On October 18, The Great Bookstore gratified its viewers with a singularly hollow report. We saw Patti Smith, wearing a hat to face the mist, surveying the Ardennes countryside alongside Augustin Trapenard. Their walk took them to the house in Chuffilly-Roche where Rimbaud wrote A season in Hell in 1873 – building that Patti Smith bought. The rocker began like this: “To talk about Rimbaud is to talk about my entire life… I discovered him when I was 15 or 16. I saw his face on the cover of the Illuminations and, when I opened the book, I found something completely new. The language was so beautiful… I didn’t understand everything, but I captured the beauty, the intelligence, the space that Rimbaud had created.”
Embarrassed, Trapenard asked her to clarify the poet’s influence on her: “Oh, he was my secret weapon in many ways! He gave me confidence in myself and sent me the following message: if you want to do great things, it’s in A season in Hell let it all begin. I had a goal to work towards – that’s very important. Rimbaud remains my master. Even if I read it in translation I continue to learn, thanks to the secret language of poetry.” What followed were ten minutes of self-indulgent gibberish in which Patti Smith was unable to express herself with clarity.
The reason for this move to The Great Bookstore ? On the occasion of the 150th anniversary ofA season in Hell, Gallimard entrusted Patti Smith with the design of a collector’s edition: she thus embellished Rimbaud’s text with comments, photos and drawings of her own, as well as Andy Warhol-style screen prints. All this doesn’t add much but the book costs 45 euros. Patti Smith having become a lucrative icon, Gallimard published at the same time a second work by the pseudo-poet, A Book of Days : an endless series of briefly captioned photos, which resembles an Instagram feed that is both snobbish and consensual – for example, we meet Yoko Ono, an opportunity for Patti Smith to remind us that “we must all give peace a chance”. The object is magnificent, nicely bound, with a bookmark, enough to justify its price: 26.50 euros. These two gadget publications fit perfectly into a certain current consumerism, that of coffee table literature. They will be all the rage at Christmas.
Perhaps it’s time to reconsider Patti Smith’s entire career in light of the utter emptiness of this Book of days. How was she able to build such a status (especially in France) with such a thin body of work? Remember that his most famous song, Because The Night, was not composed by her, but by Bruce Springsteen – he had given her the demo, not considering it worthy of appearing on one of his records. As for his flagship album, Horses (1975), we quote it more than we listen to it. If it has become a rock legend, it is thanks to its superb black and white cover by Robert Mapplethorpe, where the androgynous look of Patti Smith invents the aesthetic of stylist Hedi Slimane twenty-five years in advance. . Coming out of bohemian life, the Rimbaldian rocker is surfing the image, and if she has something to do with Céline, it is more with the luxury brand than with the writer of the same name.
What can we credit Patti Smith with? Having been the only rock singer of her generation to shine – she is lucky that Janis Joplin died in 1970 and that Debbie Harry, leader of Blondie, was not taken seriously by intellectuals. After a period of media disappearance, Patti Smith perfectly knew how to ride the nostalgia that appeared in the 2000s for the New York punk of the 1970s. In 2008, she exhibited her photos at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art – very chic. In 2010, she published with a bang Just Kidsan autobiography acclaimed by critics even if it was not worth a damn compared to the masterpiece Chronicles by Bob Dylan. The real poet Lou Reed was undrinkable in an interview, while Patti Smith is always on the side of Good. By disappearing in 2013, Reed left her free reign: the bobo shaman has since exploited the purely mercantile vein of her sepia imagination. Sold dearly, its edition ofA season in Hell teaches us how Rimbaud is his “secret weapon”: it allows him to pick the pockets of a French readership who is a little too credulous.
A season in Hell, by Arthur Rimbaud and Patti Smith. Gallimard, 176 p., €45.
A book of days, by Patti Smith. Gallimard, 393 p., €26.50.