by Joe Moran
He did sometimes go out to buy his favorite stationery and to post letters, for he had begun a caustic correspondence with the music press, assuming a persona quite at odds with his real-life self. “Go and see them first and then you may have the audacity to contradict me, you stupid sluts,” he wrote to the New Musical Express after it was insufficiently approving of the Buzzcocks. “If these rock classics don’t give you thrills to the joy of living,” he scolded a Sounds critic foolish enough not to share his love of the New York Dolls, “then I suggest you stick with the Sex Pistols whose infantile approach and nondescript music will no doubt match your intelligence.”30
In this pre-Internet age Morrissey relied, like many other shy British teenagers, on the marvelous efficiency of the Royal Mail and the cheapness of its second-class postage to keep in touch with his fellow humans from a distance. The most intense crisis of his adolescence, he later said with his trademark blend of flippancy and dead seriousness, was when the price of stamps rose by a penny.31 The Smiths song “Ask,” which seems to be coaxing someone, perhaps Morrissey’s younger self, out of his shyness, recalls this teenage letter-writing life. When he began writing the odd concert review for Record Mirror, Morrissey assumed the nom de plume of Sheridan Whiteside, after the character, inspired by the critic Alexander Woollcott and played by Monty Woolley, who dispenses scathing wit from a wheelchair in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942). For an awkward adolescent with fantasies of influence and revenge the borrowed persona fitted well. This mingling of shyness and savagery was to become his calling card.
When Morrissey was twenty-three, a young musician called Johnny Marr knocked on the door of his house in Stretford and asked him if he wanted to form a band. Marr was the perfect liberator of a shy person: cool, garrulous, and utterly unshy, he was nonetheless well disposed to cults of melancholy and outsiderdom. The Smiths’ rhythm section was less indulgent. The bass player, Andy Rourke, lived near Morrissey, and they shared the bus home from band practice in silence. “You started counting the lampposts,” Rourke recalled.32 He and the band’s drummer, Mike Joyce, agreed that their new lead singer was singularly unsuited to stardom.
But Morrissey was fortunate in the time he chose to become a star. In 1980 a small group of independent labels had launched the indie chart, published every week in the NME. Indie bands tended to see conventional kinds of promotion as “selling out,” choosing instead to build up their following through avant-garde fanzines, small gigs, and the thriving and articulate music press. In reaction to the power suits, shoulder pads, designer labels, and pumped-up bodies of mainstream 1980s fashion, the indie dress code was thrift-store chic, with collarless shirts and cardigans hanging off underfed-looking, pale bodies.
Indie bands were rarely pictured on their own album covers, and they posed unsmilingly for press shots, the glassy-eyed pout being the approved expression of earnest commitment. Their publicity shyness came with a side order of surliness. It was normal for band members to speak barely above a mumble when interviewed on radio or television and to have next to no stage patter. Paul Haig, the lead singer of the Scottish post-punk band Josef K, would tape introductions to songs to play over loudspeakers rather than talk to audiences at gigs.
Young men ostracized at school as misfits had long formed bands as a way to circumvent their shyness, nursing dreams of stardom to assuage their feelings of inadequacy. But indie culture was something more: shyness as a personal and political philosophy, a response to a perceived coarsening of British life in the Thatcher years. The clichéd mise-en-scènes of the decade—brokers shouting across trading floors, yuppies mouthing off in wine bars about house prices, public relations executives yelling into brick-sized mobile phones—seemed to the decade’s refuseniks to be symptomatic of a new braggadocio afflicting national life. Thatcherism, opposition to which was de rigueur in indie culture, championed what the conservative thinker Shirley Robin Letwin called the “vigorous virtues” of energy, ambition, and independence over the “softer virtues” of humility, modesty, or reticence.33 Thatcherism set itself against that very English culture of diffident disdain that saw it as unmannerly to be too eager or thrusting.
Shyness was a concept that, like humor, the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, simply did not grasp. Almost everything about her, from her one-note volubility to her decisive way of walking, with her handbag clutched in front of her like a steering wheel, suggested someone with little time for English reserve. In Carl Jung’s typology she was a classic extrovert: “All self-communings give them the creeps. Dangers lurk there which are better drowned out by noise.” She was suspicious of waverers and shilly-shalliers, of people who talked with nuance and subtlety, which she saw as mere fudging and evasion. One of these unfortunates was her chancellor and foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, whose owlish reserve she at first tolerated and by the end found irritating. Another was Oliver Knox, the Bletchley Park code-breaker for whom Elizabeth Taylor had been governess in the early 1930s and who now worked at the free-market think tank the Centre for Policy Studies. Thatcher, who liked her advisers to be as bluff with her as she was with them, did not care for his hedging manner and verbal hesitations and christened him “Mr Erm.”34
The shy people Thatcher really resented were the work-shy. This term is not just a play on words: in the 1980s the high and seemingly intractable unemployment figures meant that, along with the millions of unwillingly jobless people, a small subculture developed of diffident, daydreaming artists and musicians who saw collecting unemployment benefits as a badge of authenticity with bittersweet appeal. For all Thatcher’s rhetoric in favor of workers over shirkers, it was not until after she left power that the government began seriously to cut and target benefits, so the unemployment figures during her premiership led to something of a burgeoning of creative endeavor as emerging bands survived on the dole and housing benefits while hoping for their break. Jarvis Cocker, a shy teenager who formed the band Pulp in the hope that fame would cure his feelings of social ineptitude, but who spent most of the 1980s unemployed, called it, when he at last became famous in 1994, “the golden age of dole culture.”35
The crucial aspect of indie music was that it was amenable to solitary, introspective listening. When the Smiths were in the recording studio, Johnny Marr always asked himself how the music would sound in their fans’ bedrooms.36 The 1980s was the last great age of the vinyl record and its sensual rituals: carefully removing it from its sleeve and holding it with the thumb in the central hole, placing the stylus delicately on the record and hearing that crackle and pop as it traced the groove, and, while listening to the music, poring over the lyrics and liner notes. Like most indie bands, the Smiths hated the shiny blankness of the compact disc. Morrissey’s rearguard action in defense of vinyl was to address his fans teasingly through cryptic messages etched into the run-out grooves of Smiths records: “Are you loathsome tonight?” “Would you risk it for a biscuit?” “I don’t know anyone that’s happy, do you?”
In June 1984 the Smiths performed “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” on the BBC’s Top of the Pops. As Morrissey sang, he looked into the high distance as if dissociating himself from the surrounding tackiness—the customary balloons, glitter balls, and disco lights in the studio were woefully mismatched with the song—before turning away from the audience at the end and bowing to no one in particular. He was wearing a hearing aid he didn’t need and, instead of his usual contact lenses, the NHS Contours he had rejected as a teenager. NHS glasses had come to symbolize the state’s support for both the optically weak and the poor: a year after this Smiths’ Top of the Pops appearance they were abolished, and the NHS began offering vouchers for glasses instead. Now that thick throwback frames are part of skinny-suit geek chic, it would be easy to miss the symbolic significance of these first stirrings of the cult of nerddom. “Morrissey, the lead singer of The Smiths, is what American high school students would call a nurd [sic],” wrote one of the Guardian’s music critics. “A nurd is a la
rge, gangling being, good at his studies but awkward in all social situations and doomed to romantic failure.”37
In an English tradition stretching back to early twentieth-century aesthetes such as Ronald Firbank and Stephen Tennant, Morrissey had turned his shyness into a persona in which reality and artifice were indistinguishable. He represented the reverse of that style of indie pop termed shoegazing, in which bands would stare at the stage floor during gigs because they were either too timorous to face a crowd or too busy concentrating on the FX pedals at their feet. Instead, as Morrissey stepped forward from what he called “the huddled shyness of my life,” he became, to the astonishment of the Smiths’ rhythm section, a showman.38
As Marr’s strong melodic lines and licks turned his awkward-scanning words into stirring music, Morrissey would offset the limited range of his voice with wild falsetto yodeling while rotating gladioli above his head, waving his hands or clasping them together in exhortation, throwing confetti in the air, stripping to his waist and writhing on the floor. Smiths concerts turned into revivalist events for fans who had experienced their music in solitude and now wanted to share this strangely joyous miserabilism with others. Morrissey would help them through the bouncer cordon onto the stage and into his arms, as if he were laying on hands and curing them of their shyness.
The kinds of epistolary relationships that had sustained Morrissey earlier now began to form around him. His teenage acolytes put together fanzines in their bedrooms with scissors, glue stick, and Letraset sheets, and like-minded souls sent letters with coins sticky-taped inside to make up the cover price. These fanzines, with names like Smiths Indeed and This Charming Man, spawned lively letters pages and pen pal networks. The Royal Mail, in the era before email and the blogosphere began to take over such functions, was coming to the rescue of the shy and speechless for one last time.
Morrissey gave timid people a way of dramatizing the thwarted or inconclusive encounters of their lives. “Sitting on an Intercity train from Leeds to London last autumn, an attractive woman of 40ish caught my eye and smiled warmly,” wrote one young man in his contribution to a book made up of Smiths fans’ reflections. “‘Jeane’ was playing on my walkman at the time. Instantly, she became Jeane and it was as if I was singing the song to her in my head. Sadly, she got off at the next stop (Doncaster) and we didn’t speak.”39 The hyperrational Albert Ellis, who thought shyness and romantic love very similar in the forms of neurotic fantasy life they inspired, would have despaired at seeing all these Morrissey fans self-mythologizing their unrequited feelings.
In the mid-1960s, Dorothy Tennov, a psychology professor at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, became interested in why unrequited love was such an affliction of the shy. She had first noticed the phenomenon when normally conscientious students, distracted and late with their assignments, broke down in tears in her office and turned out to be nurturing unspoken passions for fellow students or tutors. After conducting many interviews with sufferers, she devised her own word, “limerence,” as a better term for something we would normally call infatuation or being in love. Limerence was an involuntary state suffered equally by men and women, across cultures and personality types, involving “intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors from euphoria to despair.” Demurring at Freud’s famous claim that being in love was caused merely by the blocking of our sexual urges, Tennov noted that sex was fairly tangential to limerence, which had more to do with the acute sensitivity of humans to signs of approval or rejection from others.
Limerence, Tennov argued, could produce a “sometimes incapacitating but always unsettling shyness” in the presence of the love object, and around other people as well. Its symptoms were similar to deep embarrassment: heart palpitations, trembling, flushing, a churning stomach, awkwardness, stuttering, and, more rarely, fainting. The all-consuming concern of limerents was whether their feelings would be reciprocated; inconveniently, the fear that they might not be was both painful and enhanced their desire for the loved one. Limerents took a lot of convincing before they accepted that their love would never be returned, especially if, frozen with shyness, they had not made their feelings known to the love object—thus failing to avail themselves of what Diana Athill calls the quickest and most reliable cure for a broken heart: the killing of all hope.40
The association of lovesickness with torpefying shyness is evident in some of the earliest surviving fragments of poetry. In a verse written around 600 BCE, the poet, Sappho, lists her symptoms when she looks at the woman she loves: “O Brocheo, I see you / And speech fails me, / The tongue shatters, / My skin runs with delicate / Flame . . .” The link between love and shyness was consolidated in the ideal of courtly love that emerged in the courts of twelfth-century Provence and that was captured in the writings of Chrétien de Troyes and Andreas Capellanus and carried into the French countryside by troubadours. This ideal was based on Catharism, a neo-Manichaean heresy, whose adherents saw the realms of spirit and matter as opposed to each other and the human spirit as imprisoned in the dark desires of the flesh. “Every lover grows pale at the sight of the beloved,” wrote Capellanus in his Art of Courtly Love (ca. 1184–1186). “A lover is always timorous.”
Courtly lovers were in love with the idea of love, preferring desire that was unfulfilled and unarticulated to the consummated kind. The idea of sweet, self-ennobling longings came to dominate the Western idea of romance. According to Sir Philip Sidney in Astrophil and Stella (1691), lovers are always tongue-tied, “dumb swans, not chattering pies.” Stendhal picks up on the idea centuries later, in his essay On Love (1822), writing of the lover reproaching himself for “lack of wit or boldness” in the presence of the loved one, when in fact “the only way to show courage would be to love her less.”
The natural mode for the shy lover was the lyric poem: it recollected one’s embarrassment in tranquillity, at a safe distance from the beloved, and eternalized it within a classic literary form. In Keats and Embarrassment (1974), Christopher Ricks argues that one of the great consolations of poetry, with its public articulation of intensely private feelings, is that it helps us to express embarrassment and put it to creative use, making us feel less lonely and estranged in the process. Keats, he says, was a poet particularly attuned to, and insightful about, embarrassment. He felt embarrassed by his lack of formal education, his lowly apprenticeship as an apothecary, his poetry’s poor critical reception, his height (only just over five feet tall), and his sometimes unrequited and excessive love for Fanny Brawne. His ecstatic communions with nature arose, according to Ricks, out of a realization that “among the sane, fortifying, and consolatory powers [nature] has is the power to free us from embarrassment, to make embarrassment unthinkable.”41
Keats’s willingness to face the subject of embarrassment in his poems and other writings allowed him, Ricks argues, to turn awkwardness into “a human victory.” He was brave enough to be gauche, to identify with that period of life, adolescence, when we are most shy and embarrassed but also most open to the insights inspired by such feelings. In Keats, youthful naivety and immaturity are “not just excusable errors, but vantage-points.” Ricks contrasts him with Byron, who dismissed Keats’s work as “mental masturbation” and who offered up a different model of nonchalant pretense “as a cordon sanitaire against contagious embarrassment.”42
Morrissey was clearly Keatsian in this Ricksian sense of being open to his own awkwardness. Many of his songs, such as “Half a Person” and “Never Had No One Ever,” are about enduring loneliness and unrequited love, about climbing into empty beds, about feeling ugly and unwanted. But he could channel Byron as well when he felt like it. He could seem to offer up his heart and “launch my diary to music,” as he put it, and then pull back before things got too embarrassing.43 His lyrics veered between first and second person, a teasing mix of earnestness and evasiveness, and his mordant sense of humor let him skirt nimbly around a point without overliteralizing it.
The same p
aradox was clear on the frequent occasions when he spoke to journalists—for he was the most talked-to and talked-about shy person of his age. Here he would stray into potentially uncomfortable areas like his clinical depression, his celibacy, and his association of love with pain and nonreciprocation, but he covered it all with a protective patina of waspish wit and wryness, his words carefully chosen and his sentences elegantly built. As a boy from a school that had stomped on every sign of intellectualism and pretension, he had taught himself the art of rhetoric, but in a way that was slightly askew, evincing an overfondness for arcane words and piled-up adjectives, as if he were flicking through Roget’s Thesaurus in his head: “The suggestion irks me constantly . . . Against my better judgement I’m affixed to EastEnders . . . I have a dramatic, unswayable, unavoidable obsession with death.”44
The Byronic veneer with which Morrissey coated his Keatsian embarrassment was necessary for an age that was becoming uneasy about unrequited feeling. In Why Love Hurts (2013), the sociologist Eva Illouz argues that unrequited love, idealized in poetry since the Provençal troubadours as a sign of profundity and sensitivity, has become an embarrassment in contemporary culture. Modern love is meant to be the coming together of enlightened self-interest, with partners offering intimacy and commitment in return for the same. When love hurts, according to this ethos, it is simply a mistake made by two people who are incompatible. In an age that values emotional mutuality, unrequited love signals immaturity and low self-esteem. A new word has emerged to describe this unenviable state: “needy.” The word that once just meant “destitute and deserving” now also means “clingy and insecure.”