The Mourning of John Lennon (review)

"Nobody Controls Me": The Mourning of John Lennon in Modern Memory

Somewhere on "The Long and Winding Road" between confusion and understanding, every "Nowhere Man" listener must pass through the "Strawberry Fields" of John Lennon's "Revolution." Moptop hair and gray suit. The Ed Sullivan Show. Yoko. Long hair and tiny round glasses. Imagine. December 8, 1980. Free As A Bird. In modern memory, 'John Lennon' is used as a shorthand for Rock music's Atlantic crossings, youth mania, Vietnamian outrage, avant-garde skepticism, and unintended martyrdom. Unlike his fellow Beatles, who continue to (d)evolve as middle-aged knights, Lennon is frozen in time as a soul-probing artist who captured fame by transcending celebrity. While McCartney, Harrison, and Starr reappear in the occasional commercial, award show, and benefit concert, Lennon lives on in death as an omnipresent site of baby-boomer nostalgia and counter-culture inspiration; yet, by mourning obsessively over the facts of his murder and the depths of his pristine genius, we actually refuse to accept Lennon's final disappearance. To ignore his loss is to deny our own mortality. To reject his burial is to hold onto our postmodern hope (digital reality) that the Beatles will be reunited once again.

In his meticulously argued book, The Mourning of John Lennon, Anthony Elliott shows how the meaning of loss has been refracted through a haunting concert-within-a-concert: Lennon's Hamletian memory of his mother's death in 1958 (a drunken, off-duty 'cop' hit her with his car) and our own twisted memory of Lennon's assassination in 1980. Drawing heavily from critical theory and psychoanalysis, Elliott, a self-described Lennon fan and griever, forces us to reconsider 'The Walrus' as a man and icon of paradox, contradiction, and ambiguous "Goo Goo Goo Joob." Even before we open the book's cover, it is clear that Elliott's 'Fab' subject will trick and elude as a two-way mirror of loss: in a picture of "John Lennon in New York City T-Shirt," he stares behind a pair of shaded glasses which distort his eyes while reflecting our own. With wavy hair, sideburns, gold-cross chain, and faded denim jacket, Lennon seems to warn away readers looking for certitude, neat facts, and comfortably chronological narrative. Rather, Elliott's Lennon "provokes," "disturbs," mocks with puns, fractures barriers, finds creativity in depression, defies institutions, capitalizes on anti-capitalism, craves and loathes fame, and "remains a figure of extraordinary paradoxes and elusive contradictions" (2-3). He invites us to remember him as a poet of "shreds and patches," who coped with his unsunny life by writing songs, producing films, tasting drugs, staging bed and bag protests, taking "lost weekends," and abandoning or obsessing over his wives and sons.

Convinced "that Lennon's most creative work represents a kind of container for the shadow of despair which affected the very core of his emotional life," Elliott argues that "it is one of the rich ironies of Lennon's life that he experienced so much loss and mourning and then came to represent mourning, came to symbolize the struggle to mourn, at the level of our general culture" (6). Moving quickly over Lennon's skeletal biography, Elliott proves how childhood despair (absent father, impulsive mother, bourgeois Aunt 'Mimi,' Hitler's bombs, England's post-war haze) flung Lennon into a world of isolated interiority, violent eruption, sexual fantasy, fear of failure/success, repressed anxiety, and gloomy reflection on death. At the same time, Elliott zooms in on such recorded classics as "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Revolution," and "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," and such experimental films as Rape and Fly, to show how Lennon used artistic space to sort out messy remembrances of things past. Captured in Elliott's brilliant close readings, which allow us to re-hear clichéd Beatles lyrics for an imagined first time, Lennon emerges as...