“This is how I live, I am thinking.”
“I walked east to St. Mark’s Bookshop, where I roamed the aisles, randomly selecting, feeling papers, and examining fonts, praying for a perfect opening line. (…).”
Written in poetic, luminous, melancholic and fragmentary prose M Train by Patti Smith is an introspective non-chronological and non-linear memoir capturing the texture of fleeting moments and the rich landscape of a sensitive artistic soul contemplating the meaning of artistic influences, solitude, loss, memory, the mystical nature of travel and the importance of small mundane rituals in everyday life.
In M Train Patti Smith takes a reader on a journey to various places across the world following the footsteps of writers and artists who inspired her throughout her life. Patti travels to French Guyana and Berlin to look for places once visited by Jean Genet whose book The Thief’s Journal then accompanies her on her bus ride from Madrid to Valencia; to Mexico City to connect with the memories of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo; to Weimar to see the house in which once Nietzsche lived; to London where she walks along the famous Charing Cross Road known for independent bookstores where she buys the first edition of Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees and a copy of Ibsen’s plays; to Lawrence, Kansas to visit William Burroughs where she sees him living “in a modest house, with his cats, his books (…)”; to Cambridge after reading about he scuffle between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein at King’s College and to visit Wittgenstein’s grave in Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge; to Tangier to interview Paul Bowles in the late 1990s whose flat’s walls and halls were lined with books,”books that [she] knew and books [she] wished to know”; to Kamakura and Tokyo to find the places related to Osamu Dazai, Mishima, Murakami, Akutagawa, Kawabata, Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa:
“Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Osamu Dazai wrote the books that drove me to such wondrous distraction, the same books that are now on the bed table. I was thinking of them. They came to me in Michigan and I have brought them back to Japan. Both writers took their own lives.“
Heptonstall in England is another place that Patti travels to numerous times throughout the years to visit Sylvia Plath’s grave:
“It was such a desolate place in winter, so lonely. Why had her husband buried her here? (…) some part of me wanting her to feel that proximate human warmth. (…) In early spring I visited Sylvia Plath’s grave for a third time, with my sister Linda. She longed to journey through Brontë country and so we did together. We traced the steps of the Brontë sisters and then travelled up the hill to trace mine. (…) I sat quietly by the grave, conscious of a rare, suspended peace.”
Travel is shown as a way to seek a connection, and meaning in life as well as to create memories. Places that Patti visits have been shaped by others and the traces of these others are what Patti is looking for in her travels making each journey a mystical experience:
“I was going to see the things that mattered to other people, to stand where they stood, to walk where they walked.”
“I craved to be somewhere else, to lose myself in an unfamiliar city, to sit in an unfamiliar café, to be a stranger among strangers.”
The exploration of solitude in M Train constitutes the emotional arch of the memoir. Patti often travels alone, watches her favourite ITV3 detective dramas by herself. She often goes on solitary walks across the newly visited cities like Berlin or Tangier where she wanders aimlessly through the city’s medina in contented silence or when she spends solitary hours in the Cafe Ino in Greenwich Village, Pasternak Cafe in Berlin, Cafe Bohemia in Mexico City, or in Tangier’s Gran Cafe where she notices the pictures of Jean Genet and Mohamed Choukri having a cup of tea at the very same cafe for Patti to realise the sacredness of the connection between her, the place and her beloved writers.
“Paul Bowles once said that Tangier is a place where the past and present exist simultaneously in proportionate degree.“
Patti Smith’s often locates her place in the world through silences, written words by the authors with whom she feels a strong emotional connection and through deep contemplation of the mundane rituals which are the anchors of the familiar.
The importance and sacredness of the everyday rituals and small pleasures that bring comfort is evident throughout the entire memoir. Seeing her late mum’s inscription in the book or having a cup of coffee at her favourite cafe or watching her favourite TV dramas, where the character of the main protagonists mirror Patti’s moodinesses and obsessive nature, provide Patti with calmness.
“I was glad to be home, sleeping in my own bed, with my little television and all my books.”
Throughout the book we accompany Patti in her visits to her favourite place of refuge, a small quiet cafes, first Cafe Dante with its murals of Florence and then Cafe Ino in Greenwich Village wher she feels at home writing and reflecting. For many years Cafe Ino was a spiritual home of safety and inner peace for Patti until it was closed down marking the end of a certain chapter for the artist.
“(…) I was looking forward to sitting at my corner table [at the Cafe Ino] and receiving my black coffee, brown toast and olive oil without asking for it.”
“I’d boil water and pour it into a teapot stuffed wuth mint and spend the afternoon drinking tea, (…) and rereading the tales of Mohammed Mrabet and Isabelle Eberhardt. (…) I would sit by a low window in Cafe Dante thtat looked out into the corner of a small alley, reading Mrabet’s The Beach Cafe. (…) The slow moving atmosphere surrounding the cafe so captivated me that I desired nothing more than to dwell within it.”
The presence of Patti’s late husband Fred Sonic Smith and her late brother Todd is felt throughout the pages of the book. M Train explores the meaning of loss of the loved ones and how those left behind learn to live with their absence through preserved memories of moments spent together. Patti Smith’s writing shows her vulnerability when reflecting on the impact of the absence in her life.
“My yearning for him [Fred] permeated everything – my poems, my songs, my heart.”
“I stopped abruptly at my door, suddenly realising that I would never see him [Patti’s friend, Lou Reed] again. That is death. A disappearing act.”
“How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they re gone?
“Do our lost possessions mourn us? Will my coat, riddled with holes, remember the rich hours of our companionship? Asleep on buses from Vienna to Prague, nights at the opera, walks by the sea, the grave of Swinburne in the Isle of Wight, the arcades of Paris, the taverns of Luray, the cafes of Buenos Aires. (…) why is it that we lose the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after we’re gone?”
In M Train, books are an integral part of Patti’s life. They connect her with others, mark important milestones in her life, bring her peace and solace, are the portals of the world for Patti:
“We [Patti and her late husband Fred] often went to the library, checked out stacks of books and read through the night. (…) Rapt in the atmosphere of certain writers I converted the small storage room (…) into my own. (…) I had yet to settle on the books I would take. I went back into the basement and located a box of books labelled J -1983, my year of Japanese literature. (…) Some were heavily notated; others contained lists of tasks on small slips of graph paper (…).”
““I was fortuitously drawn into the inter dimensional world of Haruki Muraksmi. (…) I had spent the past two years reading and deconstructing Bolano’s 2666 – swept back to front and from every angle. Before 2666, The Master and Margarita had eclipsed all else, and before reading all of Bulgakov there was an exhausting romance with everything Wittgenstein (…). In the weeks to come I would sit at my corner table reading nothing but Murakami. (…) Dance Dance Dance and Kafka on the the Shore swiftly followed Sheep Chase. And then, fatally, I began The Wind – Up Bird Chronicle. That was the one that did me in, setting in motion an unstoppable trajectory, like a meteor hurtling toward a barren and entirely innocent sector of earth.” (…) There are two kinds of masterpieces. There are the classic works monstrous and divine like Moby Dick or Wuthering Heights or Frankenstein. And then there is the type wherein the writer seems to infuse living energy into words as the reader is spun, wrung, and hung out to dry. Devastating books. Like 2666 or The Master and Margarita. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is such a book. “
Book lovers and those interested in all forms of artistic expression will deeply love M Train due to many literary references included in the book. We learn about the impact that the literature had on shaping Patti Smith as an artist and as a deeply sensitive and thoughtful human being.
Patti’s reflections on life, getting older and being in her 60s, loss of her friends and loved ones, grief and solitude are interwoven with her musings on her favourite writers, scientists and artists already mentioned earlier as well as Patrick Modiano, Cesar Aira, Rene Daumal, Bruno Schulz, W.G. Sebald, Rimbaud, Hesse, Beckett, Keats, Robert Graves. Mohammed Mrabet, Bertolt Brecht, Albertine Sarrazin, Isabelle Eberhardt, Anns Kavan, Roberto Bolano, Robert Musil, Gerald Nerval, Friedrich Schiller, Nabokov, Artaud, Maria Callas, Alfred Wegener, Pollock, Albert Camus.
M Train is a beautiful and comforting book that shows the rich tapestry of human experience and explores the landscape of one’s soul providing a deeply rewarding reading experience. It also constitutes a compelling testament to the enduring power of books and literature in one’s life. I highly recommend this book.
