Woman as warrior (Part 2)

[Pete Johnston <P.Johnston>]

Woman as Warrior (Part 2)

Within the mythology of Patti Smith, it has
often been said that she had hallucinations, whose form and residue
enabled the stream-of-consciousness Babel that has marked her performances
and writings. And, opened to the written and spoken word, Smith's
adolescence took a classic literary turn in her discovery of Rimbaud, the
19th-century French poet, as both a vagabond writer with a violently
heightened sense of beauty and an icon of romantic rebellion. Indeed, if a
strong awareness of God was to inform her vision of the world, then
Rimbaud was to be her muse, inspiring such later lines as Rock 'n' Rimbaud
(the title Smith gave her performance with guitarist Lenny Kaye at Le
Jardin in 1973) and the oft-quoted Go Rimbaud Now Go Johnny Go on the
album Horses. But Smith makes no claims to early profundity or
intellectual precocity in her teenage love affair with the great French
poet; rather, it was a crush that turned into a creative marriage.
 `When I was 16, I really wanted a boyfriend. And I didn't like the way the
boys looked in the neighbourhood: they didn't really appeal to me. And so
then I found a copy of Illuminations and he was on the cover and he was
just my kind of guy. So I really got the book because I looked at him and
it was love at first sight. I opened it up and I read it, and I have to
admit that I couldn't really comprehend or decode what he wrote. But my
instinct and whatever ability I have to feel knew that the writing was
beautiful. Even in translation, I was seduced by the language.
 `And, you know, I really think that great art is seductive on various
levels. You don't have to be able to understand it; I mean, if you're
touched by it or you feel any kind of cerebral response, it's done its
work. I couldn't tell you what Pollock meant in Blue Poles - it's not
necessary. I don't really know what Bob Dylan was talking about in
Desolation Row, but it doesn't really matter. I'm not an analysing type.
But an artist's gifts have nothing to do with external factors like drugs
or alcohol or anything like that. You can have a great night or a weird
night, or some kind of experience through drugs or alcohol, and you can
write about it - but it ain't going to make you nuthin' but a physical
wreck.'  Having majored in art at Deptford High, Smith was offered a
partial scholarship to the Philadelphia Art Museum. Her parents were
unable to make up the shortfall in the fees, so she went off to the
Glassboro State Teachers College to study to become an art teacher. It was
here, according to the legend, that she found a tutor called Paul Flick
who instilled in her (or authorised, with the benign superiority of a
trusted teacher) the deeper Rimbaudian values of the relationship between
outcasts, criminals and artists. Working through her vacations at a
factory, prior to dropping out from Glassboro, Smith was faced with the
choice - emphasised by the brutal cul-de-sac of local employment - of
either following in Rimbaud's footsteps as a vagrant poet or accepting the
tyranny of minimum-wage work. Her experiences in the factory gave rise to
Piss Factory, one of her first mature pieces of writing.
 Written in 1970, and later recorded as a B-side, Piss Factory, with its
powerful opening line, `Sixteen and time to pay off, I got this job in a
piss factory inspecting pipe', was both a cri de coeur and a de profundis;
it drew its strength from social realism as opposed to hallucinations, and
empowered its language with local vernacular as opposed to romantic
poetry.
 `Piss Factory was written in reaction . . . Where I was brought up in South
Jersey, there wasn't much work. In terms of getting a job, you either
worked at the glass factory or you went to this other factory - that I
wound up in - where you made mattresses or children's buggies. It was
non-union, so you had really low pay; the conditions were terrible and, it
was, so I perceived, a really rotten way to live. But most of the people
who worked in this factory had worked there all their lives. I only worked
there for two summers, but in that small glimpse I had of what some people
considered a life, it was a real prison. I was at a time in my life when
there was really no way out: my parents had no money, and while I'm not
speaking against the local community, it wasn't a very culturally
developed area. People were happy just to have this crappy job and live
under the worst conditions - and that probably produced the most rebellion
in me.
 `But in Piss Factory I wasn't trying to represent any punk-rock point of
view. I was just representing the fact that we all have a choice. I
perceived I would rather live on the subways and sleep on the streets of
New York and try to find something better to do with my life, than choose
living in a cheap little place - trying to divide my pennies between a
little bit of food and a little bit of clothing. Working in this hot,
sweaty, shitty factory - to me it was all a matter of choice and
imagination. It felt like a lot of people were happy to be like cattle in
the factory, and never rebel against the fact that it was 110 degrees and
there were no windows. It was unhealthy, they were being paid minimum
wage, they just sort of went along with it. So Piss Factory wasn't
anything to do with punk rock. I mean, what is punk rock, anyway? Is it
like, I'm writing something just to make a bunch of people with weird hair
happy? I wrote that because I was concerned about the common man, and I
was trying to remind them they had a choice.' Piss Factory closes,
prophetically, with the desperate avowal: `I'm gonna get on that train and
go to New York and I'm gonna be so bad, I'm gonna be a big star and I will
never return never return no never return to burn out in this Piss
Factory.' Both Lou Reed and Robert Mapplethorpe were children of the
suburbs, and Piss Factory can be seen as echoing the brittle determination
of countless provincial and suburban romantics. Smith's flight from
Woodbury, New Jersey, to New York City in the late Sixties, sleeping rough
until her Cocteauesque relationship with the young Robert Mapplethorpe,
during which they struggled against desperate conditions to realise their
respective dreams as poet and photographer, has all of the qualities of a
19th-century novel from the Bildungsroman tradition, in which the young
poet comes to the big city and learns about life, love and ambition the
hard way. Importantly, as a woman, Patti Smith reversed the
Bildungsroman's accepted formula - that the poet hero was always male. At
this point, living between cold lofts and the cheapest hotels in New York,
Smith's second great literary passion, for the French criminal, political
activist and novelist Jean Genet, began to define her writing and describe
her own experience of attempting to write in and about a state of near
vagrancy. Genet's writing, like Smith's, was driven by a desire to live in
opposition to social orthodoxy, and to confirm an outlaw status through a
life of degradation. His criminality, as well as his prose, articulated a
deeply moral view of society, in which his homosexuality and his sexual
fantasies became parables of personal, artistic and political freedom. As
such, he was the perfect patron saint for Mapplethorpe and Smith's
artistic union.
 `I think that we're polarised people, raised to be polarised - good and
evil, life and death. With my earliest writing . . . Well, I aspired. I
remember reading Little Women when I was a kid, and the character Jo, she
was the rebellious sort, y'know, and she writes in the attic all day
instead of cleaning, and that appealed to me. And I did dream of being a
writer, but it's a lifetime's work and some people have to work a lot
harder. I mean, some people, they have gifts that immediately flower, you
have someone like Rimbaud or Genet and they just . . . they find out that
they're gifted on Monday and write a master-piece on Tuesday; but others
of us have to really plug away, and I guess I'm one of those.
 `Genet was obviously a man who was so gifted, and born with a certain
calling. We don't know who his father was, we don't know, genetically,
where his gifts might have come from; we know very little about his
mother, and so we can't trace certain things. So they came from within
him, from God, and when I say God I'm not discounting Buddha or Allah or
any of 'em, `But he was a crappy thief. He wanted to be on the outside of
society but he was actually very intelligent and very aristocratic - I
think he was like the son of Proust. He liked to romanticise himself and
imagine he was one with the brotherhood of thieves - but what did he
steal? He stole some rare books and some silk to make fancy shirts, and he
got caught and got life in prison. And the thing with Genet that tormented
him most was that he never really knew where his gifts came from. One day
he's writing a letter on this beautiful sheet of paper, and instead of
just writing, `I'm in prison in Spain; wish you were here', he starts
elaborating about the texture of this white paper, and all of a sudden
he's really writing, and he realises he knows how to write. I think all
artists seem to have a lot of conflicting values. With Genet, a part of
him loved luxury and fancy silk shirts; the other was a complete bum.'