Svengalis
I recently read the 1895 (give or take a year; I don’t feel like looking it up right now) novel Trilby, one of the most popular books of its time but one that is almost never read today. Even in 1946 George Orwell, who enjoyed the novel despite admitting that it is very bad, wrote a newspaper column lamenting that nobody was reading it any more.[1] Orwell admitted this, though, in the context of also admitting the thing for which the novel is best-remembered, which is its intense antisemitism. Artistically, this isn’t even the biggest problem with the book, which is saying something. The book is by George du Maurier, grandfather of the much more famous Daphne; Daphne du Maurier, a writer I like very much, is more famous for good reason.
Trilby is where we get the concept of the Svengali, an artistic impresario who overwhelms and controls a young ingenue; generally this is a man and a woman. The stereotype is intensely gendered, which I think is fine; this is how a lot of these relationships work in real life, and that is the case for a reason. But in the book—not, to be fair, most of its adaptations, with which popular culture was teeming once upon a time, but the book—the character of Svengali is also an antisemitic stereotype. He is an unkempt, dark-haired, talented-but-uncreative musician and music teacher who hails from somewhere in Central Europe and has a mysterious past that he lies about constantly; he mooches off people, both “friends” and his own family; he is sexually obsessed with the crypto-nudist artist’s model/washerwoman/singing sensation of the book’s title. (He is not unusual in this, but nobody else in the book gets condemned for it by the course the narrative takes.) He has a cringing underling called Gecko who himself appears to be Romany, and at one point the narration calls him “an oriental Israelite Hebrew Jew”—just in case, one supposes, anyone missed the point.
Why do I say this isn’t as bad as Trilby gets? Mostly because of the other characters. Svengali is recuperable in the sense that, as I will discuss later, a reparative reading of him as a lively, interesting, sympathetic figure is possible. This is not true of his opposite number, our “hero,” Little Billee—which is seriously what he is called. Supposedly an exceptionally talented painter, he is also a “Reddit atheist” avant la lettre (he has read Darwin, you see!) who goes on pages-long sententious little monologues about how bad he has it. Trilby almost marries him but decides against it under pressure from his overbearing mother, and if Svengali, with whom she shacks up instead, were just a tiny bit less repulsive and abusive to her, it would be hard not to conclude that she has dodged a bullet. Trilby herself is a serviceable character; it’s easier than I hoped it would be going in to see why everyone else in the book is so desperate to get in her rarely-worn skirts. Some of the secondary characters—Gecko; Svengali’s long-suffering aunt; someone called Taffy—have their moments as well, but for the most part the only well-written “character” in the book is the setting, which is a nostalgic rendition of the 1850s and 1860s Parisian art world. To be sure, at points this is enough in itself to make the book worth reading; I was a child in Howard Dean’s Vermont, so I know from short-lived golden ages coinciding with one’s early days.
(Du Maurier expresses this well enough, in fact, that one wonders that he intended the book to be by another person. Trilby began life as an idea that du Maurier pitched to Henry James, the proverbial “hey you should totally write this!” story idea from one’s less-talented friend. Du Maurier and James did both live in Paris in the 1850s, but du Maurier, almost a decade older, would have been much better able to remember the social environment that Trilby depicts.)
While Trilby is a terrible book, however,[2] it is not completely vacuous. Svengali has had a long afterlife in cultural memory even though almost nobody alive reads the novel or is familiar with the character himself. “Well, maybe he’s got, like, a cheerful mental hold on you,” Jerry suggests to Elaine when she mispronounces it “Svenjolly” in an episode of Seinfeld. (It’s worth noting that, in Trilby, the name is ridiculous because it’s a stage name; his real name is Adler.) It is true, as Orwell already pointed out in his 1946 essay, that the book is no longer widely read in large part because of its antisemitism. Yet it also suffers from being influential-but-not-itself-good, a term I am hyphenating because I think this is a common problem that literary and artistic criticism should acknowledge more. There is nothing that one can get out of Trilby that one cannot get out of Dracula or The Phantom of the Opera, unless one is intensely and specifically interested in the mid-nineteenth-century artistic subculture in which Trilby is set. Lucy Sante dedicates a passage of Low Life to extolling the young women who “who derived from [Trilby] the courage to call themselves artists and ‘bachelor girls,’ to smoke cigarettes and drink Chianti.” That was a very good thing except for the cigarettes, but once those young women had that courage well in hand, the novel’s legitimate social and cultural task was probably done. “Little Billee” in particular is an almost unreadably thin and obnoxious romantic hero compared to Jonathan Harker or even Raoul de Chagny. Yet the Trilby-Svengali relationship remains compelling.
Not only does it remain compelling, but I think the aspect of the book in which Svengali is doing all this in part because of his subaltern social status remains compelling as well. It’s worth noting that, although du Maurier’s narrative hates Svengali and wants us to hate Svengali because he is Jewish, it doesn’t appear to hate, or want us to hate, all Jews. Orwell points out that the book has a Sephardic (as opposed to Ashkenazi) side character, Glorioli, who is depicted much more positively, but I disagree with Orwell that du Maurier presents the difference as racial. After all, members of Svengali’s family, such as the aforementioned aunt, figure into the story, and they are depicted much more positively than he is as well! Du Maurier thinks that there is such a thing as being “Jewish in a way that makes one evil,” but seems not to think that this corresponds to anything external other than, perhaps, whom one happens to find subjectively unpleasant or disgusting—which is bad enough! It’s very easy to imagine someone perceived this way by others becoming a desperate and unscrupulous striver and, when successful, a controlling and dishonest tyrant.
It’s also easy to understand someone who acts like this in a more sympathetic (but not necessarily forgiving) way. The Phantom of the Opera does this with its physically disfigured protagonist, and so, I would argue, does the postwar Powell and Pressburger movie The Red Shoes with the gay impresario Boris Lermontov. People can’t believe that Lermontov, who relentlessly hammers the movie’s heroine Vicky to ignore or even end her marriage in order to return to the stage as a ballerina, is supposed to be a less-bad option than Vicky’s husband, because the movie was made in 1948. The assumption is generally that most stories from that period will have a conservative assessment of marital reasons, or will at least have had to pretend to have one in order to see the light of day. Yet according to Michael Powell himself the point of the movie is that “art is worth dying for.”[3] Lermontov is the character who represents this idea. In this way Lermontov is “a Svengali” who, as with Phantom’s Erik, retains the centrality of bigotry in the character concept but moves, or tries to move, the bigotry from inside to outside of what the story itself is advocating.
I don’t mean to suggest that The Phantom of the Opera and The Red Shoes are meant to confront something recognized and pointed out as bigotry in an explicit way. I don’t think they are. I think this was clearly not Powell and Pressburger’s intention and, from what I know, likely not Leroux’s intention either. It is, however, evident that they saw something in this type of character to recuperate and treat sympathetically where du Maurier did not. Perhaps some enterprising Jewish writer will mine Trilby itself directly some day and decide to do the same.
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[1] George Orwell, “As I Please,” Tribune, 6 December 1946.
[2] I’m not even going to mention the eleven-paragraph-long descriptions of Trilby’s feet.
[3] Quoted in Adrienne L. McLean, “The Red Shoes Revisited,” Dance Chronicle Vol. 11 No. 1 (1987): 43, https://doi.org/10.1080/01472528708568965.