The Chatelaine Q&A: Patti Smith on reclaiming solitude

In her 2010 memoir, Just Kids, Patti Smith — musician, writer and idol of stubbornly artistic women the world over — mourned her late friend and lover, New York artist Robert Mapplethorpe. With her latest work, M Train, she’s crafted another elegy: to her late husband, Fred Sonic Smith, to her family and to a life lost to time. In advance of her book tour, I spoke to Smith about a wide range of subjects, from the value of nostalgia and solitary daydreaming to the more humble aspects of her artist's existence, like cleaning up cat vomit. Cultural icons: they're just like us.

What was the impetus for this book?

[With] Just Kids, Robert had asked me the day before he died to tell our story. I had to live up to my promise, but it had its parameters. When I sat down and started writing M Train, I wanted to be liberated from any expectation. No one asked me to write it. I didn’t expect to write about time or my life in Michigan [with]. At the beginning of the book, I have certain things that give me a sense of identity, and by the end of the book, I had lost several of them. It’s like life — it has its symmetry, but it also throws you all huge obstacles or shocks or curves daily.

You seem to be sort of a memory magpie, whether it's the Polaroids in your book or your father’s chair or Fred’s fishing hook. But can’t all that nostalgia be painful, too?

Truthfully, I try to move away from nostalgia. I try to replace it with work. If you get too deeply entrenched, as you said, it can be painful. I talk in the book about how I don’t like to go inside one desk because it has specific objects in it. Not even valuable objects — just an old paperback book of Fred’s that he read over and over, [so] that it’s almost glowing with his energy. But everyday, I remember him. I keep him present. Looking at my own face, I can see my mother. But I have to pick and choose the moments that I let myself really plunge back into the past. You just miss them so much.

Related: Camilla Gibb on heartbreak, hope and the family we choose

You’ve long felt an affinity with works by poets like Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Did you ever stop yourself and say, “Wait, was I born in the wrong era?”

When I was young, I always used to mourn that I wasn’t born in the 19th century — I thought that was my century. I loved the way people dressed and the culture and art and the poetry that came out of it. But now, I find myself mourning the 20th century. There was an innocence. Robert and I had no phone, no TV, no radio. A record player was the only piece of technology in our little apartment. We found stimulus out in the world or talking with one another.

You often describe a real sense of contentment in spending afternoons sitting in the same café with black coffee, daydreaming and writing. But we live in an era of quick convenience, one in which contemplation falls by the wayside.

We could talk about this for hours. I used to work at a bookstore up [on], and at every day at lunchtime, [the] would be packed with people on their lunch break, either talking with a friend or walking by themselves, thinking, daydreaming, just letting their mind rest. But now, I was walking on the same street and looked, and all I saw around me were people arguing on their phones, continuing their workload or trying to figure out what happened to their American Express package. I thought, Where is their downtime? What happened to daydream time?

Related: Judy Blume on confessions, catharsis and coming of age

It seems ironic that people who hold business meetings over the phone probably think of daydreaming as frivolous, but then they’re the ones giving us 80 different flavours of Pop Tarts.

You can’t criticize our culture as it shifts. It’s a collective consciousness. But I do mourn certain things, and I feel concerned about children who are not outside playing and building forts or making up games. There’s nothing wrong with playing video games or watching cartoons, but when it becomes the essential way that you are spending your supposed creative or physical energy, you have to ask yourself if you’re losing something.

I think if people imagined a caricature of an artist’s life, yours would align with it closely: You talk about having imagined conversations with dead poets; you prefer to write in bed and on napkins, which is pretty analog. Do you think we make room for that kind of romanticism anymore?

Things like Instagram have given people creative outlets who perhaps didn’t have them before. They can cheaply make their own music if they’re not on a record label. So [social] has its merits in certain ways. But what I’m thinking of is all of the time lost in just simple contemplation, in getting to know who you are. Having richer and more meaningful communications with the people you care about. I think people have become burdened by this; it’s like we’re all each other’s surveillance cameras. I guess what I’m talking about is time spent on our own. Just feeling things that we don’t need to necessarily tell anybody, that we don’t need to quickly share on Facebook. We have to reclaim our solitude.

Related: Margaret Atwood on modern love

There are also some hilarious interjections in M Train: One minute you’re exploring Frida Kahlo’s house, and the next you’re cleaning up cat puke. So it’s not all glamourous?

I don’t want a glamorous life. I take all these things in stride, and they all have equal weight. Cleaning up cat vomit — I love my cat. And it’s important to show care and love towards those you love, whether it's an animal or your child. Recently, I performed at Glastonbury Music Festival for about 100,000 people, and the Dalai Lama came on stage. It was really a beautiful and exciting time, but I'm still myself. I got off the stage, walked all through the mud, found my tour bus and got back in my bunk. I have some great adventures, but also I'm really happy getting on the train, going to Rockaway [Beach], drinking deli coffee or, you know, having the privilege to shake hands with the Pope. You have to appreciate it all.

In the book, you say, “I miss that particular version of me, the one who was feverish, impious. She has flown, that’s for sure.” Where has that piss-and-vinegar, godmother-of-punk energy gone?

It’s not about me as a performer; I haven’t lost that. I was talking about the obsessive passion or physical energy of youth. I’m 68. I feel like I'm pretty healthy. I like my life but, you know, I live alone. Passing through my consciousness [are] moments of nostalgia, thinking of when [I] in love. That little phrase that you [mentioned], it was just a little whiff of taking a deep breath and going, ‘Ah, I remember when….’

M Train, Patti Smith (Knopf Canada), $32.

Related:
Camilla Gibb on heartbreak, hope and the family we choose Judy Blume on confessions, catharsis and coming of age Margaret Atwood on modern love

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