M Train - Patti Smith

'I'm going to remember everything and then I'm going to write it all down... a requiem for a cafe'

M Train is the second volume of Patti Smith’s memoirs, focussing on her later life, and her attempts to connect with her literary and artistic inspirations. Like Bob Dylan in his Chronicles, Smith eschews traditional autobiography in favour of describing her milieu, and the thought processes which lie behind her art. This takes in Scandinavian TV Detectives, painters, writers and actors, her favourite coffee shops, her husband, and a deceased geologist, among many others.

In his review of Just Kids, Edmund White described Smith’s ‘mythic imagination’, and attachment to ‘talismanic objects’. Both qualities are still very much in evidence in M Train.  Smith blends memoir, everyday thoughts, daydreams and travelogue, but M Train is held together by the objects, places and photos which trigger memory. Smith embarks on a quixotic journey to find the mystical places of literature and art, to access some of the power they possess, through proximity to sacred relics.

The narrative takes in a derelict prison in French Guiana, the final stopping point for convicts due to be exiled to Devil's Island, Casa Azul, home of Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the graves of Mishima, Plath, Genet and Akira Kurasawa, but always returns to the Café ‘Ino in Greenwich Village (the same table, if possible – Smith is known to hide in the bathroom until her favourite spot is available, and when the café finally closes down, she is allowed to take her chair home with her). Cafes have a mythical significance to Smith, defining the bohemianism to which she aspired as a young woman, when they 'existed within my books and flourished in my daydreams...nothing seemed more romantic than just to sit and write poetry in a Greenwich Village cafe'.

Where Just Kids detailed Smith’s relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, M Train eulogises Smith’s husband, the musician Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. The couple shared a silent language, each understanding the other’s desire to live quietly outside of the conventions of society. Looking back, Smith conjures up a sort of bohemian hinterland which she inhabited with her husband: 'our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronisation of the jewels and gears of a common mind… shard by shard we are released from the tyranny of so-called time'.

The other man who acts as a spiritual companion to Smith throughout this part of her life is Alfred Wagener, the scientist who originated the theory of Continental Drift, before dying on a disastrous field trip in Greenland in 1930. Smith is invited to join the Alfred Wagener Institute, a society which meets annually to discuss matters relating to the geologist’s life, but unfortunately her attempt to discuss Wagener’s last moments at their conference ends in disaster. Her literary interpretation of the event is met with confusion and anger by the scientists present, who demand facts from her; the talk is abandoned, and the group ceases to exist shortly afterwards, but the spirit of Wagener continues to haunt Smith throughout M Train.

Early in M Train, Smith observes (through the medium of a 'vaguely handsome, intensely laconic' cowboy wearing a Stetson, ‘the same kind… that Lyndon Johnson used to wear’) that 'It's not so easy writing about nothing'. Fortunately, she is able to do so with style. M Train is a poignant examination of a bohemian lifestyle which seems utterly out of step with the pace of modern life. While Smith writes beautifully about her inspirations, the power of books 'wherein the writer seems to infuse living energy into words as the reader is spun, wrung and hung out to dry', it is the insight into the quiet routine of Smith’s solitary existence which gives M Train its emotional weight. Tonally, this is a giant shift from the idealism and energy of Just Kids, but M Train is equally satisfying and enthralling.