Patti Smith wades into memory and loss in literary sequel

In M Train, Patti Smith reflects on her life's other great, late love, rocker Fred Sonic Smith whom she married in 1980.

Patti Smith with Fred Sonic Smith.

Revered for her influence on punk rock, Patti Smith more recently proved herself to be a literary heavyweight with her 2010 memoir, Just Kids, which won the National Book Award for non-fiction.

She delves further into her literary persona in a follow-up book, M Train, a meditation on memory, loss and her worldwide quest for the perfect cup of coffee.

Just Kids was a memoir of artistic discovery that offered a tender account of her relationship with avant-garde photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, but also highlighted the gritty New York of the 1960s and 1970s that stirred their creative energies.

In M Train, Smith reflects on her life's other great, late love, rocker Fred Sonic Smith of the band MC5, for whom she relocated to Detroit after they married in 1980.

She returned to New York with their two children after he died in 1994. But M Train is less tied to a city than Just Kids.

Instead, Smith, 68, goes back into her memories – and her photographs – as she fondly recalls trips to places as varied as French Guiana, Tangier, Tokyo and Veracruz, the last of which was reputed to have the world’s best coffee.

Yet M Train is also a book about loss – not only of her husband but of seemingly unrelated anchors in her life, including a club devoted to the study of Alfred Wegener, the German scientist best known for the Continental Drift theory, and a cafe in Greenwich Village where Smith every morning would sit at the same table and order black coffee and brown toast with olive oil.

Upset over a lost coat that bore sentimental value, Smith asks: “Do our lost possessions mourn us?”, wondering whether the coat remembered their times “asleep on buses from Vienna to Prague, nights at the opera, walks by the sea”.

“Why is it that we lose the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after we’re gone?” she writes.

Absent from M Train is virtually any direct mention of Smith's music, from her 1975 album Horses, which is often ranked among rock's most influential, to her best-known song, Because the Night.

Unlike so many rock memoirists, Smith has no interest in boasting of excesses.

In M Train, she obliquely refers to shows as jobs and, to explain how in 1978 she was able to lease a building in New York, writes that she "came into a little money".

“I feel embarrassed when people call me a musician,” Smith said at The New Yorker Festival last week ahead of the book’s release.

She said that she can “play a few chords”, but that she ultimately considered herself a “performer” whose skill was working up crowds.

Smith, who grew up in working-class southern New Jersey, said that neither of her parents completed high school but belonged to a generation that considered reading their entertainment.

Her father, she said, would casually quote Aristotle.

Smith’s own literary aspirations were sparked after her childhood discovery of French doomed poet Arthur Rimbaud, and she has long published her own verse along with music.

Explaining why she wrote the latest book, she joked that her late husband was envious of the attention to Mapplethorpe via Just Kids.

Smith said she had further books in progress, including a companion to Just Kids that would focus on the music.

Merging her literary and musical sides, she is following the release of M Train with a concert tour of Europe and the United States to mark the 40th anniversary of Horses.

With her love of travel, Smith was asked whether New York remained her home.

She said that she did not feel fully at home anywhere, but returned to one of her book’s themes.

For all of the city’s drawbacks, Smith said, a New Yorker rarely has to walk more than a block for a cup of coffee.

* Agence France-Presse