MANUSCRIPT: Master's Mule, The. Manuscript, with card.
The Master’s Mule Slippers:
Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jack Wall
Smith, Patti. The Masters Mule. Unpublished autograph manuscript. January 1991.
12mo; gathering of 4 bifoliums, rectos only, 7 pp; blue ink with a few pencil emendations; leaves loose, with stab holes; first bifolium separating at fold.
Together with:
Smith, Patti. Autograph note signed, “Patti,” to Jack Wall, n.d.; on a printed gift card from Museum Het Rembrandhuis; envelope addressed in manuscript, “Jack.”
An unpublished manuscript by legendary New York musician, poet, and feminist icon Patti Smith, written in memory of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and enclosed with a card as a gift to one of Mapplethorpe’s favorite models and his longtime partner, Jack Wall, from whose collection the manuscript and card originate. A hybrid of prose poem, memoir, and short story formed around a special pair of Mapplethorpe’s shoes, the manuscript begins as follows:
When Robert died I had the distinct image of his ankles and his long, slim feet in a pair of monogrammed slippers, a pair of velvet mules, the color of night, with his monogram embroidered on the face. I used to tease him about them, tho I was quite taken with them, for they seemed to magnify in their elegant simplicity, his final hour, his fame, his affluence, and also his illness.
Smith goes on to describe other pairs of shoes Robert owned, including a pair made of alligator skin which he wore “at night to walk to Max’s Kansas City, without the money to buy a salad or a cup of coffee, but his feet, resplendent.” Smith draws an analogy to her peculiar state of mind after Mapplethorpe’s death from AIDS in 1989, and the image at the manuscript’s title:
Robert left a great legacy, but I found myself, on the crazy center of grief, fretting over his slippers. The same way that I had worried over, as a child, what had happened to the masters [sic] donkey. I loved the story, when a little girl, of Jesus arriving with great fanfare into the city, on the back of a humble but proud mule...into his darkest, and humanitys [sic] brightest, hour. It bothered me tho, that nothing more was said of the donkey. I wondered what happened to it, who took care of it.
Smith writes that, in the same way, she wondered what happened to Mapplethorpe’s slippers, and she reveals their fate in one of several lyrical passages that appear in the manuscript:
Several months passed before I learned the whereabouts of Roberts [sic] slippers, it seemed a friend, a woman who loved him, retrieved them and placed them untouched upon a surface that reflected all light but thru [sic] no shadow, giving them the image of precious objects that just appeared, and might just as easily disappear, if they were called upon, in all their vain humbleness, to cushion the steps of one on a rich, somewhat treacherous, and infinite journey.
Dated “1.11.91,” the manuscript is originally titled “The Prophets Mule,” with “Prophets” crossed out and “Masters” written above in pencil. Beside the title in pencil is the word “Master,” and written in ink on the verso of the first page is the phrase “combing a greyhound.”
Smith and Mapplethorpe were romantically involved before Mapplethorpe began living as a gay man, and the two remained intimate friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. Smith’s 2010 memoir, Just Kids, is an account of their relationship and of their coming of age in the New York art and music scenes of the late sixties and seventies – including their presence at Max’s Kansas City, the bar where Andy Warhol held court. In 1996, Smith published The Coral Sea, a collection of lyrical reminiscences and tributes she had written to Mapplethorpe, into which the present story would have fit comfortably, but was not included.
The manuscript is loosely inserted into a card from the Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam, featuring Rembrandt’s etching of the prodigal son on the front, and including a not
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