Today, I sit on my bed finishing Just Kids by Patti Smith. I rarely read books written by people that aren't professional writers, since they tend to be crap, at least in my opinion. However, my love for Patti Smith's music made me give this one a try and I was nicely surprised to discover a marvelously written novel full of poetry.
Much of the first half of Just Kids is dominated by how Patti Smith fell in love with Rimbaud and the countless mentions of the other important men in Smith's life, most of whom shared the principal attributes of being French, dead and terribly artistic. Baudelaire, Cocteau and Genet all merit frequent references and it is made clear that Smith had her mind on higher things than the factory she worked in. After giving up a child for adoption, she buys a one-way ticket to New York and disappears into an esoteric mist of artistic pretension. The friends she is hoping to stay with never show up so she is forced to take to the streets. When a tramp asks her, "What's your situation?" she replies, "On Earth or in the Universe?"
Fortunately both Smith and the book are saved from imploding with self-satisfaction by a chance encounter with a green-eyed boy called Robert Mapplethorpe. In Mapplethorpe, Smith finds her spiritual twin, a man as obsessed with artistic creation as she is. She describes the setting as the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn leads two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. Patti Smith evolves as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe directs his highly provocative style towards photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traverse the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair sets up camp at the Chelsea Hotel and soon enter a community of the famous and infamous—the influential artists of the day and the colourful fringe. It is a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics are colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids make a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they prod and provide for one another during the hungry years.
For the next 12 years, against the vivid backdrop of 1970s New York, Mapplethorpe and Smith live together, support each other and share jointly in their burgeoning success as artists – Mapplethorpe as a photographer, Smith as a poet turned rock and roll singer who would become the mother of punk. They sleep together too, and although Mapplethorpe later admits he was gay, his relationship with Smith remains intimately aside from the outside world. As the title suggests, their lasting friendship is defined more than anything by its innocence and purity.
The relationship with Mapplethorpe infuses her writing with a necessary human warmth. The knowing references become less frequent and she concentrates instead on crafting a moving and delicately handled dual memoir, a love letter to the man who became her real-life Rimbaud. Living in a succession of squalid New York apartments, spending what little money they had on art supplies and surviving on day-old doughnuts and lettuce soup, both Mapplethorpe and Smith took their first tentative steps towards becoming the artists they so desired to be. Mapplethorpe, always the more focused and ambitious of the two, started to make collages by ripping photographs from male pornographic magazines. To save money, Smith suggested he take his own pictures. Some of the early portraits are reproduced here, Smith's gaunt elegance and dense-eyed gaze staring out of the pages in black and white. It was Mapplethorpe who took the iconic shot of Smith – at once both cocky and fragile – for the cover of her first album, Horses.
Although both Smith and Mapplethorpe eventually went their separate ways, their spiritual closeness remained. When she discovers that Mapplethorpe is dying of Aids in 1989, Smith writes with brutal poignancy that "every fear I had once harboured seemed to materialise with the suddenness of a bright sail bursting into flames". Shortly before his death, when Mapplethorpe ruefully comments that they never had a family, Smith responds: "Our work was our children."
And it is true that, in many ways, Just Kids is a compassionate portrait of an unconventional marriage; an intimacy forged through a shared artistic vision. Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.
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