Morrissey and Philip Larkin connection #27:
In his poem 'Deceptions', from what is generally held to be his first mature collection, The Less Deceived, Larkin writes arrestingly of someone whose "mind lay open like a drawer of knives".
I believe it's fairly well-known that Philip Larkin was sexually attracted to Margaret Thatcher. From his correspondence we have the following:
Your anecdote reminds me of a brief exchange I once had with Mrs. T., who told me she liked my wonderful poem about a girl. My face must have expressed incomprehension. “You know,” she said. “Her mind is full of knives.” I took that as a great compliment – I thought if it weren’t spontaneous she’d have got it right – but I’m a child in these things. I also thought that she might think a mind full of knives rather along her own lines, not that I don’t kiss the ground on which she walks.
But I rather think that her mind – and her drawer, or drawers – full of knives must have been part of the attraction for Larkin.
In his song, You're Gonna Need Someone on Your Side, Morrissey sings similarly arresting lines: "Someone kindly told me that you'd wasted/Eight of nine lives." Famous for his Freudian slip-like live lyric changes, during performances of this song he has been known to change the lyric to the seemingly nonsensical (so we are told): "Someone kindly told me that you collected very sharp bread knives". I remember it from performances I have heard as "very sharp kitchen knives". (I know people who collect very sharp kitchen knives.) (Incidentally, Moz also seems to have changed this lyric along the lines of, "Someone kindly told me that you'd thrown away, every day of your precious teenaged life.")
The website It May All End Tomorrow suggests that such lyric changes by Morrissey are flippant and without particular meaning. I would suggest that, like Freudian slips, they have more meaning than is at first apparent.
To indicate the direction in which I am thinking, imagine the line, "Someone kindly told me that you collected very sharp bread knives", as being sung by Philip Larkin. To Margaret Thatcher.
Which brings us to Mishima Yukio, and we've almost come full circle.
