Sex and art and rock' n' roll

MEMOIR: Just KidsBy Patti Smith, Bloomsbury, 280pp. £18.99

PATTI SMITH, an American musician known for mixing poetry with rock and roll, promised the dying Robert Mapplethorpe, the unique, controversial and legendary photographer, that she would one day write their story.

Just Kids, her memoir of their early struggles and their shared rise to fame, helps, to some extent, to explain the force behind their indestructible friendship, and it provides interesting and intimate glimpses – if far too few – of the young Mapplethorpe's transition from aimlessness to decisiveness in his art.

Smith and Mapplethorpe meet in the summer of 1967 – the Summer of Love. After a handful of chance encounters, they happen across one another in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, New York City, and Mapplethorpe saves Smith from a creepy date. The two move in together immediately.

Smith had, from a very early age, felt cosmically if vaguely connected to the forces of art. At the age of 19, she gave up a child for adoption. This act would leave her with heavy guilt and an painful consciousness of the wounds on her abdomen (“I was so small-hipped that carrying a child had literally opened the skin of my belly”).

Mapplethorpe was a young man absolutely certain of his potential, but tormented spiritually and sexually. He came from a strict Catholic family and was loathed by his father. Mapplethorpe tells Smith that he has no family; she is his family.

The two begin a sexual relationship – it does not take a professional to recognise the weird Oedipal-in-reverse subtext of this romance. Smith becomes the early breadwinner – she resolves to support Mapplethorpe with practical necessities such as space and food. Meanwhile, Mapplethorpe devotes himself to art – an art that is derivative and predictably LSD-influenced, but which quickly begins to show signs of maturity and sexual awakening.

She sees originality and power in him: “He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination”.

The first apartment on Hall Street had blood smeared on the walls and discarded syringes crammed in the oven. As Mapplethorpe’s art began to evolve toward the homoerotic, and he cut images from what Smith euphemistically calls “men’s magazines” for collage works, the two began to drift apart. She decided to leave him. He demanded that she come with him to San Francisco. If she didn’t, he warned, “I’ll be with a guy. I’ll turn homosexual”.

In one of the book’s many head-scratching moments, Smith says she never saw his homosexuality coming.

They separate. He goes to San Francisco. She goes to Paris.

When they are reunited, weeks later, he is deep in work but suffering physically. He has trench mouth and gonorrhea (they have sex, and she gets gonorrhea). She whisks him from the dilapidated hell of his loft and speeds, in a taxi, to the most hallowed rock and roll institution ever: the Chelsea Hotel.

They will, in this microcosm of American cultural identity, bear witness to the last days of the 1960s.

“You could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening,” writes Smith. Man has landed on the moon. The Manson murders have taken place. Robert Kennedy has been assassinated. And Mapplethorpe has started to take photographs.

Smith and Mapplethorpe begin to push deeper into their respective scenes. Smith hangs out in the El Quixote, a restaurant and bar adjacent to the Chelsea, and meets figures such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Grace Slick. She will go on to meet and be mentored by poets such as Allen Ginsberg, who first mistook her for a “pretty boy”.

Mapplethorpe, meanwhile, seeks his fame at Max’s – Andy Warhol’s famous hangout. Warhol, in a sign that the times are changing, no longer spends time there. Mapplethorpe also hangs out at the Factory, but Warhol no longer makes appearances.

Mapplethorpe hustles to make money, and Smith waits for him, nervous and worried, in the lobby of the Chelsea.

S&M, homoeroticism and the demonic are beginning to define Mapplethorpe’s work. Photography plays an ever-increasing role in this evolution. What holds him back, at this time, is the price of film. It is this early limitation, Smith argues, that results in Mapplethorpe’s lifelong ability to get exactly what he wants in very few takes.

The Chelsea era ends with Mapplethorpe finally breaking into more sophisticated levels of the art world, and having two romantic affairs with powerful men who would allow him to focus exclusively on photography.

Mapplethorpe had spent years with collage and mixed media, seeing photography as a small part of a larger process. Now it became an end in itself. He also began to champion photography as art form equal to painting and sculpture.

As Mapplethorpe’s career ascends, Smith has an affair with Sam Shephard, collaborates on some tunes with luminaries, and begins to discover what her own contribution to the art world will be – this starts as a tour around the country trying to sell the credibility of beat poetry set to guitar and piano.

The book does not often analyse Mapplethorpe’s work critically, but when it does, it offers insight: “Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art . . . Robert sought to . . . imbue homosexuality with mysticism”.

Mapplethorpe’s work was not socially or politically motivated: “He wasn’t taking pictures for the sake of sensationalism, or making it his mission to help the S&M scene become more socially acceptable”.

Smith spends little time on his premature death, in 1989, from Aids. By then, they hadn’t spoken for years, but in this time of need, she returns to him, and their relationship, stripped of the psychological subtext that Smith never seems to have fully, or remotely, appreciated – reveals itself as something meaningful and real.

Greg Baxter's memoir, A Preparation for Death, will be published by Penguin Ireland in July