Woman as warrior (part 1)

[Pete Johnston <P.Johnston>]

Here is part one of four of the Guardian interview I mentioned 
yesterday, which touches on some of the issues which have been 
discussed here on the list in the last few days.

SOURCE: The Guardian (Weekend supplement), 22 June 1996.

Woman as warrior
MICHAEL BRACEWELL

 Patti Smith was the high priestess of punk, an outlaw with God on her mind,
who re-invented the role of women in rock. That was 20 years ago. Now, a
50-year-old widow with two children, she's found her voice again
 Patti Smith's return to the British stage after a gap of 18 years bore the
comic timing of Tommy Cooper. Having struggled to find the gap in the
backdrop curtain that would deliver her face-to-face with the 200-strong
audience crammed into a smallish room in the Serpentine Gallery in London,
she took a half-step backwards, peered suspiciously at the rows of
expectant faces, and demanded, in the tonesof a crotchety suburbanite who
has found a gang of strangers helping themselves to drinks in her front
room, `Who the hell are you?' And, given that it has been 18 years with no
hit records and no one-off appearances, we could have been forgiven for
asking her the same question. That we didn't, of course, is testament to
the fact that Patti Smith is still considered to be one of the most
radical writers and performers to emerge from rock and become a leading
figure in the much broader arena of contemporary culture. Historically,
she embodies the second wave of New York's pop avant garde: the punk scene
of the early Seventies, based around CBGBs, that took over the underground
after Warhol had been forced to close the doors of his Factory. This was a
world where art, poetry and music were all plugged into the same circuit,
creating a fledgling society that would produce, under the inspiration of
the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, smart young groups such as
Richard Hell And The Voidoids Tom Verlaine's Television, Alan Vega's
Suicide and, foremost, the Patti Smith Group.
 Regarding her role in that much-mythologised era, Smith wrote in her
dedication `To The Reader' in her Early Work 1970-1979: `The Seventies.
When I think of them now I think of one great film in which I played a
part. A bit part. But a part nonetheless that I shall never play again.'
But Smith's `bit part', fronting the Patti Smith Group, was more of a
starring role. Her one hit single, Because The Night (1978), has been
largely eclipsed by the enduring respect, closer to reverence, for her
first three albums: Horses (1975), Radio Ethiopia (1976) and Easter
(1979). In addition to this, she has published four collections of her
poetry, and started work on a novel. She retired from performing, although
not from writing, in 1979. Now, 50 years old, the mother of two children,
and widowed last year, after 15 years of marriage to Fred `Sonic' Smith of
the seminal rock group the MC5, Patti Smith has a biography that contains
all of the tragedy and romance that marks out a bohemian legend. She's
been described as a visionary and an iconoclast, but she has no interest
in playing the high priestess of punk rock - which was a role she never
really wanted in the first place. Rather, she is a realist, intent on
dismantling the myths that surround her and replacing them with a less
heated assessment of her worth and presence as a primarily literary
figure.
 `Fitting people into a formula is just another act of jerking off, but I
can't say I don't find it interesting. I used to be a lot more rebellious
about all that stuff. If you'd asked me about it in the past, I'd have
said it was all bullshit, but one thing I learned in the Eighties, mostly
through the breadth, compassion and intelligence of my late husband, was
how to appreciate, even with humour, all the different ways people
conceive, translate or digest things. And so I guess it's all interesting,
it's all good - it all keeps the planet going. But I have to tell you,
some girl sent me her doctoral thesis, relating my work to Rimbaud, and I
didn't understand a word of what she was talking about. I was honoured
that she'd spent all that time analysing and considering my work, and even
considering it next to the work of someone I greatly admire - but it's not
really my beat. It's just great that people keep on pursuing things. I
mean, I'd rather see someone write a worthless, 900-page dissertation on
CBGBs than see them take their own life. Then again . . . I might want to
shoot him after he wrote it.' With her high cheekbones, her greying,
Indian-plaited hair, and her severe, angular beauty, Smith can make her
features and her stature convey rustic humility or formidable strength
from one moment to the next. Her androgynous glamour is entirely
uncontrived, with a tribal elegance that confounds fashion and politics.
Dressed in a ripped jacket, combat trousers and loosely laced boots, she
could have walked off a Paris catwalk - or across a ploughed field. She
appears to be neither of the country nor of the city, and her voice, too,
drifts between hillbilly whimsy and tough, New York street talk. Her roots
are suburban, but only in as much as suburbia was a transit camp for her
questioning and rebellious spirit.
 `I was moved from Chicago to Philadelphia when I was about three or four
years old, and then to southern New Jersey when I was about nine or ten. I
wasn't really raised so much in the suburbs as in a fairly rural community
- a sort of lower-class rural suburbia. Even though I felt very alienated
there, I don't really feel that people who have a certain calling will
feel any less alien anywhere else. I don't think it's the suburbs' fault,
or the square dance community's fault, or the farm community's fault - I
just think that certain people are born with a very specific calling. It
could be that their sexual preference is away from the mainstream; it
could be that, whether scientifically or artistically, they have a
calling. Albert Einstein never fitted in wherever he was, and Mother
Teresa didn't fit in where she was. I don't think you can blame your
surroundings. It's more that some of us are born with a certain burning
and we have to live with it, nourish it, and produce work and then be
grateful for it.
 `I think that the things that produce poets, that internal thing that
produced Genet, or Artaud, or Michelangelo - and I'm not comparing myself
to those people, of course - has more to do with God and less to do with
the suburbs. I think we have to be grateful to the middle classes and the
suburbs for keeping the planet going, and we can't blame them for
producing a bunch of crazy alienated artists. I think God does that; I
don't think the suburbs does it. There. Ain't I brilliant? Well, not
brilliant. Just fairly intelligent.'  Smith's mother was a Jehovah's
Witness, and her father a non-believer. Herein, perhaps, lies the basic
pattern of conflicting influences that prompt creative activity. And, for
a child with a highly developed imagination, being brought up in more or
less the middle of nowhere, a heightened awareness of God was bound to
stir a powerful ingredient into the chemistry of her formative years. The
distant horizons of the country suburb and its community would make for a
world in which the local became universal, and the interior world of the
child's thoughts and fantasies would achieve a vivid colouring that linked
consciousness to conscience. And God, in whatever sense one might like to
conceive of a higher power, has played and still plays a vital part -
arguably the most important part - in Smith's life and work.
 `I think that I was really lucky in my parents to be offered those totally
opposed poles. My mother taught me to pray when I was, like,
two-and-a-half years old, and it expanded my world totally. It was the
greatest gift she could ever have given me. It was the idea that no matter
how bored you may be, you can still go to bed early and you can pray -
which means that you can talk to the Ultimate Place all you want: tell
your troubles, ask for stuff, and receive. And then I was raised a 
Jehovah's Witness. It's an extremely disciplined faith. They have their
own philosophies and their own dogma, which I don't fully agree with, but
that's the beauty of that particular religion.
 `My father wasn't necessarily an atheist, but between him and my mother
there was a lot of expansive territory, and so the idea of God was
constantly being discussed in our household. And so it was a very
stimulating household. And now my father's a Jehovah's Witness! He's
nearly 80 years old, he explored nearly every arena, and he's wound up
agreeing with my mother!'