Patti Smith's Horses (7 page)

When, a few months later, Mapplethorpe began to acknowledge and explore his identity as a gay man, Smith, disillusioned
and depressed, disappeared with her sister Linda to Paris in the spring of 1969. In all, the sisters spent three months in France, supporting themselves by a variety of means, from street theater to pickpocketing. One significant event from this period deserves scrutiny. In a January 1976 interview with
Roiling Stone
magazine, Smith gives a detailed account of her time on a communal farm, known as the Wishing Well, and lays particular stress on her dream life. One dream, in particular, stands out. She dreamed that she was riding with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Anita Pallenberg in a Victorian carriage. The singer and guitarist appeared to be speaking in a weird Haitian dialect, as if reciting a voodoo incantation. Smith, at this point, wonders where Brian Jones is. The dream recurred the following night, augmented with “Kenneth Anger—like … homosexuals and switchblades” and climaxing with a vision of Jones’s head in the toilet (Marsh, 1976).

Matters intensified when Smith fell into a fever after accidentally spilling boiling water on her leg. Under the influence of belladonna and morphine, prescribed by the local doctor to numb the pain, she began to hallucinate:

I was crawling in the grass. And there was a whirlpool, rocks and river and ocean and whirlpool, and we were slipping, it was me and Brian. He said, “Throw up.” He’s saying, “Spit it out. Spit it out.” He grabbed my hair and he says, “Spit it out.” And I remember this white hem, like a Moroccan djellaba, grabbing it and spitting up. (Marsh, 1976).

On awakening Smith felt certain that something terrible had happened to Jones. The next day, she reportedly saw a newspaper bearing the headline
BRIAN JONES MORT
. Jones
had drowned in his swimming pool, under mysterious circumstances, on July 3.

Another dream followed, this time about her father’s heart. Alarmed by her apparent gift of prophecy, Smith and her sister made the decision to return home to the States. On arrival Linda was dispatched to check up on Grant, who, it turned out, had indeed suffered a heart attack from which he was now recovering. Smith meanwhile headed back to Mapplethorpe who, as a result of poor dental hygiene, was experiencing some grave health problems of his own. Taking matters into her own hands, Smith took care of her former lover, moving with him into the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third Street. It was here that she began to reflect on her Wishing Well visions, a process that led to an outpouring of creative energy, as she explained to Lisa Robinson: “At this time I was writing a lot of poems in a little orange notebook, and I was writing my Brian Jones poem[s]; of course they were rock and roll oriented because they were about Brian, and I would write them in the rhythm of the Stones’ music” (1976).

In “death by water,” a poem included in
Seventh Heaven,
which Smith performed at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in December 1971, Jones’s death forms the centerpiece of a richly suggestive threnody, a “black rock and roll mass” informed by biblical, mythological, and literary allusions. Like “Oath,” it may be read as an Ur-text for many of the songs on
Horses,
particularly those which take as their focus the death of a rock star: Morrison in “Break It Up” and Hendrix in “Land” and “Elegie.” The first twelve lines of the poem are reproduced below:

How long ago was man promised?

never again. no not again.

no death by water

was the red sea really?

does man rule the river?

did she / he drown?

was it natural causes?

was it sorrow?

How many tears on your pillow.

crocodile or real. water shed.

brian jones drowned. face down. in a childs

pool of water. youth fountain.
(Smith, 1972)

Like T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
(1922), the great modernist poem from which Smith derives her title, “death by water” defamiliarizes the expectations of its audience. The absence of rhyme, the piling on of rhetorical questions, and the removal of connectives in stanza three, not to mention the unconventional punctuation and, typically for Smith, the almost total denial of uppercase letters, creates an air of cultivated disorder.

How, then, should we approach this poem? To begin with, it might be helpful to consider the significance of the work on which it is based. In
The Waste Land,
Eliot depicts a world denuded of moral, social, and spiritual significance. The poem’s fragmentary form reflects this condition, confronting the reader with abrupt transitions, dense clusters of imagery, and stark juxtapositions. Rather than offer the
easy consolations of narrative continuity, a descriptive mode which the poet identifies with the vapidity of modern life, Eliot insists that his audience attends to the significance of a series of mythological allusions. To this end he foregrounds the ancient tale of the Fisher King, an aging and exhausted ruler unable to bring relief to his dry and barren lands. As recounted by the anthropologist Jessie L. Weston in her 1920 book
From Ritual to Romance
(1997), the myth turns at this point to a figure called “The Deliverer,” also known as Phlebas the Phoenician Sailor, who must sacrifice himself in order to save the kingdom. In Eliot’s version, in the section of the poem titled “Death by Water,” the story of Phlebas the Phoenician is linked quite explicitly with that of Christ the redeemer. Like Christ, Phlebas must forget his concern with earthly affairs, “the profit and loss,” so that, in death, he may become an instrument of man’s salvation.

What Smith is doing with this material is hard to discern, but in calling her poem “death by water” she may be forging a link between Jones’s death, the figure of Phlebas in Eliot’s poem, and, by extension, the sacrifice of Christ. According to this reading, what the first line recalls is the “promise” that Christ’s sacrifice would put an end to
all
sacrifice. With Jones’s death this promise appears to have been betrayed. But is Smith serious in making this comparison? One answer is yes, as the association between premature rock ’n’ roll death and the death of Christ is sustained in a section of the poem devoted to the death of Jim Morrison: “our leather lamb. he feared / the bathroom. he warned us. hyacinth house. / how did he know. how did christ know.” There is, of course, something strained, even hysterical, in this comparison, but this itself may be read as an artful response to Eliot’s conservative
denunciation of popular culture. To the grand mandarin of modernism, the gaudy figures of Jones and Morrison would most likely represent the false idols of a fallen world, the very wasteland that the poem seeks to restore. By rendering Morrison as significant as Christ, Smith, perhaps with a glance back to her days as a Jehovah’s Witness, challenges the distinction between the sacred and the profane, suggesting, along with Blake, that everything is Holy, while simultaneously questioning the basis of Eliot’s cultural conservatism.

A further possibility is that the promise refers to God’s covenant with mankind following the flood. When “questions arise … like the perfect dead,” Smith both alludes to the return of secular reason, “was the red sea really?,” and to an early childhood memory: “our house was built on a long swamp. on easter a boy died. he sank in the quick mud and the next morning he floated up like ivory soap. Mama made me go to the wake” (1973). The essay from which this memory is taken charts Smith’s love affair with the Stones and features a slightly different version of the Wishing Well hallucination:

That night stretched like a cloud. A hypnotic. I was aware of the droning of bees. In the garden the blonde woman was preparing a mixture of pollen and pure honey. Keith was twisting her arm. He had a leather erection. Mick was writhing. some dizzy ritual. The pollen made me wheeze. I laid in the grass and puked. The dew was cooling my hot leg. Someone grabbed my ankle. bruising it. I was saved. I was suffocating in my own warm vomit. I gulped sweet oxygen and turned. Brian was still holding on. I wanted to speak to him but I got caught up in the lace border of his cuff. I traced the delicate embroidery until it stretched across my field of
vision like queen anne’s lace.

It was morning. It was dazzling. It was July 3rd. By night fall the whole world knew that Brian Jones was dead.

I went home to America and threw up on my father’s bed. (Smith, 1973)

Earlier on, Smith reminds us that “blind love for my father was the first thing I sacrificed to Mick Jagger.” By the end of the essay, in the wake of his arrogant behavior in
One Plus One,
Mick has been reduced to an “ass” while Jones has become “the bruised and vulnerable soul of the Stones.” Does Jones’s sacrifice lead the prodigal daughter back to the father? Is the father, brokenhearted by the loss of his daughter’s “blind love,” restored by her return? (Smith, 1973) Or does her vomit signify a final act of abject defiance? Perhaps all or none of these things.

Whatever the case may be, the focus throughout these pieces on floodwater, death, and rebirth suggests an immersion in powerful unconscious forces, associated by Freud and Jung with the lifeforce of the mother. Given Smith’s recent experience as a pregnant woman, and then as a pseudowife to Mapplethorpe, the rising of the waters may well signify the return of a repressive female stereotype. By the time Smith comes to recount her second version of this dream, to
Rolling Stone
magazine in 1976, Brian Jones is recognizable as a redeemer figure, one who dies, significantly in a uterinelike “childs pool of water,” so that Smith may live, untrammelled by maternal guilt. Drinking from Jones’s “youth fountain,” the devotee is restored not only emotionally but also creatively, as Bockris records:

I was still painting but my paintings were becoming more and more like cartoons, and the words were standing out more than the images. I had gone to Paris to find myself as an artist, but I came back to New York filled with words and rhythms. After putting seven years into it, I gave up art just like that in one day. (1998)

In a more positive sense, the rising of the waters represents a creative breakthrough. With Jones as shamanistic totem, conceived both as child sacrifice and as messianic deliverer, Smith was ready to be reborn.

By the close of 1969, Patti Smith had been accepted as a fully fledged member of the Chelsea Hotel sect. When not writing poetry or working the till at Scribner’s bookstore, she could be found “networking furiously in the lobby,” as Morrisroe notes (1995). Within the year, Smith would become friends with such notable residents as Janis Joplin, Gregory Corso, Leonard Cohen, William Burroughs, and Harry Smith. Eager to establish contacts in the literary and artistic worlds, Smith and Mapplethorpe took to hanging out at the terminally hip Max’s Kansas City, which numbered among its diverse clientèle such luminaries as Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Larry Rivers, and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as numerous celebrities from the realms of politics, high society, film, and fashion. Among the most influential connections Smith made during this period was the theatrical impresario Tony Ingrassia. Impressed more by her striking appearance than by her as yet untried acting skills, Ingrassia invited Smith to make her stage debut
in the Playhouse of the Ridiculous play
Femme Fatale,
at the La Mama theater in May 1970. Smith’s coactors were the Warhol stars Wayne (later to become Jayne) County, Penny Arcade, Mary Woronov, and Jackie Curtis. The play itself was written by Jackie Curtis and was loosely based on the drag queen’s experiences with her fellow Warhol associates.

Like the St. Mark’s show, now less than a year away, Smith’s success in the Theatre of the Ridiculous brought her to the attention of a number of key players in the Manhattan arts scene, including Andy Warhol and Sam Shepard. But what must be emphasized at this point is the extent to which acting enabled Smith to hone her skills as a performer. As anyone who has witnessed Smith on stage will confirm, her ability to inhabit a song, to fall into its emotional life and to convey a range of mutually contradictory feelings, delivered often within the space of a few lines, is extremely impressive. This skill, together with her facility with banter between songs and improvised dialogue, must surely have been derived from her time as an off-Broadway actor.

When not acting, writing poems, or creating sculptures, Smith and Mapplethorpe continued to frequent Max’s Kansas City. During the months of June and July they would have had the opportunity to see the Velvet Underground playing their last shows with Lou Reed. With the support of Neuwirth and Carroll, Smith, who had already begun to feel constricted by the poetry reading circuit, began to explore the links between poetry and rock ’n’ roll, experimenting with the rhythmic delivery of her poems, while turning her attention to music journalism, which in the early 1970s was beginning to be taken seriously as a mode of cultural enquiry. One article in particular, published in
Jazz and Pop
magazine, caught her
attention. The article was on doo-wop, the unaccompanied vocal harmony music of the 1950s that Smith had absorbed as a child. Its author, Lenny Kaye, also a former New Jersey resident, argued that the music of doo wop had had a profound effect on black American culture, initiating not only a revolutionary new musical style but also a new way of thinking.

The notion that music could influence society and culture, rather than the other way around, was certainly appealing to Smith, and she took pains to seek out Kaye, eventually finding him working the checkout at the Village Oldies music store on Bleecker Street. The pair bonded over their mutual admiration for old rock ’n’ roll and dance music and soon entered into a close alliance, meeting every Saturday night to drink beer, dance, and listen to records. Kaye played guitar and had released a record in 1965 called “Crazy Like a Fox” under the name Link Cromwell and the Zoo. That fall, he took to accompanying Smith on guitar, experimenting with different rhythms while she explored the interface between recital and song. Toward the end of the year, following Mapplethorpe’s negotiation with Gerard Malanga, Smith and Kaye were set to perform, for the first time, as a duo at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.