We’ll convene this evening for a discussion of “Just Kids,†the award-winning memoir of friendship and artistic aspiration in a vanished New York, by the rocker, poet and consummate romanticist Patti Smith. The live discussion will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the comments section below, but feel free to start posting your thoughts and questions now.
“Just Kids†begins in the late 1960s, when Ms. Smith, at age 20, flees southern New Jersey and all of its constraints to find a life she thinks will be infinitely more meaningful in New York. Her mother gives her a waitress’s uniform in hopes that she’ll find work to keep her solvent. That particular career ends prett much the day it starts when Ms. Smith, having landed a job at a Midtown Italian restaurant, deposits a parmigiana dish on a patron wearing a tweed suit. (Given that it is July, it’s hard to believe the man really was wearing a tweed suit, but Ms. Smith’s flourishes and embellishments and what seem to be, every now and then, doctored memories are harmless and forgivable.)
Ms. Smith’s evocation of youthful poverty doesn’t glorify it â€" this surprised me. Perhaps others will see more wistfulness and affection there than I did, but she depicts a New York that is free and anarchic but also decidedly grim. There are many, many days when she and her soul mate, Robert Mapplethorpe, don’t have the money for more than one food item, which they must share. She makes lettuce soup, which is as basic and unappetizing as it sounds.
When Ms. Smith first arrives in New York, she sleeps on stoops and in parks. She isn’t afraid, but a sense of menace looms.! We know what was happening in the streets in the late ’60s (and this season of “Mad Men†has just reminded us). Eventually someone is murdered just outside a loft she and Mr. Mapplethorpe are living in in Lower Manhattan. This prompts the duo to decamp to the Chelsea Hotel. Previously, they’d been in a flophouse around Times Square where the pillows contained lice and the junkies shot up with their doors open. The book evokes nostalgia for the way things were in the New York of peep shows and 20-cent subway rides without making you want to time travel back to it.
The heart of the book is the relationship between Ms. Smith and Mr. Mapplethorpe, which abandons sex and transcends it. What struck me is how conventional some dimensions of their relationship were when they were living together, with Ms. Smith subordinating her own aspirations for a while to make meager earnings and support Mr. Mapplethorpe’s career, such as it was in the early days. He had a more voracious appetite for fame and sccess than she did, but you also get the sense that, despite everything, she had vestiges of traditionalism within her, a sense of old-fashioned sex roles.
I’m eager to hear how the book affected everyone who read it â€" what sorts of memories it prompted. Ms. Smith and Mr. Mapplethorpe came to the artistic life as generalists. Each was consumed with the idea of becoming an artist but neither really had a medium in mind initially. Is anyone like that anymore?
