The singer Patti Smith has given the gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and herself a monument: Her book "Just Kids" is the wonderful story of a friendship without end.
Patti Smith discovered her best friend in bed in a back room in New York, "wrapped in sunlight". The budding poet wanted to visit friends who had forgotten to tell her that they had left the city on the Hudson for good a few days earlier. The young squatter Robert Mapplethorpe was "asleep and dreaming, at least that's how he looked: beautiful."
When he woke up, the poet and the budding artist quickly became best friends. They spent their days sitting around in Central Park, contemplating the world, New York and themselves and having their photos taken by tourists who were looking for "the bohemian" at the end of the 1960s. And waiting for fame.
This would come to both of them sooner than they could have imagined. Patti Smith, a huge Bob Dylan fan, became the reluctant figurehead of a new feminist singer/songwriter generation with her album "Horses" in the early 1970s. Robert Mapplethorpe became one of the biggest stars of international photography, starting with the album cover, then with his disturbing S&M shots and male nudes.
Robert Mapplethorpe dies of the consequences of Aids in 1989. The last thing Patti Smith hears of him is his heavy breathing, telling her by long-distance phone: "It's over, soon. Tomorrow. Go to sleep."
The death of the photographer is the beginning of the book that Smith has now written about their friendship: "Just Kids". However, Smith doesn't want to say any more about it. "Just Kids" is written as a retrospective and tells of the beginnings, both his and hers.
The book is a story about innocence lost and regained, about the different stages of a friendship that is so stable that even death cannot harm it. And somehow also about the fact that only those who know what dreams you had when you were young and what they looked like when you dreamt them can really know you.
Smith remembers trying to maintain her innocence, even when she was sitting drunk in a bar between Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. She recounts how Mapplethorpe wanted nothing more than to squander his innocence on Andy Warhol in order to become exactly like the admired master. She recapitulates her horror at his first photographs of men as well as his envy of her "stardom".
And she confesses that she didn't know exactly what she looked like until he had seen and photographed her: tart, masculine, incredibly exciting.
"Just Kids" is the legend of Patti and Robert, also stylistically. Where Smith as a songwriter often tends to use a wealth of moralising metaphors, in the book she celebrates emotion with big, simple words. At times it reads like a big fairy tale about the hippie generation, without being any less cruel or accurate than a Grimm parable about queens who have to dance themselves to death in red-hot shoes.
In all of this, the author openly admits that her Verclarification is at least as important as Heclarification. The two prodigies go through their life together without a thought of its end and the reader follows them with pricked ears and tears in their eyes.
Because they are so beautiful and so true, and because anyone who has ever dreamt of sleeping in the sun can find themselves a little in them and get lost in them.
Can you do that, work on your own myth the way Smith does in "Just Kids"? If you do it as well as she does, then definitely!
(Paul Schulz)
Patti Smith: "Just Kids", Kiepenheuer &Witsch, 304 pages, 19.95 euros
Patti Smith plays on 4 July in Bonn (Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle) and on 5 July in Berlin (Zitadelle Spandau)
