John Lennon: The Life (Book Review) Book By: Philip Norman
It has been years since the last major biography of John Lennon, Albert Goldman's The Lives of John Lennon. Philip Norman opts for a tone which is the so called revelations contained in his account often tend towards the lustful desires.
The book was written with the blessing of Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney, though both are reported to be unhappy with the end result, which Ono claims is 'too mean' to her late husband’s memory.
The sources to this book include George Martin, the Beatles' producer, Arthur Janov, the primal therapist who treated Lennon for a time in the Seventies and Jimmy Tarbuck, the comedian and also known as the teddy boy who attended primary school with him. Norman has also been able to track down many long-lost childhood friends and ex-girlfriends, all of who speak about the young Lennon's rebellious but vulnerable temperament.
I personally believe that the most fascinating section is the first half, which recounts Lennon's life in Liverpool and Hamburg. Norman is brilliant at kindling the post-war world from which the Beatles emerged and to which their extraordinary global success had lasted the end. He recreates Lennon's childhood in Liverpool and Lennon’s unmanageable father, Alfred 'Freddie' Lennon. Freddie has long been labelled as a drifter but here emerges as a more complex man who deeply regretted abandoning his young son and who craved, but never received, John's forgiveness.
Norman is the first Lennon biographer to be granted access to the private papers of Lennon's Aunt Mimi, who took the troubled youngster in when his parents' marriage finally fell down. He has also made good use of the notebooks the singer filled with his often scrabby musings and the cassettes on to which Lennon fitfully recorded his random thoughts, opinions and memories.
The book's big revelation is that, when he was a hormonally charged 14-year-old, Lennon developed incestuous desires for his mother Julia. Her death in a car accident, when John was 17 was to haunt him for the rest of his life. Likewise, it would seem, the moment in his adolescence when he lay down beside her and accidentally touched her breast.
Julia is a reoccurring presence in this book, just as she was in her son's life, having, in his eyes, abandoned him when she gave him up to the care of her childless sister Mimi and then died on him while he was still trying to come to terms with that first betrayal.
Though he always insisted that 'Help' was 'the only honest song I wrote', it is still deeply pleasant to listen to 'Mother' on his first solo album. It begins with the line, 'Mother, you had me, but I never had you' and is as naked an expression of hurt and longing.
John Lennon was an emotionally tortured individual, often consumed by rage, grief and a lifelong fear of abandonment, should come as no surprise to anyone who has paid close attention to his often brutally honest and occasionally teary songs. What emerges most strongly, though, from all this through Lennon's life is just how emotionally tortured he was for most of it and how his own demise was foreshadowed by the deaths of those closest to him: Julia, Epstein and his teenage fellow mate Stuart Sutcliffe, who died at 21 from a brain haemorrhage in Hamburg.
For a while, the music he made soothed his demons, as did, his toying with LSD, heroin, alcohol and politics, all documented here in greater detail than before just like his complex and consuming relationship with Yoko Ono.
It is Sean Lennon's testimony that provides the after thoughts to this biography, which ends too abruptly at the moment of his father's death.
This is the best life of Lennon to date which gives an insight on the unsettled and brooding musician and the environment responsible.
