Patti Smith's Horses Page 5

  Patti Smith was not alone in her admiration for him. The combination of outrage and bravura, the flaunting of raw talent before an influential but moribund cultural elite, struck a chord with other members of the rock ’n’ roll generation, most notably Bob Dylan. But while Dylan took immediate note of Rimbaud’s facility with language, echoing his lapidary phrasing, complex rhythms, and enigmatic elisions on Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), Smith at this stage seems to have been more attracted to the poet’s image and example. As she writes in “Piss Factory”: “what did i care what he was saying it was the sound the music the way he was saying it his words over and over in my skull when I was pumping steel … i was getting my first brain fuck” (1998). As in the case of her experience of the Rolling Stones, what mattered was not the meaning of the poet’s words but rather their sensory impact. And of course there was always that photograph: the poet as bad boy, the image that Smith would recall when posing for the cover of Horses. What Smith gained from Rimbaud was more than mere brainiac amour, as we shall see in the following chapter, his writings, including Illuminations and A Season in Hell offered vital instruction in the power of the word.

  Departure

  In late 1964, with Rimbaud by her side, the high school graduate was casting around for her next move. Writing had seemed like an obvious choice, but as she later stated, “When I discovered the poetry of Rimbaud I actually stopped writing for a while because I felt that I’d found the ultimate language” (Sischy, 1996). A career in art looked like the best option, but due to her parent’s poor financial situation she was unable to attend a private art school. She eventually enrolled at Glassboro State Teachers’ College with the intention of becoming an art teacher. According to her biographers, Smith did not prosper on the teacher training program (Johnson, 1997, and Bockris, 1998). Taking inspiration from her latest heroine, the aloof and mysterious Greta Garbo, Smith took to styling herself in dark glasses and a long black trenchcoat. Dismissed by her fellow students as a decadent beatnik type, she used her time at the college to learn as much as she could about twentieth-century art and literature. Under the tutelage of a sympathetic teacher, Dr. Paul Flick, Smith was encouraged to nurture her interest in outsider artists, and she began to see herself as a follower in their tradition. Admitting that her interest was primarily in the lives of the artists rather than in the art itself, Smith regarded herself initially as a sort of muse or mistress figure. She identified in particular with Edie Sedgwick, who accompanied Andy Warhol to the opening of the artist’s first retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in the autumn of 1965. “It was,” Smith recalls, “like seeing a black and white movie in person. … Edie Sedgwick with the blonde hair and the dark eyebrows—she didn’t mess around. … She was really something” (Bockris, 1998). An early connoisseur of American celebrity, Smith notably took more interest in the figure cut by Sedgwick than in the figurative qualities of Warhol’s art. In addition to literature and art, music remained a primary source of inspiration, and in the early summer of 1965 Smith saw the Rolling Stones play live at the Philadelphia Convention Hall. Crushed against the edge of the stage and about to be trampled by the crowd, she grabbed on to the first thing she could find. This turned out to be Brian Jones’s ankle. As she explained to Thurston Moore: “I was grabbing him to save myself. And he looked at me. And I looked at him. And he smiled. He just smiled at me” (Moore, 1996).

  Despite these distractions, and despite her inability or unwillingness to follow the college’s teaching methods, Smith began to attract some attention for her artistic endeavors and in 1966 she won a scholarship to attend Saturday morning classes at the Philadelphia Museum of Arts. Any thoughts of advancing as either a painter or a teacher were placed on hold, however, by the news that she had become pregnant. Without support from the father, and in the absence of legal and safe abortion, she decided with the support of her family to give the baby up for adoption. With the help of her mentor, Dr. Flick, she stayed initially with a couple in New York before going to live with friends in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Here she recalls listening repeatedly to Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde (1966) while dreaming of life as an artist. In her poem “Female” she describes herself as

  bloated. pregnant. I crawl thru the sand. like a

  lame dog. like a crab. pull my fat belly to

  the sea. pure edge. pull my hair out by the roots.

  roll and drag and claw like a bitch.

  like a bitch. (Smith, 1972)

  By February 1967, the drugged, oneiric soundtrack of Blonde on Blonde had been replaced by the Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and Smith had given birth to a daughter. In her Creem article on the Stones she writes that “by 1967 they all but eliminated the word guilt from our vocabulary. ‘Lets Spend the Night Together’ was the big hit. Its impossible to suffer guilt when you’re moving to that song” (1973). A few years later she explained she gave up the child “because I wanted to be an artist. Simple as that. I wanted to create and recreate in my own way. I didn’t want to create through another person—at that point in my life” (Bockris, 1998). With this desire in mind she set out for New York.

  Chapter 3

  New York, 1967–1972

  Work

  When Smith was sixteen she painted a watercolor depicting a Modigliani-styled woman standing next to a bus stop. The woman is wearing sunglasses and a sleeveless dress. By her side are two suitcases. The one on her right states ONE WAY, and the other is marked N.Y. As Beverly Smith explained to Sharon Delano (2002), her daughter had told her that if her money ran out in New York, or if there was trouble, she would come back home. Stepping off the train in the spring of 1967, Smith faced some immediate challenges. Without a place to stay, and with only sixteen dollars in hand, she took to sleeping in subway stations, building stoops, and even, on one occasion, a graveyard. Yet, for all these initial difficulties, Smith stayed in the city, eventually finding work at Brentano’s bookstore, right in the heart of Manhattan.

  It was while seeking out an old friend from New Jersey that she first encountered Robert Mapplethorpe, then a nineteen-year-old art student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. The pair very quickly entered into a passionate and creative partnership. Buoyed along by fantasies of becoming a painter’s muse, Smith saw her lover as the consummate outsider artist, a voyant in the Rimbaud mold. But she also responded to Mapplethorpe’s self-discipline: “I’d been through a lot of hard times. I had all this powerful energy, and I did not know how to direct it. Robert really disciplined me to direct all my mania—all my telepathic energy—into art” (Bockris, 1998).

  Encouraged by Mapplethorpe, Smith began to work hard at her own drawings, completing a series of spidery characters that she dubbed her “bad seed children.” These “bad seeds,” as Patricia Morrisroe comments, “were usually naked little girls, their genitalia exposed and almost painfully accentuated. Sometimes she would also draw a young boy called Pan, who was conceived as Mapplethorpe’s alter ego. … Eventually she began to scribble poetry around the edges of her drawings, which she now described as ‘drawlings’” (1995). Smith had begun the transition from images to words that would eventually issue in the writing and performance of poetry and that would culminate in her incarnation as rock performer. Uncertain of her artistic identity at this stage, Smith was content to follow the direction of her line, wandering around the edges of the page to see what might happen. All she knew was that she wanted to be “somebody,” and in New York in the late 1960s that meant being an artist.

  Death by Water

  When, a few months later, Mapplethorpe began to acknowledge and explore his identity as a gay man, Smith, disillusioned and depressed, disappeared with her sister Linda to Paris in the spring of 1969. In all, the sisters spent three months in France, supporting themselves by a variety of means, from street theater to pickpocketing. One significant event from this period deserves scrutiny. In a January 1976 interview with Roiling Stone
magazine, Smith gives a detailed account of her time on a communal farm, known as the Wishing Well, and lays particular stress on her dream life. One dream, in particular, stands out. She dreamed that she was riding with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Anita Pallenberg in a Victorian carriage. The singer and guitarist appeared to be speaking in a weird Haitian dialect, as if reciting a voodoo incantation. Smith, at this point, wonders where Brian Jones is. The dream recurred the following night, augmented with “Kenneth Anger—like … homosexuals and switchblades” and climaxing with a vision of Jones’s head in the toilet (Marsh, 1976).

  Matters intensified when Smith fell into a fever after accidentally spilling boiling water on her leg. Under the influence of belladonna and morphine, prescribed by the local doctor to numb the pain, she began to hallucinate:

  I was crawling in the grass. And there was a whirlpool, rocks and river and ocean and whirlpool, and we were slipping, it was me and Brian. He said, “Throw up.” He’s saying, “Spit it out. Spit it out.” He grabbed my hair and he says, “Spit it out.” And I remember this white hem, like a Moroccan djellaba, grabbing it and spitting up. (Marsh, 1976).

  On awakening Smith felt certain that something terrible had happened to Jones. The next day, she reportedly saw a newspaper bearing the headline BRIAN JONES MORT. Jones had drowned in his swimming pool, under mysterious circumstances, on July 3.

  Another dream followed, this time about her father’s heart. Alarmed by her apparent gift of prophecy, Smith and her sister made the decision to return home to the States. On arrival Linda was dispatched to check up on Grant, who, it turned out, had indeed suffered a heart attack from which he was now recovering. Smith meanwhile headed back to Mapplethorpe who, as a result of poor dental hygiene, was experiencing some grave health problems of his own. Taking matters into her own hands, Smith took care of her former lover, moving with him into the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third Street. It was here that she began to reflect on her Wishing Well visions, a process that led to an outpouring of creative energy, as she explained to Lisa Robinson: “At this time I was writing a lot of poems in a little orange notebook, and I was writing my Brian Jones poem[s]; of course they were rock and roll oriented because they were about Brian, and I would write them in the rhythm of the Stones’ music” (1976).

  In “death by water,” a poem included in Seventh Heaven, which Smith performed at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in December 1971, Jones’s death forms the centerpiece of a richly suggestive threnody, a “black rock and roll mass” informed by biblical, mythological, and literary allusions. Like “Oath,” it may be read as an Ur-text for many of the songs on Horses, particularly those which take as their focus the death of a rock star: Morrison in “Break It Up” and Hendrix in “Land” and “Elegie.” The first twelve lines of the poem are reproduced below:

  How long ago was man promised?

  never again. no not again.

  no death by water

  was the red sea really?

  does man rule the river?

  did she / he drown?

  was it natural causes?

  was it sorrow?

  How many tears on your pillow.

  crocodile or real. water shed.

  brian jones drowned. face down. in a childs

  pool of water. youth fountain. (Smith, 1972)

  Like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the great modernist poem from which Smith derives her title, “death by water” defamiliarizes the expectations of its audience. The absence of rhyme, the piling on of rhetorical questions, and the removal of connectives in stanza three, not to mention the unconventional punctuation and, typically for Smith, the almost total denial of uppercase letters, creates an air of cultivated disorder.

  How, then, should we approach this poem? To begin with, it might be helpful to consider the significance of the work on which it is based. In The Waste Land, Eliot depicts a world denuded of moral, social, and spiritual significance. The poem’s fragmentary form reflects this condition, confronting the reader with abrupt transitions, dense clusters of imagery, and stark juxtapositions. Rather than offer the easy consolations of narrative continuity, a descriptive mode which the poet identifies with the vapidity of modern life, Eliot insists that his audience attends to the significance of a series of mythological allusions. To this end he foregrounds the ancient tale of the Fisher King, an aging and exhausted ruler unable to bring relief to his dry and barren lands. As recounted by the anthropologist Jessie L. Weston in her 1920 book From Ritual to Romance (1997), the myth turns at this point to a figure called “The Deliverer,” also known as Phlebas the Phoenician Sailor, who must sacrifice himself in order to save the kingdom. In Eliot’s version, in the section of the poem titled “Death by Water,” the story of Phlebas the Phoenician is linked quite explicitly with that of Christ the redeemer. Like Christ, Phlebas must forget his concern with earthly affairs, “the profit and loss,” so that, in death, he may become an instrument of man’s salvation.

  What Smith is doing with this material is hard to discern, but in calling her poem “death by water” she may be forging a link between Jones’s death, the figure of Phlebas in Eliot’s poem, and, by extension, the sacrifice of Christ. According to this reading, what the first line recalls is the “promise” that Christ’s sacrifice would put an end to all sacrifice. With Jones’s death this promise appears to have been betrayed. But is Smith serious in making this comparison? One answer is yes, as the association between premature rock ’n’ roll death and the death of Christ is sustained in a section of the poem devoted to the death of Jim Morrison: “our leather lamb. he feared / the bathroom. he warned us. hyacinth house. / how did he know. how did christ know.” There is, of course, something strained, even hysterical, in this comparison, but this itself may be read as an artful response to Eliot’s conservative denunciation of popular culture. To the grand mandarin of modernism, the gaudy figures of Jones and Morrison would most likely represent the false idols of a fallen world, the very wasteland that the poem seeks to restore. By rendering Morrison as significant as Christ, Smith, perhaps with a glance back to her days as a Jehovah’s Witness, challenges the distinction between the sacred and the profane, suggesting, along with Blake, that everything is Holy, while simultaneously questioning the basis of Eliot’s cultural conservatism.

  A further possibility is that the promise refers to God’s covenant with mankind following the flood. When “questions arise … like the perfect dead,” Smith both alludes to the return of secular reason, “was the red sea really?,” and to an early childhood memory: “our house was built on a long swamp. on easter a boy died. he sank in the quick mud and the next morning he floated up like ivory soap. Mama made me go to the wake” (1973). The essay from which this memory is taken charts Smith’s love affair with the Stones and features a slightly different version of the Wishing Well hallucination:

  That night stretched like a cloud. A hypnotic. I was aware of the droning of bees. In the garden the blonde woman was preparing a mixture of pollen and pure honey. Keith was twisting her arm. He had a leather erection. Mick was writhing. some dizzy ritual. The pollen made me wheeze. I laid in the grass and puked. The dew was cooling my hot leg. Someone grabbed my ankle. bruising it. I was saved. I was suffocating in my own warm vomit. I gulped sweet oxygen and turned. Brian was still holding on. I wanted to speak to him but I got caught up in the lace border of his cuff. I traced the delicate embroidery until it stretched across my field of vision like queen anne’s lace.

  It was morning. It was dazzling. It was July 3rd. By night fall the whole world knew that Brian Jones was dead.

  I went home to America and threw up on my father’s bed. (Smith, 1973)

  Earlier on, Smith reminds us that “blind love for my father was the first thing I sacrificed to Mick Jagger.” By the end of the essay, in the wake of his arrogant behavior in One Plus One, Mick has been reduced to an “ass” while Jones has become “the bruised and vulnerable soul of the Stones.” Does J
ones’s sacrifice lead the prodigal daughter back to the father? Is the father, brokenhearted by the loss of his daughter’s “blind love,” restored by her return? (Smith, 1973) Or does her vomit signify a final act of abject defiance? Perhaps all or none of these things.

  Whatever the case may be, the focus throughout these pieces on floodwater, death, and rebirth suggests an immersion in powerful unconscious forces, associated by Freud and Jung with the lifeforce of the mother. Given Smith’s recent experience as a pregnant woman, and then as a pseudowife to Mapplethorpe, the rising of the waters may well signify the return of a repressive female stereotype. By the time Smith comes to recount her second version of this dream, to Rolling Stone magazine in 1976, Brian Jones is recognizable as a redeemer figure, one who dies, significantly in a uterinelike “childs pool of water,” so that Smith may live, untrammelled by maternal guilt. Drinking from Jones’s “youth fountain,” the devotee is restored not only emotionally but also creatively, as Bockris records: