Patti Smith’s Devotion
I read the book Devotion in 2017, as soon as I could find it in my local bookstore. After reading Just Kids and M Train, I knew I wanted to read anything Patti Smith wrote. And I was particularly interested in this book after hearing her in an interview just prior to its release talking about art as legitimate work. At that moment I was feeling ambivalence about the worthiness of my own artistic endeavors, especially as they were not instigated or supported by an outside authority, as my previous lifetime of work had been. What I thought I heard Smith say that was helpful was that art is a vocation--work that requires responsibility and discipline--and thus, respect.
This is not exactly what Devotion is about. Instead, it is about the process of making art. It is Patti Smith’s generous insight into her creativity and writing process. It was written as part of the “Why I Write” series based on lectures by winners of the Windham Campbell Prizes at Yale University. I recently re-read this small volume, and realized how much I absorbed what I learned from my first reading of Devotion into my own writing.
The gift of Devotion is that Smith shows us more than tells us what happens when she writes. In the first chapter, “How the Mind Works,” she takes us on a trip with her to. Paris for a week of book-related events. She begins the story describing a trailer for the black and white film Risttuules (The Cross Winds) she watches before going to bed the night before she leaves. The next day she must re-arrane her schedule to make an earlier flight when hers is cancelled. Once on her way, she reads about Simone Weil on the plane. There, she revisits the Paris of her past memories, wakes from jet-lag to watch women’s televised skating competitions, and visits the French editor of her translated work. She leaves Paris to find Simone Weil’s grave in Ashford, Kent England to. pay homage to Weil as she does so many writers and creative thinkers that live vividly in her own consciousness.
In the second chapter, Smith shares the short story, for which the book is aptly named, that she writes on a train during her trip back to Paris. We recognize a number of elements from her pre- and post-travel experience in this charming and disturbing story--scenes from the movie trailer, ice skating, a train ride. Reading this tale is like waking up from a dream and disentangling pieces that are familiar to us from our many memories.
The third short chapter, “When a Dream Is Not a Dream,” is the synthesis we had been waiting for--the resolution of the third act. Smith is explicit about why she writes. She begins by describing another part of her French journey--her invitation to the residence of Albert Camus in Loumarin by his daughter, Catherine. While there, Catherine allows her to look at the handwritten manuscript of his last book, The First Man, pages rescued from the wreckage of the fatal car accident in which he lost his life in 1960. Smith writes, “One could feel a sense of a focused mission and the racing heart propelling the last words of the final paragraph, the last he was to write.”
She goes on to say,
“...I discerned a familiar shift in my concentration. That compulsion that prohibits me from completely surrendering to a work of art, drawing me from the halls of a favored museum to my own drafting table...That is the decisive power of a singular work: a call to action. And I, time and time again, am overcome with the hubris to believe I can answer that call.”
I know that feeling of being moved by someone else’s work to take what they have shown me and say how it is true for me, in my own life. To start there and try to create something as beautiful as they did, even as it stretches my imagination to believe I could--but I am pulled by this desire to try.
The last chapter, “Written on a Train,” is a set of images of her handwritten manuscript of the story she wrote on the train, plus a photograph taken on the train of the passing landscape. Her handwriting evidences her physical connection to her creative work that may beckon readers to a call to action similar to what she experienced by seeing Camus’ manuscript.
Since reading Just Kids many years ago, I have consciously considered Patti Smith a role model for me as a writer, and more generally as someone who lives her life as an art form. I have taken heart in her whole-hearted embrace of the need for daily practice and solitude (and coffee) for art--and her embodiment of the uncompromising, unapologetic life of an artist. It has taken me a lifetime to define myself this way—and I still waver. Her use of photography in her writing, in both process and presentation, also has inspired me to use words and images together. And I noticed for the first time during my recent reading of Devotion, the influence of her writing on my own use of travel as a story frame in my current writing project.
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I encourage you to read this book and her other books of poetry and prose and listen to her music and find out more about Patti Smith’s life of art. And follow her on Instagram where she posts every day, sharing photographs and paying tribute to the lives of artists she admires. She also writes about how she is making her way through covid-times, struggling, but also making the best of what can be done. She recently began sharing more in-depth writing through the Sub-stack platform, providing some sample work and offering subscriptions to longer, more frequent work.
I am grateful for what Patti Smith’s artistry offers to the world
and what I personally have learned from her work.
May we all feel such devotion to a vocation we love.