“Robert dying: creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express.”

In the Magificat, the earliest known Marian canticle (and Latin for “my soul magnifies”), Mary discovers that she is pregnant and wonders aloud that God “hath regarded the humility of his handmaid”: “For He that is mighty hath magnified me.” Although I am not Catholic, I came to understand why followers love Mary so dearly when I had my children. To feel blessed because you have been miraculously gifted with this child, but to also know that this perfect little biscuit must also some day die, as we all must, is the most glorious—and piteous—magnification of joy and mortality one’s soul can endure.

Perhaps it is especially since Patti and Robert both shared both devotion to, and abnegation of, Catholic iconography and the faith itself that I can’t help but draw a constellation connecting Mary and Patti. They share the joys and pains of mothers whose beloved offspring belonged to them and yet were somehow born wanting to belong to everyone—and, more, to a higher purpose.

Patti is mother to her own actual children, but she had long been so to Robert: through his early, difficult years when he was straining to hear his true calling; when, via his trademark sacred profanity, he became the object of desire to legions of followers; and in the last years of his life, when he was publicly persecuted for his work. The parallels aren’t neat, and Robert Mapplethorpe was no Jesus, but still. They’re there.

What illustrates the comparison most painfully, for me, is that Patti discovered she was pregnant at the same time that she learned that Robert had been diagnosed with AIDS. Patti, having been busy with family life in Michigan for years, hadn’t spoken with Robert in some time, and when she picked up the phone to call him, and heard that he was hospitalized with AIDS-related pneumonia, she cried, instinctively covering her belly. “He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life.”

Mary and Patti: our ladies of sorrows. As Mary hears Simeon’s prophesy about her son’s rise and demise, Patti—knowing that Robert was now living on borrowed time—recalled her early sense of foreboding about Robert: “Every fear I had once harbored seemed to materialize with the suddenness of a bright sail bursting into flames. My youthful premonition of Robert crumbling into dust returned with piteous clarity.”

Yet, there they are, both with their perfect babies. There is Mary, pictured, as she most often is, as Madonna and child—her predestined Savior. There is Patti with her newborn daughter and dying soul mate. When the two reunited in LA after Patti’s daughter, Jesse, was born, Robert asked to take a picture of mother and child: “I held Jesse in my arms, and she reached out to him, smiling,” she writes. “‘Patti,’ he said, pressing the shutter. ‘She’s perfect.’ It was our last photograph.”

And Patti, as mother to her brilliant, wayward, and courageous son of sorts, writes of Robert’s corporeal and spiritual beauty: “…it occurred to me looking around at all your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still the most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.”

On a personal note, I am amazed to report that I now have my own Patti/mother story. By way of background, I have always given each of my three children royal monikers, for our mutual amusement (and my abiding hope that some amazing painter will one day fancy making a regal portrait of them). My eldest, 12, is Zuzu the Just, for her ferocious sense of ethics and fairness; my youngest, almost 4, is Will the Undaunted, for his intrepid cast of mind and body. My middle child, 9, is Frances the Blessed, because she is a sort of changeling, who does not believe that any lines exist between magic, science, and spirituality. Her career goal, she told me a few months ago, is to be “a quantum physicist who discovers the dimension where souls are located.” Awesome.

Naturally, I took Frances (or, as we more often call her, “Frankie”), as my date for Bryn Mawr’s Hepburn Award ceremony in Patti Smith’s honor. We had brought her a present, a talismanic piece of jewelry, a necklace made by our friend J. Rudy Lewis: a bronze wishbone on a leather cord, with one of our favorite things that we’ve heard Patti say before and after her concerts.

Patti noticed Frankie right away, and leaned down to accept our gift, for which she thanked us graciously, but also with alarm: “But what am I going to give you as a present?” she asked Frankie. She searched her jacket and pockets and smiled, drawing out her gift, a simple silk black ribbon of the sort she is famous for wearing. “I have had this in my pocket for five years, all during the time I was in Japan, and it is my good luck charm,” she said, pressing it into Frankie’s palm. “And this is my present to you.” Frankie whispered, “Thank you,” amazed and mute with honor.

After the ceremony, some faculty, including me, were to have our photos taken with Patti. When it was my turn, Frankie shyly told Patti the words that were inscribed on the necklace we had brought her: “It says, ‘I’d like to thank God I’m alive.’” Patti leaned down, hugged and kissed her, looked at Frankie in the eye and said: “And I am, honey. I am.” Patti then politely shooed the adults away and told Frankie that she would like to have her photograph taken with her.

And there they were, the most beautiful works of all: my blessed baby, Frankie, and the magical survivor and genius, Patti Smith. My soul was magnified.

Patti singing J. Carroll's "People Who Died" (But we're alive!)

Frankie, the Blessed

Early on in “Separate Ways Together,” a director at what would become the famous downtown avant garde theater La Mama, in whose germinal years Smith had performed a few times as an actor, threw up his hands in irritation. He was sure he’d typecast Smith as a lesbian junkie. In spite of all leading appearances, however, she assured him that she was most certainly not, and in rehearsals, Smith just couldn’t muster up the requisite lust, or even a passable facsimile of it, during a same-sex love scene. When he learned that Smith was neither-nor, he laughed incredulously. And he then wondered aloud: So, if Smith didn’t shoot up, or have sex with women, then just what was it that she did do?

It was a little mean of me, but I laughed out loud at the guy’s exasperation. Honestly, I’d been wondering them same thing, too. I’m not talking about her sex life or drug use; I don’t have an interest in the prurient contours of people’s lives. I had, however, been seriously ruminating on just what the bleep she had been doing up until this point.

She’s done a great deal, certainly, most of it experimenting with buddies; going to lots of parties (albeit often shyly, as Robert’s awkward arm candy); talking about art; creating some art; writing some poetry. In other words, she’d been doing a lot of hanging out. But is hanging out the same thing as doing something?

For Mapplethorpe, yes. It led him directly to what he wanted to become. As we learn throughout Smith’s tracing the arc of the friendship, Mapplethorpe was, as he invariably was, Smith’s foil: the evil or good twin of the duo’s dual natures. Mapplethorpe, though many times despaired that he would never arrive at it, had, in fact, nailed his goal early on. He went about cutting away at it, like an Inuit statue hiding in a stone waiting for the artist to carve it out, until he unearthed the precise style he had been working to pry out of his mind’s eye and into galleries. Simultaneously, he worked to achieve his twin goal—fame—by developing a circle of powerful fans and benefactors. Hanging out was helping him achieve his goals.

Smith, however, had no other goal than to become an artist, though she had no real notion of what kind of artist she would like to be, or, moreover, be any good at. After the failed play, she knew she wasn’t an actor. She’d been too shy to read her poems in front of an audience, in spite of Mapplethorpe’s urging. She worked drawings, played with clothes. Smoked a little weed. Even in this section, she persists in hanging out, taking a solo pilgrimage trip to Paris to visit the various historic sites of her favorite poets.

But then, we see her—finally free of Mapplethorpe’s constant presence—
find out exactly what kind of artist she wants to be: her own. It is in this section that we see all the components of Smith’s hang-outs gel into creating an utterly original, strange, ferociously intellectual, and gritty form of performance art. To answer the director’s question—what did she actually do?—she had been the unwitting Inuit sculptor of her own image and mind.

So while they walked hand in hand—and hung out a lot—we finally see what Mapplethorpe will ultimately become known for: a provocative photographer and social butterfly. Patti Smith, however, will become known for something far more complicated and original: Patti Smith.

Patti Smith is one of a handful of enigmatic pop icons about which many—even dudes who scour every last liner note—presume much but discover how little they knew after their hero broadcasts some self-revelatory incident. (Bob Dylan is an obvious other, as his own autobiography and the surrealistic, imagined biopic, I’m Not There, denoted so astonishingly). For my money, the second part of Hotel Chelsea chapter in Just Kids dispels so many Smithian presumptions, I finished it wondering: Where is she?

Pre-read, when I thought of Patti Smith, these were the tropes that came to mind: gender-bending pop poet; ground breaking punk performer; flat out independent woman. For me, it was that last one that was always boldly underlined, probably because I thought it was so cool that she was so defiantly not known as a sex symbol in that era of centerfolds. Looking at any timeline of photographs or album covers of her is evidence enough. Androgynous? Yes. Alluring—for sure. Sexpot? No way. She never went for anything obviously girly: not interested in glittery maquillage (the cosmetic of choice for Factory stars and wannabe’s), nor in emulating downtown contemporaries such as Blondie’s Debbie Harry—too cotton candy-ish lip pouting.

Yet, fascinatingly, in this section of “Hotel Chelsea” Smith’s catalogues with stripping candor the many men on whom she was dependent—and who dumped her. There was Jim Carroll, early punk rocker and author of The Basketball Diaries; Smith cared deeply for him, even through his co-hustling with Robert, and then he leaves her. There was the then-married playwright Sam Shepard, with whom she has a protracted, intimate affair and co-creates a play; he dumps her. There was Allen Lanier of the heavy metal band Blue Oyster Cult; she even moves in with him, and then he dumps her. At one point, Smith writes that Robert, Allen, and Sam get together and “hashed it out” to determine how, between the three of them, they were going to support her financially.

Then, we see Smith getting dragged around by her social-climbing ersatz husband, Robert, to fancy parties with Met curators and Diane Von Furstenberg—expected to summon social graces to advance his career. Then we see Smith “there, there, dear”-ing Janis Joplin, as the latter sobs that men never go for her. Then, there she is again, the object of the ultimate male gaze in Robert’s photographs.

Where the heck did that “flat out independent woman” idea come from? It struck me, as I was trolling around YouTube and stumbled on her 1979 performance of The Who’s “My Generation,” that though Smith would, of course, ultimately—and, per her memoir’s trajectory, soon—come wholly into her own, that in judging her prematurely in these pages, I had made the ultimate amateur’s mistake: I’d forgotten that, though she’s now plastered in iconography, she was, is, not a paragon but a person of her time. And that was a time in which even the most flat out of independent women were still male-dependent and, to a large extent, arm candy.

In watching that performance, and Smith’s punky take on the pop song of its time, I thought: There she is. Exactly where she ought have been—sandwiched between two male guitarists, but holding her own as the main attraction—at just that moment.

Felix culpas—“happy accidents”—make for mysterious ciphers. There they are, in genetics, fate, and free will. But in the first part of the “Hotel Chelsea” section of Just Kids, they seem to twist in helixes that confound the reader (or, at least, me) as much as they reveal about what Smith was ultimately to become: the godmother of punk.

The first of these came to me in a totally dim-witted revelation, reading about Smith’s early tenure at the Chelsea: Patti Smith was more hippie than punk. This much is old news to long-time students of Smith, who have pointed out—as has she herself—that she believed that the 60s counterculture had a great deal in common with the punk movement. But what really struck me was that, so far as I could see, it was not her voice, poetry, or ideas that propelled her into prescient punkdom, but rather felix culpa. Without her aquiline bone structure and ragged clothes—coupled with an impulsive, self-executed haircut that transformed her Joan Baez hair into her trademark shaggy, Keith Richards-y do—Patti Smith, it occurred to me, could very well have become a Joni Mitchell with a Rimbaud vibe.

This bummed me out. A lot. Perhaps because I was born in Berkeley, though equally perhaps because I am a member of the oft-reviled Generation X (born 1965-1980), I have always been obliged to hate hippies. I came to the second-wave of punk as a freshly minted teenager in the 80s. As a student of (and participant in) those later punk scenes, particularly DC hardcore—populated by such bands as Minor Threat (later, Fugazi), The Faith, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Government Issue, and so on—I’d sneered at what I considered hippies’ naïve, self-referential ideology and grandiose protest oeuvres. In my teenage mind, as well as my fellows who faithfully attended Rock Against Regan punk shows in the early-to-mid 80s, baby boomers were arrogant and self-serving, shaggy autocrats who insisted that their revolution be televised, to “change the world,” and to force everyone to be loving and peaceful, so long as it followed their prescription.

Latter day punks, however, were propelled by sheer fury. They attacked political and social issues head-on and created their own word-of-mouth grassroots movement. They were DIY-ing their own album covers and wheat-pasted show posters before such HGTV-appropriated acronyms existed. Cynics, for sure, but they were also clear-eyed realists. Hippies’ simplistic solutions had yielded nothing. Why offer anything but questions, rage, satire?

Patti Smith in the formative days of her burgeoning career was clearly neither full of punky spit and vinegar, nor did she cotton to the snooty hierarchies imbedded in the social milieus of Max’s Kansas City and Warhol’s Factory. She hated glitter (no glam-rock designation for her). Rather, Smith was a solitary wordsmith who still wore bell-clinking anklets, an artist in-her-own-residence, a nurse to the multitudinous social diseases (physical and psychic) attending Mapplethorpe’s hustlerdom, a devourer of poetry, an observer. One has the sense that, at this stage, Smith was everywhere but part of nothing.

Indeed, that she inhabited her singular idiom so completely seems to render her not so much like Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell as like Bob Dylan. As his own memoir ultimately revealed, Dylan was neither joiner, hippie, nor especially political: he loved words and traditional American worker-folk music. Also a loner (but for her abiding attachment to Mapplethorpe), Smith loved art, in all its media. But where Dylan landed in New York to launch an immediate campaign of live performances, Smith long remained a student. She needed to learn, she tells us, before she felt could produce anything of value, much less arrive at performing as her chosen path in life.

And she was hanging out a lot—and a lot like a college student. Smith seems to have spent her days at the Hotel Chelsea chatting and visiting with her hall-mates, offering and being offered careful critiques of works-in-progress, attending impromptu parties where she and her friends dabbled in parlor games and drugs, engaging in the kind of earnest, searching conversations that only college kids have the time, or newly-discovered ideas, to take to heart and to permit to brand their minds indelibly.

Enter felix culpa, part deux. The Hotel Chelsea emerges in these pages as the fertile campus of a freewheeling arts college whose professors emeriti are Salvador Dali, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and Bobby Neuwirth, and whose canteen (El Quixote) is invariably packed with visiting luminaries: Grace Slick, Jimi Hendrix, Country Joe and the Fish, and others.

Where else but in college do young people have such access, such shots at genuine mentorship nowadays? I wonder if there is, or even potentially be, an equivalent of the early 1970s’ Hotel Chelsea in contemporary life. Today, celebrities are attacked, whether by invitation or not, by a vast array of intruders—ranging from paparazzi, tabloids, and crazed fans—who are protected by an equally vast army of boots on the ground: handlers, body guards, press and talent agents, personal assistants.

No, the Chelsea, as it was when Smith lived there, doesn’t exist any more than CBGB’s or Punk itself. Indeed, reading about it, I felt as though I was privy to the unearthing of an artifact left over from period of American history in which a collection of relative amateurs—self-taught students, really—enjoyed a kind of steady stream of kismet: bumping up into the stars of their fields, to make lifelong contacts out of them, to network so easily and unguardedly. Try “bumping into” Eminem and see how many lawsuits you’re served.

So, though she and Mapplethorpe suffered horrors together and apart, Smith was nevertheless blessed by felix culpas critical to the development of her artistic persona. First, though she seems to have been born androgynous, forever preferring boyish garb, it was the single, arch comment of a manager at The Factory about her hair that ended in the iconic haircut that, she bemusedly confesses, opened doors for her at Max’s, The Factory, and would later inspire the rough, tailored couture of fashion designers, most notably Ann Demeulemeester. Second, and more importantly, she stumbled into a bona fide arts education vérité at the Chelsea at a time when American life was not so busy, so savagely Calvinist, that she was allowed time to discover, experiment, study, gestate, so that by the time she finally performed in public, Smith was ready to deliver herself: her words, her voice, performance style, and her trademark look—all down.

The “godmother of punk,” a moniker Smith has never adopted herself, was conceived by the mitosis of happy accidents.

Writing a memoir is a strange pursuit for sure, but even more elusive, at least for me, is reading one. On first read, I invariably forget that the memoir necessarily follows the trajectory of a narrative arc: beginnings that culminate in an early turning point; a series of obstacles and life events leading to a seeming solution, followed by a series leading to seeming disaster; a heightened, intense period racing toward resolution and denouement. It’s a novel!

No, it isn’t! I often have to re-read memoirs to remind myself that the writer lived through all this stuff and then tasked herself with deciphering and erecting that arc—how and why her life inevitably became what it is. In this way, probably every memoirist has to borrow a little from Oedipus. And Smith, in particular, could very well have rendered her narrative along a tragic arc.

All the signposts are staked early and brutally. Her family, though loving, is poor, and her parents work constantly, making outings rare. Her childhood friend dies; she is consistently forced to wear the dunce cap at school (literally); she becomes pregnant, is kicked out of college, ridiculed at her factory job, later by nurses during a harrowing labor, ending in an emergency C-section. At 20, she arrives in New York penniless, planning to stay with friends who never show; she is homeless, hungry, alone. “No one noticed me,” she writes, toward the end of the first chapter.

But she also writes this: “I could move freely…I had faith.”

There, for me, is no better summation of Just Kids. Having read it several times, I am still floored that its arc is firmly anchored on the axis of freedom and faith. Rather than transcribing a narrative that one might legitimately expect not just from a woman whose life is pocked by loss, but also from the very godmother of Punk—a genre and movement defined by fury, denunciation, and impulse—Smith describes even her most harrowing experiences with tenderness and unhurried reflection. Frankly, it feels almost subversive.

Then again, is it surprising that Smith’s story would be subversive? She built a persona of a ferociously independent thinker and performer, yet we learn that, even as a kid, she “dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support side by side.” Her famously tattered, unadorned look disguises a collector, even a thief, of beautiful, talismanic trinkets and lover of sumptuous fabrics. Her apparent sexual androgyny belies a fairly traditional monogamous woman.

“I was a dreamy somnambulant child,” she tells us early on in Just Kids. I wonder if that very dreamy somnambulance is what protected Smith from psychic devastation; what kept her open to ideas, art, and her complex, intimate lifelong relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. Indeed, I wonder if it helped form her bedrock of freedom and faith, seeing her life as having run the arc of possibility instead of tragedy.