George du Maurier (1834–1896)

[Trilby] by George du Maurier is that rare thing, a modern source myth. In mid-19th century bohemian Paris, in the garrets of the rowdy and poetic Latin Quarter, three British painters befriend a young model, Trilby, also of British origin. Trilby isn't a whore, but with such an occupation neither is she a proper young lady, although there's the excuse of the orphaned younger brother to account for it, and although she poses mainly for--feet. But she has posed in the nude too, for one or two show more respectable painters, and this fatal fact dooms her romance with the horribly named Little Billee in the very thought of it. The three British prigs are somehow agreed on this without any discussion, so when Little Billee's (ugh!) mother appears to size up the hussy her boy's been raving about, it's unsurprising that Trilby melts out of the picture contritely, without a peep. Little Billee (blech) returns to England after a bout of "brain fever" and becomes famous; five years later the three pals are reunited, go to a concert, and discover that Trilby has become a vocal diva, a singer of unearthly gift.

This is odd because when they knew her she was utterly tone deaf, although possessing an exceptionally beautiful speaking voice. The secret must be in her teacher, whom they also knew of old--the repellent toad Svengali, a musician as brilliant as everything else about him is slimy and dark.

We've grown used to stories about powerful men building up and exploiting stars, but this was the first one, a huge hit, and in some ways unlike any of the others. For one thing, there is the literally hypnotic power Svengali exercises over his medium and victim, Trilby. Du Maurier had a rare, and to my mind, insufficiently exploited knack for the supernatural. In his other bestseller (nowadays as forgotten as Trilby), [Peter Ibbetson], a couple of thwarted lovers meet in dreams, annihilating physical constraints which, as we learn in the end, are of rather more severe nature than we're first told. Frustratingly, this aspect is diminished by du Maurier's tone, alternately frivolous and weepy--never was a writer less ashamed to pull at heartstrings, verbally pet puppies, and heap on the sugar.

Another way in which Trilby has become unusual is its blistering antisemitism. If it were a matter of some offhand remark or two I wouldn't bother mentioning it, considering its vintage, but this goes much deeper. Svengali the dirty evil cowardly etc. Jew is described in detail and his many disgusting features dwelt on repeatedly--and all of them are due to his ethnicity. The caricature is so unpleasant, so embarrassing, as to render the book practically unreadable. I can't help wondering about the minds of du Maurier's contemporary public, or believing ever more that it was pure chance it was Germans who ended up burning Jews--it could have been the British, just add Hitler.

I'm also curious about how du Maurier came to write the story, how and why he chose a German Jew for his model of evil--who was Svengali? I knew from before that du Maurier was friendly with Felix Moscheles, the son of virtuoso pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles (Felix published a book [In Bohemia with Du Maurier], illustrated by du Maurier, based on their joint travels). Of course, the end of nineteenth century saw an explosion of virtuoso pianism, with many famous pianists who were Jewish--Anton Rubinstein, who founded the Russian school of pianism, the greatest in the world, Godowsky, de Pachmann, Gabrilowitsch etc.

Fact remains that, whoever may have been the model for Svengali, du Maurier had at least one close Jewish friend. So how could he write a character like this, and how could he think about Jews like that?

Trilby suffers then, in content, style, and structure--far too much space is given to the three boring Brits and their incomparable superiority to all the other "races", and not enough to Trilby and Svengali, but, in addition to being a valuable curiosity in a time-capsule sort of way, it strikes at least one precious note of pure horror and one of real tragedy, unfortunately unexpanded. Svengali is a great conception, but undeveloped, unrealised in du Maurier's book. show less

A very interesting and genre-bending novel about the artists' model Trilby O'Farrell, the three British artists who befriend her in 1860s Paris, and the devious musician-magician, Svengali. It is kind of a mystery and kind of a romantic melodrama, but doesn't really fit into either category. There are some funny and charming set-pieces of artistic life in the Latin Quarter, especially in the first half of the book.

What I found most interesting about the novel was its interest in the show more interweaving of the arts and our perception of them--painting, music, poetry, literature are all important to the story, and Du Maurier describes them in quite strikingly vivid terms. The interest in phenomenology fits in with the novel's main plot point, dealing with mesmerism and extrasensory perception. The focus on the arts and their unity seems a great exemplar of the ideas of the aesthetic movement--even if Du Maurier pokes fun at the most egregious pretensions of certain forms of aestheticism.

Half a star off for the anti-Semitism, which is much worse than the obligatory anti-Semitism of the typical Victorian novel (for instance, Svengali, "being an Oriental Israelite Hebrew Jew, had not been able to resist the temptation of spitting in [the hero's] face.") show less

Such was the power of Svengali to mesmerise the world that his name became a word. In brief he takes a tone-deaf girl and turns her into a great diva, as long as she is hypnotised before she sings. Alas at one performance he is incapacitated and as Trilby tries to sing, but cannot - to the disgust of the audience – she is in a strange situation where she is aware of her life with Svengali but has no conception at all of her singing career. In fact this is not exactly how hypnotism works, show more but never mind that, the idea is fascinating.

If you’d asked me I would have thought the most likely reasons people want to be hypnotised is to give up smoking and to lose weight. Not so! The most asked for thing is this – can I be hypnotised to forget a person?

The uneasy reply is somewhere between a reluctant ‘yes’ and ‘this isn’t the right thing to do.’ What the experts want you to do, apparently, is trash the person you want to forget. There seems here to be a presumption that if you do want to forget them, they deserve to be trashed – ie it isn’t an artificial construct to get you over somebody who doesn’t deserve to be thus treated in your head. So, my first question is, but what if you don’t think that? I know the answer is supposed to be that you are a sucker who hasn’t gotten over a bad person in your life, but that can’t possibly always be true. Must there not also be some chance that this is a fabulously wonderful person and that trashing them as being undeserving in some way is a terrible thing to do? I find it hard to believe this is seen as the healthy option. If it comes down to it, maybe you are a scumbag and he isn’t.

My next question revolves around the idea that you have been hypnotised to forget a person and this has worked. How has it worked? If you forget a person successfully, what impact does this have on the rest of your memories? A person isn’t a discrete unit. He is time and space, sensation, touch, sound, he has a context, a background, he is part of a social setting. You went to dinner with this person and had the most divine meal. What impact does hypnosis to forget the person have on the memory of the meal? Instead of a picture in your head of some wonderful romantic occasion where you shared spaghetti together, you have what? The same picture, but your lover is erased? It is just you and a plate of spaghetti? Is there an empty chair next to you? Has the waiter filled two water glasses? Does the other fork move, but there is nobody attached to it???? Most importantly, do you get more spaghetti in this changed memory than you did on the real occasion? How much is erased with the memory of the person?

Maybe you can do that, I imagine. Maybe the mind’s eye picture of this whole occasion is erased. But add to this, a social setting, for example. Now there are three of you at dinner. How does the removal of one person from the memory of this work? You recall person ‘a’ asking a question but there is no answer because you have erased the memory of person ‘b’ to whom the question was addressed? I can’t see that in forgetting the required person, you would also forget the innnocent bystander, so to speak.

And there are the things that will be fundamentally imprinted on you, in a way spaghetti might not be. (MIGHT not, mark you…) How would you forget the way you made love, slept, woke up? And even if you forgot in a passive sense, surely you would be reminded of them by – well, it could be anything. Putting out the washing and noticing that a cardigan has been undone that isn’t usually and there is a whole memory attached to that. How it was taken off, what happened next. You are made love to exquisitely. It involves all of him, he is completely joined to you. What happens to that? Does it become an Immaculate Orgasm?

Note to self: discuss this with the VM next time in church, maybe she knows. Hey, though. That makes me think. Maybe this is exactly what happened. She shagged someone who was a bad ‘un, a couple of sessions with a hypnotherapist and voila, the Immaculate Conception. show less

After reading this book, I did some research and given its cultural impact, I'm surprised it's not better known. In addition to being the source of the Svengali character and the phrase "in the all together", it inspired the plot of The Phantom of the Opera and the stage version's costuming gave us the Trilby hat. The novel itself is quite droll. It is much more episodic than what is to be expected from its lasting legacy, with the best known aspect only making up about a quarter of its show more length. The rest of the story is entertaining as well, illustrating well the subcultural of Parisian artists in the mid- to late-1800's. The style is very droll, with the narrator seeming to be a contemporary, occasionally speaking in first person, but never involved in the present action. There are somewhat large chunks of text in untranslated French, but I didn't find it an obstacle to understanding the plot. The original illustrations by the author in my copy are charming. show less