Chapter 1Mendips

Foreword

Music biography has two house styles — adoration with a few dark passages let in for credibility, and contempt — and they share a market and often a set of sources. Neither knows what to do with a subject who tells the truth about himself before anybody has caught him at anything.

I came to this book by way of a sentence I kept meeting in pieces.

It is the most quoted thing John Lennon ever said about himself. In September 1980, in his own apartment, with a magazine journalist's tape running and a comeback record to promote, he was asked a craft question about a lyric from 1967 — the kind that gets a sentence back about who wrote the bridge. What the tape has instead is a man saying that the cruelty in the line was his own, that he had been physically violent to women, that the word for what he had been was a hitter, and that he could not express himself and so he hit. Nearly every book about him quotes some of that. Very few quote the end of it, which is where he says that this is why he was always on about peace.

I noticed the cut long before I understood it. The clause is neither difficult nor ambiguous. It is simply useless to both of the available books. In the unmasking, the confession is the last chapter and the peace campaign is the fraud it exposes; the clause ruins that, because it says the peace was real and was made out of the violence. In the tribute, the confession is a graduation certificate, the bad old days named and left behind; the clause ruins that too, because it puts both things in the same hand at the same hour. Both versions need the peace and the violence to be opposites. He said they were one mechanism, and forty-five years of writing about him has declined to print the part where he says so.

This book takes him at his word and tests the word against the work. The argument is that the peace was made out of the violence, that it was addressed first to its author and only afterward to the world, and that the world was invited in as a witness because he could not otherwise be held to anything he said. A man sitting up in a hotel bed in Amsterdam in March 1969 with the press coming through the door in shifts is not, in the first instance, addressing a war. He is shouting an instruction at himself and arranging for people who write things down to be present while he does it, so that he cannot afterward take it back quietly. That is an argument and a reader is entitled to refuse it. I would rather be refused than be one more writer quoting three quarters of a sentence.

The structure serves the claim, and I would rather say so than have it discovered. The violence is established early and factually, before any peace exists in these pages to contrast it with. Chapter six is a birthday party in Huyton on June 18, 1963, at which a disc jockey made a joke and Lennon beat him badly enough to require hospital treatment, and his manager made it go away with money. It arrives before the reader has met a single peace lyric, and it is not written as a fight scene, because the material for one does not exist. What survives is an injury, a payment, and a joke nobody wrote down.

I should say what this book is not. It is not a prosecution; the conduct convicts him without my assistance and there is nothing to add except proportion. It is not a defence either: I have refused the kindness the affectionate shelf specialises in, which files the violence as an aberration produced by pressure and moves on to the songs. And it is not narrated towards December 8, 1980. That refusal took the most work. A murdered subject pulls backward through his own biography until every earlier scene reads as preparation; but the ending was somebody else's decision, and a life narrated towards it is a life narrated by the man who ended it. Nothing in the first twenty chapters points at the archway. The killing occupies four sentences.

A word on method. Everything here comes from the published record: the records themselves, listened to closely and recently; the session documentation as it has been published; contemporaneous press; court and administrative outcomes as reported; the interviews, of which he gave a great many and in one of which he annotated his own catalogue song by song; and the memoirs of the people around him, used with more than the usual suspicion, since the memoirists of this household were variously employed, sacked, prosecuted, divorced, or writing to correct each other. I have conducted no interviews, and most of the witnesses who mattered are dead. The governing fact of the enterprise is that there is no John Lennon papers collection open to researchers. No university holds one. The tapes, the letters and the household film are divided between a company and a private estate and emerge on their schedule — which means every genuinely new thing about this man to reach the public since 1980 reached it because somebody decided to release it.

I have also not opened a number of archives, and the book says so where it matters. Not the Metropolitan Police and Home Office papers at Kew, or the Liverpool school records. Not the federal case file of the deportation, so where the literature prints dates with a precision none of its authors documents, this book prints the months and stops. Not the district attorney's file or the medical examiner's record, which is why the last minutes are four sentences. Not the parole transcripts, of which I have said only what a writer may say about a document he has not read, which is that it exists.

And not the file. The Bureau's Lennon documents are the most tempting object in this story, and they are free: they sit in the FBI's own online reading room. The published page counts do not agree with each other — 281 in one place, 400 in another, roughly three hundred nearly everywhere — which is peculiar for a document nobody has to sue for any more. I did not go and count it either. So the book writes several hundred pages, leaves the number to whoever counts, and describes no page it has not seen. Nobody in this literature is citing that file. They are citing each other's memory of it.

The same discipline runs everywhere. No crowd is counted, because the attendance figures came from promoters and broadcasters and none was checked. Where the record is contested I give both accounts and adjudicate neither, and I name whose account I am using every time — a rule that sounds like a courtesy and is the only defence this life affords, since nearly every surviving witness was also a party to something. Where the record stops, I stop with it and say that I have. It stops more often than the literature admits: at what was said in a room at Apple in September 1969, at five years spent almost entirely inside one apartment building, at an hour at the helm of a boat in a storm.

One constraint is legal rather than literary, and it was the best thing that happened to the writing. Not one line of any Lennon song is quoted here; the catalogue is controlled by a corporation he never met and the American termination rights in it are contested, so the records are described and never reproduced. You cannot hide behind a lyric you are forbidden to print. You have to say what the record does — what the drums are holding up when the harmony refuses to move, why five tape loops needed three rooms and a pencil in each, what a voice built by eight-hour shifts in a Hamburg cellar sounds like when a man stops putting anything in front of it.

Two things are left exactly where I found them. He said the violence had extended to any woman. The record supplies an assault his first wife described in her own book, a man in a hospital after a party, and a temper attested by everybody who knew him in Liverpool and in Hamburg, and nobody has produced the incidents that would fill out the rest of what he said. I have not narrowed his confession to make him look better and I have not invented a victim to make it look substantiated. And his elder son's charge against him is here, unanswered — reported, because I have the newspaper's account of it and not the tape, and the book says which of the two it has.

He could never work anything out in private. He needed a room with somebody else in it and a machine running, and he needed the result published, because a published thing cannot be quietly withdrawn. That is how the peace was made and how the confession was made, by the same man for the same reason. What follows is arranged so a reader can see how much weight that will bear — and where it stops bearing any at all.

Linus Crane Hebden Bridge

Chapter 1 · Mendips

The house stands at 251 Menlove Avenue, in Woolton, Liverpool. It is a semi-detached house with a bay window and stained glass in the porch, and it has a name as well as a number, which in England has always been a statement in itself: Mendips. It was never grand and it is not large. It is also not, in any sense the word will carry, a slum, and that is the first fact this book sets down, because the song called "Working Class Hero" was written by the boy who grew up inside it.

The house is national property now. Yoko Ono bought it and gave it to the National Trust in 2002, and the Trust opens it to visitors, which makes this among the few childhoods in popular music that a stranger can walk through by booking a ticket. Also in Woolton, on Beaconsfield Road, stands Strawberry Field, a Salvation Army children's home behind a wall the same boy used to climb; the Salvation Army opened a visitor centre on the site in 2019. The Trust holds 20 Forthlin Road as well, the house Paul McCartney was raised in. The physical ground of this childhood has been preserved with a good deal more care than the account of what happened on it.

A preserved house is a peculiar sort of document. It is exact about everything that does not matter and silent about everything that does. You can stand in that porch and look at the coloured glass and know, immediately and without anybody's assistance, a fact about class in England that no memoir would ever have told you straight. You cannot learn from the porch what was said in the hall. Mendips settles the question of what the boy came from and settles nothing whatever about what was done to him there, and the second question is the one the rest of this book is about.

What the house establishes, before any anecdote, is a position. A named house on a main road; a bay window; coloured glass in a porch; a library card in use indoors; and, in due course, a Latin master at the school its occupant attended. None of that is wealth. It is something narrower than money and, for the argument this book is going to make, far more useful: a household in which books were ordinary, in which school was assumed rather than negotiated, and in which how a child spoke was somebody's daily concern. That is a different inheritance from the one he would claim in public for most of his working life, and the discrepancy is not a small hypocrisy to be caught out and filed. It is an engine, and a great deal of what follows runs on it.

He was born on October 9, 1940, at the Liverpool Maternity Hospital in Oxford Street, and named John Winston Lennon. He kept that name until April 1969, when he added his second wife's to it and became John Winston Ono Lennon, which is worth noticing early: the naming of himself was something he understood as available to him, and he used it.

His father, Alfred Lennon, was at sea. That is very nearly the whole of what this book will assert about Alfred Lennon's movements in the years that matter here, and the restraint is deliberate rather than decorative. Liverpool was a port, and a father at sea was not in itself a strange condition for a Liverpool child; the strangeness in this case is in what the record does and does not preserve. The standard lives tell his comings and goings in versions that do not agree with one another, and the documentary work that went back and reset them is recent. This book prints no ships and no ports, because it has not seen the papers that would carry them. That is a hole in the middle of the chapter, and it is a real one rather than a rhetorical one: for the first years of his son's life we cannot say with confidence when the father was in the city.

His mother, Julia Stanley, lived a mile and a half away, with another man and another family.

That sentence is the chapter, and it should be read slowly. She had not died. She had not emigrated. She had not disappeared into a war or a prison or an unmarked grave, and there was no telegram about her, and no anniversary, and nothing that anybody would think to call a bereavement. She was in Liverpool. The distance between the house where her son was being raised and the house where she was living was a distance a child could walk, and in time he walked it.

There is a kind of loss that arrives with a funeral and a kind that arrives with an address. The first can be completed. It is terrible and it is finite; grief has a shape, a set of observances, a direction of travel, and other people will help you get to the end of it, because they can see what has happened to you. The second has no shape at all. Nothing has ended. Nobody is gone. There is only a person who is elsewhere, in a house that can be reached on foot, living a life with other people in it. There is nothing to bury and therefore nothing to finish. A child in that position does not mourn. He waits.

A child who waits acquires a particular set of skills, and patience is not among them. He learns to be entertaining, because a person who is being entertained does not leave the room. He learns to be first out of the door, because a door you walk through yourself is not a door that has been shut on you. He learns that affection arrives from elsewhere on a schedule set by somebody else, which means it can be withdrawn on the same schedule, which means that the only safe posture towards it is contempt in advance. None of that is a diagnosis and this book is not equipped to make one; nothing in the surviving record would license one, and nothing is going to be invented here to supply it. It is a description of a pattern, and the pattern is one the rest of these pages will document from the outside, in his conduct and in his work, often enough that it stops being possible to call it coincidence.

His aunt, Mary Elizabeth Smith, called Mimi, took him and kept him. She and her husband, George Smith, raised him at Mendips, and the plain verbs are the correct ones: she took him, and she kept him, for the whole of a childhood, in a house with a library card in it. On George Smith the record available to this book is thin. On the arrangement itself, who proposed it and when, on what terms, with what said aloud in front of the child and what said behind him, the record is thinner still, and the reason for that is worth stating plainly, because it governs everything else in this chapter.

There is no John Lennon papers collection open to researchers. No university holds one. The material that would constitute one, the letters and the diaries, the household film, the tapes, is divided between Apple Corps Ltd. and Yoko Ono's private archive, and it emerges on their schedule rather than at a scholar's request. What exists instead, for this household, is memory taken down late and by interested parties. The nearest thing to a contemporaneous interview record was made when Hunter Davies interviewed Mimi Smith and Lennon's aunts during 1967 for the authorised band biography of 1968, while the women were alive and the boy had become famous. That book is invaluable for exactly that reason, and it was censored: Davies has since described material that was removed from it at the families' insistence. So the closest thing to a primary account of this house was edited by the house.

That has a specific consequence for a chapter like this one, and it is not a complaint about anybody's discretion. Families protect children, including grown ones, and they protect themselves, and a woman being interviewed about a boy she raised is under no obligation to hand a stranger the worst of it. But it means that the only near-contemporaneous testimony about the arrangement at Mendips was given by the people who had made the arrangement, to a writer working with the subject's cooperation, and was then trimmed with their agreement.

The literature this chapter has to work against is unusually polarised, and the shape of it is owed to the reader at the start rather than in a bibliography. Ray Coleman's Lennon, published in 1984 and issued in Britain in two volumes, was written close to the death and with Ono's cooperation; it is good on Liverpool and affectionate to the point of protectiveness, which is another way of saying that it is weakest exactly where the subject is Lennon's own conduct. Albert Goldman's The Lives of John Lennon (1988) is the opposite instrument: six years of reporting, several hundred interviews, and an interpretive frame of near-total contempt, resting in places on sourcing that was paid for and cannot now be traced. Philip Norman's John Lennon: The Life (2008), the fullest single-volume biography at roughly 850 pages, was written with Ono's initial cooperation, which she is reported to have withdrawn on reading it. Tim Riley's Lennon (2011) is the best of them on the records themselves. Those are the shelves, and a reader of any of them is being handed either a defence or a prosecution. This book intends to be neither, which is an easy thing to declare at the opening of a life and a considerably harder thing to hold once the record of his conduct starts arriving.

The documentary base did change, and it changed recently. Mark Lewisohn's Tune In (2013), the first volume of a projected history of the band, covers the 1940s to the end of 1962 and works from civil registration, school records, contemporary press and named interviews. It runs to 944 pages in the abridged edition and 1,728 in the extended two-volume edition. Every standard life of Lennon predates it: Ray Coleman's, Albert Goldman's, Philip Norman's. Lewisohn corrects a large number of received anecdotes about the Lennon and Stanley families, which is a dry sentence with a sharp consequence attached to it, because the most famous scene in this childhood is one of the anecdotes.

The scene is set in Blackpool, in 1946. In the version that has been retold in nearly every popular account of the life, a five-year-old boy is made to choose between his mother and his father, chooses his father, and then breaks and runs after his mother as she walks away.

This book does not stage that scene, and the reader is entitled to know why. The account is single-sourced to Alfred Lennon, given decades after the fact by a man with an obvious interest in how he was going to be remembered, and it has been questioned by subsequent research, Lewisohn's included. There is no corroborating witness on the record. There is no document. What there is, is a story told long afterward by one of its participants and then repeated until the repetition did the work that evidence is supposed to do.

So there is no room here, no dialogue, no weather, no description of a boy's face on a promenade. Those things have been supplied elsewhere, and they were supplied by writers rather than by sources.

It is worth pausing on why that particular hour has been so useful to so many people, because the answer explains a good deal about how this life has been written. The Blackpool story is the most emotionally efficient scene the childhood offers and the worst evidenced, and those two properties are not independent of each other. A biography wants a moment. It wants an hour in which a character is decided, a door that closes audibly, a single act from which everything afterward can be read backward, and it wants that hour early, so the rest of the book can lean on it. Blackpool delivers all of that in a paragraph. It converts an arrangement into an event. It supplies a decision, which supplies agency, which lets the reader off, because a boy who chose is a boy who did something rather than a boy to whom something was done.

The trouble is that this childhood does not have an hour. It has a condition. A condition cannot be dramatised, only described, and it has to be described more than once, because it did not happen once. It happened every day, in the ordinary way that weather happens, and it was still happening on the days when nothing whatever occurred.

A child who has a bed in this house and a mother in another one keeps a set of accounts that nobody ever audits. There is the address he sleeps at, which is his, and the address she sleeps at, which is not, and both are real, and both are close, and the arithmetic between them never comes out even. Somewhere inside every ordinary hour of every ordinary week sits the fact that adults made a decision about him and that the decision is still holding. It is not an event. It cannot be attended, or answered, or grown out of by being lived through. It can only be carried, and the strain of carrying it is invisible from any distance at all, because to everybody watching, the boy is at home.

What is not in dispute needs no scene at all. The boy lived at 251 Menlove Avenue. His mother lived a mile and a half away, with another man and another family. She was alive, she was reachable, and he knew exactly where she was. Whatever did or did not take place in Blackpool in 1946, that arrangement stood through the whole of his childhood, and it is the arrangement, not the hour, that did the work.

One further piece of geography, which needs stating rather than interpreting. The boy who was not an orphan, and whose mother was living in the same city, used to climb the wall of a Salvation Army children's home. This book draws no conclusion from that. It records it.

Mimi Smith has not been well served by the literature, and the caricature is worth interrupting before it sets. She comes down to us as the disciplinarian, the aunt who said no, the fixed point against which a mother could be measured and found warmer. The comparison is real and it is also unfair in a way that is easy to miss. Somebody had to say no in that house every day, and whoever says no every day will lose the comparison with whoever visits. Mimi Smith took a child who was not hers, kept him for the length of a childhood, and kept books in the house while she did it. That is not a small thing and it should not be smuggled past the reader as background.

Which returns the chapter to the song, because the song is why the house had to come first.

"Working Class Hero" was recorded in 1970 and released in December of that year on John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, a record made on the explicit principle that ornament was a lie: no reverb, no double-tracking, no decoration of any kind. The song is the barest thing on it. A guitar figure repeats, unhurried, almost flat, and does not develop; a voice comes in over it stripped of every studio trick that voice had spent years learning; and the delivery is not sung so much as stated, at the pace and in the register of a man reading a charge sheet aloud in an empty room. It is among the most effective pieces of class writing in English popular music. It is also, in its title, a claim about origins.

The origins were 251 Menlove Avenue. A bay window, stained glass in the porch, a library card, a Latin master.

Two things have to be said about that, and neither one cancels the other. The first is that the discrepancy is real, and this book is not going to be polite about it. He knew what the house was. He spent a career denying the childhood he had actually had, in interviews and in songs, and the denial was not a slip of memory but a sustained position, held in public, by a man who could have corrected it at any time in front of any microphone in the world.

The second is that the denial is not simply a lie, and a biography that stops at he was middle class, therefore the song is a pose has stopped too early to be of any use. Respectability is not security. A bay window is not a father, and stained glass in a porch is not a mother. The boy in that house had a father at sea, and a mother a mile and a half away with another family, and no vocabulary of any kind for either fact. Liverpool did have a vocabulary for injury, and that vocabulary was class. It was the one language of grievance available to him, it was in the air of the city and in the politics of the country, and it was public and large and legible enough to carry a private thing that had no name and no ceremony and no witnesses.

So he translated. He took a wound nobody had given him words for and put it into the only words to hand, and because those words were not, strictly speaking, his to use, the song has been received ever since as either an anthem or a fraud. It is neither. It is a substitution, performed by a man who could not yet say the true sentence, and who would not manage to say the true sentence, out loud, into a stranger's tape recorder, for another decade.

That is the argument, and it begins here, in a semi-detached house in Woolton with a name on the gate and a mother down the road. The mood of the thing is not grief, because grief requires a death, and there was no death. It is something less usable and harder to put down: abandonment by a woman who was not dead and not gone, only elsewhere, and a middle-class childhood that the man would spend his working life refusing to have had.

The National Trust will sell you a ticket to the house. Nothing on the tour covers the mile and a half.