- INSTANT CLASSIC! Suck it, Plato.
Don’t judge a book by its cover, but is it cool to judge a book by its imprint? The first and most fascinating fact of Morrissey’s Autobiography is its inaugural publisher: Penguin Classics, the de facto library of the Western canon, inclusion in which is typically an honor earned over a book’s lifetime, signifying century-spanning significance. Notable Penguin Classics include Plato’s Republic, Homer’s The Odyssey, Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and hundreds more, including, now, in the first straight-to-classic printing in the imprint’s history, Morrissey’s Autobiography.
Defenders of the canon have blasted the UK branch of Penguin Classics for defiling a noble imprint with a stunt, while defenders of Morrissey (this one, at least) hail the stunt as one of the best of the man’s career. As a prolific artist and eloquent art-lover, Morrissey has long championed the power of transgressive art to upend power structures and rewrite rules, and his finagling of his seemingly unedited life story onto a shelf with the life’s work of Homer and Plato feels like the richest “fuck you”—simultaneously self-aggrandizing and status-quo-annihilating, as ever—of his life. (After the UK edition became the fastest-selling Penguin Classic in history, Morrissey’s Autobiography found its American publisher: Putnam Adult, a move that takes the book—in the United States, at least—out of the canon and onto the cart alongside Amy Tan and Nora Roberts.)
Whatever the publisher, a serious, if not exactly instantly classic, book written by Morrissey has long seemed plausible. Hitting the British music scene in 1983, leading the legendary rock band the Smiths, Morrissey presented himself as a distinctly literary creature—posing with Oscar Wilde volumes and bookworm spectacles in promo shots, name-checking Keats and Yeats, and fitting Smiths songs with writerly lyrics: “Why pamper life’s complexity when the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat?” he mused in the Smiths’ second single, “This Charming Man,” a sexual coming-of-age anthem that opens with eloquent scene-setting: “Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate/Will nature make a man of me yet?”
As the Smiths progressed, Morrissey turned away from the Lou Reed ideal of lyrics as poetry and became an ace pop sloganeer, showcasing his wit, self-deprecating sense of humor, and facility with words in small, self-conscious nuggets. Since 1988, Morrissey has been a solo act, releasing a dozen-plus albums packed with wordy-if-not-revelatory lyrics that secured his reputation as one of the most literate pop stars—like Bob Dylan and Patti Smith—who might very well have made his name in literature, if he hadn’t been seduced by music….
