There are lots of news stories circulating about Philip Norman's new biography of John Lennon, but Steve Marinucci over at Abbeyrd found the only one worth reproducing:
The Curious Life Of John LennonHis sexual fantasies included Paul McCartney and his own mother. And he was haunted by a mystifying inability to forget any pain ever caused him. John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman adds a complex, epic dimension to "a major, towering presence of the 20th century". Paul Du Noyer investigates.It's bloody enormous, for a start.
I had intended to take my review copy away on holiday, until it arrived by courier in two huge A4 binders. I would literally have needed an extra suitcase. The author tells me it runs to about 300,000 words and that was after he'd cut 60,000. Can there still be so much to say about John Lennon? Or indeed about anyone?
I would pitch Philip Norman's blockbuster somewhere in between its two best-known predecessors, namely Albert Goldman's The Lives Of John Lennon (a book he calls "malevolent, risibly ignorant") and Ray Coleman's Lennon: The Definitive Biography ("an honourable attempt"). But I would place it above both of them - more accurate, more perceptive and far better written. The great surprise for people like me, who have spent too many years reading about The Beatles, is the revelatory material that John Lennon: The Life actually contains. So, yes, there really is more to say.
The first eye-opener is John's incestuous desire for his mother Julia - a flighty and spirited woman who left him, as a child, in the care of her sister Mimi. (She was killed in a car accident when John was a teenager.) He spoke to Yoko of this fixation repeatedly; he confided it to others and speaks of it in a 1979 audio-diary. At 14 he lay next to his mother during her afternoon rest and wondered how far she would let him go.
Then it's suggested that he had a crush on Paul. "On the principle that bohemians should try everything," writes Norman, John had contemplated an affair, "but had been deterred by Paul's immovable heterosexuality." Yoko, again, is party to this speculation. She recalls hearing people in the Apple office who called McCartney "John's Princess". One is never sure whether John really had those leanings - or just an intellectual curiosity and appetite for mischief. The same ambiguity surrounds his early Spanish holiday with The Beatles' gay manager Brian Epstein. (Although, when a Liverpool DJ unwisely made a jibe, Lennon battered him savagely.)
Norman writes with a shrewd eye for the wider context. He's especially good on the post-war, middle-class world of Lennon's childhood. We follow John from semi-detached tranquillity to art-school and Hamburg, to the London Palladium and the world. We are necessarily in familiar territory for a lot of the time, thanks not least to the author's own Beatle book, his estimable 1981 biography Shout!. Yet there is always an arresting new fact around the corner. Connoisseurs of trivia will enjoy learning that "eight days a week" was not a Ringo-ism, but a quip by Paul's taxi-driver on the way to a songwriting session with John. Nor had I known of John's fling with the pop singer Alma Cogan - a woman whom poor Brian Epstein, ironically, had once considered marrying.
More startling, though, is the business of Norwegian Wood. This song was always read as a coded admission of adultery - but with whom? The journalist Maureen Cleave is often suggested - she was pretty and clever and Lennon adored her - but Norman's evidence points elsewhere. When John moved to London with his wife Cynthia and their child Julian, they took a flat in South Kensington. It had been found for them by The Beatles' photographer Robert Freeman, who lived downstairs with his beautiful wife, Sonny. Now, she was German but preferred to say she was Norwegian. The Freemans' pad was fashionably wood-panelled. When Robert was out and Cynthia upstairs, John slipped down to see Sonny Freeman and they did, indeed, have an affair.
The book's numerous sources include both Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney, The Beatles' producer George Martin and their right-hand man Neil Aspinall. There are long-lost girlfriends from Liverpool and the "primal scream" therapist Arthur Janov. I even provided a few scraps myself.
Documentary evidence comes from the private papers of Aunt Mimi and John's autobiographical notes and tapes. A Lennon biographer always has the benefit of his songs, which are among the most candid ever written. And there are the ever-engaging public utterances: he was, says Norman, "perhaps the only celebrity in history who never did a dull or dishonest interview".
What must it be like to write a Lennon book with Yoko looking over one shoulder and Paul over the other? The author had Yoko's blessing for the project - although she's apparently unhappy with the finished result - and Paul agreed to be interviewed also. The tone is scrupulously fair to both of them. Yoko appears to have been pulled reluctantly into Lennon's orbit. She did not push her way forward to bag a Beatle. And McCartney has shown a forgiving side. I doubt whether he has forgotten Philip Norman's Sunday Times attack from years ago, a parody poem that ended:
O deified Scouse, with unmusical spouse
For the cliches and cloy you unload,
To an anodyne tune may they bury you soon
In the middlemost midst of the road.Of all the stories contained within this teeming tale, few are as strange as that of Alfred Lennon, John's wayward father. A rascally Scouse seaman, it's true that he abandoned John in childhood, but not without a struggle to keep him. Later, as a penniless drifter, he sought the company of his Beatle son but never expected much. At 54 he eloped to Gretna Green with a teenage bride and they had two sons - Lennon's little-known half-brothers. Unaware the superstar now wore a beard, he once took along that quintessentially 1970 gift, a bottle of aftershave. The visit enraged Lennon, who responded with brutal fury and threatened to have him killed - poor Alf was so shaken he filed a statement with a solicitor, in the event of his unnatural death.
It's another instance of John's propensity to extreme nastiness. His behaviour towards his first wife, Cynthia, has some repellent aspects too. Such stories, and they're well documented, make you question the posthumous sanctification of Lennon. The Man of Peace was, in a way, the classic idealist - he loved the human race in abstract but could be a complete bastard with individuals, including his own family. He admits as much in one of his last-ever songs, I Don't Wanna Face It: "You wanna save humanity/But it's people that you just can't stand".
But there, in the humour and self-awareness, we catch a more endearing man as well. Quick, funny and frequently kind, Lennon never stopped learning, questioning and revising his ideas. Where he was headed, we can only guess. There was never much need to "expose" or "debunk" John Lennon - in his songs, from Cold Turkey to Jealous Guy, he always got there before you. Lennon: The Life may be a warts-and-all sort of book, but it's also respectful and affectionate. In the end, it's the portrait of a complex man, and it's as big as it needs to be. This is the best Lennon book so far.
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