Just How Strange Was Mr. Satie?
Erik Satie's combination of social dysfunction, odd personal habits, and unprecedented musical taste added up to an strange life, to be sure. But might that life also fit within a since-recognized psychiatric diagnosis?
In 2003, the same year that Anderson's picture-book biography came out, Prof. Michael Fitzgerald of Trinity College in Dublin floated the autism/Asperger's idea in a paper titled "Erik Satie: An Autistic Musical Brain," at the Social Brain Conference in Goteborg, Sweden. He later discussed Satie as a likely candidate for an Asperger diagnosis in The Genesis Of Artistic Creativity: Asperger's Syndrome and the Arts.
Fitzgerald seems to make a habit of identifying people with autism-spectrum diagnoses, and/or identifying creative people's emotional or social difficulties as connected to such a condition. His suggestion that Satie, who proposed to his first and only girlfriend on the day they met and later threw her out a window, had severe difficulties with social relations is far more convincing than his similar suggestion about Beethoven, who could be grumpy.
Historians have been reluctant to apply such psychiatric diagnoses to people of the past because those labels have changed greatly, and often reflect the values of the society that comes up with them. But as we learn more about brain science, those diagnoses may well become more rooted in biochemistry and measurable phenomena, less in subjective judgments. Just as historians don't write about smallpox epidemics without applying our knowledge of the virus that caused them, so they might have to consider neurology in assessing individuals' behavior.
Such psychiatry may affect how the life of a person like Eric Satie or Alexander Cruden gets told. When is "eccentricity" or "originality" not an artistic choice but a mental condition? Was Satie "irreverent" and "childlike," as the dust jacket of Strange Mr. Satie states? Did he set out to cast a "bohemian brilliance" (Publishers Weekly)? Or was he simply unable to fit in?
Actually, Satie's society might have been unusually welcoming for him. He happened to live during the flowering of the Modern, when Picasso, Cocteau, Braque, Stravinsky, Man Ray, and other men were reinventing their art forms. That world took Satie on, but would a person of similar musical invention living at another time have been shunned instead?
