Notes on Daumal's Mount Analogue

If there’s a more often-cited remark or passage about mountaineering than Mallory’s famous “Because it’s there” it may be René Daumal’s

You cannot stay on the summit forever: you have to come down again . . . So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above . . . . One descends, one sees no longer but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.

If my opening observation isn’t true, it should be. Daumal’s lines come from his “novel,” Mount Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering Adventures, a book well known to cultish group of hippie-mountaineers in the early 1970s. Intermittently hard to find over the years, today it’s a few clicks away in a relatively new translation by Carol Cosman in a Tusk Ivories paperback.

If the book retains a cultish following, it’s due to its eminently quotable prose as well as to the cult of personality following Daumal himself. Daumal died of tuberculosis in 1944 at the age of 36 and the story is that he was working on Mount Analogue the day he died. It’s a better excuse than Coleridge had, but one has the sense that it would have been a hard book to finish. The text proper ends in mid-sentence:

“Without them [wasps!], a great many plants that played an important role in stabilizing the shifting earth, . . .”

Undoubtedly here Daumal was to deliver an early lesson in ecology and species interdependence, which is not what one might expect from a tubercular Sanskrit scholar on his deathbed in the waning days of World War II in German occupied Paris.

I used the term “text proper” because many of the memorable lines about mountaineering, including the lines cited above, are from a postscript including an outline that his wife Véra appended to the novel. The reader is left with the sense that if only Daumal could have finished! We would have become so enlightened! Not likely, but isn’t it pretty to think so? Which reminds me that Daumal translated Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon into French—worth another look in his light.

It’s said that Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 cult film The Holy Mountain is based of Mount Analogue; maybe so, but tempered with massive quantities of psychedelics. They’re both allegories I suppose, but you’ll have better luck synching up Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon to The Wizard of Oz.

The premise of the story concerns a group of seekers who believe that there is an unknown mountain on earth that is higher than Everest and which connects earth to heaven, a symbolic mountain like Mt. Olympus, that they must find and ascend. Most of the extant five chapters describe the organization of the expedition and travel to the peak. We never get to the actual, make that symbolically authentic, mountaineering.

The prose is somewhat reminiscent of the great French alpinist Gaston Rébuffat who wrote gorgeous romantic (i.e. purplish) prose extolling the fraternité de la corde–brotherhood of the rope–at about the same historical moment. In fact, structurally, Rébuffat’s Starlight and Storm resembles Mount Analogue in that its appendix lays out the author’s philosophies in more exacting and memorable prose than does what precedes it.

Daumal included a few simple drawings, not unlike yet another great French romantic, Antoine St. Exupery. I’m particularly fond of the cosmos portrayed in chapter two and pictured above.

The last chapter was to be titled “And You Reader, What Do You Seek?” Maybe it’s a cheap rhetorical trick, but I’ve always fallen for these moments of direct address by great artists, such as Melville: “What are you reader but a fast and loose fish too?” or as appended to the famous eponymous Gauguin painting, “Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”

Mount Analogue is at once sweet and wise and enigmatic. When I first read it many years ago it appealed to me because I liked to think that mountaineering was in fact a spiritual pursuit. I suppose I still do. But I love more than ever that the story ends in mid-sentence and we are left forever wondering not only how the story might have ended but, as Daumal has asked, what is it that we seek?

A List of 10 Items not even related enough to be called a loose baggy monster

1. Front page articles from The Northern Light, UAA newspaper, March 29, 2011:

Avalanches bury unprepared thrill seekers

Two top ski coaches set to resign

Pot culture in Alaska reaches a new high

2. Three of my writer friends seem to do more photography that writing, though only one has renounced writing. Curiously, he was the only one of the three to ever make any money on it. Of the three, one shots mostly infra-red and the other two shoot almost exclusively at night. I hope this doesn’t fall under the list suggested by Jessa Crispin’s, “And there are those who might not even bother anymore [to write].”

3. Two photographs of George Mallory’s personal effects contain:

A cheap (by today’s’standards) pair of glacier goggles;

A jack-knife;

A tin of “meat lozenges” (portable nourishment at all times) (yucko);

A box of Swan Vesta matches (they still package them just like this, by the away);

A watch;

An altimeter.

I make note of this because the altitude needle on the altimeter, as well as the hands of the watch, have disappeared completely, turned to powder (?) and vanished. How weirdly insubstantial they must have been from the start. Rust marks, the residue of the watch hands, suggest it stopped at ten minutes after five. 5:10, coincidentally the estimated degree of difficulty of the rock climbing at “the Second Step,” which Mallory and Irvine would have had to climb at 28, 280 feet in order to obtain the summit. A mystery for the ages.

5. Wisdom from hockey coaches during the Stanley Cup Playoffs:” You can’t fix stupid and you can’t teach fast.” Luckily I have tried to reduce contact with the stupid and I’m not in a hurry.

6. My friend, and uaa mfa alum, Don Rearden had to make a trailer for his website to promote his new novel, Raven’s Gift, set in post-apocalyptic Alaska. For this, he just drove around Bethel with the camera running. Bethel didn’t have to de dressed down to suggest the scene of some mass tragedy.

View the trailer here:

http://www.donrearden.com/

7. From Pamela Kearney, author of The Sunflower Wife, a line from writer John Dufresne “If you don’t write today, you will be diminished.” (I don’t think blogging counts; it doesn’t for me, anyway.)

8. From Sam Sacks homage to Pauline Kael:

“Kael’s most memorable writing came during the Nixon years (I think that Deeper into Movies, which collects the New Yorker pieces between 1969 and 1972, is her best book). These were some of the worst years in America’s history, and Kael wrote with a passionate fervor against the national disillusionment that was saturating the culture.”

The point being that the specific years cited coincide with my high school years. And don’t think that our relative innocence shielded us from the disillusionment of which he accurately speaks.

Read the article here:

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/second-glance-astonish-us/

9. I heard Carl Zimmer this week on the radio pimping his new book, Brain Cutting (electronic only, oh-oh!). He was talking about “default consciousness,” that is, how your brain continues to work even when you are not concentrating on anything at all. And I wondered if this is like dreaming, or speaking in tongues. I wondered if this is what “automatic writing” is. Or is this what has happened when you wake up in the morning an your writing takes an unpremeditated turn, one you couldn’t have predicted the night before (when you gave up)? Is this what is happening when a writer says that a book “wrote itself”? I suspect my default consciousness—the one I can’t direct—is smarter than I am. What is this “I” of which we speak, anyway?

Musical accompaniment to the last entry:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xrqqf_electric-prunes-too-much-to-dream_music

10. Avalanches. I can think of five deaths off the top of my head that occurred in the last two weeks. Two in the Tetons, two in the Sierra, and one on the Root Canal Glacier in the AK Range–all places I have climbed. Sometimes, the only way to have prevented such deaths is simply to have never left the house. Which is unacceptable. Condolences to their loved ones. Be careful out there my friends.

Note: the opening photo of Jewel Lake was taken last night at 10:30 p.m. This morning the ice was gone.

In which I argue with the Bookslut

When Henry James minted the phrase “loose baggy monsters” he was referring to 19th century Russian novels. Which ironically, are less loose and baggy than most of his own work, The Golden Bowl, for example. But “loose baggy monsters" really best describes some blog entries (my own included), which being not subject to any editorial (or generally renumerative) forces, are free to wander all over the place. Such is the case of Jessa Crispin’s recent column in The Smart Set (she's the book slut, apparently, of Bookslut).

Whole article here: http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article03301101.aspx

Reading a loose baggy monster puts a lot of pressure on the reader to ferret out what’s interesting. But mostly a loose baggy monster will just send a reader to another link, or, optimistically speaking, to a physical text.

Crispin’s “A Sea of Words” is about a lot of things, among them: a complaint that there are too many books, a snarky review of Anne Roiphe’s Art and Madness, as well as various books about writing, a complaint about the MFA degree, a complaint that people don’t read enough, a complaint against the work of writers who have an MFA.

It’s a depressing damned piece of writing. Why do I respond at all? Unfortunately the truth within it compels me to weigh in on her more ludicrous statements.

Her first paragraph is absolutely sobering: she lives in Berlin where she receives 30 books a week, unbidden, for review. Down from 15—30 per day. “Now,” she says, “they have landed here with a clip-art book cover, a cheap binding, and a $12.00 stamp to send it to critic who doesn’t even review fiction anymore.”

I return often to this line from Walden, usually in reference to some undertaking of my own: “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?”

In fact: I myself had been looking at clip art for an idea I had for a cover of one of my own books. When I read that line, I felt that I recognized my own desperation. And I didn't like it. I hereby renounce desperation.

Further on Crispin observes:

“The books disappear as quickly as they are released, unable to cut through all the noise. And there are those that might not even bother anymore. Does one dare to raise one’s voice above the commotion, try to draw some attention away from those taking up the spotlight? Who gets in that rarified space is still determined by the writer’s gender, connections, beauty, nepotism, youth, or “platform.” Not even the most idealistic among the cultural critics bother to argue that the system is merit-based.”

(Well, Prufrock may not have dared, but it's a rhetorical question and the answer is "yes.")

Thinking about it, that’s an interesting, and sort of uneven, list. Gender–we’re given (although some even mess around with that); connections–well, actually you make those yourself; beauty–yeah, it probably helps, I wouldn’t know; nepotism–see connections; youth–arguable; “platform”—completely self-determined. I think her list is not so depressing as she is (to paraphrase Thoreau again).
.
But it is definitely true that the system is not merit-based. Yet by complaining about this she is implying that it was merit-based at some earlier un-debased time. Not. Same as it ever was.

Nonetheless, talk about an example of a bestseller not being merit based: when I learned (i.e. became obsessed with) the Greg Mortenson fiasco, all I could dwell on was the fact that his donation financed non-profit spent 1.75 million in the year 2009 promoting his book Three Cups of Tea. Oh! So that’s how you stay on the NYT bestseller list for over four years. Now I get it. (The pisser is that the profits of the book went to GM himself, not to the non-profit. Oy, what a mess!)

I won’t comment here on what Crispin actually says about the books she purports to be reviewing, except to say, she’s probably right about them.

I am moving to the red cape she has waved in my face. I must charge. “ . . . because everyone is now invited to be a writer we have an industry built up to teach writing to the masses. I’m not alone in thinking of the MFA industry as predatory.”

First, of all: she can’t really be aware of how elitist that first part sounds, can she? Secondly, “predatory?” Please. She seems to base this on unstated assumptions about what an MFA “promises” its students. Her assumptions, whatever they might be, are wrong.

We don’t promise publication, or employment. We only promise to improve a students’ writing as much as it can be improved in whatever amount of time it takes to get the degree. Fuzzy, I know. But that’s the “contract.”

Furthermore, I would like to point out that basically MFA degrees are only predatory in the way that any university humanities program is predatory. Does she really think less literacy is a preferable state of affairs?

She makes me laugh (with her, this time) when she asks, “what could the appeal possibly be? Writers are the social embarrassment in our culture, generally portrayed on television and in movies as sexually hapless, overweight, balding, constipated bores who can’t dress themselves properly.”

That cracked me up, although I have absolutely no idea to what portrayals she refers.

She concludes: “Those taking their money [MFA programs, presumably] probably aren’t going to do much to question their motives, or clue them in on all the other ways to go about things.”

And that’s where I think she exactly does not know of which she speaks. We do exactly what she thinks we don’t.

Dear Jessa, we are sorry you’re depressed. Why don’t you take break from your blog and read a book for pleasure. Or get way from language for a while (even though watching television and movies don’t seem to be working for you either). It’s spring in Berlin, right? Get out of that apartment, take a walk, it might do you some good. Peace--ds

"I am a strange trio": Shields, Hofstadter, and de Chardin

Secret Practice

from David Shields: The culture disseminates greater and greater access to the technology that creates various forms of media. The “ordinary” person’s cult of celebrity is nurtured by these new modes of communication and presentation and representation. We’re all secretly practicing for when we, too, will join the ranks of the celebrated. There used to be a monopoly on the resources of exposure. The rising sophistication of the nonexpert in combination with the sensory overload of the culture makes reality-based and self-reflexive art appealing now. There are little cracks in the wall, and all of us “ordinary people are pushing through like water or, perhaps, weeds.

Commentary regarding secret practice: When we were seniors in high school, we won our league title in football; actually, I think we “won” the tiebreaker. The prize for this was a game in the Catholic League Playoffs against, a powerhouse school four or five times the size of ours. During the week of preparation for the game, which would be sort of close at halftime, but not for much longer, the coaches devised a plan whereby the team would load up from the locker room into a gigantic Awry’s bread truck and be driven to a secret practice facility. Thereby, eluding Brother Rice’s spies (real? wishfully imagined?) who would be staking out our practices at Ford Field. It was a strange exercise, but it helped us to believe that Brother Rice had something to fear in us (they probably didn’t) and, indeed, for a week, we were oddly “celebrated.” A few days later, our senior year of football would end and we would taper off to June, trying to ignore the likelihood of being drafted to serve in Viet Nam.

Commentary number two, concerning the ordinary person’s cult of celebrity: mountaineering. Ordinary people climb Everest now, which sort of defeats the purpose. If you can pay the $65,000 guide fee, and you are fit, and the weather is okay, and you don’t succumb to edema, pulmonary or cerebral, you can climb Everest, with all the others who are able to manage these criteria. The primary hurdle would seem to be cash, which, back when climbing Everest meant something other than what it means now, was not in and of itself the primary criterion.

Kilimanjaro, is somewhat worse in a way. It is relatively high, over 19,000 feet and must, by local law, be guided. It is often done by non-climbers. Esquire magazine, just this month, has included an article about an everyman’s ascent of Kilimanjaro, editorially forgetting that they published almost the exact same article on the topic about five years ago. I’m not speaking to actual people , friends of mine even who have done, or aspire to do the actual climb. I’m speaking to its symbolic value, which must necessarily shrink, as more people ascend, as, in fact, the fabled snows melt away under the magnifying glass of global warming.

Anyway, I thought the point was to be a climber, not to “have climbed Everest. Or Kilimanjaro, or whatever.

I am a paradoxical level crossing feedback loop

From Douglas Hofstadter: And yet when I say “strange loop,” I have something else in mind—a less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by “strange loop” is––and here goes, a first stab, anyway—not a physical circuit, but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.

Commentary on loopiness: Well, T.S. Eliot beat Hofstadter to this concept by about seventy years in the Four Quartets, particularly the oft-quoted lines from "Little Gidding" (although it’s conceptually present from the very first (obscure) lines of "Burnt Norton":

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I was thinking of the strange loop effect last weekend as I topped out on Peak Three for the third time in three weeks—I am strange loop, I thought, and here I am back on top of Peak Three and it’s always new, the experience always fresh. I am never bored. I always enjoy, as Emerson had it, “a perfect exhilaration.” There is this here-I-am-on-the-summit feeling, where I always am.

Everything that Rises Must Converge

From Teilhard de Chardin: Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

Commentary on rising and converging: Flannery O’Connor is amazing, as I was reminded again last week on reading “Everything that Rises Must Converge” for the uncountable-eth time.

Consider her on the sentence level:

The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike.

This, I fear is the site of the convergence to which she alludes: may we decline the invitation? Thank you very much all the same.

I can never disentangle her religion, her illness, and her early death from her writing and in fact Everything that Rises Must Converge (the book) was published in 1965, just after her death (the same year Eliot died, though the span of his life was, of course, much greater). I was shocked to learn that O’Connor’s mother died in 1997. Her writing lives in that timeless space occupied by the kind of Truth reserved for classic stature.

Even though she took her title from Teilhard de Chardin and even though he was a Jesuit theologian (although censured) and she a devout Catholic (why is it, by the way, that the word devout is hitched almost exclusively to Catholic?) it is impossible she did not mean her title ironically. For de Chardin it seems a literal joyous vision, for O’ Connor, the rising is more of a “leveling,” the point of convergence, is rather . . . uh, low. O’ Connor’s Catholicism and the subject of her writings have always seemed somewhat perplexing, if not disconnected.

I think de Chardin did not quite take note of (conveniently ignores?) the fact that not everyone rises, a fact which O’Connor can never forget. We recognize, live in, O’Connor’s world, but aspire to the dream world of de Chardin in which mankind is the collective Christ (was he censured for fuzziness?).

Now, in the new electronic leveling, in which everyperson has an equal voice, everyperson a celebrity (and not just in the Warholian 15-minute sense), in which every moment is both the beginning and the end, we most definitely have convergence, but who wants it on the terms it offers itself?

On David Shields' Manifesto

This is the NYTBR mini-description of the new paperback edition of David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto: “Comprising 618 numbered fragments–more than half drawn from other sources–Shields’ spirited polemic argues that our deep need for reality is not being met by the old and crumbling models of literature. The book itself is an example of what the author calls “recombinant” art: appropriated, adapted, and remixed to crate new meaning.”

That’s a mostly accurate description. More precisely: he is bored by linearity and plot. Although he eschews fiction in one breath, in another he wishes to acknowledge that once it’s on the page it’s all fiction, and, in fact, though he enjoys playing the curmudgeon, there is much he loves about literature. This list from his website is basically drawn from the book:

http://www.davidshields.com/blog/index.html

Go to the “Very Partial Reading List” link. It’s a terrific list.

I could, I fear, write a long essay concerning the very conflicted feelings that the book engendered in me. I find that I love arguing with it, and true, to my fashion, tend to question my arguments.

Those last two sentences describe exactly how I feel about this book. And yet, these sentences are not mine (but Shields would say they, in fact, are mine). They are Shields’ words, from fragment 586. However I present them exactly as Shields presents the thoughts or works of others, that is: unattributed and lacking quotation marks. At the end of the book, at the insistence of his publishers (he says) is a vague list of sources. (I found myself turning back to it compulsively and often, although Shields claims he really wishes we readers wouldn’t do that).

My only real complaint is that his debt to David Markson is, I think, much much greater than he lets on. Markson deserves better. But I suppose he would say that Markson had his sources, too: Nietzsche, for example.

Despite, as the NYTBR claims, only about half the work is actually fresh to Shields, I have to admit, he holds his own among the luminaries he unattributes. No small thing, believe me.
An example (of the Shields within Shields, from #455):

“The entire play is the Hamlet Show, functioning as a vehicle for Hamlet to give his opinion on everything and anything, as Nietzsche does in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And then, down a few lines, this parenthetical observation: “(Melville’s marginal comment on one of the soliloquies in the play: ‘Here is forcibly shown the great Montaigneness of Hamlet.’)”

This leads to Shields’ very interesting conjecture that Hamlet is killed to fulfill the needs of the plot, otherwise he could go on talking forever (except, of course, for the plot of Shakepeare’s life which due to his presumed humanness would have to end and thus end the outpouring of words from Hamlet’s mouth). Oh, but wait, “reality” doesn’t have plots, according to DS (the other DS).

But the point that strikes me here is this: what a lovely chain! If we “straighten it out, chronologically (oh no! linearity!):

Montaigne
Shakespeare
Hamlet
Melville
Nietzsche
Zarathustra
Shields
Me (and Shields’ other readers)
You (that’s, like, three people)

(Into this scheme, insert arrows, most downwards etc)

Melville sees Montaigne in Shakespeare; Shields sees Nietzsche in Shakespeare: not chronological, of course. This reminds me of Nietzsche’s reversal of cause and effect: we know the pin has pricked our finger because we feel the pain, thus we move from effect to cause.

In any case, Montaigne is hardly the Big Bang, right? Montaigne has his influences, too.

Thus we are all links in the metonymic chain.

So, these are my thoughts on one of the 618 fragments. And I have one more anecdote (for now) concerning this book. I was reading this interview by Caleb Powell conducted with Shields on The Rumpus:

http://therumpus.net/2011/02/the-rumpus-interview-with-david-shields-paperback-edition/

Shields comes across as a bit prickly, and Powell has an axe to grind with the book, yet the interview did nothing if not convince me that I had to get a hold of the book as soon as possible. I went to Amazon, saw all the books in my “cart” that I haven’t yet been able to convince myself to buy and got depressed. I allowed the “cart” to defeat me.

No less than a half hour later, the mail came to my office and I had to sign for a package. It was an unbidden examination copy of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, sent with compliments of the publisher. As Shields would say, this is a better story for the fact that is true; anyone could have make it up. It’s only interesting because it happened.

AWP 2011, an itemized list

1. Walking a nearly deserted sidewalk near the Washington Monument a day before the conference starts, a man approaches and asks, “Are you here for AWP?” Wasn’t aware we were attired in AWP uniforms.

2. Lunch at Kramerbooks. I see a man who looks like Maurice, a chef I worked with in Salt Lake City in a former life. So much so that when he leaves I approach and ask, “Are you Maurice?” No, he’s not, he’s Eugene.

3. Reminded, at the Sackler, that I love the books section of museum gift shops, buying a copy of Lena Herzog’s photo essay on pilgrimage to Mt Kailais.

4. Judith Barrington, Nancy Lord, Valerie Miner, Sherry Simpson and friends discuss the narrative stance in memoir, or “the glory of an achieved persona” (Gornick) to a sitting-in-the-aisles crowd of devotees. Once again reminded how lucky we are at UAA to be surrounded by such brilliance.

5. Out of the rain and into happy hour at the Russia House: Baltica # 5 served in clear 20 ounce bottles and a large bowl of borsch served by a beautiful short-skirted over-powdered young Russian woman.

6. At the book fair I’m talking with a guy at the Cutbank table remembering I have had a piece there for a long time, mentioning it to him. When I check my email that night the piece has been rejected.

7. I meet Julie Paegle whose time at Utah did not quite overlap with mine. However, she was briefly married to a good friend of mine who now lives in Fairbanks. Her lovely book of poetry, Torch Song Tango Choir recently published to wide, and well-deserved, acclaim.

8. Do we or do we not teach the books we most love? Brock Clark reminds us that Denis Johnson wept when students did not like the book he most loved: Under the Volcano.

9. The Department of Education has enacted a law making it difficult to “deliver off campus instruction across state lines.” This educational Mann Act comes from the “Office of Integrity.”

10. Michael McGurl, author of a somewhat controversial book of scholarship on the rise of creative writing programs describes himself as a “museless pedant.” Also: the NY Times as “idiots” and acknowledges what we all know: that “there is a sadly limited amount of attention for writing today.”

11. What does it mean that the average age of the persons in the 500 vendor book fair is about 27? Or, more tellingly: what does it mean that almost no one in the room makes an actual living from writing, editing, or publishing?

12. Dana Gioia says that if Rilke wrote a grocery list it would be seraphic. And notes that John Haines writes in that same tradition.

13. I saw three of my former WIU students, two finishing PhD programs this year and one just starting after his MFA. Praying that I played a not-very-large role in their career decisions.

14. When I see at the book fair, other magazines where I have work out: Dzanc and Orion, I don’t mention this fact. And, I re-meet Eugene-not-Maurice, who turns out to be a poet from San Francisco currently exiled to the Midwest.

15. Michael Griffith leads a conversation, asking what sorts of literary ambition leads to awards? Three smart, passionate and generous people speak about the books they love: Brock Clark on Henderson the Rain King, Steve Almond on Mrs. Bridge, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum on Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones. What is good about the good? Is there a better question to ask?

16. Sitting at the bar at the Tabard Inn watching the bartender, Chantal Tseung, gracefully mix two different drinks simultaneously. Drinking a glass of Laphroaig. I feel distant from everyday life.

Just Kids: some thoughts on Patti Smith

I was interested in reading Just Kids when I read the earliest review, then, a little more so after the book won the National Book Award in nonfiction. And then even more so, when the title did not appear on the New York Times list of 50 notable nonfiction books of the year, and a tad more, when it did not appear on Time magazine’s list of the ten best works of nonfiction of 2010.

I wanted to know why one group of judges loved it and others ignored it, or seemed to. Of course, award winners are not always the books that are loved, sometimes they are just hated the least, collectively speaking, by a panel of readers. As William Gass once said of the Pulitzer: “ . . .the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second."

First, I should say that I found the book compelling: I read it over a couple days. But what was compelling about it? I wonder if the answer to that says more about me, or about the book? I like the portrait of the time and place. The time is almost mine, just as Smith herself just missed the times of some of the more glamorous names of the era. The place, New York, was never mine, yet I went West the way others of Smith’s moment flocked eastward.

I liked how utterly nonmaterialistic they (she and Robert Mapplethorpe) were. And how that didn’t really matter because they had their eyes on a higher prize. Where I found it most interesting was how little they knew, either of them, what that higher prize might be (more on this later).

Before I go any farther it occurs to me that I should describe what the book is: a memoir of a friendship between Smith and Mapplethorpe in the sixties in New York, before they became the counter-cultural icons (which basically turns out to be merely cultural [no counter]): Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. The book is supposed to be a tribute to that friendship, a kind of fulfillment of a deathbed promise she made to Mapplethorpe, who died young in 1988. As such, it does not attempt to be a complete memoir—much more a coming of age story.

The odd thing about the book as a memoir of a friendship is that there was a long gap in the story between the time both characters found their fame and when Mapplethorpe dies. I have to say that I somewhat understood this: friendships from that intense era of life, the starting out, retain a vitality and disproportion that seems impervious to time and space. I can buy that.

I have seen Smith accused of name-dropping. Well, sort of. But those were the names of the moment. Some were passing encounters, Hendrix, for example, whom she literally passes in a stairwell. Kind of impersonal. I believe it happened and that it was important to her, but a bit odd, a kind of I-was-in-the-elevator-with-Jerry Garcia kind of moment. But then, she’s “just kids.” Just like you and me. Indeed, she didn’t know Jim Morrison, her moment followed his, shortly. She visited his gravesite at Pere Lachaise. hey, me, too. Just kids.

Her description of her affair with Sam Shepherd was a bit implausible—she didn’t know he was Sam Shepherd, for a long time. Uh, okay, but . . . really?

Drugs. Other people take them, but she doesn’t. Then, after a while, maybe, she does. I almost had the feeling that she was thinking of her children as readers when she wrote the book. There are deaths, but there’s also a form of sanitization in the shape of recall she exercises here. But, why not? All of our memories are selective.

I had a couple more qualms, but these aren’t dealbreakers either. One, as a portrait of an artist it’s a bit thin. The first chapter, the dreamy childhood, the books, the longing to be elsewhere: pretty basic. Familiar. It’s little alarming to me that this desire to be an artist prefigures a genre or any real art-making. In this way artistry and celebrity are merged. She has drive and she achieves both–artistry and celebrity–but she achieves them simultaneously. And there’s something that makes me nervous about that–mostly, I suppose, it's that I see a lot of that, and it usually doesn't work out very well. I trust those who want to make art infinitely more than I trust those who want to become artists. I believe in the difference, though it can, as it did for Smith, even out in the end.

She mentions her devotion to Rimbaud. Repeatedly. But, I have to say, and here I sound like an academic (forgive me!) but there’s no real evidence that she has understood Rimbaud, except as kind of cult figure, the kind she hopes, in fact, to become. But wait! This isn’t a damned academic thesis–does she have to account for Rimbaud? Good question. I’m not sure, but I wish she had. Frankly, I wasn’t convinced she necessarily knew anything of Rimbaud. He had become for her a name, in the way Tennyson’s Ulysses becomes to himself. But then, she isn’t trying to prove that, and why should she? The subtitle of the book could be “Sweetness and Dreamtime in the Chelsea.” And that’s fine.

No memoir is complete, particularly when it has no such intention. She defines her own limits here. Let me put it this way: when she writes another book of prose, I’ll read it. But she may well not write another book of prose. Will this one suffice? Yes.