Patti Smith's "Just Kids": A Shepherd & Thief's Love Story

"Just Kids" is musician/artist Patti Smith's autobiographical tale of her life growing up in the 1960s into her music career in the 1970s. Specifically, the novel focuses on the relationship between Smith and friend/muse/confidant, Robert Mapplethorpe. The novel contains worthwhile photos that are inserted out-of-order with the text, increasing the book's poetic, scrap-like appeal.

SPOILERS!

Beginning from her childhood into her future musical career, we are flooded with details of the people, events, poets and artists who would come to influence Patti's eventual fate. These are included with immense attention to detail; time, date, place and mood are all accounted for. While she only mentions once or twice keeping a diary, it's clear she must have kept one all her life to have recalled these memories so vividly- or perhaps the reason this book took many years to publish is because she needed time to have the memories flood back to her. Still, it's interesting to have Patti reference various personal events with birthdays, death days and holidays of various saints, poets, writers, artists and musicians. She even gives mention to unnamed faces, such as the woman who left her behind the white purse and $32 in the bus station, or the man who stood by and protected her when she was without shelter in the city.

Specific people who helped an influenced her, especially during the "Chelsea Hotel" period, included Bobby Neuwirth, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Johnny Winter, Rene Ricard, Sam Wagstaff, Todd Rundgren, Jim Carroll, Allen Lanier, Allen Ginsberg, Sandy Pearlman, Sam Shepard, Jimi Hendrix and more. (The last artist revealed to Patti through an interesting conversation held in a stairwell, his idea of musicians coming together in a circle in a field and just playing continuously on & on until their dissonance became one universal language of sound; he would document this sound in his recording studio, Electric Lady [which Patti would eventually record in.] Sadly, Hendrix passed before he could pursue this dream.) Patti also wrote poems/songs for people like Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison an Edie Sedgwick, mixing her natural curiosity with the characters and events of her age.

Perhaps my favorite section of the book is the chapter labeled as the title, "Just Kids." It is in this chapter where we witness Patti and Robert's relationship blossom, within each other and within their art. Weaving in and out of details on their own artistic creations, Patti speaks of a time period when art, mythology, literature, music and history seemed to fuse together healthily, and there were no right or wrong beliefs and values- only examination and reflections of these values through an art form. Even as common interests and sexual views waned, Robert and Patti remained connected through their love of art, and moreover through their love of creation, (despite the level of destruction that this process often entailed.)

While they each praised and revered each other's work, it was Robert who specifically thought Patti should pursue singing, and Patti who specifically thought Robert should pursue photography; eventually, both artists would excel in each medium. In this sense, these two people were natural artists and artists by chance- two people who had an innate curiosity since birth and happened to encounter one another at a time when their real talent began blooming. While eventually Patti and Robert would join alliances with various other people, taking part in the tribe of artistry that surrounded the Chelsea hotel, they remained at heart both "shepherds and thieves," and their days together in the "Just Kids" chapter accurately describes this cemented bond.

At the end of the book, in her "Note to the Reader," Patti, luckily for us, explains that she wrote this book as a promise kept to Robert, and therefore wrote the book the way he would have wanted it. This explains why, in the "Chelsea Hotel" chapter an on, the book tends to swerve into ambiguity. Essentially the novel ends right as Patti and her band, and Robert as a photographer, are on the peak of success. It's therefore assumed that Patti cut the book short at this point to avoid changing the reader's perspective on her and Robert as individuals and their relationship together.

She often spoke throughout the book of Robert's struggling with the concept of evil, and since her and Robert shared duel natures, this would equate to Patti's struggle as well. Yet she never delves into this darker side in detail, as if the initial story of their innocence would remain less sacred for her and the reader both. For example, in her conversation with Robert while he's in the hospital, Robert asks her if art "got" them, and she replies in thought that a person would be a fool- or a saint- not to be "had" by art; she never elaborates though, on what being "had" implies and whether this signifies defeat or loss of innocence. And so, it can be assumed that perhaps Patti romanticized several aspects of the book to keep her and Robert's story delicate and poetic, discarding several events and large details for focus on the big picture: their love.

In the end, Robert and Patti admired each other without envy; they penetrated each other's hearts and heads, and managed to keep their love positive no matter what potentially fatal crises arose. Above all, they were two rare Americans who honored art and poetry.

Quotes:

Of Art, Philosophy & Culture-

"I longed to enter the fraternity of the artist: The hunger, their manner of dress, their process and prayers. I'd brag that I was going to be an artist's mistress one day. Nothing seemed more romantic to my young mind. I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side."

"The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artists' responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation."

"I wasn't aware of the drug culture that was blooming in the summer of 67'. I had a romantic view of drugs and considered them sacred, reserved for poets, jazz musicians, and Indian rituals."

"In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of god, discarded the spell for prayer."

"The Chelsea was like a doll's house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe... so many transient souls had espoused, made a mark, and succumbed here. I sniffed out their spirits as I silently scurried from floor to floor, longing for discourse with a gone procession of smoking caterpillars."

"I had a strange reaction watching Jim Morrison (perform.) Everyone around me seemed transfixed, but I observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that. I can't say why I thought this. I had nothing in my experience to make me think that would ever be possible, yet I harbored that conceit. I felt both kinship and contempt for him. I could feel his self-consciousness as well as his supreme confidence. He exuded a mixture of beauty and self-loathing, and mystic pain, like a West Coast Saint Sebastian. When anyone asked how the Doors were, I just said they were great. I was somewhat ashamed of how I had responded to their concert."

"...Woodstock and the Manson cult...our masked ball of confusion."

Of Robert-

"The artist and hustler was also the good son and altar boy. I believed he would once again embrace the knowledge that there is no pure evil, nor pure good, only purity."

"Later he would say that the church led him to God, and LSD led him to the devil, and sex kept him with the devil."

"I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth."

"He never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged."

"His mission was not to reveal, but to document aspects of sexuality as art, as it had never been done before. What excited Robert most as an artist was to produce something that no one else had done."

"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."

Of Her Band & Their Music-

"We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone."

(Of the Other End Show)- "The night was a jewel in our crown. Yet with all that swirling around me, I could feel another presence as surely as the rabbit senses the hound... Bob Dylan had entered the club. This knowledge had a strange effect on me. Instead of humbled, I felt a power, perhaps his; but I also felt my own worth and the worth of my band. It seemed for me a night of initiation, where I had to become fully myself in the presence of the one I had modeled myself after."

"In 'Birdland,' we embarked with young Peter Reich as he waited for his father, Wilhelm Reich, to descend from the sky and deliver him. In 'Break it Up,' Tom Verlaine and I wrote of a dream in which Jim Morrison, bound like Prometheus, suddenly broke free. In 'Land,' wild-boy imagery fused with the stages of Hendrix's death. In 'Elegie,' remembering them all, past, present, and future, those we had lost, were losing, and would ultimately lose."

Of Robert & Herself-

"We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us... 'Oh, take their picture,' said the woman to her bemused husband, 'I think they're artists.' 'Oh, go on,' he shrugged. 'They're just kids.'"

"We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse then reverse again, until we came to accept our duel natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark."

"Even as Robert and I parted as a couple, our photographs became more intimate, for they spoke of nothing but our common trust."

(Of Robert's photo-taking process for her album cover to Horses)- "I had my look in mind. He had his light in mind... I was full of references. He was full of light and shadow. When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us."

"Robert and I had explored the frontier of our work and created space for each other. When I walked on the stages of the world without him I would close my eyes and picture him taking off his leather jacket, entering with me the infinite land of a thousand dances."

"...the gypsy and the fool, one creating silence; one listening closely to the silence. In the clanging swirl of our lives, these roles would reverse many times."

"The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time. Robert dying: creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express."

"We were Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never could have dreamed of and there was splendor we only partially imagined. No one could speak for these two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together. Only Robert and I could tell it. Our story, as he called it. And, having gone, he left the task to me to tell it to you."