John’s John-ness

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Price: Rs 1,700

Pages: 392

Great men write letters. Once these letters reach a certain vintage,they are published. The letters of Lord Byron,in which he woos women and damns Keats,run into twelve volumes. An edition of T.S. Eliot’s impeccably phrased letters is currently in its third volume. Gandhi has a “Selected Letters”. Not to be left behind,Beethoven’s letters have also been found,bound and translated. And now John Lennon saunters into the pantheon,granny-glassed and long-haired,writing notes to his Aunt Mimi,sending a postcard,dropping a line. The implausible John Lennon Letters looks like the White Album and is edited by Hunter Davies,the Beatles’ first biographer.

With Lennon,the impulse to put pen to paper or bang out words on a typewriter went beyond writing songs or books. He seems to have written compulsively,filling up random questionnaires,making lists,leaving notes. He also writes indiscriminately,sending out missives to friends,fans,lovers,aunts,cousins,collaborators,hapless journalists. His letters are crowded with little fictions,doodles dance around the edges,nonsense invades — page after page crammed with the tremendous vitality of the writer. Self-conscious about his atrocious typing,Lennon often builds a performance around it. A letter to a fan in the early 1960s reads: “You might have noticed that I am typing this one-fingered lettuce to you. (I wonder if she noticed say he) It takes hours yer know. What kind fellow that John Lenro is wert a blind elbow.” There are echoes of the imagination that dreamt up “Strawberry Fields” and “I Am the Walrus”,as verbal associations mutate into surreal images.

Critics have complained the Letters is facile,a compilation of Lennon “post-it notes” that cannot be of interest to the “Beatles scholar”,which is a cultural conceit if there ever was one. Fans actually want to picture Lennon sitting at the breakfast table,making shopping lists,turning down party invitations,giving instructions,living life in all its mundane detail. For fans still searching for traces of the man behind the icon,the Letters is about the John-ness of John Lennon,every scratched out word,every spelling error an intriguing glimpse of personality.

Of course,personality is mediated by an adoring Davies,who introduces each missive and feels the need to say Lennon “graciously” signed an autograph or sent “nice” notes to a relative. The moody,abrasive,brutally funny Lennon often disappears. The new and improved Lennon of Davies’s narrative is a kind,thoughtful man,someone who writes to a fan when the other Beatles couldn’t be bothered,perhaps,and who plays benefactor to his large family in Northern England. Less flattering moments are passed over without comment,for instance,when Lennon takes off on a holiday with manager Brian Epstein just two days after his son Julian is born. In a blistering letter to Paul and Linda McCartney around the time the Beatles broke up,Lennon exhorts Paul to “get off your gold disc and fly” and politely mentions Linda’s “petty little perversion of a mind”. But Davies is quick to do damage control,rushing in with this romantic vignette — in the middle of their worst arguments,Lennon would look deep into Paul McCartney’s eyes and say “It’s only me,Paul”. Lennon makes his own case better. A rueful postcard sent to Ringo Starr in 1971 simply says,“Who’d have thought it would come to this…”

It is impossible to read the Lennon letters without a sense of impending tragedy. We know what the letter writer does not,that by the time he is forty,he will be shot dead by an agonised fan. He will not “live till a ripe old age” and he will never return to England after he leaves for America in 1971. Shelley-esque,he writes to his cousin Liela saying,“I’m 40 next year — I hope life begins — ie I’d like a little less trouble and more — what? I don’t know”. Shelley’s last,incomplete poem had ended with a breathless,“‘Then what is life’,I cried —”. We know the mystery they both confront is death.

Needless to say,Shelley’s letters have been edited and published several times over.