The John Lennon Letters: review

At last, evidence of the childhood burgeoning of John Lennon’s genius can be revealed. Perfectly reproduced on page 25 of this hefty, handsomely mounted, beautifully printed, lovingly curated tome, the journalist and official Beatles biographer Hunter Davies has unearthed an early example of Lennon’s writing, from “around 1955”, demonstrating his nascent gift for coruscating honesty and emotional directness. Less than 20 words long, written with a red crayon in capital letters, the message reads: “HARRY I HAVE TAKEN DAVIDS BIKE I WILL RETURN IT TOMORROW (SO AS NOT TO BREAK INTO THE £1)”.

Fortunately, Davies is on hand to shed light on this cryptic prose poem, revealing that the young Lennon “often went to visit his aunt Harriet, who lived nearby in a house called The Cottage, to play with his cousins Liela and David. On this occasion he seems to have gone off on David’s bike, presumably to save money on a bus fare.”

Well, I’m glad that’s been cleared up.

This book is beyond parody. There can be no argument that Lennon was one of the most iconic and culturally significant figures of the 20th century, a status based on 23 albums made with the Beatles, Yoko Ono and solo. Since his untimely death in 1980, public fascination has led to an industry of posthumous releases and pseudo-forensic examination of everything he ever touched, rather like poring over the bones of a saint in search of religious revelation. As we get further from the creative source, each new addition to the growing heap of branded Lennon memorabilia has the effect of diminishing rather than expanding our sense of the artist. Typically for products endorsed by Yoko Ono, this book has a luxurious sheen that would complement any coffee table, but its contents reveal that the bottom of the barrel has been well and truly scraped clean.

In a self-justifying introduction, Davies claims that he has “rather expanded the definition of the word letter”, but what he has actually done is reduce it to compensate for an absence of any missives of substance. This book should be renamed “The John Lennon Post-it notes”. No piece of paper bearing evidence of his hand is deemed too trivial to include, so that chapters covering the more reclusive years up to his death are filled with hastily scribbled lists of jobs left for various domestic personnel, subsequently numbered, titled and pretentiously annotated by Davies. Letter 264: List for Rosa, 1979 starts “MiLK (3 cartons) ORANGES GRAPENUTS (NOT FLAKES)” and continues in this fashion for several lines. The contrast between the serious presentation and triteness of the content only serves to make the subject look silly.



There are actual letters, many addressed to family members and close friends, written fast and unselfconsciously in a light-hearted style, full of surreal nonsense frequently pertaining to insignificant matters lost in the mists of time, so that all that is left are non sequiturs, baffling

in-jokes and badly spelt puns (Lennon’s spelling is atrocious). Nevertheless, you can hear Lennon’s voice coming through loud and clear and it is not a particularly attractive one. He is frequently defensive, aggressive, paranoid, bossy, sarcastic and self-justifying, particularly in work-related scribbles reacting to perceived criticism or imagined slights against Yoko. He can also be kind, apologetic and funny in a lunatic, Goonish fashion, with the

self-mockery to wonder (in a typically nonsensical letter to the Beatles publicist Derek Taylor) “how come us genious’s’s are so dumb?”

Almost anything of serious interest to Beatles scholars has been seen before, including impressively besotted early love letters to his first wife, Cynthia Powell, which contrast rather sadly with terse post-divorce notes later in life. Among the most telling is a self-pitying letter in 1965 describing his loneliness on tour, in which he says, “between the laughs there is such a drop – I mean there seems no in-between feelings”.

Lennon’s inner world was one of extremes, yet only one letter among the 285 sheds any light on how he mined that for creativity. It is a rambling, depressed, nihilistically defiant letter to art-school friend and former Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe, composed in 1961 but demonstrating a poetic savagery that wouldn’t be heard in his songwriting for another five years. “I usually write like this and forget about it but if I post it it’s like a little piece of my secret self in the hands of someone miles away,” Lennon tells his friend.

But the secret self this book reveals is no secret at all. Lennon chose to explore his volatile nature in music, not in correspondence, and all these scribblings offer are shallow, shadowy glimpses of his familiar contradictions. What do we really learn about Lennon from nearly 400 pages of annotated private correspondence? Well, he couldn’t spell. He liked to doodle. And he had way too much spare time on his hands.