The spiritual world is rife with powerful paradoxes, perhaps none more confounding than the fact that romantic love can be at once passionately physical and profoundly mystical, transcending time, space, and even bodily limitations. In its material manifestation, romantic love can encompass the best and worst of human drives, from fierce loyalty and self-sacrifice to physical and emotional abuse, lies, and betrayal. Yet the mystical realms to which love can open the human heart are boundless, extending beyond the physical body--as far as we now know the nonlocal mind can reach.
That all-in-one reality of human love gives the lie to the Manichaean split between body and soul that has formed the basis for countless strains of puritanical prejudice and bad religion over several thousand years. So it's all the more inspiring for a book that tells the love story of two people who emerged from the New York City art and music scene of the 1970s, and who were known for their celebrations of physical love, to be shot through with spiritual references. Even on the first page of the Foreword, the author mentions saying her prayers before going to bed, not as a child but as a grown woman of 43 who was a staple of the punk rock revolution. Patti Smith's memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2010), is emotionally involving and even sweet while detailing a subculture not noted for its compassion or spirituality.
Although Smith began her career as an artist and a poet of some note,
she gained fame as a punk rock musician in the late 1970s, performing
at clubs like CBGB and Max's Kansas City and recording a number of
albums that attracted a loyal if not broadly popular following.
Mapplethorpe worked with drawing and collage before arriving at his
signature style of photography notably focused on sadomasochistic
images and male homoerotica, among other subjects. But when they met in
1967, they were both struggling just to survive, and in pledging their
love, they also vowed to stay together through all eventualities and
help each other make art.
Smith's story resonated with me for so many reasons that I obsessively tore through the book, despite a pressing deadline on a book of my own, and felt bereft when I had finished it. While these two developing artists were encountering each other for the first time in Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan, I was living on East 3rd St off the Bowery, in a fourth-floor walk-up directly across from the Men's Shelter. According to the flap copy of Smith's book, "It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots. . . ." But it was also the summer of first acid trips and other psychic dislocations during which the political and social revolutions of the '60s were coming to a head. I wasn't the starving artist that Smith and Mapplethorpe were in those early years of their extraordinary relationship, merely a starving student, living on a steady diet of fried eggs and corned beef hash. Smith's meal of choice at the time was canned Dinty Moore beef stew.
But what was really fueling her in those years, apart from her work, was her undying love for Mapplethorpe. Her depiction of what was clearly a passionate physical affair is inextricably intertwined with their mutual support for each other as emerging artists, neither of them quite clear as to what form or direction their art would take. While spending most of her creative time writing poetry and drawing, Smith was gradually guided by her coterie of friends and encouragers into leading a punk rock band. And for Mapplethorpe, fine art photography was almost an afterthought, growing out of using Polaroids in his collages until someone gave him a Hasselblad camera.
Part of the beauty of Smith's book is the gentle unfolding of their love for each other alongaide their development as artists--a commitment that survived Mapplethorpe's discovery that he was gay. After a brief separation, they not only resumed living together but also, for a while at least, continued their physical relationship. And although Robert clearly flirted with the dark, demonic side of his personality, Smith appears as the quintessential seeker, shunning drugs and alcohol while searching for the moral subtext of her own checkered life.
Smith's account of her shared artistic journey with Mapplethorpe often reminded me of John and Yoko, whom I met just a few years after attending my first Patti Smith performance. As Lennon once described that relationship, "We were two poets in velvet cloaks, literally." (And we've seen the photos of them, so clad, strolling in Central Park while living at the Dakota.) Indeed, the title of the album that John and Yoko released in 1980--at once a manifestation of John's emergence from five years of hermitage, and, sadly, his swan song--says a lot about their own mutual commitment. He had been taken by a tropical flower called a double fantasy that he saw while in Bermuda, and he felt the name summed up his relationship with Yoko. They modeled a level of commitment and a mutual shifting of roles--John the househusband, Yoko the businesswoman--that few couples of our subculture in that time embraced so openly. Which made John's untimely murder all the more heartbreaking. Patti and Robert's double fantasy also ended sorrowfully, of course, with Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS some years after they had finally separated and Smith had married the musician Fred Smith, with whom she had two children.
Yet Patti and Robert remained in constant touch with each other until his death. Unlike many former lovers, they clearly enjoyed each other's artistic successes, if not without the occasional wry comment. After Smith's recording of "Because the Night," a song she had written with Bruce Spingsteen, became her first and only hit record in 1978--at a time when Mapplethorpe's photographs had yet to be widely recognized--they were walking down Eighth St. together as the song blasted repeatedly from storefront speakers. "Robert was unabashedly proud of my success," Patti writes of that moment. "What he wanted for himself he wanted for us both. He . . . spoke in a tone he only used with me--a bemused scolding--admiration without envy, our brother-sister language. 'Patti,' he drawled, 'you got famous before me.'"
Admiration without envy is one of those spiritual principles that is so basic to genuine love--certainly it animated John and Yoko's life together, too--yet so hard for even the most devoted to maintain, that many spiritual masters of renown haven't achieved it. As John wrote memorably on the jacket of one of his albums during his marriage to Yoko, "Love means having to say you're sorry every 15 minutes."
In the end, Smith's lovingly hewn story calls to mind some of my favorite lines from one of her favorite poets, Paul Verlaine. I carried his bilingual collection around with me during those same years--one of the few books I managed to keep through many moves, break-ups, and rip-offs. Often overshadowed by his younger, wilder partner Arthur Rimbaud, Verlaine had a timeless ability to cut to the innocent heart of love without fear.
Soyons deux enfants, soyons deux jeunes filles
Eprises de rien et de tout etonnees
Qui s'en vont palir sous les chastes charmilles
Sans meme savoir qu'elles sont pardonnées.
(Let's be two children, let's be two young girls
In love with nothing and astonished by everything
Who go palely under the chaste bowers
Without even knowing that they are forgiven.)
Smith's story resonated with me for so many reasons that I obsessively tore through the book, despite a pressing deadline on a book of my own, and felt bereft when I had finished it. While these two developing artists were encountering each other for the first time in Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan, I was living on East 3rd St off the Bowery, in a fourth-floor walk-up directly across from the Men's Shelter. According to the flap copy of Smith's book, "It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots. . . ." But it was also the summer of first acid trips and other psychic dislocations during which the political and social revolutions of the '60s were coming to a head. I wasn't the starving artist that Smith and Mapplethorpe were in those early years of their extraordinary relationship, merely a starving student, living on a steady diet of fried eggs and corned beef hash. Smith's meal of choice at the time was canned Dinty Moore beef stew.
But what was really fueling her in those years, apart from her work, was her undying love for Mapplethorpe. Her depiction of what was clearly a passionate physical affair is inextricably intertwined with their mutual support for each other as emerging artists, neither of them quite clear as to what form or direction their art would take. While spending most of her creative time writing poetry and drawing, Smith was gradually guided by her coterie of friends and encouragers into leading a punk rock band. And for Mapplethorpe, fine art photography was almost an afterthought, growing out of using Polaroids in his collages until someone gave him a Hasselblad camera.
Part of the beauty of Smith's book is the gentle unfolding of their love for each other alongaide their development as artists--a commitment that survived Mapplethorpe's discovery that he was gay. After a brief separation, they not only resumed living together but also, for a while at least, continued their physical relationship. And although Robert clearly flirted with the dark, demonic side of his personality, Smith appears as the quintessential seeker, shunning drugs and alcohol while searching for the moral subtext of her own checkered life.
Smith's account of her shared artistic journey with Mapplethorpe often reminded me of John and Yoko, whom I met just a few years after attending my first Patti Smith performance. As Lennon once described that relationship, "We were two poets in velvet cloaks, literally." (And we've seen the photos of them, so clad, strolling in Central Park while living at the Dakota.) Indeed, the title of the album that John and Yoko released in 1980--at once a manifestation of John's emergence from five years of hermitage, and, sadly, his swan song--says a lot about their own mutual commitment. He had been taken by a tropical flower called a double fantasy that he saw while in Bermuda, and he felt the name summed up his relationship with Yoko. They modeled a level of commitment and a mutual shifting of roles--John the househusband, Yoko the businesswoman--that few couples of our subculture in that time embraced so openly. Which made John's untimely murder all the more heartbreaking. Patti and Robert's double fantasy also ended sorrowfully, of course, with Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS some years after they had finally separated and Smith had married the musician Fred Smith, with whom she had two children.
Yet Patti and Robert remained in constant touch with each other until his death. Unlike many former lovers, they clearly enjoyed each other's artistic successes, if not without the occasional wry comment. After Smith's recording of "Because the Night," a song she had written with Bruce Spingsteen, became her first and only hit record in 1978--at a time when Mapplethorpe's photographs had yet to be widely recognized--they were walking down Eighth St. together as the song blasted repeatedly from storefront speakers. "Robert was unabashedly proud of my success," Patti writes of that moment. "What he wanted for himself he wanted for us both. He . . . spoke in a tone he only used with me--a bemused scolding--admiration without envy, our brother-sister language. 'Patti,' he drawled, 'you got famous before me.'"
Admiration without envy is one of those spiritual principles that is so basic to genuine love--certainly it animated John and Yoko's life together, too--yet so hard for even the most devoted to maintain, that many spiritual masters of renown haven't achieved it. As John wrote memorably on the jacket of one of his albums during his marriage to Yoko, "Love means having to say you're sorry every 15 minutes."
In the end, Smith's lovingly hewn story calls to mind some of my favorite lines from one of her favorite poets, Paul Verlaine. I carried his bilingual collection around with me during those same years--one of the few books I managed to keep through many moves, break-ups, and rip-offs. Often overshadowed by his younger, wilder partner Arthur Rimbaud, Verlaine had a timeless ability to cut to the innocent heart of love without fear.
Soyons deux enfants, soyons deux jeunes filles
Eprises de rien et de tout etonnees
Qui s'en vont palir sous les chastes charmilles
Sans meme savoir qu'elles sont pardonnées.
(Let's be two children, let's be two young girls
In love with nothing and astonished by everything
Who go palely under the chaste bowers
Without even knowing that they are forgiven.)
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