… a Philip Larkin for our time, is seriously ill. Scathing Online Schoolmarm admires this essay about him by Luke O’Neil, a fan. She thanks her sister for sending it to her.
Here’s an excerpt:
Of course I’ve always known he’ll die someday, as will we all, but the actual prospect of it here writ large has instead driven me into a sort of childish revelry about the romance of the greatest crime of them all. Maybe that’s not surprising, as the allure of the grave is a theme well-trod for we woebegone lot. And more to the point, Morrissey, perhaps more than any other artist of his stature, has been prepping us for his death since the day we first heard him. That dalliance on the border is in fact the very appeal. Morrissey without the circuitous dance with death is just a sad, unloveable loner. Where’s the drama in that?
… “Cemetry Gates” is… indicative of the way we’re supposed to process Morrissey’s eventual death, even if this latest revelation doesn’t prove to be his final bow:
So we go inside and we gravely read the stones, all those people all those lives where are they now? With the loves and hates, and passions just like mine, they were born and then they lived and then they died.
It’s hard not to hear an echo of that line in the singer’s stiff upper-lipped announcement of his ill health. But one can’t help but wonder if death, the province of Keats, and Yeats, and weird lover Wilde, and the endless string of doomed, tragic film and literary stars he’s obsessed over in song, isn’t where Morrissey belongs. No, not Steven Patrick Morrissey the human man, of course, but Morrissey the idea, the one that we actually know, the one that’s important to us. He’s made his dissatisfaction with this mortal coil quite clearly known.
October 9th, 2014 at 12:05PM
A.A. Gill was less impressed by Mozza’s autobiography.
October 10th, 2014 at 7:48AM
Yes – there was many reviews like Gill’s. It’s fine, funny, hilarious, and quite true — though Gill doesn’t bother asking why dyspeptic fools like Morrissey become… well, Morrissey.
October 10th, 2014 at 5:06PM
I will admit to being a bit of a Morrissey fan myself, even though I think he’s pretty absurd.