And so in 1994, just a decade after his initial invocation of her name, Morrissey made his final public reference to Shelagh Delaney. It's a tremendously elegant goodbye, placing all of the blame on himself for going too far, rather than crassly announcing that he'd outgrown her works or become disenchanted with them. But a curiosity remains; for all of Morrissey's adoration of Delaney, for all of his public declarations of devotion, he always manages to state that he loves her, and never why he loves her. It's not that her works don't deserve the attention. But if Morrissey truly wanted an ancestor to give him a blueprint for the hybrid of wit, sadness and honesty that made up his character, it seems obvious that John Osborne is more appropriate choice.
Morrissey was certainly aware of Osborne's work. Images from Look Back in Anger were considered twice for Smiths' record sleeves, and both times rejected. First for the single "William it Was Really Nothing" in 1984, and then again in 1992 for the collections Best I and Best II. But while Morrissey borrowed lyrics from a vast field of writers beyond Delaney-Elizabeth Smart, Keith Waterhouse, Victoria Woods, and Jack Kerouac, to name just a few-he never took from the plays of Osborne. It seems a willful omission, considering their paralleled temperaments.
In the character notes for Look Back in Anger, the description of Jimmy Porter is a concise, contradictory portrait of a unique creature. "He is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty… a combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike. Blistering honesty, or apparent honesty, like his, makes few friends. To many he may seem sensitive to the point of vulgarity. To others, he is simply a loudmouth."
This sort of in-between existence, inviting contradictory criticism from every angle, is exactly the sort of crossfire that Morrissey thrives in. As he boasted in 1984: "There are people out there, I know, who would like to disembowel me just as there are people who would race towards me and smother me with kisses." His repeated denial of extremes-neither straight nor gay; neither strong nor weak; neither cocky nor humble; neither happy nor sad-has kept critics and fans off balance and perplexed for 25 years now, but it has also kept them captivated, just as Jimmy's constant dance between tenderness and cruelty has somehow kept his friends and wife at his side since their first encounters.
Of course Morrissey is never interested in addressing these questions, he's merely content to stand at the center of the maelstrom and evade any classification. This polarizing energy can easily be traced back to Wilde, but Jimmy's working class intellect speaks more to Morrissey's own origins. As Morrissey describes the revulsion that the world showed this boy from "a penniless background... bounding down the hill clutching a copy of De Profundis" it's not hard to recognize the tone of glee lurking underneath the anger. Morrissey's pride at resisting the middle class monopoly on learning, and his joy in violating this barrier, is no different than Jimmy's party crashing. As Alison describes the night she met her husband, it's easy to imagine him soaking in all the astonishment and indignation: "The men there all looked as though they distrusted him, and as for the women, they were all intent on showing their contempt for this rather odd creature, but no one seemed quite sure how to do it. He'd come to the party on a bicycle, he told me, and there was oil all over his dinner jacket." While his mere presence is enough to unsettle the crowd, Jimmy is happy to take things even further, parodying their dignity with his oil-dripped jacket and daring to live more vividly than any of them ("everything about him seemed to burn").