I’ve been reviewing Morrissey in segments and this is # 4 and I am around a quarter of the way through “Autobiography” and I should mention that fellow Morrissey fanatic Helen bach isn’t enjoying it at all while I am dumbfounded by its honesty and beauty, I am also somewhere between distressed and bemused at his writing about his years between school and Smiths.
In an extremely revealing chapter, Morrissey describes himself as nearly completely comatose trying to exist in the Manchester workplace. “Unemployable , my life draws in tightly,” Morrissey writes, “At 17 I am worn out by my own emotions.” And then this, pure Morrissey and the truth behind the façade behind the truth “I cannot cope with anything but my inability to cope.” Rejected by “Sounds” as a music critic, fired by an imports only record store, quit as a file clerk, turned down by the post office ), he continues a steady march downwards till reaching rock bottom at a hospital where the job requires him to “shake bits of human innards out of post-op doctors’ uniforms”
Meanwhile, one of his closest friends dies in a car wreck, another from cancer, on visits to his sister in the US nothing stems the depression so great Morrissey is nearly comatose and he can’t even get a part time job at “Targets”.
This is writing very very important for young people, for his fans, to read: Moz is nearly dead here, his lifeline is music (he sees the Pistols three times, I only managed twice) and it is not much of a lifeline. He is good at nothing but somewhere, his extreme intelligence is in the background and you can hear the whirl of his brain as he moves from glam to punk and lyrics to poetry.
It is as if his entire being is on hold as he absorbs the influence that would give birth to Morrissey once and for all. He mentions writing letters to pen pals about the New York Dolls and you immediately think of “Ask” –“writing frightening verse to a bucktooth girl in Luxemburg”.
If I was a teenager, and a suicidal, manic depressed teenager, I would embrace these worlds and let them show me that there is no future in dying, that give life time and you will become who you are and will always be. What Morrissey has done in the first 125 pages is set the stage for his emerging like caterpillar even while everything seems to make it an impossibility, where is life seems ready to drown him like the runt in a litter of cats, where he can’t communicate with the world at all, and yet there, in time, we know, we’re waiting for him to emerge from this to that: to Morrissey.
