Work Text:
PLOT
This is a short prose poetry novel in which author Elizabeth Smart recounts her love affair with married poet George Barker (even though she began writing it years before they met). Said affair lasted 18 years and she bore 4 of his 15 children, whom he had from several different women.
The novel is divided in 10 parts, so I’ll proceed by summing up each one of them while also highlighting the parts which I think are relevant to the Morrissey discourse.
DISCLAIMER: even though there isn’t much of a plot to spoil (the focus is placed almost entirely on the narrator’s feelings and in the way they’re expressed), I am gonna quote extensively from every chapter so keep that in mind if you intend to read the book for yourself.
PART I
The protagonist is waiting at the bust station for the man she loves to collect her (she never names him btw) but when he finally comes he’s with his wife and it’s her that the protagonist sees first.
“But then it is her eyes that come forward out of the vulgar disembarkers to reassure me that the bus has not disgorged disaster: her madonna eyes, soft as the newly-born, trusting as the untempted. And, for a moment, at that gaze, I am happy to forego my future, and postpone indefinitely the miracle hanging fire. […] Behind her he for whom I have waited for so long, who has stalked so unbearably through my nightly dreams.”
It’s interesting to note the way she talks about her. Even though she’s wildly in love with this man, she never badmouths her. On the contrary, throughout the story she seems to have a good opinion of her.
“I see she can walk across the leering world and suffer injury only from the ones she loves. But I love her and her silence is propaganda for sainthood.”
You know what all of this reminds me of? The time Angie collected Morrissey at the station to take him to Johnny’s house, a few days after Johnny had knocked on Morrissey’s door and they’d talked about forming a band. Did he expect it would be Johnny who’d come and pick him up? Did he know he had a girlfriend?
“So we drive along the Californian coast singing together, and I entirely renounce him for only her peace of mind.”
I don’t know if the narrator shares Morrissey’s fascination with cars (I don’t even think the two things are necessarily related), but it’s worth pointing out how some of the most important and dramatic scenes of the book happen in a car.
“Why do I not jump off this cliff where I lie sickened by the moon? I know these days are offering me only murder for my future. It is not just the creeping fingers of the cold that dissuade me from action, and allow me to accept the hypocritical hope that there may be some solution. Like Macbeth, I keep remembering that I am their host. So it’s tomorrow’s breakfast rather than the future’s blood that dictates fatal forbearance. Nature, perpetual whore, distracts with the immediate.”
Look at this entire paragraph and tell me it isn’t the most Morrissey thing you’ve ever read. Also, does any part of it sound familiar? Well, let’s look at the lyrics for Shakespeare’s Sister:
Young bones groan, and the rocks below say
“Throw your skinny body down, son"
But I’m going to meet the one I love
So please don’t stand in my way
Because I’m going to meet the one I love
No, mama, let me go
Young bones groan and the rocks below say
“Throw your white body down”
But I’m going to meet the one I love
At last, at last, at last!
I’m going to meet the one I love
Then the protagonist gets to the couple’s house and her sudden proximity to the man she loves brings the feelings she’s been trying to repress right back to the surface:
“The Beginning lurks uncomfortably on the outskirts of the circle, like an unpopular person whom ignoring can keep away. The very silence, the very avoiding of any intimacy between us, when he, when he was only a word, was able to cause me sleepless nights and shivers of intimation, is the more dangerous. Our seeming detachment gathers strength. I sit back impersonally and say, I see human vanity, or feel myself full of gladness because there is a gentleness between him and her, or even feel irritation because he lets her do too much of the work, sits lolling whilst she chops wood for the stove.”
There’s an unmistakable feeling of impeding doom, as if she knows that even though nothing physical has happened between them yet, she’s sealed her own deal just by being there with him and it’s only a matter of time before the inevitable strikes.
“While we drive along the road in the evening, talking as impersonally as a radio discussion, he tells me: ‘A boy with green eyes and long lashes, whom I had never seen before, took me into the back of a printshop and made love to me, and for two weeks I went around remembering the numbers on bus conductors’ hats.’
‘One should love beings whatever their sex’, I reply, but withdraw into the dark with my obstreperous shape of shame, offended with my own flesh which cannot metamorphose into a printshop boy with armpits like chalices.”
So there you have it: Meaningful Car Scene n°1.
He confesses he had a homosexual experience (and he enjoyed it, or so it seems) and she’s jealous but not outraged or disgusted, which is quite a big deal if you think this book was first published in 1945. (It’s also worth noting that, in her later years, Elizabeth Smart had affairs with both men and women).
Another thing I noticed as I was writing this is that sentence, “remembering the numbers on bus conductors’ hats”, which reminded me of that line in Oh Phoney:
Who can make Hitler
Seem like a bus conductor?
You do, oh Phoney you do
It’s probably just a coincidence, but I found it funny nonetheless.
“He kissed my forehead driving along the coast in the evening, and now, wherever I go, like the sword of Damocles, that greater never-to-be-given kiss hangs above my doomed head. He took my hand between the two shabby front seats of the Ford, and it was dark, and I was looking the other way, but now that hand casts everywhere an octopus shadow from which I can never escape. The tremendous gentleness of that moment smothers me under; […] I stand on the edge of the cliff, but the future is already done.”
Meaningful Car Scene n°2.
There’s a first attempt at physical contact and by now he seems to have realised she has feelings for him, so he’s trying to see how far he can push himself with her.
Now, I’m just gonna go ahead and say it: I feel like something very similar to this may have happened between Johnny and Morrissey.
The reason why I decided to write this analysis is because, once I read the book, I fully realised the pervasiveness of its influence in many of the lyrics Morrissey wrote while he was in The Smiths (especially during the Meat Is Murder era) and in the first years of his solo career but, as much as people talked about it, I feel like they never went deep enough.
The way I see it, Morrissey had every reason to relate to the protagonist, even though she’s a woman. Someone who falls deeply in love with a married man (with bisexual tendencies, it seems) and is quite concerned with the ethics of what she’s doing but at the same time is very certain of her feelings for him.
The man, on the other hand, seems to have a much more ambiguous attitude, accepting her love but also wanting to keep a respectable façade by staying with his wife.
If we assume that Morrissey did harbour romantic feelings for Johnny, it’s easy to see why he would choose this book as a way to sublimate them, especially if we consider how the queer factor would’ve made them even less acceptable in the eyes of society.
But going back to the book… what about the man’s wife?
“By day she obeys the voice of love as the stricken obey their god, and she walks with the light step of hope which only the naive and the saints know. […] He also is bent towards her in an attitude of solicitude. Can he hear his own heart while he listens for the tenderness of her sensibilities? Is there a way at all to avoid offending the lamb of god?”
As I said before, she doesn’t seem to be especially jealous of his wife, but that may be because at the moment she’s high on the secret attentions her husband is giving her, so it’s easy for her to feel sorry for this other woman who’s being cheated on right under her own roof.
I can’t help but think about how Morrissey and Angie had their own relationship and seemed to be quite close. I mean, that must have been a bit of a weird dynamic (for Moz at least), and I wonder how they worked it out.
“I never was in love with death before, nor felt grateful because the rocks below could promise certain death. But now the idea of dying violently becomes an act wrapped in attractive melancholy, and displayed with every blandishment. For there is no beauty in denying love, except perhaps by death, and towards love what way is there?
To deny love, and deceive it meanly by pretending that what is unconsummated remains eternal, or that love sublimated reaches highest to heavenly love, is repulsive, as the hypocrite’s face is repulsive when placed too near the truth. […] I might be better fooled, but can I see the light of a match while burning in the arms of the sun?”
There’s another reference to dying by throwing herself off a cliff, but the really interesting part is what comes after. The narrator rejects the idea that spiritual love is the highest form of love, which is achieved by embracing its physical side instead. It’s not enough for her to have a platonic bond with the man she loves because she wants him in mind, body and soul.
While reading this, I couldn’t help but draw some parallels:
- “Dying violently becomes an act wrapped in attractive melancholy.” → “To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.”
- “Can I see the light of a match while burning in the arms of the sun?” → “There is a light and it never goes out.”
And then, opening the penultimate paragraph of this first chapter:
“I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold on to. I dare not be without a cigarette in my hand.”
This is one of the most obvious one. If we look at the lyrics for What She Said (which is based almost entirely on this book), it’s pretty self-explanatory:
What she said:
‘I smoke ‘cause I’m hoping for a nearly death
And I need to cling to something.’
PART II
This part is mainly about the remorse the protagonist is feeling towards the man’s wife, who has now realised something happened between the two of them.
“Her eyes pierced all the veils that protected my imagination against ruinous knowledge. […] Is there no other channel of my deliverance except by her martyrdom?”
It’s quite interesting to note how the chapter opens with:
“God, come down […] and tell me who will drown in so much blood.”
And then, on the next page:
“I am blind, but blood, not love, blinded my eye. Love lifted the weapon but guided my crime.”
Both of these lines reminded me of the lyrics for Yes, I Am Blind:
Yes, I am blind
No, I can’t see
The good things
Just the bad things, oh…
Yes, I am blind
No, I can’t see
There must be something
Horribly wrong with me?
God, come down
If you’re really there
Well, you’re the one who claims to care
It then goes on:
“… she whom I have injured, and whose agony it is my penalty to watch, lies gasping, but still living, on the land.”
- “Gasping, but still living.” → “Gasping, but somehow still alive.” (Well I Wonder)
PART III
The narrator spends most of this chapter gushing about how in love she is with this man, who in the meantime has followed her back home to spend some time with her (though it’s not clear whether he has left his wife for her or not.)
“Even the precise geometry of his hand, when I gaze at it, dissolves me into water and I flow away in a flood of love.”
(I have nothing to say about this line except that I like it and that I can’t help but imagine Morrissey staring at Johnny’s hands as he picks the chords of his guitar, thinking these exact same thoughts.)
“When the Ford rattles up to the door, five minutes (five years) late, and he walks across the lawn under the pepper-trees, I stand behind the gauze curtains, unable to move to meet him, or to speak, as I turn to liquid to invade his every orifice when he opens the door.”
Yet another reference to his car.
Also yeah, you’re wet for him, we get it.
“And there is so much for me, I am suddenly so rich, and I have done nothing to deserve it, to be so overloaded. All after such a desert. All after I had learnt to say, I am nothing, and I deserve nothing. […] It has happened, the miracle has arrived, everything begins today, […] all the paraphernalia of existence, all my sad companions of these last twenty years, […] all the world solicits me with joy, leaps at me electrically, claiming its birth at last.”
I can’t help but think about how similarly Morrissey must have felt after Johnny knocked on his door, after having spent his last twenty years in much the same way the narrator had, feeling lonely and isolated.
I mean, he even said so himself:
“He appeared at a time when I was deeper than the depths, if you like. And he provided me with this massive energy boost. I could feel Johnny’s energy just seething inside of me.”
“I was there, dying, and he rescued me.”
The chapter ends with this sentence:
“Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm, for love is strong as death.”
Which kinda reminds me of that part in Rusholme Ruffians:
So scratch my name on your arm with a fountain pen
(This means you really love me)
PART IV
This is, in my opinion, the book’s most interesting chapter.
What happens is, they get stopped as they’re crossing the Arizona border and once the cops realise they’re together but not married to each other, they take them to the police station, interrogate them for several hours about the nature of their relationship and then make them leave separately.
Once again, one of the most dramatic scenes takes place in a car.
I fully believe that Morrissey wrote both The Boy With The Thorn In His Side and later Late Night, Maudlin Street with this entire part in mind.
“They are taking me away in a police car […] They are prosecuting me for silence and for love […] They drove me away in a police car. […] For too much love, only for too much love. […] Are you not convinced, inspector? Do you not believe in love?”→ “They took you away in a police car / Inspector – don’t you know? Don’t you care? Don’t you know – about love?” (Late Night, Maudlin Street)
“They intercepted our love because of what was in our eyes. […] Did they see such flagrant proof and still not believe?” → “How can they see the love in our eyes and still they don’t believe us?” (The Boy With The Thorn In His Side)
I wonder who “they” were, though. I mean, we know that in the book, when she says: “They are prosecuting me for silence and for love” she clearly means the authorities, but what did Morrissey mean?
Were “they” those same “people who are weaker/uglier than you and I” and those “evil people (who) prosper over the likes of you and me always”?
And did he have some specific names in mind, or did he just mean society in general?
As in: “They (the general public / the media / the music industry) can’t (don’t want to?) see we love each other because they’re not ready to accept that idea yet, but they’re more than happy to profit from us and our art, which is only made possible BECAUSE of that love.”
The penultimate paragraph before the end of the chapter feels especially relevant:
“All our wishes were private, we desired no more scope than ourselves. Could we corrupt the young by gazing into each other’s eyes? Would they leave their offices? Would big business suffer?”
PART V
The protagonist comes back home feeling sorry for herself.
Her family doesn’t approve of her relationship with a married man, but she refuses to apologise and spends most of her time contemplating nature and reminiscing about what happened.
Another quote which Morrissey probably used as inspiration for Late Night…
“Every yellow or scarlet leaf hangs like a flag waving me on.” → “Every hag waves me on / Secretly wishing me gone.”
PART VI
The protagonist has an argument with her father, who’s worried about her state. Her mother doesn’t want to have anything to do with her anymore and even her brother is sceptical about the whole situation.
She then reminisces about leaving Ottawa with him (she’s Canadian) and she talks at length about how they’re meant to be together no matter what.
She also finds out she’s pregnant.
At the start, she mentions neighbours who warn her to stay away from him:
“The well-meaning matrons who, from their insulated living say, ‘My dear, I think you would would regret it afterwards if you broke up a marriage,’ ‘When you felt it about to happen the right thing would have been to have gone away at once.”
I wonder how many people around The Smiths were aware of Morrissey being in love with Johnny (because at this point, no one can convince me he wasn’t) and, if they were, how much did they know? Did they ever talked to him about it? Did they warn him about being cautious, about not revealing too much of his own feelings in his songs? And did they mention how bad it would look for him if he broke up a couple?
“The policeman grows fatter each day and rivals the new tanks. He blots out the doorway of the little café. A couple seeing him spills the milk at the counter, remembering what they did under the bridge last night.
But the policeman is blind. He strikes only when he hears a loud noise. There are others, though, who have eyes like shifty hawks, and they prowl the streets searching for a face whereon an illegal kiss might be forming.
No, there is no defence for love, and tears will only increase the crime.”
Here she’s talking about how, while in the midst of a war (the book is set in the 40s), the police (and society in general) seem to be concerned with futile things like arresting people who are doing nothing but love each other and it reminds me of a quote from Morrissey’s Autobiography:
“Men were draped with medals for killing other men yet imprisoned for loving one another.”
Later on, she makes a point of proclaiming herself ready to take their relationship as it is, without expecting much of a future.
“Though this is all there is […] I accept it without tomorrows and without any lilies of promise. It is enough, the now, and though it comes without anything, it gives me everything. […] But as long as the accessories are such now as to make me over-armed with weapons to combat the antagonistic world, even if a thousand programs go wrong, I won’t lament that past I was when I could see no future.”
She then tries to dissipate any doubts he might have about their relationship (because it looks as if he’s already starting to second-guess himself) by repeatedly reassuring him that she’s the one for him and that, as much as he tries, he can’t escape that fact.
“Remember I am not temptation to you, but everything is which inclines you away. Nor are you to me, but my entire goal. Sometimes you see this as clearly as I do now, for you say, ‘Do you think if I didn’t I could have…?’”.
I wonder… if Johnny hadn’t already been with Angie when he knocked on Morrissey’s door, would things have panned out differently for them? Would they have dared to take their relationship to the next level in spite of society’s backlash?
“Do you see me then as the too-successful one, like a colossus whose smug thighs rise obliviously out of sorrow? Or as the detestable all-female, who grabs and devours, invulnerable with greed?
Alas, these are your sins, your garments of shame, and not the blond-sapling boys with blue eye-shadow leaning amorously towards you in the printshop.”
Leaving aside the fact that this man is garbage, she’s obviously anxious to reassure him that it’s not his bisexuality that saddens her, but the fact that he sees her as a threat.
Also that line, “grabs and devours”, will then be used by Morrissey in The Headmaster Ritual:
He grabs and devours
He kicks me in the showers
Kicks me in the showers
And he grabs and devours
By the end of the chapter though, her words of comfort are starting to sound ominous:
“Only remember: I am not the ease, but the end.
I am not to blind you but to find you.
What you think is the sirens singing to lure you to your doom is only the voice of the inevitable, welcoming you after so long a wait. I was made only for you.”
PART VII
The man has a breakdown and he’s interned in a psych facility. She tries to go and see him, but his wife is already there. He’d previously written her a letter, asking her to take him back.
The protagonist leaves and when she comes back a few days later they leave together, but when she tries to confront him about the letter he refuses to listen to her.
They have a fight and she ends up capitulating because he’s still ill and she wants to believe him when he tells her she’s the only one.
“My love, why did you leave me on Lexington Avenue in the Ford that had no breaks?”
This line reminds me a bit of Break Up The Family, when Morrissey says:
Hailstones, driven home
In a car – no breaks? I don’t mind
Which coincidentally is what’s happening in this chapter: the honeymoon phase is clearly over, he’s having troubles with his guilty conscience and he deals with them by distancing himself from her, even though she’s expecting his child.
PART VIII
He and his wife move to London where the war is raging and, after a while, the protagonist follows them.
She stays in a dingy hotel and he occasionally visits her to have sex with her, but by now it’s clear that he has no intention of leaving his wife for her, so they often fight and every day she’s getting more and more desperate and isolated.
The chapter opens with the line:
“His brother and his mother and his grandmother lie abandoned in death on the stones of the London Underground.”
This vaguely reminds me once again of Late Night…
You gran died
And you mother died
On Maudlin Street
In pain and ashamed
With never time to say
Those special things
“Bombs are bigger, but the human brains they burst remain the same. It is the faces we once kissed that are being smashed in the English coastal towns, the hand we shook that are swept up with the debris […] and love still uproots the heart better than an imagined landmine.”
This paragraph makes me think of Ask:
Because if it’s not love
Then it’s the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb
The bomb, the bomb
That will bring us together
In the meantime, their relationship is going sour and the protagonist feels they’re reaching a breaking point.
“When the ship cracks in the typhoon, we cover our heads and tell ourselves that all will resolve back to normal. But we are unbelieving. This time may not be like the other times that with time grew into cheerful anecdotes. […] O where does he stalk like a horse in pastures very far afield? I cannot hear him, and silence writes more terrible things than he can ever deny. Is there a suspicion the battle is lost? Certainly he killed me fourteen nights in succession.”
I can’t help but think about how Morrissey must have felt when Johnny told him he wanted to leave The Smiths. People around him (Stephen Street, Grant Showbiz) thought he was going to kill himself and the fact that Johnny then went on holiday and never made contact with him must have alarmed him even more. He’d first thought the situation could be repaired, but by then he must’ve realised the end was upon them.
“He did the one sin which Love will not allow. […] He did sin against Love, and though he says it was in Pity’s name, and that Pity was only fighting a losing battle with Love, he was useless to Pity, and in wavering, injured Love, which was, after all, what he staked all for, all he had, ungamblable.”
From what I gather, he went back to his wife because he felt sorry for her and the protagonist can’t accept that because in her eyes their love was everything that mattered and everything they had.
Now: as I said before, I think Morrissey was inspired by this book because he saw himself in it. I think he must’ve found many similarities between the protagonist’s situation and his own, both of them in love with a married man who doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself.
Johnny and Angie split for a brief period in 1983, when The Smiths went on their first USA tour, and I’ve seen a few people speculate that if something physical happened between Morrissey and Johnny, it may very well have happened then.
Morrissey may have taken advantage of the fact that Johnny was free and overcame his fears by making the first move. Or maybe, Johnny was the one who, once aware of Morrissey’s feelings for him, decided to take the bull by its horns. I don’t know. Nobody does.
What I wonder is… once Johnny went back to Angie, how did Morrissey feel? Because I don’t think he was all that thrilled. Did he think he did it out of pity, like the protagonist of the book did? If something had happened between them on that tour, did he feel used? Did he feel mildly outraged? Did he resign himself to consider it a one-night stand and nothing more, even though his feelings for Johnny clearly went deeper than that?
It’s also worth noticing how the references to this book start to spring up in his lyrics from Meat Is Murder onwards, that is, after that tour in 1983.
“How can I put love up to my hopes so suicidal and wild-eyed when the matter is too simple and too plain: it is her tears he feels trickling over his breast each night; it is for her he feels the concern; and the pity, after all, not the love, fills his twenty-four hours.
Perhaps I am his hope. But then she is his present. And if then she is his present, I am not his present. Therefore, I am not, and I wonder why no one has noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury me. […] For even if he loves me, he is in her arms.
O the fact, the unalterable fact: it is she he is with: he is with her: he is not with me because he is sleeping with her.”
For me, this might be the most heartbreaking part of the book. The protagonist knows that no matter what she tells herself, when he’s done with her he goes back home to his wife while she’s stuck in a hotel room in a country which is not her own.
That line, “I wonder why no one has noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury me”, also crops up right at the beginning of What She Said:
What she said:
“How come someone hasn’t noticed that I’m dead
And decided to bury me?
God knows, I’m ready!”
Which makes me think Morrissey must have somehow related to this part.
“He loves me, but he’s still with her.”
“He has martyred me, but for no cause, nor has he any idea of the size and consequence of my wounds. Perhaps he will never know, for to say, You killed me daily and O most especially nightly, would imply blame. I do not blame, nor even say, You might have done this or this rather than that. I even say, You must do that, you have to do it, there is no alternative, urging my own murder. […] If ever again he lets those nights happen, or dallies with remorse for past sins to others while sinning most dangerously against me, I shall be unrevivable. I shall, whether I want to or not, be struck dead with the fact. And he may clothe it in all humanity’s most melting colours, and pity, and sympathy, and call on love to be kind, and I too shall pray, Let me be kind, but it will be no good.”
This entire thing reinforces my first thought, which is: Morrissey and Johnny at one point had a one-night stand (“It was a good lay, good lay…”), except for Morrissey there were much stronger feelings attached to it.
As hurt as she is, the protagonist doesn’t blame the man for going back to his wife and she even encourages him, because she recognises that, at the end of the day, it’s the best course of action for everyone involved.
What she wishes wouldn’t happen again are "those nights", coupled with him badmouthing her to others out of remorse for his own actions.
If we once again consider the queer factor in the relationship between Morrissey and Johnny, it wouldn’t surprise me if Morrissey followed the same reasoning when Johnny went back to Angie because, as much as Morrissey loved him, he wouldn’t be able to give him the stability of a straight relationship.
(That isn’t to say Johnny didn’t love Angie, btw. I’m sure he loved her deeply and he still does, but I also think at the time some internal conflict was present because, on some level, he reciprocated Morrissey’s feelings.)
That last line, “… and call on love to be kind, and I too shall pray, Let me be kind” reminds me of I Know It’s Over:
It takes strength to be gentle and kind
This can be applied to many situations, but I feel like it becomes especially relevant in the context of the love of your life leaving you for someone else, who you also care about.
PART IX
The protagonist goes back home to Canada and has to face the invasive questioning of neighbours who see her with a big belly but no wedding ring.
After a while though, she realises she must see the man she loves and so she leaves to meet him once again.
“I am lonely. I cannot be a female saint. I want the one I want. He is the one I picked out from the world. I picked him out in cold deliberation. But the passion was not cold. It kindled me. It kindled the world. Love, love, give my heart ease, put your arms round me, give my heart ease. Feel the little bastard.”
More parallels:
- “I want the one I want.” → “I want the one I can’t have.”
- “Put your arms round me.” → “All I ask of you is one thing that you never do / Would you put your arms around me? (I won’t tell anyone).” (Tomorrow)
PART X
The final chapter opens with the line that gave the book its title:
“By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept.”
He didn’t come to collect her, so she has a breakdown right in the middle of the station.
The ending is kind of confusing. It looks as if she resigns herself to go back to him just to have sex with him, and she tries to convince herself everything is fine, but it clearly isn’t.
Elizabeth Smart went back to George Barker time and time again, even though their relationship was dysfunctional to say the least and they were both very damaged, egotistical individuals. He cheated on her repeatedly but she loved him nonetheless, so I guess it would make sense for the book to end like this as well.
“They obey the glint in the middle of my glazed eye, for it is the fierce last stand of all I have.” → “Gasping - but somehow still alive / This is the fierce last stand of all I am.” (Well I Wonder)
“I wanted only one thing. I gave you the full instructions. The name, I spelt it out in letters as long as a continent, even the address, the address that makes waterfalls of my blood because it is also her address. I said quite plainly and loudly: This is what I want. I want this, and I don’t want any bonus. Just give me this and I’ll pay any price you ask. I made no reservations. You took advantage of this. I never grudged. But, Sir, so what I plead is just – what are you stalling for? There is no more to give.”
This entire paragraph reminds me of Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.
“He hangs, damp with his impotent tears, nailed by one hand to Love and by the other one to Pity.”
This man is split between love and duty and can’t seem to be able to make a decision, with everyone suffering as a consequence, including him. That’s what the protagonist sees. What I see is a man who likes to have his ego stroked and doesn’t mind a bit of drama.
It’s not that he’s unable to make a decision, he just doesn’t want to.
“Is it possible he cannot hear me when he lies so close, so lightly asleep? […] My dear, my darling, do you hear me when you sleep?”
These parts were clearly used by Morrissey as inspiration for the lyrics of Well I Wonder (which, like What She Said, was based almost entirely on this book – I even think they were written back to back.)
Well I wonder
Do you hear me when you sleep?
“This is the very room he chose instead of Love. Let it be quiet and full of healing. […] It is the cursed comfort he preferred to my breast. The one who shares it weeps silently in corners, is tender unnoticed, and makes his necessary tea.
‘Have you seen my notebook, dear?’
‘It is under the desk, my sweet.’
Give it to him, O my gentle usurper, whom I also have usurped, my enemy whom I have both killed and been killed by. […] He also is drowning in the blood of too much sacrifice. Lay aside the weapons, love, for all battles are lost.”
At last he’s made his choice and if we’ve learned anything from history it's that a man’s comfort will always be more important than a woman’s safety and peace of mind.
FINAL COMMENTS
As I said before, one of the reasons I think Morrissey was inspired by this book is that he found its story to be relatable, but it’s not just that.
The language, as you may have noticed by reading some of its quotes, is quite poetic, abstract and melodramatic, with a major focus on introspection and an underlying sense of pervasive melancholy.
This is an artistic quality that both Morrissey and Johnny had in common, even though they expressed it differently: one through his lyrics, the other through his sound.
Ultimately, I think Morrissey found By Grand Central Station… very useful creatively and personally. Creatively because it gave him the inspiration to write some of his best songs (also, here’s a reminder that both Moz and Johnny declared Well I Wonder as one of their favourite Smiths’ songs at some point), and personally because it provided him with an outlet to confront his feelings for Johnny, which I think must have been quite tumultuous.
With a shortage of LGBT media which was even more prevalent in the 80s, queer people often had to read between the lines of straight stories to find something to relate to, and I feel like that’s what Morrissey did.
Personally, after reading it I found myself surprised by the superficiality with which most people (biographers, reviewers etc.) talked about its role in Morrissey’s lyrics, because clearly there’s so much more to it than stealing a line here and there. It’s also about him feeling invested in a story because it spoke to him and it represented him, at least partially, in an era when anyone who didn’t fit in with society’s standards of what it meant to be a man or a woman might as well not have existed at all.