to me; surely, he added, he shouldn’t be there.
In reality the author also mocked the vainglory of the British, their misplaced sense of racial superiority
There are nineteenth-century novels that have survived the evolution of history unscathed and which, indeed, seem more modern today than when they were written, for example “The Betrothed”; others who have undergone happy reductions for children, see “The Three Musketeers” or “Alice in Wonderland”. “Trilby” was not a children’s book at the time, much less is it now in the woke era, which may well be a hypocritical current of thought, subject in turn to historical simplifications and dangerous backlashes, but which, like any another phenomenon, represents its own era, that is, a widely widespread feeling. A small dose of woke is part of the minimum codes of the evolution of Western society: already in the eighteenth century, for example, Pietro Aretino’s vulgarities against women were poorly tolerated. “Trilby”, naturally, is not a harbinger of the world as General Vannacci dreams of and not even a representation of the protocol of the elders of Zion; its author, indeed, ridiculed the vainglory of the British, their misplaced sense of racial superiority in his cartoons, which moreover are still on sale on certain specialized sites for lovers of Victorian paraphernalia, with their original title, Victorian too: “The degenerate daughter”, “The arrival of the sewing machine”, “The consolation of tobacco”, opium of the very poor, depicted as an evil siren, that is, a monstrous woman and it could not be otherwise in the period of femmes fatales, as he breathes the last poison into the mouths of a crowd of ghosts. But he was still a man of his time, not particularly open, seduced like all his contemporaries by hypnotism, so the very questionable operation of removal, cleaning, remise en forma politiquement correcte of the original text practiced by Baccalario and Gallucci did not it changes the meaning, if anything it makes everything even more questionable and smoky and incongruous, like Roald Dahl’s texts after the corrections imposed by the Puffin publishing house which distorted their power. Instead of expunging the references to Svengali’s origins, which however remain recognisable, and lightening the references to the profession of grisettes to make the text a hypothetically attractive novel “for young people because it speaks above all about them and the desire to enjoy everything that the world has to offer”, as Gallucci wrote to me from abroad and it is a shame that we were unable to talk to each other, because I don’t know a single boy today who would be seduced by the story of these cold and smoky attics, of these wines with added and of these indigestible foods without an explanation, it would have been a more worthy and honest operation to make the book a contemporary editorial initiative, with a real critical apparatus, marginal notes and a precise location of the historical period in which it was produced, adding the reasons for its success, the poor waste that has come down to us, and even the madness it produced, including the suicide of a guy who, in the United States, had read the book and was convinced that he had been “mesmerized” by Svengali.
Contrary to what Emanuele Coccia and Alessandro Michele write in their “Life of forms. Philosophy of reenchantment”, bestseller of the moment with presentations of adoring crowds for the former Gucci wizard now working on Valentino under the very watchful eye of the CEO Jacopo Venturini, “the difficulty and toxicity of the relationships of our world” they derive at all from “having lost the pleasure and taste of grasping the plurality of faces that every life manifests”. That fabulous golden age in which “being ambiguous means simultaneously being more than one thing” and for this being recognized and celebrated, has never existed, and three thousand years of representations and written literature are there to prove it. The different has always been depicted, yes, but to be mocked, excluded, stigmatized. Even when bourgeois, inserted into society and famous, the foreign characters who appear in “Trilby” are characterized as strangers even in the phonetic transcription of speech: they speak in gutturals, underlined in italics. “Qvesta”, “sighnorina”, “ciofane”. In short, they are “other” compared to good British subjects of high moral principles. Du Maurier knew his compatriots well and understood not only their cultural backwardness and patriotic rhetoric, but also their weaknesses and curiosities. “Trilby” represents the sum of the thought of its time, one of those feuilletons mixed with sex, murky atmospheres and hypnotism, which were all the rage at the time like séances, the ghosts of opera and the fascination for elsewhere which, in its best literary declinations, it had already given life to symbolism and Mallarmé. This kind of literature was instead destined to confirm the coarse palates in their own granite certainties, and was redundant in the description of minutiae, specific like a morning police report, chatty and gossipy like a gossip. People devoured it in installments in magazines, in this case in “Harper’s new monthly magazine”, waiting to be able to purchase the complete copy, expunged by the author of all the repetitions and addendums (the beautiful and the rare, today, are instead precisely the original collated copies, with the summaries of the “previous episodes”).
Prejudices and mystifications do not travel on the carriage of official doctrine; they go to the theater with their hair on their feet under the mask of the Maccio, and therefore Svengali, who not by chance would become a central character of German expressionist cinema and immediately after of the American one which looked at Nazi Europe with apprehension mixed with curiosity (John Barrymore gave him the face), represents the less tormented and more schematic evolution of Shylock. Like Doctor Caligari, the rabbi creator of the Golem, the scientist of Maria of Metropolis, Svengali is the man of the occult, dominant, who subjugates his victims through black magic and optical tricks, in his case the beautiful Trilby, by profession washerwoman but also model “for everything”, who becomes a world-famous opera singer thanks to her occult arts and dies upon her death. He is the irrational figure who hatches shady plots, and at the same time a highly cultured, seductive man, a great musician, versed in languages, capable of enriching himself but aware of the possibility of returning poor when people wake up from his hypnotic spell. This is the Jew in the reading that has been given of him in Europe since the Middle Ages, and this is Svengali, that is, the Jew at maximum power, the Jew for export, for the entire first thirty years of the twentieth century. Therefore, Gallucci is right when he writes to me that “without ‘Trilby’, films like ‘Moulin Rouge’ would never have existed”, but I am not at all sure that Svengali can simply be equated with a “toxic personality” or, again, that failure to translate into Italian up to now is attributable to “excessive prudery”. It is rather singular, but perhaps it derives from its English, wickedly Albionic origins, that fascist culture did not appropriate it when the figure of Svengali was raging on cinema screens all over the world. There was really no need to do this now. And among other things, as Drusilla Foer told me the other evening at the Margutta Prize, Svengali is a truly disgusting name.
