MANCHESTER, SO MUCH TO
ANSWER FOR
POSTED BY SASHA FRERE-JONES. 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.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario