This distinction is something that Morrissey was well aware of. Known for sporting a "Women's Liberation" badge while still a teenager, Morrissey was keenly aware of sexism and his own role in changing this inequity. At age nineteen, he scrawled in a letter, "Society is sick and the world is in a mess thanks to men." An aspect of his own celibacy is an underlying criticism of the predatory nature of male sexuality, a theme that's stretched the length of his career. The debut Smiths' single was backed with the song "Handsome Devil", which relied on a literal description of this predatory nature to betray its crassness: "let me get my hands on your mammary glands." It turned out to be only the first in a long line of songs concerning this topic, from "Spring-Heeled Jim" ("So many women, his head should be spinning") to "Dagenham Dave" ("Head in a blouse, everybody loves him") to "The Boy Racer" ("He's got too many girlfriends, he thinks he owns this city... stood at the urinal he thinks he's got the whole world in his hands").
As always, Morrissey was not satisfied simply inserting his politics into his songs. Interviews, tour programs and record sleeves all served as platforms to communicate his concerns. The 1984 NME list that included Morrissey's ten favorite books demonstrates his dedication to feminism, or more sharply, his aversion to heterosexual maleness. Of the ten books, six were written by women (Susan Brownmiller, Shelagh Delaney, Molly Haskell, Marjorie Rosen, Esther Rothman, Kate Swift and Casey Miller), two by gay men (Oscar Wilde and Emlyn Williams), and the other two are Men's Liberation by Jack Nichols and the prurient compendium The Murderers' Who's Who by J.H.H. Gaute and Robin O'Dell. It shows a particular dedication to the cause that Morrissey, who often described books as his best friends, chose a dry reference guide, The Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing, as one of his ten favorites.
While Morrissey's lyrical references are overwhelmingly drawn from novels and plays, it's important to note that almost none of the books named by this list fall into either category. Instead, his favorites are heavily theoretical and historical, confronting gender, politics, and cultural hierarchy. Best exemplified by Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, the list demonstrates a vivid concern for feminism, and just as importantly, the necessary direct involvement of men in the struggle. It's also remarkable that Morrissey's other favorite pastime, film, is not exempt from feminist criticism, and two of his chosen texts deal with sexism on screen: Popcorn Venus and From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies.
This list was only the beginning of Morrissey's public proclamations of an affinity for feminism. As cover stars of Smiths' records, he chose photos of Viv Nicholson, the football pool winner who represented the liberated Northern woman of the 1970s, and Pat Phoenix and Yootha Joyce, who both portrayed determined, independent women for television audiences nationwide. And in June of 1983, in one of his earliest published interviews, he very clearly explains the effect of the women's liberation movement in his work: "I just so happen to be completely influenced by feminist writers like Molly Haskell, Marjory Rose and Susan Brownmiller. An endless list of them! I don't want to GO ON about feminism but it is an ideal state."
Morrissey was barely 24 years old when he announced that he was "completely influenced" by feminism, and barely half a year from his birth as a public figure. It had only been 14 months from the first Smiths rehearsals, the "life support system" that brought him out of an eight-year seclusion. To begin his tenure in public life with the provocative statement that feminism "is an integral part of the way I write" demonstrates the importance of this message. And since Morrissey would never be so vulgar as to suggest he could understand this struggle on his own, he turned to books for insight. Books like Esther Rothman's memoir The Angel Inside Went Sour, which described her challenges as the head of a public school for troubled girls. Books like Brownmiller's Against Our Will, which used a combination of clinical study, anonymous recollections, and bracing logic to recast rape not as a crime committed by one man against one woman, but as the violence that mediates all relations between men and women. Books, which Morrissey once described as "positive weapons", offered him clear, sharp-edged facts to inform his sympathy. But again, when it comes to fiction and drama-his most consistently referenced texts-Shelagh Delaney stands alone in his favorites.
Before examining the critical difference between Delaney and Morrissey, it's helpful to clarify their similarities. Born in the same county of Manchester, the two share a lifelong-dismissal at the hands of London, the center of the nation that snickered at the provinciality of the North. As Delaney once observed, "usually North Country people are shown as gormless [stupid], whereas in actual fact they are very alive and cynical." "Alive and cynical" seems an apt description of Morrissey, who revels in such seeming contradiction, and has always presented the unique paradox of singing gleefully about his misery (and the reverse).
This brightness all bound up in gloom was one of the most admired aspects of A Taste of Honey. "There is laughter in it," a New York Times review promised, "some disenchanted and some earthy." Descriptions of John Osborne always invoke violence: "a scathing slash"; "a landmine"; "burning"; "a direct attack". But Delaney work is "filled with wry laughter," making it "all the more moving because it does not tear the emotions to tatters."
Morrissey has likewise ornamented his songs with humor, creating a richness of emotion that's nearly unique in pop music. John Peel, the legendary BBC DJ and arguably the most voracious consumer of new music in the last 50 years, recognized this humor immediately. "On more than one occasion," Peel confessed, "I've actually laughed out loud at Smiths' lyrics, and I don't often do that, I don't often laugh out loud at anything much." Peel's observation that "they're very funny lyrics, and I cannot understand why people assume that what they do is essentially miserable" is distinctly reminiscent of Delaney's insistence: "even if the play is imbued with pessimism, I am not a pessimist." The "wry laughter throughout" was the most immediate distinction between Look Back in Anger and A Taste of Honey, just as "The Smiths' humour" that Morrissey wove throughout his lyrics separated the band from the "anti-human", "very cold" bands of Manchester.