If you ever go to Haworth, bear in mind that this is what Stretford might be like in 200 years time. Eat a bun at the Steven Patrick Tea Shoppe, buy a souvenir (a tasteful china hearing aid) from World of Morrissey, marvel at the reconstruction of Firswood Library. Go to his old house and see his teenage bedroom set up exactly as it was when he inhabited it. Gaze in wonder at the brass plaque on the floor where Morrissey conjured up the lyrics to "This Charming Man". Wonder at the lock of hair clipped from his quiff and secured with a piece of black ribbon. See his priest costume in a glass case, and giggle at his shoes. "His feet were massive! But then people had big feet in those days."
The Cult of the Brontės is rather like The Cult of Morrissey. How could words that have moved people across the world spring from this place? Already people travel Manchester on the Morrissey Tour, wandering round Southern Cemetery just as tourists in Haworth wander round the cemetery that the parsonage overlooks. "No wonder Emily was so gloomy!" Lines from the Brontė canon - especially Emily's work - clutter cyberspace, where people use a quote to best express themselves. "No coward soul is mine!" they might declare as easily as someone else might claim, "my love is as sharp as a needle in your the eye."
I should point out that Wuthering Heights is my favourite novel. I couldn't adequately tell you why: it just is. My love for Emily resembles my love for Morrissey. "How can you exist? How can a human being tell me what you do?" I would have their faces tattooed on me if I wasn't scared. I like to think that if I had ever met Emily, she would've been my friend. We could've lived on a small-holding in West Riding and written poems and rambled about on the moors with her dogs and got caught in the rain and not cared. Whilst I wouldn't particularly want to live in a small-holding with Morrissey, it's similar. Morrissey is my imaginary friend. He's yours as well.
And so to Morrissey's pretty, petty theft from Emily. Place Maladjusted in your cd player. Go to "Satan Rejected My Soul". Hear him sing: "Satan rejected my soul / He knows my kind / He won't be dragged down / He's seen my face around / He knows Heaven doesn't seem / To be my home." And there it is: he's quoted Emily.
If you've never read Wuthering Heights - and I beg you to the moment you've finished reading this - Catherine lives on a farm called Wuthering Heights, a bleakly located place on the moors. As a child, her father returns from a trip to Liverpool with a raggedy boy he's found on the streets. He adopts the child and calls him Heathcliff. It is both his first name and his surname - rather like Morrissey, he is known by only one name. As they grow up, Catherine and Heathcliff develop a deep attachment to each other. They have a terrible childhood when both Catherine's parents die, leaving them to the care of her drunk and violent older brother who resents his adopted brother. Catherine and Heathcliff recognise that they are kindred spirits, soulmates of the deepest kind - to the point where Catherine declares, "Nelly, I AM Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being." Their love is amoral; asexual in fact.
Wuthering Heights is often cited as one of the world's most passionate love stories, but their love is never consummated. It's as if they don't need to have sex to be close to each other - they already are each other. "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." Gender's rules dissolve. Of course, the "dreaded C word" springs to mind - Morrissey's celibacy (which has evidently been overturned long ago, not that the media seem to notice), and the way this seems to have affected his relationship with his fans. The passionate performances on stage, where singer and fan love and are loved - how many fans have thought to themselves, "Nelly, I AM Morrissey!" Well, perhaps not necessarily prefaced with an invocation to someone called Nelly, but you get the idea. As Catherine says, "My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and HE remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it." Substitute the name 'Heathcliff' for 'Morrissey' and you'll see what I mean.
But Catherine can't marry Heathcliff: her brother has degraded him to the point of being a boorish farmhand while she has been transformed from running bare-foot on the moors to a polished lady. She will have to marry Edgar Linton, the local member of the gentry, who is a wet week in Grimsby if ever there was one. Yet she cannot deny that she loves Heathcliff, and tells Nelly so - partly overheard by Heathcliff. The quote from "Satan Rejected My Soul" comes from this moment in the novel, where Catherine describes a dream she's had to Nelly. (Nelly, in case you're wondering, is the all-purpose servant). In the dream, Catherine was in heaven. In words that sound like they've been nabbed from a Morrissey interview, she says, "If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable." That line always makes me chuckle. And she goes on to explain,
"I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy."
Catherine, rejected from heaven by angry angels; Morrissey, rejected by Satan, but not at home in heaven either.
Heathcliff and Catherine live beyond the bounds of society's norms, they won't behave as they are 'supposed to'. Nor does Morrissey, whose eccentricity is more because he doesn't know how else to be, rather than because the press expect it. Young ladies aren't supposed to run about barefoot on the moors with the stable lad; singers aren't meant to go on Top of the Pops in an old woman's blouse or make their band dress as nuns.
Wuthering Heights has spawned many monsters: not least Kate Bush. Some writers take it upon themselves to write prequels, sequels, the bits you didn't know about, filling in the gaps in the narrative that Emily quite purposely left to tease, torment and tantalise her readers. All of these books are quite terrible. Now, lots of books have been generated about Morrissey, The Smiths, et al. Some are a bit crap, most are very good - but it certainly seems to be the case that human nature demands the 'story' to be completed, or at least explained to them. This is one of the reasons why Emily and Morrissey endlessly fascinate their fans - you never quite know. It is therefore poetic justice, perhaps, that the cover of one of these books, Heathcliff's Tale features a Heathcliff who has a prominent chin, pointed nose, bristling brows, strong jaw... and a quiff. It's like Morrissey's posed for the cover, for heaven's sake!
But then, what of Emily herself? The child of an Irish father (Patrick Brunty/Prunty), she was happiest at home, it seems. Like Morrissey refusing to leave his Smiths-era dressing room to meet Iggy Pop and Mick Jagger, Emily refused to go to London to meet her publisher and the famous writers of the day who Charlotte, her sister, happily met. Emily was shy and quite content in her own company. Emily - and also Charlotte - were both of the opinion that "Work is a Four-Letter Word". They tried their hands at being governesses, but when it came to it, they couldn't bear it. Charlotte sat at her desk daydreaming about dashing chaps on stallions, and was driven to anger when one of her pupils dared to interrupt her reveries when they needed help with a lesson. "I should have vomited!" Charlotte moaned. Meanwhile, literary critic Camille Paglia does her best to convince the world that Emily was a lesbian, and academics refuse to leave the subject of Emily's gender alone.
At the beginning of Who Put The M In Manchester?, Morrissey's name is superimposed over a moorland scene. The hills are bare, the clouds are dark and swollen in the sky - it could be the cover of Wuthering Heights. Of course, when Morrissey has referred to moors in his songs, it has only been in "Suffer Little Children", where the moors take on a truly horrific hue. The moors run between Manchester and Yorkshire and dominate the skyline. It would be pointless and tasteless of me to say "OMG! Moz wrote about the moors coz he's actually Emily's reincarnation!!!111". But it's worth considering the following, I feel....
When Morrissey sings about the child on the moor, "Oh, find me, find me ! / Find me ! / I'll haunt you when you laugh / Oh, I'll haunt you when you laugh / You might sleep / BUT YOU WILL NEVER DREAM ! / Oh ... / Over the moors, I'm on the moor / Oh, over the moor /Oh, the child is on the moor", it brings to mind the haunting of Lockwood at the beginning of Wuthering Heights. Lockwood, a city gent, has a vivid dream - or is he woken from a dream? - while he sleeps in the farmhouse, that a child is outside his bedroom window, wailing to be let in. Thinking it's a tree branch, he breaks the glass but his hand is grabbed by the ghost's, who cries, "Let me in - let me in!" (once more to "Satan Rejected My Soul" - "Pull me in, pull me in / Call me in, haul me in, pull me in"). "I'm come home: I'd lost my way on the moor!" The ghost is Catherine as a child, and what seems to have happened is that Catherine's haunting of Lockwood informed the idea in "Suffer Little Children" of Hindley's haunting by the children she murdered. Was it intentional? The moment in the novel when Catherine's ghost manifests is truly frightening and it seems that Morrissey was able to convey his feelings of fear, relating to the crimes of Brady and Hindley, by using this literary reference to bolster his own words. This being Morrissey, and he being a fabulous lyricist, he doesn't make literary steals to look well-read or as a pose. There is always a reason, and in this case a profound and deeply personal one, for him to make use of other writers' ideas. Emily's creation of the weeping ghost of the child on the moor, who frightens Lockwood from his sleep, is harrowing, and - I think - for Morrissey to use this as a mould for his lyrics about the murdered children on the moor is deeply moving and affecting.
And so Morrissey ends up, in my mind, as Emily's creative peer. Had she lived 250 years later, who's not to say that she and her sisters wouldn't have formed a band - The Brontės? After all, Emily wrote a poem called "The Lady to her Guitar". Their brother, Branwell (alcoholic, addicted to opium), would've been a Keith Moon on drums, Anne on bass, Charlotte on guitar, and Emily the enigmatic singer who has a way with a lyric and a turn of phrase - constantly frustrating to the media, forever stoking the love that the fans have for her. If Morrissey had lived back then, would he have been a poet, too? What if he'd met Emily, and they could've wandered the cemetery and the moors together, conjuring up words that rhymed and that would be loved for hundreds of years to come?
To find out more about the Brontės, I recommend Juliet Barker's book, The Brontės. It is available even in the smallest of public libraries. One thousand pages of pure Eng. Lit. nerdiness. Heaven!
Find out about the Brontė Parsonage Museum and the Brontė Society by visiting the website here. Arrive in style by getting the steam train from Keighley to Haworth.
Read some of Emily's poems here. Lots of them are online. My favourites are "I Am Happiest When Most Away" and "No Coward Soul is Mine".
