13: Book Review 2, Just Kids by Patti Smith

A friendly disclaimer: This book review contains spoilers.

Above: Image from DESIRE: Photographs 1968–1969 ©Lloyd Ziff

As a voracious and ambitious reader of a wide range of novels, it is atypical for me to choose favorites, but I quickly established an immediate bias and love for Smith just within the introduction alone. Her singular voice is so artistically influenced that she can’t help to create poetic verse, it flows from her unfettered, just like her music. 

I teared up twice while reading when I realized the grief, rarity, and raw beauty of true artistic pursuit she encapsulates in her story. I cried when I felt seen by her in the earliest stages of her young and messy life, and I cried when Robert passed far before his time. 

The novel’s introduction commemorates her lover and longtime artistic confidante, encourager, and inspiration, Robert Mapplethorpe. 

Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe shot by Norman Seeff in 1969

“In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him.”

The persistent and passionately sought-after life of the artist that is so tragically and triumphantly captured in their story moved me. It opened up something inside me, a door long-shut, to realize that one can believe and love the ethereal and often in-vain pursuit of art until their dying breath. 

That is the kind of love--that is the kind of devotion to aspire to as a creative person in a spiritually starving world. 

Patti Smith wrote a rollercoaster of a memoir littered with poverty, sin, rock and roll, stories of desperation, addiction, and artistic revelation. Her writing style was succinct and relayed in self-aware truths, humility, and wonder. I saw myself in her.

She was a poet, a writer, sometimes an illustrator or painter, but ultimately her success was granted through music. Robert was a collage-artist turned photographer. They ran in New York City circles with Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and many more during the late sixties into the seventies, just past the Beat generation.

While reading this book, I wanted to cut my hair like Keith Richards too, and braid it like Frida Kahlo. I wanted to sing like Bob Dylan and create a language of peace like Jimi Hendrix. I wanted to both be and find that figurative muse. I wanted to take responsibility for my own artistic life. 

For the opening song of her debut album “Horses”, she recalled: “I spoke the line: ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.’ I had written the line some years before as a declaration of existence, as a vow to take responsibility for my own actions. Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.” (247)

Throughout the work, there was also a constant throughline of the threat of mortality, a sense of urgency pervades their artistic pursuits as if feverish, self-sacrificial, or tangibly reifying. Patti and Robert were often living in poverty, barely scraping by, scampering from park benches to squalid apartments or glorified storage rooms to the ultimate Chelsea Hotel, which became a pivotal point of connection to the greats of their time. But it also exposed the soft white underbelly of the artistic industry: the pain, grief, and loss carried like dead weight on the shoulders of the rejected, addicted, and hopeless. 

They both lost many fellow artists, actresses, musicians, poets, to that same ironically undying trope of the “tortured artist”. Though surrounded by so much discontent, the expenses of city life in New York, and continual repeated rejection, Patti and Robert had each other. That was the beauty of it. They had each other.

“Robert and I still kept our vow. Neither would leave the other. I never saw him through the lens of his sexuality. My picture of him remained intact. He was the artist of my life.” (157)

When Smith eventually achieved her hit single “Because the Night”, among other albums, she recalled that “Robert was unabashedly proud of my success. What he wanted for himself, he wanted for us both. He exhaled a perfect stream of smoke, and spoke in a tone he only used with me--a bemused scolding--admiration without envy, our brother-sister language. ‘Patti,’ he drawled, ‘you got famous before me.’”(258)

The way Smith embodied her relationship with art and Robert through her writing was nothing short of a diary-like work of genius. Joan Didion understood what I’m getting at in her blessing inside the front cover, “This book is so honest and pure as to count as a true rapture.” I loved every aching and triumphant word, anecdote, and emotional vulnerability. Patti Smith is a renaissance woman.

As her favorite author, Rimbaud, once wrote, “Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.” It is exactly that child-like purity and creative exaltation that vibrates out of the pages of this book.