Lyric query - Cemetry Gates???? [Archive]

Someone, somewhere

February 18, 2002, 09:34 PM

The line itself is meaningless-- it is an intentional gramatical abomination-- but that's precisely why it has meaning.

The speaker in the song admonishes the "you" in the song not to plagiarize literature, and claims he (she) is well-read, having spotted the rip-off of Shakespeare.

Next, the "you" says "ere long done do does did" which the "well-read", supposedly learned speaker says couldn't possibly have been borrowed from a text of any kind. He (she) is subsequently proved incorrect, as the line is actually plagiarized off a tombstone, just as the line from Shakespeare was taken out of a play.

The lesson is simple: Literary "experts" who attempt to identify the analogues of a given text (either merely to illuminate source material or to trap a plagiarist) are often involved in pointless endeavors that add up to little more than petty finger-pointing. They don't realize that in literature it's almost impossible to say what is original and what is fake because *everything* is derived from something else. "Ulysses", for example, possibly the greatest novel ever written, is fundamentally a masterpiece of parody and pastiche, not to mention the ties to Homer. Without the borrowing and usage of the materials in Joyce's remarkable memory, it's impossible to imagine that novel having nearly as much strength. Similarly, Nabokov's "Lolita" (#3 on the MLA's Top 100 Fiction List, for those scoring at home) derives a great deal of structural power from Poe's "Annabel Leigh", to name one of dozens of key sources in the novel.

The origin of "Cemetry Gates" seems to have been some "dreaded sunny days" traipsing around local cemeteries with Linder, which gives the lyric its individuality and charm, but the song was also inspred by the occasionally virulent accusations of plagiarism made on Morrissey, particularly after the various "quotations" of certain writers, namely Shelagh Delaney, which peppered the first Smiths album. In light of this, the song is a response to his critics-- those with "big noses", who *think* they know-- saying simply, "You're not as smart as you think you are."

This is not to say that Morrissey is making a blanket denial of his own plagiarism. In interviews during the mid-80s, he frankly admitted to borrowing lines from films, books, and pop music (which adds a nice resonance to the use of Billy Fury's lines at the end of "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others", another unacknowledged borrowing). For Morrissey these "thefts" were not only acceptable, they were part of a grand literary tradition.

Wilde, who as we all know is one of Morrissey's big heroes, was also something of a "plagiarist". Apparently Wilde once said, and I'm quoting from memory here, so it may not be verbatim: "When I see a more beautiful flower in someone else's garden, I take it and put it in my own." Once, when he was congratulating Whistler on a quip, he said, "I wish I'd said that". To which Wistler responded: "Don't worry, Oscar. You will." Wilde's writing owes a great debt to various literary figures such as Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, J.K. Huysmans, Gustave Flaubert, and others. "The Picture of Dorian Gray" dips liberally into works by R.L. Stevenson and A.C. Doyle, and even Poe.

Wilde's own idea-- which is obviously attractive to Morrissey-- was simply that plagiarism was essentially okay because a genius can take any raw materials he has and transform them with the sheer strength of his own personality into a higher form of art. Wilde calls this the "critical spirit", and is of a different order than traditional literary work. "Talent borrows, genius steals"-- a line Morrissey knows well-- is an idea that congratulates the shameless thief rather than the pedestrian scribe who tries to mask his influences. To Wilde all rules were meant to be broken *if* the transgressor is a genius, as he felt he was. This is not to say that Wilde was wholly unoriginal, or that Morrissey is, only that from time to time they have no compunction about taking from others to suit their own purposes. As they both feel they are geniuses, they consider themselves licensed to steal freely.

Hence, the song's placing of Wilde above Keats and Yeats-- this would be an outrageous ranking by almost any standards you choose to apply, but I don't think that Morrissey was necessarily proclaiming Wilde a better poet than Keats or Yeats, simply that the speaker has a greater affinity for the critic-artist who takes his influences and remolds them to suit his own personality and temperament, as an expression of genius rather than an "original" work-- the very idea of which, as both Morrissey and Wilde held, is a fallacy to begin with. In that sense, Morrissey is more of a critic than an artist, at least by the definitions laid down by Wilde in his seminal essay "The Critic As Artist". Sure enough, Morrissey-- in interviews, especially-- talks exactly like a critic, and we know he had designs on being a critic for the NME before Johnny came knocking. The twentieth century is littered with artists who were really of the "critical spirit"-- just look at the work of someone like Andy Warhol, a minor Morrissey influence.

I find it interesting that someone is writing a paper that touches on Morrissey's literary influences. As a student of literature myself, it's pretty easy to see, once you weigh all the evidence-- lyrics, interviews, and so forth-- that Morrissey isn't really all that literary. Certainly not in any serious way. His infatuation with Wilde is so misinterpreted it's actually amusing. If you pay attention, Morrissey loves Wilde for most of the same reasons he loves James Dean, for instance. Wilde has all the ingredients of a Morrissey hero: celebrity who met a tragic end, a misunderstood genius, reviled by the philistine English public, recreated himself (Wilde lost his Irish accent at Oxford almost overnight, it's said) an exile, an outcast (for both homosexuality and non-Englishness), etc. etc. For Morrissey Wilde is largely a symbolic figure; nowhere does Morrissey ever really talk about specific works. Yes, it's true he said "Every single line affected me deeply", but the fact is, ignorant of Wilde's life, I doubt Morrissey would find Wilde an attractive figure based on his literary merits alone. Morrissey's literary heroes-- people like Wilde, Truman Capote, Stevie Smith, Edith Sitwell, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Smart and Shelagh Delaney-- all bear some relationship to the basic themes of the pop music he loves: being an outsider, misunderstood, flamboyant, usually gay, feminist, ahead of their time, and on and on. In other words, his literary tastes are an outgrowth of his affinity for people like Bowie, Bolan, the Dolls, etc. The scope of his literary interests are limited to the ideas one can find in any record shop.

All of which is not to say that Morrissey isn't "literary", really, just that he is most certainly not a serious man of letters. His first love is pop music, and that's the language he knows. Literature is just the marginalia on the run-out grooves.

If you want some serious rock 'n' roll literary types, I hereby refer you to Iron Maiden, who actually set Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to music. Okay, I'm joking, but I will say, at the risk of getting burned at the stake, that their use of Coleridge was more seriously literary than anything Morrissey has done on vinyl.

Just my opinion.

I'm freezing and my eyes hurt so I'm not going to spellcheck this. Forgive any errors.