Erik Satie

(À bas Paladilhe et Lenepveu!)^[i]

Writing about music is hard. I still plan to say something about
Satie’s elusive music,  but right now I’m just writing about Satie personally.
 
(Well, I do have one little music thing ready: Gymnopedie #1 Unbent).

Erik Satie was a truculent alcoholic who lived for decades in tiny, squalid apartments  which no one was ever allowed to enter. After his death his family and friends had to remove two loads of garbage and rubbish before they could retrieve the manuscripts and other effects which were heaped haphazardly about the room._[ii]  He had only one very short serious relationship with a woman, and hid his true feelings behind a sarcastic, whimsical mask which no one was ever able to penetrate._[iii]

In short, a man after my own heart. His music can be described as pretty, and without the dirt and the surliness, he would have seemed a little bit too cute.

Satie was a man about town and a creature of Parisian café society (or, if you’re into Walter Benjamin, a flaneur). He assiduously cultivated his image, and over the years staged numerous publicity stunts. Every day for years he wore the same matching velours outfit (of which he owned seven identical sets), thus receiving the nickname “the velours gentleman”. (But as the photos show, it was corduroy -- velours côtelé -- and not velvet.  Another good thing -- velvet would have been too foo-foo.)_[iv]

Like many avant-gardists, Satie was a leftist – with each Socialist Party split, he stayed with the left faction, until he finally was a Bolshevik of sorts. During a long period of his later life he lived in the mediocre working-class suburb of Arcueil, walking many miles home in the wee hours almost every night, drunk and carrying a hammer in his pocket in case of trouble. In Arcueil he adopted a more bourgeois image, became a respected member of the local lower middle-class community, and engaged himself in educational projects with the local children -- his biographer Templier is the son of one of Satie’s friends during that period.

Satie was actually extremely serious about music (and other things too), but he affected an almost clownish persona -- he’s almost better known for his wisecracks and affectations than for his compositions. There’s a long tradition of this kind of dandyism in France, going back to the time of Gerard de Nerval et. al. and continuing into the 1930s and beyond.  It has been explained by a pervasive political alienation among the French creative classes,  while France was being ruled by a series of mediocre governments dominated by the suffocatingly respectable French bourgeoisie and hamstrung by British and German pressures. The need to escape from the smarm of Romanticism was certainly a second motive – Romanticism in Satie’s time appeared above all in its  grandiose and fatally earnest Wagnerian form, and Satie was the leader of French anti-Wagnerianism. But I think that above all, the quirky and clownish streak in the French avant-garde can be explained by the fear of being absorbed by the voracious French culture establishment – as even Verlaine almost was, after he went Catholic. In France there was an enormous appetite for respectable, high-minded, serious Art, and for this reason artists were endangered as much by success as they were by failure.

Reading about Satie and his forgotten or legendary contemporaries, you do get the feeling that people who lived before WWI didn’t realize how lucky they were. They really had a happiness then that hasn’t been seen since. True, there has been a lot of scientific and economic progress since then, but we could have had that without the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the continuous state of military mobilization we’ve lived with now for more than sixty years. When WWI and the Russian Revolution came along, at the time many rejoiced. Often they regretted it soon enough, but by then the genie was out of the bottle and nothing could be done.  We’re still living with that.

Facts about Satie:

Satie’s mother was Scottish, and he was first baptized an Anglican with the name “Eric”. (“Erik” was an affectation.) He spent his early years in Honfleur, a Norman shipping town where his father was a ship-broker. (Many of the great Parisian avant-gardeists were provincials or foreigners – Apollinaire, Laforgue, Corbiere, Rimbaud, Jarry, Satie, Henri Rousseau. In the same way, many of the great New York City jazz musicians came from places like Oklahoma or  Iowa. In many ways New York and Paris in their great days were not places, but escapes from other places). Satie attended music school in his youth, but was thought to be  lazy -- though as a pianist he was credited with a nice touch. Some say that he went to music school to avoid universal military service, whereas others claim that he later entered the army in order to escape music school. In his younger days he earned his meager living partly as a cabaret pianist and composer of pop songs. Late in life he dabbled in golf -- there are photographs. Satie may have been the first composer to write music intended to accompany film (Entr’acte, the surrealist Rene Clair’s film short in the middle of Satie’s Relache).

From a letter of Satie’s:

“Why attack God himself? He is just as unhappy as we could be; since the death of his poor son he has no taste for anything and only nibbles at his food.

Although he has seated him on his good old right hand, he is still completely flabbergasted that men could play such a nasty trick on the one he cherished; and he only has time to murmur, in the saddest way possible, 'That wasn’t fair'.

I doubt that whether at this moment he would send down to earth even one of his nephews; mankind has changed his mind about sending members of his family out on trips."

Bibliography

Orledge, Robert, Satie the Composer, Cambridge, 1990.

Orledge, Robert, Satie Remembered, Faber & Faber, 1995.

Shattuck, Roger, The Banquet Years, Harcourt Brace, 1958.
Templier, Pierre-Daniel, Erik Satie , MIT, 1969.

Volta, Ornella, Erik Satie, Hazan, 1997.

Volta, Ornella, Satie Seen Through his Letters, Marion Boyars, 1989.

The Princesse de Polignac: Satie’s American bull dyke patron
”Satie homepage”

List of Satie compositions

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I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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