Michael A Young
Autobiography’s opening lines, perhaps a more appropriate term than
sentences, give some sense of this style: “My childhood is streets upon streets
with no sign of motorway, freeway or highway” (3). The rhythm and rhyme of
song are audible here and Morrissey has already written and sung about such
streets in “Panic.” Not surprisingly, some of the book’s most graphic writing
describes these scenes of Morrissey’s urban childhood, an environment that
persists at least into the 1980s: “Manchester’s most pickled poor live in these
surrounds—non-human sewer rats with missing eyes; the loudly insane with
indecipherable speech patterns; the mad poor of Manchester’s armpit” (138).
In Morrissey’s youth the tramps wear “clothes brewing with meth-stench”
descriptions of “the slate-landscape of out-of-time Lancashire. An eternity of
repetitive streets of Victorian terraced houses” (107) are reminiscent of Jeanette
Winterson’s writing about Accrington’s “stretchy” (85) streets. Generally, the
urban North prompts the best writing in Autobiography. There are, however,
other instances of vivid language, even if these are sometimes set in overlong,
prosaic passages. Morrissey’s answer to an accusation of grammatical error
in a song’s lyrics is a good example: “’Yesssssssssssssss,’ I hiss, like an
adder on heat, ‘it’s meant to be there’” (216). The simile perfectly doubles the
itself. If admiration is instantly displaced by amusement with the completion
of the sentence, “and now I know how Joan of Arc felt” (216), this simply
indicates the mixed quality of the text, its frequent resort to hyperbole and the
consistency of Morrissey’s references, since in the song “Bigmouth Strikes
Again,” Morrissey compares himself to Joan of Arc.