Patti Smith's memoir

From The last bohemian by Laura Miller

When Patti Smith first began to release albums in the late 1970s, she seemed to have magically eluded all of the shackles imposed on women in the rock 'n' roll world. She was neither angelic muse nor bad-girl sexpot, a tomboy willing to be photographed in a pale peach slip, flashing a patch of unshaven armpit hair that shocked the record-store boys I knew more than just about anything any girl had ever done. Rumors went around that she claimed to masturbate to photographs of herself, a concept that baffled me; I was so naive I didn't understand yet that people (i.e., men) masturbated to photographs, and the idea of being sufficiently aroused by one's own image to do so was unfathomable. Fascinated, I turned out to see this intimidating person at an in-store appearance, only to have my copy of "Easter" signed by a soft-spoken urchin with a luminous smile.

"Just Kids," Smith's new memoir of her early life and close relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, helps explain this and other apparent contradictions. In relating her (very) gradual evolution into a rock singer, Smith gives an account of her first poetry reading accompanied by guitarist Lenny Kaye, at St. Mark's Church in the East Village. Ordinarily self-conscious, she discovered a "submerged arrogance" that only came out in performance, "a whole other side" of herself who behaved, to her dismay, like "a young cock." It's impossible to imagine the Patti Smith who narrates "Just Kids" boasting about her autoerotic practices. Instead, this version of Smith is circumspect to the point of demureness as she describes her adventures in the decadent carnival of New York in the 1960s and '70s. She is as innocent in her own way as I was when I bought that first copy of "Easter," ferociously earnest and irresistibly moving.

As much as Smith loves rock 'n' roll, "Just Kids" confirms that she identifies fundamentally as a poet, specifically as an acolyte of the French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud, who died in 1891. The opening chapters of the book -- with their descriptions of sitting on the stoop of the Chicago rooming house where her mother took in ironing, "waiting for the iceman and the last of the horse-drawn wagons" -- have the flavor of another age, with their slightly antiquated diction and vocabulary. (Smith was born in 1946.) "I lived in my own world, dreaming about the dead and their vanished centuries," she writes of her earliest years living with Mapplethorpe in Brooklyn, N.Y., in the late '60s.manitarian crises - who can keep up? Who cares? They did it to themselves. Where to for lunch?

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