Devotion - Patti Smith

DEVOTION – PATTI SMITH

The premise of Devotion, by Patti Smith, is to answer the question 'Why is one compelled to write?' It's a very straightforward question that demands a straightforward answer but then when you ask a writer such a thing it's never going to be simple because writers tend to ponder, dwell and contemplate. Or at least the good ones do.

Patti Smith twirls the question around: 'Why do I write? My finger, as a stylus, traces the question in the blank air. A familiar riddle posed since youth, withdrawing from play, comrades and the valley of love, girded with words, a beat outside. Why do we write? A chorus erupts.'

Patti's answer is concise and to the point: 'Because we cannot simply live.'

If you think about it, Patti's answer makes sense. The act of writing is living plus something more, as is any act of creativity. Or it should be. Why does an artist paint? Is not a landscape or a bowl of fruit, for example, enough in itself? Why does a man desire to render a vision upon canvas? Is not the vision enough? Why does a photographer need to capture an image? Is the image in itself not enough? For posterity, you might say? But photography is an art so capturing an image with a photograph is the act of turning an image into art.

Art isn't just limited, however, to the obvious forms of it such as writing, painting, sculpturing, etc, etc. Baking bread, for example, is also an art. As is building a house, tending a garden, raising a family, etc, etc. Anything that involves creation, really. And it doesn't even stop there. Dancing is also an art, as is playing football, climbing a mountain, swimming in a sea, and so on. Nothing is being created from these things but that's not the point. It's the act of 'doing' that matters. Creating something ephemeral. Something of, in and for the moment. Existing one moment but gone the next. Art is the act of living. Your life is your art.

In Devotion, Patti Smith very cleverly reveals the process of her writing. The main plank of the book consists of a story about an ice skater who lives for her art (of skating) and a possessive collector and dealer of rare artefacts. It's the story of the relationship between the two and of how obsession and possession become entwined.

What Patti does, however, is to book-end the story with her travel diary, detailing a trip to France and England. In France she visits the family home of Albert Camus where she is invited to see the unfinished manuscript of the book he was working on prior to his death in a car crash, provisionally entitled The First Man. In England she visits the grave of political activist and Christian philosopher Simone Weil so as to pay homage.

Along the way she notes various incidents, memories and observations all of which end up in the main story of the ice skater and the art collector. If Devotion is a crime, as Patti explains, then all these notes she has taken during her travels is the evidence.

So, from the art of her life – and Patti Smith's life is indeed an artistic one – is forged the art of her book, Devotion. It was Henry Miller who once wrote: 'Certainly I want to write but I don't think it's the be-all and end-all. First comes life.' This isn't to neglect, however, the importance of dream as Henry Miller again once wrote: 'We are all dreamers, only some of us wake up in time to put down a few words.'

In her song Free Money, from her Horses album, Patti famously sings 'When we dream it, we dream it for free. Free money free money free money.' What Patti means by this (or what it can be translated as Patti meaning) is that dreaming is a currency allowing the dreamer to purchase other, possibly even better dreams. It is these dreams that are rendered upon a page, a canvas, film, in a song or whatever.

From the art of life and of dreams, then, is born another kind of art.

Devotion by Patti Smith is a work of genius. It is a book that captures the essence of art and the process that goes into the creation of it. It's a very generous book that offers a rare insight into the secrets and innermost thoughts of one of our greatest – in my opinion – living day artists. For someone who obviously has a love for the written word, Patti Smith has created something whose value is actually beyond words.

John Serpico

Selected Poems - Sylvia Plath

SELECTED POEMS – SYLVIA PLATH

When you're walking past a shop and there's a box of books outside of it being sold for 10p each and one of them is Selected Poems by Sylvia Plath, you've got to buy it, really – just in case it's a gift from the universe. You never know these days. You never can tell. In a similar fashion, this is how Patti Smith came upon a copy of Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud when she was a teenager, and we all know the profound effect that particular encounter had upon her life from there on. So might Selected Poems do the same?

Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar is a very brilliant book so it might be assumed that a book of poems springing from the same well would also be of some interest. So, is a copy of Selected Poems found in a box on the street really a gift from the universe? Well, not quite. Not in comparison to Illuminations or A Season In Hell by Rimbaud anyway.

So is it even any good at all? Well, if you know nothing of Sylvia Plath then all that you have are the poems, meaning that each one must stand on its own and be judged on its own merit. Beauty, however, is in the eye of the beholder and the quality of art is subjective so that decision can only really be made by the individual reader, dictated I would say by the mood in which the poems are approached at any given time.

If you do know something of Sylvia Plath, however, then what makes the book of interest are the various clues and intimations dotted throughout the poems that tell us where she was mentally and emotionally, though none indicating her soon to come suicide. But then if you know what you're looking for there might well be? In the poem entitled Cut, for example, where she writes of the 'thrill' of slicing into her thumb instead of the onion, then contemplating the blood: 'A celebration, this is. Out of a gap a million soldiers run, Redcoats, every one. Whose side are they on? O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill the thin papery feeling. Saboteur, Kamikaze man.'

I wonder if Ian Curtis ever read Sylvia Plath?

A problem I see with the book is that this selection of poems is edited and chosen by Sylvia's husband, Ted Hughes, whom I hold partially responsible for her suicide. I feel that his presence over the book is a very controlling presence - and that's not a good thing at all.

Sylvia Plath's entire life was always a question of who controls it. Right from her childhood there was a constant battle going on over what kind of person she should be. From her parents, her peers, her teachers, and her doctors; they all wanted Sylvia to conform to their values and their norms. Sylvia, however, had her own thoughts and her own feelings and because they didn't fit in with those held by the society in which she lived, it became an issue.

Sylvia was diagnosed as suffering from depression and to cure her of this was entered into a hospital and given electro-shock treatment which led to her first suicide attempt. Her husband's infidelity led to her final and successful attempt.

I would hazard a guess that during their marriage Ted Hughes also tried to control Sylvia and to bend her to his will. I suspect that for a time she succumbed but his affair shook her to the core and it was this that pushed her over the edge. It's a tragedy, then, that even in death there is a sense of control still being asserted over her in the form of Hughes editing her poems and even choosing which ones should be published.

This is the shadow that hangs over this particular book, unfortunately. The pin that fastens the butterfly to the table. The cage that imprisons the robin redbreast that puts all of heaven in a rage...

John Serpico

Black By Design - Pauline Black

BLACK BY DESIGN – PAULINE BLACK

Just to show how little I know about The Selecter, I didn't even realise the name Pauline Black was a pseudonym. Pauline's real surname was Vickers and she changed it to Black initially to enable her to take time off work to play gigs without it leading to her being recognised and losing her job as a radiographer. And why 'Black' of all names? Well, as Pauline explains in her autobiography Black By Design: 'It was a statement of truth and intent all at the same time. Yes, I was black and I wanted to sing about what it meant to be black. But more than anything I wanted my family to finally say my name. Pauline Black. They could never bring themselves to say the B word. After years of being called half-caste or coloured, I could say it loud and proud. Pauline Black.'

To put this into context, when Pauline was a baby she was adopted into a white family where she had a white mother, father and brothers. Her adoptive parents held fairly traditional racist attitudes though it should be noted this was in the Fifties and early Sixties. Her adoptive parents desire for a baby girl apparently eclipsed the fact that she was black and blinded them to their own attitude to race. This was the backdrop against which Pauline grew up and it all makes for a fascinating read.

I understand how it appeals to some but usually I find reading about other people's childhoods a bit boring unless it's an unusual one. Pauline Black's was very unusual. I always presumed as well that she was from Coventry but actually she grew up in Romford, which makes it all the more strange because at that time there would have been very few people of colour there. She moved to Coventry to go to college and that's where she auditioned for lead vocalist in The Selecter, having cut her musical teeth singing Bob Dylan songs in local folk clubs. The past is indeed a foreign country.

Pauline's autobiography is a book that can be broken down into different parts. There's her childhood and early years, the Selecter years, her post-Selecter wilderness years, the genealogy years, and her Selecter epilogue years. Each part is going to be of more interest to some than others but I presume most people pick up her book due to having an interest in The Selecter and 2-Tone, and in this department Pauline certainly doesn't disappoint.

Amusingly, she's very forthright in her opinions of various people involved in 2-Tone, particularly individuals in The Specials. Out of all of them, Neville Staples comes out the best and is the one she offers up the most respect to even when telling us about the girls backstage being groomed 'for future sacrifice on the altar of Nev's cock'.

To Pauline's credit there is no love lost for the Sieg Heiling bonehead skinheads who flocked to the gigs: 'I'm sick of saying stuff in interviews about how 'lovely' it was on the 2-Tone tour. Some of these shirtless, bleached-jeaned, braces-dragging-round-their-arses bastards made it total misery. If you scratch their surface they have 'racist' written all the way down their centre like a sickly sweet stick of BNP rock'.

Of personal interest, Pauline writes about a specific gig The Selecter played in Bristol (my home town) at the Trinity Centre in September 1979. Her and dual vocalist Gaps are to be interviewed before they're due to go on stage so they traipse off with the journalist to a pub 'round the corner from the police station' opposite the venue. 'As soon as we walked in,' Pauline writes 'the landlady looked at us and pronounced audibly within the pub: “No, not in here”. A swift glance around the place showed me what she meant. No blacks in here.'

I used to live within walking distance of the Trinity Centre and I can't for the life of me figure out what pub it was that Pauline refers to. All I know is that whatever pub it was, it's certainly no longer managed by racists because if it was it would have been fire-bombed by now.

They return to the Trinity to conduct the interview there, only to have it interrupted by the promoter who begs that the band get on stage immediately so as to stop the growing tensions between the different factions in the audience. They do as they're asked but ultimately are unable to control the animosity between the Mods, the punks and the skinheads as fighting inevitably erupts 'like a forest fire finding dry tinder'. It's at this gig that Pauline realises it wasn't just about The Selecter spreading a message of 'unity' but about them being 'caught up in the maelstrom of competing teenage tribal factions'.

Cheers, Bristol. You're welcome.

Of all the 2-Tone bands, The Selecter were the most politically earnest and whilst this undoubtedly caused them problems it also made them a lot more valid than their peers. Madness and Bad Manners, for example, promoted their fun factor above anything else which led to greater success for them but also marked them as being lightweight. The Selecter had more substance. Importantly, Pauline understood their position in the scheme of things: 'We had been pushed up out of the masses, not imposed by some corporate music bigwig who wanted to have a bash at this new 'multi-ethnic' look. We were the real deal.'

Not that Pauline is without a sense of humour as revealed by a lot of the observations she makes and the anecdotes she relates, some of which it must be said being unintentionally funny. An amusing one is when she tells us about a time at the Melkweg in Amsterdam where she is given some Ecstasy. It's the one and only time she's ever taken it and ends up feeling a bit embarrassed about herself: 'Fortunately I was with a good friend who dragged me away from the young man who had become the object of my attentions. God knows what I'd been thinking. I had no intention of ever being counted among the ranks of that loony, perpetually grinning, bedroom-eyed breed again.'

You've got to laugh, really.

For all of this, however, the most affecting part of the book is when Pauline decides to search out her birth parents. It's the best part of the book, I would say. She discovers her dad is a Nigerian prince but has passed away and that her mum has emigrated to Australia. On finding her address, Pauline writes her a letter enclosed with photos and newspaper clippings from The Selecter's heyday. A week later she's wakened at 5 a.m. by a phone call:

'Blearily I groped around the bedside table for the phone. 'Hello,' I mumbled, rubbing sleep out of my eyes.

'Hello, is that you, Belinda?' (Belinda being Pauline's birth name.)

'Yes,' my soul blurted, before I could stop the word. I was suddenly super-alert.

'It's Mummy, darling.'

I couldn't help thinking that my mother sounded alarmingly like Dame Edna Everage!'

Following the whole build-up to this moment it's a curiously emotional piece of writing tinged with comedy that brings a lump to the throat and almost a tear to the eye.

Black By Design is a well-written memoir and Pauline should be really proud of it. As an insight into The Selecter and the whole 2-Tone movement it offers a unique perspective. Arguably, when it comes to the subject of 2-Tone it's better than Horace Panter's book Ska'd For Life if for no other reason than it being much more open about absolutely everything. For a start, Horace Panter never mentioned anything in his book about the altar of Neville Staples cock, that's for sure.

Far beyond such trivialities, however, as an insight into identity and the search for it, it's a fascinating read and this is actually where it's true strength and importance lies.

John Serpico