Verified by 
smith's album, Horses
When Patti Smith won the National Book Award (1) for Just Kids,(1) the memoir of her youthful romance with photographer-slash-provocateur Robert Mapplethorpe,(2) New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd waxed surprisingly effusive, describing the book, which charts Smith and Mapplethorpe's ascent from rags to icons, as "a spellbinding love story...achingly beautiful." She recommended it "For anyone who has had a relationship where the puzzle pieces seem perfect but don't fit... 'La Bohème' at the Chelsea Hotel..."
While this will certainly be true of the movie version, the book itself is something stranger: beyond a memoir or love story, it's an advertisement and a manual in elegiac, twilit prose. "Just Kids" packages and pushes the Smith/Mapplethorpe brand: androgyny, voluntary poverty, avid artistic ambition, Downtown social climbing and hipster drug culture (with or without drugs), and it sells them relentlessly, if charmingly. Their complicated romance, their sartorial cool, their arty whimsies and their art are all unabashedly presented as sublime, essentially "pure," literally in touch with God.(3) It is a book, in other words, whose hyperbolic enthusiasm seeks to construct an addictive romance all its own, to recruit not only admirers, but Madame Bovaries, people who spend their lives in love with someone else's poeticized story instead of the reality they're in.
Young Patti herself launches her career in that very state, looking to the legend of her cultural idol, Arthur Rimbaud (4) to validate and even romanticize life's rough patches: Mapplethorpe's sexual defection, then later, boyfriend Jim Carroll's heroin addiction. She was, fortunately for us all, lucky enough, talented enough, shrewd, cool, and driven enough so that her conflicted gay boyfriend and her talented addict boyfriend both became famous and helped her up instead of dragging her down; but for most girls who take this path, the story doesn't end as adorably.
If it sounds like I think Just Kids is in any way cynical, I don't. It's an innocent effort; short of "spellbinding," but as moving and fascinating as many of Smith's other works. What's more, it's rich in gemlike anecdotes, intriguing historical information, and admirable attitude management tips, particularly for shy young artists who hesitate to court their elders and betters. But it is worth noting here, in the context of a blog on addiction, that its narrator is so chill, so unflappable, so tenderly distanced from the sufferings, furies and anxieties of her characters that her story feels like it was written on painkillers.
We see bad things pop up along her highway, but we're slipping along too quickly and smoothly to feel the wheels run over them. She talks of having been angry and rebellious, but we never really feel the sting. When her bad-boy lover comes out of the closet she weeps for days, but we watch her beat herself up over it through a nostalgic mist, long after she knows better. Agony has mellowed into melancholy; youthful desperation, medicated with the elixir of maturity, is on the nod.
Consequently, despite how powerful an influence drugs had on underground culture of this period, drug problems and their attendant miseries, though not concealed in Just Kids, bare their veins a bit coyly. Smith says she used drugs more for research than for pleasure, and she stuck mostly to pot, cigarettes and coffee rather than relying on opium, cocaine, heroin, DMT or any of the other Schedule III pharmaceuticals that flow through the plasma of America's creative bloodstream.
Rather than go along to get along, Patti Smith basically impersonated a junky while refraining from becoming one. Smith writes: "Everyone took it for granted that I did drugs because of the way I looked." But, she adds, "I refused to shoot up."(5) Smart girl.
Nevertheless, her favorite means of conveyance is Rimbaud's drunken boat, and it always feels like she's high on something, usually the thing she calls "art." Insofar as addictive drugs are able to redirect a user's attention and motivate her so that nothing matters as much as the next fix, Smith's romance of being a great poet has the look and feel of a narcotic. Whether she's living on crumbs, cribbing Keith Richards' hairstyle or falling in love with a soul mate, her eye is always on the prize; her youth is spent in a riptide of desire.
In 1992, a small book called Crack Wars explored, in the most adventuresome spirit imaginable, the love affair between modern culture and drug culture. Avital Ronell, the author, concluded that drug use and drug culture were integral to modern society's acquisitive economy and self-transcendent aspirations. As a scaffold for her argument, she used one of the founding texts of modern literature, Gustave Flaubert's 1856 novel, Madame Bovary.
The birthplace of "realist" fiction, very recently republished in a highly lauded translation by Lydia Davis, Madame Bovary is a study of romantic intoxication. It slyly positions its heroine's addiction to fantasy in the context of her town's drug store or pharmacy---the place where society tries to keep painkillers, medicines, and poisons culturally separated, while sold in the same room.
Ronell draws parallels between Emma Bovary's early immersion in romance novels, which were denounced as addictive in her day--- much as video games are now---and the "drug drive" that captured minds as diverse as Baudelaire's Poe's and Pollock's. (6) (Her witty neologism for our culture's system of order/disorder is narcossism.")(7)
Although Patti Smith is a star of the underground, and Emma Bovary stands for the provincial middle class, the highlights of Bovary's story that Ronell picks out show eerie similarities to Patti Smith's. I've listed six more below, but for now and here, the key ones are these five:
They both seek to flee the mundane, sober dullness of everyday life for something they feel more vertiginous, more salient.
Both model themselves on the stars of their romantic fantasies. (Patti imprints on Rimbaud; Emma on heroines in novels.)
Both pursue affairs that a proper, "self-respecting" member of society would deem sordid. (Rodolphe seduces Emma amid the barnyard sounds of the county fair; Robert, who has started hustling, gives Patti gonorrhea at the seedy Hotel Allerton.)
Both play at androgyny. (Emma smokes a pipe and tromps mannishly through mud; Allen Ginsberg picks up Patti in the Automat, mistaking her for a young boy.)
Most importantly, they both turn to writing in an effort to revive romantic passions that have passed their intoxicating peak. (It's love letters for Emma; Just Kids for Smith.) (8)
But Smith succeeds where Emma fails, so the parallels between their versions of narcossism are significantly partial. With no creative outlet for her desperate yearnings, Emma Bovary is consumed by consumerism; she runs up a debt she can't live with. Patti Smith becomes (more or less) the artist she set out to become---her looks-like-an-addict-but-isn't version of the fantasy "Rimbaud." Because she doesn't go all the way down Arthur's path of escapist potions, she keeps moving and growing into an actual person, emerging as a mother of two, a comeback musician, and, as noted, a culturally certified literary celebrity. The romance of the poet is not a drug, she is saying; it's a medicine that can preempt the need for drugs.
But in many cases this is a lie, as Madame could tell you. Flaubert has Emma gobble arsenic and die (horribly), a black liquid coming from her mouth "like ink," as if regurgitating all the fictions she swallowed.
Smith by contrast---wiser than she set out to be---commits suicide by proxy: On the morning after Mapplethorpe dies (horribly) of AIDS, Smith reports that her television wasplaying Tosca's famous aria, "I have lived for love; I have lived for art." But in Tosca's last act, upon learning that her lover has been killed, Tosca jumps "into the void" to her death, whereas Smith does nothing of the sort.
How then can she fulfill her mythic assignment? How can she acquire Rimbaud's inside knowledge of suicidal desire, his die-young cachet, and not shoot up on them? Her solution to this myth-making dilemma is brilliant: Mapplethorpe, her spiritual twin, dies for her, assigning her the task of immortalizing their love with a (hopefully) intoxicating romance. Unlike Bovary's, Smith's ink is no metaphor; and the gateway fictions she has swallowed keep their original shape when she sings them back up.
Flaubert famously identified emotionally with his protagonist, Emma, (Mme. Bovary, c'est moi!" is his signature slogan), but he was scathing about her shortcomings, not to mention those of the bovine provincial society that spawned and suffocated her. In other words, his style of literary narrative offers the opposite of what Smith's does. Instead of an escape, or effort to rise above what Smith (along with Oprah) now calls "negative" things---anger, compulsion, bitterness, regret and pettiness--- Flaubert labors to write precisely about the interlocked misery and ecstasy of obsessive desire, the unvarnished truth of it. Like Mapplethorpe's sadomasochistic and homoerotic photographs, Flaubert created a new morality by aestheticizing its absence.
Soon after its publication, Madame Bovary was denounced in the courts as "poison"---degenerate and amoral. But the effort to ban it failed, as did eerily similar efforts, well over a century later, to ban Mapplethorpe's work.
Smith's book is too circumspect and sweet to cause this kind of a ruckus. As an artist, she may appreciate Mapplethorpe's sensibility, but his sympathy for the devil is one of those little pieces that, as Maureen Dowd said, do not quite fit her life's puzzle. She understands that there's something spiritually powerful in his embrace of both good and evil, something right, like William Blake's adoration of the tiger, but in "Just Kids" she wants to call that something "pure," a word that, in common parlance, strips all sins and stains of their dark power. She imagines him an angel, hand in hand with God, rather than as the omega point at which god and devil collapse into one. She herself wants to be generous, to affirm life and love, to wash the feet of the dead, to forgive. She wants to acknowledge and venerate the godliness of unabashed badness, but not inject it.
Beside the harsh clarity of Mapplethorpe's and Flaubert's visions, Smith's elegiac melancholy, her tenderness, wonder and sadness feel sentimental, unreal, effete, but nonetheless entirely welcome. Art may have to be brutally truthful to be genuinely great but a memoir does not have to be totally honest to be wonderful or worthy. Why not write an opium dream of the rebel underground that can make Maureen Dowd sigh for past loves gone wrong? Why not write a romance of Downtown New York that has more soul (and crazier hair) than Sex and the City? Why not tread softly on the graves of the dead? If some young Emma reads Smith and risks getting hooked on impossible dreams and the dangerous drugs that accompany them, well, just try to be there for her when she needs you... But come with a copy of Madame Bovary, because, if you're dealing with a romanticism addict, anti-drug laws and lectures won't do you any good.
...................................................................
NOTES:
(1) Just Kids, Patti Smith, National Book Award
(2) A more complete collection of Mapplethorpe's photos than appear on his website. Caution. Strong, and to many people, disturbing sexual imagery.
(4) Arthur Rimbaud the French Symbolist "poet maudit," author of "Le Bateau Ivre" - The Drunken Boat -- who subsisted on hallucinogens and alcohol, had a troubled affair with Verlaine and died young.
(5) Just Kids p. 161
(6) "Leaving aside the more obvious examples," Ronell writes in Crack Wars, (alluding to the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Parker, Burroughs and chroniclers of "artificial paradises" like deQuincy (Confessions of an English Opium Eater), "we also have 'proper' names: Proust (cortisone abuse); Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (frequent recourse to laudanum); Novalis, Kleist, Wackenroder ("soft" drugs); Voltaire and Balzac (coffee)...Berlioz (hallucinogens, coffee, cigars); Stravinsky (cigarettes)."
(7) Crack Wars p. 23
(8) Both feel stifled in small town lives and dream of blowing Dodge. (The outskirts of Rouen for Emma; suburbs of New Jersey for Patti.) Both sacrifice their first-born. (Patti puts hers up for adoption, while Emma keeps but neglects hers.) They are both transgressive in their pursuit of pleasure. (Emma cheats on her husband; Patti has an affair with Sam Shepherd while he is married.) They fetishize keepsakes as embodiments of their aspirations. (Emma cherishes an aristocrat's cigar case, a memento of a fancy dress ball; Patti puts Mapplethorpe's portrait of her on an album cover and it turns her into an icon.) Both strive to join an aristocracy they weren't born to. Both trade on their looks, although Smith, significantly, has accomplishments to match---and Bovary does not.
