What Kylie Minogue is, I told my dribbling, pink-faced underlings, is a short Australian singer. At the top was, ‘Diminutive Antipodean chanteuse’, which used to feature practically weekly in the diary of my predecessor. The insistence on using ‘more interesting’ words… When I started as editor of The Times diary (diaries are always the worst for cliché, because they are staffed by overeducated public schoolboys desperately trying to be noticed), I wrote up a list of words and sentences that I would not stand for (or ‘up with which I would not put’, as I would write if I were a young diarist who thought that was a wittier way of phrasing it). Then there’s circumlocution, or what EM Forster called ‘elegant variation’…. There’s a great piece by Giles Coren that illustrates what I mean: Sometimes Morrissey writes like an undergraduate after two pints, testing out the cadences of wit (an A and R man has ‘the Nigel Patrick touch of British raffish elegance, being six parts Etienne Dumont champagne, the rest a checkered career in rock management (which is not the management of rocks, as such)’ sometimes like an early Martin Amis derivative (‘It is explained to me that Mike had shared his bed last night and that the unlucky dalliance left him with an outbreak of Lebanese warts’) sometimes like a real ale bore (‘there will never be one instance in the Smiths’ history with Rough Trade when Geoff would treat the band to a lavish none-too-cheap dinner or salutary clink of earthenware’).
Lecturers in creative writing could use this book as the ‘do not do’ model. In his way Morrissey has done a service to the study and teaching of prose. It’s like the awful 200,000-word trunk novel of middle-youth angst that hides on every writer’s hard drive. The resultant book, I think, would read a lot like Morrissey’s Autobiography. Could you get something across as soon as? Don’t worry about editing, we’ll just whomp out whatever you send us, indeed to great fanfare, and it’ll even be on the Penguin Classics label, along with Dante, Balzac, Seneca, Cicero and Alexis de Tocqueville. Sound like a deal?’ ‘How’s it going? Just to let you know, we’d like to publish a manuscript by you. It’s the commissioning editor at Penguin. You are an aspiring writer of nineteen years old with one or two key influences and a lot of big ideas, but not much in the way of discipline or self awareness.
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