Morrissey - List of the Lost: 'the future is a time when you will only watch'

I still think that The Smiths were one of the greatest bands of all times (I saw them four times), and last year their lead singer/lyricist wrote a novel about running. What's not to like? Except that 'List of the Lost' by Morrissey (Penguin, 2015) received pretty much universally terrible reviews, and knowing that even his musical solo output has been decidely patchy I have put off reading it until now. 

And no it isn't very good. It's the tale of four young Boston athletes, 'America's most sovereignly feared college relay team' but that is a device for the over-intrusive narrator to sing of the joys of a band of brothers at their physical peak before what he sees as the inevitable disappointments of adult relationships and ageing.
  

So as they prepare to run their half-mile relay (or in metric terms 4 x 200m), Morrissey reflects that 'Their success depends upon the communal goal, the spring in eight legs, the combined methodology of four minds, and the maintained perfection of four physical frames; four wheels of the one machine... there is a job to be done - a job almost as old as reading, one which fades faster than it blooms, batting away the decline that rots in life, a decline that must always win'. 

 There is a coach who is simply one of the 'belligerent ghouls, run Manchester schools' (The Smiths, Headmaster Ritual), transplanted to New England. He berates the young athletes 'we search in life for that one race that sums everything. Well keep searching. As they lower your cold-meat body into the ground, keep searching still... Historians of track and field need watch you no longer'.  

Devices that work fine in song lines - alliteration, internal rhymes etc. - sound strained and tortuous in long archaic sentences. And the plot - well without wishing to spoil it, the young athletes are spared the compromises of getting old thanks to a series of deaths with a supernatural twist. But surely Morrissey, who was a schoolboy athlete himself (see my previous post on this) must have some perceptive observation to offer on the world of running? 

Well, this was the best I could find: 'Somewhere alone within the hole of the soul it is known that the page is already turning, and the future is a time when you will only watch. Fully present in today, you will make the most of yourself as you dig deep to bring out whatever will save you'.

The cover star is American athlete Early Young, running a relay for Abilene Christian College, Texas. Young won a 4 x 400m gold medal for USA in the 1960 Rome Olympics.

More running related literature:

Jack Kerouac running down a mountain

'These forms who hasten by' - runners on the Pilgrims Way, 1920s

'You just had to run' - Karl Ove Knausgaard

Burns Night Running Thoughts

Running in the Railway Children

A Midsummer Night's Running

Running to Paradise - W B Yeats

The Sky of a Saturday Morning - John Updike

The Road is a Strange Country - Rebecca Solnit

The Runner - W H Auden

Once a Runner - John L Parker jr

Louisa May Alcott - 'A Joy to Run'

Morrissey and Marr: The Running Smiths [updated - Marr in 'Hand in Glove' running injury]

Morrissey's 450+ page 'Autobiography' has a few surprizes, but the biggest revelation for me was his apparent prowess as a teenage athlete. In between seeing Mott the Hoople, David Bowie and Lou Reed, the young Stephen Patrick won medals running in the 100m and 400m for St Mary's Secondary Modern School in Manchester - although given his otherwise miserable time at the school he quips that 'I was actually running from St Mary's'.

Morrissey reminisces: 'my Saturdays are marked out by solitary excursions to woe-begone stadiums in child-gorging Gorton or dishearteningly dented Denton. I am obliged to make my own way, and I am obliged to feel honored and to dream of the 14-second dash, or the one-minute 400... Frozen amongst the pugilistic roughnecks whose kits don't fit, I await the starting pistol, always relieved to let loose on a grey granite track with its wet chalky smells'.

Unfortunately Morrissey doesn't throw any light in his book on his encounter with fellow indie athlete Billy MacKenzie of the Associates, other than confirming that they met.

In recent years it has been Morrissey's former songwriting partner in The Smiths who has been making all the running. Johnny Marr ran a  credible sub-4 hours time in the 2010 New York City Marathon

As I mentioned before, The Smiths' 'Is it really so strange' does include a lyric pertinent to running.

Update 12 March 2014:  Johnny Marr is still running, and broke his hand last week after taking a tumble and has had to cancelsome gigs as a result-  'The guitarist and singer fell while he was out running in London last week, and now has his hand in plaster (see picture above).In a statement issued to NME, Marr said: "I was running pretty fast and just went straight over. I banged my shoulder and then realised my hand was in a bad way. Obviously we’re hoping there’s no long term damage."

Marr displays his running injury last week

Update, 27 September 2014:  Johnny Marr interviewed by John Harris in The Guardian: 'What now assists his frantic work rate, it seems, is an exacting exercise regimen, built around at least four long-distance runs each week. “When I go out, I do 10 miles. If I’ve got decent time between a soundcheck and a gig, I’ll do 15, sometimes 18. I try and time my run so I finish 20 minutes before a gig, and I’m hopping around.”