46 pages • 1 hour read
Patti SmithM Train
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Preface-Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface-Chapter 1 Summary: “Café ’Ino”
M Train begins with a Preface describing Smith’s dream about a cowpoke, who tells her that it is “not so easy to write about nothing” (13). Smith tries to talk to the cowpoke, but he ignores her, eventually telling her that this is not her dream but his. The Preface ends with a photograph of a solitary table and chair.
In Chapter 1, “Café ’Ino,” Smith is in her favorite café in Greenwich Village, where she lives. Café ’Ino’s server, Zak, brings her black coffee, brown toast, and olive oil, her usual order. She contemplates her dream about the cowpoke, and Zak tells her that he is moving on from the café to open his own on a boardwalk in Rockaway Beach. Smith has always dreamed of opening a café herself and is happy for him. She offers to invest. Smith almost opened her own café when she was young but abandoned this dream and moved to Detroit to be with her partner, Fred “Sonic” Smith. They married soon after.
Just before their first wedding anniversary, Smith and Fred took a trip to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in French Guiana. Smith wanted to see the remains of the French penal colony that was important to Jean Genet (1910-1986), a French writer. Genet never got the chance to visit the prison, and as he was now old and infirm, Smith wanted to bring him a token of earth and stone from the grounds. She organized with fellow writer and friend William Burroughs (1914-1997) to deliver the stones to Genet. Once in French Guiana, Smith and Fred visited the prison, and Smith collected some rocks and placed them in a large matchbox.
They spent some time in French Guiana and, at one point, hitched a ride with a man who was stopped at a security checkpoint. The car was searched, and officers found another man hiding in the trunk. Smith and Fred were questioned by the authorities, though neither spoke French, and eventually, the officers gave them a ride to their hotel. They visited a beach, and Smith dreamed of her imaginary café. This section contains several photographs from Smith’s trip to French Guiana, including her and Fred’s visa photographs.
Back in the present, Zak promises her free coffee for the rest of her life at his new café in exchange for her help.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Changing Channels”
At home, Smith writes from her bed. She avoids holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, preferring to be alone. She tries to write a 100-line poem as an homage to Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) but finds she is one line over. The new year arrives. Over the next few days, she struggles to fix the poem but can never seem to get it to exactly 100 lines. Smith dreams of getting out of the city for a while but is also protective of her routine of writing at Café ’Ino and watching crime dramas late into the night. She feels that as a poet, she is like a detective, searching for her 100th line, and feels a kinship with the detective protagonists on screen.
Smith looks at her father’s writing desk and chair and reminisces about him. She does not sit in his chair, as she was never allowed to as a child. Smith sorts through her unopened mail and finds a letter from the Continental Drift Club (CDC) inviting her to deliver a talk of her choice at their upcoming convention in Berlin. The CDC, Smith explains, is a club dedicated to the memory of Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), a German geologist and climatologist who “pioneered the theory of continental drift” (50). Wegener died on an expedition in Greenland in 1930. Smith accidentally became a member of the CDC when she sent a request to the Alfred Wegener Institute asking to photograph Wegener’s boots. She was put in touch with the secretary of the CDC and eventually invited to their 2005 conference in Bremen, Germany. She is the only artist in the club; most other members are geologists, mathematicians, or theologists.
While attending the 2007 CDC conference in Iceland, Smith was asked to preside over a chess championship. Other members of the CDC were embarking on an expedition to Greenland to locate a cross that was placed in memory of Wegener. Smith was unable to go, knowing that she did not have “the constitution required for such an endeavor” (51). In exchange for overseeing the chess tournament, Smith was given the chance to photograph the table that chess grandmasters Bobby Fischer (1943-2008) and Boris Spassky (born 1937) used in a 1972 match. She received a message from Bobby Fischer’s bodyguard inviting her to meet Fischer at a hotel dining room. She was instructed to bring her own bodyguard and refrain from mentioning chess. Smith spent a bizarre night interviewing Fischer.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Animal Crackers”
Smith travels to Berlin to attend the CDC conference. On the plane, she watches the Danish crime drama Forbrydelsen, which inspired The Killing, one of Smith’s favorite shows. In Berlin, Smith visits the Pasternak café, which she discovered on a past trip to the city. At the CDC conference, Smith consults her notes, which she has written on a collection of napkins, and delivers her talk on Alfred Wegener’s last moments; it is incorrectly introduced as being about his “lost” moments. The talk does not go well and sparks an argument among the scientifically minded members. They believe that her points are all conjecture and that she is not presenting science but poetry. Smith tries to salvage the situation with a joke about Wegener’s last moments being lost, which gets her some laughter.
Smith spends the rest of her time in Berlin visiting places she has already been, including the Berlin Zoo and the grave of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). She takes a photo of a statue of a guardian angel in the cemetery and thinks about her mother and brother, both of whom are dead now. She meets with another member of the CDC before she leaves; the woman suggests that the CDC remembers Alfred Wegener “for Mrs. Wegener” (73).
On her way back to America, Smith spends a few days in London. She spends her time watching British mystery dramas. As she watches, she sees a trailer for an upcoming marathon of a show called Cracker, starring Robbie Coltrane (1950-2022). Soon after, she takes a break and leaves her hotel room. She is surprised to run into Coltrane at the hotel elevator. As Smith heads to the airport to catch her flight home, a heavy mist descends on London. She is unsure if her flight will be canceled but does not mind if it is; she has nowhere she needs to be.
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Flea Draws Blood”
Smith tries to get over her jetlag when she returns to New York. She has strange dreams that she tries to interpret but finds she cannot. She keeps remembering the phrase “It’s not so easy writing about nothing” (75). She wonders what her friend Burroughs would say about her dreams and laments that she cannot call him like she used to; since his passing, she must “summon him in other ways” (76). She goes to Café ’Ino and tries to write about Burroughs. She thinks about how lucky she was to know the Beat poets and mourns the fact that they are all dead now. The last time she saw Burroughs, he compared himself to William Blake’s painting The Ghost of a Flea. Smith is not sure what he meant by this comparison and contemplates its implications.
Smith returns home and searches for a book, After Nature by W. G. Sebald (1944-2001). Reading inspires her to write something of her own. She writes and thinks about the writer’s process and the reader. She hopes that her readers want to be familiar with her and that her work is enough to encourage this familiarity.
Preface-Chapter 4 Analysis
The early chapters of this memoir introduce motifs and threads that seem like non sequiturs but will pay off later. These anecdotes also characterize Smith as someone with wide-ranging curiosity and artistic expertise. Smith describes getting stones for Jean Genet but does not describe giving them to him. Genet, a writer, spent parts of his life in various prisons. He wrote about his experiences extensively, and his perspective was somewhat unusual. He expressed an active desire to be sent to the prison colony in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni; Smith explores this desire in greater detail in an article for The Paris Review. Smith also mentions Bobby Fischer, the chess player. Fischer was one of the most accomplished chess players in history, and he was known for being somewhat erratic. He was also known for his vitriolic antisemitism and Holocaust denial; Smith alludes to his views in her description of her unusual interview with him. He lived in Iceland from 2005 until his death in 2008.
Smith mentions her friendship with poet William Burroughs several times. Burroughs was an accomplished writer most famous for novels like Naked Lunch and Junkie. Burroughs was in the same literary circles as other Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. In 1951, some years before Burroughs and Smith met, Burroughs shot and killed his wife, Joan Vollmer; the circumstances surrounding the event remain somewhat unclear today. Though Smith references many writers and historical figures, none is more important in this section than Alfred Wegener. The CDC was a real secret society dedicated to Wegener’s works, though it no longer exists. Very little information is available about it, in accordance with its mandate of secrecy.
Smith hints at the very beginning of her memoir that she will be Writing About Nothing and readily acknowledges how challenging this is. Many scenes in the memoir depict ordinary activities, but even something as simple as getting coffee at a café can become meaningful and interconnected. Instead of talking about major events in the present day, Smith focuses on memories of events that might not have been big parts of her career but were nonetheless personally significant. The theme of writing about nothing appears prominently in the section of the story about Smith’s CDC talk. She tries to give a talk about Wegener’s final moments, about which virtually nothing can be definitively known. The end of Wegener’s life seems like a blank space, but it is actually a space open to speculation and discussion. The CDC members can project their poetic and scientific interests into that space, turning nothing into something, though most are unwilling to do so. The gap between Smith’s attempts to create something from nothing and the scientists’ rejection of the principle highlights the difficulty of the task; it is a purely artistic endeavor and requires comfort with both uncertainty and conjecture.
There are many moments of Solitude and Connection in Smith’s work. For the most part, she spends her time alone and avoids contact with other people during holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Although she is a very guarded person, she does appreciate connections with others when they are on her terms. The CDC is an unusual community, and Smith is somewhat on the outside of it. She is the only artist in the group, but she values her connections with other members, even when they do not see eye to eye. Likewise, Smith genuinely cares about Zak, the barista. Though they do not know each other very well, she enjoys the coffee he makes and is invested in his desire to have his own café.
Grief and Loss are part of Smith’s life and central to this memoir, even though she has not talked about her husband’s death yet. Each of the writers and friends she mentions in these first chapters is dead, adding another layer to Smith’s solitude. The narrative blends past and present, interrupting Smith’s solitary musings with memories of friends and loved ones, mimicking how grief and memory are nonlinear. She lives alone, and her present life is in sharp contrast with her past life with Fred. While the past is vibrant and filled with meaningful memories, the present sometimes feels comparatively empty. When Smith tries to talk about Wegener’s last moments, there is a confusion between “last” and “lost” moments. This scene links the theme of loss with the theme of nothingness, which is a connection that endures in the rest of the memoir. Another member of the CDC says that they remember Wegener because of his wife carrying on the work of mourning. The following chapters reveal that Smith is in the same position as Wegener’s wife: Her husband is dead, and she now has to navigate the process of mourning.
