I tell him I don’t, which is true, but would you like one anyway? Let’s open the old woman’s billfold and see what’s inside. Certainly not much in the way of money—a jangle of pesos and centavos and crumpled bills—but so many ghosts. So, so soft. I won’t pretend you’d want to see another of my grandson. (Handsome as anything, though, have I mentioned? He’s going to live forever. Don’t tell me I’m wrong.) Let’s assume that you would rather see one more of Erik. We’ll go back to the Gymnopédies. Not the choice of the connoisseur, but easily the winner of the popular vote. Not the time he played one at the Mirliton, but earlier. When he debuted them at the Chat Noir. I wasn’t actually there, but I haven’t let that stop me up to now.
Salis is letting Erik have a recital late on a Wednesday night, the three Gymnopédies, plus the Gnossiennes and Sarabandes, everything he’s ever written that he can bear to revisit, that he thinks might—just might—hold up. The audience is composed of his friends, plus anyone still trying to sober up enough to stagger home. Even Rodolphe Salis sticks around. “I’ve been listening to the doorman call you a gymnopédiste since you were a teenager,” he says. “Finally, the mystery unraveled.”
Erik clutches his sheet music in his hands, his usual painstaking script growing crumpled and sweaty. Surely he’s got the music memorized—he wrote it, after all—but he thinks he might be nervous enough to need the handwritten copies. Philippe’s never seen him like this, doesn’t know whether to buy him a drink to calm his nerves or just be heartened that he has nerves after all. Erik takes the stage to raucous applause. Philippe, who has been publishing poetry as Lord Cheminot, who was never Philippe to begin with, who was born in another country as someone else altogether, claps loudest. All Erik’s friends wear their names like hats, ready to be doffed and replaced. Erik-with-a-K born Eric-with-a-C, his pseudonym halfhearted, a bit too honest.
Conrad is across town doing his homework at the dining table. I am in Le Havre, in bed asleep. The hour is late, but Fortin is still awake, worrying about husbands. His great-niece will need one. That will go rather grimly for her, but all that is yet to come.
Erik spreads the pages of the three Gymnopédies out along the music rack. He has declined a page-turner, saying he’s too anxious to have anyone up onstage with him. He is worried about his breath, his soaked underarms. He doesn’t want anyone to come too close. The café piano is a plow horse, but he is used to it by now, knows how to massage the keys. As he plays, the piano becomes another kind of instrument. The sound is quiet and the room quiets with it.
You have heard these songs. You, reading this now, I promise you, you know them. They’re going to show up in concert halls and advertisements, children’s piano lessons and programs of turn-of-the-century French music. They’ll play in the background of film scenes where someone stares mournfully out a rainy window; they’ll play while someone else falls in and out of love. They’ll be covered by everyone from jazz musicians to drum-and-bugle corps. They’ll become so ubiquitous they are nearly white noise, but then they catch your ear and are beautiful all over again. They are wallpaper that can make you cry. If you have heard any songs Erik ever wrote, you have heard these. It is possible, perhaps even probable, that you have heard only these.
Seven and a half minutes of music, and as Erik raises his hands from the keyboard, lifts his foot off the pedal, they are already over. There is only one debut, and it has ended.
Philippe buys Erik a glass of wine. Salis charges full price. The applause is proud, relieved. The people who know Erik, who have been agreeably calling him a gymnopédiste for months, are pleased to have done so, to have believed in him. The few who had been hoping that the pieces would be garbage, or another parody or prank, are chastened.
Erik is twenty-one years old, almost twenty-two. The most popular seven minutes he will ever write are fading away in the sweaty, soot-dark room. A piano note is dying from the moment it is struck, hammer to string. The vibrations slow and the note decays, a birth and a death with every press of the keys. The last sounds of the third Gymnopédie hang and dissipate like smoke, and then they are gone. His life is long yet, but the thing people will love best about him is already finished. Let us hope he does not know it. How would he live, otherwise? How would any of us, if we knew all that was to come?
Acknowledgments
In this book I have aimed to color inside the lines, so to speak, of what is known about Erik Satie’s life and work, as well as what records remain of his family members and associates. As one would expect, there is a tremendous amount of information available on Claude Debussy, for example, and relatively little about José Maria Patricio Contamine de Latour, the inspiration for Philippe. Where the record stops, I have invented. I have occasionally changed names or made other minor adjustments for the sake of clarity and narrative. The novel is shaped, even governed, by facts, but it is a work of fiction.
The book has involved a great deal of research, and I have consulted more sources than I could possibly list. I am grateful to all the scholars, creators, and fellow travelers who have informed my thinking and answered my questions, either personally or through their published work, particularly Robert Orledge and Andrea Cohen.
For anyone wishing to know more about Erik Satie, I recommend first his music, available in a wide variety of recordings and formats. The Satie family home in Honfleur is now a delightful, unusual museum. You can also visit Château Bellenâu: the current owners are restoring the gardens and rent out rooms and cottages. Many of Satie’s stomping grounds in Paris and Arcueil-Cachan can still be seen, at least from the outside.
Some of Satie’s prose writings are available in English translation in A Mammal’s Notebook, or in the French-language Mémoires d’un amnésique. Of the many books written about Satie, my personal favorite is Satie Remembered, a collection of reminiscences from people who knew him, compiled and edited by Robert Orledge. Erik Satie: Correspondance presque complète, edited by Ornella Volta, was another key text. The best (and essentially only) resource on the life of Louise-Olga-Jeannie Satie-Lafosse is the radio documentary Je suis la sœur d’Erik Satie by Andrea Cohen and Gaël Gillon. The most comprehensive source on Suzanne Valadon is Renoir’s Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon by Catherine Hewitt. Édouard Fortin’s photographs of Le Havre have been collected by Dominique Rouet in the book Le Havre: une ville neuve sous l’oeil d’un pionnier. A special mention goes to Satie the Bohemian by Steven Moore Whiting, which I have had out on loan from the Grand Valley State University library since 2011. Thank you to Hazel McClure and the GVSU library for both your research assistance and your generous loan renewal policies.
Archival research at l’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France was supported by a grant from the GVSU Center for Scholarly and Creative Activity. Portions of this book were written at the MacDowell Colony, Can Serrat Centro de Actividades Artisticas, and Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, as well as in nearly every coffee shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, often alongside writing partner extraordinaire Mara Naselli. Portions of this book originally appeared, in altered form, in the literary journals Gulf Coast, Bat City Review, Indiana Review, and Sonora Review.
Thanks to Judy Heiblum, Jim Rutman, and Ben George, who believed in this book even before I’d written most of it. Ben, in fact, believed in my work before I’d written much of anything and, once this book was done, paid careful and graceful attention to every single sentence. For both your faith and your rigor: thank you. I am also pleased to be in the good hands of the entire team at Little, Brown, including Reagan Arthur, Craig Young, Pamela Brown, Lena Little, Pamela Marshall, Allan Fallow, and Cynthia Saad.
Wild gratitude to Marian Crotty and Adrianna Jordan, who read the whole damn thing. Thanks to those who read what ultimately became the beginning sections: Elizabeth Weld, Robby Taylor, Beth Staples, Monica McFawn, and Benjamin Drevlow. Thank you to Taryn Tilton, Laurence José, and Molly Jo Rose for l
ending their expertise, and special thanks to the people at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in July 2010, who read a terrible short story about Erik Satie and tactfully told me that it would work better as a novel. I’ve learned a great deal from all the writing communities I’ve been a part of, including GVSU, the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, the Kenyon Review, the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
I’m grateful to everyone who supported my first book in myriad ways. It felt like the Little Short Story Collection That Could, and I owe a debt to all the people who helped push that train up the hill. I’m giddy that I get to do this publishing thing all over again.
My husband, W. Todd Kaneko, made this book possible in a thousand different ways. As for Leo, I suspect this book would have been written more quickly if you hadn’t come along, but it would have been poorer, as would our lives, without you. Thank you to my sister, Mary Horrocks, for the fortuitous gift one year of Satie’s Gymnopédies, Gnossiennes, and Other Works for Piano, and to my earliest piano teachers: my mother, Marlee Horrocks; and my grandmother Marjorie Lee Parmiter. My father, David Horrocks, drove me to another decade of piano lessons uncomplainingly. Thanks also to all the teachers, musicians, directors, and conductors I have had the pleasure of making music with over the years, with special appreciation for Margaret Faulkner, who first assigned me Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 3.
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About the Author
CAITLIN HORROCKS is the author of the story collection This Is Not Your City and a recipient of the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Plimpton Prize. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, and elsewhere and has been included in The Best American Short Stories. She lives with her family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Also by Caitlin Horrocks
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