What Survives
Morrissey, Autobiography
Penguin Classics, 368pp, £30.00, ISBN 9780141395081
reviewed by Nicolas Padamsee
The contours of life are not the contours of art: the former coils, the latter arrows. We wend our way forwards with caducuous dreams, stop-start careers and capricious slews, whereas (successful) fictional characters follow a lodestar – their motivations fixed, their attachments delineated, their nadirs and their peaks manifest. For this is what lures us to films and novels: definiteness, the placement of pattern.
So. What then of the autobiography? Well, the salient lure is illumination. Perhaps even revelation. Certainly intimate access to an idiosyncratic character. But form remains fundamental to its artfulness. And here the fabula – defined by the Russian Formalists as the events a narrative comprises – is set in stone. 6 cannot love 9 in lieu of 4 simply for equipoise. If 6 had the hots for 4, then 6 had the hots for 4. That’s life. Slack life. Non-fiction will not achieve the flawless balance of fiction. Still, in the siuzhet – the schematism of these events – the life writer does have carte blanche. How to control the text’s internal time? What to spin out? What to omit? These are the life writer’s calls; and they are cardinal. KO them and luminous constellations can form, even if the fabula is ‘a unique random blend of family and fashions’ (Philip Larkin, ‘Ambulances’).
Published in October 2013, Morrissey’s Autobiography spent five weeks at the summit of the UK Paperback Chart. It has now been re-issued in hardback – the first Penguin Classics hardback – with a sumptuous monochrome cover and a number of new photos. Born in 1959, Morrissey is the co-founder of the Smiths, a contender for the most influential band in British history; a solo artist with nine studio albums, three of which reached number 1; and a ceaselessly eloquent iconoclast, a musician unafraid to alienate sectors of his own audience. In a time of narcissistic clamour for ‘niceness’ – be like me! – this alone ensures Autobiography deserves to be read. But does it deserve to be reread (the Nabokovian test of literary merit)?
‘My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets’ begins the book: ‘streets to define you and streets to confine you’. This is ‘Victorian knife-plunging Manchester’, where the ‘mournful remains of derelict shoulder-to-shoulder houses’, school nuns wear ‘post-volcanic black’, and kids are ‘slackly shaped and contaminated’. As colourful adverbials leave a Dickensian impress on line after line, the narrative streams with a celebratory spirit in counterpoint to a landscape of ‘blank astonishment’. Having been introduced to our author’s Irish clan, we are shown around St Wilfrid’s, a ‘bleak mausoleum’ staffed with such gargoyles as Miss Dudley, a ‘sexual hoax’, Miss Redmond, who ‘will die smelling of attics’, and Mr Callaghan, a ‘cauldron of spite’, whose facial muscles invariably crinkle into ‘soupy sourness’. And St Wilfrid’s is followed by St Mary’s, a secondary modern in which matinal abuse is routine and ‘each day is an array of invectives’. Wonderfully rendered, these cinereous establishments set the scene for rescue; and rescue comes: in the form of music and literature, in the form of David Bowie, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, WH Auden, John Betjeman, AE Housman, Shelagh Delaney and Oscar Wilde.
These influences sifted through, the Smiths section of Autobiography commences on page 110 with an account of Morrissey and Marr’s first meeting (in the concourse of the Ardwick Apollo); and by 112 we are in Joe Moss’ rehearsal room, the band belting out ‘Hand in Glove’. Indeed, the celerity is such that by 116 we are seated with Geoff Travis. Sadly, few compositional anecdotes are offered; there is little on the lyricist’s craft. Spotlighted instead are the studio sessions, the tours, the album artwork, Rough Trade’s stubborn incompetence, and Sire’s insouciant incompetence. But Morrissey’s esprit doesn’t falter:
With Strangeways, Here We Come, the ‘search for wisdom’ ends. The Smiths split. And a solo career is incepted with ‘Suedehead’ and Viva Hate.
‘If you undo someone, you make history. It is the type of move that will impress only the simple mind, but it is history nonetheless’. 1996. The Joyce v Morrissey & Marr court battle. Spanning nearly 50 pages, this is acidulous: a comprehensive excoriation. The evidence is presented. John Weeks’ judgment is palpated. Questions abound: ‘Why was Weeks…’ ‘Why was the failure of Joyce…’ ‘Why couldn’t Weeks see…’ ‘At what point does absurd become psychoneurotic?’ Snappy? No. Enjoyable? Reasonably. As the assertions recur – and, trust me, they recur – it becomes apparent what we are witness to: we are witness to a howl of protest, and, as howls of protest will, this furnishes us with (1) vital emotion (2) hamminess and (3) lucid conviction. ‘Even if the passing of time might mellow you into forgiveness, it doesn’t mean that you ever again want to be friends.’
Life in Rome and LA; the solo albums You Are The Quarry, Ringleader of the Tormenters and Years of Refusal; sold-out shows across Europe and the Americas; affection for the Latino community; and happiness are all mused on in the final section of the book.
This sense of easement pervades the end. Still, remembering the scores of fans at a concert in Helsinki, Morrissey wistfully writes:
Where does this leave us? How successful is Autobiography? Let’s consider the style. Morrissey’s wit is inimitable (‘Naturally, my birth almost kills my mother, for my head is too big, but soon it is I, and not my mother, on the critical list at Salford’s Pendlebury Hospital’) and his concinnity is unquestionable (‘Windows like eyes facing downwards, awaiting the chop’ is a terrific simile). Yet there is imbrication (‘Windows like empty eye sockets hiding secrets in back bedrooms and dingy parlours’ surfaces later) and there are some awkward rhymes (‘It is too much to bear, and in this dank November air I hear voices of people who are not there… From St Stephenson Square…). Curiously the text also features a number of visual eccentricities: the use of both italics and speech marks for dialogue, sporadic emboldened lines, CAPS outbursts, and corpulent paras. All of which leads us to form, to schematism.
Autobiography’s charm, it seems to me, lies in the appearance of luminous constellations amid determined sprawl. 1960s TV is pored on. As is Joyce v Morrissey & Marr. As is the ineptness of record labels. There is excess. However, with the fabula of most lives – spouses, old flames, amorousness – pushed to the periphery, music is uncontested as the marrow, around (and in) which the secondary stars, loneliness and love, can scintillate. From scruffy childhood to Smiths fame to solo success that remains the case. Thematically this is siuzhet with astuteness. Spatially this is siuzhet with character. What results is a work of jaunty artfulness: both definite and intimate. In spite of its flaws, it is a triumph, and it deserves to be reread.
So. What then of the autobiography? Well, the salient lure is illumination. Perhaps even revelation. Certainly intimate access to an idiosyncratic character. But form remains fundamental to its artfulness. And here the fabula – defined by the Russian Formalists as the events a narrative comprises – is set in stone. 6 cannot love 9 in lieu of 4 simply for equipoise. If 6 had the hots for 4, then 6 had the hots for 4. That’s life. Slack life. Non-fiction will not achieve the flawless balance of fiction. Still, in the siuzhet – the schematism of these events – the life writer does have carte blanche. How to control the text’s internal time? What to spin out? What to omit? These are the life writer’s calls; and they are cardinal. KO them and luminous constellations can form, even if the fabula is ‘a unique random blend of family and fashions’ (Philip Larkin, ‘Ambulances’).
Published in October 2013, Morrissey’s Autobiography spent five weeks at the summit of the UK Paperback Chart. It has now been re-issued in hardback – the first Penguin Classics hardback – with a sumptuous monochrome cover and a number of new photos. Born in 1959, Morrissey is the co-founder of the Smiths, a contender for the most influential band in British history; a solo artist with nine studio albums, three of which reached number 1; and a ceaselessly eloquent iconoclast, a musician unafraid to alienate sectors of his own audience. In a time of narcissistic clamour for ‘niceness’ – be like me! – this alone ensures Autobiography deserves to be read. But does it deserve to be reread (the Nabokovian test of literary merit)?
‘My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets’ begins the book: ‘streets to define you and streets to confine you’. This is ‘Victorian knife-plunging Manchester’, where the ‘mournful remains of derelict shoulder-to-shoulder houses’, school nuns wear ‘post-volcanic black’, and kids are ‘slackly shaped and contaminated’. As colourful adverbials leave a Dickensian impress on line after line, the narrative streams with a celebratory spirit in counterpoint to a landscape of ‘blank astonishment’. Having been introduced to our author’s Irish clan, we are shown around St Wilfrid’s, a ‘bleak mausoleum’ staffed with such gargoyles as Miss Dudley, a ‘sexual hoax’, Miss Redmond, who ‘will die smelling of attics’, and Mr Callaghan, a ‘cauldron of spite’, whose facial muscles invariably crinkle into ‘soupy sourness’. And St Wilfrid’s is followed by St Mary’s, a secondary modern in which matinal abuse is routine and ‘each day is an array of invectives’. Wonderfully rendered, these cinereous establishments set the scene for rescue; and rescue comes: in the form of music and literature, in the form of David Bowie, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, WH Auden, John Betjeman, AE Housman, Shelagh Delaney and Oscar Wilde.
These influences sifted through, the Smiths section of Autobiography commences on page 110 with an account of Morrissey and Marr’s first meeting (in the concourse of the Ardwick Apollo); and by 112 we are in Joe Moss’ rehearsal room, the band belting out ‘Hand in Glove’. Indeed, the celerity is such that by 116 we are seated with Geoff Travis. Sadly, few compositional anecdotes are offered; there is little on the lyricist’s craft. Spotlighted instead are the studio sessions, the tours, the album artwork, Rough Trade’s stubborn incompetence, and Sire’s insouciant incompetence. But Morrissey’s esprit doesn’t falter:
I pass away as The World Won’t Listen compilation is released, and the artwork of which I am most proud is repulsively reduced for the CD format to an absurd fraction of the larger photograph. The side view of a blow-fish face in black and white looks stingy and paltry – a cheapened impression of the album sleeve, and I storm the gates of Rough Trade in a now familiar maniacal furore.
With Strangeways, Here We Come, the ‘search for wisdom’ ends. The Smiths split. And a solo career is incepted with ‘Suedehead’ and Viva Hate.
‘If you undo someone, you make history. It is the type of move that will impress only the simple mind, but it is history nonetheless’. 1996. The Joyce v Morrissey & Marr court battle. Spanning nearly 50 pages, this is acidulous: a comprehensive excoriation. The evidence is presented. John Weeks’ judgment is palpated. Questions abound: ‘Why was Weeks…’ ‘Why was the failure of Joyce…’ ‘Why couldn’t Weeks see…’ ‘At what point does absurd become psychoneurotic?’ Snappy? No. Enjoyable? Reasonably. As the assertions recur – and, trust me, they recur – it becomes apparent what we are witness to: we are witness to a howl of protest, and, as howls of protest will, this furnishes us with (1) vital emotion (2) hamminess and (3) lucid conviction. ‘Even if the passing of time might mellow you into forgiveness, it doesn’t mean that you ever again want to be friends.’
Life in Rome and LA; the solo albums You Are The Quarry, Ringleader of the Tormenters and Years of Refusal; sold-out shows across Europe and the Americas; affection for the Latino community; and happiness are all mused on in the final section of the book.
No dreamy reality could ever equal my first concert in Sao Paolo, when the crowd lifted a girl over their heads towards me, and as she came closer I could see that she held a white stick, and closer still I could see that she was blind, and as the crowd placed her gently on the stage she handed me a note which read, ‘I cannot see you, but I love you.’
This sense of easement pervades the end. Still, remembering the scores of fans at a concert in Helsinki, Morrissey wistfully writes:
My body is changing once again, and I now look avuncular, and it can’t be helped, and I can’t measure the love they transmit as being to the sexual or to the paternal.
Where does this leave us? How successful is Autobiography? Let’s consider the style. Morrissey’s wit is inimitable (‘Naturally, my birth almost kills my mother, for my head is too big, but soon it is I, and not my mother, on the critical list at Salford’s Pendlebury Hospital’) and his concinnity is unquestionable (‘Windows like eyes facing downwards, awaiting the chop’ is a terrific simile). Yet there is imbrication (‘Windows like empty eye sockets hiding secrets in back bedrooms and dingy parlours’ surfaces later) and there are some awkward rhymes (‘It is too much to bear, and in this dank November air I hear voices of people who are not there… From St Stephenson Square…). Curiously the text also features a number of visual eccentricities: the use of both italics and speech marks for dialogue, sporadic emboldened lines, CAPS outbursts, and corpulent paras. All of which leads us to form, to schematism.
Autobiography’s charm, it seems to me, lies in the appearance of luminous constellations amid determined sprawl. 1960s TV is pored on. As is Joyce v Morrissey & Marr. As is the ineptness of record labels. There is excess. However, with the fabula of most lives – spouses, old flames, amorousness – pushed to the periphery, music is uncontested as the marrow, around (and in) which the secondary stars, loneliness and love, can scintillate. From scruffy childhood to Smiths fame to solo success that remains the case. Thematically this is siuzhet with astuteness. Spatially this is siuzhet with character. What results is a work of jaunty artfulness: both definite and intimate. In spite of its flaws, it is a triumph, and it deserves to be reread.