Her poetic and immersive fourth memoir ‘Bread of Angels’ is both a prequel and a sequel to the bestselling ‘Just Kids’
Patti Smith was in her early teens when she renounced the church. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, she would sit in turmoil in Bible study classes as the elders said there was no place for art in Christ’s kingdom. After having her mind blown by Picasso on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with her father, Smith came to a decision: she stopped going to Bible study, cast off her religion and “gave my evolving self to art”.
Smith – who is now 78 – would be reminded of that moment years later when she took a lengthy break from music. After the release of Horses, her landmark 1975 album which she memorably described as “three chords merged with the power of the word”, she was hailed as a trailblazer, the godmother of punk. But fame didn’t sit well with Smith who, previously a poet and visual artist, had never planned to front a band. And so, in 1979, she decided “to reclaim who I was”, give up music and settle down with her husband, the MC5’s Fred “Sonic” Smith, in Detroit. “Walking away was my second declaration of existence,” she notes.
Patti Smith with her husband Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith in Detroit in the 80s (Photo: Seiji Matsumoto)
These pivotal moments are recounted in Bread of Angels, Smith’s fourth memoir. Her first was 2010’s award-winning, mega-selling Just Kids, which documented her early years as an artist living in contented squalor with her partner at the time, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, in New York. The next two, M Train and Year of the Monkey, gave glimpses of Smith’s life in the present, touring, writing, visiting old friends and communing with the ghosts of her past.
In its timeline, Bread of Angels is essentially a prequel and sequel to Just Kids; while not the same heady snapshot of a time and place, it nonetheless showcases Smith’s storytelling flair as it fills the gaps the book left behind. The early chapters dig deep into Smith’s post-war childhood that was shaped by poverty, first in Chicago and later Pennsylvania and New Jersey and where, between life-threatening bouts of tuberculosis, scarlet fever and pneumonia, she would run feral with her siblings, emerging victorious in battles with rival gangs.
If her everyday life was often brutal, her interior world was rich and revelatory. The young Smith was mesmerised by animals, the landscape and, most of all, books, which she saw as containing “wisdom and sacred mysteries”. In her late teens she was transfixed by Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell and its author’s “seemingly supernatural power over language while displaying a vehement self-loathing… I recognised a relatable duality, the demonic hand in hand with the charitable”.
Smith at home with two of her younger siblings (Photo: Patti Smith)
Smith’s recall of events from over half a century ago is pin-sharp, brimming with period detail. Her prose, meanwhile, is evocative and poetic, spiced with flashes of humour. She doesn’t so much observe her own life as plunge us into her psyche, allowing us to see the world through her eyes. As with all of Smith’s memoirs, there are celebrity cameos, among them William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepard, Bob Dylan and Sid Vicious.
The book’s third act is taken up with the author’s time in Detroit raising a family, a domestic idyll that was ruptured in 1994 when her husband died from heart failure aged 46. Suddenly the sole breadwinner, Smith was forced to go back to work. As detailed here, her life since then has combined terrible loss – along with her husband, she endured the deaths of Mapplethorpe, her brother, Todd, and, later, her parents – and intense creativity taking in music, performance and the written word.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Horses, the album that sealed Smith’s status as rock’s renaissance woman. That she is still creating as she approaches her ninth decade feels miraculous. In Bread of Angels, she notes how age has brought a “brilliant calm, akin to natural light. All about us is debris, and yet we step lightly so not to tread a waning silhouette, our own primordial skin”.
‘Bread of Angels’ is published by Bloomsbury, £25
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