Patti
Smith and her husband Fred used to fantasize about producing their own midday
talk show. It was to be Fred’s show, really. He’d drink beer and talk about
aviation and invite B-list actors like Cliff Robertson to be his guests. Patti
would arrive for a segment called The Coffee Break, which she hoped would be
sponsored by Nescafe. She’d invite the viewers to join her and make their own cups
of hot joe, but rather than engage them or take phone calls, she’d simply sit there
and talk to Fred. Still, she was happy to know you were out there, enjoying
your coffee as she enjoyed hers. This playful sense of ‘Join me, but keep your distance’ permeates M Train, her elegant, moving new memoir.
In some
ways, M Train is an improvement on
her well-received first memoir, Just Kids,
though it may not appeal to as many readers. Just Kids was about young love and youthful exuberance, a fairly
traditional memoir told in a fairly traditional way. M Train is about a woman nearing 70, a careworn widow with an aura
of sadness around her, who can create a tight mosaic of words and thoughts,
gliding from one topic to another, from her favorite café to Jean Genet’s
grave, from her love of Sylvia Plath, to her love of detective programs, done
so smoothly that you may not even notice
that Smith has quietly erected a small masterpiece. Patti Smith is, after
decades of flirting with it, finally approaching something like genius.
The
trick, though to call M Train a trick
is like calling Saint Joan of the
Stockyards a trick, is that she makes you think she’s writing about coffee,
or traveling, or visiting cemeteries, but she’s actually doing a kind of
elliptical rain dance, summoning nothing less than God’s silence. That’s
exactly what she hears when, in a moment of dire loneliness, she calls out to
her long dead husband Fred: “You’ve been gone long enough. Just come back.”
It’s a heartbreaking instant, one of a dozen or so slipped unexpectedly into
the story’s weave.
She can
fool you, though. She’ll leave openings, as if the book is a dialog and not a
monolog. When she mentions a certain childhood memory, you’ll find yourself
back in your own childhood. I found myself wanting to show her my old toy box, and woo her with
a wind-up tin bird from my pre-school days. She’d sit and watch as I turned the
key and set the bird pecking across the floor. She’d marvel at its yellow chest
and orange beak.
- It’s
beautiful, she’d say.
- It’s
yours, I’d say. If you want it.
You have
to remind yourself that it’s her story, not yours. Of course, you’ll eventually understand this,
because many of the topics are unique to her, such as her membership in the
Continental Drift Club, a small, secret society dedicated to the remembrance of
scientist/explorer Alfred Wegener. She has nothing in common with the other
members, and was only granted membership after she’d written several letters to
the Alfred Wegener Institute, hoping to find a living heir who would grant her
permission to photograph Wegener’s boots. See? Her story, not yours. Just when
you think she’s just a regular gal feeding her cats, she’s suddenly in Iceland,
singing Buddy Holly songs with neurotic chess wizard Bobby Fischer.
Photographs
from Smith’s personal collection punctuate various chapters of the book, and
some of them are fascinating: a guardian angel statue from a cemetery in
Berlin; the crutches used by Frida Kahlo; Virginia
Woolf’s walking stick; a picture of Patti as a child; pictures of Fred. It’s
the writing, though, that stuns. It feels breezy, but is actually dense with
thoughts and ideas, and poetry. Nothing is off limits. “I hate being confined,”
she writes, “especially when it’s for my own good.” She’s referring to airplane
seatbelts, but she may as well be commenting on her galloping intellect.
Late in
the book Smith fears that she wouldn’t make a good detective like her heroes on
television. “I’m not the observant type,” she writes. “My eyes seem to roll
within.” Yet, that’s not the real reason. The reason she couldn’t be a
detective is because she’d rather BE a puzzle than solve one. She’s secretive.
Rather than spill her guts, she’ll spill the contents of her suitcase, letting
us search for clues, as if we can learn something about her by knowing what she
packs for a trip. She can’t be a detective because her nature is less about
solving the mystery of others, than to leave traces of herself, like a thief on
the run in 1930s Algiers. We covet these morsels. We kid ourselves that we
know something about Patti Smith because we know she loves brown toast with
olive oil. But we don’t know her. She’s been doing this sort of cerebral fan
dance for decades, and she’s mastered it.
This
sense of mystery has been a key to Smith’s writing over the years – she never
quite shows her entire hand, preferring to funnel her thoughts through those of
Genet and Burroughs and various other saints and sinners. She puts herself in
the role of student, rather than master. Case in point: When in Japan she
begins thinking of Ryunosuke Akutagawa and his “devoted acolyte” Osama Dazai,
two writers who committed suicide. She wants to write something about the
elder, but can’t channel him. Instead, not surprisingly, she writes about the
disciple, whose “spirit seemed to be everywhere, like a haunted jumping bean.”
Her natural affinity for the follower has always given her juice. When other
young women were writing about the pains of romance, she was writing paeans to
Rimbaud; she was happy, ecstatic even, to play Robin to every great poet’s
Batman. But even her humility is a kind of disguise. She’s great and she knows
it, and she wants us to know it. That’s why she describes the recovery after
Hurricane Sandy as “a truly daunting task, like piecing together the shattered
mandolin of Bill Monroe.” You don’t name drop the leader of the Blue Grass Boys
unless you’re going for the kill.
M Train is not without imperfections.
The book’s recurring motif about an old cowboy who appears in Smith’s dreams,
for instance, feels forced. I suppose the cowpoke, who offers Smith cryptic
advice, was a kind of stand-in for her old paramour and occasional collaborator
Sam Shepard (the book is dedicated “To Sam”). The cowboy feels a bit
Shepardish, maybe a conscious effort to break up the Smithian riffs on art and
love and survival, something distinctly dusty and American to offset her own
far-flung musings. But these off moments are rare, akin to when a skillful
boxer throws a sloppy haymaker to amuse the rabble in the cheap seats. The
cowboy interludes are quick, and she’s soon back to her beautiful, understated
style, like when she tells about a taxi driver caught harboring a man in the
trunk of his cab, “curled up like a slug in a rusting conch shell.”
What’s
the book about, you wonder? It’s about all the good stuff that rattles us in
the wee wee hours, namely, the magic and loss that good ol’ Lou Reed used to
sing about. It’s about aging, and memories, and of course, death. Smith has
been hanging around cemeteries and adoring dead authors for so long that she
practically wears death like an accessory. But the book isn’t morbid. Death, in
M Train, is like our final dance
partner, waiting at the side of the gymnasium, grinning shyly, knowing that we
will eventually dance a long slow one with him. He’ll pick the time, but with
luck, we’ll pick the song.
But if
Smith can write about death without turning morose, there is still a bit of
melancholy that covers the book like a layer of gauze. She’s never written much about the death of her husband Fred in 1994, but in M Train we get some glimpses. For my
money, Patti and Fred Smith were the real John and Yoko, involved in a true
partnership of souls. If for no other reason, M Train is memorable in that it’s the first time Smith has shared
some thoughts about her “human angel from Detroit…with eyes the color of
water,” her husband then, now, and always. Still, she doesn’t rub our faces in
her sorrow over losing him. In such seamless writing, too many intimate revelations would throw off the delicate balance she’s achieved. What we get is
something artful, as if she’s telling us about Patti and Fred by showing us the
footprints where they’d once walked.
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