Mystics and Saints: Patti Smith and Isabelle Eberhardt

I’ve seen Patti Smith only once in my life, not onstage but in the checkout line of the Whole Foods in Chelsea: tall, gaunt, overcoated, unmistakably herself. I’ve never been a fan of her music, which belongs for me in that category of “extremely brilliant and personally disinteresting” where I file artists like Tarkovsky or Kurosawa—artists whose work I can appreciate without particularly wanting to embrace. But like a lot of other people, I wept my way through her National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids, entranced not just by the extraordinary mythology of her life but her flawlessly rendered version of a lost New York to which no artist, genius or hack, can ever move—a New York that very possibly never existed, or at least not for anyone who wasn’t Patti Smith, but in either event will certainly never exist again.

M Train is a very different book than Just Kids, as incongruous in some ways as the idea of Patti Smith poring over vegetables in a Whole Foods (out of all the gin joints in all the towns, etc.). It’s a discursive chronicle of an older, intensely solitary life characterized by loss so chronic as to be inescapable. Smith leaves behind beloved coats, photographs, cameras, pens, notebooks, treasured cafés shuttered by gentrification. All of these losses are a kind of extended shorthand for the greatest loss of all: that of her longtime partner, the musician Fred “Sonic” Smith, whose sudden, unexpected death and the subsequent void of his absence permeates every page of Smith’s often-dreamy account of travel, work, travel, books read, coffees drunk. M Train is a book almost entirely about absence and longing, but it is written by a person who would far rather be alone than with a poor substitute for the beloved, and so it is also the daily résumé of a life that is enviable in its Spartan freedom. She feeds the cats. She cleans their water bowls. She travels: to play shows, to give readings, to see friends, to take photographs of the graveyards of people whose art she admires. She drinks a lot of coffee and she makes a lot of spaghetti. She is accountable to no one, to nothing, but the practice of her art. “Here is joy and neglect,” she writes. “A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly just work. –This is how I live, I am thinking.”

Isabelle Eberhardt was born in Switzerland in 1877, the illegitimate child of a general’s wife and the household tutor, a Russian nihilist who dressed her in men’s clothing and took complete control. He taught her to read and write French, Russian, and Arabic and insisted she undertake hard physical labor outdoors with her male siblings. He taught her to ride horses, despise bourgeois values, and disdain public opinion. Eberhardt may have learned her lifelong desire for escape in the hardships of her childhood, but her father’s punishing lessons also gave her the multitude of skills she’d later need to survive as a woman alone in North Africa. After fleeing Switzerland for Algeria, she converted to Islam and embarked on the nomadic life for which she would gain notoriety in her lifetime and admiration after her death. She traveled throughout North Africa dressed like—and often passing as—a man, smoking hash in the Tunisian equivalent of dive bars and writing articles, essays, and fiction. Her collected body of work, including journals and letters, ultimately comprised thousands of unpublished pages produced in a little over a decade. She survived illness, dire poverty, and an assassination attempt (by saber, no less), joined a secret Sufi brotherhood, and conducted a long, wildly romantic affair with a young Algerian soldier before her sudden death in a flash flood at the age of 27.