There are no fixed boundaries in the world of Patti Smith, who was born on this day in 1946: her dreams seep through her waking hours, the dead speak to her, she journeys on a whim, Anwen Crawford writes.
Patti Smith loves coffee. It courses through her new memoir, “M Train,” like a dark, steaming river, connecting her various adventures. In her early twenties, Smith travelled to Veracruz, Mexico, on the advice of William S. Burroughs, who advised her that the best coffee beans in the world were grown in the mountains there, but she’s no snob: a large serving from 7-Eleven—accompanied, on occasion, by a glazed doughnut—will do, if necessary.
Unlike “Just Kids,” Smith’s previous memoir, “M Train” is not a sustained narrative but a collection of short, loosely connected essays. Each piece shuttles backward and forward through time; she might start somewhere like the present day, but soon Smith is transported across years and continents, and off we go with her, like neophytes accompanying a seasoned pilgrim.
This is far from Smith’s strangest journey, or her most recondite quest. In Tokyo she sweeps the grave of the Japanese novelist Osamu Dezai; in Tangier she attends a conference of “the gone Beats’ orphaned children.” She travels to Reykjavík and Berlin as a member of the Continental Drift Club, a secretive society dedicated to the legacy of the German researcher Alfred Wegener. The Club has strictly twenty-seven members, referred to only by number; Smith is number twenty-three.
While Smith’s attitude to objects is devotional rather than acquisitive , she holds dearly to the things she has. A favorite café chair, her father’s desk, a fishing lure given to her by her husband: each is a relic of people and places now lost. “M Train” is the work of an artist growing older and becoming lonelier—the word “empty” appears often, as if even Manhattan were uninhabited.
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