Careless Words are So Lightly Thrown
The story of an essay on Morrissey that I put my heart and soul into but that everybody rejected
There’s an insidious hint of autumn in the air, the August Bank holiday passed with a curious chill and it looks as if things are on the turn, so I need to finally lay to rest something that has irked me immensely this year. I’m just catching up with work after a long and well-deserved break, tying up some loose ends before the start of the new term [yes, the school year is the dependable rhythm of my life] and I finally decided to do something with this essay that has been bugging me for ages. Actually, it’s a nice way to round off the summer holiday before going back to school, to finally put this one to rest.
So, I’ve been working on this essay - it’s a longread, around 5500 words - since March but nothing much has come of it and, to be honest, the whole thing has been a bit traumatic. It came about because, having seen Morrissey live at Hammersmith Apollo in March, I found myself finally able to bite the bullet and admit that I didn’t love him any more; moreover, and perhaps worse, I allowed myself to admit out loud what I’d been secretly, shamefully thinking for years. Morally, it’s a weight off my shoulders, and aesthetically, it feels like the most honest, authentic thing I’ve ever written, but professionally, it’s been a bit of a pain.
You see, I’d had this idea for an article on Morrissey, which in itself was no great achievement, since at the time (March 2023) everyone was doing it; he was on tour in the UK and Europe and there was noise about his latest (two) unreleased albums. But, I thought, my angle is unique [I know, every writer thinks that] because my point is not that Morrissey is a bigot, or a closet right-winger, or a racist [I mean, he might be, but that is not my concern here], but rather my point is that is that Morrissey - if we look with open eyes and open palms - is not as talented and brilliant as we once thought he was. In fact, he’s a bit of a let down, hence why the essay is titled ‘In the Midst of Life, Morrissey is in Debt, etcetera’.
There are two difficult truths to chew on here: first, his best work was done up to and including Vauxhall and I (1994), while everything since then - save You are the Quarry (2003) and a smattering of odd songs - has been unparalleled dross which only gets worse with time and age; second, Morrissey’s greatness has always been facilitated, nurtured and driven by somebody greater than him - Johnny Marr, Stephen Street, Alan Whyte, Mick Ronson - and by himself he is simply not up to much, which has been exacerbated in the last decade by his alienating everybody around him. And that was it, that was the hook - I, a lifelong Morrissey fan, am willing to come out and say it: Morrissey is past his best, and maybe even wasn’t that great anyway, and I for one am escaping from the chokehold of his supposed but poorly maintained impression of greatness. Outrageous, I know.
Anyway, it was always going to be a long one, so I started work on it in March [I guess some time after the concert, which was on the 19th] but didn’t make progress fast. I was writing a sentence or two a day and then stewing over it. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to write, it was more that I didn't know how to say what was on my mind, or, indeed, whether I should say it at all. I guess it felt like a disloyalty, it felt heretical and I worried hat I’d face some kind of backlash and would never live down the shame of being cancelled for saying Morrissey is not as good as we thought.
In the end, I had a conversation with a colleague which both clarified my thoughts and gave me the courage to express them; after all, I finally reasoned, it is not actually treason to speak ill of Morrissey. And, I realised - this is the big thing - what I had to say is a valid, reasoned and well-informed point of view; after all, I have been a fan as a long as I can remember and have followed Morrissey’s career with interest, so I am at least qualified to have an opinion. So, I finished the first draft in a couple of days (a la Kerouac) over Easter in time to submit to a journal that ultimately rejected it.
I never considered the possibility that the journal would reject it. Yes, friends, I committed the cardinal error of confidence. The journal had asked for submissions of 5000 words and I submitted 4994, so when they rejected it I was in too deep, stuck with an article that was both too long for most people to publish and impossible to edit. You see, and this is the reason why I was so cocky about its prospects, it was 4994 words of raw heartbreak, brutally honest critique and impossibly fine-tuned argument which simply could not be cut down for publication without losing so much of the flow and the nuance. I exaggerate, of course, but - I thought then and I continue to think now - it is a good piece and it does contain some hitherto unexplored insights.
So first I pitched it to publications, mostly journals, that would take it in its entirety. Most of them simply ignored me; the rest said no. Then I took to pitching ideas for articles based on the separate sections, so the articles would end up around 1000-1200 words. I tried angling it to arts and culture magazines whom I thought would be receptive to cultural criticism. Most of them simply ignored me; the rest said no. Then I changed direction a bit and started pitching a version of it to the music press. By this time - June - I was so desperate to get it out there that I’d abandoned the long-form essay altogether and was pitching ideas derived from my two or three central thesis. The music press completely ignored me, except one editor who sent over a link to their own review of the very same Hammersmith gig I went to with a note that said something to the effect of, ‘I think you best take this elsewhere’, as if I was trying to start a fight in their pub. That review, incidentally, was bafflingly positive; it was as if we were at different gigs.
At that point, I took a break and spent some time thinking about where I was going wrong. Firstly, I know the pitch is my Achilles heel - I resolutely lack the two key skills of being able to summarise and to sell, not to mention that I am incapable of knowing what I am going to write until I actually write it, so pitching hardly suits me at all. This is why I have never been or thought of myself as a journalist of any kind, why I have never made a living freelancing and why I tend to work on commissions where I have been approached or where I have been able to submit a complete draft first. With that in mind, I did some research and some learning and, I think, got my pitch into good shape. Secondly, I realised I was delusional and I was barking up the wrong tree: neither the essay I’d written nor the imaginary article I was pitching were news pieces, nor were they biting commentary and analysis; they weren’t even the well-argued critique I took them to be. In short, the publications I’d approached were the wrong places for the product I was selling, compounded by the fact that I didn’t really know what I was selling in the first place. And it wasn’t just a simple case of me approaching the wrong publications - I really believed this Morrissey article to be something that it was not. Crazy, I know, but sometimes we are poor judges of our own work.
As I reflected on the piece, I subjected it to a ruthless edit, which resulted in removing 1000 words and then replacing them with more than 1500 new words. It was useless trying to make it shorter because I still hadn't articulated the main thrust of my argument, and that’s where the epiphany came. The essay, I realised, is not about Morrissey after all - it is really about me. It is less a work of cultural criticism and more a work of cultural memoir; it is the confession of a lapsed Morrissey fan; it is the story of a middle-aged man’s tragic and mystifying journey from faith to revelation. And there’s another more sensitive strand to it that I hadn’t fully acknowledged but which, ultimately, I realised is the main thrust of the essay.
I first discovered The Smiths when I was a teenager in the mid-1990s and the thing that I found so alluring was Morrissey’s expert handling of the clandestine love song coupled with a slew of flagrantly homoerotic images. I assumed, naively but not unreasonably, that Morrissey and I had something - at the time, a secret - in common. For years to come it didn’t occur to me that there wasn’t something gay going on at the heart of The Smiths, but then as the 90s drew to a close and Morrissey increasingly did himself no favours, the illusion began to crack. In a sense, my history with Morrissey is the history of the gradual fracturing of an illusion that I was not solely responsible for the creation of. The thing is that I didn’t just project my ideas about being gay, the fear of the forbidden and the easy charm of the male form on to Morrissey; some of it was there before I got there and it was the very thing that attracted us - the uninitiated teenagers of the 90s who were geographically, historically removed from The Smiths’ 1980s - in the first place.
Sure, in middle-age I’d come to the conclusion that Morrissey’s music is not as good as it used to be or as good as I’d once thought, but that was a smokescreen obscuring the real problem that had gnawed away at me for decades. In a sense, my entire history with Morrissey is the history of a betrayal. Morrissey started out as a kindred spirit but ended up a pariah. Everything I once held dear tuned out to be a lie. Morrissey seemed to be a free-thinker, a poet, an entertainer, but turned out to be a bigot, a moaner and a self-obsessed parody. And as for the gay thing - well, who knows, but I’m increasingly left with the feeling of being duped or exploited, as if Morrissey deliberately built something up and then walked away before it was finished. I mean, sure, he has an incontestable right to his privacy, but if you look at everything from The Smiths to his Autobiography there’s something there but not there at the same time and it’s difficult not to feel you’ve been taken for a ride.
So once I realised the essay was a personal story of betrayal, I recalibrated my pitch and started sending it out to queer publications as a sort of inspirational story for Pride Month. Unbelievable, I know, but that version of the Morrissey essay - as pure autobiography - was promising and received several sympathetic rejections. Rejections nonetheless, so then I tweaked it a bit and leant heavily on the cultural memoir/autobiography angle, selling it as a sort of final revelation piece along the lines of ‘My life with Morrissey and why I’m finally done with him’. I sent it out to what I consider serious publications. This garnered sympathetic and spirited rejections.
By this point it was August and I’d been working on the essay for five months and had listed every single rejection in my diary. It was time to give up, but not before reflecting on the fact that, at least once I’d gotten serious about what the essay was about and honestly reflected on its purpose, I was able to write a more authentic, honest and affective essay, which, in turn, I don’t doubt, generated actual rejections as opposed to silences. My diary informs me that I have submitted some version of the article to 26 publications.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere. Part of it is that nobody’s interested in what I have to say about Morrissey because - and this was the difficult thing to accept - nobody is interested in publishing or reading a deep dive into Morrissey. If I had been offering a soundbite, a pithy news story or some salacious gossip, I would have sold the piece back in April. Morrissey just isn’t important enough to warrant 5500 words of anybody’s time. Except the he clearly is because I have gone through all of this to write the words just to end up with nobody ever reading it. And that’s the kicker - of those 26 publications, all bar two only received a pitch - hardly anybody has read the piece and the only reason I wrote it is that I felt that my thoughts on Morrissey and the journey I have to recount contains something unique that people would want to read, but it seems as if it was doomed from the start. Now, I am in so deep and am so invested in the piece that I can neither let it go nor give it away.