Biographers like to start with a person’s childhood, which of course makes sound chronological sense. But while occasionally there are some insights to be gleaned — the child is parent to the person (to modernize William Blake), and all that — more often one’s eyes glaze over while waiting for the good parts.

So let’s get a few biographical details quickly out of the way. Wikipedia tells us that

George Ivan “Van” Morrison was born on 31 August 1945, at 125 Hyndford Street, Bloomfield, Belfast, Northern Ireland, as the only child of George Morrison, a shipyard electrician, and Violet Stitt Morrison, who had been a singer and tap dancer in her youth. Morrison’s family were working class Protestants descended from the Ulster Scots population that settled in Belfast.

And yes, I will once again be using Wikipedia as a primary source, though I know that drives some people batty. For my purposes — the subjective exploration of popular culture — I generally find it quite sufficiently reliable, and often surprisingly insightful.

But it can’t go into great detail, so I went in search of a Morrison biography as a companion for this journey. There aren’t as many as you might think — and upon reading the introduction of the one I chose, Clinton Heylin’s Can You Feel the Silence, I found out why: Van does everything he can to stop people from writing about him. Right at the beginning of the book Heylin quotes him thusly:

The fact that I may be successful at what I do does not mean that I accept that anyone can come along and publish details of my private life, for other people to read, purely for their own personal enjoyment.

And on the one hand, fair enough; everyone’s entitled to a private life. But Morrison seems to take this philosophy to extremes, heavy-handedly dissuading anyone who knows him from talking to writers, and often taking legal action against would-be biographers. (I’m pretty sure that this little blog will fly under his radar, though it would be a great honor to be named in a lawsuit by Van the Man.)

But Heylin persevered, though his prose sometimes bears the marks of post-traumatic stress. From his book we can gather such tidbits as the following:

• “George Junior would be an only child, something that would cause him a certain amount of wonderment and pain as he grew older.”
• Van’s father was “a hard man, short on words, not because he had naught to say but because he did not like to bluster.”
• His mother was “generally portrayed as ‘the life and soul of the party’ … she would never need prompting to do one of her ‘wee turns’ at the perennial family gatherings.”

And right there a portrait begins to emerge. Cross “a hard man, short on words” with “the life and soul of the party” and what do you get? This guy:

*

But there I go getting ahead of myself. We were back in the 1940s….

So what does Morrison himself have to say about his childhood? In 1973 he recorded a song called “Wild Children,” written, he said, “for all the kids born around that time. Because… I think there was a heavier trip to conform.”

We were the War Children
Born 1945
When all the soldiers came marching home
Love looks in their eye

Tennessee Tennessee Williams
Let your inspiration flow
Let it be around when we hear the sound
When the spring time rivers flow when the rivers flow

Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando
Standing with their heads bowed on the side
Crying like a baby thinking about the time
James Dean took that fatal ride, took that ride

Tennessee Tennessee Tennessee Tennessee Williams
Let your inspiration go
Will you be around to hear the sound
When the spring time rivers flow, rivers flow

And Steiger and Marlon Brando
Standing with their heads bowed on the side
Crying like a baby thinking about the time
James Dean took that fatal ride, took that ride

And we were the Wild Children
Back in 1945
When all the soldiers came marching home
Love looks in their eyes, in their eyes

Van couldn’t have actually seen the love looks in their eyes, of course… he was born three weeks after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and two days before Japan surrendered. But that’s poetic license innit? The references to On the Waterfront (released 1954) and the death of James Dean (1955) must be childhood memories, but I’m not sure how Tennessee Williams enters into it.

Well, several of you reading this know more than me… thoughts?