BREAD OF ANGELS, by Patti Smith
How many memoirs can a richly lived life fill? Eleanor Roosevelt published four autobiographies. Shirley MacLaine has written at least five so far. Charles Lindbergh published six autobiographical books, though only “The Spirit of St. Louis” won a Pulitzer Prize. Maya Angelou wrote six or seven, depending on how you categorize the writing. Now, with “Bread of Angels,” Patti Smith has matched Angelou in one of the few things the two poets have in common, with more than six books of autobiographical prose and prose poetry.
Unlike most of her earlier volumes, which tended to focus on particular time periods or sets of events, “Bread of Angels” is an expansive cradle-to-late-life account of Smith’s experiences over eight decades. The prose flows in malleable chronology from Smith’s earliest memories — “The first sensation I remember is movement, my arm waves back and forth,” begins the first chapter as baby Patti knocks her Bugs Bunny doll off her highchair — to her ruminations on “the excruciating yet exquisite process of letting go” in her late 70s. When we get to material she covered thoroughly in “Just Kids,” the narrative of her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from their romping together in the ’60s to the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic that took his life, Smith glances there briefly and pretty much moves on, presumably assuming anyone reading the new book probably knows the predecessor that earned her a National Book Award in 2010.
There are flashing moments of overlap with some of Smith’s previous books in “Bread of Angels.” The semi-autobiographical prose poems in “Woolgathering” touch upon the love of nature Smith developed as an adolescent girl growing up in a tract house built for G.I. Bill families in the farm country of southern New Jersey. “M Train,” the lyrical, elliptical memoir and treatise on the spiritual benefits of coffee published after “Just Kids,” has a bit on Smith’s life outside the cultural spotlight with her late husband, the guitarist and songwriter Fred “Sonic” Smith — a period long shrouded in rumor. Some of Patti Smith’s core ideas about music as a sacred mystery lace through many of her books. Still, one of the marvels of “Bread of Angels” is that, for a work by a memoirist of uncommon prolificacy, it is remarkably fresh, with long sections on subjects about which Smith has rarely written or even said much publicly.
If she hadn’t decided to switch to an expansive mode, she could have spun the contents of “Bread of Angels” into at least three separate books and surpassed Angelou numerically. Embedded in the new text are enlightening, full-bodied treatments of her girlhood, her decade off the cultural map with Fred Smith and their two children, and her reconfigured family life as she unspooled the truth about her paternity and reconnected with a child she had given up for adoption in young adulthood. Smith lingers with particular affection on an early childhood crammed with parents and two younger siblings in a low-rent rooming house in Philadelphia, where she discovered poetry in a book of Irish fairy tales an old neighbor woman would read to her and picked up ideas about culture from slick magazines she scavenged. “High fashion magazines, which I continued to study throughout my youth,” Smith writes, “made an indelible mark, introducing me to the world of art, photography, style and an ever-expanding aesthetic vocabulary.”
For a serious Patti Smith fan who has been following her closely since we lived a few buildings from each other on MacDougal Street in the ’70s, the big reveal in “Bread of Angels” is the slow, warm, unpretentious section about the life Smith lived with her husband and kids in Michigan. Almost nothing about anything they did was reported at the time, and gossip flew — much of it predictably wild but unfounded. Now we know that what Patti and Fred Smith did was set up housekeeping in a stone house on a mucky canal, where she wrote on a little card table; they read books they borrowed from the library, and listened to classical music and John Coltrane records. They bought a boat, on which she kept writing as she sipped coffee from a thermos and he listened to Tigers games on a transistor radio and chugged Bud.
“Our life was obscure, perhaps not so interesting to some, but for us it was a whole life,” Smith writes.
Sometimes challenging, yet I could feel my own evolution in slow, but real time. It was painful, as though scrubbing centuries of skin, ash, debris, from an unearthed vessel coming at last into its own. … I am the same person, I would say to myself, only better. I grew lighter, healthier and sure of the vocation I had chosen above all others. That of a writer.
As she describes it with prosaic eloquence, her decade tantamount to exile was a critical period of transition for her as an artist. Until then, she had enjoyed a special status conferred by the hybrid nature of her musical art. In the punk-rock world, she was thought of as a poet; in the literary world, she was a punk rocker — exceptional by definition in both spheres. Working at her card table, assessing and adjusting her priorities, she came to see herself mainly as a writer. She would write songs, sometimes, yes — and songs with the kinetic energy of Beat poetry, best performed in public with a music of force to suit their spontaneity and fire. But, more and more, what she’d write would take more traditional forms: poetry and prose poetry for chapbooks and readings without musical accompaniment. And books, more than a dozen of them, including a few memoirs.
A core theme of “Bread of Angels,” then, is how its author became someone who would write something like “Bread of Angels.” At points, particularly in the sections on the word-heavy music that made her famous, the book sounds like her songs: spiky, intuitive, more than a little showoffy. The rest of the book is more relaxed, more reflective. As smart and vivid as “Just Kids,” it’s more mature: just older.
BREAD OF ANGELS | By Patti Smith | Random House | 267 pp. | $30
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