Patti Smith’s “Just Kids”, one of the best memoirs I’ve read, starts with the end:
“I was asleep when he died.”
I’ve been a Patti Smith fan since way way back. I’m over 50 so I’m measuring my memories in decades. (Bite it, whippersnappers, the world was not born with you.) She is a writer, poet, musician, visual artist, and at long last she has written a book, “Just Kids”, about her early life and the beginnings of her career with Robert Mapplethorpe back in the 1960s- early 1970s.
The first chapter is an overview of her childhood, a misfit in our misnamed land of the free, which is really a stifling, rigid conformity that punishes individuality– “I was a dreamy somnambulent child. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with an inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical….I drew, I danced, I wrote poems…”
Smith grew up in New Jersey in a struggling working-class family. You can see these roots in some of her songs such as Free Money, Kimberly, and Piss Factory. Patti’s parents struggled financially, but they supported her intellectual and artistic hunger with books, music, and encouragements. A visit to the Museum of Art in Philadelphia when Patti was 12 changed her life: “I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.” It even led to an argument with her father; imagine having a father to argue art with: “My father admired the draftsmanship and symbolism in the works of Salvador Dali, yet found no merit in Picasso, which led to our first serious disagreement.”
After various misadventures– getting pregnant, dropping out of teacher’s college, giving her baby up for adoption, quitting a dismal factory job, Patti moved to New York with no money, no job, no home and no friends. There she improbably met Robert Mapplethorpe (both of them were looking for a place to sleep), and together they became, literally, starving artists. This is the story of Smith and Mapplethorpe before they became famous and successful. She was his first photography model. The unforgettable cover of Horses, Smith’s first record album, was shot by Mapplethorpe, and “Just Kids” includes several photographs from those early days.
We know that Mapplethorpe died too young from AIDS, at age 42. He was born into a devout Catholic family and was expected to go into the priesthood, or military, or both. For much of his life he struggled with the conflict between his drive to be an artist, to be his own man, and to live up to his family’s expectations. But he had an unwavering belief in his talent and what he wanted to do with his life, “to live for art alone.”
Those early years were rough; always hungry, sometimes homeless, always struggling to meet their basic needs while finding time and money to develop and produce their art. In these Gordon Gecko times such a lifestyle seems unimaginable. But the times and the location were right– a ferment of music and art and literature, a time when someone like Patti Smith, starting raw with no experience or any idea of what she could do, could find support and inspiration, and stay true to her dreams of being an artist, to live for art alone.
Smith and Mapplethorpe complemented each other. He was supremely ambitious and confident of his talent and ability. She was unsure of her own abilities and direction, but was more grounded in the practical realities.
Don’t expect an orderly, thorough, scholarly biography. It moves at a contemplative pace and is as much an emotional journey as a historical one, a sweet and inspirational remembrance.
