A pair of books track the strange journey of the Smiths' lead singer

By Brian Pera

ALMOST EVERY OTHER line from Saint Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre's 1963 paean to writer Jean Genet, could be applied to Morrissey, the former lead singer of the Smiths, or so it sometimes seems. "He adopts the same attitude toward the aristocracy of crime that Proust does toward the nobility," for instance, or "All he asks of them is that they be myths, heraldic animals, figures in a tapestry, so that he can admire them in his solitude." It was exactly this kind of monkish reverence that Sartre felt for Genet, pinning him to the walls of his consciousness the way Genet used photos of thieves and thugs to transform his solitary prison cell, and by naming his critical testament to Morrissey after Sartre's thesis on Genet, Mark Simpson reveres not just his subject but this tradition of worshipful respect and mimesis, a tradition Morrissey's best work exemplifies.

Though there are legions of Morrissey devotees, the literature on Manchester's finest has heretofore remained disappointingly academic. One wishes for the unrestrained, evangelical fervency of a fan – and gets it, with Saint Morrissey. A love letter to self as much as subject, Simpson's appreciation delves underneath received ideas and done-to-death biographical data into something more nuanced and sublime. Saint Morrissey, like Saint Genet, evokes the world its subject theoretically embodies as much as it does the one that technically spawned him. Morrissey, as did Genet, wove his own elaborate tapestry, and Saint Morrissey evokes, more than anything, the vast warp and weft of this cloth, which extends from one private bedroom to another -- from Genet to Sartre to Morrissey to Simpson to you, dear reader, ad infinitum. What Morrissey had that few have had since was a sense of this fabric's scale and the fragility of its thread. His aesthetic ancestors haunt his oeuvre, informing it with a sense of loss, a presence that registers as an absence. The emptiness a lad like Morrissey felt – and expressed – is therefore probably best addressed by considering the people, places, and things he recruited to fill in the blanks.

Simpson understands his subject's tortured nostalgia, and Saint Morrissey pays remarkable tribute to the spirit of Morrissey's influences: northern women of the working class turned celebrity like Sandie Shaw, Viv Nicholson, Shelagh Delaney, and Pat Phoenix; stars, writers, and singers such as James Dean, Dorothy Parker, Marc Bolan, and the New York Dolls; and of course the criminals, exemplified most spectacularly by Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, Genet, and Oscar Wilde. "For Genet," Sartre wrote, "the answer is clear: love is a magical ceremonial whereby the lover steals the beloved's being in order to incorporate it into himself." Like Genet, Morrissey became what he coveted. The pose he strikes on the cover of Simpson's book embodies all of his influences at once. In one fell swoop of self-creation, Morrissey manages to comment on Genet's own cover stance – however inadvertently – and to expand on it. Side by side, the books play off each other in a seductively complex dialogue of geometries. Simpson too exhumes and reanimates his influences, most notably Sartre and Genet, revising and conflating them. Just as Morrissey, in his pose, recalls the thugs Genet admired, Simpson, posturing with words, becomes Genet, gazing back through Sartre.

Saint Morrissey is an insightful, evocative collage of faded photographs and fleeting impressions. Simpson, who clearly loves his subject, approaches Morrissey's music as if he were working out his own inner conflicts – and in a sense he is. Because no one, fan or foe, has written this sensitively or intelligently about Morrissey, the hold he has maintained on a notoriously slippery segment of the population has sometimes seemed, to the uninitiated, overblown. No less than the ruffians he and Genet elegized, Morrissey has often been misunderstood, if not excoriated -- as has Simpson. Admiring the singer often means defending one's position. For many, Morrissey represents the bittersweet impossibility of consummation with one's ideas of other people and oneself, and vice versa.

Saint Morrissey looks for the man who wasn't there, the lad Steven Patrick Morrissey submerged beneath invention and the figure Mark Simpson refashioned from his own impressions, so it's fitting that the book ends in the cul-de-sac of Los Angeles, where, like Norma Desmond, Morrissey has hermited away. L.A. means entropy as much as it does reinvention, and recent reports of Morrissey boating the concrete waterways in a magnificent Rolls Royce dovetail nicely with his own mythology and those of the forgotten personages his music so wistfully resuscitates. The rich tradition of expat migration westward includes its share of Brit musicians (David Bowie, Keith Moon, John Lennon, et al.) whose stories detour into decadent oblivion -- and stall there. In How Soon Is Never?, another Morrissey fan picks up where Simpson leaves off, tracking down the myth like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, intent on recapturing whatever it was he felt the first time he heard a Smiths song.

Saint Morrissey reconciles itself to the disconnect between ideation and reality, finding hope in hopelessness and personal gain in loss, as Morrissey himself seemed to. Joe Green, the 30-year-old protagonist of Marc Spitz's debut novel, is a little less well-maladjusted: he's a rock writer who longs for assignments about things he still believes in. How Soon Is Never? is a coming-of-age story about a guy who never grew up, and the two books speak to each other like fans comparing notes. "I'll do anything to feel clean and reverse what I did to myself the night before," Joe says, to which Simpson's book nods in sympathy: "As for me, well, I'm not sure I ever made it out of the early Eighties."

Like Holden, stuck facedown in the swimming pool, Joe reviews his life as a ghost of what he was. Like Simpson, he has matched Morrissey's poses with one protective mask after another, for so long and so convincingly that he's lost touch with what he was initially trying to hide. Unlike Morrissey, he's no celibate -- not by choice, anyway -- and much of the novel is taken up with his oversexed hunt for feeling though true love. "This is not playing it cool," he scolds himself, after blowing his cover in front of a girl. It's not very compelling either. Joe's obsessive investment in the Smiths is not just a plot device but the motor that keeps his story going, and Spitz runs on empty when he moves too far astray from it. No dalliance can compare to Morrissey, which is to say Joe is more in love with an impossible idea of himself than he could ever be with any mortal. "The image of this person instantly became a design for everything I wanted to be," he says, recalling the first glimpse of his idol, and the novel is strongest when detailing the various guises involved in this identity theft, from his childhood on Long Island to his childish adult ennui, circa 1990s Manhattan.

As his 30th birthday approaches, Joe digs out all his old Smiths albums. Listening to them makes him feel young and clean again -- and gives him the bright idea of trying to reunite his favorite band. Toward this hubristic end, he sets out to track down all the players, with an inevitable moment of truth in L.A. He sets himself up in a bungalow at the Sunset Marquis like has-been rock royalty, then camps outside Morrissey's Beverly Hills mansion – with (sigh) predictable enough results. There's just no recomposing a picture of yourself that was copied off a picture of someone else in the first place. Simpson, or Morrissey himself, could have told him that.

Now pass it on.

Brian Pera is the author of the novel Troublemaker.

Saint Morrissey
By Mark Simpson. SAF Publishing, 224 pages, $25.