These two well-researched pieces create two interior worlds of torment
pp.320
Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2014
The two novellas of Skinner’s book are tightly written
meditations on two opposing kinds of life, one being a life of religious
devotion, the other a life of selfish, uncompromising creativity. Nevertheless,
they both explore eternality with an emphasis on the physical reality of the
world – experiences, memories, hopes. The novellas follow the lives of two single-minded
people pursuing with all their strength what they believe to be the overriding
truth of existence.
In the novella from which the book gains its title, The Mirror, the author works in the
confines of a Venetian convent, where the young nun Oliva’s world is shaken
first by a portentous earthquake and then by her faltering belief in God and
the life of abstinence she leads. The timid girl is tested further when she is
forced to sit for her portrait with the painter Signor Avilo, who uses a mirror
‘to put perspective in [his] picture’, a mirror being an instrument of vanity
and therefore of the devil. Along with the presence of the mirror, Signor Avilo’s
atheistic monologues confuse and worry Oliva. Talking about the so-called devoutness
of the nunnery, the painter states that ‘in the end, you will find the same
things on the inside that you have left on the outside.’
Such a supposedly prophetic statement is shown to be quite
true, given that Oliva’s friend Ottavia runs away from the cloister to pursue a
love affair with a man, and when the priests ransack the nuns’ cells for
evidence of complicity, they find ‘the most beautiful and valuable dresses,
shifts, gloves, jewellery, rugs, tapestries and altar cloths’. They even find
stockings and silk underwear. Such worldly luxuries and vain materialism are a
shock to behold for the infuriatingly naïve Oliva, as they show the hidden sins
of greed and lust amongst the sisters.
The piece builds to a shocking denouement as grief, sorrow,
confusion and anger seethe within the young pliable Oliva. Her faith is
stronger than we think, though she totters on the brink of corruption.
In the second piece, The
Velvet Gentleman, the composer Erik Satie must choose a single memory from
his life to take with him into oblivion. In the post-death limbo in which he
finds himself, he searches through his lifetime for a memory worthy of keeping
forever. It is a clever technique that Skinner uses to fictionalise his
biography of the man. Each episode that Satie explores of his past is filled
with poignancy because of his quest.
Each memory, as well, is rich with Satie’s personality.
Skinner develops a very convincing, eccentric voice in bringing the composer to
life. A funny, very nearly insane man, a man not only willing to walk ten kilometres a day to work, and to live in a
single room so small that his two pianos have to sit one on top of the other,
but convinced that these aspects of his life are vital to the art of his
composition.
In terms of the man’s art, we get a picture of a kind of
Beckett-figure of music composition, striving to ‘reduce music so that it
aspires towards the point of zero’, as Beckett sought to do the same with
words, reducing them to ‘complete silence’. Satie’s expositions on his work are
the most interesting parts of the story, as well as how his ideology is built
into his way of living. This is an interestingly executed fictional study of a
very interesting character. And the memory Satie finally chooses is wonderfully
befitting of a man who has lived by his passions and principles, who has lived
for his art.
These two well-researched pieces create two interior worlds
of torment, one building to a horrifying climax and the other to a beautiful,
visually pleasing one. Well-crafted, original, excellently told, they often
seem oddly confined themselves, and whether this is a clever trick of narration
or an unintended side-effect of their precision it is hard to tell. Erik Satie,
though, in particular, is one of those compulsively drawn characters who will
stay with you for quite a while after reading.
Listen to Erik Satie's Gymnopedies and Gnossienes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtLHiou7anE
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