Very cross from Mersey

Sunday 21 October 2012

ON November 25, 1969, John Lennon returned his MBE to the Queen, enclosing it with a letter that made his feelings plain.

John Lennon in 1966, just after apologising for saying the Beatles were 'more popular than Jesus'Photograph: Harry Benson/Getty

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THE JOHN LENNON LETTERS Edited by Hunter Davies Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £25 Reviewed by Russell Leadbetter

The protest, he said, was against Britain's involvement in the "Nigeria/Biafra thing", against British support of America in Vietnam – and against his latest single, "Cold Turkey", slipping down the charts. It was typical of Lennon, the toughest-minded and most sardonic of the Fab Four, that he should undercut a serious point of principle with a sliver of comedy.

The letter is one of 285 items reproduced in this handsome and substantial book, which was sanctioned by Yoko Ono, who holds the copyright in her husband's correspondence. Lennon was a compulsive letter writer and, needless to say, lots of Lennons emerge from all these fragments: petulant, witty, caustic, demanding, self-indulgent, loving – and perhaps surprisingly, given his famously unsentimental nature, showing a touching regard for family and friends back home. He liked to sift through thousands of items of fan-mail and respond to those that caught his eye, and also liked filling in questionnaires in newspapers and magazines, the anodyne kind that wanted to know what his favourite food was. It's hard to think of any major stars today who would do the same.But Lennon was Lennon, and he could be wounding when he wanted to be. Reproduced here is a long letter to Paul and Linda McCartney in 1971, when the Beatles were still in the grip of their acrimonious break-up. The letter – known in knowledgable Beatles circles as the "John rant" – sees Lennon picking away at a number of festering sores. "In fact," notes Hunter Davies, editor of this volume, "he is furious about so many things that the letter simmers with rage."Here's the thing, though. Lennon cushions his vitriol by ending the letter with "In spite of it all – love to you both, from us two", which reminds Davies that McCartney once told him how, during a bitter argument, Lennon stopped in mid-flow, peered over his glasses and said: "It's only me, Paul," before returning to his effing and blinding. It's a reminder that the history between them stretched all the way back to 1957.Lennon could be touchy, too. He slaps down George Martin, the producer who did so much to fashion the Beatles' sound and hence their legacy, after some harmless remarks by Martin about the composition of some Beatles songs.Included here are lots of Lennon juvenilia, amusingly gushing billets-doux to his girlfriend and first wife, Cynthia (Lennon had initially to pretend to be single, so as not to alienate his fans' affections) and countless little squibs, most adorned with squiggles and drawings. There are allusions, private wordplay, puns, Goons-type flourishes and in-jokes, written to friends, colleagues, family and friends. There are postcards, handwritten scribbles, pages torn from notebooks, and letters on airline, hotel and official Lennon stationery. You can only wonder what he would have done with email.Scots-born Hunter Davies, who wrote the first serious biography of the Beatles in 1968, has edited this book with care, having tracked down many of the letters through major auction houses and dealers in Beatles memorabilia. He acknowledges that he has stretched the definition of "letters" to include domestic lists and other trivia, things that will amuse die-hard Lennon fans while leaving everyone else cold, or at least slightly bemused. Davies notes: "As often happens with famous people, the most trivial scraps were kept as souvenirs, shoved in someone's pocket, retrieved from wastepaper baskets ..."Such minutiae appear to have acquired a power simply because they were scribbled by someone famous – someone, moreover, whose own legend has been burnished partly through the tragic manner of his early death. It's difficult to imagine the shopping lists of Pete Townsend or Mick Jagger arousing the same degree of interest. But there is no gainsaying the attraction of such things – as well as the longer letters, of course – to the serious enthusiast, for whom this book will be a source of fascination.This isn't a conventional collection of letters in the manner of, say, those of Philip Larkin or TS Eliot – too many of the items are inconsequential novelty items, larded with private jokes – but when he writes to a Norwegian girl fan: "Everyone will think I'm a bastard, but I don't care", or berates himself in a letter to Cynthia for his neglect of his young son Julian, we glimpse the real Lennon, unguarded and painfully honest.Read as a whole, the book follows his path as an exuberant, cocky young Liverpool musician with the world at his feet who experiences an astonishing ascent to global fame. We read his thoughts on his bed-ins for peace, his encounters with the Maharishi, and his love for Yoko, and end up with the multi-millionaire holed up in his Berkshire mansion, then in an apartment in New York's Dakota, looking after his business interests, lying low, reading books, caring for his second son, Sean, writing when the mood seized him. His final autograph – the last missive reproduced here – was for a receptionist at the New York studios where he was working on his new album, on the night of December 8, 1980. He had every reason to be upbeat about his creativity, his personal life. Twenty minutes after leaving the studio he was shot dead outside his home, by Mark David Chapman.

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