By Philip Marchand, National Post‘Two men will be out in the field,” the Bible says, “One will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal; one will be taken and one will be left.” This apocalyptic vision from the Gospel according to St. Matthew finds its mournful echo in the world of art. Two artists are equally gifted. One will be taken — will achieve fame, money, immortality. One will be left — thrown back into anonymity.Few had a more intense desire for artistic stardom than the musicians, painters, drag queens and performance artists who Patti Smith hung out with in her own days of obscurity, drawing and writing poetry in the New York City loft she shared with her lover, another would-be artist named Robert Mapplethorpe. She and Robert were eventually taken, while the others were left. “Candy Darling died of cancer,” Smith recalls in her memoir, Just Kids (HarperCollins, $31.99) “Tinkerbelle and Andrea Whips took their lives. Others sacrificed themselves to drugs and misadventure … I feel no vindication being one of the handfuls of survivors. I would rather have seen them all succeed, catch the brass ring. As it turned out, it was me who got one of the best horses.”Just Kids is an apt title for this sweet-tempered and highly readable chronicle of survival. It begins with the 20-year-old Smith, daughter of a working-class New Jersey family, heading out for New York City in the summer of 1967 and, through a series of chance encounters on the street, meeting and forming a friendship with Mapplethorpe, a Long Island boy of the same age. It ends in 1975, when the author and Mapplethorpe both stand on the verge of international success — Smith as a rock star, about to release her debut album, Horses, Mapplethorpe as a photographer. (There is a brief section at the very end describing Mapplethorpe’s death from AIDS, in 1989.)The focus of the memoir, then, is the period during which Smith and Mapplethorpe devoted themselves in almost childlike fashion to play, i.e. the making of art. Mapplethorpe, Smith recalls, “wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.” Much of this art consisted of dress-up. In the early days, Smith wore her beatnik sandals and ragged scarves. Later, she would embrace more sophisticated ensembles of “black ballet flats, pink shantung capris, my Kelly green silk raincoat, and a violet parasol.” Mapplethorpe was obsessed with necklaces. At one point, he was in the habit of pocketing lobster claws from a seafood restaurant, scrubbing, sanding and spray-painting them and stringing them on his necklaces, between brass beads. In the early days, they had to support their art habit with the $65 Smith earned from her job at a bookstore. It was a struggle. They lived on cans of Dinty Moore beef stew and day-old bread, became masters of scavenger hunting on trash day and occasionally shoplifted art supplies. In this enclosed, hardscrabble world, however, they were happy. “I was always reluctant to visit people,” Smith recalls, “especially grown-ups.”In many respects, they were an odd couple. Smith recalls an incident that took place during her childhood, when her mother told her to put a shirt on. “You’re about to become a young lady,” her mother insisted. All her life, Smith resisted that fate. When somebody in New York asked if she were “androgynous,” Smith took it as a compliment. In the memoir, she includes an amusing episode when a stranger helped pay for her lunch. The stranger turned out to be Allen Ginsberg. The poet chatted her up until it occurred to him that the object of his interest was a girl. She confirmed the fact. “I’m sorry,” Ginsberg said. “I took you for a very pretty boy.”Her androgyny fitted well with her lover’s own cherubic looks. But their intimate relationship was doomed. As time went on, Mapplethorpe increasingly embraced a homosexual identity, even hustling on the streets. But his greatest drives may have been social and professional rather than physical. Anyone who doubts that sex and money rule the art world should read Smith’s account of Mapplethorpe’s rise in the highest circles of that art world through his personal relationships with curators in great American art museums. Of course, Mapplethorpe also had talent, and a very clear idea of what he wanted to do with it. “He worked without apology, investing the homosexual with grandeur, masculinity and enviable nobility,” Smith writes. “Robert sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism.”Unsurprisingly, this agenda made many outside the highest circles of the art world nervous, especially when these “aspects of male experience” began to include hair-raising photographic portrayals of sexual sadism. Even Smith was shocked by some of this work. Mapplethorpe’s occasional attempts to invoke the Evil One in the early days of their relationship had seemed to her almost theatrical, but there was no play-acting about the “darker, more dangerous place” Mapplethorpe was driving himself into.On her part, Smith was beginning to make a name for herself in poetry circles as a reader adept at fending off drunks and hecklers. In the memoir she gives the impression that all her valuable contacts, including playwright Sam Shepard, with whom she had an affair, more or less fell in her way — but it is clear that she was not allergic to the noble art of networking. Making friends with musicians, she evolved from a poet who occasionally read her work while a guitarist strummed a few chords in the background, to a genuine songwriter and vocalist, and finally leader of a band. “I want to be a poet, not a singer,” she told Mapplethorpe. Nevertheless, it was by virtue primarily of her voice — a voice as fierce and vibrant as Grace Slick’s, but with an additional ability to capture the throb of emotion — and not primarily by virtue of her lyrics, however charged, that Smith became the artist taken up, and not left behind.It is also worth noting that Smith avoided the more obvious perils of self-destruction that beset many of her friends. She eschewed alcohol, promiscuity and the more dangerous drugs. “You don’t shoot up and you’re not a lesbian,” said one of her acquaintances. “What do you actually do?” Her response might have been that she had a “mission to preserve, protect and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll,” as she puts it in the memoir. Ultimately, she failed in her hopeless mission, but in her prime, in the late ’70s, she galvanized the corpse of that revolutionary spirit with some vital and stirring music.