Patti Smith's Horses (5 page)

In 1955 the family moved for the last time to the rural New Jersey suburb of Deptford. Smith, by now a tall, skinny eight-year-old with a wandering eye and thick glasses, felt the loss of city life keenly. By contrast her father, now working for the Honeywell Corporation, seems to have adapted well to life in the suburbs; the relative isolation of the family’s single-story ranch house enabled him to retreat further into silence and solipsism, cultivating new interests in Bertrand Russell and the mythologist Joseph Campbell. But as Grant Smith fortified his country retreat, growing huge hedges around the house, his firstborn looked outward. And what she saw was the untamed landscape of her own mind: “there were thousands of fireflies outside my window and a pig farm was nearby. There were six-foot black snakes coming into our yard from the swamps. There was the smell of skunk cabbage. … There was a black barn across the street filled with bats and owls. There were deer” (Delano, 2002). Something, it seems, was about to break in.

In the midst of this gothic wilderness Smith experienced both visions and hallucinations. When she was sick with scarlet fever, her mother would buy her records, the box set of Puccini’s
Madame Butterfly
being a particular favorite. It was around this time that Smith recalls hearing Little Richard’s “The Girl Can’t Help It” on a friend’s RCA Victrola, as she explained to Lisa Robinson in
Hit Parader
in 1976: “My mouth just dropped—it was instant recognition, it really got me below the belt. Little Richard got my mind at six [as the single did not appear until 1956, Smith must in fact have been nine or ten] and I felt the desire to live.”

In
Patti Smith Complete,
the author tells a slightly different version of this first encounter with rock ’n’ roll:

It was Sunday. My mother and I hand in hand. She was taking me to Bible school. She had kid gloves on like the White rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. They gave her a special air and I admired them tremendously. We passed the boys’ clubhouse. … Ritchie Glasgow was spinning sides and what wafted from the hand-cut window (more for breathing than for seeing) stopped me dead in my tracks, causing me to let go of my mother’s hand so abruptly as to remove her glove.

I didn’t know what I was hearing or why I reacted so strongly. It wasn’t “Shrimp Boats” or “Day O.” It was something new and though I didn’t comprehend what drew me, drawn I was. Drawn into a child’s excited dance. That was “Tutti Frutti,” so alien, so familiar. That was Little Richard. That was for me the birth of rock and roll. (1998)

Fittingly, given Richard’s own fraught relationship with the divine, this epiphany occured on a Sunday. Rock ’n’ roll is conceived here as quasireligious, a point to which I will return. Meanwhile, the removal of the mother’s white glove suggests another form of transition, a movement in this case from the havened world of maternal fantasy, signified by the Alice in Wonderland reference, to the clandestine, alien realm of adolescence. To join the boys’ clubhouse, to experience the excitement of this other fantasy world, the girl must leave the mother behind, and, as we shall see, the father as well.

Meanwhile, the hallucinations and visions continued. In
Woolgathering,
a collection of writings from 1992, Smith describes sitting at a window in her room at night while her sister Linda and her younger brother Todd were asleep. In a vision, she saw a gathering of people, speaking an unfamiliar
tongue, wandering around in Thomas’s Field, the land across from her house. “It was an eidetic” or photographic “vision, much like those that Blake had as a child. I believed that those people lived there, gathering light. And I believed that God inhabited that place” (Delano, 2002). Key to all these early experiences is the stress on a kind of uncanny aurality: opera in a foreign tongue, the camp hysteria of Little Richard, and the strange language of the gathering in Thomas’s Field. In later years, Smith would translate these sounds into the multi-tracked echolalia of “Land,” “Poppies,” and “Babelogue,” losing herself in a torrent of words, pushing language to the limits of expression. For the child, the noise of Callas, Puccini, and Little Richard performed a similar function, allowing the young girl to “tap into the emotional content” of her mind in ways that mere language would not allow (Milzoff, 2005). In a derivation of this theme, the feminist theorist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva refers to a “prelinguistic” state of childhood known as the Semiotic. In this state, the very young child is intoxicated with the rhythms, alliterations, or stresses of language. He or she is not yet in a position to carve sense out of language, but instead derives pleasure from indulging in “babble.” My point about Smith’s suspicion of the fixed or unified self can be related to Kristeva’s claim that “the melodies and babblings of infants … are a sound image of their bodily instability. Babies and children’s bodies are made up of erotogenic zones which are extremely excitable, or, on the contrary, indifferent, in a state of constant change, of excitation, or extinction, without there being a fixed identity” (1986). Once the blissful chaos of the Semiotic gives way to the order of the Symbolic, the domain of language and society, which both Lacan and Kristeva associate with the “Law-of-the-Father,”
the child is able to pronounce sentences about him, or herself, and so becomes a subject. But here, again, the entry into language comes at a price. For Kristeva, the Symbolic entails the repression of the child’s desire for the maternal body and for a time of primal delight prior to the imposition of paternal order.

Lying ill in her bed, hallucinating by the fire, held by her mother, while her father withdrew into silence, Patti Smith found in music a means to reconnect with the lost bliss of infancy. But while music enabled the young girl to look backward, it also pointed the way forward, offering in “The Girl Can’t Help It”/“Tutti Frutti” a raucous sense of the power of female sexuality, and intimating, in Puccini’s arias, a profound insight into its depths and terrors. As yet, however, Smith the preadolescent had little sense of herself as a girl. In 1973, reflecting on her childhood for Andy Warhol’s
Interview,
she claimed, “I was always a tom-boy. I hated being a girl. I was always Flash Gordon, not his old-lady. I never identified with any female at all. I hated the look of the 1950s … I would lurk about in limp taffeta and I stuck out like a boil on a bare back” (Green, 1973). Later, she remembered, “I was so involved with boy-rhythms that I never came to grips with the fact that I was a girl. I was twelve years old when my mother took me inside and said, ‘You can’t be wrestling outside without a T-shirt on.’ It was a trauma. In fact, I got so fucked up over it when my mother gave me the big word—that I was absolutely a girl and there was no changing it—that I walked out dazed on a highway with my dog Bambi and let her get hit by a fire engine” (Tosches, 1976).

In the Disney film,
Bambi
(1942) the deer is orphaned at an early stage. The death of his mother initiates a period of comic
adolescence, which ends with the appearance of the “lost” father and Bambi’s symbolic entry into adulthood. For Patti Smith, who on the cusp of womanhood
lets
“her dog get hit by a fire engine,” the word of the mother spells the death of her fantasy of becoming a man or, more specifically, of becoming her father. For what the father offered was a sense of the allure of the phallus, not to be confused here with possession of the penis, an actual physical organ, but rather as the master signifier of the Symbolic order, identified by Lacan as the paternal realm of language, culture, and power. That Smith was, from a very early stage, preoccupied with phallic identity is evident from her 1967 poem “Female”:

female. feel male. Ever since I felt the need to

choose I’d choose male. I felt boy rythums when I

was in knee pants. So I stayed in pants.

I sobbed when I had to use the public ladies

room. My undergarments made me blush.

Every feminine gesture I affected from my mother

humiliated me …

In anger

I cut off all my hair and knelt glassy eyed before

god. I begged him to place me in my own barbaric race.

the male race. The race of my choice.

In answer he injected me with all the characteristics

of my gender. sultry. languid. wanton …
(Smith, 1972)

In light of Lacan’s theorizing, a poem such as this should be read not so much as an expression of the desire to literally become a man, but rather as an attempt to occupy, displace, and perhaps even disrupt the symbolic power of the phallus (see Middleton, 2006). This endeavor, as we shall see, underlies the subversive significance of
Horses,
and is articulated most clearly in the songs “Gloria” and “Land.”

Smith’s passage to adolescence was affected not only by gender trouble, but also by increasing awareness of the competing claims of art and religion, a binary opposition that maps roughly on to the symbolic roles played by her parents. In 1996, Smith stated, “I think that I was really lucky in my parents to be offered those totally opposed poles. My mother taught me to pray when I was, like, two-and-a-half years old, and it expanded my world totally. It was the greatest gift she could ever have given me” (Bracewell, 1996). In addition to the discipline afforded by religious observance, communion with the divine instilled in Smith an abiding hunger for “the Ultimate” while fostering a concern with death and resurrection. As she recalls in a 1973
Creem
essay: “see our house was built on a long swamp. on easter a boy died. he sank in the quick mud and the next morning he floated up like ivory soap. Mama made me go to the wake” (Smith, 1973). From the non-believing Grant, meanwhile, Smith gained an insight into the highest forms of human potential, specifically literature and art. Her early passion for painting, for instance, was almost certainly fostered by visits with her father when she was twelve to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Smith’s fascination with art conflicted, however, with the central precepts of her mother’s religion. Like Beverley, Patti Lee Smith was a Jehovah’s Witness. But since her religion
expressly forbade any form of creative expression, Smith found herself at a turning point. “By the time I was about twelve or thirteen,” she recounts, “I just figured, well, if that was the trip, and the only way you could get to God was through a religion, then I didn’t want any more” (Bockris, 1998). Through her rejection of the mother’s religion, Smith appears to move into the realm of the atheist father. In reality, however, her sense of herself as a creative individual was forged in the tension between these two spheres. To paraphrase William Blake in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(1790), she needed these contraries in order to progress, utilizing the best elements from both to forge a unique vision. From the pole of religion, Smith gleaned an insight into the sublime, a vexed condition where love of the divine, the highest of the high, leads to disdain for the stuff of this world. Although she came to reject the Witnesses’ peculiarly stringent take on the good life, dabbling for a while in Catholicism, Judaism, and Buddhism, she maintained its fascination with biblical apocalypse, recasting the prophetic claims of Revelations as a form of psychomachia or psychic struggle. Again like Blake, Smith’s sense of the apocalypse as “mental fight” (from Blake’s poem “Jerusalem,”
c.
1804), enabled her to regard art and music as “the new answers for religion,” providing a forum in which even blasphemy could serve as a form of religious inquiry.

Art and religion were not the only stimuli in Smith’s life. Desire too, had its part to play. Patterns of impossible longing, forged in her relationship with her father and with God, were now also played out in her sexual life: “The guys I
always fell in love with were completely inaccessible. I didn’t want any middle-of-the-road creep. I always wanted the toughest guy in school, the guy from south Philly who wore tight pants. Y’know, the guy who carried the umbrella and wore white shirts with real thin black ties. … But I couldn’t make it with guys. I used to dream about getting fucked by the Holy Ghost when I was a kid” (Tosches, 1978). To attract the tough guys, Smith experimented with some of the more conventional images of femininity available to her. But even as the adolescent strove to conform to the acceptable female images of the time, her inclination toward androgyny smouldered like a hot coal. One incident in particular, following her graduation in 1964, stands out:

My father always watched
Ed Sullivan,
and he screamed at me, “Look at these guys!” I was totally into black stuff, I didn’t wanna see this Rolling Stones crap. But my father acted so nuts, it was like, he was so cool, for him to react so violently attracted me.

As she wrote in 1973, “they put the touch on me. I was blushing jelly. this was no mamas boy music, it was alchemical. I couldn’t fathom the recipe but I was ready. Blind love for my father was the first thing I sacrificed to Mick Jagger” (Marsh, 1976).

The Rolling Stones’ first appearance on the
Ed Sullivan Show
in 1964 ended with what appeared to be an audience riot. Performing the Chuck Berry standard “Around and Around” and “Time Is on My Side,” the Stones provoked the ire of parents across the land. But what Smith saw in the group and, in particular, in their charismatic leader, was a version of masculinity that broke with the buttoned-down austerity of the McCarthy generation. More specifically, here at last was
an idol to displace the god-like image of her father. At once cocksure and flamboyant, the Stones’ mutation into a cross-dressing, sexually ambiguous group, as seen on the cover of their 1966 hit “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby (Standing in the Shadows)?,” provided Smith with a model of androgyny on which to map the contradictions of her own gender identity. Like the eyeliner-wearing Little Richard, or Jimi Hendrix with his fedoras and feather boas, Jagger, Jones, and Richards enabled Smith to renegotiate her relations with both the masculine and the feminine poles in her life. In terms suggested by the gender theorist Judith Butler, building on the Kristevan model outlined above, this renegotiation meant regarding the Symbolic order not as a monolithic space of repression, but as a realm of self-subversion and creative play (Butler, 1993). As Smith wrote in
Creem
in 1973: