Felipe Trigo

Felipe Trigo y Sánchez-Mora (Villanueva de la Serena, February 13, 1864-Madrid, September 2, 1916) was a Spanish writer, who previously worked as a rural and military doctor..

Biography

Felipe Trigo y Sánchez-Mora was born on February 13, 1864 in the town of Villanueva de la Serena —located in the province of Badajoz— into a wealthy middle-class family that began to have economic difficulties due to of the early death of the father. He completed high school in Badajoz and medical school at the San Carlos Hospital in Madrid. His experience as a foreign student in the capital would be captured in the novel In the Race .

After graduating, already married to his college classmate, Consuelo Seco de Herrera, he worked as a regular doctor in the towns of Trujillanos and Valverde de Mérida in Badajoz, a biographical circumstance that he would also novelize in The Rural Doctor.

In his youth, Felipe Trigo professed orthodox Marxist socialism, and published a series of nine articles in El Socialista. Later he evolved to a petty-bourgeois radical reformism, along the lines of Melquíades Álvarez, to whom he encomiastically dedicated the prologue of Jarrapellejos , his main work.

Tired of rural life, he entered the Military Health Corps by competitive examination. His first destination was Seville, where he began his journalistic activity that he had already attempted in Madrid. From Seville he went to Trubia, as a doctor at the weapons factory. Years later he volunteered to go to the Philippines in full rebellion. Stationed as a doctor at Fort Victoria, actually a detachment of Tagalog prisoners, he nearly lost his life during a skirmish. The rebels attacked him with no less than seven machetes, leaving him for dead. Trigo, however, managed to flee across the countryside, in terrible conditions. With one hand disabled, he was repatriated as a war mutilated, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. The press received him as "the hero of Fuerte Victoria" and he was even proposed for the Laureate Cross of San Fernando. Rejecting the possibility of politically capitalizing on his celebrity, in 1900 he retired from the Army and took up residence in Mérida to dedicate himself exclusively to literature.

The overwhelming success of his first novel, Las ingenuas, in which he recounts his dramatic Filipino adventures, made him a true best seller, both in Spain and in America; It allowed him to lead a life of luxury, halfway between his native Extremadura and his chalet in Madrid's Ciudad Lineal, and gave him access to the most select social circles, earning him a reputation as a great gentleman, dandy and ladies' man. In less than fifteen years, he published seventeen novels, several short novels (in the famous and very popular collections El Cuento Semanal, first, and La Novela Corta, already at the end of his life) and several stories, all of them very well received by the public.

At the height of his popularity, on September 2, 1916, Felipe Trigo ended his life with a shot, being buried in the Canillejas cemetery. The reasons for his suicide are not completely clear. In the note of farewell and forgiveness that he left to his family, the writer seems to allude to an incurable and fatal illness; But it is more likely that the illness that he actually feared was madness, which had long stalked him in the form of acute neurasthenia. The writer himself narrates in his posthumous novel If I know why a previous suicide attempt that he, supposedly, had carried out in 1911 during a stay in Buenos Aires.

During the Franco dictatorship, editorial and critical silence fell on Felipe Trigo, as on so many other writers of his time and characteristics. Only after the Transition were his most important novels republished.

Work

Fiction

Most of Felipe Trigo's novels and short stories have eroticism as their main theme. Trigo criticized in these novels the hypocrisy and prejudices of Spanish society regarding sexual morality. The author is, however, best remembered for two works in which, although the erotic is also present, his regenerationist concerns prevail, close to the ideas of the members of the generation of '98. These are The Rural Doctor (1912), in which, with abundant autobiographical elements, he energetically criticizes the misery and ignorance in which the Extremaduran peasants live; and, above all, Jarrapellejos, a novel republished several times and made into a film in 1988 by Antonio Giménez-Rico, which denounces the evils of despotism in the Spanish society of the Restoration.

An almost complete list of Felipe Trigo's production would be the following, in chronological order:

• The naive (1901)
• The thirst for love (Social education) (1903)
• Soul on the lips (1905)
• From cold to fire (They aboard) (1906)
• The Most High (1907)
• The brute (1908)

  

• The inns of love (1908)
• Sister Demon (The Honor of a Hidalgo and Metaphysical Husband) (1909)
• In the race (A good student boy in Madrid) (1909)
• Naivetales (1909)
• The Eves of Paradise (1909)
• The inns of love (1909)
• To all honor (1909)
• The cynical (1909)
• My cousin hates me. (1909)
• My half orange (1910)
• Besides the frac (1910)
• The key (1910)
• Test (1910)
• So the devil pays (1911)
• Rural doctor (1912)
• The shipwreck (1912)
• The father of beauty (1913)

  

• We abyss (1913)
• Jarrapellejos (Arcádic life, happy and independent of a representative Spanish) (1914)
• In pink shirt (1916)
• In my castle of light (Diary of a beautiful soul) (1916, posthumous; attributed by Julio Cejador to Julia, daughter of the writer)
• If I know why (1916, posthumous)
• She died of a kiss (1925, posthumous and incomplete).

It is also worth mentioning two compilation volumes of short novels: The One with Grape-Colored Eyes — Revealers — The Irreparable (1905) and This is how the devil pays — On Test — The Great Nice One (1916).

Nonfiction

Felipe Trigo also wrote essays in which he explained his political opinions. The most notable is perhaps his book Individualist Socialism, published in 1904. It is also worth mentioning:

• The Philippine Campaign (Impressions of a Soldier(1897)
• Love in life and in books (1908)
• Crisis of Civilization (European War) (1915).