The Odyssey of Patti Smith

Those of us who even vaguely remember the late 70’s music scene can take a moment to look back and celebrate the 50th anniversary of Patti Smith’s seminal work, “Horses,” which is receiving a lot of well-deserved praise in both literary and musical quarters.

Like other notable artists of that era who masterfully blended poetic passion and musical calling (think Bob Dylan), she created one of the most important rock albums of the last century by adding a raw edge in her vocal delivery.

But across the decades of the 50 years that have passed, what I have come to celebrate, more than her poetry and music are her essays and memoirs. In her National Book Award winning “Just Kids,” she wrote of her journey from South Jersey misfit to scrappy writer and ultimate survivor in the Chelsey Hotel world of New York City in the late 60s and early 70s with her artistic and romantic partner Robert Maplethorpe.

But the artistic and romantic partner labels don’t do justice to the journey they took together in that era, which was to become a metaphor for the journey an entire generation of young disaffected youth took trying to find their way in post 50s America.

Like several other memoirs she has written since “Just Kids,” with “M Train” among my favorites, she reminds us that all memoirs are, at their core, the essential Homeric Odyssey – a journey outward of searching and, ultimately, a journey home again.

In Odysseus’ case, from his home in Troy to Ithaca and back, and in Ms. Smith’s case from a person who set out seeking her own identity and purpose in life to returning “home” as a more fully realized, self-defined person.

A journey with which we all identify because it is a journey we all must take.

Some parts of our leaving – our journey outward – are relatively predictable for their pre-defined and linear paths and milestones, like college and career. While others follow a route less defined, as was Ms. Smith’s, the arc of which is uneven, with challenges unknown until lived, whose risks are greater, and whose life discoveries can be truly remarkable.

Some take the predictable journey because it is easier, perhaps paved by privilege, class, or wealth. Others take the less predictable perhaps because the easier path is simply not available, perhaps because they don’t have the resources or the inclination to follow such a life script.

If Ms. Smith’s generation taught us anything, it is that we need to pay close attention to the path we are drawn to, even if it is less defined, rather than the easiest and more visible one often laid out before us.

And the journey a seventeen-year-old Ms. Smith began by moving to New York without a place to stay, a job, family to support her, or a friend to guide her, says everything you need to know about her courage, grit, and wonder.

To say she made her own luck could not be farther from the truth for she chose her path knowing full well that luck was what happened to the pretty ones, the privileged ones, and the rule followers. She was, and proudly remains, none of those.

While her vast literary and musical oeuvre is rightly highly regarded by critics, it is her life journey and ability to share it so poignantly on the page that I love most. Her sentences reveal an empathy and tender regard for life itself beyond that which her music alone confronts.

Odysseus returned home to find a radically changed place. Patti Smith created the place she set out to find, and in doing so, came home to herself.