What are we to make of
Woolgathering, this hand-sized book by the legend Patti Smith? First published in 1992 as a Hanuman Book and described by its author (years later, upon its re-release) as absolutely true. The book, legendary singer/writer tells us, was such that in its writing Smith was drawn from her "strange torpor." Here she is, looking back:
In 1991 I lived on the outskirts of Detroit with my husband and two children in an old stone house set by a canal that emptied into Lake Saint Clair. Ivy and morning glory climbed the deteriorating walls. A profusion of grapevines and wild roses draped the balcony, where doves nested in their tangles.... I truly loved my family and our home, yet that spring I experienced a terrible and inexpressible melancholy. I would sit for hours, when my chores were done and the children at school, beneath the willows, lost in thought. That was the atmosphere of my life as I began to compose Woolgathering.
There are photographs in this slight book—many of clouds, many of childhood places. There are concentrated memories, phantoms, distillations intensely personal and inescapably vivid. Some of the passages begin like the beginnings of psalms, or songs, while others break toward a private vocabulary.
Here is a line:
Exclamation! Questions of origin, scope.
Here is a scene, a codex, a rebus:
How happy we are as children. How the light is dimmed by the voice of reason. We wander through life—a setting without a stone. Until one day we take a turn and there it lies on the ground before us, a drop of faceted blood, more real than a ghost, glowing. If we stir it may disappear. If we fail to act nothing will be reclaimed. There is a way in this little riddle. To utter one's own prayer. In what manner it doesn't matter. For when it is over that person shall possess the only jewel worth keeping. The only grain worth giving away.
Woolgathering is a book of parts. It is a prayer set into motion. It is a return to child awe, a vindication of at least some part of adult responsibilities to make sense of things, to cohere. What do our minds do when we let them roam and wonder? Something perhaps, like this. Let Patti Smith lead the way.
Thanks to my friend Elizabeth Mosier, I will be seeing Patti Smith this coming Thursday evening at Bryn Mawr College. Elizabeth knows what a huge Patti Smith fan I am (I could not stop raving about
Just Kids, for example (a book featured prominently in my forthcoming
Handling the Truth), or about
Smith's interview with Johnny Depp in the pages of
Vanity Fair). She knows how proud I was of her piece about Smith in her alum magazine,
here. And she knows that, even if I cannot find just the right cocktail dress to wear (because I end up looking so lousy in all of them), I will stand proudly at her side on Thursday, when the Main Line welcomes Patti to town.
For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.
I never read nearly as much as I'd like to read—my multiple worlds are perpetually colliding, fracturing time. But I was so gratified to learn that, on this year's list of
NBCC nominees, many of the books I'd loved best and celebrated here, on my blog, are being equally celebrated by the judges. In Autobiography, there's Patti Smith's remarkable
Just Kids, Darin Strauss's deeply moving
Half a Life, and the thoughtful, provocative
Hiroshima in the Morning, by my much-loved friend, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. In Criticism, there's Elif Batuman's
The Possessed and Ander Monson's
Vanishing Point. I'd put all five books on my Penn syllabus months ago, and here they are—proven, lifted, upheld.
A huge congratulations to them all, and, especially, to my dear friend, Reiko. I've linked to my own reflections about these books here, should you be interested in how they affected me early on.
I couldn't stop reading
Just Kids, Patti Smith's memoir. I was supposed to be doing other things—was in the land of mouse ears and Grumpy, among writers and teachers, in a hotel nestled around this cloud-reflecting lagoon. But Patti Smith writes poetry, she tells a story, she searches for truth, and
Just Kids is so full of the surprising line, the arresting scene. It's full of Patti Smith herself, a rock and roller with a vulnerable heart, a scorcher of a performer who nonetheless craves the sacred companionship of books.
Just Kids is advertised primarily as the story of Smith's relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, and that it is. But it is also the story of Smith's ascension through art—the years she spent choosing between buying a cheap meal and an old imprint, between being an artist or a writer, between being Mapplethorpe's lover and his best friend. She tells us about the conversations that generate ideas among artists and friends, about coincidences that set a life on its path, about the clothes she wore and the mis-impressions she couldn't correct, about a kind of love that is bigger than any definition the world might want to latch onto it. She yields an entire era to us, and though her writing is all sinew, strength, and honesty, she does not once betray her friends, does not invite us to imagine privacies that should remain beyond the veil.
This is, then, a revelation of a book, an exemplar. I could quote from every line. I'll simply give you the beginning:
When I was very young, my mother took me for walks in Humboldt Park, along the edge of the Prairie River. I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates, of an old boathouse, a circular band shell, an arched stone bridge. The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle. A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage.
You don't assess writing like that. You honor it. The National Book Award Nonfiction Panel got this one just right.
Because Lilian Nattel is a very brilliant author and reader, I trust her, and when
she sang the praises of Adam Foulds'
The Quickening Maze back in late June, I knew I'd be reading the book sooner than later. And when the dear and deep and perpetually risk-taking
Elizabeth Hand wrote (long before the National Book Award list had been unveiled) that I absolutely had to read
Just Kids by Patti Smith (she'd
reviewed it for the
Washington Post), I said,
All right, Liz. I will.Yesterday, released for the afternoon from client work, I headed to the
Chester County Book & Music Company, which is another version of paradise on earth. We're talking an indie book store here that feels a city block deep, and those who work there stack their favorite reads up and down end shelves. I get lost there, and I don't mind one bit.
This afternoon, I board a plane. Smith's coming with me. So is Foulds.
Oh, my - more delicious items for my to-read list...
Congratulations all around!
...A.
Ditto--more books I clearly need to look into!
And, I completely understand about the fracturing of time/too much to read/not enough time dilemma. Story of my life. :)