Book Review

By Derryll White

Smith, Patti (2010).  Just Kids.

Patti Smith is considered a poet whose energy and vision found their voice in the most powerful medium of our culture – music.   -Wikipedia

This is certainly a memoir for my generation, the New York art and music scene of the 1960s and ‘70s.  It was a great time, when young people were alive with the possibilities of a new world order – sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.  Patti Smith takes the reader into the lofts and deteriorating hotels of the new avant-garde – Andy Warhol is large on the scene while Dada and surrealism, Baudelaire and Rimbaud were discussed in every dark corner.

She takes one into the emerging dark worlds of AIDS, political chicanery and death of some of the leading lights – Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison.  She parties and plays with them and then mourns their passing.  Patti’s love affair and life with Robert Mapplethorpe, now after his death a renowned photographer, moves the reader to tears.  Twenty or 80, the emotion, love and caring, as well as the loss, twists the heart of the reader.

Patti Smith in ‘Just Kids’ is a woman who risks as she lives, who devotes herself to a goal and pursues it through tragedy and deprivation.  Her words bring to life the memories of so many who were fortunate to reach maturity in the 1960’s and who were lucky enough to survive Vietnam.

This memoir is a blessing, a love story and an elegy for a generation.  I was lucky enough to be loaned it by a young barista in tears, who dared me to read it without crying.  By the end I sat in Hot Shots with tears diluting my coffee; just couldn’t stop.  It is a memoir for everyone.

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Excerpts from the book:

THE ART MUSEUM – I’m certain, as we filed down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve-year-old, all arms and legs.  But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

GROWTH – For a time Robert protected me, then he was dependent on me, and then possessive of me.  His transformation was the rose of Genet, and he was pierced deeply by his blooming.  I too desired to feel more of the world.  Yet sometimes that desire was nothing more than a wish to go backward where our mute light spread from hanging lanterns with mirrored panels.  We had ventured out like Maeterlinck’s children seeking the bluebird and were caught in the twisted briars of our new experiences.

REBELLION – Some of us are born rebellious.  Reading the story of Zelda Fitzgerald by Nancy Milford, I identified with her mutinous spirit.  I remember passing shop windows with my mother and asking her why people didn’t just kick them in.  She explained that there were unspoken rules of social behavior, and that’s the way we coexist as people.  I felt instantly confined by the notion that we are born into a world where everything was mapped out by those before us.  I struggled to suppress destructive impulses and worked instead on creative ones.  Still, the small rule-hating self within me did not die.

LOSS – The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time.  Robert dying: creating silence.  Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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