[A good friend asked me to recount this story for a book he is working on about his collection. It took longer than I anticipated, so I’m posting it here, also]
I first read Elizabeth Smart’s beautiful prose poem By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept in my late teens or early twenties. I found a copy in a used bookstore in Ottawa, where she was born, in 1913. A few times while reading it I thought that I noticed a a turn of phrase that made its way into a Smiths’ song, which I quickly dismissed as unlikely. Years later I read that Morrissey adored the book, and that his songs frequently quoted verbatim from his sources.
Decades later I wondered if I could produce a book about influence and plagiarism entirely plagiarized from other books. The project became a compendium of source lines for Morrissey lyrics, produced for an exhibition called
Stop Me If You’ve Heard It [below, bottom], which Christina Ritchie described as “chasing influence thru detective work”.
The book took a few years to complete, particularly because I decided that if I used page 62 from, say, Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics, it had to become page 62 in my book. Sometimes I bought five or six copies of a title, hoping that a new longer forward or larger typeface would push a section to later in the volume, so that it would fall on a page that I was missing.
The eventual bookwork was sold alongside photographs of six of the original source books, documenting the tabs I used to indicate the pages of pinched lines. Out of the dozens of options, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept was naturally included as one of the six, both for being the impetus for the project, and because it provided so many lifted passages, for such a short novella.
The line “who grabs and devours, invulnerable with greed?” is repurposed by Morrissey for "The Headmaster Ritual” - which opens the band’s second album Meat is Murder - as "He grabs and devours, he kicks me in the showers”. The same LP contains the song “Well I Wonder” which begins "Well, I wonder, do you hear me when you sleep?”, which was likely borrowed from Smart’s "My dear, my darling, do you hear me where you sleep?” Her "I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold on to” becomes becomes “I smoke coz I’m hoping for an early death, and I need to cling to something” from "What She Said”, also on Meat is Murder.
"God, come down" is lifted verbatim, for the solo b-side "Yes, I am Blind”, as is the less common phrase “Louder than Bombs”, which became the title of US Smiths compilation from 1987.
The single song with the most references is, unsurprisingly, about nostalgia: "Late Night Maudlin Street", from Morrissey’s debut solo album Viva Hate. Pitchfork calls it "a patchwork of 1970s memories that fans received like a superhero origin story.” It’s about the last moment spent in a childhood home, and Morrissey laces his memories with some generous self-loathing.
“They took you away in a police car” seems to come from Smart: “They are taking me away in a police car”, and the next line, too: "Dear Inspector, don't you know, don't you care? Don't you know about love?" (“Are you not convinced, inspector? Do you not believe in love?”).
And flag becomes hag in his send-off interpolation: “Every yellow or scarlet leaf hangs like a flag waving me on” (“Every hag waves me on, secretly wishing me gone”).
Other phrases that found their way into Smiths or Morrissey solo songs from Smart's small masterpiece include:
“the fierce last stand of all I have”
"butterflies on pins”
“drab dress”
“you notice the jealousy of those that stay at home”
etc.
The title of the bookwork is ‘Ere Long Done Do Does Did, which is a line from the Smiths’ song "Cemetry Gates”, which addresses the author’s tendency to take on loan:
You say, "'Ere thrice the sun done salutation to the dawn"
And you claim these words as your own
But I've read well and I've heard them said
A hundred times, maybe less, maybe more
If you must write prose and poems
The words you use should be your own
Don't plagiarise or take on loan
'Cause there's always someone, somewhere
With a big nose, who knows
And who trips you up and laughs when you fall
Who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall
Despite this (tongue-in-cheek?) advice, the song itself pilfers from a few sources, most notably the 1939
George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart play The Man Who Came to Dinner [below] for the scene-setting stanza:
So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people, all those lives
Where are they now?
With loves and hates and passions just like mine
They were born, and then they lived
And then they died
Seems so unfair, I want to cry
In the play, the character Lorraine Sheldon - a gold-digging actress who glitters when she walks - contemplates her own mortality:
"Here was a woman-like myself—a woman who once lived and loved, full of the same passions, fears, jealousies, hates. And what remains of any of it now? Just this, and nothing more. A span of four thousand years—a mere atom in the eternity of time-and here am I, another woman living out her life. I want to cry."
