From looming political crisis to a leaky flat – a troubled year in
the life of a great American punk poet
’ … Patti Smith. Photograph: Getty Images/Getty Images for Ray-Ban
At the start of 2016, Patti Smith’s friend the
producer, manager and rock critic Sandy Pearlman was hospitalised after
suffering a brain haemorrhage. She first met him in 1971 when he attended one
of her performances during which she read poetry against a backdrop of
feedback, courtesy of guitarist Lenny Kaye. Pearlman approached Smith after the
show and suggested she front a rock band, but, as she recalls in her new
memoir: “I just laughed and told him I had a good job working in a bookstore.”
Later she took his advice and went on to make the landmark punk album Horses. Their friendship
endured, leading her and Kaye to his bedside nearly 50 years later as he lay in
a coma. “We stood on either side of him, promising to mentally hold on to him,
keep an open channel, ready to intercept and accept any signal,” Smith writes. But the signal never came; six months later, Pearlman died.
Her account of 2016 shows it was a difficult year all round. Along
with the loss of friends, she is poleaxed by the rise of populism, the
dirtiness of the US election battle and looming environmental catastrophe. She
is also discomforted by her impending 70th birthday. And so, after a run of New
Year gigs at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and a stretch back in her leaky New
York flat, Smith engages in what she calls “passive wandering, a small respite
from the clamouring, the cries of the world”. She travels to Arizona,
California, Virginia and Kentucky.
In the latter, she visits her friend and former partner, the
playwright Sam Shepard, who is almost bedbound and nearing the end of his life.
Shepard’s final book The One Inside is close to completion but, as the act of
writing becomes increasingly difficult, he calls on Smith to be his amanuensis.
Elsewhere, she goes to Lisbon, where she visits the poet Fernando Pessoa’s
house, and looks through his personal library, and to her bungalow in New
York’s Rockaway Beach where she clears out the dust, sits on the porch and
gazes at the insects and the flowers.
Typically for Smith, portents and symbols lurk in unexpected
places, and everyday objects become freighted with meaning. Photographing them
with her trusty Polaroid camera, she basks in the memories evoked by her
father’s cup, a motel sign, a suit worn by the artist Joseph Beuys and a book
of poems by Allen Ginsberg. She imagines her old chum Ginsberg fearlessly
grappling with the current political turmoil. He “would have jumped right in,
using his voice in its full capacity, encouraging all to be vigilant, to
mobilise, to vote, and if need be, dragged into a paddy wagon, peacefully disobedient”.
Year of the Monkey is often maudlin, a reflection both on mortality
and of the times in which Smith finds herself, but rich in detail. She reads
endlessly, strikes up conversations with strangers, takes walks in the middle
of the night and drinks gallons of coffee. At one stage she lists the contents
of her suitcase – “six Electric Lady T-shirts, six pair of underwear, six of
bee socks, two notebooks, herbal cough remedies, my camera, the last packs of
slightly expired Polaroid film and one book” – which reveals much about her
day-to-day needs. She cadges lifts from oddball types, among them the couple
who forbid her to talk while they are driving and abandon her at a gas station
when it becomes clear she can’t stay silent, and the garrulous Cammy, who has a
car boot full of pickling jars. Smith also dreams vividly, leading to seemingly
normal scenes suddenly bending out of shape as you realise she has slipped into
unconsciousness. Indeed, the narrative moves constantly between reverie and
memory; it’s invariably left up to us to work out which is which.
Both mundane and magical, this book is a world away from Just Kids,
Smith’s award-winning 2010 account of her relationship with the photographer
Robert Mapplethorpe, though the unique artistry of her prose remains. There are
greater similarities to M Train, Smith’s previous memoir which found her
staying in hotels or shuffling around her apartment, watching Inspector Morse
and Midsomer Murders reruns on TV. Here she once again cuts a solitary figure
prone to forgetfulness, who falls asleep in her coat a lot, and holds
conversations with inanimate objects. The ghosts of those she has lost – her
mother, her husband, her brother – remain close.
Smith lives much of her life in the past but her account of her
wanderings shows us who she is now, and the stories and dreams that occupy her.
She is not without optimism – “Our quiet rage gives us wings, the possibility
to negotiate the gears winding backwards” – but exists with a keen awareness
that there is no overcoming the passing of time or the limits of the imagination.
As she notes in the epilogue, “the trouble with dreaming is that we eventually
wake up”.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/18/year-of-the-monkey-by-patti-smith-review
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