Patti Smith's Horses (6 page)

The Stones were sexually freeing confused american children, a girl could feel power. lady glory, a guy could reveal his feminine side without being called a fag. masculinity was no longer measured on the football field.

Ya never think of the Stones as fags. In full make-up and frills they still get it across. they know just how to ram a woman. they made me real proud to be female. the other half of male.

It was possible, after all, to challenge conventional archetypes of gender and sexuality.

Upon graduation from Deptford High, Smith worked for a period at the Dennis Mitchel Toy Factory as an assembly line
inspector. Her experience here would provide the inspiration for her first record, “Piss Factory,” which I will discuss in the next chapter. By all accounts, life as a piece-worker proved instructive. In an early version of “Piss Factory” included in
Patti Smith Complete
(1998). Smith describes herself as “a moral asshole hard working school girl,” at odds with her more seasoned coworkers. Cautioned by the floor boss for working too fast and “screwing up the quota,” Smith gets her “nerve up” to challenge this “hot shit Dot Hook.” Depending on which account we read, the incident culminates either with the threat of violence (“we may knee ya in the john if you don’t shape up baby”) or with Smith having her head pushed into a toilet bowl full of piss. In either case, the figure of Dot Hook and her associate Stella Dragon, stand in the account as powerful maternal archetypes, their “midwife sweat” contrasting with “the way fags smell and spades and dagos school boys in heat. the way their legs flap under the desk in study hall and that forbidden acrid lean ammonia smell lilacs the way they droop like dicks.” In the stifling factory heat, the “clammy ladies” seek to curb the adolescent girl’s spirit, threatening a return to preuterine matter, the “piss” of the title, while barring the way to the fulfillment of her desire. At this point in the story, the Freudian symbolism comes thick and fast. Denied her favorite “hot sausage sandwich” by these women, the narrator heads out to a “little bookstore … looking for something to read” (Smith, 1998). The book she chooses, enchanted by the figure on its cover, a faded black and white portrait of a young man with rakish hair, a white shirt, and a “real thin” black tie, is Arthur Rimbaud’s
Illuminations.

Years later, in conversation with Thurston Moore, Smith
reflected on the importance of this encounter: “I loved my Rimbaud when I was young. … He was like my boyfriend. I mean really, you know, we spent a lot of time together” (Moore, 1996). Numbed by piece work, Smith saw in Rimbaud the very image of the
homme fatal
she so desired. Born in 1854, in Charleville, France, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was the second son of an army captain and a farmer’s daughter. When, three years later, Captain Rimbaud abandoned his family, the child was left to the care of his mother, by all accounts an austere and forbidding woman. Under her influence Rimbaud entered the College de Charleville in 1865 where he developed a talent for literary composition, winning numerous prizes for verses written in both Latin and French. By the time Rimbaud was sixteen, he was already a published poet. It was at this point, however, that he began to rebel against his upbringing, denouncing the influence of his mother, his school, and the Catholic Church.

Following the outbreak of the Franco-German War in July 1870, Rimbaud’s behavior became increasingly erratic. He developed an interest in revolutionary ideas, ran away from home several times, and was arrested and imprisoned for traveling on a train without a ticket. By 1871, Rimbaud’s unruliness, fuelled by drink, had reached a crisis point. When not writing
“Merde à Dieu”
(“Shit to God”) on public benches, he could be found in the library at Charleville, absorbed in obscure studies of the occult. Spurred on by his reading, Rimbaud’s focus in his poetry on blasphemous and scatological themes began to intensify. As news of the revolution in Paris filtered through to Charlesville, the tone of the poems became more combative, the imagery more violent and disturbing. A letter written in this period to his friend Paul Demeny, and reprinted
in Smith’s own copy edition of Rimbaud, sets out the terms of a new artistic ideal:

The poet makes himself a
visionary
through a long, a prodigious and rational disordering of
all
the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, keeping only their quintessences. Ineffable torture in which he will need all his faith and superhuman strength, the great criminal, the great sick-man, the accursed,—and the supreme Savant! For he arrives at the unknown … and even if, half crazed, in the end, he loses the understanding of his visions, he has seen them! Let him be destroyed in his leap by those unnamable, unutterable and innumerable things: there will come other workers: they will begin at the horizons where he has succumbed. (Rimbaud, 1957)

Rimbaud’s understanding of work as
“visionary”
toil must have struck a chord with a young woman sickened, literally, by the repetitive rhythms of factory life. Moreover, the stress on transcendence (“he arrives at the unknown”), achieved through sensory disorder, rather than through prayer, would have satisfied the lapsed Christian’s search for purpose. The poem “Drunken Morning” (
c.
1874), in the collection
Illuminations,
restates this ideal: “Little drunken vigil, holy! … We pronounce you, method! We shall not forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our life every day. Now is the time of the
Assassins.”
The assassins are the new saints; their mission is to convulse bourgeois “respectability” in “a riot of perfumes,” “pure love,” and “laughter,” replacing the oppressive imperative of Christianity with the liberating impulses of the body. Rimbaud’s brief career as a poet was marked by
violence and scandal. In 1873, he was shot in the wrist by the poet Paul Verlaine, with whom he had endured a short and tempestuous relationship. Thereafter, following the publication of
A Season in Hell
(1873), Rimbaud abandoned literature altogether. He was only nineteen.

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.

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.

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.