Amid all the hideous things going on in the world, I’m always grateful for something that reminds me now is a great time to be alive. I feel like that about Patti Smith’s performance at Glastonbury this summer. There she was on the Pyramid stage – with her unkempt grey hair and crow’s feet, looking for all the world like the kind of ageing lady who talks to her cats – radiating anarchic energy, urging us all to see things differently, and demonstrating just how kick-ass a woman in her late 60s can be. Even when she tripped and fell on her backside, she just got up and snarled: “I don’t care – I’m an animal!”
I occasionally wondered what had happened to that all-powerful rock goddess as I meandered through her memoir. As it turns out, Smith really is the kind of woman who talks to her cats. She also talks to her floral bedspread and her TV remote (“Oh the haughtiness of a handheld device!”). She is obsessed with TV detective shows, to the extent that one weekend she flies to London from New York and checks herself into a “small favoured hotel” to spend days watching them uninterrupted – now that’s what I call rock’n’roll. Everywhere she goes she is pursued by melancholia, a sense that the best days of her life are behind her. “No one knew where I was,” she reflects, stuck in a taxi in the London fog. “No one was expecting me.”
Smith’s acclaimed first memoir, 2010’s Just Kids, documented her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, with whom she lived and worked during the 1970s. The book had certain key selling points: a gritty New York setting, a tale of hungry young artists before they became household names. M Train is a rather trickier proposition. Like its predecessor, it has the feel of a love letter, but this time the muse is her late husband, the musician Fred “Sonic” Smith. It is set mainly in the present, following the author dreamily through a series of journeys: to a meeting of an obscure society, the Continental Drift Club, in Berlin; to Frida Kahlo’s house in Mexico City; to Japan, where she visits the graves of the film director Akira Kurosawa and the writer Osamu Dazai (visiting artists’ graves is another of her obsessions: she spends a lot of time looking for them, washing them and collecting offerings to take to them). When she’s not travelling, she mooches around Greenwich Village, drinking black coffee, eating brown toast with olive oil, and spending whole mornings making lists of literary masterpieces or playing word games. Wherever she goes she is haunted by memories of Fred. On a long-haul flight she starts to weep: “Just come back. You’ve been gone long enough.”
This is not a recent bereavement – the couple met in 1976 and had two children before his death in 1994, at the age of just 45 – but for Smith it clearly feels like yesterday. M Train is shot through with grief, and an intense nostalgia for the “mystical times” they spent together, whether evading arrest in French Guiana or watching baseball in the boat they restored and kept propped up in the yard of their house in Michigan. She is in no doubt that she and Fred were twin souls. “Looking back, long after his death, our way of living seems like a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronisation of the jewels and gears of a common mind.”
Smith’s life is privileged. She has her house in New York, her friends and admirers all over the world. Wherever she goes, people roll out the red carpet: itineraries are organised, hotels booked. When she falls ill in Kahlo’s house during her visit to Mexico, she gets tucked up without hesitation in Diego Rivera’s own bed. I confess to suppressing a hollow laugh when she gripes that she will have to work hard for an entire summer in order to buy, mortgage-free, a second home she has fallen for on Rockaway Beach (it’s a tumbledown bungalow, but still).
Despite all these advantages, isolation is the running theme. Her only constant companions are the ghosts of her mother and father, of Fred, of Mapplethorpe and of her brother, Todd, who died soon after Fred. Her children, grown and flown, are almost completely absent from the narrative – this feels like a frustrating, though understandable, little touch of self-censorship. She remembers wistfully the days when she was cared for, needed: “I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me …” If getting older is this sad for Patti Smith, what chance for the rest of us?
Her sustaining force, however, is an unswerving commitment to art – her own, and that of others. She has said that she learned to write during the years she spent at home raising her children, working at it every day and publishing nothing. That long apprenticeship has paid off; M Train is certainly literature rather than a celebrity memoir. There is no conventional storyline, but the narrative is subtly controlled and compelling. Motifs bubble up – the detective shows, objects getting lost, dreams, a black coat – then disappear and resurface, to mesmerising effect. Just when things threaten to get too pretentious, mercifully, she can also be very funny (there is a particularly good scene in which she arrives in her favourite cafe to find a woman sitting in her customary chair, and erupts in comedy rage: “If this were an episode of Midsomer Murders she would surely be found strangled in a wild ravine behind an abandoned vicarage.”) To read this book is to immerse oneself in the mind of an artist, in all its entertaining, surprising and self-indulgent glory.
