Patti Smith: Just Kids Review - The Birth of an Artist(s)

Do all great artists need creation myths? Reading this excellent semi- autobiography of Patti Smith ostensibly about her symbiotic relationship with controversial artist/photographer Robert Mapplethorpe but also about her (re) emergence as a musical icon from the scuzzy sexy New York of the 1970s I wondered. For there are many passages in here where I wasnt sure if it was truth, exaggeration or fiction: at one level it doesn't matter because the art stands apart and may or may not have had such a genesis.

So whether a young Patti had a chat with Jimi Hendrix on the stairs a few months before he died, whether Allen Ginsberg made a pass at her in a diner because he thought she was a he or whether she shared bon mots with William Burroughs in the Hotel Chelsea (actually believed that) is neither here nor there. In the world she was in that could have happened and it could have help her create the original masterpiece of Horses.

What is most touching and true is her account of her remarkable relationship with Mapplethorpe - the work is bookended with memories of hearing of his death from the distance of her new life and world in the late 80s. Yet for the majority of the period looked at they are almost "twins". You could almost say soul mates if that term hadnt been terminally destroyed by god awful internet dating adverts .

They run into each other almost by accident refugees in the underworld of NYC and bind together for survival. Again there is a whiff of mythology about exactly how they meet but their initial life together is a believable bond. I like the way their initial meagre surroundings are made palatable by their artistic impulses with little design touches and ornaments which they share with each other. Although they seem to start off as lovers in a fairly conventional early twenties relationship this is not really maintained as Mapplethorpe embraces his sexuality more fully, having as is the American way come from a fairly repressed military/religious background. He even has a period of working as a male prostitute when together with Patti before embarking upon lasting male relationships. They share a living space and a bed for much of this period - including a couple of years in a Chelsea hotel bedroom with a shared bathroom. As their Art develops their relationship deepens but becomes something different - they live in separate parts of the same studio. Patti develops a relationship with a guy out of Blue Oyster Cult who she also lived with, they contemplated having her as the singer of the band fact fans! and in a very well written bit an encounter/fling with Sam Shepherd - the actor/playwright.

The art that each engage with is almost interchangeable - I get a sense that they were both experimenting with which medium they felt more comfortable with. Patti always is writing poetry in particular but paints and has an eye for books and design. Robert begins as a designer of jewellery goes into visual art with a focus on collages particularly of gay pornography (there seems to be a theme!) and finally - and famously - Photography which he initially only tentatively embraces. I think it is significant that the launchpad for both comes around the Horses album which Robert M took the iconic photos with.

Mapplethorpe also has a small obsession with Warhol and entourage though Patti is a little less committed - she likes artists who shake up their time not merely document it. Though this is the late 60s early 70s period Warhol where he is more or less in hiding following the SCUM assassination attempt. So that is strange a lost movement of drag queens, male models and wannabees hanging around nightclubs and bars waiting for their leader who never shows up.

Though through this world Smith sees the Velvet Underground, Hendrix, Joplin and famously in her eyes Jim Morrison who in her eyes showed her that she could become a musical performer. These are intertwined with her love of Rimbaud, whose trip to Abyssinia inspired her second album. In echoes of Dylan's autobiography she mentions key musical tracks through this time which are versatile - heavy roots reggae along New York Doo wop - and all worth a listen. One amazing find for me which was her soundtrack in part of the 70s was a pan-pipe album from Morocco produced by Brian Jones.

Danny Baker, of all people, gave an interesting analysis of Punk on an interview I watched recently stating that the 70s was an amazingly productive musical period and Punk was the last throw of this - following Bowie, Krautrock, Reggae, New York, soul etc etc. It was in contradiction to the Year Zero manifesto of the London Punk movement of MacLaren/Pistols/Clash etc. Patti S with her broad appreciation of musical form and language through poetry is clearly an argument for the former. Her description of creating her first recording of a Hendrix track, Hey Joe, with Tom Verlaine and Lenny Kaye is spellbinding. Even cliches of rock biographies like how she gets her band together and the tracks on the first album have a new perspective. She also explains how she wanted to integrate political protest into her work - something Robert M shied away from. Her later work is only really skirted over - maybe for another bio although I dont think she would be interested in doing a musical chronology which had no real theme.

The work with the exception of the foreword and ending is very linear though - one experiment Dylan did with his Chronicles was to be episodic - dip in and out of times jump back and forward. I thought that worked well and would have liked to see Patti S try this method. But this is a more stylistic criticism than content.

Being an analysis of her closest adult relationshop - they even look spookily similar in some photos mortality is central to the work. Death is something which is all around Patti S work - the musicians that died young, her husband who she nursed before he died, her brother and numerous casualties around the NY scene. But touchingly it is the dying of Mapplethorpe with AIDS which seems to have the most profound effect. Her pursuit to wake the dead is "the one that burns most deeply".

So it's a book about growing up, life long relationships, death and art. And great music. What more do you need.

Uncle's Dream: Dostoevsky has a laugh?

In his decade of exile, the first few years of which he spent in hellish prison conditions, Dostoevsky produced little written work. You could argue that all of his great works couldn't or wouldn't have been produced in the same way without his 1850s experience. After all many writers don't immediately draw on traumatic life experience in their own work. I'm thinking of JG Ballard whose work specifically on his childhood in occupied Shanghai came relatively late on in his work or the prolific Dennis Potter where only his later TV dramas like the Singing Detective (currently repeating on BBC4) dealt with his own youthful trauma.

There was another problem for FD though - he was living in a feudal dictatorship which he had been arrrested and exiled for opposing. Although by the end of exile he supported the new Tsar. They had controls of publication and also in his prison time he was not permitted any writing material.

So the sum total of that time was two ostensibly light novellas - Uncle's Dream being the first. Seemingly a literary confection, a bauble as Mark Cousins would say, this short work explores the machinations of a provincial village elite trying to marry off an elderly, possible senile, member of the aristocracy to a young beautiful woman. Lots of visits to country houses, aristocratic balls and comic misunderstanding.

The tone is very theatrical and I wasn't surprised to see it had been turned into a play something like 20 times. The lightness is obvious and it flies past as you read it. However I have a sense there are glimpses here of deeper issues. One theory is that FD stuck to this path so there would be no issue around censorship.

Given all that the characterisation is pretty dark - the key villain - the manipulative mother who believes she controls all the comings and goings of the village and equally can control the doddery old Prince: Maria Alexandrovna is a sophisticated creation that could come from a modern writer. I could see similar issues being done and a similar woman in an English play by Alan Ayckbourn or a TV comedy drama by Victoria Wood. The pathetic thwarted suitor of the intended for the Prince and indeed the nominal nephew Pavel Mozglyakov also stands out.

What is missing from the work I have read so far of FD are the contemporary literary and artistic references. This village is in a bubble where banal worries about who is going to marry (and trick) an elderly aristocrat are to the fore. Although there are references to light French novels like Dumas and constant quotes in French - these stand out because they are so isolated. I guess this is not surprising because FD himself was miles away from the literary milieu he had cultivated.

Yet in passing the number of "souls" -peasants - controlled by these figures is thrown about pretty lightly. The deference to the feudal structure, a constant them in FDs work, is there in spades in fact the whole plot revolves around it. The Prince even raises the issue of serf emancipation, one of FD's crimes in the eyes of the Tsarist state, before almost as quickly dismissing it - he speaks of being influenced by foreign ideas. And in a very unusual last chapter the issues of mortality are raised darkly and really out of kilter with the rest of the piece.

So all those things are touched on but I have to say it is actually funny - maybe unusually for a nineteenth century literary comedy. I could see some influence perhaps of Dickens whose jokes have not all stood the test of time. There is a funny line about a boring male character who often "looks blankly like a sheep that has seen a new gate" well it made me chuckle. And the plot whilst derivative is pretty well paced and structured for humour. Also in quite a modern way FD contrasts the lightness with quite dark and bitter ideas- Maria's essential prostitution of her daughter and her relationship with her husband is quite shockingly violently cruel.

So you could argue this got FD back in the saddle of published work and it's a good distraction for a few hours read. Also have to give word of praise to edition I picked up by Hesperus press. Lovely lay-out and good translation and introduction - published last year. I think it specialises in publishing more obscure literary works from the great writers. Lucky for me!

Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus - How to Live?

There's been an excellent documentary series on Monty Python currently on Sky Arts (inevitably they have bought it from somewhere else) it shows the amount of research and intellectual endeavour that went into their work. So seeing the end of Life of Brian again with its iconic crucifixion scene one line of the famous song stood out after my reading of this work : "Life is so absurd and death's the final word".

As what Camus attempts to disentangle in this detailed and complex essay is the "absurdity" of life. Humans intrinsically want life to have a purpose, a direction a framework but we live in a direction-less vast universe in which we will all die and disappear. This is a duality - one cannot exist without the other - human hope and existence on the planet. The prism that Camus wants to examine this from is that of suicide which he says is the essential question as Shakespeare puts it "to be or not to be".

If there is no meaning in life or an after - life what is the point of continuing life. He uses a literary example -in quite a detailed critique of Dostoevsky's work - of a character in the Russian author's work (the Possessed) who kills himself because he knows there is no God. FD was fundamentally critical of this position which was reflective of elements of his position that life is brutal but it has a direction towards an after life because of the existence of God.

Thus Camus in the most difficult first part of the work critiques a series of philosophers who try and deal with this central question by accepting the existence of a supernatural being. Kierkegard as an example essentially argues life is hellish and the universe is bleak but we need to believe in God ultimately: "one can only live in that prison". This is what Camus calls philosophical suicide. In a pretty complicated bit of the work he also critiques the school of phenomenology which (I think) attempt to put some spiritual being into real things which ultimately falls into the same trap as the quasi - religious thinkers. Camus believes essentially the "point is to live".

Humans have to embrace their absurdity and throw themselves into life - a "revolt". Not only that humans should attempt to experience as much as possible. This is where the work takes on a different tack rather than a detailed philosophical rebuttal many examples from literature, art and myth are used. In this there is a really thoughtful analysis of the art of acting, the work of Kafka and as mentioned Dostoevsky. This shows the work is not really a lengthy statement of a new philosophical view - in a sense it is a contemporary comment on aspects of life through this absurd position. It is an essay in the fullest sense of that term.

Sisyphus is the Classical example of this - doomed to roll the rock up the hill watch it roll down then repeat, for ever in the Underworld. This punishment was ascribed to Sisyphus as he dared to challenge death and refused to go - hence his role in Camus' eyes as an absurd hero. The parallel is clear with the modern individual in capitalist society bound to endless work. Yet Camus, convincingly I think, argues that people can adapt to this and one must "imagine Sisyphus happy". Knowing there is nothing else other than rolling the rock - no higher meaning means he can enjoy the process "the struggle is enough... to fill a man's heart".

Essentially then the work is a refuting of religion and a declaration of the enjoyment of life. Where I think it is a bit ambiguous though is the idea that more experience rather than the quality of experience. This is seen in his archetypal absurd heroes - the conqueror, the actor and Don Juan. It is better to have many romantic lovers than one - clearly as long as each has depth. I am unclear how this fits into the vision of routine as captured by Sisyphus and am a bit unconvinced that the endless search for new experience after experience is the most fulfilling way to live life. Surely by doing that one is searching for something which Camus himself thinks doesn't exist. In the introduction to my copy the translator believes he is using secular metaphor rather than religious metaphors but it still doesn't really fit in for me.

Another interesting perspective is the time Camus wrote this was 1940 - the high point of Nazism on the continent. Maybe this was a method of intellectual survival to contemplate the wonder of life just as the reality of living was becoming so impossible. A bit like Gramsci and McLean did in prison during the first world war. Given that context it is a remarkable essay and as a paen to the wonder of life in a secular universe it has to be admired: though still very difficult.

A sad after thought is this book was beside Nick Drake's bed when he died. I dont fully understand why as it really is an attack on the motives for suicide - much (as Camus explained) L'Etranger is an attack on murder. Read this, be puzzled, wonder at the language and imagery, be puzzled again and enjoy.

Revolutionary Road: You're Only Kidding Yourself...

My 2011 reading trip round the decay of American family structures and consumer capitalism concluded with this book - Richard Yates' first novel from 1962. My appetite has obviously been whetted with John Cheever but as explained below although the subject matter is in the same ball park it's a slightly different game that Yates is playing.

One of the limited benefits of a movie being made from a novel is that it reinvigorates interest in the work. This was the case for this as Sam Mendes 2008 version led to a reprint and increase in sales of the work; Yates himself died in 1992. I've not seen the film as was waiting to finish the book but as adaptations go it is very good apparently and pretty faithful to the work. But as ever the internal monologue of a good writer, use of phrase and metaphor only enhances itself in prose for me and this is particularly true here.

Split into three the novel is ostensibly an examination of a young suburban couple living on the eponymous street in the mid 1950s. Young as in their 30s with the requisite two children (of which more later) - in 2012 you could probably add 10 years to their age for the same stage of life.

Cars, new televisions, tentative attempts at creating a suburban community, cocktails after work, train journeys home - so far so Cheeverian 1950s America and I would argue many modern developed captialist societies in 2012. But there is a distinction this couple : Frank and April see themselves as apart and removed from their literal lifestyle. More of the avant garde than the golf club/swimming pool set. When they meet 10 years before Frank fresh from the war lives in Greenwich Village and frequents jazz clubs. Even his job in a proto- computer company in the City (which he commutes to) is taken as a post-modern prank or so he would have people believe.

This deceit although buried eventually sprouts up into loathing between the couple which comes to a head after a disastrous (and hilariously written) am-dram production of a mainstream American play which had been a big success in 1950s tv. April is the lead (she trained vaguely as an actress in the 40s) but the show almost literally falls about around them. The fight between the couple is bitter and quite painful to read.

Warring couples are also a Cheever trait but I think the route of the unhappiness is different. This is not simple alienation creating a consumer lifestyle to fill the emptiness of modern capitalist work in a place removed from your geographical being. This is a couple who are pretending to play the game but hold it in disdain but as they play the game becomes more important than the disdain.

The Cheever novels I have read actually only deal with the suburban lifestyle in passing - they have a broader historical sweep ( as this work does slightly with the examination of the couples' parents' lifestyles). It is his short fiction where he forensically dissects it so it is a change to read it in the context of a novel.

An escape is offered - an emigration to Paris where April will work to sustain Frank in "finding out what he wants to do". This is unclear as although Frank tries to be aloof he never really exhibits any particular desire or interest in any other direction - he even refuses to audition for the terrible play. Thus his emptiness or fear of it is exposed by this possibility. It is not a mere fantasy the plan gains legs and serious moves are made to turn it into reality but ultimately Frank baulks using the excuse of April's pregnancy to hide his growing reliance on the lifestyle he despises.

This hesitation exposes April and Frank and their relationship for what they really are with truly sad consequences. Adultery is almost inevitable on both sides. But it culminates in the banal setting of a suburban hospital with a poster advertising a staff dance and Life magazines on the table.

You could make a case that Yates is making broader points about American capitalism - a country born on Revoulutionary Road remember. The book is set almost mid way through the twentieth century in the richest society ever created on the planet but that point but the desire not to be part of it and the unhappiness that seeps into the protagonists bones is palpable. But this is no obviously didactic piece it is in the minutiae of personal relationships that Yates is brilliant at , and a big influence on other writers I think.

He also preempts one of the defining issues of American society in the late 20th Century : abortion. Unusually this is dealt with in an open, honest and contextual way. This divides the couple though they both have ambiguous views on it - again parallels with the broader USA.

The use of minor characters - the realtor Mrs Givings who provides the passage into suburbia for the Wheelers, her son an asylum inmate who is the mirror that reveals the deep truths that the young couple don't really want to see, Shep and Milly a sort of distorted mirror image of the Wheelers with some similar disdain but ultimately I think Shep deals with it in a more honourable way - particularly at the climax.

I enjoyed Yates style of narrative which provides sort of mute and multiple witnesses - he sweeps into scenes and takes different perspectives: Frank, April,Shep, even briefly and memorably Frank and April's children. Yates speaks of the curtainless massive windows in all the houses in Revolutionary Road and the adjoining estate and in a sense he invites us the readers to look through them.

The closing image of Frank as described by Shep is an image that will stay with me for a long time. An important and beautifully written work.

Netochka Nezvanova: Fragmented Witness

My latest FD instalment is an intriguing piece which he was working on prior to his arrest as part of a Utopian Socialist underground group in 1840s Russia. He didn't have another piece of published fiction for ten years. So this I guess is the last piece of this specific period of Dostoyevsky's work.

It is a little difficult to judge it as it is a fragment of what was clearly planned to be a substantial "major" work - like a Dickens or French 19th Century Novel. The eponymous character outlines the early years of her life from brutal childhood to her alienated teenage years: unlike the Double - no laughs to be had here.

As this is all that survives I assume that FD must have written chronologically as there are no records of any other parts of this novel. So it can be followed unlike other unfinished novels.

He develops his psychological approach for the characters although being part of the rigid Russian social stratification are never characatures but more rounded - a constant theme or tension of his early writings. However I also think he is attempting to use the young female narrator as a witness of certain aspects of human interaction and obliquely Russian society. Thus her unhappy childhood unravelled by her step-father a drunken musician elevated from the peasantry and moved to Petersburg, convinced of his genius. Her adoption by an aristocrat provides an insight to that world. She is then passed on to a slightly lower echelon of aristocrat where she is a witness to a disintegrating marriage undermined by secrets and lies. A wee bit like Oliver Twist - an orphan can look at different aspects of society - in Dickens case the underworld in London.

Thus the character is a bit of a cipher, indeed the translation of the name is Nameless Nobody, but she has her own relationships. In particular with another 10 year old - the Princess daughter of the aristocrats which is very abusive and unusually written I thought for kids of that age. This is one of the problems of the work as it stands you dont get the sense of a child or an adolescent's view point. It reads the same as the perspective of an older writer. Apparently this was not FD's wish he wanted a different style for each part of her life - this definitely doesnt come across in translation. It may account for the strange way the relationship with the little princess is written.

Like the other short works I have read of his at this time it is also about the power of art and writing itself. The character's partial liberation comes from getting a secret key to the library and discovering the joys of fiction in particular the novels of Walter Scott - a pioneer of that form - Although this source also provides the root of the downfall from her last familial setting. Art is also shown through music and the mercurial nature of her stepfather. According to the Dost biography I am reading he wanted the character to become an artist - so the interaction of art and life was going to be a constant in the work.

Unusual that he never returned to this, unlike the Double which he re-worked after his decade's absence, perhaps the moment had passed or he felt he could deal with the ideas and themes in a different way. A fragment, then, but gives a glimpse of his power as a writer and of how he would later construct his big novels.

John Cheever Collected Stories part 2 - drilling down to the core.

There's a point when I was reading the second half of Cheever's complete collection of stories (I completed first half earlier this year) when you think he can't better the one you've just read but he does.

For me he really raised his game consistently between the end of the 50s and early 60s. You could argue that this is the period when his alienated bourgeois suburban lifestyle was beginning perhaps to get a little dated in the States. Yet his laser like eye for detail means he really just hones his craft, outlining the destructive nature of these claustrophobic cocoons which the quite wealthy have put themselves into.

Unlike his Wapshot novels the sexual alienation which are felt by the characters (male mainly) is not represented by any gay encounters - with the slight exception of a couple of stories but through the constancy of adultery. The Country Husband (brilliant), the Chimera, the Brigadier and the Golf Widow all show the essential sadness of betrayal but also the essential sadness of the life which nominally they seem to want to escape from.

There are less classical references than his novels although one story Metamorphoses attempts to transfer Ovid's work to suburbia.

His later works also combine more Italian travels with the American world - some dealing with the ex pat world of the American living there - others with the Italian attempting to fit into modern consumer capitalism: Clemintina for example. I recently saw the Antonioni movie L'Avventura based in Sicily and the time frame (1960) and the group it focussed on - the Italian wealthy reminded me strongly of Cheever's work.

As the stories progress (this work is chronological) the early references to the servants and the poor of consumer post war America are less. The focus is more on the internal distintegration of these high salaried individuals with their world of hard liquor and regular trains. There are also very little specific historical points of reference although there is an excellent working in of a domestic nuclear bunker within suburbia in the Brigadier story- around the Cuban Missile crisis. He even creates his own suburban neighbourhood, Bullet Park - the title of one of his later novels.

The zenith I think comes with the Swimmer (written in 1967) - unsurprisinglythe basis of a movie with Burt Lancaster. It is breathtaking in what it does in such a short space - it's only around 10 pages yet Cheever considered making a novel on the theme , having 150 pages of notes. This condensing intrigues me and is really more like the mechanics of writing poetry. The work is quite experimental and every word is relevant and powerful. It concerns the travel of a man across his suburban landscape swimming through each of his neighbours' swimming pools - but embarking on the journey he (and Cheever) drill down to exactly what this society represents - the deceit, the social climbing- and exposes the whole edifice with a chilling final paragraph. It's like a summary of all of Cheever's work, quite brilliant.

An unfortunate theme in some of these later stories much more prominent than in his earlier work is the deceitful and selfish nature of women : Clementina, An Educated American Woman and The Geometry of Love leave a slightly bitter taste in the mouth over their portrayal of women. Not that men get it much easier it just seems a bit nastier - I think there was quite a lot of turmoil in his private life at this time which is definitely worked through here.

I would also add that the last few stories written in the 70s when he also wrote two novels are a little weaker perhaps because they don't have the discipline and tightness of the other prose which were published in the New Yorker magazine. Ironically they seem to come from the collection called the World of Apples - the titular story concerns an old highly respected poet (An American in Italy)who becomes focused on sexuality and obscenity as he nears the end of his life - writing endless dirty limericks until he resolves the issues. Yet all Cheever's subsequent stories are equally explicit with reference to orgies, pornography and masturbation - he apparently had to publish them in Playboy as the New Yorker refused. They don't really work for the most part although even them have the occasional phrase or sentence which reflect his brilliance as a writer.

So flaws exposed as his work and indeed his life drew to a close but an amazing collection of work. 2011 has been an eventful year but one of my highlights has been my discovery of John Cheever's writing.

Dostoyevsky: The Double - Fear and Loathing in St Petersburg.

Did you ever have a moment in your life when you act in such a way that you dont recognise yourself - as if you were looking in from outside? Well old FD seems to have or rather young written alongside Poor Folk when he was 26. That very 20th century form the existential novel seems to have a forebear here in Dostoevsky's second work and first traditional novel.

It was a critical failure at the time apparently particularly amongst the left intelligentsia who had seen (and overstated I think) in D's first work a new voice exploring the poverty and inequities of Tsarist Russia. But it was so important to the writer that he spent many years re-writing it when he got out of his Siberian exile.

Narratively the work is "fantastic" in that it deals with a middle ranking civil servant in mid nineteenth century St Petersburg confronting some one who is his literal doppelganger. Yet although they start on friendly terms the double soon undermines him at work, humiliates him in front of women and makes him pay for ten pastries he buys and consumes at a German bakers!

Through this unusal prism FD explores the static nature of Russian feudalism, as in Poor Folk, the frustration of accepting without question such an unfair society. Yet to the chagrin of the critics he doesnt do it through a downtrodden serf or a decadent aristocratic but a pompous bureaucrat with a servant who he treats pretty badly.

But Golyadkin, the name of the dual character, is collapsing. His other doesn't appear in the work until after he's spent a morning skiving off work, wandering around shops promising to pay for stuff and then not, tried to get medication from his doctor and he has humiliated himself in front of a beautiful woman whilst at a party. Sounds like a modern tale !

I think all of these events are a catalyst for the self-examination which is externalised with the appearance of his look - a - likey. The passages where Golyadkin examines his faults and then pulls back to put a superficial brave face on it to admit everything is fine are painful to read yet anyone who has ever had self-doubt (which I would hope is everyone) will clearly identify with them. The problem is every time he resolves to make the best of things his double appears and stamps all over them

Golyadkin goes even further though ending up being carted away by his sinister doctor to an asylum we guess lost in the throes of mental illness crying "I think Im all right". I think the work is a brilliant examination of mental disintegration and the feeling of not having a place in a society which is completely reliant on structure. Golyadkin is an outsider who doesnt want to be - indeed in one of the passages he accuses his double of being disdainful of the rightful order of things.

Way ahead of its time in many ways but strangely it is quite contemporary - the sense of 1840s St.Petersburg is palpable - indeed the sub-title of the work is A Petersburg Poem. Reference is made to music and prose of the time (again like Poor Folk).

The tale works if you believe it is possible you can have an absolute double or if you view it as a sort of fantasy but I really think it is more about the single, the struggle that we all have as individuals to keep things together particularly when someone (who looks very much like ourselves) is trying to rip them apart.

I saw after finishing this that the guy out the IT crowd is going to direct a movie of the book - which again is pretty short 130 pages. I'm not surprised the attraction given its universal themes. But for me it was a real surprise as a piece. but a pleasant one.