Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I admire this woman. She writes a deft, deeply felt prose. She has a peerless memory. She remembers gestures, apparel worn thirty years ago, favorite objects, facial expressions, stretches of dialog. She can reanimate for us moments of deep emotional complexity. This was clearly a labor of love. The character study of Robert Mapplethorpe is disturbing, shattering. We watch Smith living with him as a veil is lifted from her awareness, as her empathy broadens and she carries the reader along with her. This is memoir as maelstrom, cataclysmic in its effect. There's more than sufficient foreshadowing. We know that Robert will die. Yet one still finds oneself grabbing futilely for the gunwales, whirling ever faster, ever downward and inward.

The book reminds me of Jean Stein and George Plimpton's Edie: American Girl in it's New York setting. But Stein and Plimpton's book consists of transcripts of recorded conversations worked up into semi-confessional monologues. It's compelling, but it doesn't touch the nimble pairing of image and incident we find in Just Kids, nor does it have the latter's exquisite verbal compression. Like Edie, this book details an era of New York's art and cultural scene, but with a vividness I've never come across before. This intensity radiates from The Hotel Chelsea where Mapplethorpe and Smith occupied a room.

The middle third of the book gets a little lost in name dropping. I suppose that's inevitable. There's less insight into Mapplethorpe, whom the author is growing away from. The sixties greats parade by: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, et al. Then the artists and then the poets and so on. The narrative dissipates under this welter of names. Smith dates poet and rocker, Jim Carroll ("People Who Died"). She dates playwright Sam Shepherd (True West, etc.) One begins to lose track. Who's Matthew with the 45s again? We watch Smith's astonishing evolution from visual artist to poet to rock and roller. If someone were to write this story as fiction, it would probably be criticized as unrealistic.

The theme, one of them, is the artist being true to his or herself and doing the work. Fascinating is the level at which which both Mapplethorpe and Smith learn their art. They are huge talents but they have entered a talented artistic circle that beggars description. When Shepherd has to leave Smith to return to his wife, they pen a valedictory play which is later staged at the American Place Theater in midtown. Mapplethorpe falls in love with photography when curator John McKendry brings him into the Met vaults and shows him rarely exhibited works by Stieglitz, Strand and Eakins. Until then he was hesitant to do his own photography, though Smith had repeatedly encouraged him to; he worked in photo collages with images from male magazines. Smith in her turn is cajoled into poetry by Gregory Corso and into song writing by Bobby Neuwirth. Who can claim such mentors and so many of them? Most artists' develop in far less encouraging settings. Smith and Mapplethorpe have been incredibly blessed.

Toward the end the author reaches for a kind of ecstatic prose flight that seldom works. Fortunately the attempts at woolgathering are few. We are soon returned to earth by way of Mapplethorpe's suffering. I was especially pleased to learn that in his last 15 years or so, he had found a partner, Sam Wagstaff, who supported him in all he did. Wagstaff was both patron and lover, and rich as Croesus. Mapplethorpe no longer had to hustle sex on 42nd Street to make the rent. Wagstaff bought him a studio on Bond Street, walking distance from his own flat. Smith herself no longer needed to work at Scribners bookstore either. She recorded Horses which made her an international star. So when the end comes at least it is unmarked by the poverty and obscurity of Smith and Mapplethorpe's earlier years. Smith, living in Detroit by then with her husband, Fred Sonic Smith, drives to New York to see both men—Sam is sick, too—during their final illnesses. Her last encounter with Robert, before he's wheeled off, was for this reader Sophoclean in its tragic impact. The love these two shared, the exquisite trust! Suddenly, it's gone. A void prevails.

By no means perfect, this is still an astonishing, emotionally affecting book. As with all great writing, its effect is greater than the sum of its parts. Please read it.