Lennon in America: 1971-1980, Based in Part on the Lost Lennon Diaries by Geoffrey Giuliano (Cooper Square Press)
In the two decades since, the public appetite for Lennon’s private life has never come close to being satiated. In the publishing arena alone it’s devoured at least a dozen biographies and oral histories, from Ray Coleman’s respectful Lennon: The Definitive Biography to Albert Goldman’s muckraking The Lives of John Lennon, not to mention memoirs by Lennon’s boyhood friend Pete Shotton, his half-sister Julia Baird, his mistress May Pang, his personal assistant Fred Seaman, and the Lennons’ personal mystic, John Green. There are oddities like Jim O’Donnell’s The Day John Met Paul, an entire volume on the day Lennon bumped into his future collaborator at a church fete in Liverpool, and Linda Keen’s Across the Universe With John Lennon, which purports to be a document of the singer’s afterlife as communicated to the author in her dreams. If that’s not weird enough for you, point your browser to the John Lennon Artificial Intelligence Project (www.triumphpc.com/john-lennon), which aspires to “recreate the personality of the late Beatle, John Lennon, by programming a highly advanced artificial intelligence with John’s own thoughts and words.”
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But for years the Dead Sea Scrolls of Lennon’s private life have been the diaries, both written and taped, that he kept daily throughout most of his five-year hibernation inside the Dakota. Now two recent additions to the Lennon bibliography appear to be based on them. Robert Rosen, author of the brand-new Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, writes in his “prelude” that immediately after Lennon’s murder he was approached by Seaman, whom he’d known since college. “John had told him that if anything should happen to him, it was Seaman’s job to write the true story of his final years….I chose to believe him. I had no reason not to. I was a 28-year-old unemployed writer, with a master’s degree in journalism, whose last occupation was cab driver. I’d known Seaman since college; I was his editor at the school newspaper. He’d begun working for Lennon in January 1979. After one day on the job he told me, ‘We must collaborate on a book.’” Seaman was kept on at the Dakota as Yoko Ono’s executive assistant, and five months later he brought over Lennon’s journals, which Rosen began transcribing in October 1981.
Even if all that stuff were deleted, Ono would have ample reason to want the book quashed. Giuliano, who’s written or edited ten other books on the Beatles, interviewed her 17 years ago and includes among the book’s photos a shot of himself wrapping an arm around her. But the book begins with an attack on the “acquisitive Yoko Ono” for trying to “sanitize (and therefore commercialize) the life and times of the artist toward a more satisfactory bottom line.” His book, he promises, will present a truer and more complex portrait of Lennon, whom he crowns “the single greatest artist of the twentieth century.” The Yoko Ono of Lennon in America is the old dragon lady of Beatles legend, hypnotically subjugating the weak-willed musician for her own ends, and Giuliano can barely conceal his spite, using ironic quotation marks to frame her “career” and her “recitals.”
On the other hand, if modern life has proved that fact is stranger than fiction, it’s also shown that literature can be truer than journalism, because it acknowledges and as a result transcends its subjectivity. Rosen’s book may be half baloney, but it also offers more genuine insights than Lennon in America. Even its limitations become a virtue: denied use of the diaries, Rosen beefs up his text with references to Lennon’s favorite reading material and lengthy digressions on the assorted philosophies that he and Ono studied–tarot, astrology, numerology, and katu-tugai, which prescribed westerly travel around the globe to achieve mystical results. Like the rest of us, Lennon assembled his sense of the world from the odds and ends of pop culture, and the publications he used to fill the vacuum of his days–the New York dailies, the supermarket tabloids, books by Henry Miller and Hunter S. Thompson–form a collage of his consciousness even as they reduce him to a passive consumer like his fans. And the book’s primer on numerology (which figured into recordings like “Revolution 9” and “#9 Dream”) and quotations from Patric Walker’s horoscopes in Town & Country (the Lennons’ favorite) are as oddly seductive when correlated to someone else’s daily life as to our own.
