The Theology of Patti Smith

Patti Smith on stage
There are no fixed boundaries in Patti Smith’s universe: her dreams seep through her waking hours, the dead speak to her, she journeys on a whim.Photograph by Stefan M. Prager / Redferns / Getty

Patti Smith loves coffee. It courses through her new memoir, “M Train,” like a dark, steaming river, connecting her various adventures. In her early twenties, Smith travelled to Veracruz, Mexico, on the advice of William S. Burroughs, who advised her that the best coffee beans in the world were grown in the mountains there, but she’s no snob: a large serving from 7-Eleven—accompanied, on occasion, by a glazed doughnut—will do, if necessary. She could, she informs the reader rather casually, “drink fourteen cups without compromising my sleep.”

Is it caffeine that gives Smith her trembling sensibility? She writes—and, judging by her memoirs, acts—as if the world were brimful with the divine. There are no fixed boundaries in Smith’s universe: her dreams seep through her waking hours, the dead speak to her, she journeys on a whim. She requires only the right gesture, or the right setting, to bring her into contact with mystical currents. Returning to Mexico to visit Casa Azul, the house of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, she is afflicted by a stomach bug, and is given permission to rest on Rivera’s own bed. “I lay thinking of Frida,” she writes. “I could feel her proximity.”

Patti Smith is a person for whom the material world veils—flimsily—a set of more lasting, luminous truths. These are the truths of art, genius, fate; she has no truck with the irony or flippancy endemic to the contemporary perspective. She is an unreconstructed Romantic, which makes reading her books rather like time travel, and that’s before she’s taken us anywhere.

Unlike “Just Kids,” Smith’s previous memoir, “M Train” is not a sustained narrative but a collection of short, loosely connected essays. Each piece shuttles backward and forward through time; she might start somewhere like the present day, but soon Smith is transported across years and continents, and off we go with her, like neophytes accompanying a seasoned pilgrim. “Just Kids” was an elegy for her great friend and former lover, the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, and the wanderings of “M Train” add up to an elegy, too, though a less overt one, for Smith’s late husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, a guitarist with the rock band MC5, who died in 1994.

“Fred told me that if I promised to give him a child he would first take me anywhere in the world,” Smith writes early in the book, in the essay “Café ’Ino,” which begins at a now defunct café near the corner of Bedford Street and Sixth Avenue. To seal this fairytale-like bargain, the couple travelled to French Guiana, to collect stones from the former prison of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, where the poet Jean Genet, much to his anguish, had once failed to be incarcerated. The plan was to present these stones to the elderly Genet, through the intermediary of Burroughs. Inside the ruins of the prison, Smith picked three and placed them “in an oversized Gitanes matchbox, leaving the bits of earth clinging to them intact.”

This is far from Smith’s strangest journey, or her most recondite quest. In Tokyo she sweeps the grave of the Japanese novelist Osamu Dezai; in Tangier she attends a conference of “the gone Beats’ orphaned children.” (Metaphorical orphans, that is.) She travels to Reykjavík and Berlin as a member of the Continental Drift Club, a secretive society dedicated to the legacy of the German researcher Alfred Wegener. The Club has strictly twenty-seven members, referred to only by number; Smith is number twenty-three. After delivering the Club’s annual lecture, she makes an impulsive side trip to London, for the sole purpose of checking into “a small favored hotel to watch detective shows.”

Crime shows are one of Smith’s few cultural concessions to the twenty-first century. (She is particularly fond of the American remake of the Swedish series “The Killing.”) Her intense identification with fictional detectives feels of a piece with her broader understanding of the artistic process: much in the way that a detective might obsess over physical evidence, in search of a truth that will reveal itself only to her, Smith celebrates artists who are able to transfigure ordinary objects in the light of their own genius.

While Smith’s attitude to objects is devotional rather than acquisitive (“All doors are open to the believer,” she writes, of sitting at a stone table that was once host to Goethe and Schiller), she holds dearly to the things she has. A favorite café chair, her father’s desk, a fishing lure given to her by her husband: each is a relic of people and places now lost. “M Train” is the work of an artist growing older and becoming lonelier—the word “empty” appears often, as if even Manhattan were uninhabited. The young woman of “Just Kids” was at one with the city’s pulse, but in this book Smith seems out of time: she longs for subway tokens instead of a MetroCard; she observes New Year’s Eve from her stoop, not venturing farther. She wants to leave New York, and does so frequently, only to return again, from force of habit, if nothing else. There is an indelible sadness to “M Train,” borne of bereavement, aging, and isolation.

And yet this mood can seem self-willed. Smith admits as much, writing of her “fascination for melancholia” and the poetic potential that resides in her “numinous malady.” Smith’s single-minded dedication to a fairly mirthless bohemianism is both notable and discomfiting; the reader, almost inevitably, falls short of Smith’s own moral measure. I suppressed an occasional laugh in the face of Smith’s somberness: as with the Catholic priests of my childhood, her piety provokes my irreverence. And never have I encountered an artist whose way of being in the world, with its rituals and talismans, seemed so very Catholic, without also having the literal trappings of Catholicism. (She may have picked up some of this from Robert Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy. Smith herself was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness.)

A serious Romantic who is also a rock star, Smith is unique. When it comes to popular music, our collective memory tends to be short, but Smith resists that kind of temporality: her mind is with the immortals. Her own personal pantheon, with a few notable exceptions (Frida Kahlo, Sylvia Plath, the character Sarah Linden from “The Killing”), is, and always has been, male: Rimbaud, Genet, Mishima, and so forth. Her attitude to genius seems pre-feminist, if not anti-feminist; there is no democratizing, deconstructing impulse in her work. True artists, for Smith, are remote, solitary figures of excellence, wholly dedicated to their art.

“Just Kids” benefitted from its evocation of a youthful becoming: even those readers who find Smith’s reverence hard to bear might find in that book a vivid, moving portrait of two people trying to figure themselves out. “M Train” is less vulnerable, and more peculiar. Smith writes often in “M Train” about her dreams, which are baffling, as another person’s dreams always are. The book opens and closes with a desert dreamscape, in which a Stetson-wearing cowpoke speaks to Smith in riddles. Who knows what, or whom, this figure represents—Smith hardly seems to know herself. But she does express, toward the end, something close to a creed: “Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.” This is her theology, and she has served it with uncommon resolve. If you happen to spot her out and about in the West Village, maybe buy her a coffee—or, instead, pour a cup out for her, in the manner of a true libation.