Philip Norman: John Lennon

[selenak]

One of the books I got at the Frankfurt Book Fair; as opposed to Norman's earlier Beatles biography from the mid-80s, Shout, I read this one in German. Norman must have handed his manuscript over to Droemer (the German publisher) early on for them to publish pretty much simultanously, given that the translation reads fluent and not sloppy or awkward. This being said, I notice there are more pages in German than English-written reviews name for the original edition, which is pretty par the course for translations; somehow you usually need more words to convey the same intention. But enough about the translation aspect. First of all, the question is, given the sheer amount of Beatles literature, the two-volume Lennon biography by Ray Coleman and the very thick one volume biography by Albert Goldman, does the world need another Life Of J. L.? Norman addresses this in the postscript and cracks me up by declaring Ray C.’s effort to be worthy but dull, failing to bring John Lennon to life, as opposed to, you know, his own efforts (no false modesty, Philip, huh? you’re right, though), and Albert Goldman’s The Lives of John Lennon to be an over-the-top malicious bashing (also true, but Norman fails to mention Goldman did unearth new material which he himself uses for this biography). Then we get a touch of self-criticism as Norman states there are some inaccuracies and wrong judgments in Shout which he now had the opportunity to rectify. I’ll get to what I think he meant by that soon. Having read the biography, I’d say that while it doesn’t present anything new (the two bits the papers picked up as new aren’t really surprising if you’ve read more than one book dealing with The Spectacled One) it is indeed far more readable than many a previous effort. Norman excels with the family, both the Stanley family (i.e. John’s aunts and cousins) and the previously hardly described Lennon family (one of his causes is to exonerate Alf, aka Freddie Lennon, from his “fickle father who left little John and Julia and only came back when John got famous image”), is great with Liverpool in the 40s and 50s, Hamburg and London in the 60s. It has to be said that the last decade of Lennon’s life still doesn’t get nearly as much thorough treatment as, no, not the Beatles years, but the adolescence until the Beatles, but even so, it’s a plausible portrait. (Safe of May Pang. Norman is coy about May Pang, basically not giving more description than a quote from a minion that she overestimated her importance for Lennon during his “Lost Weekend” because John had sex with other women as well, a quote from Yoko stating that she didn’t tell her to have sex with John, she just send her to be his assistant in Los Angeles but that it was obvious what would happen, and a remark by himself that he can’t figure her out.)

Something else Norman he’s good at is the vivid description of concerts, of recording and of song writing. Which leads me to what I think Norman meant with previous inaccuracies and misjudgements on his own part. Because while Yoko in both Shout and John Lennon is portrayed very positively (and defended against the accusation of having stalked John, etc.), so much that it explains Norman’s bewilderment in the postscript that while she liked Shout, she didn’t like this one, Philip Norman did a 180% turnaround on the other partnership in Lennon’s life, and I don’t mean poor Cynthia (whose portrait remains consistent as well). He’s, to put it mildly, quite harsh on Paul McCartney in Shout . Not so in John Lennon. On the contrary, here he’s sympathetic and at times downright admiring. It’s not that he reports different actions, but that his attitude and description towards them have changed, and he uses different explanations for the motivations and, during the big fallout at the end of the 60s, sympathy for the McCartney side of things where in Shout he has none. The postscript informs us that he can’t understand why people claim he hates Paul, who while not giving him interviews for the new biography the way Yoko did cautiously cooperate via email. Is it mean on my part to suspect that this is where the increase in authorial sympathy hails from? Mind you, being pro-McCartney myself, I’m all for it, but I somehow doubt we’d have gotten Norman’s shift without those emails, given that he was still hostile in his article after George Harrison’s death. Anyway, sympathy shift aside, the main result of the emails appear in said vivid descriptions of writing songs together and apart, of recordings, and, during Lennon’s “Lost Weekend” phase in the 70s, one last jam session, the last time they played together (March 31st 1974, for those of us keeping score, starting with Little Richard’s Lucille and ending with B.E. King’s Stand By Me, which is when Norman gets lyrical and calls the moment “unique bittersweet harmony”.)

Regarding the two elements the papers picked up as sensational news: Yoko is quoted as the primary source for both, with Norman naming a secondary confirming source in the case of the one which he actually deals quite a bit with in the book, to wit, John Lennon stating about Julia, the mother who died when he was a teenager and who didn’t raise him but whom he adored, that he once accidentally touched her breast when she was sleeping and now wished he’d have done more, and that he thinks she would have let him. Apparently he said this to journalist Maureen Cleave (she of the “bigger than Jesus” quote) as well as to Yoko, only Yoko responded with concluding he needed therapy stat, which lead to the famous Primal Scream sessions. As I said, between Lennon’s song “Julia” where Julia is also addressed as “ocean child”, the English translation of Yoko’s name, the fact he called Yoko “mother” in their later years together and everything else, the confession of oedipal feelings isn’t exactly a staggering surprise, and Norman doesn’t treat it as a big discovery, either, though he does use it to point out patterns in Lennon’s relationship with other women, including first wife Cynthia (who became his steady girlfriend around the time Julia died). While the quote about Julia appears early on the book, the other Yoko quote that made the papers in advance doesn’t come up until page 833 of the German edition, leading to a passage that as opposed to the Julia quote stands pretty isolated in the rest of the volume. At this point, we’re in the year 1970, the Beatles are broken up and John and Paul are engaged in proxy fighting via the press. After reporting that John took a line from a McCartney song “Too Many People”, which went “you took your lucky break and broke it in two” as alluding to himself and as the ultimate insult, Norman ventures that the reaction – Lennon’s song “How do you sleep?”, containing such lines like “those freaks were right when they said you were dead” and “the only thing you ever did was Yesterday” – was, shall we say, a bit out of proportion for a quarrel between former collegues and then quotes Yoko stating that she always suspected John felt far more for Paul than what was usually assumed, that he would have done something if Paul wasn’t “unmovable heterosexual” and that he was that angry because of betrayed love. Norman, who I guess didn’t want to get sued, is careful to keep this strictly as “Yoko though…” and “Yoko suspected…”, not as his own conclusions, and you have to wonder why he included it at all, because as opposed to the Freudian confession about Julia, it’s not alluded to either before or after in the entire rest of the book. Hence the impression of randomness, because the relationship comes across as emotionally intense anyway and supported by actual Lennon and McCartney quotes, including John using the marriage comparison quite a lot. (The last one, with John saying to Yoko that he had two great partnerships in his life, one with her and one with Paul and that he discovered them both, always amuses me because really, Yoko was an established artist before he met her, and he and Paul were teenagers impressing each other with guitar playing.)

In conclusion, the biography leaves one with a vivid idea of John Lennon as a person (one can see why Norman states he was never boring in interviews, as opposed to many another rockstar), if not necessarily always the same idea the author has. (Sorry, but I can’t buy the Lennon conversion to feminism via Yoko Ono when he simultaneously continued to treat Cynthia shabbily both during and after the divorce.) And, as I said, with an equally vivid impression of all its locations, from post war Liverpool to Hamburg to London… with the arguable exception of New York, but maybe I’m just picky. If you haven’t read a Lennon biography yet, this is probably the best one to start with; if you’re already familiar with the saga, you don’t have to read it, but if you do, you won’t waste your time, either.