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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 successfulliterary 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 piano… 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 1970s—the Chelsea Hotel, Warhol and Edie Sedgwick, WayneCounty 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 us—most of us—could 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 die—when, like all my other