Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

into Philly’s Jewish culture—for its aesthetic rather than its religious value. “They were so hip,” she told Amy Gross. “They wore black leotards, they had sports cars and all these art supplies. So I went back to Glassboro dressed like a Jewish art student.
    “I failed everything—I was so undisciplined.”

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    ANNA OF THE HARBOR
    A S P ATTI TRIED on different personas, she also cultivated an array of life ambitions. She would listen to Coltrane and then write poetry, trusting the freedom of one to unlock the doors to the other. She dreamed of being an actress like Jeanne Moreau or Anouk Aimée. And she looked forward to the day when she would become an artist’s mistress, the power behind the throne of creation. One day, she imagined, she would subsume herself behind the requirements of a man who would answer all of her questions, who could tell her what to say and what to think, when to laugh and when to cry. One day. But until then, she would dream—of Coltrane, of Bob Dylan, of William Burroughs. And Rimbaud. Especially Rimbaud.
    To Patti, Rimbaud was everything, and had been ever since she first saw his face, one day as she was passing the bookstall that used to stand across the road from the main Philadelphia bus station. A portrait on a book cover caught her eye. She may or may not have heard of the poet at that time, but it didn’t matter. It was the photograph that drew her in. He looked a little like her father, a little like Dylan, and a lot like the boyfriend she wished she’d meet. The book was called Illuminations.
    She picked up the same bilingual French and English reprint that every other budding romantic of the era owned, and once she’d finished devouring it, she devoured the rest of its author’s life.
    Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born in Charleville, France, on October 20, 1854, the son of a veteran of France’s conquest of Algeria. The boy’s early gift for poetry was rewarded when the Revue pour tous published his” Les etrennes des orphelines” (“The Orphans’ New Year Gifts”) in January 1870.
    He was unruly from the outset. Despondent when his favorite tutor, Georges Izambard, quit to fight in the Franco-Prussian War later in 1870, the teenager turned his literary talents to the most antisocial ends he could imagine. He drank and stole, and dedicated his pen to vileness and scatology. He grew his hair and abandoned his earlier manners and morals. He moved to Paris and joined the Commune, that short-lived experiment in communism that erupted on the streets of the city following the war’s humiliating cessation, and he openly embraced homosexuality, launching into a torrid relationship with an older man, poet Paul Verlaine, that ended only when Verlaine was jailed for two years for shooting at his lover. A bullet hit Rimbaud in the wrist.
    Rimbaud blazed with creative rage for just five years, a short span in which he wrote some of the most moving and meaningful of all the poetry now collected beneath the banner of Symbolism. Illuminations, published in 1874, was his final major work; two years later, he enlisted in the Dutch Colonial Army and used that as the bridgehead to the world travels that would consume the last years of his life.
    He deserted the army in Java, returned to France, and then moved to Cyprus, where he worked in a stone quarry. The following year, 1880, he was in Aden; by 1884, he was in Harar, Ethiopia, running his own export company. There, with a circle of friends that included Ras Makonnen—the father of future emperor Haile Selassie—he seemed to find happiness. But in 1891, returning to France in search of treatment for what he thought was rheumatism, he discovered instead that he was suffering from cancer. Rimbaud died in Marseille on November 10, 1891. His death, Patti mused to herself, was infinitely more interesting than her life.
    “I really didn’t fall in love with writing as writing,” Patti told Victor Bockris. “I fell in love