Kids in the cauldron [a review]

Patti Smith was ten cents short of a cheese-and-lettuce sandwich when she met Allen Ginsburg. The Beat poet, whose famed epic "Howl" rejoices in his own homosexuality, stepped up behind her to pay the difference. He was trying to seduce her. He thought she was a "'very pretty boy.'"

In her National Book Award-winning memoir, "Just Kids," Patti Smith can't seem to turn around without bumping into history. She acts and Andy Warhol and Tennessee Williams come to the play. She plays music and William Burroughs attends. She goes to a party and hears Janis Joplin sobbing that her date has vanished with a cute groupie. She bumps into Jimi Hendrix and he tells her he wants to create a universal musical language. "'The language of peace. You dig?'"

That this fairytale procession of co-stars never take over the show is a testament to the power of her book. The juicy anecdotes just detail her world: the creative cauldron of 1970s New York. She is overawed by these living legends, but never overwhelmed. She marches on fueled not by determination to join their young pantheon, as we might suspect today, but by a pure--there is no other word for it--conviction in art. Her self-confidence seldom flickers. She moves, with little doubt at all, through the mediums as her spirit takes her: poetry, mixed media, acting, songwriting. Art is the ends.

But let's not forget the kids. "Just Kids" is not just about art. It is the story of two young artists--Patti and Robert Mapplethorpe. Their upbringings, their paths to New York, their young love, their transcendent bond, their striving for art. While legends people their lives--Ginsburg becomes her writing tutor--they do not soften its hard edges. Robert turns tricks for rent money. Patti nurses him through detox. One night, burglars ransack their apartmentand destroy months of artwork. In another apartment they awake to find a chalk outline outside the door. Throughout it all, their bellies ache for food. They are often ten cents short.

While reading "Just Kids," I had moments where I could scarcely fathom that such a time and a place--such a potent stew of talents and personalities and drugs and art and love--had ever existed. Yet it was the missing ingredient--one whose absence I could, at first, feel but not name--that shocked me most of all. Irony. And with the realization, I understood my disbelief.