by Claire Franken
When Patti Smith was awarded the key to New York City in December, she wondered, “What have I given to New York City to earn this?” In recent years, her Substack poems and charming Instagram videos featuring readings, tangential musings, and interruptions from her cat, Cairo, seem like enough for any one person to gift the world. Yet over the course of her career, Smith has given us so much more. Through her music and her writing, Smith has counseled us on how to nurture a mischievous soul; she has taught us how to realize dreams, sometimes exchanging old dreams for new ones, and how to find beauty beneath the most rugged veneers. “I wish I could give New York City a key to me,” she said in her acceptance speech.
With her 2019 memoir Year of the Monkey, Smith added to the living body of work that helps unlock her life. In the book, Smith travels from California to New York, hitchhiking in strangers’ silent cars and dreaming Nescafé-induced dreams in diners and motel rooms. She begins her story on New Year’s Day 2016, when she learns her friend Sandy Pearlman is comatose after suffering a brain hemorrhage in San Francisco. She recounts Pearlman’s death with the same tenderness and care she uses in her first memoir, Just Kids, to describe her life and relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.
Pearlman’s health emergency is just one of several darkly auspicious events reflecting the deterioration of Smith’s America, moving through the Democratic National Convention and culminating in the inauguration of Donald Trump. She weaves together dreams and imaginative reverie; motel signs taunt her aloud, fueling her broader impression that American culture is mocking her too. Her descriptions of personal and cultural collapse can be dark, but Smith always manages to console us, teaching us how to navigate our own way.
Patti Smith’s Year of the Monkey (Knopf Doubleday, 2019)
At one point, Smith finds a candy wrapper on the beach in Santa Cruz. Later she hears a group of teenagers discussing whether “candy wrapper” is a noun. This prompts her to return to her own candy wrapper and discovers it says “Peanut Chewz.” These peculiarities are jarring at first. But as the book continues, Smith convinces us that perhaps if we, too, paid close attention to garbage on the beach, we could all be charmed by coincidence. In New York City — a place marked by unfeeling, ignoring, and looking away from passersby — Smith has shown us an alternative for moving through the world, one that requires care and attention.
In Smith’s stories, oddities are never singular: each one inspires another. A heavy rain is a “melancholy witness to Sandy’s struggles.” A lost coat isn’t lost at all, but simply waiting somewhere as a talisman to greet her in the afterlife. A piece of skin hanging from a waitress’ lip can transport her out of reality. A dream on Joan of Arc’s feast day produces images of a sick friend healed. Smith feels things intensely but recounts them plainly; of course a lost coat could never just be lost.
In her December speech, Smith talked about how New York City had embraced her, but in her work, we see that to be embraced one must search for connections, for reason. Throughout Year of the Monkey, Smith builds upon the nonsensical, nonlinear style of writing she explores in another earlier memoir, M Train. She doesn’t just alternate between dreams and reality; she overlaps them, and with such fluidity that the reader begins to wonder what’s real. In one chapter, she feels a moment of “sorrow’s vertigo” for her late husband on their wedding anniversary. She writes: “In the outer world, the sky had fast darkened, high winds moved in four directions, churning in concert with a rapid onset of torrential rains, and just like that everything broke.” The water rushes in through a skylight until it reaches her knees. Then the door disappears.
“Trapped in the center of my room when an elliptical blackness, a widening aperture, taking up much of the plaster wall, opened onto a lengthy path strewn with dark toys,” she continues. “Wading toward it I saw errant tops zigzagging through a narrow lea of daffodils, mowing them down… I reached out, blindly seeking a way out or a way into the void.” Smith later inspects the wall’s plaster and finds it perfectly intact. The reader wonders how much of this scene is real. At first, we assume, the wall must not have opened as she described it, and that the meadows she saw were a hallucination, a dream, or a metaphor. Later, she concedes that the wall never collapsed but maintains that flowers remain scattered on the floor: “water dripped from the unsecured sections of the skylight. Severed bloom everywhere…” She tosses them in the trash.
You might flip back to the beginning pages to verify that, yes, the book is indeed a memoir, that Smith is telling a nonfiction story. We feel frustrated by her lack of respect for genre; we didn’t sign up for fantasy. But by the end of the scene, we somehow understand exactly what she means. We find there is no distinction for Smith between outer and inner worlds. Of course the wall didn’t break, but of course she saw “severed bloom everywhere” because this was “sorrow’s vertigo.” There is no better explanation. One simply has to read Smith to understand how her writing persuades us to see otherworldly things in the everyday, things only she can see.
Dreams are an alternate dimension where Smith feels deeply, remembers old friends, and creates characters who confront her with realizations and desires she seems unable to understand on her own. One character, Ernest, invites questions to his legitimacy in the physical world, so much so that Smith asks if he is a hologram (he never answers). Ernest tells Smith early in the book, “some dreams aren’t dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality.” This seems the guiding principle of Smith and her work: an understanding of reality and life from overlapping and intersecting dimensions that multiply and multiply until her writing transcends genre and the truth of the situation is revealed by combining fiction and fact. That is the key Smith has given us: a constantly evolving framework for seeing a seemingly stagnant world.
Claire Franken is a writer based in Manhattan. She’s pursuing an M.A. in Cultural Reporting & Criticism at NYU. Get to know her better: @clairefranken1
Lead photo by Beni Köhler.
