All successful men are self-made in hindsight, and their memoirs prefer to dwell on struggle and talent over support and good luck. Morrissey is no exception: "It is quite true," he says near the end of Autobiography(which was released in Europe in October and comes out this week in the U.S.), "that I have never had anything in my life that I did not make for myself." Of course that’s debatable, but if you’re buying a Morrissey book, you surely expect narcissism. You might also expect wit, vendettas, pettiness and tenderness, music nerd pedantry, a perceptive critical eye, and real insight into the man’s work. You would only be disappointed with the last.
Midway through Autobiography, Morrissey and his friend Linder drive to Saddleworth Moor, an empty, rain-beaten desolation some miles outside Manchester. On their way home from this lonely place, a drenched half-naked youth looms out of the dark, imploring them to stop. They do not, and when they decide to return he has vanished. Was he a ghost? The possibility is considered. Linder feels he was likely a victim of an assault, pleading for help. Morrissey thinks differently: "My instincts told me he had been placed as bait at a scene of ambush."
There is no conclusion to this story, but of all the anecdotes in the book it gives you the clearest picture of its writer. The Morrissey of Autobiography is not inclined to think charitably of others’ motives: He sees a desperate youth and assumes he’s part of a scam. And why not? Morrissey's world is full of fools, bores, and crooks placed there to vex, snub or swindle our hero. The book is littered with severed relationships, and long-term associates are treated as bit parts compared to those who thwart the singer. His reflexive recoil at humanity starts young; I got to his shuddering descriptions of teen female sexuality ("honeypots yawn like open graves") and put the book aside for several days. Even for his adoring public, empathy is elusive: In one of his on-the-road stories, he chortles at a band member who mocks a fan’s weight. Nonetheless, he spends the last hundred pages basking in their worship.
Autobiography has a roughly symmetrical structure. The Smiths’ career and the 1996 trial over the band’s earnings that finished them are given equal space. After the trial lies hard-won contentment; before the Smiths comes awkward misery. Amidst this misery, in the drear of post-war Manchester and the brutal class and educational system that sustained it, Morrissey struggles to become himself.
Much of the book’s first part is lyrical, evocative, its flowing sentences full of humor and feeling, and overall one of the better pop memoirs I’ve read—the story of a boy growing up through and with music. Morrissey was a fan and then a critic long before he became a singer, and he has a gift for catching his love and enthusiasm as they were, untempered by hindsight. As a Smiths fan, I learned long ago that the New York Dolls were to Morrissey as he was to us, but only reading Autobiography did I really get what they meant to him and why.
What the Dolls had that Morrissey admired was a sense that they had somehow abdicated from humanity. "Their eyes are indifferent. They have left the order of this world." His early favourite records—near-forgotten singles by the likes of Buffy Saint-Marie—had some quality of drama or voice to them that made them stand out, but it’s only when glam comes round that he finds the stars to transform him. Bolan, Bowie, forgotten post-Bowie star Jobriath, Iggy, Lou Reed, and ultimately the Dolls—for the adolescent Morrissey these figures offer a possibility of new ways of being, and a diagnosis for his own sickness: "These were times when...a personal music collection read as private medical records."
In early drafts of rock history the early 1970s were an in-between time—a decadent stretch between the high creativity of the 60s and the purgative of punk. In his stories of the wonder and thrill of finding new idols, Morrissey makes a good case for that being the moment pop really got interesting—turning rock’s rebellious gestures into something braver, smarter and fundamentally queerer. The stars he falls for don’t challenge through what they sing or say, they are disruptive simply by being who they are and looking how they do. "Spare a thought," he writes, "for those who rock the boat. They challenge your attention, and even in your rage you find you quite like them for poking you as if you were a dead mule. Perhaps you are?"
A trick Morrissey uses a lot is to let stories or anecdotes end with a verbal shrug, "And this is how history is made"; "And the new life hammers the old life." It’s a very Morrissey gesture, detached but long-suffering, and it paints life as a parade of inevitable disappointments and petty cruelties. Your strategy against that has to be either transcendence—like the heroes of 70s art-pop—or resignation to suffering. In the most measured and interesting part of Autobiography, Morrissey writes movingly about his favourite poets, and it’s the only time you get even oblique insight into his own lyrical approach. He includes English poet A.E. Housman, quoting lines of stoic despair ("He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?") and citing him as an influence then and now. And it seems to me the way Morrissey made himself unique was by choosing both strategies at once—becoming a star whose very existence implied rejection, but building that stardom around a continued, knowing performance of suffering.
All this is conjecture. Morrissey is effusive about his literary and musical heroes, but you draw your own conclusions about what he learned from them. In fact, one of the strange things about Autobiography is that if I’d never heard Morrissey or the Smiths I’d be baffled as to why I ever should. He is full of praise for his band but his descriptions of their music ("explosive chords...harsh intensity") tell you nothing. His collaborative process—and how that might have differed according to co-writers—goes unexplored. If you come to the book looking for trivia on your favorite Morrissey song, you’ll leave disappointed. Fair enough; the first privilege of autobiography is that you get to decide what mattered, and even golden moments of creativity can feel shabby to live through. His expression of what singing for the first time meant to him— "suddenly, life is close to me"—means more to his story than particular details can. The Saddleworth Moor incident gets roughly the pagecount that The Queen Is Dead does, and anyway it's probably more revealing.
The story of the Smiths, through Morrissey’s eyes, is mostly the story of his perpetual frustration with Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis, who—as the singer tells it—was saved from obscurity by the band and resented them for it ever after. Every release finds Morrissey dolefully logging the band’s disappointing chart positions, and Rough Trade’s excuses for lack of promotion. When he does get onto major labels, they let him down too. It’s hard not to sympathise at first, as Rough Trade can’t get copies of "Hand in Glove" into shops fast enough to score a hit, and as the struggles with Travis are told with a sitcom writer’s eye for comic futility. But 14 years on Morrissey is still tutting over the marketing of junk like "Alma Matters", and the put-upon naïf image wears steadily thinner.
This final chunk of Autobiography is grey fare: the tour diary of a middle-aged man of settled habits, and with just as much excitement as that implies. The book devolves into repetitive expressions of surprise and gratitude at Morrissey’s worldwide popularity, interrupted by snipes at British publications that refuse to acknowledge it. The coherence and craft that marked the first half of the book dissolve. If it still feels like a happy ending, it’s credit to how well Morrissey sells his early discontent.
Another privilege of autobiography is rarely being wrong. Morrissey admits lapses in taste on a few occasions—he didn’t think "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" was very good; he took a while to like the Rolling Stones. But in print at least, he’s not a man given to regret or self-doubt. Some controversies go unmentioned, others—like the NME’s accusations of racism—are witheringly dismissed. (Morrissey’s bizarro logic is that calling a real racist a racist wouldn’t be news, so he can’t be one: "Had I actually been racist, the NME comments would reveal nothing and attract no-one.") So it shouldn’t be a surprise that when the world really does seem ranged against him—as in the High Court judgement over the Smiths’ finances—he states his case at numbing length.
Shortening that part is one of many ways Autobiography could be better as a book, and they are all irrelevant: Morrissey’s emphases and exclusions are as much a part of his story as any LP he’s made. I came away feeling that if the book is honest, then fretting about its lack of specific detail misses the point: Morrissey’s songs are already drawn straight from life. If anything, the problem with Autobiography is that—for all its early verve, and Morrissey’s obvious delight in writing—you have heard these stories first, and better, in song. None of his tirade against Geoff Travis is as perfectly cruel as "Frankly, Mr Shankly". His rage at the scars left by his teachers is put across with cold passion, but "The Headmaster Ritual" is still more visceral. His damp, hollowed-out vocal tones on "Jeane" say more about slum life in Manchester than pages of description. These are the best parts of the book, better writing than many musicians ever produce. Even so, they push me back to the Smiths’ records, with renewed regard for their economy, venom, and the precarious teamwork that produced them.