Whether Morrissey shall turn out to be the hero of his own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, this post must show. And this Dickens paraphrase (and not by much either) is from Charles Dicken’s fictional autobiography “David Copperfield” and that’s apt as humanly possible, unless of course there is an Oscar Wilde autobiography, or at least Stephen Fry somewhere out there.
The first nine pages of Morrissey (as far as I’ve gotten) are Dickensian in the extreme. Morrissey opens with a song lyric for a song not yet written “My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets, streets to define you and streets to confine you” and then goes on and on and on in a bravado five page paragraph taken our hero (if, indeed, that is what he will prove to be) from a near birth death through the slums of 1960s Manchester’s always dodgy Moss Side, a last vestige of Victorian, England, and not the good stuff, all the way through a Nicholas Nickleby Catholic school (which still reads substantially less traumatic than my own around the same time and near the same place) of pathological nuns, lesbian spinster teachers and the Headmaster “the drooled grueled face” of Mr. Coleman. A wretched figure, but nothing much compared to the Titanic sadist, my very own long dead and good riddance sadist of all sadists Headmaster Captain Patterson.
But where’s the music, you ask. Nine pages in there is a reference to the nine year old Morrissey listening to Millie Smalls hit “My Boy Lollipop”, the Hare Krishna mantra played on a dusty victrola, and Roy Orbinson’s “It’s Over”. Even this early, music is in the process of saving, and, in a flash forward, Morrissey’s love of glam rock is already leading to a confrontation with his former best friend.
Oh, and Morrissey has made his first claim to asexuality.
This is very well written stuff. I wonder if he can maintain this level of intensity for the next 400 plus pages??
So is Morrissey the hero? Not yet, but he will be.
