János Pilinszky - one of the great European poets of an extraordinary generation: that of Celan, Herbert and Bonnefoy. Like them he grew up to a world physically and morally devastated by the Second World War and the Holocaust

János Pilinszky, Passio: Fourteen Poems, Trans. by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri. Worple Press, 2011.


János Pilinszky is one of the great European poets of an extraordinary generation: that of Paul Celan, Zbigniew Herbert and Yves Bonnefoy. Like them he grew up to a world physically and morally devastated by the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Ted Hughes and János Csokits translated Pilinszky’s work. Hughes described his achievements and stature thus: “His ‘greatness’… is not a greatness of imaginative and linguistic abundance. It has more to do with some form of spiritual distinction. The weight and unusual temper of his imagination and language derive from this.”

Translator George Gömöri writes:
“Pilinszky’s colleague, Ágnes Nemes Nagy wrote somewhere that Pilinszky was as rare as a white antelope. He was an extraordinary phenomenon even among poets. And although there are some people who appreciate his poems written after 1970 in free verse, today it is practically undebatable that Pilinszky’s greatness as a poet is most resplendent in poems inspired by his experiences in the Germany of 1944-45. A poet who had almost exclusively ruminated over his own moral problems… became a poet who speaks to everyone—a witness and bard of perhaps the greatest scandal of the century, the inhumanity of Hitler’s dictatorship and of the bloody collapse of the Third Reich. His visionary poems, pervaded by a profound Christian compassion, like 'Harbach 1944' or 'A French Prisoner', to mention only two of the poems translated by us now into English, will definitely prove enduring. This Pilinszky speaks not only to Hungarians. Our Cambridge audience was moved by the poems of a Hungarian poet; I even read some of them in the poet’s mother tongue.”


“Wilmer’s ambitious versions achieve an abrupt starkness, signalling Pilinszky’s naked vulnerability, the existentialist horror of livIng through war. Formally there is an immediacy, a daring bleakness…Wilmer and Gomori have conveyed Pilinszky as a poet who inhabits suffering deftly, a suffering that cannot be contained even within formal and highly wrought structures but it is accentuated by them.”

Saradha Soobrayen, Modern Poetry in Translation 2012

“Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri’s translations of János Pilinszky’s Passio: Fourteen Poems, is another collection that is heavily influenced by the European war experience. János Pilinszky (1921-1981) is part of that generation of Paul Celan, Zbigniew Herbert, and Yves Bonnefoy who experienced both The Second World War and The Holocaust. He is a Hungarian poet and translator who was conscripted into the Hungarian army and spent the last part of the war in Southern Germany. Most of these poems are from his second book Harmadnapon (On theThird Day) (1959) which contains his war poetry, the poems for which he is most renowned. Clive Wilmer’s introductory comments on Pilinszky are insightful:

…of someone for who the mere possibility of suffering is intolerable,

whose nerves are on the surface of the skin. There is something naked

and innocent in the language, as if he could not forget his surprise at

the horrors of existence. The vulnerability… and enduring shock of a

remembered historical moment chime with the sense of ‘given-ness’ in

Existentialist thought – as if the poet had been dropped into the world

and was startled by what he found there.

Wilmer goes on to note that his work is reminiscent of Giacommeti and Beckett, but that his key influences are the work of Simone Weil, Dostoevesky and Van Gogh. He also tracks Pilinszky’s translation history. Here he notes that his and Gömöri’s translations are a corrective to the early high profile translations by Ted Hughes and János Csokits which, though worthy translations, he feels downplay the religious tone in some of the lines.

 These war poems reflect both the memories and isolation that the writer has been unable to rid himself of since the war. He describes how he has been permanently changed in the opening poem ‘On a Forbidden Star. Note the unobtrusive rhyming of the translation and the beautiful clarity of the plain diction:

 …look on me as the dead

look on the night, seeing it as their own,

your shoulder there to aid my weaker one.
I can no longer bear to be alone.

I never wanted to be born. It was nothingness

Who bore and suckled me; with her I started.

So love me darkly. Love me cruelly. Love me

like the one left behind by the departed.’ (‘On a Forbidden Star’)

From here we have poem after poem to describe vivid, horrific memories. For example, there is the immediacy in the concrete detail in ‘Harbach 1944’ where he describes soldiers harnessed to a cart still sharp in his memory – as he tells us, ‘I keep on seeing them’:

They bear the road, the horizon,

the beet fields shivering,

but only feel the burdening land,

the weight of everything.

…

Silence accepts their frames. Each fate

is dipped in height, as if

straining for the scent of troughs

in the sky far off.

And like a cattle-yard prepared

for the herded beasts outside –

its gates flung open violently –

death, for them, gapes wide.

The poem interweaves the awful physical war setting with more absolute suggestions of the after-life that is to be the inevitable fate of the soldiers. This merging can be seen particularly in the powerful comparison of the cosmos with a cattle-yard for herding beasts. He continues in the next poem with an unbearable memory of a starving French prisoner again still clear as yesterday: ‘Now he, who would have been contented once / with any kind of food, demands my heart.’(‘The French Prisoner’) Combined with the intensity of such images there is also subtlety, taking the poems beyond mere description along with a number of poems rich in religious imagery. Take this description of the collapse of an inmate of the woman’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück north of Berlin – note how he lifts the power of the last two lines of the first verse, suggesting both physical and mental size:

Fearful to be a self alone:

the pores are visible, and everything around so huge

and everything so small.

And that was it. As for the rest –

for the rest, without a sound,

simply forgetting to cry out,

the body hit the ground.

There is so much thought in these lines. There is the absolute nature of finally giving up in ‘And that was it’ and the total sense of disinterest in life in that ‘forgetting to cry out’. Pilinszky is clearly aware of how depth of meaning is most effectively conveyed in the simplest of words.

This is a very small collection, perhaps a little pricey given it only has fourteen poems. This said, each poem is beautifully crafted in these polished translations which do good service to Pilinszky’s harrowing poems.” - Belinda Cooke

HUNGARIANS CONSIDER János Pilinszky to be one of their best living poets. Sándor Weöres, a towering poet, and nobody’s lipserver, calls him ‘our greatest’.
     Pilinszky’s special quality is not easy to define. He recognizably belongs to that generation of East European poets which includes Herbert, Holub and Popa, but his differences draw any discussion of him into quite another context. Hungarians tend to set him a little outside their ordinary writers, and his poetry a little outside ordinary poetry. The reason for this is something essential to Pilinszky’s character. Critical judgement cannot rest in the aesthetic excellence of his work: it inevitably ends up arguing the ethical-religious position of Pilinszky himself, not at all a simple one in modern Hungary or anywhere else, but one which his poems and other writings and his life define with such poignancy and authority that it confronts the critic with a problem — a private, existential challenge. His ‘greatness’, then, unlike Weöres’, is not a greatness of imaginative and linguistic abundance. It has more to do with some form of spiritual distinction. The weight and unusual temper of his imagination and language derive from this.
     The bulk of his work is quite slight. His forms are traditional — varying only between tightness and looseness. The quality of his actual style is notable: it is simple, unambiguous, direct, but Hungarians agree that it is a marvel of luminosity, unerring balance, sinuous music and intensity — a metal resembling nothing else. Through translation we can only try to imagine that (though working as closely with the originals as I have worked, one soon picks up a very distinct idea of it). But even a rough translation cannot completely blanket Pilinszky’s unique vision of final things, or the urgency and depth and complexity of his poetic temperament.
     He was born in Budapest, in 1921. Certain known factors, which have had a vital influence on the mature form of his work, are worth mentioning. Perhaps one of the most decisive has been what might seem the most trivial. His syntax, for all its classical finish, is quite idiosyncratic. This can be felt clearly in a word-for-word crib — though it is less easy to translate further. Something elliptical in the connections, freakishly home-made, abrupt. It would not be going too far to say there is a primitive element in the way it grasps its subject. Yet this peculiarity is deeply part of its most sophisticated effects, and its truth. His own words give the best idea of it:

Should someone ask, what after all is my poetic language, in truth I should have to answer: it is some sort of lack of language, a sort of linguistic poverty. I have learned our mother-tongue from my mother’s elder sister, who met with an accident, was ill, and got barely beyond the stage of childlike stammering. This is not much. No doubt the world has added this and that, completely at random, accidentally, from very different workshops. This I received. And because the nice thing about our mother-tongue is exactly this fact, that we receive it, we do not want to add anything to it. We would feel it detrimental to do so. It would be as if we tried to improve our origin. But in art even such a poor language — and I must say this with the pride of the poor — can be redeemed. In art the deaf can hear, the blind can see, the cripple can walk, each deficiency may become a creative force of high quality. (1)

This ‘mother-tongue’ and especially his attitude towards it, as he describes it here, is a revealing clue to Pilinszky’s whole poetic character.
     Another pervading factor, which almost every word he writes forces us to take into account, has been his Catholic upbringing and education. His continuing allegiance to certain aspects of Catholicism is evident in small things — his publishing many of his poems in Catholic journals, his joining the staff of the Catholic weekly Új Ember in 1957. The poems demonstrate, however, that his inner relationship to Catholicism is neither simple nor happy. He has been called a Christian poet, even a Catholic poet, and the increasing density of Catholic terminology and imagery in his work provides argument for this. But he rejects those labels absolutely. There is no doubt that he is above all a religious poet. A rather dreadful sun of religious awareness, a midnight sun, hangs over all his responses. But his loyalty to a different order of revelation — which at first seems a directly opposite and contradictory order — comes first.
     In 1944 he was called up for Military Service — just in time to be scooped up by the retreating German Army. His last year of the war was spent moving from prison camp to prison camp in Austria and Germany.
     Whatever he met in those camps evidently opened the seventh seal for Pilinszky. It was a revelation of the new man: humanity stripped of everything but the biological persistence of cells. After this experience there emerges, at the heart of his poems, a strange creature, ‘a gasping, limbless trunk’, savaged by primal hungers, among the odds and ends of a destroyed culture, waiting to be shot, or beaten to death, or just thrown on a refuse heap — or simply waiting in empty eternity. The shock of this initiation seems to have objectified and confirmed something he had known from childhood: the world of the camps became the world of his deepest, most private, poetic knowledge.
     His first collection of poems appeared in 1946. It was a literary event in Hungary. He became leader, with Ágnes Nemes Nagy, of a new school of poets, and co-edited their magazine. Silence soon descended, however, and ten years had to pass before his poems began to emerge again. His second book containing eighteen poems reprinted from his first, and thirty-four new poems came out in 1959. It was acclaimed, at once, as the major achievement of a major writer.
     Those comparatively few poems have gradually established his international reputation. It was recognized, from the start, that he spoke from the disaster-centre of the modern world. What was also clear, though, was that his words escaped, only with great effort, from an intensifying, fixed core of silence. That bleak, lonely condemned one, at the heart of his poems, spoke less and less.
     The next thirteen years added only sixteen new poems. Then in 1971 and 1974 two new collections, projecting a new line of development from what had seemed impossible to alter, contained ninety-seven fresh pieces. Yet these pieces, if anything, only deepened the fixity and silence. All are short, fragmentary, and some hardly more than a sentence or couplet. The first of these collections was titled Splinters — splinters, that is, from the cross. The title of the second can be translated Denouement. The change, however, was there. The mood and imagery of his earlier work survived through an inner transformation which seemed uncompleted until, in 1975, he published Space and Relationship, a collection of poems interspersed with photographs of the sculptures of Erzsabet Schaár. The urgency and immediacy of his work, in this latest book, suggests a whole new phase in his writing. The possibilities of development suddenly seem wide open, and we can be sure that with a poet who has hung on to such a course with such tenacity, they will not be neglected.
     ‘I would like to write’, Pilinszky has said, ‘as if I had remained silent.’ He is not alone among modern poets, particularly those of his generation and experience, in his obsession with personal silence. As it is used by those Indian saints who refuse to speak at all until the ultimate truth speaks through them, or as Socrates used it before his judges, or as Christ used it before his accusers, silence can be a resonant form of speech. Pilinszky, who is rarely ironic and never messianic, makes us aware of another silence.
     It is impossible not to feel that the spirit of his poetry aspires to the most naked and helpless of all confrontations: a Christ-like posture of crucifixion. His silence is the silence of that moment on the cross, after the cry.
     In all that he writes, we hear a question: what speech is adequate for this moment, when the iron nails remain fixed in the wounds, with an eternal iron fixity, and neither hands nor feet can move?
     The silence of artistic integrity ‘after Auschwitz’ is a real thing. The mass of the human evidence of the camps, and of similar situations since, has screwed up the price of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ and ‘understanding’ beyond what common words seem able to pay. The European poets who have been formed by this circumstance are well known. They have only continued to write, when at all, with a seasoned despair, a minimal, much-examined hope, a special irony. But because he is as he is, above all a passionately religious being, Pilinszky has shifted the problem into other dimensions — which are more traditional but also, perhaps, broader and older, more intimately relevant, more piercing.
     This is not to suggest that his poetry is in its inmost spirit necessarily Christian. The poems are nothing if not part of an appeal to God, but it is a God who seems not to exist, Or who exists, if at all, only as he exists for the stones. Not Godlessness, but the imminence of a God altogether different from what dogmatic Christianity has ever imagined. A God of absences and negative attributes, quite comfortless. A God in whose creation the camps and modern physics are equally at home. But this God has the one almightiness that matters: he is the Truth.
     We come to this Truth only on the simplest terms: through what has been suffered, what is being suffered, and the objects that participate in the suffering. The mysterious thing is that in Pilinszky the naked, helpless quality of this truth is fused with the utmost spiritual intensity. The desolation of his vision is equalled by its radiance. The revelation of this particularly bleak God is the flashpoint in all his poems.
     In each poem, we find the same diamond centre: the post-apocalyptic silence, where the nail remains in the hand, and the wound cannot speak. The rich scope of Pilinszky’s religious feeling seems concentrated in that. That is his fixity. The only possible directions of movement are away from the nailed wound, or out of the flesh, both of which he reflects. Death has staked its claim in Pilinszky’s universe, and there is nothing life can do about it. Yet out of this one moment, from which theology retreats in confusion this hole of silence, which Christianity has managed to cover only with a loud chord of faith, Pilinszky makes his statement.
     In the final biological humiliation and solitude, the poems say, nothing at all can help. Yet we hear so many precious things clamouring in that helplessness. The most harrowing voice of all is sexual love. Almost as frightening is the voice which gropes for just somebody — anybody, in the radiant emptiness. In Pilinszky’s love poems ‘he’ is separated from ‘her’ as the flesh is separated from meaning and hope, and as the spirit is separated from any form of consolation. Yet his horror at the physicality and wretchedness of the trap is without any taint of disgust.
     And how is it, we might well ask, that this vision of what is, after all, a universe of death, an immovable, unalterable horror, where trembling creatures still go uselessly through their motions, how is it that it issues in poems so beautiful and satisfying? How do his few poor objects, his gigantic empty vistas, come to be so unforgettably alive and lit? The convict’s scraped skull, the chickens in their wooden cages, the disaster-blanched wall, which recur like features of a prison yard — all have an eerie, glowing depth of perspective, like objects in an early religious painting.
     Though the Christian culture has been stripped off so brutally, and the true condition of the animal exposed in its ugliness, and words have lost their meaning — yet out of that rise the poems, whose words are manifestly crammed with meaning. Something has been said which belies neither the reality nor the silence. More than that, the reality has been redeemed. The very symbols of the horror are the very things he has redeemed.
     They are not redeemed in any religious sense. They are redeemed, precariously, in some all-too-human sense, somewhere in the pulsing mammalian nervous-system, by a feat of humane consecration: a provisional, last-ditch ‘miracle’ which we recognize, here, as poetic.
     By this route, Pilinszky’s poetry proves itself to be almost a religious activity. Once we have said that, though, we realize it is also a by-product. The chief task is something else, an attitude, and more than that a sustained commitment to certain loyalties, which involve Pilinszky’s whole life at every moment. And it is true, his personality and his life are as exemplary, for Hungarians, as his poems: they are a single fabric. This insistence of Pilinszky’s on paying for his words with his whole way of life, has confirmed the authority of his poems. And this is how they come to be an existential challenge to all who are deeply drawn into them.
     It is characteristic that his affinities are not with other poets, but with such figures as Van Gogh, certain of Dostoevsky’s characters, and, above all, perhaps with Simone Weil (2). These extreme individuals, the nature of their inner struggles, the temperament verging on the saintly or the suicidal, zigzag like naked lightning through the magnetic atmosphere of Pilinszky’s writings. They personify his most vital element, the electrified steely strength under his passivity and gentleness.
     If the right hand of his poetic power is his hard grasp of a revealed truth of our final condition, then his left hand, so much more human and hurt, is his mystically intense feeling for the pathos of the sensual world. ‘Mystical’ is an unsatisfactory word, but one feels the nearness of something like ecstasy, a fever of negated love, a vast inner exposure. The intensity is not forceful or strenuous, in any way. It is rather a stillness of affliction, a passivity of transfiguration. At this point, when all the powers of the soul are focused on what is final, and cannot be altered, even though it is horrible, the anguish is indistinguishable from joy. The moment closest to extinction turns out to be the creative moment. Final reality, a source of extraordinary energy, has been located and embraced. It is like an eclipse of the sun: each image of living death, in all its solid, earthern confinement, has a halo of solar flames.
     So we feel, finally, no revulsion. The result is not comforting. But it is healing. Ghastliness and bliss are strangely married. The imagery of the central mysteries of Catholicism and the imagery of the camps have become strangely interdependent. - Ted Hughes


The French Prisoner


If only I could forget that Frenchman.
I saw him, just before dawn, creeping past our quarters
into the dense growth of the back garden
so that he almost merged into the ground.
As I watched he looked back, he peered all round—
At last he had found a safe hideout.
Now his plunder can be all his!
He'll go no further, whatever happens.
Already he is eating, biting into the turnip
which he must have smuggled out under his rags.
He was gulping raw cattle-turnip!
Yet he had hardly swallowed one mouthful
before it flooded back up.
Then the sweet pulp in his mouth mingled
with delight and disgust the same
as the unhappy and happy come together
in their bodies' voracious ecstasy.
Only to forget that body, those quaking shoulder blades,
the hands shrunk to bone,
the bare palm that crammed at his mouth,
and clung there
so that it ate, too.
And the same, desperate and enraged
of the organs embittered against each other
forced to tear from each other
their last bonds of kinship.
The way his clumsy feet had been left out
of the gibbering bestial joy and splayed there,
crushed beneath the rapture and torture of his body.
And his glance—if only I could forget that!
Though he was choking, he kept on
forcing more down his gullet—no matter what—
only to eat—anything—this—that—even himself!
Why go on? Guards came for him.
He had escaped from the nearby prison camp.
And just as I did then, in that garden,
I am strolling here, among garden shadows, at home.
I look into my notes and quote:
'If only I could forget that Frenchman...'
And from my ears, my eyes, my mouth
the scalding memory shouts at me:
'I am hungry!' And suddenly I feel
the eternal hunger
which that poor creature has long ago forgotten
and which no earthly nourishment can lessen.
He lives on me. And more and more hungrily!
And I am less and less sufficient for him.
And now he, who would have eaten anything,
is clamoring for my heart.
 Translated from the Hungarian by Ted Hughes


On a Forbidden Star

I was born on a forbidden star. From there
driven ashore, I trudge along the sand.
The surf of celestial nothingness takes me up,
and plays with me, then casts me on the land.

Why I repent I do not even know.
It is a puzzle buzzing in my ear.
If any of you should find me on this beach,
this sunken beach, don’t run away, stay here.

And don’t be scared. Don’t run away. Just try
to mitigate the suffering in my life.
Shut your eyes and press me to yourself.
Press me boldly, as you would a knife.
Be reckless too: look on me as the dead
look on the night, seeing it as their own,
your shoulder there to aid my weaker one.
I can no longer bear to be alone.

I never wanted to be born. It was nothingness
Who bore and suckled me; with her I started.
So love me darkly. Love me cruelly. Love me
like the one left behind by the departed.




On the Wall of a KZ Lager

Where you’ve fallen, you will stay.
In the whole universe this one
and only place is the sole place
which you have made your very own.

The country runs away from you.
House, mill, poplar – every thing
is struggling with you here, as if
in nothingness mutating.

But now it’s you who won’t give up.
Did we fleece you? You’ve grown rich.
Did we blind you? You watch us still.
You bear witness without speech.


Before

I don’t know much about the future, but
I can picture the Last Judgement.
That day, that hour
will be the exaltation of our nakedness.

No one will look for another in the multitude.
The Cross, as if but a splinter,
will be taken back into the Father,
and the angels, creatures of heaven,
will lay open the world’s last page.
And then we’ll say:  I love you. We’ll say:
.I love you very much. And in the sudden pushing and shoving
our cries will free the waters once again,
before we sit down at the table.

English version by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri





János Pilinszky, The Desert of Love: Selected Poems, Trans. by János Csokits, Anvil Press, 1989.


János Pilinszky (1921-1981) was a unique and compelling voice among the generation of European poets whose work bore first-hand witness to the horrors of war. The distinction of his poetry, as Ted Hughes argues, is both spiritual and artistic: `the desolation of [his] vision is equalled by its radiance'. The depth and power of Pilinszky's poetry are forcefully recreated in these memorable versions by János Csokits and Ted Hughes.
`The Desert of Love' is a revised edition of their earlier selection of his magnetic, intense and haunting poems. The added memoir by Pilinszky's close friend and associate Ágnes Nemes Nagy gives a major living Hungarian poet's view of his achievement.





János Pilinszky, Conversations with Sheryl Sutton: The Novel of a Dialogue. Trans. by Peter Jay and Eva Major, Sheep Meadow Press,  1992.


In 1973 Hungarian poet Janos Pilinszky was in Paris. He went to Robert Wilson's production of Deafman Glance. In a cafe he met a black artist from Wilson's company, Sheryl Sutton. They met again, once for several hours' conversation. He described this radiant book as the novel of a dialogue: the framework, details and some of the stories told are fictional, but the essentials are true. Sheryl is his muse as he meditates on the place of imagination in his harsh world (a Roman Catholic under communism). But, the Preface says, 'the book is also, most obviously and profoundly, a love-story', enigmatic, intense, going to the heart of Pilinszky's vision, expressing a 'faith in human life which triumphs over all the horrors'


It is fortunate for readers that this novel, a conversation between a poet and an actress, is just over 100 pages long because repeated readings are necessary to understand it. In traditional fashion, the reader tries to connect chapters into a coherent whole--sometimes unsuccessfully. Some sections are individual essays about art and reality, or about the role of dialog and silence on the stage, or about how art, reality, dialog, and silence relate, especially in Robert Wilson's play, Deafman Glance. Other sections contain ordinary descriptions of everyday activities, although under the surface the hapless reader suspects heavy symbolism that surely connects to other parts of the text, but how and in what ways? And then there is mention of love, Auschwitz, Simone Weil, and Durrenmatt. A curious book, very fascinating and challenging, that is seemingly within our grasp; but the more we deconstruct it, the more insecure we may feel. Suitable for academic and large public libraries. - Olivia Opello


Reviewers, Lord love us, may mismatch our socks and dent our fenders like everyone else, but about books we're supposed to be authorities. You, the readers, want to know two things: What is "Conversations With Sheryl Sutton" about? And is it any good? It's my job to answer those questions and, if possible, give you something extra besides.
Nothing looks worse in a review than a simple confession of ignorance. Yet the truth is: I have only a vague idea of what this experimental novel is about. And it may be good, but how good only a reader a lot more erudite than I (and, let's face it, than most of you too) would be qualified to say.
I could finesse this, of course. Reviewers have ways of disguising their intellectual inadequacy. I could talk about the author, Hungarian poet Janos Pilinszky (1921-81). I could dwell on the social and historical background: He was in prison camps during World War II; later, under Hungary's Communist regime, which banned his poetry for 10 years, he eked out a living as a columnist for Catholic publications. I could talk about the theater: Much of "Conversations" is a treatise on what we now call performance art.
Anything but the book itself.
The neatest trick--in fact, the one I'll use here--is to talk about the book after all, but only about those parts of it I can understand. The idea is that its readership, at best, will be small and select.
Pilinszky's true audience will be smart enough to find it even without the aid of my crude finger-pointing; the rest of you won't be able to call my bluff.
To begin, then: Paris, 1973. A man and a woman.
The man, Pilinszky, is in his 50s and ailing (although the bout of pneumonia he suffers in the novel may be just "a wry acknowledgment of his hypochondria," co-translator Peter Jay says). The woman, Sheryl Sutton, is another real person, an American actress, then 23, appearing in the Robert Wilson play "Deafman Glance," a work that highly impressed Pilinszky.
In life, Pilinszky and Sutton met briefly at a cafe and later talked for several hours. In the novel, they have a number of long, deeply philosophical conversations. Their relationship, although platonic, is intense. Sutton nurses Pilinszky back to health, sometimes sleeping on the floor beside his sickbed. She reads his works, acts out dramatic scenarios that they make up and cooks him his favorite potato goulash.
Do we expect a contrast between the world-weary European and the raw, primitive Yank? Whatever the real Sheryl Sutton may be like, Pilinszky's Sutton is fully his equal in intellect and sophistication.
Their dialogue, set down unadorned as in a play, is so elliptical and poetic that Jay admits: "There are a few passages so baffling that nobody we have turned to has been able to shed light on them."
Pilinszky himself puts it best: This so-called novel is "the only book of essays I am capable of writing."
The subject of those essays--of the conversations--is what possibilities are left for art after the horrors of the 20th Century. The aim, Pilinszky says, is to become a "citizen of the universe," not merely of the world.
"Masterpieces are beyond boredom, not before it," he says. "What now disturbs me in modern literature is that it doesn't dare run the risk of boredom," as Tolstoy's novels and Bach's music did. Sutton finds in Wilson's play and in performance art a path around the conventions of realistic theater to a direct confrontation with reality, the silence and wholeness of Greek tragedy and religious ritual.
This is, finally, a book of wonders. It's a wonder that the chance meeting between Pilinszky and Sutton gave rise to such a singular work. That Jay and Eva Major spent years translating it. That Sheep Meadow-Carcanet published it, with what must have been little hope of commercial gain. In short, that "Conversations," quirky and brave, exists at all--waiting for the right readers to come along. And reviewers be damned. - MICHAEL HARRIS

Frances Larson - A serious and seriously entertaining exploration of the dark and varied obsessions that the “civilized West” has had with decapitated heads and skulls.

Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found, Granta, 2014.

franceslarson.com/

The human head is exceptional. It accommodates four of our five senses, encases the brain, and boasts the most expressive set of muscles in the body. It is our most distinctive attribute and connects our inner selves to the outer world. Yet there is a dark side to the head’s preeminence, one that has, in the course of human history, manifested itself in everything from decapitation to headhunting. So explains anthropologist Frances Larson in this fascinating history of decapitated human heads. From the Western collectors whose demand for shrunken heads spurred massacres to Second World War soldiers who sent the remains of the Japanese home to their girlfriends, from Madame Tussaud modeling the guillotined head of Robespierre to Damien Hirst photographing decapitated heads in city morgues, from grave-robbing phrenologists to skull-obsessed scientists, Larson explores our macabre fixation with severed heads. 25 illustrations.

Larson (An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World) delves into the grotesque yet wildly fascinating topic of decapitation. She begins her story by offering an explanation as to why disembodied heads have maintained such novelty over time: it’s because a severed head is “simultaneously a person and a thing.” Beheadings have always captivated, as can been seen from the popularity of historical tales, such as the exhumation and decapitation of Oliver Cromwell (his head then circulated a series of private collectors and was finally buried—the exact resting place a secret), and the frequency of contemporary internet searches for the decapitation of prisoners by terrorists. Larson mentions three contexts in which heads, sans body, have been prominent: in soldiers’ homes as war trophies, in the market that was created to sell shrunken heads to European travelers, and in science labs that conduct research on heads. Perhaps more relevantly for most readers, severed heads have been a noteworthy feature of many museums and religious iconography. Larson’s lively, conversational tone turns these morbid objects into something more meaningful than a mere expression of the macabre. - Publishers Weekly

Larson (Honorary Research Fellow/Univ. of Durham; An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World, 2009) explores our morbid preoccupation with the grotesque, as typified by the value we place on severed heads.
Not only do severed heads appear in museums and similar collections, but “[v]ideos of beheadings have been uploaded online by terrorists and murderers in recent years and downloaded by millions of Europeans and Americans to watch in their own homes.” The author explains that this book was an offshoot of her interest in how museum collections are curated, but she was soon drawn to a different reality. A skull, she writes, is the tidied-up end product of “the act of decapitation…the brutality that is required to behead a person, and the varied conditions under which that brutality is unleashed.” She finds evidence that the practice of tribal headhunting was more a business transaction with representatives of collectors than a pagan religious rite; in the late 19th century, there was “a booming international trade in shrunken heads.” Shakespeare expresses the symbolic power of a severed head—now an object but once the seat of our personhood—when Hamlet contemplates the soul of Yorick. Larson examines beyond the horrific instances of terrorist beheadings of hostages, and she delves into the degraded treatment of dead Japanese soldiers by American GIs who desecrated their remains. “All the World War II trophy skulls so far recorded by forensic scientists in America are Japanese,” writes Larson, “and there are no records of trophy heads taken in the European theater.” In the author’s opinion, the savagery expressed by these cases was not only occasioned by the brutality of battle conditions, but also by “the intense racial prejudices that informed these conflicts.” In fact, “soldiers often equated their job to hunting animals in the jungle.” Along with the history, the author supplies complementary photographs and illustrations.
An alternately intriguing and disturbing sidelight on our cultural values that is not for the squeamish.
- Kirkus Reviews

“[W]ide-ranging and thoughtful… In an age where so many taboos are fading, the severed head retains its dreadful and sacred power.” - Mike Jay

“No need to explain why this nonfiction book made the top of my list… Despite the ghoulish subject, this is a closely researched, indeed, scholarly study of the bizarre customs of hunting, collecting, trading, displaying and otherwise bonding with other people’s heads.” - Marilyn Stasio

On April 9 2004, the American engineer Nick Berg was kidnapped in Iraq. A month later, footage of his beheading was posted online, and was only removed when the website could not cope with the sudden surge of traffic it had attracted. Soon the top 10 internet search terms in the United States were all Berg-related, including “berg beheading” and “nick berg beheading’, and by the end of the month it was second only to American Idol in terms of its popular appeal.

That may be shocking, but it is hardly surprising. Berg’s video audience was merely a globally dispersed version of the mobs that have always been drawn to such bloody spectacles. For many centuries, the prospect of a public beheading drew huge crowds, who jeered at the executioner as he inexpertly hacked away, or waited to catch the blood (thought to contain magical healing properties) that spurted from the victim’s neck. As late as the mid-19th century, Dickens was irresistibly drawn to an execution in Rome, and although he reported that the local crowd showed a total lack of compassion, that did not prevent him from getting up close to the severed head and noticing that it had become “dull, cold, livid wax”, and was starting to attract flies.

According to Frances Larson, in her elegantly argued and grimly compelling survey, severed heads have a peculiar ability to dull our usual ethical responses. The act of physically detaching somebody’s head also involves a form of social detachment, as if we could only cope with the brutal task of cutting someone’s life short so abruptly by delegating it to someone else.

But that alone could not account for the sheer fascination that severed heads have possessed for many people, including mild-mannered scientists and mousy authors as well the more obviously bloodthirsty.

A severed head may look like a fat full stop, but it usually behaves more like a question-mark. The place where a head is divided from its body also marks an uncertain boundary between man’s physical and mental life. It reminds us that the human brain is housed within a skull that is destined to outlast it, like an envelope after the letter has been thrown away, and that anyone who believes in mind over matter must first confront the fact that the mind is matter. Not only that, but it is matter of a peculiarly vulnerable kind. It can be killed even without being touched; all it takes is a few whacks of the axe.

A popular cultural emblem of this idea is Hamlet holding up Yorick’s skull in the graveyard. Once a man who told jokes, now Yorick cannot stop leering toothily at the world, like a comedian who knows that the ultimate punchline is death itself. No wonder Hamlet is so alarmed. Examining Yorick’s skull is like gazing into a mirror that works in time as well as space. This is what Hamlet, too, will become. This is what everyone will become.
That has not stopped researchers from trying to pluck some sort of sense from death’s mystery. One photograph reproduced by Larson shows staff at an army museum in Washington earnestly filling skulls with water in 1884 to test “the capacity of the cranial capacity”, but that is only the most literal way in which human heads have been used as containers. Once a skull’s original contents have been scooped out, it is easy to transform it into a vessel ready to be filled with new meanings. “A severed head can be many things,” Larson points out, “a loved one, a trophy, scientific data, criminal evidence, an educational prop, a religious relic…”
It can be a souvenir, like the boiled heads of Japanese soldiers that some troops sent home during the Second World War, in one case producing a magazine article in which a war bride was pictured staring soulfully at a gleaming specimen, like an American Hamlet confronting a Japanese Yorick. It can be a source of stories, like the man who was put to death in 1642 and later entertained the crowd even more when they used his head as a football. (As Larson mordantly observes, some heads “enjoy a more extensive social life after death than their owners did in life”.) It even lurks inside many common expressions, whether you are knocking someone’s block off or putting your own head on the block.
However, what distinguishes Larson’s writing is her insistence on the sheer physicality of her subject, such as the head of a young actress dug up after 10 days in the grave, by which time her flesh was “greenish-black”; or the effort required by a medical student to saw through a cadaver’s skull, followed by “sounds of tearing tissue” as the delicate brain is tugged free from its casing.
Some of her most startling examples involve attempts to prove that the mind can survive the death of the body. During the French Revolution, guillotined heads that appeared to blush or be aware of their surroundings led scientists to conduct experiments like shouting into their ears, or stuffing ammonia-soaked brushes into their nostrils. In the early 1800s, displays of electricity sometimes included a dog’s head being cut off and reanimated through probes that made its teeth chatter and eyes roll around. More recently, cryonics has allowed people to be “neurosuspended”, by having their heads removed immediately after death and frozen in nitrogen.
What links these activities is the hope that people do not merely have brains, in the way they might have arms or legs, but are their brains. To bring the brain back to life is to resurrect the person in whom it once resided. Currently that is medically impossible, even if it were morally desirable, but there is an alternative.
Larson does not go far down this path, merely pointing out that art has often engaged with the idea of disembodied heads, from the many paintings of Salome being presented with John the Baptist’s head on a salver, to Marc Quinn’s Self, a life-size sculpture of his head that is made from nine frozen pints of his own blood. But, of course, the dream of surviving your own death is also what animates Larson’s own chosen medium: writing. In this context, perhaps it is not surprising that when writers think about severed heads, they often enjoy imagining them as still alive in some way.
In traditional commedia dell’arte, the clown whose head is lopped off calmly picks it up and saunters away. In Keats’s poem Isabella, the heroine buries her lover’s head in a pot of basil and watches as it sprouts glossy new leaves. Most famously, in myth, Orpheus’s head is cut off but continues to sing as it bobs downriver. Seen from one perspective, the story is an eloquent proof of the mystery that a severed head has always represented to the living: a fragment of someone’s body that is also the centre of their personality. From another perspective, it reminds us that what comes out of our heads can hang around long after the rest of us has been reduced to dust. - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Humans are easy to decapitate: Our large heads rest on little necks. Most mammals have thick muscles joining the shoulders with the base of the skull; ours are so slender that our spines show through the skin. It is the price tag of standing upright, of casting off the hominid hunch. “Heads,” writes Frances Larson in Severed, are “tempting to remove.” Above the shoulders, our anatomy resembles a teed-up golf ball.

Larson, an English anthropologist, thinks that before turning to the mind-body problem, we might consider the head-neck situation. She wrote the book, a survey of our “traditions of decapitation,” because she believes dead heads can tell us things about our souls: “What can we learn about our common humanity from this, the ultimate image of inhumanity?” The answers she provides to this question are fascinating and unexpected (as well as grisly and paradoxical). Beheading isn’t barbaric, if by that we mean archaic. On the contrary, it is modern, the dark side of the belief that “we are our brains.” Historically, it is the people who wanted to prove something, not those who wanted to hurt somebody, who have cut off the most heads. Science “excused a multitude of sins,” Larson writes, “particularly when the ‘subjects of study’ were impoverished, imprisoned or deemed to be primitive.” She distinguishes between “those people who are labeled” and “those who label people.” The labelers get away with murder (literally). In her story, curiosity opens the door to monsters.

Of course, Larson is curious too, and curious about her curiosity. She knows it’s nasty but assumes she’s not alone—“part of the horror is that a severed head is so captivating.” Why does she want to see what repels her? The best sections of Severed look inward to these cringing urges, which run deep. “I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight,” wrote William Makepeace Thackeray in 1840, after the public execution of a murderer. The writer had gone to see the killer die live.
In nonfiction about death the personal anecdote is never far away. Larson first felt the pull of her strange topic at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford—i.e., “the place with the shrunken heads.” These heads (there are ten) arrived in England in the nineteenth century. The dark and detailed faces were small enough to hold in a hand. They were produced, according to ritual, by the Shuar, an Amazonian people of present-day Ecuador, and when they sold well the traders who’d acquired them went back for more. Headhunting had once been occasional, but the logic of the market took over: “Guns were used to take heads, which were, in turn, exchanged for more guns.” The Shuar beheaded each other, Europeans, dug-up corpses, even monkeys; it was hard to tell the difference once the heads were shrunk. Rumors of the killing made them seem more savage, which in turn made Europeans want more from them. “Visitors may see these exhibits . . . as the gruesome trophies of an untouched savage people,” Larson writes, “when what they are actually seeing are the gruesome trophies of a western fascination with the idea of an untouched savage people.”
In this manner, civilization gave birth to its nightmares, which episode Larson treats as typical. All of us are excited by what we fear—particularly, she suggests, if we are intellectuals. “Wonder and revulsion, ever in flux, are the twin responses to the study of ‘gross anatomy,’” Larson writes, and her prose displays both. About heads, she is of two minds. She wants to know more, and less. No kidding. A premed explains the trick to cutting up cadavers: “You don’t let yourself think about the fact . . . that the tongue has kissed someone.”
People in denial of the facts are always vulnerable to those who tell them what they want to hear. Dead heads are big with frauds. Churches in possession of skulls have been known to spread word of their magic properties. Victorians stole them from graves and used them to adorn their walls. Some rich people think they can live forever, thanks to cryogenics, if they agree to be beheaded after death. “Who would ever have dreamed that cutting off your mother’s head could be the ultimate act of caring love?” asks one son. That severed heads lend themselves to so much duplicity has to do with their essential doubleness. Both “unique” and “impersonal,” they span “the boundaries between persons and things.” They are the thing that stands in for nothingness, the ultimate memento mori—and the ideal prop for people looking to exploit the terror of others. Phrenologists used them to spin their theories of the races and potentates to assert their power. Artists saw in them, or tried to see, death itself, but as Damien Hirst put it, “When you’re actually confronted with that kind of thing . . . it just gets relocated somewhere else.”

It’s this desire to see what isn’t there—the secret of race, the enemy tamed, the cure for death, the essence of transience—that blinds people to the ugliness of what is. Larson’s diverse anecdotes leave a single impression: You cannot look at horrors without them tainting you. When the guillotine was introduced in France, in 1793, the crowds complained, but not about the carnage. They missed the spectacle of the manual style. No longer could a drunken executioner or a dull blade be counted on to spice things up. “Taking the drama out of death,” Larson warns, “is a dangerous ideal.”

There’s even less drama now. Larson tells the story of Nicholas Berg, an engineer who went to Iraq during the American invasion. Soon after his disappearance, in the spring of 2004, a video began to circulate. Men in black speak in Arabic; one has a knife; Berg, in orange, is seated. To see the actual beheading Americans had to go on the Internet. They googled for it—“beheading video,” “berg beheading.” In the weeks that followed, only queries for American Idol were more popular. A survey reported that half of those who had seen the “graphic content” felt they had made a “good decision.” The other half had made a bad one. Did they know more, or less? - James Camp

Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found caught my eye while I was reading the "Briefly Noted" book section of The New Yorker sometime back.  The idea that someone would write about the severed head's significance in the history of  "the civilized West" appealed to my fascination with the strange so I knew I had to read it.  After finishing the prologue about the history and fate of the head of Oliver Cromwell, I knew I'd found something deliciously different here -- and that I had to finish this book in one go.
Sadly, the spectacle of  beheadings has come back into our lives full force with the public executions by radical terrorists in the Middle East after 9/11.  In her chapter titled "Deposed Heads," the author notes that only a month after the beheading of Daniel Pearl in 2002, the video made by his captors started circulating on the internet, and four months later the Boston Phoenix published a link on their website. When in May, 2004, engineer Nick Berg met the same fate, it only took days for the "unedited" video to be made available -- this time by Reuters, then picked up by US news networks. The online footage of the actual beheading
"remained the most popular internet search in the United States for a week, and the second most popular throughout the month of May, runner up only to 'American Idol.' " 
Even worse, the Dallas Morning News printed a photo of one of the terrorists holding Berg's severed head (although thankfully with face not visible),  saying that their decision followed "interest generated in the blogosphere," and that "not one of the 87 letters"  they'd received about it "called for these images not to be printed."
And now with the advent of ISIS,  beheadings are once again in the public sphere, "a piece of theatre designed to create power and cause fear" with "maximum visibility, maximum resonance" as well as its power to encourage "maximum fear."   The author notes that
"by searching Google for the latest execution video, the people watching also have their part to play."
As someone who didn't follow that herd, while it's hard for me to believe that in this day and age there are people who freely choose to watch someone's murder online, it is a known fact that audiences have been  drawn to executions for centuries, "ready to enjoy the spectacle."
But even outside the sphere of public beheadings and executions, the author uses her book to draw the reader's attention to the very human fascination with human heads.  Over the course of several chapters, she chronicles the history of shrunken heads, of heads taken as trophies, of severed heads as objects of power, about the fascination of heads used in art, the heads (and other body parts) of saints used as relics, of the study of heads and pseudoscience (phrenology, etc) and in real science (as tools for medical students), and finally, in a chapter called "Living Heads," which in part, explores the scientific (and other) attempts to determine how long the head lives after being severed, as well as the fascination people have with keeping their head alive so a body can be reattached when science has advanced beyond its current capabilities.
Ms. Larson writes very well and immerses the reader right away. Sometimes it's obvious that she's adopting a sort of tongue-in-cheek, funny attitude toward her subject, but most of the time she's quite serious. The book is easily accessible, very reader friendly and each chapter includes not just facts, but strong analysis as well.  I think a chapter on "decapitations in literature" to go with her chapter about art would have been a strong addition.  My only complaint is that the first time she made a statement and I went to look for endnotes, there weren't any.  I'm one of those readers who enjoy noting down sources as they appear -- and even though she has a sizable bibliography at the end of the book, it was incredibly frustrating not to know an exact source of information as it was given in the text.  I was also a little disappointed at her disclaimer at the beginning of her section on sources where she writes that she intended the book as a "popular account" so did not cite names in the text.  She also notes that "detailed notes" are available at her website, but jeez -- stopping my reading to go look online (even with Ipad next to me) is a lot to ask a person to do. Other than that  not-so-minor quibble,  it's definitely a book worth reading on what is to me a fascinating and sadly relevant topic. - NancyO


Who knew beheading would make such a comeback in the modern world?

Though Larson’s elegant history of head-taking precedes the advent of Islamic State, references in her epilogue pertain all too closely to fanatical jihadists. “The physical detachment of a person’s head is often preceded by an assumed social detachment that separates the perpetrator from his victim. This social detachment has often taken the form of racism,” she observes. This “can turn a person into an object before they are even dead”. Furthermore, “geographical remoteness” also plays a part, for example for the American soldiers she quotes, who, during jungle warfare, found previously unsuspected levels of brutality within. This distance “can allow the perpetrator to assume an alternative identity and occupy an alternative reality, one where normal codes are inverted”.
The process of turning people into things can be both mundane and powerfully magical. “Taking the drama out of death is a dangerous ideal,” Larson notes. The guillotine, created during the French Revolution to be humane, terrifyingly accelerated the production line of execution and effected the Terror. The initial spectators felt cheated. Its action was too quick for the eye to see; there were no enjoyable writhings or screams. Larson relates how this led to a deep uneasiness about the exact moment of death, and urban legends about cheeks that blushed angrily, and eyes that swivelled after decapitation.
Larson’s most telling case study is the saga of the shrunken heads that can be seen today in museums. Collected avidly by 19th-century explorers and scientists, they seemed proof of the bestial nature of native peoples, and the West’s superiority. Yet, as Larson demonstrates, the market was created by such collectors, who often unwittingly bought shrunken monkey-heads or caused murder to be committed. Whites themselves were seen as head-hunting ghouls by indigenous people, even as they supplied the demand.
Saints, sinners and geniuses have all had their heads reaped for contemplation and study. Larson surveys the severed head in art, medicine, religion and criminology; her book is packed with bizarre and horrifying stories, fascinating facts and philosophical conundrums. The pictures are stirring too, including one from Life magazine that horrified and disgusted America in 1944: Miss Natalie Nickerson contemplating the thoughtful gift her Navy boyfriend has just despatched from New Guinea – the skull of a Japanese soldier. - Suzi Feay


A severed head, argues Frances Larson in her sprightly new book, is ‘simultaneously a person and a thing… an apparently impossible duality… an intense incongruity’. History is ‘littered’ with such heads. Pilgrims visit them: the heads of St Peter and St Paul, for example, are thought to be in the high altar of the Basilica of St John Lateran. Artists are inspired by them, especially the erotically charged ones in the stories of Salome and Judith. Medical students dissect them, thereby acquiring the ‘necessary inhumanity’ of their profession. And Americans pay $50,000 to have their own heads cut off — cryonicists prefer the term ‘cephalic isolation’ — and preserved in thermos flasks of liquid nitrogen. ‘Could decapitation,’ asks Larson, ‘be just another stage in a person’s life?’
She begins her story at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (of which she has co-written a history), where shrunken heads — tsantsas — are displayed in the ‘treatment of dead enemies’ section. They were made about a century ago by the Shuar tribe of Peru and Ecuador, by removing the skull, flesh and muscle, then repeatedly filling the skin with hot sand and pebbles; the idea was to harness the power of the soul, and once that had been achieved, in ceremonies that lasted years, the heads were disposable.
Some were sold to travellers, and demand for them grew in Europe and America. The Shuar wanted guns, which were much better for headhunting than spears, and the price established for one gun was one shrunken head; so some Shuar began to murder for the market, and tsantsas became ‘a kind of macabre tourist art’. Of the 10 heads in the Pitt Rivers, two turn out to be of sloths, two of howler monkeys, and of the six human ones three are ‘fakes’. The toi moko, the preserved and tattooed heads of the Maoris, tell a similar story. It sometimes happened that European visitors to New Zealand were killed, to have their heads removed, tattooed and sold to other travellers.
Who were the real headhunters, then, ‘them’ or ‘us’? In the 19th century, with the rise of such new disciplines as craniology and ethnology, scientifically-minded explorers began collecting heads from ‘primitive’ societies, robbing graves to do so. Wary of white headhunters, natives of Java and Indonesia buried their dead by night. Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert all lost their skulls to souvenir seekers. ‘To be gnawed out of our graves,’ wrote Thomas Browne in 1658, ‘to have our skulls made drinking-bowls… are tragical abominations.’ His own was dug up in 1840, to be exhibited at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital Museum.
Larson is alert to irony. Criminals have been publicly beheaded for millennia. From the 14th to the 17th centuries, a Keeper of the Heads lived in the gatehouse on London Bridge, employed to arrange fresh heads to dramatic effect and to throw old ones into the river. Executioners were often drunk, and a common excuse for a botched job was that, seeing double, they had hacked at the wrong head. In 1488 Claus Flügge, the executioner at Hamburg, beheaded 79 pirates in rapid succession. Asked by the city senate how he felt, he said, ‘I could easily go on and do away with the entire Wise and Honourable Senate,’ for which insolence he lost his own head. After the French Revolution the guillotine, or ‘national razor’, was far too quick and unspectacular for the mob, who bayed for the return of the old wooden gallows.
These days criminals have taken to publicly beheading the innocent. There is a massive difference, of course, a hideous inversion, but in both cases the event is a theatrical one, intended to create terror, and in both the audience is complicit. In May 2004 Nick Berg became the first American to be beheaded in Iraq; the video of his murder was the most popular internet search item in the United States for a week, and the second most popular for a month, after American Idol. As Larson observes: ‘The real power of the crowd lies in the possibility that we might decide not to watch.’
Severed offers a scholarly, grimly amusing and possibly definitive survey of an often disquieting subject. - Lewis Jones 

In the early 1950s, my grandfather Alan Cuell was called up for national service and sent to the rainforests of Borneo. On his first patrol, he was ordered to bring up the rear of the regiment; the only person behind him was the local Dayak guide. Alan had barely been outside Essex before, so he was intrigued by the guide’s traditional costume, particularly the items dangling from the man’s waist. Asking what they were, he was disconcerted when the translator replied, “Shrunken heads.” He spent the remainder of the patrol in constant fear that his next step would be his last, later describing it as the most terrifying experience of his life.
What Frances Larson sets out to demonstrate in Severed is that the significance of decapitated heads to the Dayak people is not as exotic as it must have seemed to my grandfather – from medieval times to the present day, severed heads have featured with at least equal prominence in European culture. It’s not all about the spectacle of heads on pikes, either: “Over the centuries,” she argues, “human heads have embellished almost every facet of our society, from the scaffold to the cathedral, and from the dissecting room to the art gallery.” This fascination with the head is reflected in our everyday speech — how often do we refer to someone putting their head on the block, or keeping their head while all those around are losing theirs?
If Alan had ever been to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, he might have seen their famous display of shrunken heads collected by the Shuar people of Ecuador and Peru. Displayed in amongst a collection of ceremonial knives and trephination tools, the heads are regarded as one of the main attractions of the museum, with school-children and tourists crowding in to get a glimpse of them.
Larson’s examination of the shrunken heads reveals a surprising underlying dynamic: many were created specifically to meet demand from Western traders in the nineteenth century. The Shuar in fact saw the head as rather insignificant compared to the power of the soul within. The head, once shrunken, is like an envelope after the letter has been taken out. As trade increased, the heads “lost their spiritual power and became commercial products; now some Shuar simply murdered people in order to sell their heads. In this way, Europeans and Americans helped to create the indiscriminate, bloodthirsty headhunters they expected to find.” In the present day too, Western culture seems to place more importance on the heads than the people who collected them do. As Larson points out, “It is not the Shuar who are pressing their noses to the glass of an exhibition case in an Oxford University museum.”
In recent years, there has been a debate over the ethics of displaying these grisly relics, with campaigners arguing that heads should be sent back to their native land for burial. However, in contrast to the Maori of New Zealand, there has been no claims from Shuar people for the heads to be returned. This partly reflects the lack of cultural importance afforded to the shrunken heads, but there is a further motive, according to Larson: Shuar visitors to other museums, notably the American Museum of Natural History in New York, have felt that the heads “created an important connection between their people and the people of New York City.”
Of the ten shrunken heads in the Pitt Rivers Museum, two are sloth heads, two are howler monkeys, and three were created specifically as goods to be traded. The remaining three are genuine cultural artefacts which “tell a nuanced tale of murderous acts that were condoned by the society where they were made, that had deep spiritual significance and that played their part in the cycle of life through the generations.” The commercially traded heads, by contrast, “tell of the nameless dead… who, after their deaths, became the victims of an exotic trade in exotic collectibles that had little to do with the indigenous beliefs of the inhabitants of the Amazon jungle.”

The display of heads in museums, then, can “help us to confront the complexities of foreign engagement with South American culture… [and] also the notion that when we stare through the glass case at shrunken heads in a British museum, they are somehow nothing to do with us.” In fact, in countries like Indonesia, Borneo and Malaysia, Westerners have often been regarded as headhunters — hardly surprising, since “British and American collectors spent a considerable amount of time asking for people’s heads…and many took the trouble to open graves and rob people of their skulls.”
Of course, shrunken heads are the exception, an extreme example of the fascination with skulls which permeates our culture. Before going any further, it is worth considering the head as a physical artefact. It accommodates four of the five senses, as well as the brain, is made up of twenty bones, and has up to thirty-two teeth; it is ornamented with hair, ears, nose and lips, which can all be ornamented in their turn. The human brain is significantly larger than that of other primates, and the head has grown in order to accommodate it. In evolutionary terms, this comes at a cost, as Yuval Noah Harari notes in Sapiens. While the development of a larger brain should be a no-brainer, “the fact is that a jumbo brain is a jumbo drain on the body. It is not easy to carry around, especially when encased inside a giant skull… archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways. Firstly, they spent more time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied.”
Removing a human head is surprisingly difficult, as generations of medical students have discovered during dissection classes. This hasn’t prevented it from being hacked off throughout all of history with great enthusiasm: the figure of the headman, axe or sword in hand, is ingrained in our history, as are iconic heads such as those belonging to Anne Boleyn and Louis XIV, which decorate the cover of Larson’s book. Decapitation even features in the playground rhyme, “Here comes the candle to light you to bed, here comes the chopper to chop off your head”.
As a method of execution, beheading is relatively quick and humane (the guillotine was designed as an alternative to the bloody spectacle of breaking on the wheel, or decapitation by sword or axe, which often took multiple blows), and, as such, was largely reserved for nobility — until it was democratised by the French Revolution. In purely mechanical terms, the guillotine was a huge success. At the height of the Terror, the executioner Sansom was able to dispatch a group of fifty condemned ‘conspirators’ in just twenty-eight minutes. However, the swiftness of death took the spectacle of execution away, and crowds soon became bored by it. This created its own problems: when severed heads become mundane and lose their spectacle, then society can tolerate extreme death tolls. The painter Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun said in her memoirs, “If the victims of these terrible times had not been so proud, had not met death with such courage, the Terror would have ended much sooner.” It is hard to imagine crowds tolerating similar numbers being disembowelled or broken on the wheel.
Nowadays, decapitation is seen as unacceptable even by many countries which still employ the death penalty. Alternatives such as lethal injection, gas chamber and electrocution have all been tried, even though none is as swift or as apparently painless as the guillotine. When decapitation is practiced, it has become a shocking spectacle once again. In his history of the war on drugs, Chasing the Scream, Johann Hari describes the way that Mexican drug gangs used beheadings to intimidate their rivals and gain a competitive advantage through their brutality. Groups such as ISIS have provoked similar reactions through their carefully stage-managed ‘beheading events’, which are disseminated on social media. Larson handles these events with an admirable sense of academic detachment, but it would have been interesting to see her explore this area in more depth: as it is, they feel slightly brushed over.
While heads severed by executioners are used to intimidate, other severed heads have had a more empowering effect. The disembodied head of the seventeenth century Archbishop of Armagh, Oliver Plunkett, displayed in Drogheda in Ireland, has become a popular site of pilgrimage for Catholics from around the world, and was the focus of a successful campaign for Plunkett’s beatification. Many Italian churches also feature heads as relics, many of which have been imbued with healing powers. Traditionally, these heads are granted a great deal of autonomy, and seem to approve of being on display; Larson writes that there are “more than 150 known cases in which martyrs pick up their own severed heads and walk to chosen spots”, occasionally preaching sermons en route.
Severed heads have multiple secular uses too, from science to the arts. In the nineteenth century, scientists inspired by Franz Joseph Gall built up enormous collections of heads from around the world, which they measured in the hopes of building up a theory of phrenology, or the ‘science’ of determining a person’s character through the study of their head. This theory was thought to have particular implications for racial theory and criminology, but, as Larson demonstrates, their research was chaotic and failed to uncover any proofs.
Human heads are just as vital to modern scientists. Larson writes affectingly about the emotional difficulties many face when asked to anatomise a human head for the first time. Reactions range from natural disgust to wonder: as one says, “You’d be awed by what simply surrounds the eye and allows you to blink or squint.”
In art, skulls and severed heads have often been used as memento mori, a reminder of death’s inevitability. Artists such as Caravaggio have even depicted their own decapitated heads in paintings. In recent times, Marc Quinn and Damian Hirst have continued this tradition. Hirst caused controversy with his photograph With Dead Head, which showed the 16-year old artist smiling next to a severed head in a Leeds mortuary. He was attacked for a lack of respect, and for posing with an identifiable head without securing anyone’s permission. Explaining the photograph, Hirst stated that his smile “seemed to sum up this problem between life and death. It was such a ridiculous way of…being at the point of trying to come to terms with it, especially being sixteen and everything: this is life and this is death. And I’m trying to work it out.”

This attempt to gain control over his fear of mortality has become a theme of Hirst’s work, and is most famously explored in his 2007 sculpture For The Love of God, a cast of an eighteenth century skull decorated with over 8,000 diamonds. The art historian Rudi Fuchs observed in 2007 that the piece “proclaims victory over decay”. Much as the Shuar people regarded skulls as little more than receptacles for the soul, Hirst attempted to rob the skull of its psychological weight, transforming it from a symbol of decay into a gaudy decoration. Soldiers in battle zones have employed similar methods of rationalisation down the centuries – during World War II, for instance, American troops fighting in the Pacific frequently collected skulls as battlefield souvenirs, often turning them into candle holders or inkwells.
As Larson says, the human head holds a seemingly inexhaustible fascination in our culture: “the dead human face is a siren: dangerous but irresistible.” Through her research she has identified a wide range of locations in which severed heads play a role in shaping culture, and she analyses these incidences with wit and insight. While our first thoughts may be of medieval executions, or ‘exotic’ cultures, Larson demonstrates that severed heads can be found all around us: in churches, galleries and medical schools. One of theatre’s most memorable non-speaking roles is performed by a skull — that of Yorrick in Hamlet — and new developments in facial imaging allow us to feel closer to our ancestors by providing realistic portraits of them based on the evidence of their severed heads. While the Shaur people believe that the skull is little more than a repository for the soul, Larson argues that much of our humanity is located here: the severed head allows us a sense of the individual’s personality, and can be a potent totem. It is this potency which led the racist phrenologists of the nineteenth century to believe that they could divine characteristics through measuring the skull. Religions, artists and tyrants alike have understood the visceral power of displaying a severed head in public, whether as an object of veneration, abomination or fascination.
Today, people can pay for their heads to be preserved after their death, in the hope that they will one day be bought back to life thanks to neurosuspension. Whereas historically only martyrs and notorious criminals would have their heads preserved for posterity, cryonic suspension allows anyone to have their head preserved (for a fee), to be analysed or even reanimated by future generations. If the technology is successful, then rather than being a fatal blow, the severing of the head may become our path to immortality. - Thom Cuell


Since August, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS, has executed a number of Western hostages, including American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. The group, known for its brutality, has carried out the killings in the most attention-grabbing way possible: by beheading the prisoners and posting video of the act to social media.

If beheadings in 2014 seem shocking in their cruelty and theater, that is exactly the point, suggests anthropologist Frances Larson. Larson has researched the meaning of beheadings for a new book, “Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found.” The book addresses the political and cultural meaning of human heads—which she says are, upsettingly, “simultaneously a person and a thing”—and how, throughout history, they have been displayed as tokens of power and even collected. Though “Severed” was finished before the ISIS beheadings began, it is, unfortunately, newly relevant now. “Decapitation is the ultimate tyranny,” she writes.

Larson, an anthropologist who is a research fellow at the University of Durham, first became interested in the subject when she realized there was a connection between a famous collection of Amazonian shrunken heads at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum and another collection, one in Oxford’s anatomy department, which gathered thousands of skulls in the 19th and 20th centuries: In a sense, the South American headhunters and the British scientists had been doing the same thing. She was left with a question that would ultimately shape her book: “What can we learn about our common humanity from this, the ultimate image of inhumanity?”

Larson spoke to Ideas by phone and e-mail from her home in Oxford, England. This interview has been condensed and edited.

IDEAS: You write about political decapitation frequently in your book. Is there a particular kind of political power in decapitation, as opposed to other kinds of murder?

LARSON: Decapitation is an inherently visual form of murder, because it produces a trophy that stands as proof of conquest. It creates something that is made to be displayed, and it presupposes an audience to watch. It also requires huge force to decapitate someone. It is a brutal show of power.

IDEAS: What do you think ISIS is communicating with these beheadings?

LARSON: I think they are trying to draw us into their narrative....I think they know...we cannot resist it despite all our misgivings and discomfort and horror at these atrocities. It still makes front page news, and they, of course, are playing on that....We no longer see these graphic mutilations, which used to be a part of life. Crowds did flock to see [beheadings], but now the thought of one man killing another man, holding a knife to his throat, is frighteningly intimate and shocking. Death isn’t like that to us in our society. I think it’s a very visual demonstration, like a play, it’s a staging of power.

IDEAS: What do you think about how this tactic has been treated on social media?

LARSON: In the book I talk about the Iraq War beheadings 10 years ago; these recent beheadings hadn’t happened yet. And I think it is quite interesting, because there is a change. Ten years ago, we weren’t as connected as we are now in terms of social media interfaces like Twitter, in which you are actually in a dialogue with someone minute by minute, instead of blogging or e-mailing, which was the situation 10 years ago. I think that has made a difference, because now the members of the crowd can talk to each other. And when James Foley was killed, there was a quite successful boycott of the imagery...when they started the #ISISmediablackout hashtag, and people actually started tweeting things like “pour water on their flame” and “take the heat out”—you know, don’t show these images....In the past, companies like Twitter and Facebook have tried not to intervene....This was different, because they actually started responding, and I think that is a real sign of human decency coming back at the murderers and the perpetrators. It’s a step towards trying not to be part of the show.

IDEAS: How does that fit into larger recent social shifts in how we treat the human head?

LARSON: Less than 100 years ago in Europe and America, horrible mutilations like hangings, and, in France, the work of the guillotine, could still be seen in public, and these events were watched by thousands. Today, even though state-sponsored deaths in the United States may be painful and torturous, they retain the integrity of the body....

[But] I think that some of the stories I researched for the book could happen again. If there was another world war, who knows what desperate hatreds would emerge again, and what activities—like taking the skulls of the enemy as trophies, which happened during the Second World War—could be overlooked by people supporting their troops fighting for their lives in terrible conditions. We like to think that we can take the moral high ground, but writing this book has taught me to be wary of assuming we are above certain activities, or incapable of undertaking them.

IDEAS: The book is a chronicle of the obsession humans have with heads as an object. Why do you think heads hold such power?

LARSON: So many things happen in our heads: seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, speaking, breathing, laughing, crying. Our face is the most expressive part of our body. And of course our head holds our brain, which is recognized as the seat of consciousness and the center of the nervous system. Our heads connect our inner selves to the outer world more intensely than any other part of us....[It’s] the only body part that can publicly confirm a person’s death.

IDEAS: You talk about how Westerners tend to believe we are our heads: They seem tied to their owner’s essential personhood. Is that inevitable, since our heads contain our faces?

LARSON: I don’t think it’s inevitable. We “feel” things much more in our guts, after all. The human gut is packed full of neurons which control some of our emotional responses....As soon as you start to think about it, the notion that we are “in” our heads breaks down. - Bess Lovejoy

Erik Satie - the most extensive collection of Satie’s writings to appear in English, from annotations to his musical scores, published articles and the contents of his private notebooks. To read A Mammal’s Notebook is to be lead through the looking-glass mirror museum of Satie’s mind by a pied piper playing Dada sonatas

Erik Satie, A Mammal’s Notebook: The Writings of Erik Satie. Ed. by Ornella Volta, Trans. by Antony Melville. Atlas Press, 2014.


This is the largest selection, in any language, of the writings of Erik Satie (1866-1925). Although once dismissed as an eccentric, Satie has come to be seen as a key influence on modern music, and his writings reveal him as one of the most beguiling of absurdists, in the mode of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear--but with a strong streak of Dadaism (a movement in which he participated). The nonconformism of Satie's private life seems deliberately calculated: he assumed various personae at different periods of his life, from the mystical "velvet gentleman" to the Dadaist disguised as quizzical bureaucrat. His poignant, sly and witty writings embody all of his contradictions. Included here are his "autobiographical" "Memoirs of an Amnesic"; gnomic annotations to his musical scores ("For the Shrivelled and the Dimwits, I have written a suitably ponderous chorale I dedicate this chorale to those who do not like me"); the publications of his private church; his absurdist play Medusa's Snare; advertising copy for his local suburban newspaper; and the mysterious, calligraphed "private advertisements" found stuffed behind his piano after his death. Satie referred to himself as "a man in the manner of Adam (he of Paradise)" and added: "My humor is reminiscent of Cromwell's.I am also indebted to Christopher Columbus, as the American spirit has sometimes tapped me on the shoulder, and I have joyfully felt its ironically icy bite." He died as he lived: "without quite ceasing to smile."




Erik Satie never really had a time of his own. He sat perfectly astride the Belle Époque and the Modern era, though he never belonged to either, which imbues his work with a particular sense of timelessness.  A proto-minimalist and spiritual godfather to ambient music, it wasn’t until John Cage elevated Satie to the level of near-sainthood in the mid 20th century that his work became more widely known. Atlas’s sexy hardcover edition of A Mammal’s Notebook is the most extensive collection of Satie’s writings to appear in English, from annotations to his musical scores, published articles and the contents of his private notebooks. To read A Mammal’s Notebook is to be lead through the looking-glass mirror museum of Satie’s mind by a pied piper playing Dada sonatas. Even when viewed apart from his music, A Mammal’s Notebook provides a unique vantage point into the mind of an iconoclastic kook and visionary oddball.
The texts collected in A Mammal’s Notebook aren’t mere musing on art and craft. They serve more as blueprints for the looking-glass world that Satie created around himself, not out of isolation, but because it seemed a more interesting place to be. Many of the entries here could be viewed in relation to the nonsense writing of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, or Christian Morgenstern, but Satie’s is a distinctly applied nonsense—with heavy overtones of Dada and absurdism. Indeed, Satie was an absurdist par-excellence, but never for mere amusement. His absurdity served as the ethos that he applied to every aspect of his life and work. From his musical annotations to his beautiful calligraphic drawings and “advertisements” for fictional establishment, it becomes increasingly clear that Satie’s reality may have been more of a subjective experience in its nature. Satie wasn’t out to replace reality; he just subverted the one that was already in place. One of the more interesting entries relating to his musical career is a glossary of Satie’s own “Performance Indications,” used in lieu of standard dynamics to annotate his scores. Satie might instruct a measure to be played “Dry as a cuckoo,” “Under the pomegranates,” or “With tears in your fingers.”
While much of Satie’s writing has to do with music and art, he’s never stodgy or academic. Like his music, Satie’s writing is calculated and deliberate, but always with a kind tongue firmly in cheek. He writes, “I started playing snatches of Music which I made up myself . . .  All my troubles stem from this . . .” There’s always a self-awareness present that allows readers to put complete faith in Satie’s charmingly bizarre notions. If kneeling at the altar of benevolent prankster saints is your thing, A Mammal’s Notebook needs to be on your bookshelf. - JARROD ANNIS


One way to understand the work of Erik Satie is to imagine a place somewhere between two opposite artistic poles: James McNeill Whistler and Robert Filliou. The former was a well-known American painter born in 1834, while the latter was a less well-known French artist born in 1926. Whistler was a devoted advocate of art for art's sake and is infamous for responding to a bad review by the Arts & Crafts writer John Ruskin by taking him to court. He gave his paintings of people, landscapes, and seascapes titles like Arrangement in Grey and Black (a portrait of his mother), Symphony in White (a portrait of his mistress), and Arrangement in Grey (a portrait of himself). He made Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room in defiance of his most generous patron, and was bankrupted as a result. His collected writings are titled, appropriately enough, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). His signature was a stinging butterfly—a perfect summary of how he combined elegance with bite. Filliou, on the other hand, made sculpture with the most basic of materials—cardboard boxes, bricks, string, dice, and scraps of paper. As part of the Fluxus group, he believed that "art is what makes life more interesting than art." He saw talent, strategy, and calculation as art's worst enemies and insisted there was no difference between well-done, badly done, and not-done-at-all work. His advice to others was as simple as it was consistent: "Whatever you do, do something else." His collected writings, published in 1970 and recently republished by Occasional Papers, were called Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts.
Erik Satie, born in 1866, was a French composer, pianist, and active (although penniless) member of the avant-garde community in early twentieth-century Paris. His collected writings, A Mammal's Notebook: The Writings of Erik Satie, were recently published in a handsome volume edited and introduced by Ornella Volta and translated by Antony Melville. It includes a range of texts: "Texts Not To Be Read Aloud," "Texts To Be Danced" (ballets, symphonic dramas, lyrical comedies), published articles, lectures, notes from his unpublished notebooks, as well as his own rarely seen drawings and illustrations. All are as precious as they are ordinary—a blend of Whistler's flowery prose and sophisticated taste with Filliou's childlike playfulness.
The book reveals Satie's complex personality—generous but also stubborn, musical but also visual, prolific but also secretive—while always rejecting any system of authority with cunning and wit. Like Whistler, Satie publicly mocked his critics and refused to compromise on his values. Like Filliou, he was wary of "virtuosity" and fought against the Wagnerian epic in favor of short and small acts of musical fragmentation—to the point of perfecting the art of making himself invisible in what he called furniture music, works meant to be ignored by their audience. His advice to others was simple: "Keep it short." Jean Cocteau's description of the composer could also describe this book: "The smallest work by Satie is small in the way a keyhole is small. Everything changes when you put your eye to it." — Anthony Huberman

One thing everyone knows about Erik Satie is that he was an eccentric. There are many kinds of eccentric and Satie was most of them. He presented himself as a nutty professor figure, not a composer but a ‘gymnopedist’ and ‘phonometrician’. He dined – or so he claimed in his autobiography – only on ‘food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals’. He walked around Paris in priestly robes, then swapped them for a wardrobe full of identical brown corduroy suits; his interests included rare sea creatures, impossible machines, forgotten local history and the occult. He was a romantic and a mystic, of sorts – his brother, Conrad, called him a ‘transcendent idealist’ – and his music, particularly his earlier works for piano, can make listeners feel so serene that the record industry has claimed him as a kind of guru. In the Satie section of the record shop you’ll find Satie: Piano Dreams, 25 Hypnotic Tracks and Chill with Satie, and his work appears on compilations of ‘classical music for babies’. But during his lifetime his mysticism was rarely presented unironically. He wrote a set of haunting, fragile, otherworldly pieces for piano and called them ‘pieces in the shape of a pear’; his attempt to start his own religion in 1893 looks like both a response to a genuine spiritual need and an elaborate prank. He seems to have felt uncomfortable being serious in public, the more so as the public warmed to him. His eccentricity became a disguise, an armour of winking and raillerie concealing a man nobody knew.

His upbringing didn’t dispose him to fit in. He was born in May 1866 in Honfleur, to a French father and an English mother who insisted that he was baptised into the Anglican Church. This turned out to be a false start. His father, Alfred, when he came home from the Franco-Prussian War, got a job as a government translator and moved his family to Paris. Satie’s mother, as well as his youngest sister, died soon after the move. Distraught, Alfred went travelling on his own, and Eric (the ‘k’ was a later affectation), aged six, went back to Honfleur to live with his grandparents, who immediately had him rebaptised as a Catholic. He started taking music lessons with the local church organist. His education was confusing too. When his grandmother died in 1878 Eric and his brother and sister, Conrad and Olga, returned to Paris to live with Alfred, who refused to enrol them at school. He took them to lectures at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne instead, and to the opera. His second wife, a pianist and composer, enrolled Eric and his brother at the Conservatoire. According to one teacher Eric was ‘the laziest student’ in the place, ‘gifted but indolent’ – another called him ‘worthless’. His first piece, for piano, was nine bars long, most of it a quote from a music-hall song called ‘Ma Normandie’.[1]​ He seems to have found the sounds of the cafés and nightclubs more alluring than the classical tradition, and a ‘Fantaisie-Valse’ and a ‘Valse-Ballet’ followed.

By the mid 1880s Satie was excelling at the vie de bohème. In a photo from 1884 he looks like a startled owl: quizzical, his hair swept back from a glaring forehead, tufts around his ears, and eyes wide open behind his pince-nez. He is evidently still drunk. Like so many young ruined Parisians before him he’d fallen in with a dodgy Spanish poet – J.P. Contamine de Latour, real name José Maria Vicente Ferrer Francisco de Paola Patricio Manuel Contamine, from Tarragona. Years later, Latour managed to piece together the following recollection: ‘We didn’t eat every day, but we never missed an aperitif. I remember a particular pair of trousers and a pair of shoes that used to pass from one to the other, and which we had to mend every morning.’ By night they lived it up in Montmartre; at the Chat Noir especially, a cabaret decorated with a large picture of a cat above the slogan ‘Stop … Be modern!’ When Satie was kicked out of his family home after an affair – it’s alleged – with the maid, he moved into a flat round the corner from it. In 1886 he quit the Conservatoire and volunteered for the army, then got bronchitis more or less deliberately a few months later by spending a winter night outside with no shirt on. He was back in Paris within a year, and on his return he got a job as the Chat Noir’s second pianist. As soon as he was hired he destroyed his old clothes: according to Latour he ‘rolled them into a ball, sat on them, dragged them across the floor, trod on them and drenched them with all kinds of liquid until he’d turned them into complete rags’. Then he bought himself a top hat, Windsor tie and frock coat, initiating himself into dandyism.
Satie spent his apocalyptic hangovers lurking in Notre-Dame and reading Viollet-le-Duc’s treatises on architecture. Conrad remembered his ‘thoughts used to follow the curves of the vaulting and rise towards the Creator’. The result was the Ogives, a group of four piano pieces named after the technical term for the tip of a Gothic arch, all of them very slow, alternating very quiet passages with booming chords played by both hands in parallel, chunky as blocks of stone.[2]​ He also set Latour’s poetry to music, and the Trois Sarabandes of 1887, Satie’s first suite, were inspired by Latour’s esoteric poem ‘La Perdition’ (‘Suddenly all was revealed and the damned fell/Shrieking and jostling in a whirl …’). These pieces aren’t dissimilar from the Ogives in mood: mostly slow and stately, alternating loud and quiet passages, both hands moving together. But the harmony is crunchier, full of unresolved sevenths and ninths. Unlike most of his contemporaries, who were still imitating Wagner, Satie used harmony to create texture rather than tension, a backdrop of vaporous colour. The chords don’t lead anywhere, they shade the melody. Satie seems to have invented the language of French Impressionism – both Debussy and Ravel praised and were influenced by his innovations – almost by accident.
His most famous pieces are thought to have been inspired by another Latour poem, ‘Les Antiques’, which compares the movement of ‘amber atoms’ in a fire to dancers ‘mingling their sarabande with the gymnopédie’ – the gymnopédie being, according to one popular 19th-century musical dictionary, ‘a nude dance, accompanied by song, which youthful Spartan maidens danced’. Satie started writing his Gymnopédies soon after he started working at the Chat Noir at the end of 1887, and completed them the following spring. They don’t sound much like sparks or like youthful maidens; they’re quiet, slow, poignant. It’s difficult to hear them afresh, particularly the first one, which is one of the best-known pieces of classical music ever (it was recently the sound of Bournville chocolate).[3]​ But they’re extraordinary. In structural terms they’re very simple: in all three, the left hand plays a slowed down waltz accompaniment while the right hand picks out a melody. But this simplicity helps to conjure a strange feeling of resignation – music written in a state of gnostic exhaustion, when only the sweetest, most direct language would do. There’s so much space in them that they seem to hang in the air like crystal mobiles, fragile and scintillating. The smudgy harmonies and almost modal shape of the melodies makes them sound as if derived from an unidentifiable musical tradition: people suggested ancient Greek; Venusian might have been closer. Debussy, whom Satie befriended on the Montmartre scene, loved them: apparently he heard Satie chuntering through them one day and interrupted him saying, ‘No, let me show you how your music sounds.’ He would later orchestrate them.

It was perhaps inevitable that Satie – irremediably religious, but hardly a typical Catholic – should have found the occult. There was a lot of it about in the Paris of the late 19th century, and many of those involved hung out at the Chat Noir. Satie fell in with Joséphin Péladan, a cape-wearing Kabbalist from Lyon with a forked beard and hair like an electrified bird’s nest. He was the ‘Imperator’ and ‘Sâr’ (a title he claimed was bestowed on his family by a Babylonian king) of a Rosicrucian order called the Rose + Croix esthétique, which Satie joined as its in-house composer. For the inauguration of the Salon de la Rose + Croix, the order’s cultural wing, Satie composed three ‘Sonneries’ for trumpets and harps. No scores of the original version have survived, but Satie later adapted them for piano: the note lengths and the intervals between them appear to have been dictated by the golden ratio.
He broke noisily with the order in 1892 in a letter published in the satirical magazine Gil Blas. He’d never be a disciple, he said, and certainly not of M. Péladan. Soon afterwards he declared his intention to set up a religion of his own, the Eglise Métropolitaine d’Art, ‘a refuge where the Catholic faith and the Arts, which are indissolubly bound to it, shall grow and prosper, sheltered from profanity, expanding in all their purity, unsullied by the workings of evil’. He began to refer to himself as ‘Parcener and Master of the Chapel’, and it was then that he roamed Paris in long, flowing robes. His garret was now his ‘abbatiale’, from which he fired off a series of epistles written in Gothic script in red and black ink and covered with symbols of the church. Three of them are gathered in A Mammal’s Notebook, a nicely presented collection of his writing. In his first epistle an authentic, or authentic-sounding, cry of outrage at the modern world, and a plea for us to find salvation through the Gospel, constantly threatens to collapse into piss-take under the weight of its own hyperbole: ‘We live in a troubled time when Western society, daughter of the Apostolic Roman Catholic Church, is invaded by the shades of ungodliness, a thousand times more barbarous than in the days of Paganism, and seems near to perishing.’
Soon after the founding of the Eglise Métropolitaine, Satie and Latour wrote a ‘Christian ballet’ about the conversion of the pagan Uspud, an extraordinarily odd piece of theatre. A Mammal’s Notebook reprints the stage directions. It opens with Uspud playing knuckle-bones in the desert beside a semi-circle of statues. There are skeletons in the middle distance. Uspud crushes the bones, puts the powder in an incense burner, and the smoke turns into cherub’s wings, which flutter in the air. Uspud collapses. The air turns white. A beautiful woman appears: ‘It is the Christian church.’ She throws aside her cloak and stands there in a gold tunic, looking a bit like Wonder Woman. Uspud throws stones at her, which turn into fireballs. There’s a clap of thunder and the statues grind their teeth. A volcano rises up in the middle of the stage and spits stars. Uspud collapses again. When he comes to, he has a beard and his hair has turned white. That’s Act I. Somehow Satie managed to stage Uspud as a shadow theatre piece at the Auberge du Clou. He also petitioned the Opéra. When the director didn’t respond, Satie challenged him to a duel, which frightened him enough to give Satie a hearing; but then Satie declared that if he was going to allow the Opéra to take the piece, work on the production would need to be vetted by a committee of forty musicians, hand-picked by him and Latour. The plan seems to have stalled there.
In early 1893, Satie started a relationship with the painter and former trapeze artist Suzanne Valadon. She kept two cats to whom she fed caviar on Fridays and described as ‘good Catholics’, as well as a goat, who ate any art she wasn’t pleased with. Satie recognised a kindred spirit and the two fell in love. He nicknamed her ‘Biqui’ and wrote a jarring, utterly unromantic, four-bar piece for her called Bonjour, Biqui, Bonjour!: three diminished chords to be played ‘very slowly’.[4] Their relationship fell apart after six months, leaving Satie devastated. He wrote to his brother: ‘I shall have great difficulty in regaining possession of myself … She was able to take all of me.’ Another composer might have poured his feelings into a tempestuous storm of a piece; Satie wrote the infuriating Vexations, a short, creepy-sounding motif which was intended to be repeated a mind-numbing 840 times. The piece wasn’t performed in full until 1963, when John Cage managed it with a relay team of 11 pianists: it took 18 and a half hours. The relationship with Valadon was, as far as we know, the last sexual relationship Satie had.

His despondency slowed down his rate of production. For at least two years, his friend Augustin Grass-Mick recalled, he ‘did absolutely nothing at all’. He came into some money in 1895, and immediately blew almost all of it on seven identical chestnut-coloured corduroy suits with matching hats, acquiring the nickname of ‘velvet gentleman’ from his friends. A couple of months later he was broke again. In 1897 he managed to finish a piece, the sixth Gnossienne (from gnostic? Knossos?), a series of piano pieces he’d started in 1889. It’s perhaps the most alien of the set, jerky and not exactly atonal, but of unstable tonality – one bar in one key, the next in another.[5] But it wasn’t until he cleared out of his garret in 1898 and moved to the suburb of Arcueil-Cachan that he began to feel himself again. Walking seems to have helped. Every day he walked the ten kilometres from Arcueil to Paris, setting off in the morning with his umbrella tucked under his arm, and staggering back in the small hours. According to another friend, George Auriol, he carried a hammer in his pocket for protection as he crossed the bandit-ridden stretch between Glacière and La Santé. Friends would sometimes accompany him and Satie would entertain them with his knowledge of Parisian history. Pierre-Daniel Templier, his first biographer, painted a charming picture of Satie on the move: ‘When talking he would stop, bend one knee a little, adjust his pince-nez and place his fist on his hip. Then he would take off once more with small, deliberate steps.’
He got a job accompanying the popular chansonnier Vincent Hyspa, whose satirical lyrics Satie set to music. Their first song together, ‘Un dîner à l’Elysée’, is about a dinner party thrown by the president for the artists of Montmartre: the conversation is stilted, the wine runs out, and the artists, for all their revolutionary bluster, bow and scrape to the president. Hyspa wrote the lyrics, but the subject suited a composer who had just turned his back on the Montmartre scene, moved to the suburbs and got himself a ‘real’ job. He managed to work on a few serious-ish pieces on the side. One was Geneviève de Brabant, a spoof opera for the shadow theatre based on a famous medieval canticle about a duchess who is falsely accused of infidelity and exiled to the forest, where she befriends a deer. Another was La Mort de Monsieur Mouche, a three-act play by Latour for which Satie composed the music: all that remains of it are a few sketches which reveal that Satie was working with figures derived from ragtime, more than a decade before Debussy did the same in his ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’. But neither work was performed, and in June 1900 Satie wrote to his brother: ‘I’m dying of boredom … Everything I begin timidly fails with a certainty I’ve never known before.’ He began writing for the music-hall star Paulette Darty, with whom he had more creative freedom than he did with Hyspa, and the sentimental waltzes he produced for her, ‘Je te veux’ and ‘Tendrement’, are among the finest popular songs of the era. In 1903, he produced one of his best pieces, Trois Morceaux en forme de poire for piano duet. There are several theories of what Satie meant by ‘the shape of a pear’, the most elaborate of them being that it encoded his anti-royalist politics: poire – slang for ‘fool’ – was King Louis-Philippe’s nickname in the early 19th century. Another interpretation is that the title was intended as a playful rebuke to Debussy, who’d told Satie that though his music had genius it lacked ‘form’. It may have been the case that Satie simply liked the idea of music that made false statements about itself: the music isn’t in the shape of a pear, and the set contains seven pieces, not three.
Public acclaim still eluded him, and Satie began to feel that it was his lack of technique that was holding him back. ‘There is a musical language and one must learn it,’ he declared, and he changed his outfit again, swapping the corduroy suits for a conservative three-piece suit and a bowler hat, and enrolled at the Schola Cantorum, a prestigious music school in the Latin Quarter. The one-time laziest student in the Conservatoire, now forty years old, applied himself diligently to counterpoint, orchestration, chorale harmonisation and fugue writing – and despite Debussy’s comment that he wouldn’t be able ‘to shed his skin’ (Debussy could be quite patronising), he scored well in his exams. Among the fruits of his labours was En habit de cheval, a set of chorales and fugues which he was now able to orchestrate for an ensemble of wind, string and brass instruments.[6] But Satie doesn’t seem to have thought the work was worth it. In January 1911, soon after his graduation, he wrote again to Conrad: ‘The things I wrote before had such charm! Such depth! And now? How boring and uninteresting!’

*

He had just received confirmation that his earlier work wasn’t worthless after all. The evening before he wrote that letter, Ravel, as head of the Société Musicale Indépendante, had showcased Satie’s music at the Salle Gaveau with a programme that included the second ‘Sarabande’ and the third ‘Gymnopédie’, played by Ravel himself. The programme notes referred to Satie’s ‘prescience’ and the ‘quasi-prophetical character of certain harmonic discoveries’. A few weeks later, Debussy conducted a rapturously received performance of his orchestrations of the Gymnopédies. A spread on the composer appeared in the Revue musicale, and several of his works were published for the first time, including Trois Morceaux en forme de poire and En habit de cheval. When a group of younger composers suggested to him that he should be known as the ‘Prince of Musicians’ he at first demurred, then changed his mind: ‘Music needs a prince … she shall have one, by God.’

Buoyed by his new celebrity, Satie produced a flurry of ‘humoristic suites’ for piano, a dozen of them between 1912 and 1915. These are miniature plays for the performer’s imagination: the scores have text running through them, and the music mirrors the words. ‘D’Holothurie’ is the first of the suite Embryons desséchés (at the top of the score there’s a short passage telling you what a holothurie is – ‘ignorant people call them sea cucumbers’). It begins with a simple semiquaver figure in the left hand; ‘It is raining,’ the score says, and Satie adds in a plangent descending figure in thirds in the right hand. ‘The sun is in the clouds’ and the right hand switches to a bright arpeggio. Later, the sea cucumber is described as purring ‘like a nightingale with toothache’ and both hands switch to chirrups.[7]​ Sports et divertissements (1914), which appears in full in A Mammal’s Notebook, added pictures. It was commissioned by the fashion magazine La Gazette du bon ton, whose publisher Satie had been introduced to by a friend. Each piece has a picture at the top drawn by the illustrator Charles Martin in the style of a fashion shoot. The words and music stand in for captions. ‘Le Golf’, for example, tells a story about a cocky colonel’s comeuppance on the links:
The colonel is wearing shocking green ‘Scotch Tweed’.
He will be victorious.
His ‘caddie’ follows him carrying his ‘bags’.
The clouds are amazed.
The ‘holes’ are all a-tremble: the colonel is here!
And now he is playing his shot:
His ‘club’ flies into pieces!

At ‘He will be victorious’ the left hand plays a strident, tromping figure in octaves. The colonel’s club shatters with a rapid upwards run of semiquavers ending in shrill fortissimo.[8]

After Sports et divertissements Satie began mixing with a more glamorous crowd, and the later suites premiered at chichi venues: Heures séculaires at the Galerie Barbazanges, an art gallery run by the fashion designer Paul Poiret, who pioneered trousers for women; Avant-Dernières Pensées at the Galerie Thomas, which was run by Poiret’s sister. Among the glitterati, Satie was introduced to Cocteau, with whom he had an immediate rapport. They started working together on a ballet based on the sideshow acts at a fairground: conjurors, acrobats, dancing horses. Parade was to be the ultimate synthesis of high and low art, combining fashion, advertising, cinema and popular music with classical modernism. There was no need this time to threaten pistols at dawn: the Ballets Russes readily took it on as the only new work in their one wartime Paris season. The costumes and decor were by Picasso. But despite the glamour, the press wasn’t convinced. Le Figaro accused Satie of laboriously reproducing ‘the burlesque effects that even a dozen fairground musicians can produce without effort’. Its lone defender in print was Apollinaire, who wrote of Parade’s ‘astonishingly expressive music, so clear and simple that it seems to reflect the marvellously lucid spirit of France’.
Still Satie continued his ascent. Cocteau wrote a piece about him for Vanity Fair, praising his ability to ‘marry the racket of a cheap music hall with the dreams of children’, and followed it up with a book, Le Coq et l’arlequin, which called for a new French music ‘based on the music hall, the circus [and] American Negro orchestras’. The Princesse de Polignac – the heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, who’d married into the French aristocracy – commissioned him to write a setting of The Death of Socrates. An orchestral version of it premiered at a Festival Erik Satie sponsored by Count Etienne de Beaumont and attended by Paris’s wealthiest. La Belle Excentrique, a work of pastiche cycling through three decades of Parisian dance culture, from march through waltz to cancan, ended up at Poiret’s private garden club, l’Oasis, with Satie conducting. Then in 1923 Etienne de Beaumont booked the team behind Parade – Satie, Cocteau, Picasso – to produce the opening entertainment for his annual costume ball, the high point of the Parisian social calendar. Satie wrote his music for the newly restored 18th-century organ in the Beaumonts’ drawing room, but to prove that he was still the arch-modern, and not some backward-looking medievalist, he wrote to Beaumont: ‘The organ isn’t necessarily religious and funereal, good old instrument that it is. Just remember the gilt-painted merry-go-round.’ Beaumont funded more projects, the most substantial a ballet called Les Aventures de Mercure, which opened in 1924 at La Cigale in Montmartre, a venue notorious for its risqué all-girl revues.
But Satie wasn’t, perhaps, as clubbable as all that. Later that year he fell out with Cocteau, who had been attending opium parties in Monte Carlo with Poulenc and Georges Auric at the house of a critic who’d had the temerity to ignore Satie’s contribution to the Ballets Russes’ Grand French Festival. Satie was already mixing with a different crowd. He had met Man Ray at an exhibition of Ray’s work in 1921, and they’d gone drinking together. (On his way back to the gallery Ray bought a box of tacks and an iron, glued them together, and added them to the show – ‘This,’ he said, ‘was my first Dada object in France.’) Satie contributed to the Dadaist magazine Coeur à barbe. And in 1923 Tristan Tzara asked him to organise the music for a Dadaist soiree. Surrealist thugs gatecrashed it – one audience member recalled Breton rampaging around, clubbing people with his walking stick – and the police had to be called.
By the time Satie broke with Cocteau he was already working on a ballet with Francis Picabia called Relâche based on a script about Parisian nightlife by Blaise Cendrars, and in December 1924 it opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. It wasn’t unconfrontational. The set was studded with 370 mirrors and scrawled with graffiti telling dissatisfied audience members to fuck off, and the ballet began with a film of Satie and Picabia jumping up and down on top of the theatre then firing a cannon in the direction of the viewer. There was a scene in which a man in tails chased the female lead round the stage in a wheelchair; and another – the ‘Dance of the Revolving Door’ – in which she stripped to a rose-coloured body stocking and was then paraded round the stage. In the second half the men stripped to tights and top hats and the woman dumped their clothes in a wheelbarrow, then threw a wreath to a man in the audience who got to choose a ‘queen’ for the night. ‘Reactionary “muttonheads” will hurl their thunderbolts,’ Satie correctly predicted. In the Revue Pleyel Alexis Roland-Manuel wrote that ‘Dada waylaid Satie … Relâche is the most stupid and boring thing in the world.’
It was the last substantial piece of work he completed. In the winter of 1925 the vie de bohème caught up with him and he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. By February he was housebound, so friends put him up at the Grand Hôtel on the Place de l’Opéra; he hated it and moved to a hotel in Montparnasse that was shabbier but more fun. By April he had developed pleurisy and had to be hospitalised. On 1 July, after receiving the last rites, he died. His last words – was he mentally sketching another humoristic suite? – were ‘Ah! The cows …’ After the funeral at Arcueil, Conrad, Milhaud and some other friends gathered at Satie’s flat. They were the first people besides Satie to see it for decades. Milhaud was shocked by the state of it:
It seemed impossible that Satie lived in such poverty. The man … had literally nothing worth a shilling to his name: a wretched bed, a table covered with the most unlikely objects, one chair and a half-empty wardrobe in which there were a dozen old-fashioned corduroy suits, brand new and almost identical. In each corner of the room there were piles of old newspapers, old hats and walking sticks.

Satie had charmed away any curiosity about what his life alone in Arcueil might have been like. In the end, the dandy, priest and velvet gentleman owned nothing but his disguises.[9] As a composer who seemed to have taken pains to cleanse his work of seriousness, Satie’s reputation didn’t fare well in the heyday of high serialism. In his 1932 biography, Templier wrote: ‘Today his name no longer appears on concert programmes; and although we consider this to be an excellent thing, its consequence is that we cannot “judge” him.’ Sixteen years later, Satie’s second biographer, Rollo Myers, wrote that Satie’s name ‘is usually pronounced with either a sneer or an air of amused condescension … The neglect and oblivion by which his music has been shrouded are, I venture to suggest, unjustified,’ he declared, not because the music was any good but because Debussy and Ravel had inexplicably held it to be.

Satie was partly rescued by John Cage, who in the late 1950s took to championing his work. A tribute to Satie by Cage appeared in the Art News Annual of 1958. Much of it concerns the Musique d’ameublement, a proto-ambient piece from 1920 that Satie intended to be ‘part of the noises of the environment … softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself’. In Satie, Cage found another artist interested in letting chance into composition; a vindication of his own direction. But Cage’s endorsement meant that people became interested in Satie for his ideas, and the influence they had on the avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century, rather than for his music. That doesn’t seem right either. Perhaps the best way to see Satie is not as a classical musician who failed to become a great composer, but as an art-rock star avant la lettre. His career contained all the phases of 1970s art-rock history, though not in the same order: a proggy occult phase, a glam phase, a Bryan Ferryish lounge pop phase, a Brian Enoish ambient phase, a David Bowieish decadent nightclub phase; Bonjour, Biqui, Bonjour! was his punk phase. Debussy and Ravel (not to mention Poulenc, Fauré, Milhaud and others) may have written grander pieces. But while they were busy with concertos and sonatas, Satie was working on surreal pop operas, shadow plays and lo-fi Gesamtkunstwerken, experimenting with film, flirting with Dada and hanging out with the couture crowd. He may not have been a great composer, but he was a great Satie. - Nick Richardson