It feels such an uneasy position, caught between the idleness and cruelty of the powerful on one side and this dead-alive heartlessness on the other. Just as Morrissey sought to bring light to the mournful gray skies of Joy Division, Delaney's initial impetus was the dreadful groaning of Terence Rattigan's middle class sufferers. Joy Division's lyrics, relentless in their embrace of despair ("Let's take a ride out, see what we can find/A valueless collection of hopes and past desires"), refuse to acknowledge the possibility of laughter or beauty with the same obstinacy that led Rattigan to create 25 plays cast with only villains and their victims: stubborn judges, disgraced politicians, cuckolded professors, and alcoholic pilots. Both Morrissey and Delaney recognized there was more to life than suffering, and aimed to represent a broader picture.
But it's a shock to examine what this broader picture entailed. Taken in summary, the stories they tell seem so horribly ordinary: one teenager spends all day in bed, another teenager finds out she's pregnant; one mother abandons her daughter, another mother drops her son at the train station; students fight with teachers; parents give up on their children; "I was looking for a job and then I found a job." But these stories were ultimately what set these works apart from the likes of Rattigan and Joy Division. This "irrelevancy of daily living" that a New York Times reviewer recognized upon his first viewing of the play, was what made A Taste of Honey strike viewers so fiercely.
It's clear that Morrissey and Delaney are both witnesses, their stories born out of the everyday happenings in their neglected towns. Delaney, when asked about her inspirations, explained that "it's partly observation and a little of myself. The rest is imagination." She went on to explain that inspiration for her is in characters, not events or messages. "Some writers have an idea and use people to put it over. With me it's the opposite. I create people first." It's helpful to recall here the people she creates: pregnant teenagers, black sailors, gay men, and poverty-stricken single mothers, all people who rarely have their stories told in public. While Delaney forcefully insisted that A Taste of Honey had "no message", her desire to spotlight such individuals and her care in presenting the vastness of their lives betrays a clear concern for these dispossessed.
In a 1997 interview, Morrissey similarly, if glibly, admitted that his observations fed his narratives: "I get ideas from almost everywhere but especially from supermarket queues-I have a talent for eavesdropping and it's amazing what you learn while waiting to pay for your fruit juice." But "amazing" is a relative term; his songs aren't made out of the darkest secrets or the brightest revelations, instead they unfurl these mundane stories of failed amateur boxers, misunderstood teenagers, auto-plant worker and always, always, lovelorn individuals. Again, the types of people that are most often neglected by storytellers: the unglamorous anonymous who make up the queues at the supermarket.
Like Delaney, Morrissey doesn't present these characters simply as fodder to prove a point or to exploit their entertainment value. It's important to remember that the first character Morrissey introduced was himself, the lonely, bad-lucked recluse of "Hand in Glove" and "Reel Around the Fountain" and "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want." And people reached out to him, reacted to his sensitivity: "There were lots and lots of people ready to identify with what I was feeling. Hatred! Hating everything but not being effectively hateful. It was like hate from quite gentle people." This identification gave him a courage to populate his songs with a host of otherwise ignored, quite gentle people, and give voices to their various hatreds. And because he never forgot how vulnerable his autobiographical songs made him feel, he took care to shield his characters from exploitation, even in the most delicate circumstances. For example, the paralyzed girl of "November Spawned a Monster" ("a hostage to kindness") or the heroin addict of "Sunny" (they're not forgiving you, and you're not even wrong"). Morrissey may claim he's peddling hatred, but what he's really offering is empathy.