The publication date Patti Smith chose for her latest memoir, Bread of Angels, is not just happenstance: Nov. 4 is the day her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith died (in 1994), and the birthday of her comrade-in-arts, Robert Mapplethorpe (in 1946). Both men died in their 40s, "the love of my life and the artist of my life," the celebrated punk rock star and author writes.
Bread of Angels is Smith's most straightforwardly autobiographical book to date. It touches on material she's written about before, but her focus this time is her trajectory from a working class childhood in Pennsylvania and south Jersey into her stage and recording career — which she put on hiatus during her marriage and reignited during her widowhood. The title Bread of Angels refers to the "unpremeditated gestures of kindness" Smith has experienced along the way, which color her essentially optimistic attitude toward life.
In the last 15 years, Smith has produced a tidy collection of small books that braid ruminations on her current endeavors with memories and photographs of her much-missed lovers and friends. The best is her National Book Award-winning Just Kids (2010), an extraordinarily resonant record of her relationship with Mapplethorpe. A Book of Days, in which she commemorates her journeys, personal touchstones, and the birth and death dates of her various heroes with evocative snapshots and brief appreciations, underscores her associations of people and memories with specific dates.
Smith credits her parents for a stable, nurturing childhood despite economic and health challenges. Her father, Grant Harrison Smith, returned to Philadelphia from active duty in New Guinea and the Philippines "emotionally broken and plagued with malaria-induced migraines." Jilted by his longtime girlfriend, he reconnected with Beverly Williams, whom he had known in high school. Their first three (of four) children came in rapid succession. Unable to complete his education, Smith's father worked the night shift in a union factory; her mother waited tables.
Smith, born in 1946, writes that she was a sickly baby whose "Proustian childhood, one of intermittent quarantine and convalescence," was marked by numerous contagious diseases, but also by free-ranging fantasy play with her siblings, "a visceral need to be free," and an early passion for books, shared with her mother.
In her first four years of life, Smith's family relocated 11 times, forced out of a series of condemned buildings. When she was 8, her parents bought a house in a lower-middle class development for veterans in rural south Jersey. Her Bible-reading father rejected organized religion, but her mother became an active Jehovah's Witness, taking her children with her to knock on doors. By her teens, Smith discovered her calling in music and art. When she was 15, she writes, "The angels served a new portion; I discovered [the French poet] Arthur Rimbaud."
Much of the material in Bread of Angels will be familiar to readers of Smith's prior memoirs, including recaps of her early years in 1960s and 1970s New York City. But she goes into more detail about her swift rise from poet to punk rocker, and the production of her first album, Horses, now celebrating its 50th anniversary. "There was no plan, no design, just an organic upheaval that took me from written to spoken word," she writes. "From solitude to collaboration ... One thing tumbled into another."
Her account of her devotion to Fred Sonic Smith, for whom she cast off "the mantle of fame and fortune" and moved to Detroit, is unabashedly gushing. "I knew instantly he would be my life. Such is the terrible mystery of love, that draws us from all that we know," she writes. Grounded by domesticity and children, she turned to writing, but struggled with "characters in stories reluctant to be born, until I shook the cage of imagination, shocked them free to wreak havoc, gather wishes and trample time." What's shocking here is the overwriting from the ordinarily pitch perfect Smith.
At points, the last third of Bread of Angels reads like quick notes for future biographers. But there are intriguing revelations, including the surprising discovery that Grant Smith was not her biological father — whose identity was uncovered with the help of the daughter she gave up for adoption when she was barely 20.
Smith's tally of her many losses in the 1980s and 1990s brings to mind the 19th century French writer Gustave Flaubert, who, after the deaths of several close friends, commented: "My heart is becoming a necropolis." Smith might relate. But her attitude is better reflected by her new book's upbeat epigraph, from another 19th century author, Nikolai Gogol: "Obstacles are our wings." Smith is a survivor who has made it her mission to "leap back up" and keep going after setbacks. Now approaching the end of her 70s, she has remained active — performing, touring, traveling and writing.
The tone of Bread of Angels veers between elegy and engagement. She mourns "the worlds I knew, the hopes of my generation," yet celebrates "the concentrative energy of a new idea emerging." She concludes that her "incandescent restlessness has somewhat quelled" but that she hasn't changed much. Her latest project: "the excruciating yet exquisite process of letting go." Stay tuned.
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