Bad girl, good boy?

Patti Smith begins Just Kids with a formal old-fashioned kind of language. The voice unsettles – it’s not what I expected. Soon after she departs Chicago for New York, that voice disappears and what replaces it is a frank and honest contemporary feel. Her story is beguiling – she leaves badly paid factory work and the shame of having a child out of wedlock in search of something more akin with who she is – a potential artist of some kind. Her mother – who thinks she will probably end up waitressing, gives her a pristine new waitress uniform and a pair of white waitress shoes which Smith abandons after a couple of hours of this kind of work. She’s not a snob about what she does though – the book has a humble tone.

Smith arrives in New York and almost immediately meets Robert Mapplethorpe. They connect as fellow ingénues and wanna-be artists. Actually Mapplethorpe is probably not an ingénue – but she initially presents him as a gentle beautiful artistic boy. She says: "We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl ¬trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad."

They arrive in New York at a very dynamic time – 1967 (is there not a dynamic time in this city?) and gradually began to move in the same circles as a whole lot of artists and musicians. For the first half of the book, there is no mention of her being a practising musician though she certainly loves music and references artists like Dylan. Staying at the Chelsea Hotel for a while, she mentions contact with Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick and Janis Joplin and wrote poems/ songs for some of these people. Much of the book is devoted to exploring the relationship that she has with Mapplethorpe - their struggle to make art, the fun they had, and the beginning of a clash in values as Mapplethorpe begins to work his way through the social set in New York.

The writing describing their activities is lovely – aesthetes who value the visual, who try to add beauty to the spartan rooms they inhabit, who express part of their identity through what they choose to wear. The image of the book released in the America is worth looking at (It's the one shown here) – Mapplethorpe and Smith dressed up for an excursion to Coney Island. Also worth looking up the very beautiful image that Mapplethorpe took of Smith for her first album, Horses - speaks for the essence of the book and their relationship - and the times.

One reviewer describes the book at embodying the spirit of Smith’s song Elegie written for Jimi Hendrix and that it was written “in a strong, true voice unencumbered by the polarizing mannerisms of her poetry.” True. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with her. And him.






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