Ten Years in the Tub (94 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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And in any case, the Sweden that Andrew Brown knew in the late '70s and early '80s is not a million miles, or even forty years, away from Austerity Britain. Our postwar Labour government was in some ways as paternalistic, and as dogged and dour in its pursuit of a more egalitarian society, as Olof Palme's Social Democrats, and one can't help but feel a sense of loss: there was a time when we were encouraged to think and act collectively, in ways that were not always designed to further individual self-interest. In England after the war, no TV was shown between the hours of six and eight p.m., a hiatus that became known as the Toddler's Truce; the BBC decided that bedtime was stressful enough for parents as it was, and, as there was only one TV channel in the U.K. until 1955, childless viewers were left to twiddle their thumbs. In Olof Palme's Sweden, you bought booze in much the same way as you bought pornography: furtively, and from the back of a shady-looking shop. It would be nice to think that we have arrived at our current modus vivendiâchildren
watching thirty-plus hours of TV a week, young people with a savage binge-drinking problem, in the U.K. at leastâafter prolonged national debates about individual liberty versus the greater good, but of course it just happened, mostly because the free market wanted it to. I may not have sold
Fishing in Utopia
to you unless you are at least a bit Swedish and/or you like casting flies. But Andrew Brown demonstrates that any subject under the sun, however unpromising, can be riveting, complex, and resonant, if approached with intelligence and an elegant prose style. He even throws in a dreamy, mystical passage about the meaning and consolations of death, and you don't come across many of those.

Despite my affection for my German publishers, and for Cologne, the city in which my German publishers live, I wasn't particularly looking forward to reading at LitCologne, the hugely successful literary festival that takes place there every March. I had been traveling a lot (I was actually nominated for an Academy Award this year, believe it or not, and that necessitated quite a lot of schlepping around), and the novel I was reading from feels as though it came out a lifetime ago, and I hadn't written anything for the best part of a year. And then, the morning after my reading, I was in Cologne Cathedral with Patti Smith and our German editor, admiring the beautiful new Gerhard Richter window, and I remembered what's so great about literary festivals: stuff like that usually happens. It's not always Patti Smith, of course, but it's frequently someone interesting, someone whose work has meant a lot to me over the years, and I end up wondering what I could possibly have written in these twenty-four hours that would have justified missing out on the experience. I started
Just Kids
on the plane home and finished it a couple of days later.

Like Dylan's
Chronicles
, it's a riveting analysis of how an artist ended up the way she did (and as I get older, books about the sources of creativity are becoming especially interesting to me, for reasons I don't wish to think about), and all the things she read and listened to and looked at that helped her along the way. And it was a long journey, too. Smith arrived in New York in the summer of '67, and her first album was released in 1975. In between there was drawing, and then poetry, and then poetry readings with a guitar, and then readings with a guitar and a pianoâ¦ And yet this story, the story of how a New Jersey teenager turned into Patti Smith, is only a subplot, because
Just Kids
is
about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, the young man she met on her very first day in New York City, fell in love with, lived with, and remained devoted to for the rest of his short life. One of the most impressive things about
Just Kids
is its discipline: that's Smith's subject, and she sticks to it, and everything else we learn about her comes to us through the prism of that narrative.

There is a lot in this book about being young in New York in the 1970sâthe Chelsea Hotel, Warhol and Edie Sedgwick, Wayne County and Max's Kansas City, Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, Gregory Corso and Sam Shepard. And of course one feels a pang, the sort of ache that comes from being the wrong age in the wrong place at the wrong time. The truth is, though, that many of usâmost of usâcould have been right outside the front door of Max's Kansas City and never taken the trouble (or plucked up the courage) to open it. You had to be Patti Smith, or somebody just as committed to a certain idea of life and how to live it, to do that. I felt a different kind of longing while reading
Just Kids
. I wanted to go back to a time when cities were cheap and full of junk, and on every side street there was a shop with dusty windows that sold radiograms and soul albums with the corners cut off, or secondhand books that nobody had taken the trouble to value. (Smith always seems to be finding copies of
Love and Mr Lewisham
signed by H. G. Wells, or complete sets of Henry James, the sale of which pays the rent for a couple of weeks.) Now it's just lattes and bottles of banana foot lotion, and it's difficult to see how banana foot lotion will end up producing the Patti Smiths of the twenty-first century; she needed the possibilities of the city, its apparently inexhaustible pleasures and surprises. Anyway, I loved
Just Kids
, and I will treasure my signed hardback until I dieâwhen, like all my other precious signed first editions, it will be sold by my sons, for much less than it will be worth, probably to fund their gambling habits. And then, perhaps, it will be bought secondhand by a rocking boho in some postcapitalist thrift store on Fifth Avenue or Oxford Street, and the whole thing will start up all over again.