Patti Smith’s book Just Kids came out in 2010, but I didn’t read it until this past reading week. My Mum’s book club read it years ago and warned me against it, saying that her writing was convoluted and distracting. But something about the mythic, universally loved Patti Smith really intrigued me, so I tracked down a copy and gave it a read.
Before reading her book, I knew little about Patti aside from the fact that she is a cultural icon from the 70s New York Punk scene, and that she forgot the lyrics to “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” when accepting Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize for literature in 2016. I couldn’t understand the Patti Smith phenomena. How can somebody be so universally loved that the most critical review of her 2016 performance was that she “is so charismatic she can goof up all she likes?”
Just Kids details Patti Smith’s early years in New York City with her lover and friend Robert Mapplethorpe. However, the book opens with an anecdote about a swan that she saw in the park with her mother as a child in New Jersey. She writes, “the sight of it generated an urge I had no words for, a desire to speak of the swan, to say something of its whiteness, the explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings.” This sentence threw me off. Particularly the wacky commas, and the presentation of three moments in time in the space of a single phrase. Somehow, Smith communicates an unachievable desire for expression, followed immediately by what she wants to express, all occurring at the moment of the swan’s take off and preceding flight. Evidently Smith experiments with grammar as she grapples with this Poundian image of a swan. And, while the swan metaphor does not escape me, it reads as incomplete and reaching. It was this partially realized experiment in image description that threw off my Mum’s book club, but also what made me fall in love with Patti Smith.
Smith presents herself as someone driven to create. She details a project she and Robert did in restaurants gathering “lobster claws in a napkin. Robert scrubbed, sanded, and spray-painted them. I would say a little prayer to thank the lobster as […] I made bracelets, braiding shoestring leather and using a few small beads.” This project epitomises Smith’s creative drive as she uses strange objects she found in her experimental art making. She then describes another aspect of her practice saying, “I went to an art supply store and bought several sheets of Arches sateen, my paper of choice, and covered the walls of my hotel room. I tacked the photograph of a young man urinating in the mouth of another, and did several drawings based on it.” Critically, this image and the lobster jewelry sound terrible and almost funny. But what seems more important, in covering walls in drawing paper and stealing lobster claws, is her devotion to free experimental creation.
She tells another story about spending the afternoon in Washington Square Park with Robert. Someone says, “Oh, take their picture…I think they’re artists,” her husband refuses saying that “they’re just kids.” I see her retelling of this moment it as an almost self-aware understanding that she is not some amazing artist, she is just a kid. She did not feel worried about the future, money or what was going on around she says, “I felt we were too young to have such cares. I was happy just being free.” Smith repeats the mantra, “I’m free, I’m free.”
Reading about Smith’s jewelry making, sketches, and attitudes of general freedom in her art-making made me start thinking about my own practice. University has given me the biggest creative block of my life. I used to make prints, sketches, and comics on napkins to make my friends laugh. But somewhere in the middle of second year I realized I hadn’t done that in a long time, and that my portfolio has hardly grown in four years. As an art history student, I look at amazing artworks every day. And at some point, while reading about Fauvism or Flemish Primitives, I stopped drawing. I stopped making art for the love of it, feeling too overwhelmed with knowing that what I made would almost certainly never be as good as what I wrote about.
On the front inner flap of the book Joan Didion writes, “This book is so honest and pure as to count as a true rapture.” It seems that she sees Smith’s same experimental and artistic passion that struck me in and so many others in reading Just Kids. In this quotation, she sums up the novel, and much of Smith’s other work, highlighting her authentic nature that made her and her work so captivating. While I think Smith’s experiments in prose and art as expressed in Just Kids are strange, that doesn’t actually seem to matter. I can understand a little more why the world loves Patti Smith so unequivocally. First of all, because her albums like Horses are punk masterpieces, but beyond that because she is entirely unafraid to experiment freely in art and in life. Because she reminded me that art does not always need to be good. If it did, no one would be able to create good art.
Too much analysis here! We love Patti because she is an authentic compassionate human being. She is always just herself.