field guide

I saw last week that the book Just Kids by Patti Smith won the National Book Award for non-fiction this year, and it made me think about the book again. I enjoyed reading it earlier this year, and have seen a few great interviews with Smith about it as well. It’s been a while since I’ve written about books, so I thought I would share a few thoughts about this one.

Just Kids is a poignant memoir of the love affair and life-long friendship between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, two artists who became symbols of the alternative art culture of the early 1970s and whose iconic status in greater pop culture continues today. The staccato prose of the writing took some getting used to, and the rapid pace of Smith’s descriptions of encounters with poets and authors and musicians was at times dizzying. I really enjoy the stream of consciousness style, however, and I suppose her approach to recounting the pair’s activities matched the random nature of the times and the evolution of that particular sub-culture.

I’ll have to admit that there were a lot of names in Just Kids that I didn’t recognize. I’m just barely a child of the 70s and I guess my younger cultural experiences didn’t follow the same circles as those of the Hotel Chelsea scene. There were many names I knew I should recognize and felt a little tuned out because I didn’t — lost my official “artist” badge in a couple of instances, I’m sure. In fact, there were times when I felt I’d fallen into some giant cocktail party game of name-dropping. But, the people who took up the volume of Smith’s remembrance emerged as “characters” I learned in a new way.

I was quite enamored by the story as a whole and particularly by the ebb and flow of the relationship between Smith and Mapplethorpe. It was an interesting study of muse and artist, of friendship, of family created out of common loves and of the weathering of change. And of course, the emergence of both the artists’ “voices” in prose, photography and song is unique and compelling.

The way Smith described the end of Mapplethorpe’s life, her continued protectiveness of him and his vision, and her process of letting him go was very moving for me. It spoke volumes about life lived entwined with another person and the realities of how that type of relationship changes by necessity over time. The poignancy of the last chapters of their relationship and Mapplethorpe’s death perhaps highlight some of the ways I was disappointed with the book. The close of their story made me cry. It moved me. It showed me her grief at losing the person who was so influential in her life. It made me feel her grief over how situations change–both for good and bad. But, in many ways it was the first time I felt I really saw her in the book.

For much of the book, I felt as if Smith was painting a picture for me. Yes, that’s partly what a memoir is, but it seemed she was trying to portray a contrived image of herself. It was clear in much of the book that her goal was to emphasize Mapplethorpe, but her perspective and role in his life would have gained greater credibility from more of that rawness I saw at the end.

For me, she didn’t answer the “oprah question.” You know, the question every onlooker would ask. She didn’t seem to address with any depth her own feelings about the delving of Mapplethorpe into the gay culture he became so synonymous with. They were lovers. And young lovers at that. At a time in their lives when both their artistic visions and their forays into adulthood were very new. That’s a very powerful relationship. The woman who described her own fantasies of being Baudelaire’s muse seemed completely detatched from the fact that her lover was hustling in male prostitution. She seemed almost indifferent to his decision to pursue a homosexual lifestyle. For someone who throughout the rest of the book infused so much meaning into small details and chance encounters, it seemed just a little too cosmopolitan. I was amazed by her acceptance of Mapplethorpe’s choices, and I recognize that acceptance as one thing that made their relationship so enduring and impactful for the two of them. But, I wanted to see her care. I wanted to see her work through the emotions of that change in their relationship. It would have brought a very human perspective to the “starting gun” affect his work continues to have in our culture.

All in all, I really enjoyed Just Kids as a memoir, as a record of a very intriguing time and a very intriguing art “scene.” I just wish that in her zest to show me Mapplethorpe, Smith would have shown me more of herself as well.