A Queer Coming-of-Age in Corona, Queens

A Queer Coming-of-Age in Corona, Queens

Bushra Rehman’s “Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion” follows a young Pakistani Muslim protagonist as she discovers her nascent intellect and sexuality.
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By May-lee Chai NY Times 

ROSES, IN THE MOUTH OF A LION, by Bushra Rehman

Bushra Rehman’s stunningly beautiful coming-of-age novel “Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion” is set in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York, which was enshrined in pop culture by Paul Simon’s 1972 hit “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” Rehman’s exuberant young protagonist, Razia, knows the song well, although it puzzles her. “Why would Paul Simon be singing about Corona?” she muses. “I didn’t see many white people there unless they were policemen or firemen, and I didn’t think Paul Simon had ever been one of those.”

In the late 1980s, Razia’s Corona is home to a growing Pakistani Muslim community, along with Dominican and Korean immigrants. The earlier, largely Jewish and Italian, immigrant residents of Simon’s day have moved on to wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.

Rehman evokes time and place like a poet, with descriptions both precise and lyrical, making the streets of this working-class neighborhood come alive on the page. One house has so many roses that “they grew up and over, through the fence like they were some kind of convicts trying to scale the walls”; during the evening call to prayer, she writes, “everyone in the neighborhood tilted their heads and listened. Out of basement apartments and sixth-floor walk-ups, Muslim men started walking toward the sound, pulling their Topis out of the back seats of their pockets.”

At the novel’s opening, it’s 1985 and Razia is a precocious fifth grader just starting to bridle at the restrictions placed on her as a girl — by her parents and by other members of her first-generation conservative, religious community. While boys are allowed to play freely, their misdemeanors forgiven, girls are expected to help their mothers with the housework, raising younger siblings, training for a future as wives and mothers with no options for a career or other path. Forbidden from cutting her hair or wearing clothing more revealing than the salwar kameez that her mother buys for her, Razia is jealous of other teenage girls “decked out in makeup like tropical birds, laughing and being loud.”

However, Razia’s mother recognizes her daughter’s intelligence and allows her time for homework, reading and study, which ultimately leads to Razia testing into the prestigious, public Stuyvesant High School.

The only member of her immediate circle accepted at the school, Razia travels alone to Manhattan, which opens her eyes to a new world. Still, Rehman keeps it real. The school is its own insular community, made up of various cliques of teenagers and not always sympathetic adults, like the math teacher who demands every time she gets an answer wrong, “How did you get into Stuyvesant?”

Here Razia falls in love with a classmate, coming into her own queer identity and wondering where she fits in. Rehman again proves her bona fides as a New York writer by making the Strand bookstore (“where barricades of books lined the sidewalk”) and its shelves of titles by queer authors the first place Razia begins to see herself as part of a larger community.

When a conservative “Aunty” spots Razia on a date and reacts with odium, Razia’s journey into adulthood becomes more perilous. Where a lesser book might have stooped to stereotypes about Muslims or immigrants, Rehman shows readers the complexities within Razia’s community. Individuals are allowed to be surprising, even to themselves, in this deft and empathetic novel.

The Making of Norman Mailer

The young man went to war and became a novelist. But did he ever really come back?

By David Denby The New Yorker

When Norman Mailer was inducted into the Army, in March, 1944, he was a freshly married twenty-one-year-old Harvard graduate, a slight young man of five feet eight inches and a hundred and thirty-five pounds. In the previous few years, he had published some stories and written a play and two novels (one of them published, in a typescript facsimile, as “A Transit to Narcissus,” in 1978). Even as a student, he thought of himself as a professional writer, and from the day that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, in December, 1941, he had wanted to write a big book about the war. He was sent for basic training to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where many of the men were from Pennsylvania, the South, and the Upper Midwest. Mailer was from middle-class Jewish Brooklyn; he had landed in the great working-class Gentile world, and was eager to observe. He canvassed the recruits about their sex lives, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. (He discovered that many of them did not believe in foreplay.) Mailer knew that tough Jews served in the war, including criminals, louts, and bitterly determined, hardworking men, but he was without physical skills. He had never worked a thresher, or manhandled heavy goods into a truck, or tinkered with Dad’s jalopy.

In early January, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur landed with an enormous invasion force on Luzon, the largest of the Philippine islands; Mailer, after waiting in a troopship, went ashore a few weeks later. He was thrown as a rifleman into the 112th Cavalry Regiment, out of Texas. The 112th had been in combat in the Pacific for more than a year, and many men in the unit had died. Mailer described those who remained as a little crazy, and physically messed up—some with open ulcers from jungle rot. The Texans were joined by men from other parts of the country, some of them bar fighters and casual anti-Semites (not by theory but by habit). “I didn’t open my mouth for six months in that outfit,” he later said.

“The nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn”—that was the one image of himself that Mailer said was “absolutely insupportable.” It was insupportable because, for a while, it was true. A picture of him in uniform from early in his service shows a young man with soft lips, large ears, a gentle gaze. He did indeed write his big war book, “The Naked and the Dead,” and it presents a fascinating paradox. A tough, even pessimistic work, filled with sordid sensuality—muck and detestable odors; bodily discomforts and mutilations; the tedium, exhilarations, and cruelties of an army fighting in the jungle—it may also have been a book that only a nice Jewish boy could write. A nice Jewish boy, that is, in flight from his background.

It requires some effort to recall the young Mailer across the intervening years of turmoil. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, as doggedly as an earlier puny American, Theodore Roosevelt, Mailer transformed himself into a barrel-chested macho—a man six times married, the father of eight children and an adopted son, and the author of more than forty books, some of them American classics (“The Armies of the Night,” from 1968, and the supremely abundant and sympathetic “The Executioner’s Song,” a “true life novel,” from 1979), some of them clogged and nearly unreadable. Attentive and sweet-natured much of the time—his letters to friends and even to strangers are generously supportive—he also brawled and headbutted at parties. He was decked, hammered, billy-clubbed; his eye was gouged. He believed that physical courage was necessary equipment for a great writer (Hemingway was the model), and that Jewish men in particular had to overcome all sorts of weaknesses. “In the first week / of their life / male jews / are crucified,” he wrote in a poem. His recklessness encompassed an abominable act: at the end of a drunken party, in 1960, he twice stabbed Adele Morales, his second wife and the mother of two of his children. “I let God down,” Mailer later told Betsy Mailer, one of his daughters with Adele.

For good and for ill, that was the Mailer the world knew for more than fifty years. When he died, in 2007, at the age of eighty-four, his reputation was at a low ebb. His temperament and preoccupations seemed artifacts of a bygone and benighted era. And not without reason. His reactionary sexual politics, expressed at length in the rapturously composed but morally preposterous polemic “The Prisoner of Sex,” published in Harper’s, in 1971, have been at the center of searing critiques for a half century.

Still, writers have a way of losing their labels. In the nineteen-forties, T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and George Orwell all wrote essays about Rudyard Kipling, retrieving what was aesthetically and emotionally satisfying from the bitter effusions of a rank imperialist and racist; some four decades later, Edward Said and other post-colonial critics and scholars continued the effort of defending the art embedded in the toxic mesh of Kipling’s attitudes. Mailer is a very different writer, but a similar kind of sorting out may be in the works, especially now that a major revival of interest in him has begun. The Library of America, which has brought out two volumes of Mailer’s writing from the sixties, is now reissuing “The Naked and the Dead,” in honor of Mailer’s hundredth birthday, on January 31st. The volume is edited by J. Michael Lennon, whose many-sided biography, “Norman Mailer: A Double Life” (2013), is by far the best that the author has received. Lennon has accompanied the novel’s text with a selection of the extraordinary letters that Mailer wrote from the battlefield to his first wife, Beatrice Silverman. Many additional projects devoted to Mailer are under way or have been proposed, including selections from his mid-fifties philosophical and erotic journal, a collection of his writings on democracy, a Showtime documentary, two TV series, and extended critical studies by Christopher Ricks and David Bromwich. In a new book, “Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer,” the British literary scholar and biographer Richard Bradford has produced an almost entirely negative portrait of a man whose life is “wonderfully grotesque,” and yet the book’s very existence attests to a more complicated reality. It would be naïve to suppose that the renewed attention on Mailer has nothing to do with the scandals attached to his name. It would also be naïve to pretend that he was not a great American writer.

Mailer’s father, Isaac (Barney) Mailer, was born near Vilnius, Lithuania, but moved with his family in 1900 to South Africa; he served in the British Army during the First World War. In America, he spoke with a punctilious English accent. In all, he was a strange bird—a mock Brit, a Jewish accountant, and a passionate gambler, frequently in debt. In 1922, Barney Mailer married Fanny Schneider. She had grown up in Long Branch, New Jersey, the daughter of a Lithuanian rabbi who never officially practiced in America. (According to a relative, the elder Schneider believed that “rabbis were shnorrers.”) At home in Crown Heights, just east of Prospect Park, Fanny, a loving, capable woman, raised Norman and his sister, Barbara, while managing a home-oil-delivery business by telephone. The Jewish-folkloric combination of a weak father and a strong mother evidently benefitted Fanny’s son, who drew power from the devotion of his parents, aunts, and uncles throughout his seventy-year writing career.

As a child, Norman was quiet and obedient, too preoccupied with his studies to spend much time among the neighborhood bonditts, with their pranks and their passion for stickball. On the way to school (Boys High, in Bedford-Stuyvesant), he kept his head down, avoiding fights with the local Italian and Irish street gangs, and with the local Jewish toughs as well. He built model airplanes, some of them extremely impressive, and spent his summers, with Barbara, in a resort hotel in Long Branch, run by one of his aunts. In a spare room, he would write fiction.

In September, 1939, Mailer showed up at Harvard in an outfit of orange-striped trousers, a gold jacket, and saddle shoes. He was sixteen, and found himself as ignorant about ruling-class undergraduates and the social rituals of the college as he was, five years later, about the habits of working-class Americans. The clothes were soon discarded, though some of his regular laundry was sent home, washed by the family’s Black maid, and mailed back. In his first year on campus, he ate dinner with other Jewish boys at the Harvard Union and began to feel his way around. Until the end of his sophomore year, he lived almost entirely within the protected boundaries of the American Jewish middle class.

At the time, Latin was a prerequisite for English majors at Harvard; Mailer had never studied it, so he became an engineering major, learning much that would serve him well when he reconstructed the liftoff of the Saturn V rocket in “Of a Fire on the Moon” (1970), his impassioned report on the Apollo 11 moon landing. His main occupation at school was reading, particularly the American realists he discovered as a freshman—James T. Farrell (the Studs Lonigan trilogy), John Dos Passos (the U.S.A. trilogy), John Steinbeck (“The Grapes of Wrath”). Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe came afterward, and Hemingway served as a (distant) spiritual mentor. Hemingway’s hunting, fishing, and boxing, his war exploits, his courageous and soulful physicality—boastful yet wounded—bore little resemblance to the habits of Crown Heights Jews. Mailer fell in love.

His own problem as a writer, he believed, was a lack of experience. Escaping from Harvard’s rich preppies and ambitious Jews, he rode the subway around Boston, taking notes on working-class behavior, clothes, and accents. In the summer after his sophomore year, he left his hotel room on the Jersey shore with just a few dollars in his pocket and hitchhiked his way down to North Carolina, sleeping outdoors at night. Voluntarily, and for only two weeks, he became that familiar Depression-era figure, a hobo. When he returned home, Fanny made him take off his clothes before coming inside.

His lack of sexual experience was particularly mortifying. “You bore a standard of shame,” he later said of himself and his friends. He at least lost his physical inhibitions. He played football in front of Dunster House, and loved the bone-jarring contact. At a Boston Symphony concert during his junior year, he met Beatrice (Bea) Silverman, a lively music major attending Boston University. She was argumentative, a passionate lefty, and a proto-feminist; she was also profane and, in the appreciative slang of the day, “earthy.” They carried on in the mattressed trunk of a Chevy given to Mailer by his uncle, and, at Dunster, they became known for their lovemaking in Mailer’s dorm room. Bea would talk dirty in front of his friends; they were both showing off. They got married in secret, in January, 1944. His draft notice arrived a week later.

What Mailer did in the war was not heroic. At first, working at headquarters on Luzon, he typed reports, laid wire, built a shower for officers. Humiliated and bored, he volunteered for a reconnaissance squad. He went on twenty-five patrols, many of them fifteen miles long, and he finally saw some combat: nothing much, as he admitted, but he knew what it was like to climb up a damp, rocky hill in the heat while burdened with a rifle, ammunition, grenades, two canteens, a steel helmet—perhaps forty pounds in all. His real mission was to see the worst and make an account of it. He wrote long letters to Bea (who had joined the Waves), some of which were detailed and harrowing. He was not just creating the book but creating himself as a man. In February, 1945, he entered a Japanese-held town that the Americans had overwhelmed with artillery and tanks. A letter to Bea chronicled what he saw:

Right before us was a destroyed Japanese armored half-track and a tank. The vehicles were still smoldering, and the driver of the half-track had half fallen out, his head which was crushed from one ear to the jaw lay reclining on the running board, and the pitiful remaining leg thrust tensely through the windshield. The other leg lay near his head on the ground, and a little smoke was still arising from his chest. Another Japanese lay on his back a short distance away with a great hole in his intestines which bunched out in a thick white cluster like a coiled white garden hose. . . .

After a half hour or so we descended to the road, and mounted the Jeep again. As we drove along the road the destruction was complete. Fragments of the corrugated steel from the warehouses had landed everywhere, and the wreckage formed almost a pattern on the road. Everything stunk, and everything, the road, the wreckage, the mutilated vehicles had become the two colors of conflagration—the rust red and the black. The whole vista was of destroyed earth and materiel—that battlefield looked like a hybrid between a junk-yard and a charnel house; it was perhaps the ugliest most dejecting sight I have ever seen. You wished acutely for rain, as the quick hand-maiden to time.

Some of the writing wound up in “The Naked and the Dead.” The impressions are fresh: war meant the destruction of the body’s unity, the collapse of physical structure, color, intactness.

After the Japanese surrendered, in August, 1945, Mailer became part of the American force occupying the home islands. He worked mainly as an Army cook, which he enjoyed. He attained the rank of sergeant, and sent his family a picture of himself in uniform looking much older than in the earlier photograph—now darkly handsome, with square shoulders and a full head of hair in the style of the actor John Garfield. Soon after that picture was taken, though, he got into a humiliating quarrel with a superior and turned in his stripes. He left the Army in 1946 as a private, after a little more than two years of service. He and Bea settled in Brooklyn and Provincetown. He wrote “The Naked and the Dead” at a rate of five thousand words a week, finishing in about fifteen months, including new and rewritten sections. The book received rave reviews and was an overnight best-seller, remaining on the Times list for more than a year. The Brooklyn Jewish boy was no longer abashed, no longer inadequate, and certainly no longer quiet.

In 1960, looking back on the book, Mailer described his state of mind in a letter to his friend Diana Trilling, the literary critic. “There is no meaning but the present,” he wrote. “So of course I could do The Naked and the Dead. I had no past to protect, no habits to hold on to, no style to defend. My infirmity is that I had no emotional memory.” This is an attempt at mythmaking. He sounds as if he were creating himself as he went along, though what he actually meant by “no emotional memory” was no memory he was proud of. Henry Roth, in “Call It Sleep” (1934), and Alfred Kazin, in “A Walker in the City” (1951), had done a great deal with the furtive behavior of a Jewish boy on the streets, but Mailer saw his childhood as something not to explore but to transcend. He drew heavily on the American realists, especially Dos Passos, in constructing his own version of wartime naturalism, piling up endless physical detail and moments of emotional suffering.

“The Naked and the Dead” is set on the fictional island of Anopopei, an irregular kidney-shaped blob in the Pacific with trackless vegetation and withering wet heat—and also thousands of Japanese defenders, though they hardly figure in the novel. Mailer never tells us how the Anopopei campaign fits into the Americans’ strategy. The absence is intentional: strategy is left to officers, who, in Mailer’s estimate, are mainly self-important stiffs. What matters most in the book is the day-to-day lives of fourteen soldiers in a reconnaissance platoon, who find themselves trapped between the obsessions of two pathological egotists—the island commander, General Edward Cummings, a MacArthur-like military intellectual who thinks that men can be controlled only through fear (“the natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety,” he says), and, at the platoon level, Staff Sergeant Sam Croft, a nerveless warrior who “could not have said . . . where his hands ended and the machine gun began.” For Croft, killing seems a natural expression of his being. In a limited way, he’s intensely admirable. Writing to Bea, Mailer described his creation of Croft as “an archetype of all the dark, bitter, inarticulate, capable and brooding men that America spawns.” Capability meant a great deal to the young writer.

Mailer wrote a terrifying combat scene (armies firing across a river at night), but much of the novel chronicles the routine work of men at war: unloading supplies, building a road, cleaning weapons, “harsh eventless days” followed by such exertions as pulling 37-mm. anti-tank guns down a jungle path in darkness. (Seen in the light of a flare, “the guns had a slender articulated beauty like an insect reared back on its wire haunches.”) In the central action of the novel, General Cummings, eager to show off his tactical prowess, sends the platoon on a recon mission that turns out to be foolish, even superfluous, and Croft, ready to test himself, willingly carries it out, sacrificing men en route. He tries to take the platoon over the island’s big mountain, Anaka—which he thinks of as his mountain, as Ahab thinks of the whale. But the labor of ascending Anaka is far from exalting, and the men curse it the whole way. In the end, Croft’s mountain worship goes nowhere. Somewhere near the peak, he stumbles into a hornets’ nest, and the enraged insects cause the men to abandon their packs and rifles and scatter down the slope like children. Cummings’s regular infantry, under the command of a mediocre officer (Cummings is away), wipes out the remaining Japanese garrison.

When Mailer worked on the book, right after the war, jubilation was a large part of the national mood—a cheerfully militant atmosphere of gallant warriors and sleeves-rolled-up citizens fighting Fascism in “the good war.” During the war and just after, Hollywood movies portrayed the democratic unit—an ethnically mixed platoon or bomber crew—as a vessel of a great national cause. But Mailer writes without the slightest elation over American victory and Japanese defeat, and his platoon is less a common cause than a group of ornery, banged-up soldiers hoping to survive. Unlike Kipling, who overcame a miserable, bullied childhood in part by identifying with the strong (especially those of the British Empire), Mailer expressed contempt for powerful men bereft of human understanding. He was attracted to violence as an exploration of personal will, while despising authority in any institutional form.

The over-all emotion of the novel is one of futility. Accident, not strategy, rules. Cummings and Croft could be seen as incipient postwar American Fascists, highbrow and lowbrow, but both of them wind up stymied. The book asks, What is the point of endless effort and repetition? Is persistence life’s only meaning? The postwar celebratory mood was shadowed by disillusionment and absurdism. As Mailer was bringing out “The Naked and the Dead,” in 1948, Samuel Beckett was in Paris writing “Waiting for Godot.” As a war novel, Mailer’s book looks back to Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895), with its confused, even incoherent battle scenes—all smoke and noise—and forward to Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” (1961), in which the war and Army bureaucracy are rendered as a malign joke, dissolving any possible purpose into contradiction.

Mailer wrote “The Naked and the Dead” in an omniscient floating third person, moving from the mind of one man to that of another. The coarseness of the soldiers’ thoughts and speech shocked some readers in 1948, though now it seems to us the way men in combat have always talked. As we discover in lengthy, bristling flashbacks, many of the men had been knocking around in Depression America, working on farms, in stores, in ordinary jobs, or not working much at all. Vaguely rebellious yet defeated, they are callous and cynical about women, and routinely contemptuous of “Yids” and “Izzies.” These hard-luck guys have little purpose in their lives. Lieutenant Hearn, a Harvard graduate like Mailer, appears, at first, to be the hero of the novel, a liberal in revolt against his wealthy family. But Hearn is unfocussed and diffident, pulled by his own narcissism into confrontations with General Cummings that will destroy him. This war book has some courageous fighters and some generous acts, but it has neither heroes nor innocents. Unlike “the youth” in “The Red Badge of Courage,” no one has any illusions to lose.

For all Mailer’s hard knowledge of failure, his prose is little like that of his hero, Hemingway. It is not spare, stoic, and flowingly lyrical (from “A Farewell to Arms”: “Late in the afternoon the rain stopped and from out number two post I saw the bare wet autumn country with clouds over the tops of the hills and the straw screening over the roads wet and dripping”) but abrupt, obsessional, and grimly material. Mailer, describing men attempting to carry a wounded buddy on a stretcher back to safety, unleashes the enduring achievement of the book, his portrayal of the male body at the outer edge of fatigue:

Through the afternoon the litter-bearers continued on their march. About two o’clock it began to rain, and the ground quickly became muddy. The rain at first was a relief; they welcomed it on their blazing flesh, wriggled their toes in the slosh that permeated their boots. The wetness of their clothing was pleasurable. They enjoyed being cold for a few minutes. But as the rain continued the ground became too soft, and their uniforms cleaved uncomfortably to their bodies. Their feet began to slip in the mud, their shoes became weighted with muck and stuck in the ground with each step. They were too fagged to notice the difference immediately, their bodies had quickly resumed the stupor of the march, but by half an hour they had slowed down almost to a halt. Their legs had lost almost all puissance; for minutes they would stand virtually in place, unable to co-ordinate their thighs and feet to move forward. . . . The sun came out again, inflamed the wet kunai grass and dried the earth whose moisture rose in sluggish clouds of mist. The men gasped, took deep useless breaths of the leaden wet air, and shambled forward grunting and sobbing, their arms slowly and inevitably bending toward the ground.

On a bad day, a soldier will know every wretchedness of skin, lungs, arms, legs, bowels, kidneys. “The Naked and the Dead” is repetitive but at times very moving; the men carrying the stretcher reach a state, beyond exhaustion, in which “they were reduced to the lowest common denominator of their existence,” and meet it with acceptance. As Mailer’s letters to Bea reveal, he was shocked by the corrupted materiality of jungle war: the spilling corpses, the breakdown of physical integrity. But his writing about the living male body amounts to a full-throated humanist response: the body under stress is heroic, living in its wholeness, with consciousness remaining intact, even when vibrating with pain.

At the same time, “The Naked and the Dead” is surprisingly delicate in feeling. The rare moments of solidarity among the men give way to scraped emotions and anger, followed by distance and bitter hurt. The two Jews in the platoon, Roth and Goldstein, struggle especially hard for dignity—an obvious point of concern for Mailer, who had his own anxieties to resolve. Roth has been to City College in New York (the home of New York Jews in the thirties); he’s married, but he’s not getting anywhere. An irritable guy, he’s snobby, morose, and too weak to survive—clearly Mailer’s disapproving version of himself. Mailer endowed Goldstein with greater physical and moral strength. Like some earlier Jewish writers, Mailer saw virtue in a life of physical activity and advanced moral adventure: what Max Nordau, at the Zionist Congress in 1898, called Muskeljudentum, or “muscular Judaism”—a disavowal of endless study and effete intellection. Goldstein, along with a very serious Christian, attempts to carry the wounded soldier out of the jungle. As a boy, Goldstein heard his grandfather talk of Jewish suffering in the back of the family’s candy store in Brooklyn. It meant nothing to him at the time, but when he’s bearing the stretcher the words of the medieval sage Judah Halevi jump into his head: “Israel is the heart of all nations.” Goldstein’s consciousness as a Jew keeps him from letting go, for, if he fails, the men will think badly not just of him but of all Jews. In the character of Goldstein, Mailer’s fear that he was not tough enough for the Army ends in a portrait of formidable endurance.

The enormous success of “The Naked and the Dead” left Mailer uneasy. He had no idea how he was going to live up to it. Seemingly on top of the world at twenty-five, he feared many things. In his novel, the Harvard-educated liberal allows himself to be trapped by power. Mailer, in his own eyes, needed to escape the traps not only of his soft middle-class Jewish background but also of postwar America—the desire for “security,” the endless consumerism, and what he took to be the country’s humiliating spiritual mediocrity. It’s as if he were still in the jungle, pulling artillery through the night. He had made himself into a novelist in the Pacific, and now he brought the war home, fighting on two fronts—against what he disliked in himself and against those menaces of the nineteen-fifties, “conformity” and “adjustment.” He acted out his rebellion in a continual performance with phallus, fists, booze, and sustained ass-in-chair writing sessions—a pressure at times noble, at times foolish, and certainly rough on other people as well as on himself. He became an egotist of a peculiarly self-afflicting sort, both calculating and spontaneous, provoking many blows, all of them deserved, all of them welcomed. For the author of “The Naked and the Dead,” the truce never arrived. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 26, 2022, issue, with the headline “Flesh Wound.”

Artistic Differences The Beatles in History

Artistic Differences

Martin Tyrrell Dublin Review

The late Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head is by a long way the best appreciation of the Beatles’ music currently available. But it is in a shorter piece, the title essay of his 2003 collection The People’s Music, that he mentions the “Biography Test” ‑ people are culturally important if there is enough to them and to their work to justify a “sustained biographical study”.

It is a test that MacDonald’s earlier subject, the Beatles, passes effortlessly. There have been more than half a dozen lengthy biographies of the band (from Hunter Davies’s official version in 1968 to Mark Lewisohn’s outstanding work in progress, All Those Years Ago) as well as close-up accounts of major turning points in their story such as And in the End, Ken McNab’s chronicle of their final days, and Peter Doggett’s You Never Give Me Your Money, which focuses on their muddled finances. John Lennon and Paul McCartney have each warranted several biographies, George Harrison, at least one that I can think of (plus his autobiography, I Me Mine). Add to that more than a dozen memoirs, and the various, more specialised books about the band’s music, their use of drugs, their solo careers, and so forth.

Erin Torkelson Weber’s The Beatles and the Historians: An Analysis of Writings About the Fab Four (McFarland and Company, 2016) is a welcome and considered account of this vast Beatles industry. The book takes a critical, historiographical look at the various tellings of the Beatles’ story concluding that many of these books fail under analysis, losing marks for bias, myth-making, and myth-perpetuation. Weber has a keen eye for anecdotes of dubious provenance and authors with agendas ‑ Lennon as saint, McCartney as sinner, the benevolence or otherwise of Yoko Ono, Allen Klein and the Maharishi. But the news is not all bad. The last twenty-five years have seen, she says, a continuous improvement in the quality of books about the Beatles. With the passage of time has come a greater objectivity. Also, with so much now in print and so much being exhumed from the archives, musical and otherwise, there is no shortage of source material.

Weber says that most writings about the Beatles can be categorised into one of four principal narratives ‑ four ways of seeing and telling the band’s story. The first and earliest of these is the Fab Four Narrative. This is the more or less official version of the Beatles that evolved following their initial breakthrough. It was propagated by a largely friendly media nudged along by the Beatles themselves, their management and publicists. In the Fab Four Narrative, the Beatles are depicted as four friends whose relationship with each other is easy and free of tension. This is how they come across in their early interviews, their monthly fan magazine, and, especially, in their first two films: A Hard Day’s Night and Help. In Help, for example, the fictionalised Beatles live in a luxurious communal home that is, by mid-sixties standards, high-tech. These are rich young men, leisured and with few responsibilities, but who get along together, well enough to live in the same shared space like perpetual teenagers. As Weber comments, these mainstream films were especially important in differentiating one Beatle from another for a wider public (Jonathan Miller, commenting when they were new on the scene, had thought they all looked the same, like the Midwich Cuckoos). Not only did the films put names to faces, they put (fictionalised) personalities to names ‑ Lennon, caustic/eccentric; Harrison, intense; McCartney, cute/romantic; Starr, happy-go-lucky. (Approximately these same personalities were, a few years later, used as the basis for the Monkees, a wholly fictionalised outfit living the same communal quasi-teenage life as the Beatles in Help, but in this particular imagining with much less success and money.)

Hunter Davies’s official Beatles biography, published in 1968, had been commissioned by Brian Epstein when the Fab Four Narrative was at its peak. One of that book’s intended functions was to consolidate the Narrative. In a second edition, published ten years after, Davies came clean about this, admitting that he had been under some pressure to suppress certain details, such as Brian Epstein’s sexuality. Also, John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi, who had brought him up, intervened to excise the many swear words Davies had, she said, put in her nephew’s mouth. As for drugs, Lennon’s use of cannabis is described coyly, in a scene reminiscent of Michael McLaverty’s The Poteen Maker. An innocent reader, or a careless one, might conclude from Davies’s description that Lennon had lately acquired a taste for hand-rolling tobacco. Only as he ends his description does the author give the game away – “This was during the pot-taking period, which is now over.” Indeed.

Lennon himself would later call the official biography “a whitewash”. That was unfair, I think. Davies’s is a frequently revealing account of the Beatles, ultimately more a challenge to the idealised view of the band in the likes of Help than a confirmation of it.

The Fab Four Narrative did, in fact, begin to unravel in the second half of the 1960s, its demise hastened by Brian Epstein’s death and the Apple fiasco. The Beatles’ output from this time received either a mixed response (The White Album and, surprisingly, Abbey Road) or was panned (Magical Mystery Tour, and the initial, and self-indulgent, Beatle solo projects such as Harrison’s Wonderwall and Lennon’s Two Virgins). Other narratives now took over. Weber calls these: the Lennon Remembers Narrative; the Shout Narrative; and the Lewisohn Narrative, named, respectively, for an interview, a biography, and an author.

In 1970, John Lennon gave a lengthy interview to Jan Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine, an interview long enough, and popular enough, that it was subsequently published as a book, Lennon Remembers. It is a cathartic interview dating from roughly the same time as Lennon’s first solo album proper, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, a fine, if unsettling, collection that mixes confession and disenchantment with, here and there, the occasional blink of optimism. The album peaks with the song God, in which Lennon casts off much that he had previously believed in ‑ Jesus, Elvis, Dylan, and finally the Beatles—concluding that “the dream is over”, a phrase that would become almost obligatory in all commentary on the Beatles for about the next ten years. The Wenner/Lennon Remembers interview is the same only more so ‑ an intense, prickly Lennon displaying more than a little self-importance. (“Genius is pain,” he at one point offers, leaving no doubt that he himself is the definitive pained genius, right up there with Vincent van Gogh.)

The essentials of the Lennon Remembers Narrative are that Lennon was the Beatles and that the other three were to varying degrees ancillary. He alone was the true artist in the band, but tortured with it, as all the best artists are. One consequence of this narrative was that, in homing in on Lennon as the talent in the Beatles, it often encouraged a dismissive assessment of Paul McCartney. This dismissal was compounded by the fact that McCartney was widely blamed for breaking up the Beatles (he had publicly quit the band six months after Lennon had privately done so). Moreover, having supposedly broken up the band, he then, after a slow start, became the only one of the four to have a consistent and commercially successful solo career. As this success was based on music generally seen as less impressive than his Beatles work, the worth of his work with the Beatles was sometimes retrospectively questioned. In contrast, Lennon, in death, became a kind of secular saint and his “Imagine” a kind of secular hymn.

The negative view of McCartney would gain considerable currency in the seventies and has not completely lost its grip even now. It is especially noticeable in The Beatles, an Illustrated Record (1974), by Roy Carr and Tony Tyler, a book that Weber does not mention. That is, I think, a surprising omission on her part since it was the most detailed assessment of the Beatles’ music before MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head and a bestseller on publication on both sides of the Atlantic. It is an altogether breezier, if not better, affair than MacDonald’s or than a previous highbrow appreciation by Wilfred Mellers entitled, somewhat portentously, Twilight of the Gods: the Beatles in Retrospect (1973).

Carr and Tyler were journalists on the New Musical Express, the NME, when it was probably at its most influential, speaking its often irreverent mind to the world. In form, their book is primarily a critique of each Beatles release, single, EP or album, whether as a band or as solo performers up to around the middle of 1974. There is also a short biography at the start covering the period up to the band’s Parlophone contract and, in the first edition only, a kind of end-piece that brings the story up to date and assesses the prospects for a reunion. (The authors thought it most likely that there would be no formal reunion.)

I no longer have a copy of that first edition but, from memory, in their end-piece, Carr and Tyler say something like “Few would deny that John Lennon was the most talented of the four original Beatles …” That big claim, and the odd way they phrased it – “four original Beatles” ‑ has made it memorable to me. In contrast, McCartney’s work is frequently downplayed, particularly, it sometimes seems, if it has been generally commended – “Yesterday” (“McCartney’s predilection for schmaltz bursts into full horrendous flower”); “Michelle” (“flatulent and sugary”); and, oddly, “Eleanor Rigby” (“sentimental, melodramatic and a blind alley”).

“Eleanor Rigby” is interesting to consider in the context of the decline of the Fab Four Narrative and the rise of the altogether less appealing image of a band divided that dominates the Lennon Remembers Narrative. It was a tenet of the Fab Four Narrative, at least in its initial phase, that Lennon/McCartney was a conventional songwriting partnership which typically wrote songs together. In fact, most of their songs were written separately, then jointly assessed and amended, then worked over again by the band as a whole under producer George Martin’s guidance. Hunter Davies captures this process in his official biography, sitting in on the development of songs that would later feature on Sergeant Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, and The White Album. It is clear from his valuable contemporary account how collaboratively the songs were developed even if they were usually substantially drafted alone by Lennon or McCartney (or, increasingly, Harrison). If the Fab Four Narrative overstated the Lennon/McCartney partnership, the Lennon Remembers Narrative goes to the other extreme and plays down the extent to which the Beatles’ music was a collective effort.

Following the Beatles’ split both Lennon and McCartney were quite open about which of them had written which song and their respective lists largely corroborate. “Eleanor Rigby”, however, is a notable exception. Right to the end ‑ including in what was, quite literally, the last interview he ever gave ‑ John Lennon maintained that he had written most of the lyrics. In contrast, McCartney has always said that it was mainly his song but that the band and anyone on hand at the time threw in a few ideas when he was stuck on the last verse.

Who is right here? Weber, and Craig Brown in his recent 1234 The Beatles, come down in favour of McCartney’s claim to authorship. For one thing, Lennon does not appear to have disputed, at the time the song was current, that McCartney had written it, music and lyrics. The McCartney version of how the song came to be composed is the version that appears in the Hunter Davies biography, which was begun about a year after the song had been recorded. The nearest Lennon gets to a credit in the Davies book is when George Martin comments: “Meeting John has made [Paul] try for deeper lyrics. But for meeting John, I doubt if Paul could have written Eleanor Rigby.” And, in fact, only from the early seventies did Lennon claim an increasingly bigger role in the writing of the song’s lyrics. Why might he have done this, and why only in the 1970s? Weber speculates that it was Allen Klein, when he was on his charm offensive to become the band’s manager, who encouraged Lennon in the view that he had had a greater role in the song’s composition than was actually the case. Lennon might not have been particularly difficult to flatter into such a belief. He was widely looked upon as the literary member of the band, the one who read well and widely, the only one, according to Davies, with proper bookshelves at home, and the only one who had, himself, published books, albeit slim volumes of questionable merit and taste. As the literary Beatle, Lennon might have wanted to associate himself with what was at the time increasingly seen as the most literary of the band’s songs (allegedly, Ezra Pound “smiled lightly” when it was played to him by Allen Ginsberg). Here was someone who had been writing since he was no age, and who had published books, but who had nonetheless little to do with the one Beatles song that was, in some circles at least, being considered as serious poetry. If Roy Carr and Tony Tyler thought it “sociological” and unimpressive (except to sociologists), this was an eccentric view with which few would concur. Wilfred Mellers, for instance, comments: “The song proper is a narrative ballad, and the words are poetry …[they] reverberate through their very plainness …” Or Ian MacDonald: “the lyric’s televisual vividness … is never gratuitous being consistently at the service of the song’s relentless despondency”.

Assessing Lennon’s claims to co-authorship of “Eleanor Rigby” by reviewing the available source material ‑ as Weber does ‑ is neatly illustrative of the point of The Beatles and the Historians. Here is a claim that some at least might find attractive, credible and worth repeating, particularly if they were favourable to Lennon and hostile to McCartney. But if you look at the sources, Lennon’s claim to authorship does not seem to hold up. Pete Shotton, a friend of Lennon’s since schooldays, has said in print that he was the person who resolved that tricky final verse by suggesting that McCartney should round things off by having Father McKenzie officiate at Eleanor Rigby’s funeral. Shotton says that Lennon scorned this idea at the time, but it was, of course, the idea that McCartney ran with, for which McCartney later thanked him.

The “Eleanor Rigby” authorship debate touches on another, thornier question asked (and answered) in the Lennon Remembers Narrative. Who was the greater talent, McCartney or Lennon? And which of them, therefore, contributed the most to the Beatles as a lasting cultural phenomenon? Ultimately, these things come down to personal taste. For what it’s worth, I prefer Lennon ‑ the songs that were mainly his – “I Am the Walrus”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “Hey Bulldog”, “Dear Prudence”, “Sexy Sadie”. His verses in “A Day in the Life”,with their chilly, disinterested vocal. I agree with MacDonald that Lennon was the great innovator in the Beatles and that when he stopped innovating ‑ MacDonald says that “I Am the Walrus” was the last of his innovative compositions ‑ it marked a turning point in the band’s short history. But to say that Lennon was the great innovator is not to dismiss McCartney.

Lennon had a choice when he first met McCartney at that church fete in July 1957. This superior musician, two years his junior, would enhance the band but was also a potential rival. And so he would prove. Paul McCartney, in his youth and young adulthood was both an exceptional talent and, as Weber notes, resistant to what she sees as Lennon’s domineering position, whether in the band or out of it.

By 1967, Hunter Davies thought, McCartney was in many respects already the Beatles’ leader. He was surely the most musically talented ‑ a great singer and bass player, a superb guitarist, a competent drummer, and the best keyboard player of the four. Also, an ever-evolving songwriter with a massive gift for melody and arrangement, and musically innovative, striving almost on a song-by-song basis for greater sophistication. It was around 1967 that Lennon ceased to dominate the songwriting partnership, Sergeant Pepper being the first album on which there was more McCartney than Lennon.

Thereafter it was McCartney, not Lennon, who tried to give the band projects and tried to hold it together musically when it was disintegrating, as in Let it Be/“Get Back”. Though Anthony Fawcett, in his 1976 Lennon memoir, One Day at a Time, thought that only Lennon was genuinely heartbroken by the Beatles’ ongoing demise, in the Get Back film especially he seems generally bored, his mind on other things. Only McCartney appears keen to go on, the only one who still thinks the band has a future, and who is enthusiastic for it. In scene after scene, he sits like a teacher vainly trying to motivate a class in the last half hour before home time. Lennon contributed only a handful of songs during this final Let it Be/Abbey Road phase, one of them, “Come Together”, sufficiently close to Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” that it would embroil him in litigation until 1975. In contrast, McCartney produced at least four strong songs – “Let it Be”, “Two of Us”, “The Long and Winding Road” and “Get Back”, plus the long medley from Abbey Road that goes a long way towards making that final effort one of the essential Beatles albums.

So much for the music. There is, I think, something else going on in the Carr and Tyler book. It is something that is also going on in several other books about the Beatles. It is not simply that they do not like McCartney’s music as much as they like Lennon’s; they do not much like McCartney, the idea of him, or the idea of him that they have formed. And it might be that their idea of him has affected their assessment of his work. He is not their kind of guy and because he is not their kind of guy, he is rarely singing their kind of song.

Here they are, for instance, opining on McCartney’s 1971 solo album, Ram (to be fair, not his most distinguished effort) –“ready-to-wear music, to be listened to in a lounge with plaster ducks on the wall … it positively reeked of cosy domestica ‑ the kind of environment which stifles all creativity”. They go on to mention “Paul’s long-drawn-out yearnings for cucumber sandwiches at the local Rotary Club and a family of his own …” In short, not only did Paul McCartney break up the Beatles (allegedly), he is, to boot, bourgeois, in the colloquial rather than the Marxist sense. In Marxist terms, Lennon and McCartney were both firmly in the rentier capitalist class by their early twenties, living increasingly on vast private incomes. And looking at where they came from, Lennon was by far the more privileged of the two. The house in which he grew up ‑ the house of his Uncle George, a business owner, and his Aunt Mimi ‑ was owner-occupied and had a name, Mendips, rather than a number. It even had the workings of the bell system by which its previous owners had been able to summon their domestic servants. McCartney, who lived in a rented house and, from age fourteen, in a low-income single parent household, would, he said, go to Mendips anxious to make an impression on a woman, Mimi, who made no secret of the fact that she considered him her social inferior. It was Lennon himself who decided, belatedly, that he was working class, a self-identification that at least some of his chroniclers (the sympathetic Anthony Fawcett, for instance) either go along with or do not challenge.

McCartney was bourgeois in the sense that he was conventional, to the extent that someone with his wealth and in his line of work could ever be conventional. Also, more user-friendly, at least until Lennon, post-Wenner, post lost weekend, began turning on the charm.

Though Carr and Tyler refer to McCartney’s “essentially bourgeois talent” and so forth they also, and I think accurately, describe all four Beatles as products of the postwar welfare state and the opportunities it brought. None of the Beatles made particularly much of those opportunities, at least in the way they were expected to make use of them. McCartney might have gone to Liverpool University or a teacher training college after he was done with school but his academic performance tailed off because his mind was elsewhere, focused on music. And Lennon, an avid reader from childhood, could also have gone to university had his academic performance not slumped, earlier than McCartney’s. However, because such opportunities were available to Lennon and McCartney and because they went through the motions of trying to avail of them meant they were able to evade regular paid work in a way that previous generations, and many of their Liverpool contemporaries, had not been able to. Lennon went to art school, for example, where he was by all accounts as unremarkable a student as at Quarry Bank Grammar, but it allowed him a few more years out of the workforce in which to stick with his music. MacDonald comments perceptively on the importance of the art school to the rise of rock music in Britain. Art schools, a nineteenth century innovation, offered, he writes, “a parallel educational structure … a home from home to the gifted but wayward and often frankly eccentric people with which English life overflows (or used to). John Lennon was a classic case of the art school type: an academic misfit who could more or less draw and was otherwise consumed by a chaotic creativity in need of channelling.” Many rock musicians, he goes on to say, including many major talents, were former art students. As well as Lennon there were Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Ray Davies, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Syd Barrett, and Ronnie Wood (a superbly gifted visual artist). Art school, says MacDonald, brought kindred musical spirits together in a place where they were able to spark off each other. Also, and more prosaically, art school provided a venue where aspirant musicians might practice and perform. Liverpool Art College modified Lennon, who arrived there a teddy boy, or something like one, but became gradually more arty through the influences of others ‑ his future wife, Cynthia Powell, his friend Stuart Sutcliffe, and Bill Harry, who encouraged and published his writing.

The Lennon Remembers Narrative would get a second wind from what Erin Weber calls the Shout Narrative. The Shout Narrative takes its name from Philip Norman’s 1981 Beatles biography, the first since Hunter Davies’s. It was a book that, on publication, immediately raised the standard of rock biography, and by some margin. Shout was being finalised at the time of John Lennon’s murder in December 1980 and the text was duly rewritten to reflect this, resulting, perhaps, in the somewhat downbeat mood of its final pages. The book sold well when it was published a few months later, benefiting in part from the massive renewal of interest in the band following Lennon’s death but thanks, also, to its own considerable strengths.

There was relatively little in the way of new material in Shout. But it told a familiar story a great deal better than it had ever been told before. Philip Norman was an accomplished journalist and fiction writer and, in Shout, wrote believable characters and vivid, memorable scenes. When the Beatles first arrive in Hamburg, for instance, he has them surprised by what they see:

… tree-lined boulevards, seamless with prosperity; chic shops and ships chandlers and cafés filled with well-dressed, unscarred, confident people …What was said inside Alan Williams’ minibus that August evening would be echoed many times afterwards in varying tones of disbelief. Wasn’t this the country that had lost the war?

Shout is full of wonderful writing like that but, all the same, Weber is critical of its historical reliability. She reckons that the style in which the book is written, coupled with its lack of referencing (not even an index on its first outing), makes it difficult for readers to disentangle what are Philip Norman’s own opinions and imaginings from what he has drawn from reliable primary sources. That passage I quoted above, for instance, can it be considered a reliable account of how the Beatles first saw Hamburg, how it looked to them? Did they really reflect on how prosperous the country that had lost the war was looking, and were they truly among the first to make this observation? Shout also suffers from its proximity in time to the events it describes, and to a relative lack of sources upon which to draw ‑ none of the Beatles agreed to an interview with Norman and the surge in Beatles publishing did not come until a few years after the book was published. But perhaps its biggest flaw, in Weber’s view, is its bias.

In Shout, Philip Norman is generally sympathetic towards Lennon and correspondingly hostile to McCartney and all ‑ or almost all ‑ his works. “Michelle”, for example is “a bland love song with words that lapsed into French as a plain act of social climbing”. McCartney, Norman writes, “could be … suddenly imperious and petulant. Possibly he knew that Lennon’s Sergeant Pepper music was destined to outshine his.” And McCartney’s self-penned press release written to announce his first solo album comprised “smiling yet sly phrases” that “revealed his most ingratiating, least agreeable side”.

These observations are, I think, are fairly typical of how McCartney is depicted in Shout, or certainly in the first edition of Shout. (It is only fair to say that in subsequent editions of the book comments such as those I have quoted are either greatly softened or excised completely. Philip Norman has also since written a Lennon and a McCartney biography which are as compelling a read as Shout but without its flaws. However, I cite the first, 1981 edition because it is the edition that I think had the greatest readership and reach.)

The effect of Shout in its first edition was to put something close to the Lennon Remembers Narrative into the mainstream and thereby to contribute to Lennon’s growing, posthumous legend. Someone reading Shout (1981 edition) would have come away burdened with considerable Lennon Remembers baggage ‑ Lennon, flawed but brilliant; McCartney, “tyrannically particular and perfectionist”.

Weber writes that, in the years following Shout, a great many books were published on the Beatles, including Albert Goldman’s The Lives of John Lennon, which is a kind of anti-Shout in that it adopts an unremittingly hostile view of its subject, several memoirs, and the Anthology project, curated by the Beatles themselves and comprising a documentary film history of the band, an accompanying book and three double albums of outtakes and similar. (“Little of it is worth a second listen, let alone the scores of millions of pounds it has cost the group’s worldwide fans to acquire,” comments Ian MacDonald, sourly, in Revolution in the Head).

One consequence of all of this productivity, writes Weber, is that it has greatly expanded the amount of material on the Beatles now available to readers, writers and researchers. This, the passage of time, and the gradual disempowerment of earlier narratives have enabled the creation of better, more evidence-based Beatle histories. Weber considers Mark Hertsgaard’s A Day in the Life (1995) as the first Beatles biography that might be considered genuine historical writing. But it is the work of Mark Lewisohn that she regards as the most important in recent decades, to the extent that she names the fourth, and most satisfactory of the Beatles narratives for him.

“There is, in Pinner, Middlesex,” writes Philip Norman in the original endpiece to Shout, “a serious young man of 22 who holds the title ‘Beatle Brain of Britain’, so labyrinthine is his knowledge of their music and history. His name is Mark Lewisohn.” Lewisohn had worked with him on Shout as a researcher. But it is Lewisohn’s subsequent books (The Beatles Day by Day, 1987, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, 1988, and the exemplary biography in progress, All Those Years Ago) that have established a clear, and evidenced account of the band and so made him the indispensable Beatles authority. The first volume of All Those Years Ago ‑ the only one yet published ‑ runs to some 1,000 pages, concluding with the release of “Please, Please Me” in 1963 and the beginnings of Beatlemania. Two further volumes are planned, taking the story up to 1970. I, and millions like me, await these with childlike impatience.

As the telling of the Beatles’ story has become more satisfactorily historical, it has become more sympathetic to McCartney, acknowledging his contribution as well as that of Harrison and Starr, George Martin, Brian Epstein, and Dick James, their publisher. The emerging view, which Weber summarises, is that the Beatles worked best when they were a partnership. The songs might not have been composed jointly, but they were recorded jointly and with patient dedication. The quality of the Beatles’ music was high more or less from the start but increased as this working partnership matured ‑ Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sergeant Pepper. Significantly, it is primarily as performers of their own music on record that the Beatles have remained popular and not, say, as the writers of songs that others perform and interpret. This is especially the case with their more innovative and groundbreaking work. In songs like “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am the Walrus”, for instance, the pleasure is arguably more in the finished recording than in the songs themselves as words and music, and therefore in recordings greatly enhanced by the work of people other than the songs’ actual composer. In the case of “I Am the Walrus”, the basic melody derives from a police car siren Lennon heard when he was in his mansion in the stockbroker belt. He fretted that the police must be coming for him. Why else would they be there in that affluent place with their siren blaring but for him, the one resident who was least typical of it? If the song has a theme, it is a theme that follows directly from this anxiety ‑ the persecution of the transgressor. Hence, Edgar Allen Poe. A random sampling of King Lear from a BBC broadcast by chance achieves relevance and meaning, like a found poem. After the bridge, for instance, Lennon sings “I am the Eggman” just before Gloucester says “Now, good sir”. Only “Now good sir” sounds a lot, I think, like “Are you, sir?” Which works a treat. Likewise, when Lennon sings “they are the eggmen”, Edgar says “Poor man made tame by fortune”, although for years I misheard that as “This man he claims a fortune”, which again sort of fits. I assumed at the time and for years afterwards that these semi-audible voices had been put there deliberately by Lennon himself. I had no idea they were from King Lear. Nor had John Lennon. This is not to diminish the achievement, which is arresting and unforgettable, but it is to question how much of it is Lennon’s, how much George Martin’s, who orchestrated, recorded and quality assured it, and how much the Beatles as a group. It is as they stop working together that they begin their descent, the quality of their work more patchy as the partnership itself disintegrates. On The White Album, as Carr and Tyler note, the Beatles have started to work more as each other’s session musicians and less as a band. The result is a mixed album on which strong songs sit alongside weaker efforts and self-indulgences like “Revolution 9”. “They were no longer invulnerable,” the authors comment.

From Lewisohn’s account in All Those Years Ago, it would seem that the Beatles, around 1961-62, had no clear idea what they were going to be. Earlier accounts, like those of Hunter Davies and Philip Norman, depict them as more focused and resolute ‑ they would be a band that played, primarily, the songs of Lennon and McCartney and not a band for whom others wrote songs behind the scenes. Lewisohn and other of the more recent Beatles writers reject this. Lennon and McCartney in 1962, alone or together, had written only a handful of songs, few of which they felt were good enough to perform, and then only rarely. They thought their audience, which even in 1962 was considerable and dedicated, wanted to hear songs that had either been hits or had at least been recorded ‑ songs that had gone through some kind of quality control. In 1962, Lennon and McCartney were hobbyist songwriters who between them had averaged around one or two songs a year with long fallow periods. And yet it was one of these songs ‑ one of McCartney’s – “Love Me Do”, that interested the publishing section of EMI and thereby secured them their recording contract with Parlophone, which was an EMI subsidiary. It might be that this small recognition ‑ of a song and not its singers ‑ by what had been up to then an otherwise indifferent music industry was what sparked them into action as songwriters. Certainly, in 1962, with their new Parlophone contract and a producer, George Martin, who had yet to take to them or see them as something special, they nonetheless dug their heels in and insisted that they recorded their own “Love Me Do” and not the Formbyesque “How Do You Do It?”, by the professional songwriter Mitch Murray. So “Love Me Do” it was, a better effort than it is usually given credit for, then “Please, Please Me” and, soon, a sea-change in popular music.

The Beatles’ success relied on a number of lucky accidents. It is surely a good thing, for example, that they failed their Decca audition. Imagine they had nailed it. They would almost certainly have become some kind of variety act. Decca would have signed them, not as songwriters but as performers. They would have had their songs written for them and been assigned in all likelihood to a conventional producer who would have steered them in a predictable direction. Instead, they went to Parlophone, where they were assigned to George Martin who was not only a little more offbeat and experimental than his peers but ambitious too, keen to make his mark, and to establish that a producer of recorded music was no mere bureaucrat but as creative a person as any artist.

After the Beatles, it was more or less obligatory that bands and solo artists who wanted to be taken seriously wrote their own material, or the greater part of it. Also, that they should regularly, or at least periodically, release albums of new, original music and that these albums, not individual songs or live performances, were the main landmarks in a band’s or an artist’s career, the work by which they would be assessed. That is the template the Beatles established, more or less by chance, and in a very short space of time ‑ the four or five years after their breakthrough.

It is sixty years since “Love Me Do”. The year after it was released, 1963, would see the Beatles achieve not just rapid success, but that particular fame that extends beyond its core audience. Even so, few at the time, including the Beatles themselves, thought they would last. The band’s early years were lived day to day on the assumption that their acclaim would be short-lived ‑ five years being the general life expectancy in what was then still very much pop. Five years of people knowing who you were and what you did, then a lifetime of oblivion. The Beatles would have a mere half-decade in which to live the high life of hits and movies, tours and TV appearances, after which they would go the way of every flash in the pan. That was roughly how long Helen Shapiro had lasted. She was the headliner on the Beatles’ first, post-breakthrough tour. Over the course of that tour, their respective statuses shifted, she on the way down, they on the rise. And though it was now the Beatles’ turn, soon it would be someone else. The Dave Clark Five perhaps. Both Lennon and McCartney explored other career options in preparation for their inevitable post-Beatles lives. Lennon wrote his books, appeared on the TV comedy sketch show Not Only … But Also and acted in How I Won the War. McCartney wrote the score for the film The Family Way (scripted by Bill Naughton) and found that other artists were keen to record his songs (his more so than Lennon’s). Only towards the mid-decade did it seem they might last longer than expected, that the world around them had changed and that they were an essential part of that change.

And an enduring part of it, too. As Erin Torkelson Weber writes, “their music and their mystique continue to sell. The world finds the Beatles endlessly fascinating.” The recent success of the Get Back film and the remastered Revolver are evidence of this continued interest. But so, too, is the Lewisohn biography, which Weber rightly sees as part of a step change in the telling of the band’s story. Close on a thousand pages just to reach the first stirrings of Beatlemania and yet a bestseller across all territories and in all formats. That is MacDonald’s Biography Test definitively passed.

Chantal Akerman’s ‘Jeanne Dielman’ Named Greatest Film of All Time

Chantal Akerman’s ‘Jeanne Dielman’ Named Greatest Film of All Time in Sight and Sound Poll

The drama is among several by female and Black directors in the respected once-a-decade survey, last conducted in 2012.

Jan Decorte, left, and Delphine Seyrig in “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece.





By Reggie Ugwu The New York Times

For the first time in its 70-year history, an esteemed international poll of film experts has ranked a film directed by a woman as the greatest of all time.

“Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” written and directed by the Belgian auteur Chantal Akerman and released in 1975, topped a list of 100 films honored by the British magazine Sight and Sound’s “Greatest Films of All Time” critics’ poll, the publication announced Thursday. Conducted only once a decade, the poll is the largest of its kind and the results have been regarded as an authoritative canon since it was first conducted in 1952. This year, it surveyed more than 1,600 critics, scholars, distributors, curators, archivists and others.

The previous No. 1 on the list, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1959), dropped to No. 2. Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” (1941), which had held the top spot for 50 years before that, is now No. 3.

“Streaming and digital communication have created opportunities to amplify voices and films that were less seen before,” said Mike Williams, the editor of Sight and Sound, which produces the list in partnership with the British Film Institute, the magazine’s publisher. “I think our list is becoming more reflective of the wider world of filmmaking, enjoyment, criticism and conversation.”

The number of participants is nearly double the 846 surveyed when the last poll was conducted, in 2012. Williams said that the inclusion of so many new voices probably helped elevate films and filmmakers from a broader range of backgrounds and perspectives.

In the 2012 poll, “Jeanne Dielman,” then tied at No. 36, was one of only two films directed by women, along with Claire Denis’s “Beau Travail” (1998), then tied at No. 78. (Regardless of ties, which occur often, only 100 films make the cut.) This year, 11 films directed by women are on the list, including “Beau Travail,” now ranking at No. 7, Agnès Varda’s “Cléo From 5 to 7” (1962) at No. 14 and Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019) at No. 30.

For the first time, the poll also acknowledges the work of several Black directors. In 2012, the Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty’s “Touki Bouki” (1973) was the sole Black-directed film in the Top 100, ranking at No. 93. This year, seven Black directors appear on the list, including Spike Lee, at No. 24 for “Do the Right Thing” (1989), Charles Burnett, tied at No. 43 for “Killer of Sheep” (1977), and Julie Dash, tied at No. 60 for “Daughters of the Dust” (1991).

In another first, the list also includes two animated films, both directed by the Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki: “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988) is tied at No. 72 and “Spirited Away” (2001) is tied at 75. Four films in the Top 100 were released in the last decade, including “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight” (2016), tied at No. 60, Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” (2019), tied at No. 90, and Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” (2017), tied at No. 95.

The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards Season

The Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.

Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.

An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.

Jennifer Lawrence: The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.

In 2012, no film released in the previous 10 years made the cut.

As is the case every decade, the new arrivals mean some notable demotions. This time, a handful of long-heralded landmarks, including David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962), Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” (1969) and Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974) dropped out.

“Momentum moves in both directions,” Williams said. “Certain directors perhaps are less in vogue now than they were in the past.”

To create the list, five Sight and Sound editors and associates asked respondents to select what they considered to be the 10 greatest films of all time, with the definition of “greatness” left to the respondent’s discretion. The lists were unranked — each of the 10 films received one vote. The editors then used software to rank all submitted films by the total number of votes.

Akerman’s triumph continues decades of growing recognition for the director, who died in 2015 at 65. “Jeanne Dielman,” the first of several of her films exploring the interior lives of women, meticulously tracks the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, slowly building to a dramatic climax. A second Akerman film, “News From Home” (1976), inspired by her move to New York City, also made the Sight and Sound list, tied at No. 52.

Speaking to The Times for Akerman’s obituary, Nicola Mazzanti, the director of the Royal Belgian Film Archive at the time, said “Jeanne Dielman” “created, overnight, a new way of making films, a new way of telling stories, a new way of telling time.

“There are filmmakers who are good, filmmakers who are great, filmmakers who are in film history,” he said. “And then there are a few filmmakers who change film history.”

Top 20 ‘Greatest Films of All Time’ Critics Poll

Here are the films (with their British release dates) at the top of Sight and Sound’s survey. The full list will be available on the BFI’s website

1. “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

2. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

3. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)

4. “Tokyo Story” (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

5. “In the Mood for Love” (Wong Kar-wai, 2001)

6. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

7. “Beau Travail” (Claire Denis, 1998)

8. “Mulholland Drive” (David Lynch, 2001)

9. “Man With a Movie Camera” (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

10. “Singin’ in the Rain” (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1951)

11. “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans” (F.W. Murnau, 1927)

12. “The Godfather” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

13. “The Rules of the Game” (Jean Renoir, 1939)

14. “Cléo From 5 to 7” (Agnès Varda, 1962)

15. “The Searchers” (John Ford, 1956)

16. “Meshes of the Afternoon” (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943)

17. “Close-Up” (Abbas Kiarostami, 1989)

18. “Persona” (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

19. “Apocalypse Now” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

20. “Seven Samurai” (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

Reggie Ugwu is a pop culture reporter covering a range of subjects, including film, television, music and internet culture. Before joining The Times in 2017, he was a reporter for BuzzFeed News and Billboard magazine. @uugwuu

Will It Be Different This Time?

Brian Stewart

It is starting to look like a question of when, not if, the Islamic Republic of Iran will fall.

Although the Islamic Republic of Iran has always brimmed with enmity for foreign foes, popular discontent at home has always posed the more obvious and lethal threat to its existence. By its very nature, theocratic rule tends to unsettle societies in ways that breed political opposition of great breadth and depth, and the clerical tyranny in Tehran is no exception. Since it seized power in 1979, and particularly since the disastrous 1980–88 Iran-Iraq war, the revolutionary theocracy has had to contend with tenacious opposition from below. At one time or another, a range of dissidents—from liberal student activists and ardent secularists to disgruntled mullahs and the bourgeoisie—have defected from a system that, in theory and in practice, has no respect for the concept of the citizen.

Barely four decades into its existence, the Islamic republic is confronted by another eruption of public rage, this time brought about by the nation’s women, that may yet end in revolutionary change. A majority of Iranians now groaning under this austere order have no recollection of the revolution that produced it, and reject its central justification—an Islamic concept known as velayat-e faqih, or “guardianship of the jurist.” Originally conceived as a license for the clergy to assume responsibility for orphans and the infirm, the late Ayatollah Khomeini amended it to encompass the whole of society. By these means were his unfortunate subjects relegated to the status of state property.

The current Supreme Leader, Seyed Ali Khamenei, and his regime have used capricious violence and cunning incentives to shore up their support base and thwart resilient opposition. Lavish instruments of repression and intimidation have imposed a high price on those Iranians brave enough to protest in public, and an elaborate welfare state and subsidy system have wedded the poor to the ruling establishment. For decades, this potent combination of sticks and carrots has ensured that the counter-revolutionary cause has always ended in bitter disappointment and defeat. This time, though, things may be different.

In recent years, the Iranian working class and urban poor have abandoned their quiescence and joined the ranks of disaffected educated professionals and protesters hailing from the middle class. This denotes a new level of resentment made more acute by a combination of economic mismanagement, the pandemic, and punishing sanctions. The inflation rate hovers around 50 percent and the value of the rial has been shredded. As a result, the regime’s traditional constituency has shrunk considerably. Iran’s authorities continue to employ brutality in an attempt to smother the burgeoning civil resistance, but the spell of fear in Iranian society has been broken.

This new dispensation is indicated by the schisms that have opened among the clergy, with even regime stalwarts venturing trenchant criticism of the government. The leadership of the fearsome Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps may be culled from the upper echelons of society, but the rank-and-file of the Guard Corps and the Basij are another matter. Drawn largely from the lower orders, the loyalty of these enforcers is no longer assured. The massive, lingering street demonstrations will not be easily swept away.

The proximate cause of Iran’s latest eruption of unrest was a grotesque crime. On September 16th, 2022, a 22-year-old Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini died in custody, following her arrest by Ayatollah Khamenei’s “morality” police for wearing her hijab improperly. Amini’s murder at the hands of cold and arrogant officialdom caused Iranian women to pour into the streets. But that cruel instance of the routine subjugation of half the Iranian population has also galvanized a broad cross-section of Iranian society, including its diverse mosaic of ethnic groups. The courage of women removing or burning their headscarves in public—a breach of law punishable by whippings, if not detention and rape—has been augmented by demands for an ignominious end to the regime that equipped the clerics with such inordinate power in the first place.

Iranians have plainly tired of this regime, the baroque misogyny of which is a standing affront to their basic rights. To the embarrassment of regime apologists in the West (some of whom betray a surreptitious fancy for theocracy), the participants in this new liberation movement understand that the mullahs are incapable of prioritizing Iran’s national and economic interests over revolutionary ideology. Those who have long claimed the contrary in support of a policy of rapprochement have fallen silent of late. But it is vanishingly unlikely that they have learned from their mistake of siding with Iran’s rulers over its ruled—or worse, of imagining that the rulers are the legitimate tribunes of a people infuriated by US imperialism.

If the slogans “Mullahs Get Lost” and “We Don’t Want Your Islamic Republic” sound uncompromising, it is because the decaying one-party/one-god state has left Iranians with no alternative. Although the waste and futility of the Islamic revolution have exacted a terrible price on the country, even modest reform initiatives (from the presidential campaign of Mohammad Khatami in 1997 to the green revolution in 2009) have been stymied by a corrupt and imperious establishment. For the vast populace, convulsive street demonstrations have been the only possible means of redress.

Iranians today live without hope for the backward political order that has immiserated and imprisoned them since 1979. It’s no less apparent that they have lost their fear of it. Separately and together, these facts should make the masters of the Iranian regime nervous. If, as Benjamin Disraeli remarked, a weak government discloses itself by its eagerness to resort to strong measures, the Islamic republic will continue to reveal its vulnerability in the ruthless force with which it aims to quell dissent. But for a state that no longer commands the widespread loyalty of its people, such measures are fraught with risk.

This may explain its initial reluctance to unleash brutal suppression en masse. But there can be little doubt that a regime with no compunction about abusing and killing its own citizens will seek to stamp out this uprising with force. The most recent evidence of this impending savagery was a proposal by the rubber-stamp parliament, which voted overwhelmingly in favor of harsh measures, including capital punishment, for protesters. Although the judiciary is the only body vested with authority to determine punishment in these cases, raising the specter of the death penalty evokes a grisly precedent. On the heels of the revolution, this regime became infamous for raping its female political prisoners on the eve of their executions because killing a virgin is a sin in Islam.

Nonetheless, the spirit of revolt now on display has inflicted the kind of damage on the legitimacy of the state from which it cannot easily recover. This development is even more grave in its implications than it may at first appear. The end of the Islamic republic would be an unqualified boon for liberal civilization, shoring up the cause of freedom after more than a decade of autocratic gains in the international system. Since the US has a huge stake in thwarting both Iran’s atomic ambitions and its pursuit of regional hegemony, it’s naturally invested in any possible transformation, or at least reformation, of the Iranian regime. The principal blessings of regime collapse would be enjoyed in Iran itself, which could at last shutter its political dungeons (not least the monstrous Evin prison) and build an open society for all. But the wider world—beginning with the Middle East where the Islamist imperium has wrought so much destruction—would accrue huge benefits from a post-revolutionary Iran, too.

The inauguration of a new order in Tehran would surely be followed by the return of its copious oil supplies to the market, alleviating the crude shortage occasioned by Russia’s war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian resistance would be strengthened, since Putin’s outmoded forces have been reinforced by an Iranian arsenal of missiles and kamikaze drones. The gruesome Assad dynasty in Syria would be dealt a severe blow by the removal of its primary patron and protector, as would the Houthi insurgency in Yemen. Hezbollah, Iran’s jihadist proxy, would also suffer grievously from the loss of its foreign paymaster. No longer hostage to the whim of the Party of God, Lebanon could reclaim its full sovereignty. Last but not least, without the looming specter of a predatory and potentially nuclear-armed Iran, both Israel and the Gulf states would enjoy an unprecedented security windfall.

In the meantime, hard facts must be faced. Henry Kissinger has long maintained that Iranian leaders must decide whether they want to be “a nation or a cause.” But Kissinger, like other foreign policy “realists,” insists that the character of foreign states is not a legitimate American concern, so his analysis fails to consider the nature of the regime seated in Tehran. The architects and heirs of the Islamic revolution have rejected the choice articulated by Kissinger and offered by the international system, seeking instead to burnish their prestige and power with an unsleeping quest for the bomb. The raison d’être of the Islamic republic remains what it has always been: to be an instrument of its own brand of Shiite millenarianism, and to conscript the Iranian nation into the service of that messianic cause. For such a regime, founded on the imposition of the veil and weaned on virulent antisemitism and anti-Americanism, it cannot possibly forego either mission without putting its entire order of power at risk.

The Islamic republic’s imperial ambitions have exacerbated its predicament at home. Its decades-long strategy of sponsoring and directing jihadist terror has long passed the point of diminishing returns, as the mounting costs of this sectarian imperium have discouraged the generosity of patronage networks. The once-popular view that any US military action against Iran would stoke the latent nationalism of its people and bind them to the ruling class has not been borne out. The targeted killing of General Soleimani in early 2020 was mourned by large crowds of Iranians. But since then, sizeable numbers have declared themselves to be contemptuous of the shadow commander. Across the Iranian hinterland, Soleimani’s omnipresent face is being burned in effigy.

When the Iranian people took to the streets in June 2009 to protest a fraudulent election, President Obama abstained in the clash between a cruel dictatorship and its long-suffering subjects. Anxious to protect his chances of signing an arms control agreement with the regime that would (purportedly) suspend its pursuit of a nuclear weapon, the ostensible leader of the free world paid his respects to the principle of “sovereignty” while musing about the past ills of US foreign policy. For a while, White House apologists implausibly insisted that the president’s neutral posture would help the demonstrators. American moral support for them would only play into the hands of their oppressors (or so the argument went), who customarily seek the pretext of a foreign plot to discredit popular discontent. This foolishness evaporated when Iranian demonstrators addressed their chants to Obama, demanding to know where his sympathies lay.

The lesson of this humiliating episode is that the United States should leave no doubt about where it stands in a struggle between tyranny and liberty. Obama himself has now admitted as much, conceding that it was a mistake not to have shown solidarity with Iran’s freedom movement. The Biden administration finds itself on the horns of that same dilemma—caught between its desire to resurrect the nuclear deal on one hand, and the depredations of the Islamic regime on the other. Present indications are that it is not in a hurry to repeat Obama’s mistake. “Don’t worry, we’re gonna free Iran,” Biden said during a recent campaign rally for Democratic Rep. Mike Levin. “They’re gonna free themselves pretty soon.”

These words were met with cautious approval from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies on November 7th:

The White House increasingly appears to recognize that Tehran lacks any interest in reaching a nuclear deal consistent with Western interests. U.S. envoy for Iran Robert Malley said on October 31 that the Biden administration would not “waste time” trying to resuscitate the JCPOA. However, it remains unclear whether the White House would advocate pursuing the deal if protests faded. To eliminate such ambiguity, President Biden should reject further talks and adopt a policy of maximum pressure on Iran.

In order to exploit the vulnerabilities of the Islamic republic and move human rights up the agenda, Washington must confront the left flank of the Democratic party that deems every US “intervention” a species of imperialism, as well as the cynical realists who recoil from any moral dimension to foreign policy whatsoever. In addition, it must not yield to those who feign support for Iranians even as they advise Western powers to remain neutral.

The strength and durability of the uprising in Persia suggests that the die may at last be cast against the Islamic republic. It no longer feels premature to venture that the days of this ghastly theocracy are numbered, even if the odds remain against a rapid overthrow. The revolutionary spirit of this regime looks depleted—not by the hostile actions of its foreign adversaries, but by its own kith and kin. In the midst of this latest season of protest, it is becoming evident that the Islamic republic has entered a patriarchal autumn and a hardened majority of Iranians are now determined to outlive it.