jueves, 24 de octubre de 2013

MORRYSSEY

MANCHESTER, SO MUCH TO ANSWER FOR
POSTED BY OCTOBER 23, 2013

Morrissey’s “Autobiography” may, ultimately, be a lesson about editing. The book’s editor, Helen Conford, is thanked at the end and praised as a “steady scrutineer.” I am spitballing here, but the faults and merits of this book probably lie only with Stephen Patrick Morrissey and not Conford, in part because I can’t imagine anyone other than Morrissey having final say. More to the point, the writing here is so vertiginous, impenetrable, and idiosyncratic that I kept hearing a (non-existent) Smiths song in my ear as I read: “You can’t tell me what to do, oh no, but I know you’d love to.” I imaginedLucy from “Peanuts” singing this particular number. It is worth noting that Morrissey himself approves of This Charming Charlie, a popular Tumblr mash-up of “Peanuts” characters and Smiths lyrics. Considering how much we hear later in “Autobiography” about the feuding between the guitarist Johnny Marr and Morrissey, it is also notable that a prompt from Marr—who did not write the lyrics being appropriated—caused Universal to threaten legal action against a blog that makes no profit from a goofy little détournement.
“Autobiography” is connected to various revelations, non-revelations, and clever negotiations. The manuscript was seen by very few (nobody knows how many) before being published, at Morrissey’s demand, as a black-banded Penguin Classic, grouped in the design rubric previously reserved for James Joyce, Graham Greene, and other people who have written more than one book. There was Morrissey’s recent announcement at the only promotional event for the book he agreed to, which was held in a Swedish bookstore, that he is a “humasexual.” You don’t need to read this book to know that Morrissey and his band members do not get along. They really don’t get along, and Morrissey is so eager to detail this not getting along that you come away from “Autobiography” thinking that Morrissey maybe started the Smiths so that he could be joined in the unholy union of protracted legal dispute for a long time, and with several people. It would, after all, befit his life as a dedicated miserabilist and a lover of the confounding. As he writes in “Autobiography,” knowing full well it’s the pull quote, “I am impossible.”
So, rather than rehearse the narrative of the bored Manchester teen who managed to become one of the most compelling and unbiddable pop stars we (still) have, it might be more useful to point out how genuinely strange Morrissey’s writing is. I feel as if I’ve read this book fifteen times and not at all. The concision and wit that Morrissey uses in lyrics is absent, which is, of course, yet another perversity. There are sections when I simply couldn’t tell what city Morrissey was in, what was happening to whom, and what Morrissey thought of the thing that he was allegedly thinking of. And as I floated, unmoored, Morrissey would drop in a single masterfully executed sentence. He’s a writer with a gift that he bends to bizarre use, ignoring easy fixes, making the reader’s experience generally exhausting. After struggling and dreaming of the much clearer “Conford edit” that might exist, I decided that “Autobiography” is best as it exists, a loopy chunk of prose launched with the kind of hubris that only maybe Kanye West both suffers from and understands (although he’d be getting a much harder time for the whole thing).
Early on in the book, when Morrissey is not yet a teen (I think), there is a passage about the tendency of his family to get into car accidents. Here it is:
On a driving jaunt to Liverpool with Dad at the wheel, we are smashed into by an amber-gambler, and passenger-seat Mary has her face shattered with glass. Seated nervously in Liverpool General, we hear Mary’s screams as stitches are forced into and pulled out of the left side of her face. Weeks later we are in a second crash as a blown tire forces the car to swirl and whirl across Wilbraham Road in Whalley Range, in a playful roustabout with death, leaving the car about-face in someone’s garden. The gentle householders of old take us in to sooth our nerves, whereas today’s indignation generation would pellet writs at us from upper windows.

Like so many anecdotes in “Autobiography,” this dyad of car crashes is not contextualized. Did Morrissey then fear cars? Did the family stop taking car jaunts? Come back into the paragraph with me—hold this light, thanks—and take a look at the finishing clause. “Today’s indignation generation” could be any age cohort, though you imagine that he means younger people. In contrast with the “gentle householders of old,” he might be describing his own generation, who could ostensibly be indignant about whatever is left over when Morrissey is not being indignant about things. And then—what? These crab cakes don’t help victims of car accidents but instead throw legal documents at them? Is this about congestion charges (which don’t exist in Manchester)? Are these “writs” legal actions being brought against him by Johnny Marr, or OK! Magazine? Or is there an ancient tradition of informal, handmade writ-making in Manchester which been torn apart by money and jealousy, like a band, oh just any band, so now amateur barristers just throw unpublished laws out the window any time they hear the screech of tires?
The book is full of these sentences, concrete pinions that block sense while feeling poetically apt. (“Pellet writs” is a pretty neat way to describe someone throwing stuff at you.) This isn’t just a case of Morrissey being gnomic or not; if he really believes that he, or anybody, who got into a car accident today would be attacked for getting into an accident, then he’s paranoid, and we’ll need to keep that kind of thing in mind as we read on.
The opening page would take too much time to untangle, as Morrissey simultaneously seems to praise and despise everything in and around Manchester. There’s one sentence in the middle, though, a gem that makes you wonder if this really isn’t all just a matter of editing: “Birds abstain from song in post-war industrial Manchester, where the 1960s will not swing, and where the locals are the opposite of worldly.” We have gone through confusing stuff about different kinds of roads and Victorians who love to plunge knives and irked people and sunshine and then, boom, this lovely string of words. Like a Smiths song, it elevates and celebrates the mundane through expert use of rhythm and euphony and economy. The bastard could have written a book that really did belong alongside Graham Greene and Susan Sontag. But look who’s miserable now. Of course he wrote this book. We’re such dullards not to have seen it coming.
*The first of the Gang to die.
*Every day is like sunday.

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