Morrissey : This Charming Man?

 

Morrissey let me down. After finding the former Smiths singer upon his re-entry into the alternative rock world in the early noughties and then indulging my teenage romantic rebellion in all the revelry and reeling around the fountains that The Smiths offered, it soon became apparent to me that Morrissey was the rock star idol I had always dreamed of. Growing up in a working-class family that championed literacy and music above all else, picking Moz as my cultural North Star was a no brainer. Sadly, as time has passed and I’ve grown up in a world that feels far scarier than ever before, it’s hard to ignore the uncomfortable truth about Stephen Patrick Morrissey.
 
My story is not a unique one. Whether it was in the early 1980s when Morrissey joined his Iggy-influenced jangle-pop counterpart Johnny Marr to create The Smiths or you caught wind of the poetic rock and roll pomp of the band after they’d already broken up — the band had a habit of changing everything about you after only a few listens. Teenagers, especially, are drawn to the band like mopey moths to an all too enticing flame of flowery language, intellectual snobbery and disdainful danceability. The draw of The Smiths may have been spread across these ideals, championing a literacy within pop music that had never been so desperately needed, but Morrissey’s charisma spearheaded it.
 
Morrissey has never been a shy or retiring figure. Even from his teenage years, a time he spent reading and writing, slowly walking around the dark and gloomy streets of Manchester, bored by modernity and desperately craving stardom, Morrissey knew that his opinions could get him attention. He would share them in letters and, when given the opportunity by NME, he would use them in reviews of otherwise acclaimed artists. For Morrissey, almost everything, apart from New York Dolls, was below par.
 
It was a proposition that connected with swathes of a generation in the early eighties. The cultural landscape at the time was blighted by commercialism and a sincere lack of care or creativity. The cocky eighties were a decade that only saw the value in cold hard cash. It turned the music world from a crucible of artistic integrity into a smorgasbord of poorly-produced candied pop. Morrissey and The Smiths arrived with authenticity for their work that, only a year after their inception, in 1984, The Smiths were becoming a nationally recognised pop band. In fact, they were one of the biggest bands on the planet. Having already been crowned the kings of the indie scene, the creative pair of Morrissey and Marr were still set on conquering the world. While some would go to war, The Smiths would do it by providing a genuine alternative to the music scene.
 
Morrissey used his lyrics and his looks to provide that alternative. Lyrically, he represented one of the most sincere and sought after voices around. Championing the downtrodden, he was sincerely anti-capitalist and a bonafide animal rights activist, providing a voice for those who needed it most. He was authoritatively anti-monarchy, ensuring that the machismo of rock was given a thorough bashing with his bouquet whenever possible and delivering a safe space for a generation of disaffected teens. It saw Morrissey become an idol across the board as one of the most subversive rock stars around. Little did we know that, some years later, this predilection for controversy would change with the times and cast Moz as music’s answer to Tucker Carlson.
 
There’s no doubt that in the early days, Morrissey showed a nationalistic tendency that seemed innocent enough. After all, artists from The Beatles and the rest of the ‘British invasion’ all the way up to Sex Pistols have claimed their country and apparel for their in one way or another. It would continue into the nineties, with Noel and Liam Gallagher also claiming the Union Jack as part of their ensemble. But for Morrissey, things started to take a more serious turn.
 
Around the same time as Britpop exploded, Morrissey began getting pictures taken draped in the British flag; he also began making disparaging remarks about immigration. Hell, he even wrote a song called ‘The National Front Disco’. But while Morrissey’s views always gained column inches, as his music waned and the singer’s original fandom began to find themselves in bank manager positions, he began to find his place in the press less and less often. Years later, he made a big return in 2004 with You Are The Quarry, his first new album in seven years. It was about this time, at around 15 years old, that I would become enchanted with Morrissey.
 
I pawed over his new record, found particular favour in the somewhat strangely placed ‘Irish Blood English Heart’, and began to dive deep into The Smiths rich tapestry of indie-pop. It would sate me in the exact same way as it had for generations before me. Morrissey was not only a singer, a writer of clever and morose lyrics or simply a rock star, Moz was the embodiment of a romantic dream that England seemed incapable of genuine producing. Time passed, the indie explosion hit in a big way and as nu-rave arrived with a Day-Glo sexiness that sitting in cemeteries didn’t produce. I moved on.
 
That allowed the furore of Morrissey’s comments to largely pass me by. After all, smartphones were still in their infancy, and people’s reliance on social media had only just begun to take root. It was straightforward to ignore the ramblings of an ageing rock star, such as his 2007 conversation with NME journalist Tim Jonze: “Britain’s a terribly negative place,” he said. “And it hammers people down, and it pulls you back, and it prevents you. Also, with the issue of immigration, it’s very difficult because, although I don’t have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England, the more the British identity disappears. So the price is enormous. If you travel to Germany, it’s still absolutely Germany. If you travel to Sweden, it still has a Swedish identity. But travel to England, and you have no idea where you are.” Comments like this could go by without so much as a second glance. These days, it isn’t so easy to keep things quiet.
 
Over recent years, the volume of Morrissey’s voice has become an ever-increasing one. Having made some seriously disgusting remarks about Anthony Rapp, the accuser of Kevin Spacey: “One wonders if the boy did not know what would happen,” said Morrissey, “When you are in somebody’s bedroom, you have to be aware of where that can lead.” Every disparaging comment made by Morrissey is now picked up like the cheap thrill it is and shared across the globe in seconds.
 
When it comes to different races or nationalities, Morrissey can get a little more vicious. He labelled Chinese people a “sub-species” because of their animal rights policies; he said he couldn’t understand how the mayor of London Sadiq Khan spoke, saying, “Even Tesco wouldn’t employ Diane Abbott,” about the Cambridge-educated former shadow home secretary. He also supported the far right-wing political party For Britain (largely because they were determined to remove Halal killings) and said the way the press treated Tommy Robinson (a known racist political figure) was too harsh. It all mounts up.
 
However, one of his worst moments came in 2019 when, after Stormzy provided a generation-defining performance at Glastonbury, Morrissey posted a video claiming that the British institution promoted multiculturalism over white culture. Posting a video titled ‘Nothing But Blue Skies For Stormzy … the gallows for Morrissey’ on Morrissey Central. The clip showed headlines of Stormzy glorious performance contrasting with headlines about Morrissey’s support of For Britain. It has seen the singer labelled as a racist by his detractors.
 

  
Morrissey has made a number of controversial comments in recent years. (Credit: Alexander Film)
A swing to the right politically is somewhat expected as the years roll by, but there are other incidents to consider. In 1986, the singer told Mojo that there was a “black pop conspiracy” which was keeping The Smiths out of the charts, labelling reggae as “the most racist music in the entire world” and that he “detests […] black modern music”. In 1992 he caused Cornershop to turn their back on him for his use of the Union Jack in provoking a skinhead crowd into vicious remarks. When the NME wrote a story about the moment, he refused to speak to them for 12 years — a trick that the singer often pulls off when the press paint him in an unfavourable light. He even took shots at The Simpsons this year for alluding to his moral character. But in the last few years, things have gotten far worse.
 
It’s a view that has left many of his supporters in complete limbo. The man who had given them safe refuge from the cold and careless commercial world was now keen to pull up the drawbridge and start firing out fearsome remarks like a dragon in their turret, happy to cause damage and make dollars whenever he can. The uncomfortable truth about Morrissey is that he has quickly become everything he stood against and let us all down in the process. Perhaps what is even more uncomfortable is that he isn’t alone.
 
Swathes of the same generations who moved to liberate women, who fought for sexual freedom, championed the rights of refugees, and LGBT people are now succumbing to the easy contrarianism of celebrities like Tucker Carlson, Piers Morgan and, yes, you guessed it, Morrissey. Sadly, after his recent album releases, it has become abundantly clear that the only way Morrissey can continue to remain relevant is to keep making these remarks, firing them out into the ether, unconcerned with the damage they may cause and retreating to his masturbatory echo chamber of fans claiming innocence whenever things get a little too hairy.
 
For me and many other fans of the singer’s band and his solo work, it can be incredibly difficult to align my own values with that of a former idol. The singer represented such a pivotal moment in my life; he offered so much connection in one of the loneliest periods of my teenage years that it can be easy to get offended by the evidence noted above. It can feel like an attack on one’s own character to have your teen idol be torn down. But really, we should thank Morrissey for making us feel this way.
 
It is only through his left-wing values in the eighties that we can note just how screwed up his opinions in the 21st century are.
 
The uncomfortable truth about Morrissey. By  Jack Whatley. Far Out Magazine, May 22, 2021.

 

 

1.       Commonplace
 
I first  saw the object  in someone else’s hands. She was a teenager at Vallco, the most comprehensive shopping mall in the Silicon Valley. This was 1986 or so, when I was not yet teenaged myself. I watched her pull the twelve-­inch square out of her Rainbow Records bag. Roughly half the plane, though it seemed like more, was occupied by one man’s face. Even in severe close-­up, cropping out cues like hairstyle or shirt collar, he had the look of a chap from decades before—from back when the world was safe, watched over by strong-­jawed fathers.
 
The man conveyed a respectable anonymity. (Much later I’d learn that he was Richard Bradford, an American actor known for his role as a private eye on the British TV series Man in a Suitcase.) His angle is one of reverence, forty-­five faithful degrees. He could have been a priest, or Joan of Arc in the silent film. He could have been on his knees about to pray—or give head. Maybe he was just filled with ennui. In front of him, electric blue letters, italicized and sideways, spelled out “SMITHS.”
 
The ascetic design seemed far more sophisticated than what I’d hitherto known. I’d started out buying records by Duran Duran and the Go-Go’s, bands with recursive names and album artwork crowded with ancient palimpsests and party bunting. But here a process of extraction had occurred, and what was left was stripped so bare it was almost embarrassing to see. The cover also depicted a specific kind of manhood—generic, taciturn, self-­contained. In this man’s presence, I’d be clumsy, unintentionally speak too loudly. The stoic became an object of desire. Though the cover did not state the name of the single, “Panic,” it elicited in me that febrile state of being.
 
By thirteen, I’d become devoted to the band. In the suburbs of northern California, I felt adrift. The sunshine and manicured lawns that surrounded me could not be my natural habitat; I belonged somewhere more historical, and gloomier. I found my place through the Smiths. The band, a product of post-­industrialism, formed in 1982 in Manchester, England, where, under Margaret Thatcher, manufacturing was in decline and unemployment on the rise. Fronted by the beguilingly maudlin, lizardy, weird-­sexy lead singer Morrissey, the Smiths had little truck with the New Wave flourishes—teased hair, pirate blouses—of acts like Dead or Alive and Adam Ant; instead, their look was more akin to a style dubbed “hard times” in the September 1982 issue of The Face—distressed, rockabilly-­tinged, Dust Bowl-ish, evincing downbeat economic realities.
 
Morrissey, born in 1959 to Irish immigrants in a Lancashire town outside Manchester, came to embody a caustic and erudite distillation of northern English working-­class sensibilities. His lyrics, wrapped around Johnny Marr’s distinctively jangly guitar lines, tackled economic disparity (“England is mine, it owes me a living”), and his public comments cut straight to the mendacity of powerful politicians.
 
Morrissey constructed himself as an unlikely bard of the common people. In place of Thatcher or the queen, his national treasures were the saturnine playwright Shelagh Delaney and the bouffanted Viv Nicholson, who flamboyantly squandered the small fortune her husband won gambling. Morrissey’s spotlighting of working-­class figures could be vital and productive. But he tended to fix his gaze on a certain point in history, some time in the era of his youth. He made icons of a photogenic few while dismissing the rest as hoi polloi. “Birds abstain from song in postwar industrial Manchester, where the 1960s will not swing, and where the locals are the opposite of worldly,” he wrote in his autobiography. Rendering a subtly camp vernacular from this provincialism, Morrissey aestheticized a partial, and mostly whitewashed, image of the working class. I was yet to grasp all this consciously: I came into an aesthetic the way young people do, in a conundrum of longing and envy.
 
     2. Shirtlifter
 
I was compelled, too, by the post-­Warhol sameness and replication of Morrissey’s art direction. The Smiths’ cover artwork comprised a procession of faces: when they weren’t brash working-­class women, they were statuesque white men in banal clothing. It was a homo that was distanced from the sexual. “I hate this ‘festive faggot’ thing,” Morrissey proclaimed of gay culture in 1984. People said he was celibate, which made him attractively hard to get. He was a pinup for the closet, expert in imperious denial: “I’m not embarrassed about the word ‘gay,’ but it’s not in the least bit relevant. I’m beyond that frankly,” he said in an interview in 1985. (Weirdly, few seemed to talk about the significance of a sexually abstinent pop star rising to fame at the time of the spread of AIDS.)
 
The band’s sparkling second single, “This Charming Man,” tells of a lad who gets into the car of a flirtatious gentleman. The song was as chaste and codified as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” (released a week earlier) was smutty and overt. Words like charming and handsome gleamed like polished antiques; the syntax of hillside desolate was archaic. Even when Morrissey’s lyrics were forthright, as in the song “Miserable Lie,” the sex remained awkward: “I know that windswept, mystical air / It means: I’d like to see your underwear.” This was reassuring to someone like me, as desperate to be corrupted as I was terrified by penetration. We Smiths fans kept our undies on.

 
In place of copulation, the Smiths extolled stalking, hesitation, repulsion, disavowal. This provided me with a model for deflection: Instead of being gay, I could be what the critic Richard Dyer identifies as “the sad young man”—as Dyer points out, generally meaning “sad young white man”—a paradoxically impermanent archetype in literature, “moving between normal and queer worlds, always caught at the moment of exploration and discovery.”
 
I was enthralled by an older Smiths fan named Aaron. He worked the lightboard at the theater where I ushered. He had a serious, sensuous face, with hair lying close to his scalp in golden waves. He passed close by me in the lobby once, wearing a necktie as a belt, its length dangling along his thigh. I was deeply impressed. Not long after that, Aaron shot himself in the head. It was said he did so in his bedroom beneath a giant poster for the Smiths’ single “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” I fought against imagining his shattered brains on the wall.
 
A lot of kids kill themselves in the aspirational county where I was raised. But Aaron’s suicide seemed to me specifically homosexual. Only recently did I learn that shirtlifter was once a British slur for gay men; the phrase “Shoplifters of the World Unite” may be Morrissey’s play on words. I can’t imagine that Aaron would have been any more alert to this reference than I was; we had no way of learning about that kind of history. We had only our intuition about the atmosphere around such codes.
 
 
      3. The sun and the air
 
After moving to London in my thirties, I rediscovered that “Panic” twelve-­inch in a basement record shop. I purchased it, finally, and marveled that the dour cover had captured the attention of my very young self. I then set out to write a memoir about growing up out of place—a Smiths fan in the California suburbs. I titled the manuscript “The Sun and the Air”—a mondegreen of “the son and the heir” from the Smiths song “How Soon Is Now.” My homophonic misapprehension goes some way toward demonstrating how I construed in the band something elemental, transcendent. The actual verse is, “I am the son / And the heir / Of nothing in particular,” a culturally specific reference to bloodlines, to the lack of title or entitlement. But I had taken Morrissey’s post-­industrial landscape of iron bridges and grim side streets as poetic invention and the spiritual home for my own awkward puberty.
 
In Saint Morrissey: A Portrait of This Charming Man by an Alarming Fan (2003), the critic Mark Simpson coined the portmanteau melanalgia (combining melancholy with nostalgia) to describe how Morrissey’s lyrics pine for the England of a gritty yet spectral past. To Simpson, who actually grew up in England, melanalgia meant wearing secondhand clothes and checking foxed books out of the library, pointedly reacting against the slick 1980s status quo. To the sect of American teens to which I belonged, it meant identifying ourselves as alternative. The term wasn’t futuristic or utopian; instead, we donned makeshift signifiers of authenticity from eras past. At Savers, a sprawling thrift store, I sought out the hand-­me-­downs of strangers. I particularly loved a scratchy green cardigan the hue of an artificial Christmas tree. We traded optimistic, aggressive Americana (cheerleading, drinking from kegs, weight machines, jeeps) for the chalky terroir of old England. Though I had near-­perfect vision, I was always looking out for a pair of bulky spectacles like the ones Brits got for free from the National Health Service. Morrissey wore a pair like that. He adorned himself in meretricious stigmas such as Band-­Aids and hearing aids to accentuate his alluring vulnerability. Like him, we wanted to look wounded.

 
Morrissey emboldened my sense of disaffection through songs like “What Difference Does it Make?” and humored my persecution complex in songs like “Unloveable.” I responded to his historicized English landscape because I saw myself in it—a romantically anemic, damp, pitiable, somehow justified version of myself. I wanted to be, as the press called Morrissey, “pale and interesting.”
 
 
     4. Common name
 
When fans talk about the Smiths, they talk about themselves. They testify that Morrissey’s lyrics seemed to speak just to me. I knew as much but remained convinced that my own elision of fandom and autobiography was somehow idiosyncratic enough to merit pursuing at book length. I got down tens of thousands of yearning, impetuous words. What I didn’t grasp was that a meaningful study of my connection to the band would require me to expose a rupture.
 
As a boy, I had been told that Smith was the most common name. I saw commonness as an honor. I envied every Smith I knew, all of them blonds; I failed to note the many Smiths of color. In a 1984 interview on Good Morning Britain, Morrissey said of the band name: “It really had to be as basic as humanly possible.… It’s the most popular name in the universe, nearly…” The host interjected: “Outside of a couple of Chinese ones, which wouldn’t have gone down too well in this market.” Morrissey demurred with a grimace. For my part, I tried to take consolation when my father informed me that Lin was a Mandarin equivalent of Smith—a ubiquitous name in China, meaning “forest.” But it did not have the trustworthiness of the Old English patronym, as derived from blacksmith—a reliable, hardworking appellation.
 
In my inchoate memoir, I fixated on my compulsion to blend in, be undetectable. I was the son of a Chinese immigrant writing about the urge to achieve anonymity through manifesting an essential Englishness. I invoked Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: “To go unnoticed is by no means easy. To be a stranger, even to one’s doorman or neighbours.… This requires much asceticism, much sobriety, much creative involution: an English elegance, an English fabric, blend in with the walls, eliminate the too-­perceived, the too-­much-­to-­be-­perceived.” My proclivity for white Englishness wasn’t totally extrinsic—I’m of Anglo matrilineage. In Morrissey (and in his stand-­in on the cover of “Panic,” or in his other heroes/surrogates, like James Dean and Little Joe from Warhol’s Factory), I sought compensation for what I took to be the disapproval of white males in my extended family. I latched onto Morrissey’s perpetual ambivalence. I didn’t have to impress Morrissey; I could imagine his affection as a remote possibility. Morrissey loves you, we all love you, a friend wrote in my yearbook. (The icon was ours to ventriloquize like that.) Yet I wasn’t obsessed with Morrissey in order to feel seen but because he looked the other way.
 
In 1991, my junior year in high school, Morrissey, by then a solo artist, released the song “Asian Rut,” about three white lads beating a druggy, vengeful Asian boy. The narrative was ostensibly a nuanced condemnation of racial conflict, but it was told in a manner at once fetishistic and phlegmatic. My Asian American friends and I giggled uncomfortably over the title. We understood that in Britain, Asian referred to the subcontinent, to Pakistan and Bangladesh; our ancestors were from China and Korea. Still, it felt personal. We detected a vague chauvinism cast over Morrissey’s perspective, as in his 1988 song “Bengali in Platforms,” with its vexing line “Life is hard enough when you belong here.” I felt seen, but in a creepy way, as in sussed out.
 
But Smiths fandom proved hard to outgrow. After moving to New York City, Ben, my Korean American friend, magnetic and as “out” as could be in high school, began to cohost a night inspired by the band at a club called Sway. The weekly event had no name, so people referred to it however they wanted, keeping its image low-­key and cool. Soon enough “It began to draw crowds, first of downtown scene-­making types, later of celebrities.” That line was from Ben’s 2017 obituary in The New York Times, headlined “Death of a Downtown Icon” to chime with the Smiths song “Death of a Disco Dancer.” At his funeral, a gospel choir performed another, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” and those words were illuminated in LED.
 
When we were in our twenties, Ben regaled us with the tale of spotting Morrissey at a restaurant in Los Angeles. He’d been in the presence of big papa, as he put it. Or would he have spelled it like the Notorious B.I.G.: “Big Poppa”? Either way, it put in mind the Indian American girl at the high school next to ours who legally changed her surname to Morrissey at sixteen. This idol worship seemed tongue in cheek and yet obviously committed and strangely devoid of any introspection about why we all yearned for a grumpy white daddy. Maybe on some level we thought our purchase on Morrissey and his doppelgangers—the ordinary aesthetic, classic grooming tics, regular fit jeans—was empowering. There was nobody to enlighten us as to how ordinary, classic, and regular, like neutral, had been constructed by a culture dominated by whiteness. What’s more, alternative may have been just a different shade: even whiter.
 
 
   5. Big Papa
 
I figured Ben’s funny, slightly icky nickname for Morrissey had been spontaneously put, a one-­off. Recently, my brother-­in-­law Euan was strolling in a park in Los Angeles when a Chicano man approached, calling “Hey, big papa!” and offering him a protracted handshake. At some point, Euan realized he was being mistaken for Morrissey.
 
By now, it’s well known that the singer has a lot of Latinx fans. In a 2017 TEDx Talk, Gabriel Avalos, an earnest Mexican American teenager, wearing a blazer over his Smiths T-­shirt, almost tripping as he walks onto the stage, advances the theory that while artists typically define the fans, in this case the fans have redefined the artist. Other devotees wear T-­shirts that transpose Morrissey’s song “Irish Blood, English Heart” to “Mexican Blood, American Heart.” The symbol riffs on Mexico’s coat of arms, adding an American bald eagle to the Mexican golden eagle devouring a rattlesnake while perched on a prickly pear cactus.
 
Morrissey has professed his fondness for Mexico, donned a Chivas jersey, and written a song called “Mexico” to lambast inequality across the border: “If you’re rich and you’re white / You think you’re so right / I just don’t see why this should be so.” Writing in The Guardian, Raf Noboa y Rivera describes a shared “sense of estrangement and longing” that links the lyrics of Morrissey’s ballads and those of Ranchera, a northern Mexican folk-­music tradition. “My family has myriad tales of living in a golden Mexico during the 1940s and 1950s,” he writes. “Those stories helped foster a deep-­seated melancholy within me about where I truly belong. Not quite American; not wholly Latino, living in all the spaces in between.”
 

The etymology of the word nostalgia combines Greek nostos (a return to home or native land) with algos (pain or suffering). It was once a medical term for homesickness, considered to be a physical disease. The historian David Lowenthal explains that by the seventeenth century, immigrants who had languished or perished were considered to have been enfeebled by dislocation from their homeland; bodies that succumbed to meningitis or tuberculosis or malnutrition were said to be nostalgic. “Today,” the critic Carol Mavor wrote in 2007, “nostalgia is a disease of longing, sociocultural and not medical.”
 
That year, Morrissey lamented the impact of immigration on his homeland: “England is a memory now,” he said. Curry and reggae had come to be considered national heritage, evidence of a pluralistic society. I had my own part in spoiling the English identity, I guess: I relocated there a few months before he made that comment. Morrissey himself had done the reverse, moving to Los Angeles in 1995. “The England that I have loved, and I have sung about and whose death I have sung about, I felt had finally slipped away,” he said about his expatriation. With that statement, he laid bare how he—the son of immigrants—authored his own England, a willful confabulation. Even in his most miserable depictions of Britain, Morrissey helped mythologize it as a place to be cherished as waves of foreigners erode it. Long before he left, Morrissey dwelled in the old country.
 
 
     6. Apologist
 
Morrissey is not a racist. So stated, with whatever amount of sincerity, the editors of NME in a 2012 apology after Morrissey sued the magazine for suggesting otherwise. Then in 2019, the singer proclaimed the word racist meaningless. “If you call someone racist in modern Britain you are telling them you have run out of words,” he said. “You are shutting the debate down and running off. The word is meaningless now. Everyone ultimately prefers their own race—does this make everyone racist?”
 
As I toiled over my prose about being his fan, Morrissey would periodically pass remarks like that. He spoke of how the Chinese could be a “subspecies,” considering their record on animal welfare, and how London has been debased by a British Pakistani mayor who “cannot talk properly.” On late-­night TV, Morrissey wore the badge of a far-­right U.K. political party whose leader has focused on quashing Muslim immigration. I tried to take his outbursts in stride, to fix my narrative in the past, as if the past is fixed. But revisiting his lyrics, I began to find them more vituperative, less empathetic than I’d recalled. A song’s narrator would be woefully misunderstood, but that was because he was surrounded by the dim-­witted and distinctly othered: women buck-­toothed and monstrous; gay pederasts; Bengalis who don’t belong. Whereas I’d once positioned the singer in a coalition of outcasts, I began to see him as sneering at the rest.
 
In his essay “The White to Be Angry,” the critic José Esteban Muñoz revisits the lyrics of X, his favorite band as a teenager. Their anthemic song “Los Angeles” describes a resident of the city who finds herself hating Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, and gays. It’s an allegory about white flight, but listeners may suspect the message is as collusive as critical. Muñoz, a Cuban American, writes:
 
           ‘Though queerness was already a powerful polarity in my life, and the hissing pronunciation of “Mexican” that the song produced felt very much like the epithet “spic,” with which I had a great deal of experience, I somehow found a way to resist these identifications. The luxury of hindsight lets me understand that I needed X and the possibility of subculture it promised at that moment to withstand the identity-­eroding effects of normativity. I was able to enact a certain misrecognition that let me imagine myself as something other than queer or racialized. But such a misrecognition demands a certain toll…to find self within the dominant public sphere, we need to deny self.’
 
Self-­denial is a tricky position from which to write memoir. Ultimately, I was relieved to abandon “The Sun and the Air.” You’d have been brought onto the radio, a friend laughed, and introduced as a Morrissey apologist.
 
 
     7.  Weirdos and Misfits
 
In early 2020, Dominic Cummings—then chief special adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and architect of the victorious Brexit campaign—posted a job recruitment notice for “weirdos and misfits with odd skills.” This jargon, and the jobseekers it attracted, came under scrutiny after one new hire was forced to resign; comments he’d made in support of eugenics had surfaced. The ­“weirdos and misfits” line struck me as in accord with the way alternative was now being bandied about—as in alt-­right, or alternative facts.
 
In my youth, “alternative” connoted, or so I thought, not only a position on the social margins, but the open-­border policy there. At some point, the word flipped to mean angry white people with abandonment issues, the far-­right fringe. I’m forced to consider that the subculture I’d participated in, by centering the narrative of wounded white men, might have laid foundations for this consequential turn. Looking back, what was alternative without bitterness, pasty complexions, hatred of the contemporary, feelings of ostracization, moping? The alternative scene was basically angry white people with abandonment issues. Morrissey’s England was depressing yet glorious, an island in the doldrums, yet halcyon, white—the very place members of today’s alt-­right want to paddle back to.

 
Mid-­ to late-­period Morrissey, paunchy, remote-­eyed, spouts off a rose-­tinted jeremiad about the loss of identity. He’s pretty zeitgeisty that way. Just recently a poll showed that nearly a third of England’s adult residents, hot off leaving the European Union, would also vote in favor of independence from the United Kingdom, despite London being the center of power and seat of government. The academic Alex Niven responded in The Guardian: “One of the major problems with contemporary debates about ‘Englishness’ is that England does not really exist as either a coherent or a concrete political reality.” Niven cites the historian Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities,” which are drummed up to foster a sense of shared belonging. “England,” Niven proposes, being scarce of political institutions that differentiate it from Britain as a whole, “can mean pretty much whatever people want it to mean.” England, to amend Morrissey, is now a false memory.
 
“Why did you call yourselves the Smiths?” a schoolboy asked the band on a children’s TV show in 1984. “Because it was the most ordinary name,” replies Morrissey, almost teacherly, “and I think it’s time that the ordinary folk of the world showed their faces.” I admired that class consciousness. It took much longer to recognize that Morrissey saw ordinariness in his own image, a perspective that can slide into “Make ________ great again” politics. I’m not sure there’s a place for (mixed-­race, faggoty) me in that mythical past.
 
When I was an alternative teenager, uneasy in the present, I sought refuge in the retro. The fashion statement of my anachronistic green cardigan was, basically, History is worth repeating. In truth, against my skin, it wasn’t a great look. But I was a Smiths fan, charmingly old-­fashioned, thriving in disjunction from my surroundings. Today, having forsaken my idol, I’ve also exited the illusory country he inhabits. I can never go back to the house of the wrong daddy again.
 
The Wrong Daddy :  Morrissey and the cult of the wounded white male. By Jeremy Atherton Lin. The Yale Review,  May 19, 2021. 

Also of interest :  
 
Bigmouth strikes again and again: why Morrissey fans feel so betrayed. By Tim Jonze. The Guardian, May 30, 2019. 

Samuel Pepys : Witness to the London Plague

In early April, writer Jen Miller urged New York Times readers to start a coronavirus diary.

“Who knows,” she wrote, “maybe one day your diary will provide a valuable window into this period.”

During a different pandemic, one 17th-century British naval administrator named Samuel Pepys did just that. He fastidiously kept a diary from 1660 to 1669 – a period of time that included a severe outbreak of the bubonic plague in London. Epidemics have always haunted humans, but rarely do we get such a detailed glimpse into one person’s life during a crisis from so long ago.

There were no Zoom meetings, drive-through testing or ventilators in 17th-century London. But Pepys’ diary reveals that there were some striking resemblances in how people responded to the pandemic.

For Pepys and the inhabitants of London, there was no way of knowing whether an outbreak of the plague that occurred in the parish of St. Giles, a poor area outside the city walls, in late 1664 and early 1665 would become an epidemic.

The plague first entered Pepys’ consciousness enough to warrant a diary entry on April 30, 1665: “Great fears of the Sickenesse here in the City,” he wrote, “it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.”

Pepys continued to live his life normally until the beginning of June, when, for the first time, he saw houses “shut up” – the term his contemporaries used for quarantine – with his own eyes, “marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there.” After this, Pepys became increasingly troubled by the outbreak.

He soon observed corpses being taken to their burial in the streets, and a number of his acquaintances died, including his own physician.

By mid-August, he had drawn up his will, writing, “that I shall be in much better state of soul, I hope, if it should please the Lord to call me away this sickly time.” Later that month, he wrote of deserted streets; the pedestrians he encountered were “walking like people that had taken leave of the world.”

In London, the Company of Parish Clerks printed “bills of mortality,” the weekly tallies of burials.

Because these lists noted London’s burials – not deaths – they undoubtedly undercounted the dead. Just as we follow these numbers closely today, Pepys documented the growing number of plague victims in his diary.

  

‘Bills of mortality’ were regularly posted. Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Image

At the end of August, he cited the bill of mortality as having recorded 6,102 victims of the plague, but feared “that the true number of the dead this week is near 10,000,” mostly because the victims among the urban poor weren’t counted. A week later, he noted the official number of 6,978 in one week, “a most dreadfull Number.”

By mid-September, all attempts to control the plague were failing. Quarantines were not being enforced, and people gathered in places like the Royal Exchange. Social distancing, in short, was not happening.

He was equally alarmed by people attending funerals in spite of official orders. Although plague victims were supposed to be interred at night, this system broke down as well, and Pepys griped that burials were taking place “in broad daylight.

There are few known effective treatment options for COVID-19. Medical and scientific research need time, but people hit hard by the virus are willing to try anything. Fraudulent treatments, from teas and colloidal silver, to cognac and cow urine, have been floated.

Although Pepys lived during the Scientific Revolution, nobody in the 17th century knew that the Yersinia pestis bacterium carried by fleas caused the plague. Instead, the era’s scientists theorized that the plague was spreading through miasma, or “bad air” created by rotting organic matter and identifiable by its foul smell. Some of the most popular measures to combat the plague involved purifying the air by smoking tobacco or by holding herbs and spices in front of one’s nose.

Tobacco was the first remedy that Pepys sought during the plague outbreak. In early June, seeing shut-up houses “put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell … and chaw.” Later, in July, a noble patroness gave him “a bottle of plague-water” – a medicine made from various herbs. But he wasn’t sure whether any of this was effective. Having participated in a coffeehouse discussion about “the plague growing upon us in this town and remedies against it,” he could only conclude that “some saying one thing, some another.”

During the outbreak, Pepys was also very concerned with his frame of mind; he constantly mentioned that he was trying to be in good spirits. This was not only an attempt to “not let it get to him” – as we might say today – but also informed by the medical theory of the era, which claimed that an imbalance of the so-called humors in the body – blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm – led to disease.

Melancholy – which, according to doctors, resulted from an excess of black bile – could be dangerous to one’s health, so Pepys sought to suppress negative emotions; on Sept. 14, for example, he wrote that hearing about dead friends and acquaintances “doth put me into great apprehensions of melancholy. … But I put off the thoughts of sadness as much as I can.”

 Humans are social animals and thrive on interaction, so it’s no surprise that so many have found social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic challenging. It can require constant risk assessment: How close is too close? How can we avoid infection and keep our loved ones safe, while also staying sane? What should we do when someone in our house develops a cough?

During the plague, this sort of paranoia also abounded. Pepys found that when he left London and entered other towns, the townspeople became visibly nervous about visitors.

“They are afeared of us that come to them,” he wrote in mid-July, “insomuch that I am troubled at it.”

Pepys succumbed to paranoia himself: In late July, his servant Will suddenly developed a headache. Fearing that his entire house would be shut up if a servant came down with the plague, Pepys mobilized all his other servants to get Will out of the house as quickly as possible. It turned out that Will didn’t have the plague, and he returned the next day.

In early September, Pepys refrained from wearing a wig he bought in an area of London that was a hotspot of the disease, and he wondered whether other people would also fear wearing wigs because they could potentially be made of the hair of plague victims.

And yet he was willing to risk his health to meet certain needs; by early October, he visited his mistress without any regard for the danger: “round about and next door on every side is the plague, but I did not value it but there did what I could con ella.”

Just as people around the world eagerly wait for a falling death toll as a sign of the pandemic letting up, so did Pepys derive hope – and perhaps the impetus to see his mistress – from the first decline in deaths in mid-September. A week later, he noted a substantial decline of more than 1,800.

Let’s hope that, like Pepys, we’ll soon see some light at the end of the tunnel.

Diary of Samuel Pepys shows how life under the bubonic plague mirrored today’s pandemic. By  Ute Lotz-Heumann. The Conversation , April 24, 2020. 

One of the more curious effects of this pandemic has been the sudden return to cultural relevance of the 17-century naval administrator and diarist Samuel Pepys. In the week before lockdown, as the public was urged to stay indoors and the newspapers printed disbelieving photographs of rammed parks and high streets, a quote began circulating on Twitter that felt like a warning from history:

On hearing ill rumour that Londoners may soon be urged into their lodgings by Her Majesty’s men, I looked upon the street to see a gaggle of striplings making fair merry, and no doubt spreading the plague well about. Not a care had these rogues for the health of their elders!

– Samuel Pepys, 1664

The quote is fake: there was no “her majesty” during the reign of Charles II, nor was 1664 a bad plague year. Putting those to one side, the hey-nonny flourishes of the language—“a gaggle of striplings make fair merry”—are a far cry from the glinting cut-and-thrust of Pepys’s prose. In fact, the quote came from the Twitter account @pepys_diaries, one of several Pepys impersonations that have sprung up in recent weeks. (Full disclosure: disconcerted as I am to be a part of this sniggering cottage industry, I should admit that I regularly impersonate Pepys for independent magazine the Fence.)

It was a well-intentioned joke, whose authors can’t be blamed for it being shared out of context. In truth, the real Samuel Pepys would likely have been the subject of his fake avatar’s disapproval. With Pepys impersonators suddenly ten-a-penny, it’s worth thinking about how the diarist actually lived when the plague was at its peak.

Nothing pleases us more than seeing our own views in the mouth of a venerated historical figure. We’re not alone in this. Fake authorship is an old and inevitably political game, one that Pepys’s forebears and contemporaries played deftly. One of the most popular books of Pepys’s own youth was the Eikon Basilike, a series of devotional letters and texts that were printed, billed and sold as having been written by Charles I before his execution. Historians doubt Charles is the true author—but under Cromwell’s protectorate the book sold like hot cakes.

Pepys’s plague came in 1665, a descendant of the Black Death, now known as the “great plague of London.” It was the last great British plague epidemic, lasting for over 18 months and killing an estimated 100,000 people. That number feels real again today, as we are warned to expect deaths numbering 20,000 or more.

In September of that year the plague was at its peak. It tore through the country killing more than 5,000 people each week in London alone. But Pepys was thriving like never before. Removed to the safety of the countryside, he was busier than ever: a tailor’s son, elevated by a mixture of chance and merit, well on his way to becoming a dignified man of state.

His entry for the 14th of that month shows him caught between moods, weighing personal security and wellbeing against the death that was all around. He had travelled into the city that day, racked with an all-too-recognisable anxiety:

‘’I did endeavour all I could to talk with as few as I could, there being now no observation of shutting up of houses infected, that to be sure we do converse and meet with people that have the plague.’’

In London he settled his business with great success, securing his goods and advancing his career again. The day, he wrote, gave him “matter for as much content on one hand and melancholy on another” as any day in his life. In a bravura passage, he went on to describe the effects of the plague in the city. He had seen corpses carried close by him on their way to be buried; he discovered that someone had been dying of the plague at an inn when he was there.

“To hear that poor Payne, my waiter, hath buried a child, and is dying himself. To hear that a labourer I sent but the other day to Dagenhams to know how they did there, is dead of the plague; and that one of my own watermen, that carried me daily, fell sick as soon as he had landed me on friday morning past, when I had been all night upon the water […] and is now dead of the plague.”

Here we can see Pepys wrestling with the way epidemics invert our normal intuitions about the opposition between public and private concern. Each victim is to be pitied, but each is also a potential threat. The closer someone is, the more dangerous they become. This can be awkward: before he fled to the countryside, Pepys had found himself among people so anxious about the disease that he had to lie about where he lived. Conversely, many of us are now wrestling with the counter-intuitive notion that the most public-spirited thing to do may be simply looking after ourselves.

At the end of that year, Pepys took stock of the great catastrophe in a typically un-self-deceived fashion: “I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague-time, by my Lord Brouncker’s and Captain Cocke’s good company… and great store of dancings we have had at my cost (which I was willing to indulge myself and wife) at my lodgings.”

This is the other surprise: Pepys’s was a social plague, full of meetings, dancing and drinking. He regularly slept at his friends’ houses throughout the epidemic, and never gave up his merriment—or his unsavoury womanising. What Pepys’s diaries record, in time of plague and out of it, is the busy particularity of our daily lives: their abundant small pleasures and casual fellowships. The day after his trip to London, Pepys was happily beavering away at his office. In the evening he went for a medicinal drink with a companion. The day after that, he was at lunch with three friends, “and very merry we were.” With our own peak still to come, we can’t expect the same pleasures for some time.

How Samuel Pepys really dealt with the plague. By John Phipps.  Prospect  , April 2, 2020.

Samuel Pepys was always better at social than distancing. At the end of 1665, after bubonic plague had taken off a quarter of London’s population, he wrote in his diary: “I have never lived so merrily . . . as I have done this plague time.”

By December the great tide of death had abated but even as it had swept in months earlier, Pepys wrote of “the greatest glut of content that ever I had”, adding, almost as an afterthought, “only under some difficulty because of the plague”. He was a prosperous government official, member of the Navy Board during a maritime war with the Dutch; treasurer of the English colony at Tangier.

While Pepys had sent his wife downriver to Woolwich to escape the disease, he remained in London and continued to visit taverns and flirt his way through the evenings. He took what he thought were precautions, chewing tobacco and forgoing new wigs lest they be cut from the head of an infected body. On one occasion, “I met a dead corpse of the plague in the narrow alley . . . but I thank God I was not much disturbed at it.”

But in the last week of August, more than 6,000 had died from the plague and Pepys’ imperviousness to melancholy was under strain. The few people he saw, he wrote, looked as if they had “taken leave of the world”. He moved amid Buriers and Searchers, often elderly women assigned the dangerous job of examining the dead for signs of the plague, carrying long white wands to warn people to keep their distance as they went about their gloomy work. It was getting closer. His physician and the waterman who ferried him daily had both died, and Pepys decided to make a will.

His more austere friend, also a diarist, John Evelyn, Commissioner for Sick and Wounded Seamen, as well as for prisoners of war (many incarcerated in deathtrap confinement at Dover), looked on the ghastly spectacle in early September with a more tragic eye. Walking from Borough on the south side of the Thames to St James’s was “a dismal passage and dangerous to see so many coffins exposed in the streets, now thin of people; the shops shut up, and all in mournful silence, as not knowing whose turn might be next”.

Even in a statistically minded age (both were fellows of the newly founded Royal Society), Pepys and Evelyn knew that the vanishing act they were witnessing could not just be measured by the body count of the Mortality Bills. It was the city itself that was perishing, deprived of the oxygen of sociability.

Pepys took it hard when one of his favourite taverns, The Angell on Tower Hill, in common with many others, closed. He and many like him exemplified Aristotle’s conviction that humans are, above all else, social animals; and that the vital energy of cities in particular comes from gatherings — in public squares, theatres, sports stadiums — where, through some collective elixir of attentive enthusiasm, individuals are lifted by the (not invariably) benign excitement of the crowd.

Take that away and what you were left with were buildings and the fearfully confined inside them. And what Pepys, in his reckless way, was determined to hold on to was that other basic cell of community, beyond individuals and family — friendship.

A succession of writers from antiquity onwards celebrated friendship as the most life-enhancing social relationship of all.

The poet Horace’s friendship with his wealthy patron Maecenas was the wellspring of some of his most affecting verse. Cicero was at pains to distinguish the real thing — voluntary and entered into for nothing other than its own intrinsic pleasure — from sensuality that could wither along with the exhaustion of lust, or connections based on utility.

The great essayist Michel de Montaigne went into deep grief at the loss of his friend Étienne de la Boétie and lamented in an essay on friendship that there was “no action or imagination of mine wherein I do not miss him”.

And because, according to these champions of amity, disinterested friendship was intrinsically virtuous, it was the primary building block of strong societies; the place where personal pleasure and the common good nourished each other.

Acts of friendship were and are among the most painful casualties of epidemics. The earliest and most gripping account of plague, given by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War, describes “dejection of mind” as its greatest misery, brought on by the fracturing of friendship. Those who visited the sick knew they were inviting a death sentence on themselves. But those who had no visitors “died forlorn”.

Our generation of the plagued is more fortunate. For once, the grotesque debasement of what it means to be befriended on social media has something going for it. FaceTime, Skype, Instagram and Zoom allow comforting visits to the sick and distressed in ways denied to Thucydides’ stricken Athenians or Pepys’ Londoners walled in, as they were, behind the red cross daubed on their doors.

Since the appearance of a whole slew of books on the subject, beginning with Hans Zinsser’s Rats, Lice and History (read at college half a century ago), William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, it’s become a commonplace that epidemics are the great re-setters of history, more formative even than wars or revolutions. The lack of immunity of indigenous American peoples to the lethal diseases brought by European conquistadors in the 16th century was unquestionably decisive in their defeat and subjugation.

But the pandemic of 1918, horrifying as it was, did little to affect political and social alterations already made by the war. And some things remained constant before, during and after the plague, notably the starkly differing experiences of rich and poor.

A standard feature of the “Dances of Death” imagery that became popular after the arrival of the Black Death in Europe in 1348 was the indifference of the plague to rank, wealth and authority, indiscriminately mowing down popes and emperors at the height of their powers, along with peasants and beggars.

But it’s equally true that if you had the means to escape the urban hotspots of infection, you had a much better chance of survival than if you were stuck in the urban swarm. The ancestors of today’s escapees to New York summer homes were panic-stricken passengers in coaches and private carriages jamming the exits from the city when the first big wave of cholera struck in 1832.

While the epidemics differ in their origins, virulence and duration, and while the understanding of how they arise and in what form they are carried has changed dramatically over the centuries, to a remarkable degree the social danse macabre following the shock of impact has stayed much the same. It’s a square dance along a quadrilateral formed by political power, economic desperation, religious fervour and medical understanding. Each of those institutional communities does what it can to minimise the damage to their authority. But what happens when they interact is less predictable.

The first reaction of western rulers whose best-laid plans are frustrated by epidemic has been, almost invariably, to blame Asians and to adopt the blustery vocabulary of war. There is, in fact, a dramatic founding history behind this militarisation of medical crisis. In 1346, Genoese merchants and soldiers had locked themselves inside the Crimean fortress city of Caffa (now Feodosia) to defend themselves against a siege by the Mongol army of Jani Beg.

 Before they could press their advantage of numbers, the besiegers were struck down by a brutal wave of bubonic plague, a contagion which had been endemic along the Silk Road for at least 20 years.

According to Gabriele de Mussi of Piacenza, who probably wrote his account two years later, “the dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster . . . ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside”. What seemed like “mountains of dead” were thrown into the city.

This was the earliest documented act of biological warfare and, according to de Mussi’s narrative, the Black Death subsequently travelled to Christian Europe through survivors of the siege. In fact, it was likelier that the Genoese carried the disease in the hold of their ships, where fleas living on the bodies of black rats were the carriers of the fatal bacillus. But the history established the notion, still current in the Trumpian branding of coronavirus as “Wuhan” or “Chinese”, that somehow the epidemic is a tool of ruthless oriental strategy.

The hitherto unknown strain of cholera that ravaged the world in the 19th century originated in British-controlled Bengal in 1817, and may have been carried west on European steam shipping. By the end of that century, however, it was not uncommon to refer to cholera as an Asiatic act of revenge for the humiliations of imperial domination.

If scapegoating was always going to be a predictable response of plague-beleaguered powers, the inevitable target of blame was the Jews. At the time of the Black Death, they were accused in some places of poisoning wells; in others it was said that they had introduced the disease out of sheer malevolence towards Christians.

The consequences, even by the standards of persecution endemic in the medieval Christian world, were horrific. From Spain to the Rhineland, in Switzerland and Bavaria, Jews were the victims of massacre and, very often, burnings alive. In Strasbourg, 2,000 were slaughtered; in Basel, 130 children were separated from their parents before 600 adults were burnt. In the single village of Tàrrega in Catalonia, virtually the entire community of 300 Jews were killed by assault or burning.

Other times, other epidemics, found other victims. Outbreaks of cholera in American cities such as Boston and New York were blamed on the immigrants, most often Irish, who of necessity were packed together in insanitary conditions. The nativist Know-Nothing movement was fired up by attacking Irish migrants as a double threat to Protestant Anglo-America; as the carriers of both popery and disease.

John Pintard, one of the founders of the New-York Historical Society, who remained in the city through the 1832 epidemic, believed the infection would of itself purify the population and act as a prophylactic against future outbreaks harming the better sort of people. “Those sickened must be cured or die off,” he wrote, “and being chiefly of the very scum of the city, the quicker [their] dispatch, the sooner the malady will cease.”

The pious and the powerful often, but not invariably, held up their hands in horror. Pope Clement VI forbade attacks on Jews and insisted that since they had suffered at least equally if not more seriously than Christians from the plague, why would they be responsible for their own suffering? But it suited other authorities to let popular hatred run its course along with the infection; just as the better off and the better educated were sometimes prepared to endorse the idea that immigrants were, by the very fact of their arrival and lodging in crowded quarters, tantamount to an invasion force armed with disease. Better that outsiders should be blamed.

Nonetheless, the powerful did not escape blame for the calamity. If the plague was commonly believed to be God’s punishment for the sins of egregious wealth, debauchery and overweening pride, popular preaching held the stewards of both church and state to be complicit in these transgressions. Humility and self-mortification were needed. Processions of flagellants, hundreds in number, made their way through cities including Florence, thrashing their bodies with metal-studded flails, in bloody reproof of bishops and abbots.

Painting and tomb sculpture brought the warnings of the dead into the world of the living. “Transi” tombs placed sculptures of decaying cadavers lying immediately beneath the grander likenesses of the deceased. In the Campo Santo cemetery at Pisa, Francesco Traini’s terrifying “Triumph of Death” (painted before 1348), in which grandly dressed types beheld open coffins containing corpses in various states of decomposition, took on freshly urgent meaning.

In the midst of calamity, economics was always at loggerheads with the interests of public health. Even though, until there was an understanding of germ-borne diseases, the plague was mostly attributed to “foul air” and noxious vapours said to arise from stagnant or polluted marshes, there was nonetheless a sense that the very commercial arteries that had generated prosperity were now transformed into vectors of poison.

But when quarantines were proposed or imposed (an invention of the same northern Italian towns and ports that have suffered most brutally from our own pandemic), those who stood to lose most, merchants and in some places artisans and workers, from the stoppage of markets, fairs and trade, put up stiff resistance.

Must the economy die so that it could be resurrected in robust good health? Yes, said the guardians of public health, who became part of urban life in Europe from the 15th century onwards.

When the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in western Europe appeared in Marseille in 1720, the regent, Philippe of Orleans, not renowned for his public-spiritedness, appointed one of his generals, Charles de Langeron, to take command of the emergency, put a quarter of the royal army at his disposal, established a “Council of Health” in Provence, and shut down travel and trade between the port and towns like Aix, Montpellier and Arles.

Not all of the prophylactic remedies were of much avail. Plague walls were built to prevent the entry of travellers to provincial towns such as Aix and Arles, but the disease penetrated the cities nonetheless. The crew of the ship thought to have brought the plague were confined to a lazaretto offshore, more or less guaranteeing mass mortality. And a general massacre of cats and dogs was no help at all. But de Langeron was praised for being publicly conspicuous in the hotspots, “on his horse from morning till night . . . scornful of danger, to remedy ills that seemed insurmountable”, and compared to the most virtuous consuls of antiquity.

In the long term, the idea that state and local governments should, as part of their brief, become specialised institutions for public health, which in times of pestilence would gather reliable information on the source of infection and be able to map its spread as a precondition of remedial policy, was a crucial legacy.

Which is not to say that empirical science always has its way in its toils with piety, profit and power. Even though the physician John Snow conclusively traced back the cholera infection of 1854 to those who had used a single water fountain at Broad Street in Soho, and established that the water company servicing that pump had been using dangerously tainted water from the sewage-riddled gunk of the Thames, his principal argument that the disease was conveyed in faecally polluted water took a while to be accepted.

  

For some time now, the cult of the individual and the hollowing out of government, the better to strip away any impediments to the optimisation of profit, has been riding high. The global trauma of the pandemic may well move things in the opposite direction, towards a greater acceptance of government intervention, a trend which can either become baleful — as it already has in the illiberal authoritarianism just instituted in Hungary — or benign, with policy, both preventive and reactive, based on the authority of knowledge.

And there is something else, evident in much of the public response in this time of profound distress, which may yet arise from the ashes of our complacency, and that is the quality most important to Adam Smith (sometimes misunderstood as the high priest of individualism), which in The Theory of Moral Sentiments he called “sympathy”.

However selfish man be supposed, he wrote, “there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others . . . That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane . . . The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.”

In the pit of our common trepidation, we must hope he is right.

Plague time: Simon Schama on what history tells us. The Financial Times , April 10, 2020.