Today very few remember Silvina Bullrich. However, this blond and aristocratic lady, with an unmistakable nasal voice, she knew how to be among the ’60 and ’80, in addition to an unbeatable bestseller, an explosive media character. The print runs of his novels broke records and he sold one million copies of each title, a very high figure for an Argentine author at any time.
Of course the weather helped: it was the time when Latin American literature was experiencing a boom, magazines like “Front page” or “Confirmed” they published photos of writers on their covers and the releases were the subject of national debate. And although these conditions benefited most writers, Bullrich’s desire for promotion far outweighed that of the rest. The writer Victoria Pueyrredon She said that Bullrich even did advertisements for cars and creams, for which she was highly criticized and even branded as “not serious”. “Everything one does for a living seems serious to me,” the million-copy writer defended herself.
Several decades before Pola Oloixarac will stand out with his spicy tweets or what Mariana Enriquez summon hundreds of people in a theater to listen to it, Bullrich was already an exponent of the type of writer who manages to be, above all, a convening and recognizable character. He gave notes in magazines every week and walked through television shows like “New time”led by the journalist bernard neustadtwhere he expressed his opinion with audacity and self-confidence on any subject.
Controversial and controversial, it was in that program where he told that the writer Jorge Luis Borgeswith whom he had had a brief affair, “was impotent and a premature ejaculator”, a statement that earned him the anger of Borges’ great friend, Adolfo Bioy Casares. Later, at a meal where they met, Bioy reproached Silvina for having aired that detail. “Well look, what do I know, che, as one lets out a fart, one says whatever comes to mind,” the writer replied. “She was very rude, she had a very ugly way of communicating with people,” said critic Ernesto Schoo. Who was this fine, blonde paqueta lady who, in the words of the writer Edgardo Cozarinsky, “spoke like a carrero”? In the next lines we tell it.
the big bourgeoisie
Silvina Bullrich was born in 1915 in an aristocratic family. His grandfather had been a diplomat and his father, whom he adored, a prestigious cardiologist. She grew up reading French authors such as Zola, Balzac or Flaubert, although the two authors who influenced her the most were Francois Sagan and Simone de Beauvoir. From the latter he would go so far as to translate several books, among them, “The second sex”.
as slogan Cristina Mucci In the biography he wrote about her, from a very young age she knew that her destiny was to be a writer, despite the fact that no one, not even her father, supported her with her vocation. In 1933, at the age of 21, Silvina married Arturo Palenque Carreras, with whom she would have her only son, Daniel. After “a passionate honeymoon” everything became boredom. While she was going through marital boredom, Silvina published her first book, “Calles de Buenos Aires”, which was later followed by “La vial of the first angel” and “The third version”.
He dabbled in translation and journalism and rubbed shoulders with the cream of the intelligentsia of the moment: Silvina and Victoria Ocampo, Borges, Bioy Casares, Estela Canto And a long etcetera. As she became popular, she took special care in her image. In keeping with the times, she wore raincoats and wide-brimmed hats for a Parisian look, and even went so far as to get a nose job. Renewed, she separated from Palenque, while the novels “Bodas de Cristal” and “Será Justicia” consecrated her definitively. Estela Canto recounted that once she proposed to go out for lunch together, she told him: “It’s a good idea for them to see you with me.”
She was obsessed with money and feared that she was poor. With the publishers that published her books, she discussed everything from advances to promotion. She also demanded cachets to give reports and participate in round tables and conferences.
She became such a popular figure that, during the Cámpora presidency, she was imitated on television. Her personality and her stamp of “lady package” made her an extremely “dragable” character: in 2013, in his show “Hoy Caviar”, the actor Jean François Casanovas gave a hilarious interpretation of Silvina, with the phonomimic of an audio where she He told stories of his life.
Bullrich’s Literature
Her novels contained introspective stories of frustrated women (often belonging to the same class) as “Tomorrow I say enough”; family struggles such as those of the bourgeois and decadent family of “Los burgueses”, or more political novels such as “La bicicleta” or “Escándalo bancario”. They were precisely the novels that the public expected to take to the beach during the summer.
She had many lovers and romances, but her great love was the businessman Marcelo Dupont, with whom she lived for a few years until he died of cancer in 1956. Silvina was inspired by his pain for the novel “Garden Passengers”. It was made into a film by Alejandro Doria in 1982, with the performance of Rodolfo Ranni and Graciela Borges. The latter once recounted that, during filming, she always denied certain things; for example, that Ranni wasn’t skinnier, to look like Dupont. She “She kept demanding (…) As a personality she was very conflictive”; told Graciela Borges. Other Bullrich novels that were made into movies were “A Very Long Moment” and “Glass Wedding”. None of them had much significance.
Although it was very successful in sales, it was never recognized by the literary world, something that she accepted but made her suffer. In the opinion of the editor Jorge Naveiro, Silvina never wrote “works of great literature”; and the writer Elvira Orphée went so far as to say that Bullrich “wrote for a bourgeoisie with few lights”.
It is possible that there was some mismatch between who she thought she was and the image she gave. She once told Ernesto Schoo that she had met her admirer Simone de Beauvoir and they had stayed chatting about the sale of her books. However, Beauvoir’s best friend in Argentina, María Rosa Oliver, told Juan José Sebreli that Simone had told her: “Please, explain to me who that unpleasant woman called Silvina Bullrich is (…) she did nothing but talk to me about the money she earned from her books and the men she slept with.”
At the end of her life, Silvina was alone, depressed, and with respiratory problems. In 1980, in an interview regarding the publication of “My Memoirs” (which can be seen on YouTube) she recounted that some of her friends had cried for her when reading her book. “And I asked them why, what made them cry the most and they told me ‘solitude,’” she recounted.
In 1990, at the age of 74, he traveled to Geneva for another cosmetic surgery, but died of pulmonary complications a few days after arriving, on July 2. He died in the same hospital as Borges. He left more than forty titles as a legacy and the memory of a character that was difficult not to pay attention to.
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