I think this response typifies his relationship with literature, one identical to his relationship to pop music and movies: an artist's personality fascinates him more than her art. Go down the list of his stated heroes and the common threads are easy to spot....
True as hell, though in stuff like his Under the Influence liner notes he does sound very passionate about some artists whose lives he doesn't particularly admire, or know anything about.
The typical example from films is James Dean. If you read anything from his book "James Dean Is Not Dead" you're instantly struck by Morrissey's deep interest in Dean's alleged bisexuality, among his other virtues.
Yeah, isn't
James Dean amazing? It's a list of traits Morrissey shares with Jimmy, and there seems to be no other purpose for the thing. "James Dean had very poor eyesight...and a close relationship with his mother...and he made a huge drama out of his differences from other people, and he liked men at least some of the time, and he was very passively self-destructive...allow me to speculate for a moment on what on earth is going to happen to me-- I mean Jimmy. If he'd lived. Because I worry."
He isn't a poet writing pop songs, he's a writer of pop songs, full stop. He is far more interesting to me because of that fact.
Yeah, that's the neat thing about Morrissey to me. One of them. He is not (like Dylan or Ani DiFranco) a poet who sings (and audibly sees it as a minor aspect, the thing one
must do to connect all-important words to the audience); nor is he a pop singer/melodist who happens to write clever lyrics.
Instead he is one of the very few pop musicians out there who move naturally in the form of pop, in and of itself. He wouldn't make it as a poet or a melody writer or a singer, but when you combine the three he's suddenly one of the best artists out there.
*Observant point about his prose style. He does write as you describe, although I'm not sure I agree that it's good. Entertaining and highly enjoyable, but not necessarily good.
Yeah...it's a distinction that has to be drawn. I thought his Dolls and James Dean books were absolutely terrible prose (though they had their moments) and his Influence liner notes a complex, interesting mess. His Q&A's on TTY are really just annoying, and not in a good way.
But I enjoyed the letters he wrote to his Scottish pen pal back in the early 80's, and a lot of his Email-type stuff -even The Email- that's leaked or shown up on TTY has been great. Maybe what I'm saying is that he's not a good prose writer, but is an
excellent letter writer; his eye for effect, ability to round off a thought, word choices ("censorial?"), and timing, particularly as it pertains to moments with the potential for offense, are all particularly suited to letters.
More than merely having a presentiment of his great fall, Wilde actually did nothing to prevent it from happening even when he could have (first by foolishly prosecuting the Marquess of Queensbury and then not fleeing England when it was clear he would lose the third trial). It's not crazy to suggest that Morrissey also believes he is fated for his own exile-- glorious martyrdom and eternal fame, in short. If that's true, how much of a contribution is he making to his own downfall?
Morrissey's apparently got Wilde especially on his mind at the moment, since he's shown up as a tour backdrop; I also suspect there's more to it than that. As you said, Morrissey identifies intensely with his heroes, and Wilde above all of them. I find it amazingly unlikely that Wilde's moving to mainland Europe to die (at 46) had nothing to do with the 46-year-old Morrissey's decision to go to Rome. There were presumably other reasons, but the symbolism must have crossed his mind.
I really think that ROTT has a lot to do with Wilde, and with that numeric coincidence and associated point in Morrissey's life. Large parts of it deal with the things that fuelled Wilde's demise, primarily self-destruction, and the general (whether wry, resigned or angry) sense of its inevitability. It also deals several times with being "destroyed" by a lover (your Lord Alfred Douglas character), and of passively allowing this, most prominently in "You Have Killed Me."
I feel, however, that there's more to the Wilde connection than that. I feel that it's about all the ramifications of
rejecting the idea of living your life according to what you think is appropriate for an artist to do -i.e. according to the principles of observation, setting yourself apart from humanity, and pursuing a casual self-destruction- and instead going out and getting laid and saying embarassing things and openly wrestling with the self-destructive habits that have served you so well thus far, even it means that the habits win. The risks are massive humiliation, a loss of objectivity which can lead to literary clumsiness, and the horrible possibility of learning that, without your mantle of caustic reason, you're not actually an artist; the potential reward is an understanding of human life which allows your work to touch the universal. (Forgive my grad-student voice. I'm getting a vanity license plate that says "PONTIFIC-8!"
...but I also believe it.)
Wilde and Morrissey both stepped off that cliff, I think, in about the same way and at about the same time. Morrissey seems to have met with more success on the way down, but we have yet to see what will actually happen to him.
Past a certain point, analyzing ROTT devolves into paradox and speculation. We won't know the story behind it, or how it ends, for years and years. (Well, hopefully.)
(All of this exemplifies the essential annoyance of Morrissey: one tries to work out this character, the persona, interpreting its complexities and reading it as literature, but one is aware aware the entire time that there is a man behind it, and no matter how great the apparent similarity to the persona, we will
never know the exact connection between them.)
Art is a dick.
Thanks!
I was so happy to find this board.
