New York Public Library
Patti Smith | Paul Holdengräber
October 6, 2015
LIVE from the New York Public Library
live
Celeste Bartos Forum
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: My name is Paul Holdengräber. I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library. My goal here at the Library is to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and when successful to make it levitate. It is the opening of our tenth anniversary season, which yesterday we opened with Shaq, Shaquille O’Neal, and next week, Tuesday the day after Columbus Day we have Ta-Nehisi Coates, who will be joined by the Director of the Schomburg, Khalil Gibran Muhammad (applause) I’m glad you approve. Now I wonder if the other names will be all right for you. But I hope I hope I hope I hope I hope we’ve made good choices. Elvis Costello. (applause) Okay, now I’m getting nervous. (laughter) And then later in October, Nobel Prize, that should count for something, Orhan Pamuk, who will be joined by Mona Eltahawy, and now I’ll just say and so on and so forth. Check out the schedule at www I think there’s three ws, dot, one dot, nypl one dot org, one slash LIVE and if you not on our e-mail list, join the tens of thousands of patrons who are.
I’d like to say a big thank-you to the Ford Foundation (applause) and particularly to the foundation’s director, the president, Darren Walker, (applause) for their and his fantastic support of LIVE from the New York Public Library’s tenth anniversary. To celebrate the Ford Foundation, it will match your contribution to LIVE dollar for dollar. When you give you’ll help make sure we can continue to engage New Yorkers in conversations that contribute and enrich the cultural discourse. So please consider giving with the pledge cards placed on your seats and drop them off at the container by the door as you leave tonight.
Additionally I want to thank the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos and Mahnaz and Adam Bartos. After our conversation tonight, which will last about as long as a psychoanalytical session (laughter) if your shrink is generous, Patti Smith will be happy to sign books. Again. (applause) Again thank you to our independent bookstore, 192 Books, for being on hand. They’re on hand there. (applause)
Many years ago, in 2010, I fell in love. I fell in love with Just Kids, I fell in love with Patti Smith, who I really met through Just Kids, because when I grew up I was listening to seven different versions of The Magic Flute, (laughter) so I’ve lived my life backwards, I’m discovering many things that one discovers young, for instance, Elvis Costello I’m discovering in some sense now. I discovered Patti Smith after, her music after reading her. But that book, Just Kids, moved me really deeply totally. I had what you call in French a coup de foudre, and I think I wrote her and the people she works with a kind of a love letter saying I would love to have her here, and she came here and it was one of those, I think, at least for me it was a magical, magnificent night. A night where we spoke about many things that we might invoke in one form or another tonight.
But tonight we’re going to be speaking of her new book, which is out really today called M Train, which in a way is—it’s not the sequel but one could say that Just Kids and M Train form a diptych. Now, for many of you who have come to events before, you know that I ask my guests to give me a biography of themselves in seven words, a haiku of sorts, seven words that will define them. If you’re very modern as indeed I’m not, a tweet, and here are seven words that Patti Smith submitted to me today: “Poet, artist, photographer, mother, dreamer, Knopf author.” Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Patti Smith.
(applause)
PATTI SMITH: Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Thank you. It’s really such a pleasure to have you—to have you back here. And as I was saying, Patti, last time it was Just Kids that brought us together, my love affair with that book. And in many ways it was a love letter to Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids, among many other things also I remember you spoke so beautifully of your love affair with the New York of the 1970s and what it meant for you then. M Train seems like a love affair and a love letter to Fred. And maybe you can say something about that.
PATTI SMITH: Well, first, I think I should say that it’s fitting that two books brought us together in the library and, well, the book didn’t have any design. I didn’t even know that Fred would appear in the book and it was really just my exercise in freedom to write about whatever I wished, but Fred found his way in. I believe he came in by his own design. He came to me throughout the book and I had planned, really my next book that I planned to do was to be more of as you say a section being a love letter to Fred. But I think it’s very nice you said that. I suppose it was unconscious, subconscious.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And Fred being your husband, I didn’t mention that.
PATTI SMITH: Yes. Also my daughter joke that he was probably annoyed that Robert got so much attention in the other book.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: He might not have been the only one, yeah.
PATTI SMITH: I’m sorry, was that a question?
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, it could be a question.
PATTI SMITH: I don’t understand, the only one what—there were other ones?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: There were others that were annoyed by the attention he got. But it isn’t a question, it’s a comment which is really not very interesting at all.
(laughter)
PATTI SMITH: Well, Robert asked me to write the book. No one else asked me to write a book about them or about our relationship. Robert asked me to write Just Kids the day before he died, and I vowed, I promised him I would, so that book was bred of a sacred vow and this book was bred of nothing at all.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And writing, you begin the book by precisely saying that you’re trying to write a—how does one write about nothing?
PATTI SMITH: I had a dream that it was said to me, that phrase was said to me by this enigmatic cowpoke. He said, “It’s not so easy writing about nothing.” And when I woke up that resonated and I contemplated that and then I got annoyed by it and I thought, “I’m going to write about nothing until the cows come home,” as they say in South Jersey.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But the book is about something. And the book is about—let’s start to discuss a few of the things the book might be about. In my view it is a book very much about pilgrimage, and about being a certain kind of pilgrim that goes to certain places.
PATTI SMITH: Well, it is a pilgrim’s process, you know, I suppose. I don’t you know when I think of pilgrims, you know in the old way, the pilgrims that go, where they would take these long journeys going from church to church, on their knees sometimes and gathering a medal from each church to put on their rosary. Yeah, it’s something like that. (laughter) No, no just joking. It was again an unconscious pilgrimage. I don’t do anything consciously. I’m not a very analytical person. I don’t like think things out, I just think, you know, I just barrel on through.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But it is a pilgrimage for instance to tombs. You go and visit a lot of tombs.
PATTI SMITH: OooooooOOOOOOOooooooooo. I do visit.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You do visit tombs, and I don’t see it so much as “oooooh,” (laughter) you know, no, no, no, I mean, I don’t even know what that ooooh means.
(laughter)
PATTI SMITH: Halloween is coming.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s coming up.
PATTI SMITH: No, I visit a lot of resting places, and as you know I’m a very proximity-oriented person. You know that because you have shown me such wondrous artifacts and things whether manuscripts or pens or sacred objects of some of our great artists and writers and I—you know visiting someone’s grave site, you know that that person, if I visit for instance Baudelaire’s grave, I know that he’s there. You know, his remains are there. I know that his last moments on earth were on the soil near the soil I’m standing, I know the people who were there, like Paul Verlaine, who was at Baudelaire’s funeral, I know they were there, and I just, I just go and, you know, have a sense of all that. You know, it’s a place where I can quietly contemplate Brancusi or Jean Seberg or whoever I’m visiting and think about the people that mourned these people and think about the work that these people gave us, so it’s a form of contemplation, meditation, about the person, but also about the work the person did and sometimes if the light is beautiful or if it seems like the right thing I’ll take a photograph, and that is my little medal, like the little medal on my as I called it my Polaroid rosary.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But something, when you’re standing there by the tomb of Brecht or by the tomb of Baudelaire, or by the tomb of so many other writers and artists you’ve admired, you feel something is being transmitted, there’s a reverberation, something is happening. You know, I think of that wonderful line, I think it’s from the Aspern Papers in Henry James where he says, “I delight in a visitable, tangible, palpable past.”
PATTI SMITH: Nice.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Isn’t it?
(laughter)
PATTI SMITH: The rain in Spain falls— (laughter) Well, I have to be honest sometimes I visited people and felt nothing, but I’m still happy to visit them. It’s not like every time it’s a mystical experience, but sometimes it’s just getting there. I was at Proust’s grave and I remember thinking that I didn’t really like his headstone, (laughter) but sometimes very unexpectedly I feel very moved. I’ve sat, the first time I visited Sylvia Plath, which I talk about in the book, I was very self-preoccupied and all I wanted was a photograph. The second time I went back almost as a penance—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: For the first.
PATTI SMITH: I took photographs, beautiful photographs, the first time. The photographs somehow were lost, so I went again, so stubborn, to take another photograph. It snowed, the photographs were terrible, I couldn’t leave, I felt paralyzed. And it wasn’t until the third time I visited her that I visited as a loving friend and just sat quietly. So, you know, I don’t want people to think that I go and like I’m a good monk and visit these people. Sometimes I’m, you know, irresponsible or dismissive, arrogant, and sometimes I’ll just stay there and don’t even want to leave, I feel so attached.
You know, but I feel the same way when I visit my mother. (laughter) I go to my mother’s grave and I feel like, “Oh, I really want a hoagie.” (laughter) And other times I could sit there and weep for like an hour. We can’t, we can’t like manufacture feelings, but we still can go and just say hi. Sometimes that’s all I can do, I can just say, “hello, I’m here, thank you, thank you for writing Pinocchio. Thank you, Herman, for writing Moby-Dick.” That’s good, right?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You mentioned Sylvia Plath, and we just saw some incredible manuscripts.
PATTI SMITH: We saw her notebook from when she was a little girl and poems from when she was seven, nine, I mean, you know, it made me realize what a scattered child I was. You know, she was so precise, she had her little notebook, she had her poems, all different stages of her life, she was truly a poet from, she was just born a poet, but it was very touching to see her manuscripts from childhood to later in life. And beautiful that you have them.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And touching them was important for you, holding them in your hand.
PATTI SMITH: It’s proximity. To touch. Some people aren’t moved by those things and that’s fine. But you know, I would be, I would faint to hold Brancusi’s toothbrush, you know. (laughter) I wouldn’t use it, though.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, but there is and I felt that so much last time we spoke, there is a kind of a tactile inebriation you feel when you’re touching these objects which you call sacred. I want to recount that moment, it happened again tonight in a different way and it happens in the book which when I read it.
PATTI SMITH: Surprise, surprise.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s a moment which we’ll get to in a moment where you encountered the cane of Virginia Woolf that she took into the ocean when she committed suicide and which floated on, and I remember four years ago on that April 29th day, four years back, four and a half years back, you were touching that cane and I remember you slightly trembling and you said to me, Patti, “And you expect to speak to me after this?”
PATTI SMITH: He wanted me to come out here and talk like everything was normal. But holding her cane was a moving experience but, you know, for me I think I’m probably relic-oriented. Like, I’m not a Catholic, but I know that they have, you know, stages of relics. You know, if it’s a first-class relic, I think, if I’m wrong, sorry, it’s just proximity, but I think the first-class relic is something of the saint themselves, like you said you have a piece of Shelley’s skull. That would be a first-class relic and then the second-class relic might be something he wore, like St. Francis’ vestments that I’ve seen in Assisi, and then the next stage is something that touched something that maybe something that brushed against St. Francis’ cloth. I don’t know, but I feel very—all of this has meaning for me. It doesn’t have meaning in any religious way. It doesn’t have any meaning in any way that you can calculate, but it really has meaning.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Holding Dickens’s pen. You did, but just it’s a fresh experience.
PATTI SMITH: Such a humble thing. His pen, you know, you can imagine Charles Dickens having some kind of big, you know, ivory or gold pen with a big plume, but such a tiny, small little wood, so humble with the perfect little nib. So nice.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And so much came out of it.
PATTI SMITH: Yes, this tiny little pen and you can imagine, you know, Tale of Two Cities from this little pen.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Have you sometimes felt daunted by the experience of being in the home of certain of the writers or poets or artists you’ve—
PATTI SMITH: No, I feel daunted by the mess in my own house. (laughter) I feel daunted by the piles of books. No, I just get—I just get happy.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Because you know I remember when I was living in Los Angeles, I remember the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, when he arrived in Los Angeles, he was given the opportunity of living in a house in Brentwood which was Stravinsky’s house and he came into the living room and saw in the living room the kind of where the piano had been and he said to himself, I can’t be here. If I’m here, I will never compose, mainly known as a conductor but his greatest passion is composing. He felt that the weight of that history would be too much.
PATTI SMITH: I think that’s equally beautiful. You know, that’s what I was saying was that people respond to things differently. I have a very good friend that if you—sometimes, like I was looking for the grave of Riemann, how do you say his name? I have terrible pronunciation, the German mathematician. I looked with my friend all over Italy trying to find his resting place. We finally found it after much strife, but as we approached it he started trembling and he couldn’t go near it. We went to see Shelley’s grave and as we approached it he couldn’t go near it, I just bounded over like a Saint Bernard. These things make me happy, they just make me happy.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You like being in their presence, as you loved living in the Chelsea Hotel.
PATTI SMITH: I just like. I mean, I could sleep here, it’s wonderful. Anyway.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Well, maybe it can be arranged.
(laughter)
PATTI SMITH: I want to sleep here, and by my pillow I want the cane and the pen and—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Now you’re becoming greedy, but it still can be arranged. I’m going to say a phrase, you know what it means, nobody else does, and I’d love you to unpack it.
PATTI SMITH: Oh, it’s like being on Charlie Rose.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I truly hope not. (laughter/applause) But I shouldn’t have said that. I regret it already.
PATTI SMITH: You were only kidding.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I was only kidding. (laughter) Thank you. Thank you. You have saved me. Continental Drift Club. I’d love you to tell the story about the Continental Drift Club.
PATTI SMITH: Well, it’s all in the book.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It is.
PATTI SMITH: It’s just a simply it was an organization that of a few very learned, somewhat stodgy sometimes eccentric souls who formed this club not with me involved, it was some years ago, in remembrance of Alfred Wegener, the idea being that Alfred Wegener was much ridiculed in the twenties when he brought the scientific community the idea of the continental drift theory. He was ridiculed and he went to Greenland to disprove them or to prove his theory. And he died in Greenland on his birthday, his fiftieth birthday, All Saints’ Day, in 1930, and after his death with all his papers and research, his theory was proven, but he never in his life saw recognition. He knew only ridicule from the scientific community so these few people had a little club where they perpetuate his memory but also they’re very interested in what happens in the Arctic, the arctic ice sheets, climate change, but I got involved in this little club and it afforded me some of the most awkward and humorous moments of my life. But it’s hard to talk about because—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And then you talk about the perpetuation of remembrance.
PATTI SMITH: It’s the perpetuation of remembrance in regards to Alfred Wegener and in other words they wanted to keep him, his spirit alive, not by just science but all kinds of things, poetry, discussions, film festivals. There was actually an Alfred Wegener film festival. Thrilling.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: There is something of everything in the world, it’s true.
PATTI SMITH: But you know, I have always been fascinated with science and mathematics, two things I’m really bad at. In fact, I was so bad in science and mathematics during my brief stint in teachers’ college that both of my professors told me I didn’t have to come anymore. I said, “why? I’m enthralled.” Why, I was enthralled, I just loved hearing about all this intricate geometry and drawing the pictures they said, “Yes, you do very nice drawings but they don’t mean anything.” (laughter) So, anyway, but I often find myself veering off into these strange situations. Like getting involved, getting to know Bobby Fischer, I can’t play chess, I don’t know anything about chess. In any event, I’m rambling. Sorry.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Can you—no, no, no, no, Bobby Fischer. If we could at forgive me for a second, I don’t know now.
PATTI SMITH: Are you looking for his table?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’m looking for his table, you’re absolutely right.
PATTI SMITH: Well, as he’s looking for it. I had to go to a CDC—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Number 21, thank you.
PATTI SMITH: A Continental Drift Club meeting in Iceland, and one of the members wanted to go on a separate expedition which I couldn’t go to and he couldn’t go because he had to preside over a chess match. And he asked me if I would preside over it and in exchange he would make arrangements that I could photograph the table that Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky played on in 1972. Well, who could resist that?
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I know one person who couldn’t.
PATTI SMITH: What happened was, after I presided over it, and luckily it was twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, but they were like chess geniuses. Afterwards, I found out that I as moderator was supposed to play the winner (laughter) and I couldn’t tell them that I didn’t know how to play chess or anything. So I just simply said, “I defer to you,” to the winner, “so let’s go and have ice cream instead,” so I had to buy everybody ice cream to get out of the chess match. That’s not in the book, so this is a private tale.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But again, it’s being in the presence of that object that matters so much.
PATTI SMITH: Yes. Yes. It’s awesome. I didn’t get a good picture of it because it was in fluorescent lighting but still I hung out there, I sat at it. It was exciting.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I want to talk about one experience you have, you speak about in the book, which is your connection, which you also talk about in Just Kids comparing Mapplethorpe to Jean Genet, and I want to read a passage to you. This is in connection in some way to the trip you took with Fred to the Prison of Saint-Laurent and this comes from someone who I think is close to you and who I recently had the pleasure of meeting, it’s Anselm Kiefer, and in his Collège de France lectures Anselm Kiefer speaks about The Thief’s Journal, and I’m just going to read you a passage and then I want you to react to it. I’m going to read it as carefully and as clearly as I possibly can.
PATTI SMITH: In original French.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Si vous voulez.
PATTI SMITH: Please don’t.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I would have to translate simultaneously. I could do it but probably very poorly. But in English it reads as follows: “The book’s genius lies in its ability to delineate situations, to designate the exact spot where life changes into art, as if fragments of life could be dissolved in acid and their chemical composition altered. No object is in fact so repugnant, so abject, so deep that it cannot be transgressed, made secret or sacred. Strangely enough, even before Genet transformed the objects, pimps, and hoodlums he talks about, they were already enchanted, it took but a second of logic for them to gain another status. So that all that remained for Genet was to gather them together and turn them into magnificent bouquet.”
PATTI SMITH: Nice. Anselm wrote that? It’s beautiful.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Does something come to your mind?
PATTI SMITH: Does something come to my mind? Well, many things come to my mind, but I think that that’s exactly what I felt that Robert did in that Genet transformed, okay, he was beautiful enough to say that they were already say, angels, but Genet took these very marginalized people, pimps and thieves and murderers, and elevated them within his pantheon as saints. He elevated them and I felt that that was something Robert did in his S&M photographs. He took very difficult—even could be frightening, could be repulsive, consensual sex and he elevated it as art. He elevated—and I think the process is the same, the intent is the same, and I don’t know if that’s what you were thinking.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I wasn’t thinking anything, I was wondering what you were thinking.
PATTI SMITH: Oh, didn’t want to say the wrong answer.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You know, unlike experiences you had in the past, this is not a math exam, at all.
PATTI SMITH: I love, I love. The Thief’s Journal is my favorite book of Genet. But why I love The Thief’s Journal isn’t necessarily because of those things. I love it because he takes—he writes my kind of memoir. It’s a memoir yet—it’s completely true and simultaneously completely false because that’s the kind of guy Genet was. But when I say false, I mean that’s the part that he transforms truth into art. He elevates it as poetry.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And in this way it’s close to what Anselm Kiefer says.
PATTI SMITH: Yes, and I think that, you know, I don’t even like reading memoirs. People say, “What’s your favorite memoirist? Whose memoirs do you like?” I hardly ever read them. I like fiction, really. Really strange that I should be writing nonfiction, but it just happened, but that’s the kind of. I was thinking of it and writing this. I didn’t want to just sit and write an autobiography.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And you don’t.
PATTI SMITH: I wanted to just write about real time which I am living and the things that are—they are the truth of myreal time. But what is the truth of our real time? It contains dreams, it contains you know, spinning off, it contains misinterpretation, it contains memory. So I was very interested in finding a way to braid all of these things together.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And also there’s a distinction, which is maybe a spurious distinction between fiction and nonfiction. It’s complicated, because memoirs, as you were saying, I mean, they can—they so often find themselves under the category of nonfiction when in fact maybe they should be somewhere else.
PATTI SMITH: It’s just “memoir” is a nice word and maybe they should just be called memoirs. I don’t know. I’d never really—when I was writing the book, it never occurred to me what kind of book it was, you know?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Were there models for the book in the sense that—there’s one writer in particular who—I feel, tell me if I’m wrong, I feel like he haunts you in the best possible way, sort of as a shadow that accompanies your movements, is Sebald.
PATTI SMITH: His poetry, but his—the way—I love him and I love the way his books look. But sometimes—I’m not even ready to read all of his things. I’m too—my mind moves too quickly. But I wouldn’t say that he had—his prose had a lot of impact on me, because I’m still negotiating it. Certainly his book After Nature, which I talk about absolutely has influenced me. But the writers—you know, I’ve been influenced a lot more by like Bolaño or reading Murakami, these fellas, but you know really also the books that I read as a child—it could be The Scarlet Letter, you know, it could be Pinocchio. I don’t know who—I don’t think any particular writer haunts me. I do love Sebald, but I don’t feel—I feel more haunted by the books of my childhood than I do with the things that I’ve currently read.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s so interesting when you were saying you don’t feel ready, you don’t have the readiness of the—you feel too scattered to—
PATTI SMITH: I just feel like I know what he’s doing. I feel like I should be walking side by side with him on his travels. I feel—it’s hard to explain. Sometimes—The only way I can explain this is when Jean Genet was a young boy in reform school he was an avid reader, and they would wait for boxes of books to come and most of the prisoners wanted to read, like you know, romance novels or things about crime or things that were easy to read, and he was the youngest so he had to wait until everyone took the books and the only thing left was this big volume of Proust, and he had never read Proust, and he was maybe fourteen, fifteen, and he tells how he started reading and he had to shut it and put his face against the wall, because—and to shut out, try to shut out, because it so affected him. And it took him a long time to go back and read it. There’s just sometimes there’s just certain books where I buy them and I look at them and I think, “Yeah, I want to read that someday.” Does that make any sense?
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It makes deep sense and I connected to the experience you had going to certain tombs where at certain moments you feel ready for that experience and at other times you don’t.
PATTI SMITH: Well, sometimes it’s just your—what your sensibility, like I have a lot of agitated energy and sometimes I can’t sit still. You know, I can’t sit still in an opera that I really love or I can’t it just depends on your—and other times I can sit for four hours or five hours watching Parsifal and wish there wasn’t intermissions. You know it’s just—some of it is just your frame of mind or your physical energy at the time.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But books. Let’s forget the example of Sebald. Books for you—
PATTI SMITH: I really like him.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I know you do. I know you do. (laughter) But you don’t like him as much as I thought you liked him maybe.
(laughter)
PATTI SMITH: No, no it’s not like that, it’s just—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Or maybe if I speak to you in five years you’ll like him more.
PATTI SMITH: Or five years ago.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Or maybe five years ago.
PATTI SMITH: I mean, I don’t know. There was a time like if we had talked some time ago all I would have wanted to talk about is Bulgakov. I’m like the serial monogamist of writers. I get involved in one writer.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Who is it now?
PATTI SMITH: I’m at a—because I’ve just been mostly writing, I’ve just been rereading stuff, you know, rereading just The Laughing Policeman or whatever I feel like. So I don’t have a—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: There’s nothing you—there’s nothing. Because there is something, and you talk about this so brilliantly in this book which is the relationship of reading to immersion. To being, you know, I remember Simone Weil at one point said that attention is a form of prayer.
PATTI SMITH: That’s nice.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I feel I’m so happy when I say these things and you say to me, “That’s nice.” I feel, you know. Because in a sense, I mean, you know it because you were talking about being scattered. I mean, I feel that—to quote T. S. Eliot, I’m distracted from distraction by distraction. I’m always—here we are sitting but I’m nearly ready to go, we are always on the move in a sense, but there are these moments where our attention—and that’s what happened with Genet and Proust I imagine you are just—I mean, in his case it was the overwhelmingness of presence. But there are these moments where you are just riveted and you can’t let go. And you talk about those moments with Murakami and other writers where you are just—
PATTI SMITH: Oh, I want to live in their atmosphere.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You want to live in their world.
PATTI SMITH: Well, it’s so nice with a book, you can carry that atmosphere with you. It’s like when you go in a movie, you know, you go in a movie and you’re in it and then you have to go out into the outside world and it takes a little while—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Brutal.
PATTI SMITH: It takes a while to, you know, readjust, but a book you can carry around, you can carry that atmosphere around with you. I love to live within the atmosphere of certain books and I think truthfully one of the things that I was hoping to accomplish in M Train was to provide the reader with an atmosphere that they would like to dwell in for a while.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And to follow you, and to follow you, to follow the footsteps, to imagine the places they might go and commemorate.
PATTI SMITH: Or walk side by side.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Or walk side by side. You know—meeting writers for you. Meeting the embody—with Murakami it’s so interesting, because there you are possibly able to meet him, possibly able to meet a place that he describes and you avoid it.
PATTI SMITH: I’m actually. Every time I’ve met a writer, well, not every time, but in recent years it’s always a disaster, because I get so excited. I’m like—I wrote this actually so I’m repeating myself but it’s a true thing, I feel like Chris Farley, you know, (laughter) because I see an author I like that’s alive, you know, that’s so rare, to actually like a writer and they’re actually living and I get so excited and all I want to say, “Oh, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, you know, that, it was awesome. Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, it was awesome.” (laughter) I don’t have anything else to say, really.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I think about this problem all the time because all I do is meet authors and meet writers and meet artists.
PATTI SMITH: Yeah, but you know what to do. I don’t.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I don’t know if I know what to do. There is a line I want to read to you of Margaret Atwood that she says, I wonder what you might say to this. She says, “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté.”
(laughter)
PATTI SMITH: That was awesome.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Okay.
(laughter/applause)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let’s look at image 27 if we could. There you are meeting an author.
PATTI SMITH: Yes, that was Paul Bowles. I met him in I don’t remember the year. Ninety-six or—maybe ’96. I was asked to interview him for German Vogue. I know it sounds wacky, right? At the time I had no money, I was in slightly dire straits. I hadn’t traveled in some, in quite a while. The idea of going to Morocco and meeting one of my favorite, favoritest authors when I was young was, you know, an offer I couldn’t refuse. So I went. I went with some trepidation because I didn’t want to bother him, but they really wanted this done, he wanted the interview done, and I thought, “It might as well be me that’s bothering him.” So and I—it was sad and beautiful to meet him.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Sad and beautiful?
PATTI SMITH: Yes, because, you know, he was at the end of his life. He knew that. He no longer was motivated to write. I asked him how he felt and he looked at me and he said, “Empty.” Yes. I found it poignant, but he also gave me a good smile, so that was nice. Sorry.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The book is a lot about loss.
PATTI SMITH: Well, I don’t think. I mean, yes, there’s a lot of loss in the book, but I didn’t plan to write about loss. I didn’t plan to write about anything. It’s just that in life we do suffer. We lose our loved ones. We lose things.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We lose our loved ones. We lose things. We regain contact with people through the things that they loved. They’re very meaningful in that way because somehow by touching an heirloom of someone you have loved or someone who has mattered, whose work has mattered to you, you feel as though there’s a transfusion happening.
PATTI SMITH: The other day I opened up, I have this little, well a big glass medicine cabinet, or some kind of cabinet, that has precious things in it and I opened it up and there’s a battered copy of one of my brother’s books, I lost my brother in 1994. And it’s a copy of Knock on Any Door, and it was about this kid Nick Romano, and his byline was “live fast, die young, have a good-lookin’ corpse.” And it was one of my brother’s favorite books and I don’t know what compelled me to open up the case and pick it up, and I looked at it, but instead of feeling sad it just—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Made you—
PATTI SMITH: It just, It made me—I don’t know, I can’t explain it. It transmuted not sorrow but joy because he loved the book, he used to ask me to read portions of it to him.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But what compels us at what moment, the role of serendipity in our life, something that you come upon and that may inspire quite the contrary feeling that one might imagine. I remember four years ago one of the most joyous moments I had speaking with you was when we spoke about Maria Callas, and your eyes lit up the way they just lit up now. And I think the day Robert died you heard on the radio Callas and that inspired the beginning of Just Kids and we played a little bit of the music and then you spoke about how you went to a certain hotel in Milano and put flowers in her room. Am I right to remember this?
PATTI SMITH: Yes, yes I did.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What was the name of it? Because I remember telling—when my mother was still alive I remember telling her, at that point I think you mentioned the hotel.
PATTI SMITH: It was the Grand Hotel of Milan and it’s the hotel actually where Giuseppe Verdi died.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And they made the streets very quiet that day so—
PATTI SMITH: Well, they covered them with hay so that the sound of horses wouldn’t bother him because he was in his last hours. But Maria used to stay there, and they have a Maria Callas room that had her fans and beautiful pictures of her and sometimes I stay in that room, and I was staying in a different room and I was sent two dozen long-stemmed roses—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That was the story.
PATTI SMITH: —from someone, some dignitary in Milan, but I was leaving and I couldn’t take them with me and they were so beautiful. And I asked the concierge who was, was anyone staying in Maria’s room, and he said, “No,” I said, “Is anyone staying there tomorrow?” and he said “No,” and I said, “Well, could we put the roses in the room for Maria?” And they didn’t flinch. They said, “Well, of course, of course.” So they got a beautiful cut-glass vase, and put the roses in, looked so beautiful, and they put them in Maria’s room for her.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I mean, I remember that story vividly and I remember when I told my mother she remembered the name of the hotel and I think it was then that my father mentioned that story about the streets being covered—
PATTI SMITH: Yes, it’s true.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And, you know, how important it was to arrive at the greatest amount of silence a city could arrive at. We were talking about loss, and there’s a line, as we slowly wind down, there’s a line in Rilke that I very much love about loss, where he says, “Loss however cruel is powerless against possession, which it completes or even affirms. Loss is in fact nothing else than a second acquisition but now completely interiorized and just as intense.”
PATTI SMITH: Rilke.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s extraordinary, no?
PATTI SMITH: I’m not going to say awesome, because it’s not an awesome enough word. But yes, he’s so beautiful.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: “A second form of acquisition.”
PATTI SMITH: Yes, I believe in that. I know it to be true.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: We carry around our libraries. We carry around our quotations. I think I mean in many ways the reason that M Train moves me so deeply is in part because you are inhabited by words, you are inhabited by sentences, you are inhabited by certain moments, and I think, you know, as I think of it I think of literature of having the highest—and Herzog speaks about—Werner Herzog speaks about literature offering him always consolation in the toughest, hardest moments. He reads, you know, he reads the great Greek writers because they will—Thucydides, he will offer him in some form or fashion consolation, when things really get rough we turn to what really matters. When Montaigne lost his son he couldn’t tell his wife that his son had died. Instead he wrote down the letter that Plutarch had written when he lost his son, and he copied it out and sent it to his wife. That was a way in some way of expressing emotion.
Recently—I feel like I must say that because our conversation is inhabited by this. I lost my sister on September 1, and it’s a terrible thing to have to lose one’s sister. It’s even worse in some way to have to tell one’s ninety-seven-year-old father of that loss. After that moment, which was so difficult, literature came back. Not to rescue me, because there is no rescuing and consolation not to flatten the experience, but I thought of a writer who matters to you too so much and I thought of those last lines of The Unnamable, “I can’t go on, I will go on.” And thankfully we have memory and we remember, literally putting our members back together because if we didn’t we might be truly more lost than we already are. Anyway I’m sorry, that was a long moment.
PATTI SMITH: No, it’s lovely to hear you speak. And I think there’s another aspect. We can talk about loss and we can think about our people and we carry our people and can access our people but also even getting down to things even more simply, each person has a life, and our lifes are precious and no matter what we go through in life, what we lose, who we lose, the strifes, the illnesses, and anything, the sorrows, the heartbreaks, we still have our—if we have our life we have the best thing that we’ll ever have and in that way I would quote another great poet, Jimi Hendrix, who said, “Hooray, I wake from yesterday,” and every day when I wake up that’s one of the first lines that comes in my head, I think it’s just “Yes, I have another day, you know, I have another day and whatever comes my way I’m going to be grateful.” I’m going to be grateful, because we don’t have a long time and sometimes some people have longer and some people have shorter, but whatever our fate is we have a little time on this planet and it’s just fantastic to be alive, just. Sorry.
(applause)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’d like, I’d like people to get a little bit of a flavor of the book. I’ll ask you to read two very short passages.
PATTI SMITH: Okay, luckily I brought my reading glasses. (laughter) What would you like me to read?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Just this little passage here, you might want to contextualize it if you’d like.
PATTI SMITH: Well, I don’t think I have to.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No.
PATTI SMITH: I think they’ll understand.
We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment. Sound, sensation. 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, weeping from a bad dream. “Please stay forever,” I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.
Okay.
When my children were young—oh, I know, I’ll read a little before that, do you mind?
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I don’t mind at all.
PATTI SMITH: Okay.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I hope you don’t mind.
PATTI SMITH: We seek to stay present even as the ghosts attempt to draw us away. Our father manning the loom of eternal return, our mother wandering toward paradise, releasing the thread. In my way of thinking anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all. We imagine a house, a rectangle of hope, a room with a single bed with a pale coverlet, a few precious books. Walls papered in faded floral fall away and burst as a newborn meadow speckled with sun and a stream emptying into a greater stream where a small boat awaits with two glowing oars and one blue sail. When my children were young I contrived such vessels, I set them to sail though I didn’t board them. I rarely left the perimeter of our house. I said my prayers in the night by the canal draped by ancient long-haired willows. The things I touched were living: My husband’s fingers, a dandelion, a skinned knee. I didn’t seek to frame these moments, they passed without souvenir, but now I cross the sea with the sole aim to possess within a single image the straw hat of Robert Graves, the typewriter of Hesse, the spectacles of Beckett, the sickbed of Keats. What I have lost and cannot find I remember. What I cannot see I attempt to call, working on a string of impulses bordering illumination.
(applause)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I think the so striking in this last passage is the word “possess,” because possess and also being possessed by.
PATTI SMITH: Well, you know, when we—You know, I might fall in love with Virginia Woolf’s cane, but I can’t have it.
PH:I can’t arrange that.
PATTI SMITH: But I take a photograph and I have that, I have a souvenir but that’s what I was talking about in—you know, when I said certain things passed without souvenir. You know, you think some things will go on forever, your children will always be small, your husband will always be alive, but time passes and, you know, the souvenirs some of them are memory. Memory is our most fertile souvenir.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: If we could have image number 19. “Now I am older than my love, my departed friends, perhaps I will live so long that the New York Public Library will be obliged to hand over the walking stick.” (laughter) “The New York Public Library will be obliged to hand over the walking stick of Virginia Woolf. I would cherish it for her, and the stones in her pocket, but I would also keep on living, refusing to surrender my pen.” Now, the book is symphonic, there are all these images. I’m going to show in closing some of the images. If we could see in moderately quick succession images 5, 6, 7, 9, 18, and again 19 and 21. You might want to say something. Maybe we stop there for a moment.
PATTI SMITH: That’s Schiller. That’s in the summerhouse of Schiller and I visited that with the Continental Drift Club. It’s where Goethe and Schiller used to sit and talk at the end of Schiller’s life. Goethe would come visit him and they would sit. It’s just this humble stone table and I fell in love with it but I couldn’t take it with me so I took its portrait.
Frida Kahlo’s crutches. That’s Frida Kahlo’s bed.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You slept in it.
PATTI SMITH: No, I slept in Diego Rivera’s bed.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That’s right. Mistake.
PATTI SMITH: Herman Hesse’s typewriter, and if you look I took this specifically very close up under a lot of sunlight so that the typewriter keys would look like glass beads or beads, because he typed The Glass Bead Game on this typewriter. He did.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And here, well, again.
PATTI SMITH: Virginia’s cane.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And Virginia’s cane, which I’m afraid you can’t have but again touching it, touching it was such an experience and there it is. And there it is. It’s so interesting to my mind. You know, Susan Sontag wrote so brilliantly about photography as a form of possession and in some way, you know, it reminds me of what Sontag said about traveling. She said, “Just wait until now becomes then. You’ll see how happy we were.” Something about that.
PATTI SMITH: Well, that’s why I keep traveling, so I’m always in the now.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Was that it? Now.
PATTI SMITH: I was trying to identify it.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I thought there was one more.
PATTI SMITH: I was thinking of something clever. The black night sans—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Maybe we can look at image 22 just so there’s something to identify here.
PATTI SMITH: Well, that is the galley copy of Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird with a half a cup of coffee.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And you lost one of his—one of the books.
PATTI SMITH: Not that one. I lost my original paperback, which was filled with notations and scribbles and things and I was so heartbroken that I decided to replace it with something special. So I went to ABE Books and bought me a copy of the galley. Had I known I was going to be a Knopf author, I would have waited and not spent so much money on this.
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But it’s so interesting you know to think about original copy. Because original copy means what for you?
PATTI SMITH: It was just my original. It was the one that I read. I still have the first. I have about five different copies of Magister Ludi, but I still have the very first one that I read, you know—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Herman Hesse.
PATTI SMITH: —and I can look at that and still feel a—
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A shiver. You know and Proust speaks magnificently about the first edition not being the first edition but the first edition in which you read a book.
PATTI SMITH: That’s nice, yeah.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So that is really the first edition, that is how you came upon it.
PATTI SMITH: Marcel. He’s so wonderful.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: He is, eh? Genet thought so. Now, Patti, before I thank you for tonight I know you want to leave us with some music, maybe singing.
(applause)
PATTI SMITH: Well, I didn’t really plan that and I didn’t bring my guitar, which I can play four and a half chords and I thought what I could, I was wondering what little song I could do. I will tell you that I sang a little song, there was a party here for Knopf’s one hundredth anniversary and I sang a song there just for the night, the wonder of the night, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to sing it again, but I’d like to sing it for Monica, for your sister.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Oh.
PATTI SMITH: So I’m going to take this off.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: There’s a mic there.
PATTI SMITH: Don’t want to mess my hair up!
(laughter)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let me help. Now we’re in real trouble.
PATTI SMITH: My father used to brush the tangles out of my hair.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I need your help. I need professional help here.
PATTI SMITH: It’s just a nice little song that I wrote. Is this working? One two one. It’s a simple little song that I wrote really for my daughter. She was about six years old when her father died, and I knew that her road ahead would be somewhat difficult because of that, and I wrote her this little song. It’s called “Wing.”
[Patti Smith sings “Wing”]
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Patti Smith!
(applause)
PATTI SMITH: Thank you, everybody. Long live the library!
(applause)
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