The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Citation preview

Th e L ong a n d Wi n di ng Roa d f rom Bl a k e t o t h e Be at l es

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Ni n e t e e n t h- C e n t u ry M ajor Liv es and Letters Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull

The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influential writers and artists in English, European, and American public life who captured and expressed what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age.” Their achievements summarize, reflect, and shape the cultural traditions they inherited and influence the quality of life that followed. Before radio, film, and journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike, literary forms such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, novels, reviews, essays, children’s books, and drama generated a golden age of letters incomparable in Western history. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of major figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact on the character of this age. Projects to be included range from works on Blake to Hardy, Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats, Coleridge and J.S. Mill, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Browning, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty at Temple University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades of experience as editor of books on nineteenth-century literature and culture. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes editions, essays, and reviews in numerous journals and lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory. P UBLISHED BY PALGR AVE: Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson FORTHCOMING TITLES: Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in 19th Century Literary Culture, by Lynn Parramore

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Th e L ong a n d Wi n di ng Roa d f rom Bl a k e t o t h e Be at l es Matthew Schneider

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THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD FROM BLAKE TO THE BEATLES

Copyright © Matthew Schneider, 2008. All rights reserved. “Single Girl, Married Girl” by A.P. Carter © 1927 by Peer International Corporation Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–8489–0 ISBN-10: 1–4039–8489–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schneider, Matthew, 1958– The long and winding road from Blake to the Beatles / Matthew Schneider. p. cm.—(Nineteenth century major lives and letters) Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 1–4039–8489–1 (alk. paper) 1. Music and literature—History—19th century. 2. Music and literature—History—20th century. 3. Poets, English—19th century. 4. Poets, English—20th century. 5. Blake, William, 1757–1827. 6. Beatles. 7. Transatlantic aesthetics and culture. I. Title. ML3849S2975 2008 782.4216609292—dc22

2007044854

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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C on t e n t s

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Preface Introduction

Why the Beatles?

Chapter 1

The Transatlantic Roots of Rock Romanticism

25

The Nowhere Man and Mother Nature’s Son: Coleridge/LennonWordsworth/McCartney and the Productivity of Resentment

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George Harrison and Byronic In-Between-ness

99

Chapter 2

Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Epilogue

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Ringo Starr and the Anxiety of Romantic Childhood

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“What Matters is the System!” The Disappearance of God and the Rise of Conspiracy Theorizing

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A New British Empire

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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his book originated in an experience that Sigmund Freud would have called “uncanny.” While reading through William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s groundbreaking Lyrical Ballads one afternoon some fifteen years ago, I started hearing Beatles songs in my head. When I read a poem by Wordsworth, I heard McCartney songs; and when I read one of Coleridge’s poems, I heard songs by John Lennon. Investigating this strange incursion of two-hundred-year-old poems into twenty-five-year-old pop songs led me to the question of the relationship between high literary culture and mass pop culture. Are poems the distant ancestors of pop songs? If so, how was that influence transmitted? More important, is popular music capable of fulfilling the cognitive and aesthetic functions previously reserved to self-consciously “high” art, like the Wordsworth and Coleridge poems that had raised in my mind specters of Beatles songs? Like many of my generation (I was born in 1958), I have a significant personal stake in answering these questions, for my introduction to the magic of poetry—of language rhythmically arranged—came through pop music. Along with some 72.9 million other Americans, I witnessed a seminal moment in the poeticization of pop music when I saw the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show on February 9, 1964. As I grew older, the love for the Beatles I felt for the first time that night remained undimmed as I found my way to the rich poetic tradition of the land from which they hailed. But not until that afternoon a decade and a half ago—when I heard “Mother Nature’s Son” playing in my head as I read Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as A Cloud”—did my vocation (professor of English literature) finally overlap with my avocation (Beatlemaniac). Writing a book that takes the Beatles seriously as poets requires, to a certain degree, adjusting one’s definition of poetry so that it includes pop music. Thanks to the Beatles, this adjustment is not as arduous as it might have been five or six generations ago. Nevertheless I should make it clear from the outset that the definition of poetry from which I proceed is more functional than formal. If Beatles songs

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can evoke the subtle, philosophically complex poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge, it is because both poem and song do the same thing: make meaningful utterances that people can use to help them negotiate the intellectual, moral, and emotional questions and problems with which life inevitably confronts them. To a far greater degree than other pop music stars of their time, the Beatles were serious about manifesting in their songs this ideal of functional poetry. Even as songwriting novices, capable of nothing better than “Love Me Do,” the Beatles sensed the personally expressive potential of the pop song. By striving to establish the primacy of the singer/songwriter as the dominant model of pop artistry, the Beatles helped give the pop song the literary respectability it commands today. Another problem with writing about the Beatles as poets is the impracticability of quoting their words. Like literary poetry published after 1923, pop songs are copyrighted, and may not be quoted without permission. And since “fair use” is limited to a small percentage of the work quoted, the rule of thumb for quoting from pop songs is not to use more than two or three consecutive words. The careful reader will notice that in this book I refer to Beatle songs by title, and occasionally paraphrase their contents, but never quote more than three words in a row. Permission to reprint Beatles lyrics—as should be obvious to anyone who thinks for a moment about how lucrative their catalogue continues to be to the copyright holder—is tightly controlled and breathtakingly expensive. For Across the Universe, Julie Taymor’s 2007 musical film about the 1960s, Revolution Pictures paid Sony/ATV Music $8.25 million for the rights to perform thirty-three Beatles songs (Martin Lewis, “Sony Exploits its Beatles Catalog,” Variety, September 6, 2007). Were this book about any other poeticized pop musicians, however, the inability to quote their work would make a book like this impossible to follow. The Beatles’ songs are so familiar, however, and so thoroughly written into the fabric of contemporary culture, that quoting them verbatim is scarcely necessary. Anyone reading this book who wishes to peruse the Beatles’ lyrics will be able easily to find them, if not recall them immediately from the store of his/her own memory. Through nearly forty-five years of listening to and loving the Beatles and their poetic ancestors, I have accumulated many intellectual debts. First of all, I owe a debt of gratitude to Jennifer Wiegert, who as a researcher demonstrated astonishing diligence and enthusiasm throughout this project, and without whose help I can’t imagine this book could have come about. My editor Marilyn Gaull has not only generously provided encouragement and assistance, but has also

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served as the model of committed, responsible scholarship to which I try to live up. My wife Ann and children Sarah, Hannah, and Joshua— the Fab Four in my life—have helped in more ways than I can count, not least of which in enduring, without complaint, Beatles songs endlessly playing in our little house. Others, too, some of whom I haven’t seen in years, helped me to write this book by sharing my love for the Beatles: being played a part in bringing this book into being. I want to thank Eddie Washkin, who taught me how to play “Mother Nature’s Son” and “Get Back,” and with whom I spent many happy hours teasing the meaning out of Beatles songs. The most important of these Beatle buddies, though, is Mark Stanley, to whom this book is gratefully dedicated. When I couldn’t have been more than six years old, and he couldn’t have been more than ten, he tried—without success—to teach me my first guitar chord. That was an act of generosity motivated by Mark’s authentic enthusiasm for the Beatles, a feeling that calls out, in every Beatlemaniac, to be shared. Mark’s spontaneous, genuine admiration for John, Paul, George, and Ringo touched me when we were childhood neighbors. With this book, I hope to honor not only the Beatles’ ability to inspire that kind of admiration, but also the acts of kindness and love—like Mark’s struggle to get my recalcitrant fingers to make the shape of a D chord—which their optimistic, life-affirming music naturally generates.

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Introduction

Wh y t h e Be at l es?

They have not made music together for more than three and a half

decades, and their founder has been dead for more than a quarter of a century, but the world still cannot get enough of the Beatles. Other names from the “British Invasion” of pop music in the 1960s—Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, P.J. Proby, Freddie and the Dreamers—now survive only in trivia quizzes, but the Beatles are still going strong, still breaking sales records, still setting the pace in the music industry. In 2000, the Beatles were third on Forbes’ magazine annual list of celebrity earners, largely as the result of the publication of a massive oral history of the group, The Beatles Anthology. In 2001, Beatles 1, a compilation of the group’s twenty-seven number one hits—all of which had already been released on vinyl and CD at least three times—sold twelve million copies worldwide in the first twelve weeks of its release. Paul McCartney’s “Driving USA” tour—in which the Beatles’ former bassist played twenty-two of that band’s songs—was the world’s most successful concert series of 2002, earning $103 million in gate receipts. Returning to his Beatle roots worked so well for McCartney that for his 2005 tour, he increased the number of Beatles tunes in his set list to twenty-five. The Beatles Anthology, a ten-hour documentary film about the group’s history (originally televised in 1995) became the fastest-selling special-interest DVD in the history of that medium after it was released nearly eight years later in April 2003. Later that year, in November, Let it Be Naked, a remix of the Beatles’ second-to last album, sold a million copies in its first four weeks on the market. Jerry Goldman, director of the Beatles Story Museum and Shop in Liverpool, estimates that Beatle-related tourism generates from £200 to £500 million annually for the band’s hometown,

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where the boyhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney have been furnished as they were in the 1950s and opened as museums under the care of Britain’s National Trust, the only such properties in the nation commemorating rock musicians.1 Media attention to the fortieth anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band made this relic of the 1960s the tenth most frequently downloaded internet album for the month of June 2007. When they conquered Britain, the United States, and then swept through most of the rest of the globe in 1963 and 1964, the Beatles were sufficiently novel—visually and musically—to ignite the biggest show-business fad the world had seen up to that time. But popstar crazes had come and gone before—teenaged girls had screamed for, and then forgotten about, many a pompadoured crooner before John, Paul, George, and Ringo burst onto the scene. “So these are the famous Beatles,” says a sarcastic Scotland Yard inspector to John Lennon in the group’s second film, Help! “And how long do you think you’ll last?” Well, the joke’s on him, because the Beatles did last, defying all expectation to the contrary, not just through the rest of 1965 and into 1966, but now through three generations, and for the foreseeable future. Capitol records estimates that 42.5 percent of the buyers of Beatles 1 are age thirty and younger—that is, born well after the Beatles stopped playing together in the summer of 1969. To be sure, Apple Corps and Capitol Records have shown great ingenuity in generating new marketing opportunities by periodically repackaging and re-releasing the Beatles catalogue. But that only proves that the number of Beatlemaniacs is growing, rather than shrinking over time, and that their hunger to gobble up ever more arcane and previously unknown elements of the group’s life and works is increasing. The Beatles are now much more than an episode in the history of popular music and culture; they are an epiphenomenon, an institution, with a canon (the songs recorded and released between 1962 and 1970), meticulous historic and biographic documentation (especially in the audio, video, and textual anthologies that the surviving band members produced between 1995 and 2005), and a rapidly growing body of scholarship, encompassing thousands of articles, no less than two exhaustively researched day-by-day chronicles of the band’s time together (and one of the decade immediately following their break-up), two Beatles encyclopedias, and multiple full-length, scholarly biographies of each group member.2 What can explain the extraordinary power that the Beatles possess to inspire this fascination and depth of devotion? Why are they, and

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not some other musical group from the tumultuous 1960s, at once the emblem of that age and at the same time capable of capturing the hearts and imaginations of each new generation as it comes along? Answering these questions is the aim of this book. The answer is that the Beatles embodied—in their music, their personalities, and the group dynamic they enacted in their songs, performances, and the trajectory of their seven-year career in the public eye—the unique character of the Anglo-American culture that produced them. They stood at the end point—and therefore became a concentrated embodiment of—nearly two centuries of cultural exchange between Britain and America from the first few decades of the eighteenth century to the early 1960s. When, on February 9, 1964, some seventy-three million Americans—roughly one third of the U.S. population at the time— tuned in to see the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, they witnessed the reconvergence of two cultural streams that had been following separate but parallel courses since the late 1780s. As unlikely as it might seem for these four young men, barely out of their teens, hailing from the rough-and-tumble northwestern seaport town of Liverpool to play such a role, the Beatles were, nevertheless, the agents who united once and for all the destinies of Britain and America. A campy memorial to the Beatles on Matthew Street in Liverpool calls them “Four Lads Who Shook the World”—and so they were, for through these happy-go-lucky blokes the democratizing energies of English Romanticism and northern British folk individualism finally and irrevocably joined with American economic enterprise and mass communications, which then spread those isms to every corner of the planet. The Beatles sealed what Winston Churchill called the “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States, but in ways that even a statesman as insightful and prescient as Churchill was unable to foresee.3 Their influence spreads far beyond music, beyond entertainment, even beyond the arts in general. That “the Beatles changed the world” is not show biz hyperbole. They did change the world—by absorbing, focusing, and then transmitting, with unmistakable authenticity, their formulations of and responses to the core existential problems of life in our era: the conflict between individual ambition and collective solidarity, the role played by childhood memory in forming an adult consciousness, the challenge of discovering purpose in an apparently meaningless universe, and the difficulty of finding personal fulfillment while striving for professional accomplishment. As this book will demonstrate, a long and winding road leads to the Beatles: behind them lies the literary/cultural tradition of

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Anglo-American Romanticism, and they were fortunate enough to have been born at the right place and time to reap the harvest sown by the founders of that tradition. But John, Paul, George, and Ringo— again, through a serendipitous combination of luck and genius—also managed in their songs to evoke the essential, unchanging elements of human nature, and by speaking authentically and movingly about those timeless truths, secured for themselves a relevance that has transcended, and will continue to transcend, the precise historic circumstances that inspired those songs. By definition, genius is beyond explanation, and much of what the Beatles accomplished while performing and composing—especially as a group, since their whole was greater than the sum of their parts—cannot be parsed and analyzed. Their achievement stands as one of humanity’s great treasure troves—a collection of gems that will bring delight to people around the world for centuries to come. But like all great artists, the Beatles entered the human pageant at a certain moment, and took advantage of the treasures amassed by others. In Liverpool they were at a particularly busy intersection of the long and winding road between Britain and America—between an ancient, deeply rooted culture and a young, vigorous, swiftly evolving culture, and being born in that place at that time played an indispensable role in their achievement. Appreciating the fullness of that achievement requires us to follow the long and winding road back to its beginning, back to the eighteenth century, when northern British folk music—the ancestor of the country, blues, and rock music that entranced the boys who would become the Beatles—arrived in Appalachia with a quarter to a half million northern English and Scots-Irish immigrants between 1717 and 1775. The long and winding road also leads us back to the early nineteenth century, when Romanticism—a literary movement that would eventually become the West’s dominant cultural paradigm—was starting on its course to overturn centuries of settled ideas and unquestioned assumptions about politics, religion, and selfhood. After completing its westward course from Britain, the long and winding road reversed direction, back east to Liverpool, where it found the Beatles. Heading west yet again in what Robert Weisbuch has called “the Atlantic double-cross,” the road brought the Beatles to the United States, where they landed, with all the triumph of conquering heroes, in early 1964. In embracing them, America embraced once and for all a previously deemphasized aspect of its British cultural heritage: the northern traditions of folk individualism and Romantic self-determination. Those traditions, which were already firmly in place in the most populous region of the United States,

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the southeast, spread to the rest of America after the Beatles made rock and roll—a derivative of country and blues, the endemic folk music of the southeast—the dominant style of popular music in the nation. Folk individualism and self-determination were also exported, through the Beatles and the rock and roll culture that rose up in the Beatles’ wake, to the rest of the world. It is no exaggeration to say that the Beatles initiated a new historical era. As this book will demonstrate, others played essential roles in bringing about the sweeping social, artistic, and political changes that occurred between the mid-1950s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. But the Beatles and Beatlemania are the linchpin between what existed before them and what came after them. They modeled the contemporary self, not just in the English-speaking world but around the globe. A specific culture—Anglo-American Romanticism—spawned them; but they, in turn, created a culture as well, the first universal culture the world has ever known: the culture of Rock Romanticism, which can be seen in Topeka and Tokyo, London and Lahore. Rock Romanticism is the mode of selfhood that the Beatles, encapsulating more than two hundred years of musical/cultural exchange between Britain and America, introduced when they catapulted to worldwide fame in 1964. Rock Romanticism distils two fundamental aspects of the literary Romanticism from which it derives: the celebration of folk culture for its sincerity and truthfulness; and the assertion of the dignity and significance of ordinary individuals. From American country and blues and rock and roll music, the Beatles took a powerful infusion of folk energy, and linked themselves both with American culture and the northern English folk traditions of their home region. Those traditions had been altered and intensified during their sojourn in the cricks and hollers of the Appalachian backcountry, where the old northern British folk music and the culture it preserved met other folk traditions—especially African and Caribbean—before evolving into country and blues, and traveling back across the Atlantic after World War II. This music struck the boys who would become the Beatles as gloriously raw and honest—it represented the spontaneous upwellings from the souls of unsophisticated, and therefore primally authentic people. Country, blues, and rock was music that mattered—the antithesis of the finger-popping, ring-a-ding-ding schmaltz of crooners like Sinatra and Bobby Darin. The hierarchy of aesthetic values in Rock Romanticism is the same as that of late eighteenth-, early nineteenth-century Romanticism: both glorify earnestness and emotion, and reserve their highest praise for the artless effusions of people who live authentic and passionate lives,

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and for whom death and love, sorrow and joy were vivid realities instead of academic abstractions. Literary Romanticism on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries celebrated folk arts for their emotional sincerity and truthfulness, qualities that defined American country and blues. Most important, the country and blues songs that captivated John, Paul, George, and Ringo were composed, played, and sung by common folks—many of them on the economic and racial margins of society. Like their historically prior counterparts—the nineteenth-century poets and early twentieth-century Bohemians—Rock Romantics assert the preciousness and nobility of the common person. Rock Romantics only differ from the great nineteenth-century Romantic painters, poets, and composers—Van Gogh, Wordsworth, Chopin—in their choice of artistic media: instead of taking up pen and ink, or brush and canvas, Rock Romantics buy a guitar, learn three chords, and pour out their aching joys and luscious pains in song for patrons at open mic nights at the local coffee bar (or, increasingly, for their family and friends through home-engineered CDs burned on PC-based studios). But while Rock Romantics may express themselves via different means, their creative impulses and their works arise from and convey the same faith that spurred on their nineteenth-century forbears: because the same heart beats in every human breast, my spontaneous and honest expressions of my deepest thoughts and feelings will be intelligible and relevant to you. To a greater degree than anyone who came before them, the Beatles established this mode as the fallback stance of contemporary selfhood. In addition to celebrating the hopes, aspirations, and feelings of the common person, John, Paul, George, and Ringo were ordinary. They claimed no extensive musical, literary, or philosophical training, employed no specialized jargon, announced no lofty ambitions. The vocabulary and ideas of their songs—in the early days— were simple, and grew not increasingly complex, but more personal as they matured. Though they were part of a group, they retained their individual identities—that is, they lived in the same flux of conflicting imperatives and moral dilemmas that all of us occupy. When they were still hardly more than boys, John, Paul, George, and Ringo found themselves in the center of the most intense maelstrom of celebrity worship the world had ever seen, yet we knew them all by their first names, and their affable smiles. At once instantly recognizable, and touchingly intimate in singing about wanting to hold your hand, the places they remember, and their cries for help, they were also cut off by the impassable barrier of their unprecedented stardom. They were

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ordinary and extraordinary, at the same time, as Romanticism makes everyone ordinary (because we all share humanity) and extraordinary (because each person is unique, precious, and significant). In attributing both the Beatles’ immediate success and their continuing appeal to their unwitting encapsulation of two hundred years of Anglo-American cultural evolution, I depart from previous critics, historians, and other experts who have tried since the dawn of Beatlemania to account for the mysterious power of the Fab Four to remain in the usually fickle spotlight of pop music fame. Explaining the initial outburst of Beatlemania is easy, for at first the phenomenon bore all the hallmarks of previous pop music crazes: in the 1950s, teenagers had screamed for and mobbed Elvis Presley and Pat Boone, and before that, Frank Sinatra; and as Newsweek magazine pointed out in a February 1964 cover story about the Beatles, in the nineteenth century “women shrieked, fainted, and fought when Franz Liszt sat down at the piano.”4 Musical fads like these, though, are notoriously short-lived, a fact demonstrated by the recurrent appearance—and quick disappearance—of scores of one-hit wonders since the explosion of pop music after World War II. The Beatles are unique in the degree to which their popularity and appeal have not been dimmed by the passage of time and the aging of their original fan base. This aspect of the Beatles epiphenomenon is at once the most remarkable and most difficult to account for. The nostalgia of baby boomers for the music and associated experiences of their youth alone cannot explain it, for the Beatles now have millions of fans who were born long after the hippie culture of the 1960s had given way to 1970s hedonism and 1980s neo-conservatism. Clever marketing also cannot explain the Beatles’ longevity, for until the mid-1990s, interpersonal tensions and legal entanglements dating back to the break-up prevented or delayed the release of the group’s work in the new formats that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. The Beatles’ catalog did not appear on CD until late February of 1987, nearly four years after compact disc players first appeared and made vinyl records obsolete. Their second film, Help!, was not issued as a home video until 1987, and Let it Be, the last of the five films the group made together, still has not appeared on DVD. As of this writing, Beatles songs are still not available for download on iTunes, the casualty of a 2002 trademark violations lawsuit between Apple Corps and Apple Computers. Perhaps genius needs no explanation. John Lennon said as much when, in 1964, at the height of Beatlemania, he was asked “Why the Beatles?” “Why not?” answered the group’s founder, with characteristic wit.5 In 1970, when it was all over, Lennon was similarly

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cryptic when asked to account for the phenomenon: “We were just a band that made it very, very big. That’s all.”6 “I’ll always think of the Beatles as a great little band, nothing more, nothing less,” said Paul McCartney in 1995.7 Statements like these comfort the Beatlemaniac, for they preserve the magic of the Beatles phenomenon from the reductiveness of the sorts of historic and sociological analysis of Beatlemania that have periodically appeared since the summer of 1963. Often, the first outburst of Beatlemania is explained as a response to the historic circumstances and signal events in Britain and America during the early- to mid-1960s. On both sides of the Atlantic, conditions were propitious for the emergence of a feel-good group like the Beatles, for both England and the United States suffered major public traumas in 1963. In June, British Secretary of War John Profumo resigned after admitting to a sexual relationship with call girl Christine Keeler, who had been having a concurrent affair with a Soviet naval attaché. The Profumo Affair, with its tawdry accounts of aristocrats and cabinet ministers cavorting in sex games and nude pool parties, shook public confidence in Britain’s ruling elite, eventually toppling the United Kingdom’s first conservative government since the end of World War II, when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (who claimed ill health) resigned in September of 1963. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22 sent the United States into a state of shock and mourning not seen since the murder of Abraham Lincoln nearly a century earlier. Young, good looking, witty, and charismatic, the Beatles and their upbeat music offered both Britain and America consolation and escape from the troubles of that tumultuous year. Seeing Beatlemania in its historic context can help account for its initial surge, but gets us no closer to understanding how the Beatles have sustained, year after year and generation after generation, their astonishing appeal and ability to inspire the kind of fascination they do. Clearly the Beatles captured the temper of their times, but also somehow managed to touch on and represent something deeper than a passing correspondence with the spirit of the age. Every age has such a spirit, which manifests itself as a succession of transient fads and trends, each of which supplants the previous craze and thereby gratifies the human hunger for novelty. But beneath these passing crazes and fancies lie the deeper, more slowly evolving ideals of the age, the set of shared assumptions about life that give the great eras (classical, medieval, modern) their distinguishing characteristics. And, beneath those lie the essential human experiences, emotions, and

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desires that do not change over time and therefore constitute what Oscar Wilde called “that dreadful universal thing . . . human nature.” 8 That human nature really does exist, and is not—as some branches of contemporary literary criticism and philosophy would have us believe—just a poetic convenience or a political fiction appears to be confirmed by recent cognitive mapping research into the physical bases of emotional, linguistic, and aesthetic experiences. Using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures electrochemical changes in the working brain, neuroscientists have demonstrated that particular regions of the brain consistently “light up” under the stimulation of certain words, musical phrases, and states of feeling. This has led to the creation of a new branch of aesthetic theory and criticism, based on the hypothesis that there are “literary universals”—transsubjective aesthetic techniques and images that are effectively hard-wired into the human brain, and that can be found in literary and other aesthetic objects that arise in unrelated chronological or cultural contexts.9 Crazes come and go, but the power of a particular work of art or body of works to extend its appeal across cultural boundaries or to continue to touch people long after their novelty and topicality have faded—as the Beatles have done—depends on the degree to which those works arise from and evoke the fundamental aspects of human experience. The more superficially a mass-culture phenomenon reflects the temper of its times, the weaker its capacity for sustaining the public’s attention after the spirit of those times has changed. Those—like the Beatles—who continue to appeal to people long after the precise historic circumstances of their emergence have been forgotten are able to do so because they draw upon, and manifest, the deeper, less transitory dimensions of the spirit of their age. The longer their appeal lasts, moreover, the more comprehensively and closely they touch upon human universals. Much of the Beatles’ ability both to speak to three generations and to appeal across national and cultural boundaries stems from their having evoked—in their songs, films, and the oft-told story of their time together as a group—such human universals as love, hatred, longing, joy, sorrow, and loss. Beatle songs strike each new generation that has come along since the 1960s as relevant and timely because— serendipitously—they touch upon these timeless aspects of life: emotional states and experiential situations that are, in effect, hardwired into the human neural system. But there is also a historically contingent reason for the Beatles’ initial and continuing appeal. Their cultural roots go much deeper than is commonly thought. Instead

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of merely hearkening back to late 1940s and early 1950s country, blues, and rock, the Beatles drew on and evoked in their songs and their personalities the history of Anglo-American cultural and artistic evolution from the colonial period to the end of World War II. In the Beatles two streams of English-speaking culture, the British and the American, the old and the new—streams that had run in parallel between 1783 and 1945—reunited once and for all. In bringing these two nations together, the Beatles embodied and displayed—in the most spectacular fashion the world had ever seen—the spirit of the Romantic age: the tenor and temper of Anglo-American culture that dates back to the 1790s, a decade, like the 1960s, in which new social, political, and artistic paradigms suddenly emerged. Politically, the relationship between Great Britain and the United States is a simple story of rupture and reconciliation. After the revolutionary war disrupted cordial political relations between the former colony and its mother country, the national interests of Britain and the United States gradually coalesced in the nineteenth century, and finally united in the middle of the twentieth century in an AngloAmerican economic and military alliance that spearheaded the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II and faced down the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The cultural relationship between the world’s two great Anglophone nations, though, is more complex, encompassing waves of admiration and repulsion. The ties between American and British literature were not severed by Yorktown or the Battle of New Orleans. Throughout the nineteenth century, American writers worked in the shadow of their British cousins, half-admiring, half-envying English literature’s deeper tradition and greater self-confidence. During the War of 1812, when political relations between the United States and Britain were as bitter as they would ever be, Washington Irving corresponded warmly with Sir Walter Scott. Charles Dickens had a huge American readership in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The New England Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau championed the writings of Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle and English poet William Wordsworth. Throughout the 1800s well-read Americans knew and admired Coleridge and Dickens and Thackeray and Tennyson and George Eliot better than they did Poe, Whitman, and Melville. American churchgoers worshipped with the King James Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer well into the 1960s. In the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States became one of the most multiethnic societies the world has ever seen. Despite infusions from dozens of other cultural traditions, though, American culture has remained predominantly British. Though only

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slightly over 8 percent of Americans claimed English ancestry in the 2000 census, 82 percent of Americans speak only English at home. Even more important, the literary and artistic paradigms to which Americans are exposed in schools and popular culture are still, even in this age of multiculturalism, heavily weighted toward the classics of the British canon. Since 1995, Jane Austen’s novels have been adapted into eleven mainstream films. Shakespeare’s works are still a part of almost all American high school English curriculum, and every year brings more movie adaptations of the Bard of Stratford’s plays. American schoolchildren throughout the 1920s and 1930s memorized and recited British poems like Rudyard Kipling’s “If” and P.B. Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” read British novels like Treasure Island and Tom Brown’s School Days, and flocked to films about Britain like Goodbye Mr. Chips, Mrs. Miniver, and Fire Over England. In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans eagerly consumed more British plays and films: My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins, Oliver! Even for Americans of other ethnic backgrounds, Britishness has always been a fallback ethnicity, available through Mother Goose, Lewis Carroll, and “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing.” The still ongoing Harry Potter phenomenon stands as yet another example of this far-reaching American love of all things English. Cultural admiration also flowed the other way across the Atlantic, especially in the twentieth century. With the rise of cinema as the dominant form of mass entertainment after about 1925, British popular culture received a potent infusion of Americanism. To the English the United States was a bright, wide open land, throbbing with elemental energy and brimming with opportunity. In the big band era of the 1930s and 1940s it was difficult to distinguish an English swing band from an American one. Even the vocalists in British bands seemed to lose their English accents when they sang; and the top bandleaders went to great lengths to package themselves as Americans. Geraldo and Ambrose, who led extremely successful dance and radio bands in 1930s Britain, both had hits with a song titled “San Fernando Valley,” which was written by another English bandleader, Joe Loss—what percentage of their British listeners could have had the slightest idea what this southern California locale was like? At first, the Beatles, like almost all other musicians dreaming of success in Britain, looked westward for their inspiration and material. Touring the social clubs, dance halls, and holiday camps around Britain, before the onrush of their fame, they played American music— Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” and Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman”—which they studiously cribbed from scratchy country-western and rhythm and blues records.

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But this music—so archetypically American to their ears—was actually a hybrid of the old and new world cultures that had met and mixed on the North American continent. Skiffle—the British version of American folk music that swept through England in the mid1950s, and which was the prime motivator for John, Paul, George, and Ringo to seek musical fame—illustrates how the Atlantic doublecross of British and American pop culture united these two great Anglophone nations. Skiffle began when Lonnie Donegan, a banjo player with the Chris Barber Jazz Band, struck out on his own in early 1956 to record “Rock Island Line,” a song originally sung by American folk-blues pioneer Leadbelly in the 1930s. “Rock Island Line” was an instant hit: Donegan left Barber and went out on his own, starting a nationwide craze that by 1957 reportedly had guitars selling at Hessy’s music shop in Liverpool at the rate of one per minute.10 Donegan followed “Rock Island Line” with another Leadbelly song, “Cumberland Gap,” which went to number one in April 1957. Skiffle bands—with their simple instrumental lineup of guitar, tea chest bass, and washboard—sprung up all over the British Isles, playing American folk, blues, and country songs: “Freight Train,” “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” “Alabamy Bound.” John, George, and Ringo all started their musical careers in skiffle combos; in the earliest known photos of John Lennon’s first band, the Quarry Men, taken at the Rosebery Street centenary party in Liverpool on June 22, 1957, the washboard and tea chest bass are both visible.11 But Donegan’s “Cumberland Gap,” named for the Appalachian mountain pass that connects the Bluegrass region of eastern Tennessee to the old southeastern seaport cities of Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia, was actually an old British tune. An uptempo version (with new words) of an ancient Scots-Irish ballad titled “Bonnie George Campbell,” the song had originally come over to North America with the latest and largest wave of British immigrants to America’s shores, the migration of between 250,000 and 400,000 English borderers, Scottish highlanders, and northern Irish Ulster Protestants to the trans-Appalachian backcountry between 1717 and 1775. Skiffle, like the 1950s country, blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll songs that made up the repertoire of the Quarry Men, shows its provenance in the old northern British folk ballads, reels, and hymns through its harmonic structure: it is based on the simple I-IV-V chord progression of G, C, and D7 that John Lennon’s mother employed in teaching her son how to play Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” in early 1957.12 That the I-IV-V progression is ubiquitous in folk, country, blues, and rock music points to the common ancestry

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these American tunes share with the northern British folk tradition. Immigrants brought the old songs to the remote cricks and hollers of the American southeast, where ballads of outlaw heroes, spurned lovers’ laments, and spirited jigs and reels met other traditions—most notably, West African and Caribbean rhythms and call and response work chants and field shouts. These encounters spawned the American musical hybrids that have since spread around the world—blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, and finally rock and roll. But the process of hybridization started with a British import. So when Lonnie Donegan presented “Cumberland Gap” to rapt audiences of British teenagers as an example of genuine, pristine American folk culture, what they were really hearing was an Englishman’s recuperation of an originally British folk song that had been altered by its transplantation in America. “Bonnie George Campbell” had traveled across the Atlantic, become “Cumberland Gap,” and now had traveled home again. And when the Beatles exported their own style of country, blues, and rock-inflected songs to the United States in late 1963, they weren’t merely imitating those American styles, or playing America back to itself with a British twist. They were continuing a process of cultural exchange that had been going on for two centuries. When the Beatles burst onto the world’s stage in late 1963, they forged the final link in a chain that pulled the two great Anglophone nations once and for all back into the same cultural orbit. Thanks to the “friendly invasion” of the British Isles by three million American service men and women during World War II, the Beatles grew up in an England in which the cultural relations between the United Kingdom and the United States were closer than they had ever been since the colonial era. And just in time, too: with the dissolution of much of the British Empire by the end of the 1940s, a state of almost constant economic deprivation at home in the 1950s, and the Suez crisis in 1956, the United Kingdom was in a sorry state, and Britain needed America’s optimism, can-do spirit, energy, and economic power. And America needed Britain. For all its postwar military muscle and industrial might, the United States needed the United Kingdom’s stateliness—the weight of its lengthy literary tradition and its venerable political and religious institutions. Into this crosscurrent of needs stepped our Liverpudlian quartet. There is an important difference, though, between the Beatles’ take on American culture and that of Geraldo or Ambrose or Lonnie Donegan. While the Beatles started out, and to a great degree continued to the end of their time together, playing American music, they never masqueraded—as Eric Burdon and the Animals and the

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Rolling Stones did—as an American band. The Beatles were always unmistakably English. Ed Sullivan introduced them to America as “four youngsters from Liverpool,” and they became more English, more enfolded within their culture of origin, as they went through the 1960s. To Americans, especially in the first two years or so of Beatlemania, they brought a beguiling mixture of the familiar and the foreign. Though they played and sang American-sounding music, they had English accents (but different English accents—more playful—than those of Rex Harrison, Leslie Howard, and Laurence Olivier), odd hairstyles, and they used a strange argot—“fab,” and “gear.” Over the years, their Britishness became more, rather than less, pronounced. They made casual reference in their songs to things that belonged to a foreign culture, as apparently obvious to the British as they were opaque to Americans: who’s “Father McKenzie?” “Semolina Pilchard?” What’s the “Daily Mail?” What’s a “lonely hearts club band,” and what do the vaguely nineteenth-century satin military-style uniforms in bright colors signify? This reinfusion of Britishness into American popular culture played an important role in the Beatles’ immediate success. It answered a longing in the United States that had been building since the end of the colonial relationship between America and Britain, a longing for roots, for a way of linking the folk vitality of America’s relatively young culture to something ancient and grand. By retaining their English strangeness, by refusing to become either blandly American or vapidly international, the Beatles provided a living link to the depth of the British tradition. But by bringing Americans into a fuller awareness of the richness of their own folk musical heritage—and by helping Americans to appreciate the British roots of that heritage— the Beatles also demonstrated the uniqueness of America’s contribution to the Anglophone arts. The time was right for someone to bring the distinctive but genetically related cultures of the United States and Britain together. The Beatles performed that function. Seeing the Beatles in this way presses us to confront the old biographer’s question: does the man make the times or do the times make the man? In this case, the answer must be: both. Unquestionably, the Beatles were born and came of age during a propitious time to make their immediate success possible. By the early 1960s, the media of mass communications had developed the technical means to broadcast both the Beatles’ music and the ways of life they represented to every corner of the globe via radio, television, and cheap, massproduced phonograph records. In this way, the Beatles’ immediate success could be seen as a creation of the times. But if their songs

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and their message were only a reflection of the prevailing ideas of those times, the Beatles would not have the power they manifestly possess to touch, inspire, and guide tens of millions of their admirers born long after those prevailing ideas have been replaced by others. Like all great artistic geniuses, the Beatles were both of their time and for all time. Genius is a mysterious faculty, beyond the power of rationality to explain; but perhaps its secret lies in a fortuitous alignment between individual talent and a historic situation in which the bedrock truths of human experience lie close to the surface, and are therefore more readily discerned and easily disseminated by people of genius than at other times. There is no saying why this kind of genius falls to some and not to others. As unlikely as it might seem, though, these humble Liverpool lads must have possessed this inexplicable faculty. The other reason for the amazing staying power of the Beatles’ appeal, though, is their unwitting embodiment of another longstanding historic trend: Romanticism. In fact, the coalescence of American and British culture and Romanticism occurred simultaneously. At about the same time that the great northern British folk migration to the American backcountry was ending in the late 1700s, Romanticism—which celebrated the aesthetic and moral superiority of traditional people like the Scots-Irish—was beginning as a new paradigm for philosophers and writers. Widely underappreciated as just one in a series of successive aesthetic eras, Romanticism was in fact a major cognitive upheaval in human history, tantamount to an evolutionary step. “Romantic thought and literature represented a decisive turn in Western culture,” literary critic and cultural historian M.H. Abrams has written.13 Under Romanticism, the old assumption of essential human wickedness, upon which institutions of religion and government had been based for nearly two millennia, gave way to an assumption of essential human goodness, and as a result, almost everything changed. In the Romantic paradigm, the autonomous individual emerged as the significant unit of all cultural expression, and the ordinary, as opposed to the ornate, became the fallback aesthetic standard. Most important of all for the Beatles phenomenon, though, Romanticism never ended, and is still the prevailing cultural paradigm in the West. Popular culture—the only real culture there is—remains unapologetically Romantic, because the poems, songs, plays, paintings, and novels, that people actually choose to see, hear, and read invariably express the sensibility of a single consciousness. Since its emergence in the late eighteenth century, Romanticism had been gaining territory

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and influence, but it needed something to effect its worldwide triumph. It found that something in the Beatles, who through their gift of genius—and luck of being in the right place at the right time— manifested the brightest hopes, the thorniest difficulties, and the darkest dreams of the Romantic revolution. Romanticism created the Beatles and they, in turn, spread Romanticism to the world. Their thoroughgoing affirmation of the dignity and significance of individual experience expressed the Romantic spirit of the age. Ours is the era in which the idea of individual significance is cherished more widely and fervently than at any other period in human history. It is sometimes lamented that this idea, carried too far, encourages the excesses of tawdry confessionalism most spectacularly glimpsed on today’s daytime television talk shows. There is some truth to this: were people not inculcated via the arts and education with the conviction that everyone matters, there would probably be less motivation for them to assert their significance negatively by obtruding their failings and frailties on the public. But in spite of these grotesqueries, the idea that individuals are significant, and that, on some level, our experiences and feelings can be communicated across linguistic and cultural boundaries, is much to be preferred to its alternative, that is, that individuals are insignificant, and that human motives and aspirations are time and culture bound, rather than universally translatable and intelligible. One of the most important results of this idea from the standpoint of the Beatles phenomenon is the way in which the assumption of universal significance has elevated pop music to the status of art form. When ordinary people are bestowed with significance, their relatively untutored reflections on the meaning of their existence acquire the status previously reserved to self-consciously “high” art. At the outset of his study of the Beatles, Wilfrid Mellers observes that as recently as fifty or sixty years ago, the composer of serious music—that is, music with self-consciously artistic aspirations— would have “recognized that there was another branch of the musical profession wherein he could make money and attract a sizeable audience: but would have rejected this popular field on the grounds that, in pandering to the baser instincts for escape and entertainment, it denied the artist’s birthright—which was to make people more, not less, aware of pain, anguish, ecstasy, etc., as experienced by a human being (meaning me) endowed with a more than average quota of sensitivity.”14 Today, however, the “lonely ‘art’ composer’s” automatic assumption that writing for a mass audience detracts from his artistic seriousness is more difficult to sustain, not because pop

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has become less commercial, but because (Mellers wrote) “one can hardly deny that pop now embraces music that cannot be described as entertainment, let alone evasion. . . . To a large number of young people, pop music seems passionately to matter.”15 Through the more than thirty years that have passed since Mellers wrote these words, the Beatles have continued passionately to matter to millions around the world. The Beatles mattered in the 1960s and still matter today because they embody the spirit of our persistently Romantic age, which is that ordinary individuals matter. Before the Romantic revolution, mainstream Western thinkers largely endorsed the Judeo-Christian notion of human nature as fallen from the god-like eminence that surrounded its creation. Even the avowedly secular philosophies of the Enlightenment, which sought to understand human nature scientifically, tended to depict prehistoric humanity as a horde of primordial savages, animals who had been civilized—to varying degrees—by the institution of culture. The most influential exponent of this pessimistic view of human nature was the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Hobbes saw each individual’s self-regard—or conviction of the dignity and worth of his or her own life—as a potential source of discord and violence in human communities. According to Hobbes, the innate tendency of individuals to view themselves as unique and significant breeds conflict when people feel that others do not adequately recognize their specialness. Injured dignity breeds resentment, which if allowed to follow its inevitable escalating course, spirals into duels, vendettas, feuds, and, eventually, wars. In Hobbes’s famous phrase, life in the state of nature is “nasty, brutish, and short,”16 because, like animals, precivilized humans must continually have battled each other for that most scarce of collectively valued commodities, the esteem of others. Hobbes contended that civil society protects people from the worst tendencies of what he called their “natural passions” both by establishing punishments for wrongdoers and by providing a substitute means of indulging our socially dangerous love of the exercise of personal power. In Hobbes’ view, tribal and national identity, and the concentration of civic power in a figurehead, serve a compensatory purpose for recently civilized animals looking for a socially acceptable outlet for their natural desires to avenge even the slightest injuries and insults. Though deprived of the chance to lash out themselves, people in Hobbes’ state of nature are able to participate, if only vicariously, in acts of retribution performed by the state on their behalf. In this way, the savagery to which our innate self-regard naturally leads us is transformed from a threat to the social fabric into a source of societal cohesion.

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The most successful philosophical challenge to this dim view of human nature was mounted about a century later by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1788). Like Hobbes, Rousseau saw self-regard as instinctual. But instead of viewing each individual’s conviction of significance as a defect, Rousseau exalted it as something true: each person regards him or herself as special and unique because, said Rousseau, in the state of nature, that’s what we were. For Rousseau, life before the invention of civil society was not a war of all against all, but an uninterrupted bliss of solitude. In his hypothetical re-creation of prehistoric humanity, each individual lived a solitary and self-sufficient life; there was no need to group into potentially fractious social structures. In opposition to Hobbes, Rousseau saw society as the cause, rather than as a means of preventing, the discord and bloodshed with which human history brims. By its very nature, society forces intrinsically freedom-loving individuals to interact with and eventually develop crippling dependencies on one another. In this way, said Rousseau, we lost the magnificent freedom of self-determination that suffused our pristine lives; and this, he found, is the source of the malaise and low-grade resentment that blights life in the modern world.17 Rousseau’s paean to the lost glories of individuality and freedom resonated deeply with the times in which he lived, and in many respects set the stage for the Romantic revolution. Though his works, including the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, were written in response to specific social and governmental controversies of his day, their most lasting effect was a generalized revival of faith in the dignity and worth of the average person. Just as the Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment views of humankind’s natural savagery served to justify various forms of political and religious autocracy, Romanticism’s optimistic view of human nature was enlisted to support the creation of freer governmental and social institutions. From Rousseau, literary and political Romanticism took their distinctive precepts. The Romantic views civilization as corrupting rather than ennobling human nature; the Romantic therefore distrusts all those on whom civilization has bestowed power: aristocrats, kings, priests, and magistrates. Because life before the invention of civil society was an uninterrupted bliss of solitude, the Romantic avoids crowds, and is happiest when alone in a pristine wilderness. Because education is a product of civilization that distorts our innate wisdom, the Romantic disparages books and formal scholarship and embraces learning through direct observation and experience. Because religion shames us into denying our natural impulses with

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“thou shalt nots,” the Romantic views churches with suspicion, if not disgust. And because class and other social distinctions are oppressive impositions by those who would protect their unjustly asserted power, the Romantic asserts an underlying universal fraternal bond with all who share the human form. In its mistrust for systems of inherited power and its assertion of universal human bonds, Romanticism reveals its democratizing tendencies. In the arts especially, Romanticism is more democratic than the classical and neoclassical paradigms that came before it. Those systems required the neophyte artist to undergo an arduous apprenticeship during which the novice had to master the canonical forms—the classical poetic meters and rhyme schemes, for example—before striking out on his own to try to stand on the shoulders of the ancients. The Romantic aesthetic, by contrast, embraces spontaneity and trusts the ability of the untutored genius to speak the truth of the heart without long years of formal training. Thus neophytes like the Beatles needed only to learn the I-IV-V chord progression before proceeding to write, play, and then boldly sing their songs to the world. The path from “Love Me Do” to “Strawberry Fields Forever”—from pop hit to song poem—was a short one, because underlying both was a fundamentally Romantic presumption of universal intelligibility: since the same human heart beats in all of us, what I say about my thoughts and feelings will be heard and understood and felt by you. The momentousness of Romanticism’s assertion of deep human commonality and its continued presence at the center of contemporary culture has been widely underappreciated, particularly in college literature and history curricula, which remain wedded to a conception of aesthetic history as a sequence of eras in which the new entirely supersedes the old. Literature majors take a series of courses, each of which covers a period in which a new set of artistic ideals replaces the previous one. Under this view, Romanticism reacted against the cold rationalism of the preceding Age of Enlightenment, tempering that era’s emphasis on formal perfection with a much-needed infusion of emotion. But having achieved this limited purpose and then gone just a little too far in its emphasis on freedom, Romanticism, it is said, produced its own countermovement, Victorianism, in which emotional excess and libertinism were corrected by a reassertion of traditional moral values. But again, the argument goes, the pendulum swung too far, requiring the development of Modernism, which was in turn superseded by the era of Postmodernism we inhabit today. Undeniably, this scheme has its uses, particularly in the task of identifying and naming the tonal and formal differences between, say,

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Mahler and Beethoven or Charles Dickens and James Joyce. But to view Romanticism as merely a superannuated tradition both drastically undervalues the degree to which it broke with the past and overlooks its ubiquity in our own day. Romanticism is not just the background to Victorianism or the source of some quaint and outmoded notions about artmaking against which the Modernist and Postmodernist feel it necessary to rebel. Romanticism is a breakthrough, a cognitive upheaval, the result of which was to set in motion the intellectual and social processes that brought the contemporary world into being. To be sure, there had been brief blooms of faith in the dignity and significance of individuals at certain moments in the distant past— for instance, in Pericles’ Athens and the European Renaissance. But those happy intervals ended when abuses of the social and political freedoms that inevitably accompany deepened faith in individual significance appeared to confirm the old presumption of essential human wickedness. The cultural energies released by the “Greek miracle” and the Renaissance/Reformation sought, finally, violent outlets in the Spartan and Hundred Years’ wars. By proposing that wickedness was a product of culture rather than an essential human trait, Romanticism attacked the idea of intrinsic evil at its root, and overturned it once and for all. And by doing so it gave the arts, politics, and education the individualistic cast they retain to this day. Victorianism, Modernism, and Postmodernism did not supersede Romanticism, they elaborated it; the seeds of these purportedly independent artistic movements were in fact sown by the Romantic revolution, which, by its very nature, is continually in progress. However desperately novelists like Joyce and William Faulkner struggled to free their chosen art form from what they saw as the limitations of Dickens’ nineteenth-century “realism,” the Modernists still proceeded from the central Romantic article of faith: the validity, even the sanctity, of the perceptions and experiences of ordinary individuals. What is Joyce’s Ulysses if not an attempt to endue everyday life with the epic grandeur that pre-Romantic culture reserved to kings and magistrates? Even the most cynical and purportedly “revolutionary” of today’s conceptual and performance artists are motivated by the desire that urged Lord Byron both to live and write in a scandalously satiric mode: to shock the middle class. Even the resistance to seeing Romanticism’s centrality manifests a Romantic tenet: the desperate pursuit of originality. Treating Romanticism as an obsolete tradition to be destroyed or “deconstructed” as the first step of the ascension to aesthetic and intellectual respectability only manifests the venerable trope of Romantic rebellion

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against one’s immediate predecessors, the ultimate effect of which, paradoxically, is to grant those precursors life-giving importance. The rock band that declares itself “post-grunge” thinks that by so doing it has triumphantly exposed the pretensions and aesthetic shortcomings of the Seattle scene. But in fact, all that band has done is to identify itself as a derivative of what it purports to despise. The idea that the artist’s primary duty is to overturn established artistic forms and concerns is a Romantic invention. Before the Romantic revolution, artists and thinkers suppressed their individuality, and instead strove to accommodate their idiosyncratic visions into the confines of a relatively stable tradition. The Romantic turned this quest on its head, elevating innovation and nonconformity as the supreme aesthetic and intellectual values. Equating Romanticism with cheap sentimentality, bourgeois values, and the laughably naïve idea that art’s purpose is to crystallize the abiding truths of human existence repeats the antitraditional tradition that began in the Romantic era, and has since taken hold as an indispensable imperative in the both creating and thinking about the arts. Though it looks a little different than it did at the moment of its emergence, Romanticism comprises the background against which life in the Western world today plays out. The contemporary popular culture through which people reflect on their experiences and on the essential characteristics of human nature remains unapologetically Romantic—that is, unsophisticated, individualized, and structured by an aesthetics of spontaneity. Expensively educated young adults may encounter T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams in their university classrooms, but their late-night bull sessions and private meditations on the meaning of life are framed by the poeticized pop music world that the Beatles created and passed on to their progeny: Gwen Stefani, Pearl Jam, Kanye West, R.E.M., and Green Day, to name but a few current examples. John Lennon and Paul McCartney are the English lyric poets whose untutored language, formal experimentalism, rebellious ethos, and persistent return in their songs to the personal themes of love, childhood, and memory transformed pop music from polite entertainment into our era’s dominant medium for the establishment of a literary individuality. Like Lennon and McCartney, today’s pop stars present themselves as poets in the making; and our poetically inclined young men and women no longer retire into solitude with pen and paper, but, dreaming of fame, pick up guitars (descendents of the lyre), and pour out their private thoughts and feelings in songs for sale on the internet.

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This lyric impulse to assert the significance of one’s own individuality is not only the prevailing mood of today’s artistic and literary practice. It is also the mode of contemporary selfhood. The mantra of today’s educational institutions, repeated in posters, buttons, bumper stickers, and the tacit recommendations of pedagogical textbooks that view learning as “the construction of knowledge,” is the Romantic’s raison d’etre: “question authority.” Advertising, which lives or dies by its ability to catch the spirit of the age, consistently portrays the purchase of every product—from ubiquitous sport-utility vehicles to personal computers—as acts of bold defiance against a world that stubbornly demands mind-numbing conformity. To drive one’s Range Rover off-road through the muck is, a television ad assures us, to reexperience the glorious freedom of childhood. In the billboards and fullpage magazine spreads of an advertising campaign a few years ago, Apple Computers urged its customers to “Think different” by identifying with a pantheon of twentieth-century secular saints: Pablo Picasso, Maria Callas, Ansel Adams, Miles Davis, and, most tellingly, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, implying that if they could, all these artists would have been Mac users. Since the Romantic revolution, individualism has grown and now prevails in the West, despite occasional predictions in the twentieth century that this trend had run its course. In 1940, for example, George Orwell wrote that the outbreak of World War II marked the beginning of “an age of totalitarian dictatorships—an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.”18 Events have proved this dire prediction to have been, at worst, premature, though Orwell can be forgiven for expressing himself so pessimistically in those dark days. Still one wonders how a man as perspicacious as the author of Animal Farm and 1984 could have underestimated the power of the Romantic conceptions of liberty and personal dignity. Our belief in individual autonomy and significance is greater than ever. One can say that this belief is illusory; but one can hardly deny that the faith exists. Even today, with a new totalitarian threat rising from an unexpectedly resurgent—and violent—strain of religious fundamentalism, the Romantic conviction of the intrinsic uniqueness and worth of the individual remains strong and widespread. This book demonstrates how the Beatles came to play the crucial role in bringing this Romantic world into being. Their immediate, worldwide popularity stemmed from the world having recognized in them the key features of Romanticism, which is humanity’s most optimistic vision of its own nature. They were the culmination of the

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Romantic revolution, and the means by which this initially European philosophy of life became the cultural capital of the whole globe. Each of the following chapters outlines a step in this process, by portraying the historic and thematic ways in which the Beatles reflected the evolution and key themes of Romanticism. The first chapter, “The Transatlantic Roots of Rock Romanticism,” traces the path by which British Romanticism came to the New World, was transformed by its encounter in the United States with other immigrant traditions, and was then retrieved by a series of transatlantic musical and cultural exchanges between Britain and America, which began in the eighteenth century and continued into the 1950s. The next three chapters examine how the highly visible and individualized personalities of the Beatles themselves reflected the complex interplay of life and work in several founding figures of British Romanticism. Chapter 2, “The Nowhere Man and Mother Nature’s Son: Coleridge/LennonWordsworth/McCartney and the Productivity of Resentment,” outlines the similarities between the troubled relationships of two pairs of competitive collaborators, the first of which, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were instrumental in shaping English Romanticism, and the second of which, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, constituted the creative core of the Beatles. The nearly identical course these two relationships followed highlights the inherent conflict in Romanticism between incompatible imperatives for universal brotherhood and self-genesis. Chapter 3, “George Harrison and Byronic In-between-ness,” examines the ways in which the Beatles’ lead guitarist manifested the sensibility and key existential dilemmas of George Gordon, Lord Byron, the most famous and influential English Romantic poet. Echoing the potent cultural mythos of the Byronic self for the group, Harrison brought a degree of aesthetic and philosophic complexity to the Beatles that without him, they would not have had. Chapter 4, “Ringo Starr and the Anxiety of Romantic Childhood,” takes up Ringo’s role in the band as a representative of the Romantic preoccupation with the psychic complexity of children. At once charmingly innocent and anxious, Ringo contributes a genuinely universal experience to the Beatles: the fragile texture of the child’s consciousness, as it had been discovered and elucidated by William Blake, Wordsworth, and Lewis Carroll. Chapter 5, “‘What Matters is the System!’ The Disappearance of God and the Rise of Conspiracy Theorizing,” explores how the Beatles’ rapid transformation from pop idols to objects of mass worship reflects the gradual deemphasizing in Romantic culture of traditional religion and the coincident proliferation of a widespread conspiratorial mindset. By

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way of conclusion, the epilogue, “A New British Empire,” outlines the unique role the Beatles played in reuniting British and American culture as a new, soft empire of Romantic values and lifestyle—a historic development that hastened the fall of Soviet-sponsored totalitarianism in Eastern Europe and Russia. Will the Beatles be listened to in 100 or 200 years, as Beethoven and Mozart are listened to today? The answer to this question depends on whether Romanticism will, in the future, give way to another cultural paradigm as revolutionary as itself. But so long as our world retains the shape it has held for nearly two hundred years—so long, that is, as Romanticism remains the spirit of our age—the Beatles will be listened to, admired, and studied, and will retain their unique role as unsurpassed avatars of the cultural forces that shaped them and our era.

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Chapter 1

Th e Tr a ns at l a n t ic Roo t s of Roc k Rom a n t ic ism

There is the biggest country-and-western following in Liverpool, besides London. I heard country-and-western music in Liverpool before I heard rock ‘n’ roll. The people there—the Irish in Ireland are the same—they take their music very seriously. There were established folk, blues, and country-and-western clubs in Liverpool before rock ‘n’ roll. —John Lennon, Beatles Anthology, 10 Anyway, we wrote half of your folk songs in Liverpool. —Paul McCartney to the New York press corps, February 7, 1964

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he Beatles are the world’s best-known and most successful rock group, but their first love was country music, and they were always, at heart, a country band. This should not surprise us, since the pioneers of mid-1950s rock and the Beatles’ chief influences—Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Buddy Holly—all hailed from the American south and grew up on the old four-square hymns and songs of country and western music pioneers like the Carter Family, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Roy Acuff, and Ernest Tubb. Early rock and roll was a hybrid of several musical genres and styles—elements of jazz, blues, and gospel all contributed to rock. But rock’s inheritance from country is both most pronounced and most extensive. In the beginning, there was little distinction between country and rock: in Rock Around

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the Clock, the instrumental lineup of Bill Haley’s Comets includes a stand-up bass, a saxophone, and a pedal steel guitar, remnants of the band’s original incarnation as a western swing combo. “Elvis was country, country rock,” John Lennon observed, and “Carl Perkins was really country, just with more backbeat.”1 Country music is commonly perceived to be an indigenous American product, with its roots in the traditions of the hardy mountain folk who began settling in the trans-Appalachian wilderness in the eighteenth century. But the cultural roots of those people reach back to northern Britain, for the overwhelming majority of white immigrants to the backcountry of North America came from the five border counties of northern England, the lowlands and highlands of Scotland, and Protestant northern Ireland. When country music— and its spin-off, rock and roll—captivated the boys who would become the Beatles, it came to them with a feel at once alien and familiar. Elvis and Carl Perkins were what the northern British folk culture by which the Beatles were surrounded in their Liverpool childhoods looked like after two centuries of transplantation in North America. Through its genealogical ties to country music, rock links the values and ideals of early nineteenth-century British Romanticism to the present day. Country music celebrates and sustains the people and ways of life that were first held up as models of pristine human nature by the founders of British Romanticism, particularly William Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott. When industrialization and enclosure of ancient pastoral lands in northern Britain turned them into economic refugees, Burns’s poetic ploughmen, Wordsworth’s dignified Lake Country peasants, and Scott’s heroic Highlanders headed west, taking their traditional jigs, reels, folk songs, and the simple stringed instruments on which those songs were played to new homes in the American landscape that most closely resembled the country they left behind. In America those songs were both preserved—by the isolation of the backcountry—and altered—through contact with the folk music of other immigrant groups. The distinctly American musical forms of jazz, blues, and rock and roll resulted from this cultural cross-fertilization; but country, with its more direct ties to the ancient tradition of British folk song, forms the stock of this musical soup. Country music is also the bridge between the northern British literary Romanticism of the early nineteenth century and the Rock Romanticism of the twentieth century. Burns, Wordsworth, and Scott celebrated the country folk who lived near them because these educated and sophisticated literary men saw their neighbors in rural

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circumstances as examples of unalloyed human nature. The earnestness, passion, and spontaneity with which country folk expressed themselves and lived their lives were viewed by the Romantics as emblematic of humanity’s innate goodness—what we would all be like if our natural impulses were left unchecked by education and judicial or religious restraint. Like nineteenth-century British Romanticism, country music legitimizes untutored and unstudied expression, rebellion against constituted authority, and concentrates on individual experiences like love, childhood, and memory. In both country music and Romanticism, simplicity and passion—not wit and elegant expression—are the criteria of aesthetic excellence. A country song, said Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard, is “three chords and the truth.” It is the artless expression of an ordinary person’s thoughts and feelings, which are presumed by the composer to matter to others by virtue of the Romantic article of faith that the same heart beats in every human breast. Despite their humble origins and lack of musical and literary education, pop music poets like the Beatles and Bob Dylan became the “voices of their generation” by acting on that Romantic faith, turning their subjective perceptions and inmost thoughts into songs that seemed to capture and eloquently express the anxieties, hopes, and aspirations of millions. But the avenue through which that faith was transmitted to the poeticized pop stars of the 1960s was country music, which provided the Beatles their first and most lasting model of music that mattered.

A Country Band In the 1950s, Liverpool was the “Nashville of the North,” with the most vital country music scene in England outside of London. John Lennon recalled that the first guitar he ever saw “belonged to a guy in a cowboy suit in a province of Liverpool, with stars and a cowboy hat and a big Dobro.”2 Before he discovered Elvis and rock and roll, John’s first American music idol was Hank Williams, whom he started imitating “when I was fifteen, before I could play the guitar— although a friend had one. I used to go round to his house, because he had the record-player, and we sang all that Lonnie Donegan stuff and Hank Williams. He had all the records. ‘Honky Tonk Blues’ is the one I used to do.”3 Along with millions of other English teenagers, Lennon fell under the spell of Lonnie Donegan in early 1956, when this onetime jazz musician initiated the skiffle craze by recording a jumped-up version of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line,” which quickly went to number one in the British charts. Skiffle was, as Lennon

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explained in 1964, “a kind of folk music, American folk music with washboards.”4 Structured around simple, two- or three-chord progressions and played on inexpensive acoustic instruments, skiffle offered an easy entrée into self-taught music, and gave postwar British youth both a rudimentary musical education and the first thrill of playing in a band. Lennon’s first group, the Quarry Men, played skiffle, but even as his tastes shifted toward rock and roll, country music was still prominently featured in the group’s identity and playlist. Nigel Whalley, who briefly played tea-chest bass for the Quarry Men, designed a business card for the group that advertised their musical specialties as “country, western, rock ‘n’ roll, and skiffle.” An early 1958 photograph shows the band in boxy white jackets (recalling Marty Robbins’ 1957 hit “A White Sport Coat”) and Ernest Tubb-style bowstring ties. In addition to the skiffle standards “Rock Island Line,” “Worried Man Blues,” “Freight Train,” and “Cumberland Gap,” the Quarry Men also covered Hank Williams’ “You Win Again,” Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” Elvis Presley’s country-inflected rockabilly songs “That’s All Right, Mama,” “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry Over You,” and “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” as well as Carl Perkins’ “Lend Me Your Comb,” “Sure to Fall,” and “Blue Suede Shoes.” When the Beatles auditioned for the weekly BBC pop music show “Teenager’s Turn” in early 1962, producer Peter Pilbeam called them “an unusual group. Not as ‘Rocky’ as most, more country and western with a tendency to play music.”5 Even their choice of instruments reflected their country sensibilities. John’s first professionalgrade electric guitar was a Rickenbacker 325, manufactured by the California company that in the 1930s had pioneered the electric lap steel guitar later, the precursor of the pedal steel guitar ubiquitously heard in country music. When the Beatles’ rising fame and fortunes enabled George to buy his dream guitar in the summer of 1963, he also went country, choosing a Gretsch Country Gentleman, the signature model of Nashville electric guitar legend Chet Atkins, who styled himself the “King of Country Guitar.” The Beatles’ early love of country music and persistent country sensibilities are evident in their own compositions as well. Their first number one hit in Britain, “Please Please Me,” was John Lennon’s “attempt at writing a Roy Orbison song”; John wrote the song in the bedroom of his aunt’s house on Menlove Avenue in Liverpool while listening to country crooner Orbison’s “Only the Lonely.” Both in its rhythm guitar figure and walk-down bass lines, “I’ll Cry Instead,” from A Hard Day’s Night, recalls Elvis’s 1956 country-rock hit

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“Mystery Train,” and the first line of Lennon’s “Run for Your Life,” the final song on the Rubber Soul album, about preferring to see his girl dead rather than with another man, is taken practically verbatim from a verse of Presley’s “Baby Let’s Play House.” Other countryinflected Beatles songs include “Another Girl,” with its twanging lead guitar fills, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” a Carl Perkins-style jumped-up twelve-bar blues, George Harrison’s finger-picked “Here Comes the Sun,” which recalls Chet Atkins, McCartney’s “Here, There, and Everywhere” (covered by Emmylou Harris in 1975), Lennon’s “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” (covered by Johnny Cash’s daughter Roseanne in 1987), “I’m a Loser,” “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” “Rocky Raccoon,” and the train song “One After 909,” written early in the Lennon-McCartney partnership but not recorded and released by the Beatles until 1970. The real center of country music in the Beatles, though, is Ringo. His stage name, usually presumed to have referenced his penchant for wearing gaudy rings, actually dates from his pre-Beatle days as drummer for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. While playing a summer gig at a Butlins holiday camp in Wales, Storm christened his band members with Wild West nicknames. Storm wanted to call his drummer “Johnny Ringo”—an actual historical figure lionized as the fastest gun in the West in countless cinematic and TV Westerns—but when he discovered that another British teen singer had claimed the name, settled on Ringo Starr as Ritchie Starkey’s band name. From childhood, Ringo had been fascinated by cowboy culture, country music, and the American West, and before hitting it big with the Beatles had considered immigrating to Texas. As a Beatle, Ringo sang covers of country tunes, including Buck Owens’ “Act Naturally” and two songs by Carl Perkins, “Matchbox” and “Honey Don’t.” The three original songs by Ringo in the Beatles canon are all recorded in distinctly country mode. “What Goes On,” credited to all the Beatles but based on an idea by Ringo, is a lovelorn complaint done country style, with bluegrass harmonies and twangy electric guitar fills. “Don’t Pass Me By,” Ringo’s first solo composition, features a honky-tonk fiddle. “Octopus’s Garden,” Ringo’s contribution to Abbey Road, also gets country treatment, with its Merle Travis-style fingerpicked rhythm guitar part and George’s twangy lead guitar licks. Elvis Presley is often credited with having inspired the Beatles’ love for country music, an assumption supported by John Lennon’s frequently quoted assertion that “Before Elvis there was nothing.” As their primary model of rock and roll rebelliousness and over-the-top showmanship, Elvis played an indispensable role in the Beatles’

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development as performers. But Presley was an intermediate figure in the Beatles’ development as songwriters, for he was, for the most part, a cover artist, a singer of others’ songs. Elvis’s renditions of speeded-up blues and rollicking bluegrass songs opened the door for the Beatles to the rich history and traditions of rural American music, where they discovered Presley’s precursors, the authentic originators of rock, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, and Hank Williams. Elvis may have embodied the new spirit of teenage energy, but it was the singer-songwriters like Williams, Perkins, Buddy Holly, and Berry who modeled the poetic individuality the young Beatles yearned for. Elvis was electrifying in performance; but Williams and the rest were artists. Their works poeticized the country and blues traditions on which they drew, and transformed the three-minute pop ditty into a bona fide art object. Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, said Lennon, were “like primitive painters,” and Chuck Berry was “probably one of the all-time great poets, a rock poet.”6 Singer-songwriters like Hank Williams and Chuck Berry inspired the Beatles in the same way that Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and the poems and songs of Robert Burns inspired the first-generation English Romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott. When choosing models for artistic admiration and inspiration, the Romantic is unfailingly primitivistic, and prefers the raw outpourings of life lived close to the land to the well-crafted and sophisticated utterances of the cognoscenti. Wordsworth is largely responsible for establishing this definitively Romantic admiration of the power of the humble folk ballad to preserve and express the timeless truths of human nature, for it was Wordsworth, in his groundbreaking collection of poems titled Lyrical Ballads, who first demonstrated to the English-speaking world the artistic potential of common-language poetry based on balladry’s understated eloquence and haunting simplicity. Country music is cut from the same cloth as the folk ballads and rural legends Wordsworth and Walter Scott used as the raw material for their poetry. After all, these were the same people: before they became rural folk in the American southeast, the progenitors of American country music were rural folk in the British northwest. The ways of life and values celebrated in country music—fierce individualism, suspicion of constituted authority, simple, heartfelt religious faith, and, most important, the assertion of the dignity and significance of the ordinary and everyday—are the same as those exhibited by the rural British peasantry that inhabit the pages of Wordsworth and Scott. The Romantic admiration of rural folk and traditional culture is based on a powerful anthropological assumption. By virtue of their

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having avoided what the Romantic sees as the corrupting effects of civilization, rural folk are assumed to possess greater human authenticity. To the Romantics, the oral traditions, folk beliefs, and ancestral ways of rural people were relics of pristine human nature—what humanity was like before it was twisted by high cultural overcultivation. Preserving and commemorating rural folkways—or even composing original poetry in that simple, unadorned folk style— therefore became for the Romantic a kind of archeological expedition into human evolution. Under the Romantic presumption, the surface accretions of culture, which are assumed to obscure, rather than embellish, our natural selves, are stripped away, revealing the lost bases of essential human commonality, the characteristics that do not change with time or place. Much, if not all, of Wordsworth’s poetic project originated in this desire to lay human nature bare, and the means he employed to do so have become the fallback method of discovering the living history of humanity that surrounds us: searching out, and memorializing, the native wisdom of country folk, who, as Wordsworth wrote in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, “hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived” and therefore speak “a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets.”7 Wordsworth hoped that the common-language poetic experiment he undertook in his and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads would, as he wrote in the preface, “interest mankind permanently.” He therefore chose to set the poems in “humble and rustic” circumstances because “in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of Nature.”8 When northern British folk culture came to America, it planted the roots of country music. Country music therefore has genetic ties to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romanticism. It need not have been that way, however, for British Romanticism could have gone in a different direction. But Wordsworth determined the direction of British Romanticism; and by establishing rural culture as the basis for literary Romanticism, Wordsworth paved the way for country music to emerge, in the middle of the twentieth century, as

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the preserver and transmitter of Romanticism. The skiffle craze and the American folk revival of the 1950s were only the most recent such episodes in a long history of primitivist literary and artistic revivals, stretching back to the middle of the eighteenth century, when the songs of Ossian and Sir Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry first stirred the imaginations of those who would go on to create Romanticism.

Wordsworthian Songcatching in America For the handsome two-volume edition of his collected Poems that appeared in 1815, William Wordsworth wrote a preface and an “essay, supplementary to the preface” which, taken together, constitute the last major statement of his literary principles.9 Much of what Wordsworth wrote in these essays echoes or extends what he called the “systematic defence” of his poetic theory and practice he first propounded about a decade and a half earlier in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. But in the 1815 supplementary essay, Wordsworth went into detail about a subject he treated only sketchily in the earlier preface: identifying his poetic precursors and cherished influences by name. In light of the poetic project Wordsworth laid out in the preface to Lyrical Ballads to depict “situations from common life . . . in a selection of language really used by men,”10 one would expect him to have something laudatory to say about one of the eighteenth century’s most popular collections of English common-language poems, Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. And Wordsworth fulfills this expectation, saying “I do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the Reliques.”11 But he doesn’t stop there. To drive his point home, Wordsworth contrasts the authenticity and dignity of the Reliques with another celebrated eighteenth-century example of a reputedly ancient and native-grown poetic tradition, James Macpherson’s Ossian poems. Percy’s Reliques, Wordsworth wrote, reflect “true simplicity and genuine pathos.”12 But Macpherson’s purported “translations” of the epic songs of a third-century Celtic bard named Ossian, in Wordsworth’s view, amount to nothing but unnatural forgeries, as “audacious as [they are] worthless.”13 Nearly two centuries later, Wordsworth’s preference for Percy over Macpherson is easy enough to explain: faced with a choice between genuine and manufactured folk traditions, Wordsworth, a commonlanguage poet dedicated to tracing in his verses “the primary laws of our nature” and the “essential passions of the heart,” gravitated

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toward authentic, and away from artificial primitives. The choice that Wordsworth made, coupled with his success in creating the taste by which his poems were to be enjoyed, spelled the end of the brief eighteenth-century vogue of foisting on the public bogus “found” epics. After Ossian and the specious “Rowley” poems of Macpherson’s imitator Thomas Chatterton were exposed as frauds,14 Wordsworth suggests, we won’t be fooled again, both because we have become more skilled at spotting forgeries, and because there is little need for manufactured primeval grandeur when so many spontaneous expressions of essential human nature lie ready to hand, waiting to be collected and distilled from the ballads and folk songs with which “humble and rustic life” abounds. By opposing Percy and Macpherson, Wordsworth showed that the primitivist strain in English romanticism might have gone in two very different directions. It could have followed Macpherson’s lead in recapturing the primal through style and rhetoric—simply combine the names of actual places with a few made-up ones, throw in a few eighteenth-century archaisms, and tie it all together with inverted, Homeric-sounding syntax, as in “Oina-Morul,” the opening poem from Ossian: “As flies the inconstant sun over Larmon’s grassy hill so pass the tales of old along my soul by night! When bards are removed to their place, when harps are hung in Selma’s hall, then comes a voice to Ossian, and awakes his soul! It is the voice of years that are gone! they roll before me with all their deeds! I seize the tales as they pass, and pour them forth in song.”15 Or English Romanticism could have followed Percy in evoking the primal through the suggestiveness and understated eloquence of the traditional ballad, as in the stanza from “Babes in the Wood” that Wordsworth reproduced in the 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads to illustrate the power of common-language verse: These pretty Babes with hand in hand Went wandering up and down; But never more they saw the Man Approaching from the town.16

In both his critical writings and in his poetry, Wordsworth made the most convincing case the English literary world had yet seen for taking the naïve arts seriously. To the long list of Wordsworth’s groundbreaking poetic pronouncements and revolutionary critical judgments, we need to add one more item. In addition to persuading English-language poets who came after him to think of poetry as

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the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and to eschew the floridity of “poetic diction,” Wordsworth also encouraged readers to trust their love for the simple rhymes and lyrics on which they cut their aesthetic teeth, and to view popular culture not as the vulgar alternative to high literary culture, but as a deep well of living human truth from which the finest and most philosophically serious poetry could draw “renovating virtue.” Under Wordsworth’s influence, the poet was not only “a man speaking to men,” but also a songcatcher. And what is a songcatcher? For a start, a songcatcher’s attitude toward the oral tradition is diametrically opposed to Ossian’s, who in the final sentence of the passage above portrays himself as cut from the warrior mold he celebrates: a poet lying in wait, Ossian ambushes the heroic tales that come his way, presumably knocking them on the head before stealing their glory and arrogating it to himself as he sings “his” songs. A songcatcher, by contrast, admires and respects the land and the stories it holds, and loves the people whose everyday lives are passed under nature’s watchful care. Part rural poet, part itinerant folklorist, and part amateur anthropologist, the songcatcher is a peripatetic gatherer and interpreter of the rawest data of humanity’s ongoing project of self-understanding. The influence that traditional balladry had on Wordsworth’s writings is well chronicled.17 Less well known, though, is the influence that Wordsworth had on how subsequent poets and scholars viewed traditional balladry. Put simply, Wordsworth built a bridge between folk and high literary culture. In so doing, he changed the way that the traditional arts were viewed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The story of Wordsworth’s own songcatching and the subsequent history of Wordsworthian songcatching in America will point to the pivotal role that this early nineteenth-century poet played in shaping Anglo-American literary culture of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wordsworth’s exaltation of the virtues and far-reaching human significance of rural life led to a series of recurring folk revivals on both sides of the Atlantic, one of which was the skiffle craze of the mid-1950s that ignited the musical/poetic aspirations of the boys who would become the Beatles. Wordsworth, whose own verses exhibit a restrained aesthetics of the everyday that he drew from the natural stoicism of the rural folk among whom he lived, validated for all who came after him the artistic merits of the deeply personal, emotionally honest approach to lyric composition later embodied by the pioneer singer-songwriters of country and early rock—from Jimmie Rodgers to Woody Guthrie—who in turn influenced the chief precursors of the Beatles’ immediate influences, like Elvis, Johnny Cash, and Bob Dylan.

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This story spans more than two centuries and crosses the Atlantic at least twice, but it starts in Britain with the humble ballad. And what is a ballad? At the most elemental level, a ballad is a song that tells a story—or, it’s a story told in song. In the early twentieth century, Harvard English professor George Lyman Kittredge identified five characteristics that distinguish the ballad from other literary forms: a ballad is “a short narrative poem, adapted for singing, simple in plot and metrical structure, divided into stanzas, and characterized by complete impersonality so far as the author or singer is concerned.”18 Poets of Wordsworth’s day seeking to re-create the feel of traditional balladry frequently employed the singsong ballad stanza: alternating four beat and three beat lines rhyming ab ab, as in this, the opening of Percy’s version of “Barbara Allen’s Cruelty”: In Scarlet towne, where I was borne, There was a fair maid dwellin, Made every youth crye, wel-awaye! Her name was Barbara Allen.19

Of Kittredge’s five characteristics of ballads, the last—the “impersonality” of the author or singer—is the one that most distinguishes the ballad from folk and literary poetry. In many respects, this requirement is counterintuitive, for it contradicts the commonly held notion that lyric arises within and represents a specific and identifiable individual consciousness. Ballads, by contrast, are verses that have become detached from whoever originally composed them, and therefore have passed into collective ownership. Though ballads originated in a single mind—every ballad, presumably, had a first singer—through time they become the common property of successive generations, who might alter them with each iteration, but who also keep them alive, either as old songs passed from parent to child, or as cheap printed broadsides, sold for a half penny in the streets of London, Boston, Philadelphia, and countless other towns and hamlets. 20 Broadside ballads can be ancient, since the broadside ballad industry emerged simultaneously with the invention of the printing press. And though an old, anonymous story or song could go from a broadside into the oral folk tradition, only to be collected later and printed again, more often the process moved in the opposite direction, making broadsides—at least potentially—a source of ethnographic data. While a handful of ballad anthologies were published in England prior to 1760, 21 the literary tastemakers of the Restoration and eighteenth century tended to view a love for ballads as a quaint holdover of one’s childhood tastes, or, at best, a gentleman’s hobby,

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indulged privately. The diarist Samuel Pepys had a collection of some 1700 broadside ballads, and in a diary entry of January 2, 1666, wrote of his “perfect pleasure” in hearing an actress sing “her little Scotch song of Barbary Ellen.”22 In Spectator 85, Joseph Addison, risking the scorn of his Augustan Age readers, praised “the old Ballad of the Two Children of the Wood” as “a plain simple Copy of Nature, destitute of the Helps and Ornaments of Art.”23 What is recognized today as the English ballad revival that reached into Wordsworth’s lifetime began in 1760, when Percy’s Reliques and Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry, the first volume of the Ossian poems, both appeared. The wide popularity of both books spawned a literary fad that picked up speed as Wordsworth matured from boy to man. In 1769, David Herd’s The Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, Heroic Ballads, etc. was published; a second edition, with the slightly altered title of Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, came out in 1776. Sometime before 1800, Wordsworth saw this collection, because he copied four verses of a Herd ballad titled The Cruel Mother into his commonplace book, verses that seem to have influenced The Thorn, a gloomy narrative poem of insanity and child murder published as one of the Lyrical Ballads. Joseph Ritson brought out several anthologies of songs and ballads in the 1780s, and by the beginning of the all-important decade of the 1790s, ballad collecting and imitating emerged as something approaching a full-blown craze. Joanna Baillie’s Poems; Wherein It Is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature appeared in 1790; this collection featured “The Storm-Beat Maid,” with its Percyesque subtitle, “Somewhat after the style of our old English Ballads.” And the ballad fad was by no means limited to Britain: in 1796, William Taylor, Wordsworth’s most influential teacher and the man probably more responsible than anyone else for Wordsworth’s becoming a poet, published a translation of Gottfried Burger’s Lenora, originally written in German but based on the Percy ballad “Sweet William’s Ghost.” Walter Scott also translated Lenora for magazine publication in 1796, and later identified this as the work that made him want to become a poet. The old ballads being resurrected and imitated in the 1790s held for Wordsworth the nostalgic appeal carried by all songs of childhood. But there was an added attraction: under the influence of both Percy and McPherson, British ballad collection around the turn of the century focused on the border counties of northern England and southern Scotland, the cherished haunts of Wordsworth’s native district. One reason for this was that Percy saw the relatively uncivilized state of life on the border as the source of the traditional ballads’ emotional intensity and authenticity. Though, wrote Percy in his

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“Essay on the Ancient Minstrels,” “the old Minstrel-ballads . . . are extremely incorrect, and run into the utmost licence of metre,” they also display “romantic wildness, and . . . [the] true spirit of chivalry.” The long-disputed border between the two kingdoms, Percy goes on to say, has proved an excellent impetus for imaginative flight and as an unsurpassed aid to poetic composition: There is scarce an old historical song or Ballad wherein a Minstrel or Harper appears, but he is characterized by way of eminence to have been “of the North Countreye”: and indeed the prevalence of the Northern dialect in such compositions, shews that this representation is real. On the other hand the scene of the finest Scottish Ballads is laid in the South of Scotland; which should have been particularly the nursery of Scottish Minstrels. In the old song of Maggy Lawder, a Piper is asked, by way of distinction, Come ye frae the Border?—The Martial spirit constantly kept up and exercised near the frontier of the two kingdoms, as it furnished continual subjects for their Songs, so it inspired the inhabitants of the adjacent counties on both sides with the powers of poetry. Besides, as our Southern Metropolis must have ever been the scene of novelty and refinement, the northern countries, as being most distant, would preserve their ancient manners longest, and of course the old poetry, in which those manners are peculiarly described.24

It would be difficult to overstate how powerfully Percy’s equation of the harshness and violence of life on the northern border with poetic genuineness influenced first-generation English Romantics. It contributed greatly to the appeal of Robert Burns, whose Scottish dialect poetry evoked the romantic wildness of northern life for literati throughout Britain and America in the 1780s and 1790s. Walter Scott prefaced The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, his 1802 collection of traditional ballads and original poetic compositions on balladic themes, with a fifty-page chronicle of the intrigues, feuds, vendettas, plundering raids, and outbursts of remorseless savagery on both sides of the border, stretching from the Roman occupation to the last Jacobite rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. For Percy and his intellectual and poetic progeny, life lived close to the land— and, especially, life lived close to the land on the border—laid human nature bare, amplifying alike humankind’s innate goodness and its depravity. In his own way, Wordsworth subscribed to this view, though his poems tended to emphasize the goodness, seeing selfishness and violence as moral aberrations capable of being ameliorated, as he put it in the subtitle of Book Eight of the Prelude, by the love of nature. The

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common-language poetry project he first outlined in the 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads rests, however, on a Percyesque equation of ancient or traditional manners with essential human nature. Wordsworth’s poems depict situations from “low and rustic life,” he tells his readers, because in these circumstances “the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language.” But his assertions in the preface that the poet is a “rock of defence of human nature”25 and that the language of poetry should closely resemble “that of life and nature”26 do more than merely justify Wordsworth’s decision to adopt an unadorned style in his poems. The preface also made the most powerful argument that the English-speaking world had yet seen for the deep psychological and philosophical significance of the naïve arts, especially traditional balladry (of which American blues and country music are offshoots), the naïve art form closest to Wordsworth’s heart since childhood. Wordsworth used four lines from the Percy ballad of “the Babes in the wood” in the 1800 preface to illustrate the intrinsic elegance and dignity of common-language poetry. The important role played by balladry in the development of Wordsworth’s ideas about poetry was registered in other ways as well. In a notebook entry from 1797, Wordsworth wrote of his love for the “Scotch songs . . . Scotch poetry, old Ballads & old tales” he had known as a boy, and in 1808 he told Francis Wrangham that he had once thought of circulating some “songs, poems, and little histories” as cheap street ballads, printed on halfpenny sheets.27 Wordsworth’s most extensive explanation of how balladry influenced his poetry appeared in the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” he wrote as a sort of epilogue to volume two of his collected poems of 1815. After naming Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, and John Milton as his major influences from the neoclassical era (and dismissing Alexander Pope and John Dryden), Wordsworth identified James Thomson (1700–1748) and Percy as his most important and most immediate poetic influences. Thomson’s The Seasons, Wordsworth wrote, was “a work of inspiration”; 28 and the ballads Percy “collected, new-modelled, and in many instances (if such a contradiction in terms may be used) composed,” had “absolutely redeemed” English poetry.29 Wordsworth’s kind words for Percy bracket his scornful—and much longer—disquisition on Macpherson and the Ossianic phenomenon, which begins with a sarcastic apostrophe: “All hail Macpherson! Hail to thee, Sire of Ossian! The phantom was begotten by the snug embrace of an impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition—it traveled southward where it was greeted

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with acclamation, and the thin Consistence took its course through Europe, upon the breath of popular applause.”30 But while England and the continent rejoiced in Macpherson’s apparent discovery both of a previously unknown epic and a native-grown Homer to sing that epic, Wordsworth was not buying it: Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous Country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the World under the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious. In nature every thing is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness. In Macpherson’s work it is exactly the reverse; every thing (that is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened—yet nothing distinct. It will always be so when words are substituted for things.31

This passage presents—with remarkable economy of expression— what Wordsworth saw as the basis of traditional balladry’s lasting value. If Macpherson is the opposite of Percy, and in Ossian everything is “insulated, dislocated, [and] deadened,” it follows that in Percy’s ballads things are immediate, connected, and vivid. Can there be a better example of a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling than an ancient ballad, conceived in the throes of an elemental passion, and carried into the present by its power to communicate timeless human truth? But for all Wordsworth did to make the case for the aesthetic and philosophic validity of balladry, he generally did not—unlike some of his contemporaries—write imitations or reenactments of ballads, as Coleridge had in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “The Three Graves,” and the “Ballad of the Dark Ladie.” Though Wordsworth employed the clippity-clop ballad meter in many of his lyrics composed between 1797 and 1804, including some of the “Lucy” poems, “Expostulation and Reply,” “Tables Turned,” “We Are Seven,” and “Anecdote for Fathers,” the element of traditional balladry that found its way most frequently into his verse was the melancholic indeterminacy of the stories the ballads told. Typically, ballads start as retellings, in verse or song, of some event, societal or domestic, in which one or more people suffered. Ballads about public catastrophes, like train wrecks, ship wrecks, and gruesome multiple murders, go on at great length in detailing this suffering, with each new singer adding a stanza or two to a song about the wreck of the old ’97 or the loss of the Titanic. Country songs, however, are more closely allied to personal or

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domestic ballads, which focus on the everyday sufferings of relatively anonymous folks. These songs about lovers’ murders, betrayals, and grief tend to be shorter, and often elide most of their context-specific and historic details in order to heighten their poignancy, as in the old Scottish ballad “Bonnie George Campbell”: Hie upon the Highlands, and laigh upon the Tay, Bonnie George Campbell rode, out on a day. He saddled, he bridled, and gallant rode he, And hame came his guid horse, but never cam he. Out cam his mother, dear, greeting fu sair, And out cam his bonnie bryde, riving her hair. The meadow lies green the corn is unshorn But bonnie George Campbell will never return. Saddled and bridled and booted rode he, A plume in his helmet, a sword at his knee. But toom cam his saddle, all bloody to see Oh, hame cam his guid horse, but never cam he.32

“Bonnie George Campbell” is fairly typical of the Scottish border ballads that Wordsworth grew up hearing, and that he could have read in the collections and anthologies available during his lifetime. The appeal of a ballad like this to the Wordsworthian poet goes beyond, though, its touching evocations of the authentic details of rural life: the green meadow, the unshorn corn, and the “bonny bryde, riving her hair.” Its deeper significance to Wordsworth’s development as a poet lies in the hauntingly incomplete story the ballad tells, and the way it demonstrates the poetic power of raising, but not answering, questions in the auditor’s mind. Who is Bonnie George Campbell, and what happened to him? Is he alive or dead? What other hopes of the unidentified speaker have been dashed by his disappearance? In the poetry for which he is most remembered—the lyrics and autobiographical verses composed between 1797 and 1807, Wordsworth frequently employed this balladic ambiguity, as in the “Lucy” poems “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” and “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”: She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye!

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—Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me! A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees.33

Poems like this evoke the speaker’s peculiarly mingled feelings of grief and awe by leaving out the narrative details one would expect to encounter in conventional elegies and laments. Who is Lucy? Why did she die? What does it mean when the speaker of “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” focuses his attention in the middle stanza on a “violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye?” And in “A Slumber,” the pronoun “she” appears in both stanzas— but with no clear antecedent. Is the antecedent the “spirit,” or the unnamed female who rolls around with rocks and stones and trees? Much of the power of these two justly admired poems may be traced to the way that they, like “Bonnie George Campbell,” employ a spare aesthetics that produces a poignancy all the more powerful for its having been muted. They point at, but do not dare to name, or speculate too deeply upon, their originating events. Like the old ballads, the Lucy poems appear to have come down to the present from a long time ago, and in the process of that transmission have been stripped of all but their most essential elements. What they don’t say invites readers to supply from their own store of feelings something approaching the emotional impact of the ballads’ precipitating events. This spare and delicate gestural style was one of Wordsworth’s most important legacies to the poets who came after him. Standing midway between the antiquarian ballad collectors of the middle eighteenth century and the common-language poets (Browning, Tennyson, Whitman) of the middle of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth both benefited from and perpetuated the ballad revival.

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But by the time of Wordsworth’s death in 1850 the old northern British ballads had all been collected from the Scottish highlanders and dalesmen of England’s border counties, and were being continuously recycled into historical romances, nursery rhymes and tales, and expendable rustic poetry by Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, Robert Southey, and others. By 1825 or so, little untouched folk culture remained to be found, even in the remotest corners of Britain. Much of that culture had been overrun by industrialization (particularly in the form of lead and coal mining) or dispersed by enclosure of ancient, semi-tribal pasturelands. In the nineteenth century, searchers for Percy’s genuine “North Countreye” singers began to look westward across the Atlantic, where a treasure trove of unspoiled British folk culture flourished after one of the largest and rapidest mass migrations in recorded history: the movement of a quarter- to a half-million people from the border regions of England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland to the backcountry of the United States between 1717 and 1775. British immigration to the regions of North America that would become the United States occurred in four waves, all of which followed the relatively small first settlement in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. The Puritan Pilgrims, who came from East Anglia to Massachusetts in 1620, founded the first sizable British colony in North America. The next wave of British immigration brought “distressed cavaliers” (and their indentured servants) from the losing side of the English Civil War to the tidewater and Chesapeake Bay regions of what is today Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland. The third wave brought societies of “Friends,” religious dissenters of various sects—Quakers, Shakers, Mennonites, Anabaptists—from England’s north midlands to settle in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Delaware River Valley. Almost all of these first three migrations were completed by about 1715, and altogether brought about 90,000 British people to North America. But this total made up less than half of even the most conservative estimate of the number of Anglo-Scots-Irish immigrants who arrived in the eighteenth century. Like most immigrants to the new world, the British borderers sought space, freedom from governmental regulation of their traditional ways of life, and economic opportunity. In North America, they settled in the landscape that most closely resembled that which they had left: the mountainous trans-Appalachian region that runs from the middle of Georgia in a roughly northeasterly direction across western South and North Carolina, western Virginia, and eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, eventually merging with the Alleghany

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Mountains in Pennsylvania. By the end of the eighteenth century, there were Anglo-Scots-Irish settlements scattered throughout what is today the American south—an area roughly the size of Western Europe, and today the most populous of the United States Census Bureau’s four national regions, with an estimated 2005 population of about 105 million, more than a third of the total population of the United States. Contemporary American southern culture still bears many signs of its having originated in the British borderlands. Many of the speech ways and linguistic regionalisms of the American south can be directly traced to the Northumbrian English dialect spoken in the Scottish lowlands, the English border counties, and Northern Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. American historian David Hackett Fischer quotes W. Dickson, the nineteenthcentury compiler of a Glossary of Words and Phrases Pertaining to the Dialect of Cumberland, who wrote “that man ‘was the term by which a Cumbrian wife refers to her husband,’ as in ‘stand by your man,’” and “that honey”—as in the Carl Perkins’ song “Honey Don’t,” which the Beatles covered—“was ‘a term of endearment expressive of great regard’ in the English border counties, northern Ireland and the southern lowlands.”34 The telltale accent and vocabulary of the American south—which found their way into the songs of Perkins, Presley, and Berry—have, writes Fischer, “become familiar throughout the western world as the English of country-western singers, transcontinental truck drivers, cinematic cowboys, and backcountry politicians.”35 The best evidence of the northern British provenance of southern American culture, though, is revealed by Appalachian place names. In a recording made for the Library of Congress in 1949, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the self-proclaimed “Minstrel of the Appalachians,” sang a North Carolina version of “Bonnie George Campbell” before going on to explain that the American title of the mountain fiddle tune derived from “Bonnie George Campbell” is “Cumberland Gap.” An ancient English dukedom that provided the name for one of the border counties, Cumberland was far and away the favorite place name bestowed by the British borderers on their new world homes. There are Cumberland Mountains in eastern Tennessee, a Cumberland Knob in North Carolina, the Cumberland river, which rises on the western slopes of the Appalachians in North Carolina, and waters the fertile Bluegrass region of southern Kentucky and northern Tennessee, and the Cumberland Gap, a mountain pass that connects the American backcountry with the southern port cities of Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina. There

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are Cumberland counties in Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and southern Pennsylvania, and dozens of towns and cities named Cumberland, both in the United States and in eastern Canada. The mountainous topography of the southern backcountry, combined with the clannish tendencies the borderers brought from their homelands, kept the Appalachians isolated well into the twentieth century. Electricity and indoor plumbing didn’t come to much of the region until the late 1930s. While this isolation put Appalachia a couple of generations behind urban America in economic development, it also kept the old British folksongs, ballads, and stories the borderers brought with them to the new world relatively undiluted by influences from other folk traditions. Well past the middle of the twentieth century, one could still find in the cricks and hollers of the Southern mountains pristine examples of northern British ballads as they had been sung in the old world two or three centuries earlier. The survival of the old British folkways in North America means that country music—which both originated in and transmitted those folkways—links twentieth-century American popular culture to the rural Anglo-Scots-Irish culture celebrated by the first generation of British Romantics back at the turn of the nineteenth century. On the surface, nothing could have looked more patently American to British youth of the 1950s than country music. It evoked for postwar Britain the American stereotypes that had developed over two decades of transatlantic popular entertainment: cowboys, frontier gunfighters, and square dance callers shouting “do-si-do.” But on a deeper level, country music was eerily familiar, and reintroduced a generation of northern Britons to the half-forgotten roots of their own culture, a culture that had been ejected from its ancient haunts, transported across the Atlantic, and then reimported back to England as part of the deluge of American pop culture that streamed eastward between the 1920s and the 1950s. Country, blues, and rock music showed how the natural liberty and personal intensity that Wordsworth and Scott admired in their rural neighbors had been preserved and even intensified by the sojourn in Appalachia, and those characteristics came through loud and clear in the exuberant performances of Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Carl Perkins. These characteristics had always typified life in rural circumstances, and in northern Britain had helped inaugurate English Romanticism. But it was not only the northern British rural culture that was preserved by demographic isolation in America. The British discovery and embrace of American country music—most spectacularly in the skiffle craze, but also in the rock and roll explosion of the mid- to late-1950s—revived Romanticism, on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Wordsworthian songcatching thus both begins and sustains transatlantic Romanticism. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the collection of British ballads that had begun a century earlier in northern England and Scotland increasingly occurred on American soil. The songcatchers continued to be spurred on, however, by a patently Wordsworthian sensibility, which saw spontaneous, originally oral folk poetry as the archetype for a new poetics that would, as Wordsworth put it in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, “interest mankind permanently.” As that authentic folk culture grew more difficult to find in Britain, literary men looked to the American backcountry, to which the old ballads had been transplanted by the immigrant British borderers. Songcatching in America occurred in two stages, the first of which was carried on by professor/admirers in the Percy/Scott mode, the second of which was undertaken by collector/poets like Wordsworth. All the collectors, though, were—to varying degrees—underwritten by the all-important Romantic presumption that the old songs sprang directly from the primordial elements of human nature. The first and most influential Wordsworthian songcatcher in America was Harvard English professor Francis James Child (1825–1896). Two factors combined to interest Child in traditional balladry: the first was his exposure, at Berlin and Göttingen University in the late 1840s, to Germanic philology’s effort to transform the “romantic dilettantism” of literary criticism into something approaching a “well-organized and strenuous scientific discipline.”36 The second factor arose from his work as general editor of a series of volumes titled the “British Poets,” published in Boston between the late 1840s and the 1870s. In the course of overseeing the publication of this series (which eventually ran to more than 150 volumes), Child repeatedly ran across examples of British balladry, and resolved in the late 1850s to edit a definitive collection of all extant variants of English and Scottish ballads. This monumental task occupied Child for the rest of his life, and culminated in the publication between 1882 and 1898 of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads in five volumes. The Child canon consists of more than 5,000 variants of 305 ballads. Child arranged his versions chronologically, earliest to latest, reproducing them exactly as they appeared in their independent sources. This degree of meticulousness, Child hoped, would introduce much-needed scientific precision into ballad study, and would correct the misleading editorial practices of earlier collectors like Percy and Scott, who sometimes omitted a ballad’s rustic indecencies or furnished incomplete ballads with their own “improvements.”

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Child’s editorial apparatus in English and Scottish Popular Ballads was designed to eliminate opportunities for such silent emendations. As a result, Child’s collection remains an enormously useful research tool, and contemporary ballad scholarship still refers to ballads and their variants with Child’s numbers. At first glance, it would seem that nothing could be farther from Wordsworth’s love of traditional balladry’s delicate fragmentariness than Child’s patently Victorian attempt to catalogue exhaustively the products of an everyday activity carried on over several centuries. In at least one respect, though, Child was a Wordsworthian songcatcher. Child shared with Wordsworth an all-important anthropological assumption about traditional balladry: the older and more rural the ballad, the more truly the ballad is presumed to reveal the essential characteristics of humanity. Ironically, this is shown by the strange fate suffered in English and Scottish Popular Ballads of the “Babes in the Wood,” the ballad that Wordsworth quoted so lovingly in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. Percy’s version of “The Babes in the Wood” appeared in volume III of Child’s first eight-volume collection of ballads that appeared in 1857–1858. During the process of expanding these volumes for the longer, definitive edition, however, Child grew increasingly committed to excluding from the collection any ballads that did not show evidence of having circulated orally before being transcribed either by collectors or broadside printers. After he was granted access to Percy’s manuscripts in the late 1860s, Child discovered that Percy’s version appeared to have been taken verbatim from a seventeenth-century black-letter broadside. Calling “Babes in the Wood” “popular” rather than “genuine,” Child omitted the ballad from the definitive collection—despite the fact that the title of his life’s work was English and Scottish Popular Ballads.37 Like Wordsworth, who in the 1815 “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” had excoriated Macpherson and equated poetic popularity with sensationalism, extravagance, and superficiality, Child deeply distrusted the ability of manufactured primitivism to represent essential human nature. Curious omissions like this notwithstanding, Child’s collection carried Wordsworthian songcatching into the next century, and sent scores of British literature professors, amateur musicologists, and nostalgic searchers for the beloved songs of their childhoods into the cricks and hollers of Appalachia, where they hoped to find a previously uncollected variant of an old ballad. The last of the great transatlantic Wordsworthian songcatchers was Cecil Sharp, renowned in England for having revived interest in traditional Morris dancing around the turn of the twentieth century. Sharp spent nine weeks of the summers

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of 1915 and 1916 walking through Appalachia collecting old British folk songs, which he published in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1917). After Sharp, though, Wordsworthian songcatching in America was increasingly pursued by the mountain folk themselves, who by the late 1920s had a new, economic incentive for learning and preserving the old ballads. Thanks to gradually rising standards of living in America’s rural areas, more country folk had radios and phonographs, which created a market for recordings of the ballads and social music that had been sung and played on cabin porches and at Saturday night barn dances for generations. In August 1927, Ralph Peer, an enterprising record executive from New York, opened the last chapter of the story of Wordsworthian songcatching in America. Peer placed an advertisement in the Bristol, Tennessee News Bulletin inviting musicians who could perform the “songs of the mountains” to audition for a contract with Victor records. The ad found its way to Maces Springs, Virginia—only twenty-six miles from Bristol as the crow flies, but an all-day journey in those days, owing to the mountainous terrain and primitive condition of the roads—where Alvin Pleasant Carter, his wife Sara, and their sister-in-law Maybelle Carter decided to take up Peer’s offer. Calling themselves the Carter Family, the trio recorded three songs for Peer, who released two of them, “The Storms are On the Ocean” and “Single Girl, Married Girl” in early 1928. The record started selling all over the south, and the American country music industry was born, with the Carters as its first family. Between 1928 and 1930, the Carters sold 700,000 records. Through A.P. Carter, Wordsworthian songcatching passed from professor-antiquarians like Percy, Child, and Sharp back into the hands of people who, like Burns, Wordsworth, and Scott, lived close to a land still brimming with vital folk traditions. During his lifetime A.P. Carter would claim credit for having composed some 300 songs recorded by the Carter Family, including many—like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Keep on the Sunny Side,” and “Wildwood Flower”—that have become standards of American folk and country music. But A.P. created out of whole cloth only a handful of songs; like Scott, he was first and foremost a collector, who adapted everything he found—from genuine Anglo-Scots-Irish ballads that had come over with the borderers to maudlin Victorian parlor-piano songs—to the raw, stripped-to-the-bone Carter Family style, as in, “Single Girl, Married Girl,” their first hit record: Single girl, single girl She goes to the store and buys

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From Bl a k e to the Be atles Oh, she goes to the store and buys Married girl, married girl She rocks the cradle and cries Oh, rocks the cradle and cries Single girl, single girl She’s going where she please Oh, she’s going where she please Married girl, married girl Baby on her knee Oh, baby on her knee.38

A.P. Carter said that he learned this song from his mother and taught it to his wife Sara, who sang it at the first recording session, selfaccompanied on a percussive autoharp, and with Maybelle on guitar, playing the melody on the base strings in between strummed chords.39 Sara could have heard “Single Girl, Married Girl,” though, from her mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother. No specific old-world source for this song has been identified; but it belongs to a class of Anglo-Scots-Irish ballad, the woman’s lament, of which there are several examples in Child’s ballads, such as number 79, “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” or 295, “The Brown Girl.” Whatever its intermediate sources, the song’s most striking feature is the spare way it evokes the young wife’s realization that marriage has irrevocably ended her childhood, even while she still calls herself a girl. The most poignant image of the brutal finality of her transformation from child to adult comes in the song’s second verse, in which the teenaged girl “rocks the cradle and cries,” comforting the baby, but unable to comfort herself. Like Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems and “Bonnie George Campbell,” “Single Girl, Married Girl” depicts a welter of commingled emotions—self-pity, regret, grief, anger, frustration—as economically as possible, with the same gestural aesthetics that structures both the old Scottish ballad and Wordsworth’s balladic lyrics. This economy of expression is the hallmark of country music, and finds its way into the Beatles as the stripped-down emotionality in the lyrics of their great personal songs of the middle period, like “Yesterday,” “In My Life,” and “Eleanor Rigby.” Verses like these are composed as if the poet posits an inverse proportion between the number of words and the depth of the feelings: the fewer words, the more profound the emotion. Or, the fewer words, the more universal the feeling, since the feelings can therefore be attributed less to the accumulated (and conventional) meanings of the words and more to something that preexists language: the hard truths of human nature and the essential

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emotions that are the same in spite of differences in clime, place, and era. In Wordsworthian Romanticism—and Wordsworthian Romanticism is the founding Romanticism of the English-speaking world—thoughts come before words, and gestures come before concepts and names. This is what Wordsworth is talking about when he criticizes Macpherson in the 1815 preface for substituting words for things in the Ossian poems. Words constitute one of the most important mediums for expressing and evoking feelings; but words are not the feelings they evoke. When words are fetishized as things, they become obstacles, rather than avenues, to the feelings that remain constant despite differences in language, culture, time, or whether the Atlantic ocean is to the west or to the east of your home. There were, of course, some obvious and significant differences between these two songcatchers, Wordsworth and A.P. Carter. Though Wordsworth lived almost all of his long life in the country, he still had a university education, and he lived, and comported himself, as an English gentleman. A.P. Carter had, at most, three years of formal schooling; and though the financial success of the Carter Family would have enabled him to live grandly in a southern metropolis like Nashville or Atlanta, he never moved from what he called his “Clinch Mountain home” in Maces Springs, Virginia. But while Carter could not have been Wordsworth, A.P. could have been created by Wordsworth: in The Excursion, the long narrative poem of 1814 that gave Wordsworth a wide English readership, the narrator— who is Wordsworth’s literary alter ego—is a man like A.P. Carter, a “Pedlar” who walks the hills and valleys selling humble rustic goods as means of supporting himself while pursuing his avocation of collecting stories and lore that illustrate humanity’s essential characteristics. Before he made his fortune in music, A.P. Carter was an itinerant peddler, selling fruit trees, seeds, and simple farm implements to his neighbors in the mountains of western Virginia. Both Carter and Wordsworth were restless, peripatetic poets, living embodiments of Bob Dylan’s observation that to write a song, “it helps to be moving.”40 Wordsworth usually composed his verses while walking; indeed, a path he built for this very purpose on the steep hillside behind Dove Cottage in Grasmere, England, can still be seen today. A.P. Carter’s daughter Janette remembers her father as a restless, thoughtful man, always walking “up and down the railroad tracks, his hands behind his back” as he composed or arranged his songs.41 And in addition to sharing these temperamental similarities, both created the taste by which they were to be enjoyed—Wordsworth as

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the poet of common language and ordinary life, Carter as the creator of the raw, elemental, and genuine style of country music. In the course of creating these new tastes, both expanded the canons of the genres in which they worked, Wordsworth by bringing the simple dignity of folk songs and ballads into literary poetry, Carter by demonstrating the universalizing potential of spare orchestration and heartfelt, unadorned performance. Both served as tutelary figures and inspirations for those who came after them. As Percy and Burns were to Wordsworth, Wordsworth was to later British and American poets—a solid ground from which Matthew Arnold and Walt Whitman could embark on their own poetic excursions into humanity’s essential characteristics. A.P. Carter has played the same role for several generations of songwriter-poets, from Woody Guthrie to Joan Baez to Bob Dylan. Carter’s songs serve as a seemingly inexhaustible font of authentic human truth, capable of restoring lost vigor to artistic forms that have been enervated by overcultivation. When the overuse of conventions makes art grow stale, go back to the roots, and reinvigorate your art with raw folk energy. This is the logic of Romantic revivalism, which says that when the way forward grows hazy or dim, go back to personal and cultural roots, as Wordsworth, casting about in Book I of The Prelude to find an original theme for his modern epic, “some work / of glory . . . forthwith to be begun”42 goes back to his own roots, his childhood, to find an epic waiting there for him. After Romanticism, artistic culture can go in two directions: it can strive for ever-greater degrees of originality, which usually incorporate the “transgressive” acts so beloved by pop culture scholars in academia today; or it can seek roots, scraping away the accretions of culture and civilization to reveal a pristine, and therefore true, vision of human nature. Both directions have their pitfalls: “transgressors” risk invoking disgust and scorn in their spectators; rootseekers risk ridicule if what they present as the authentic is received as mere corniness. An old joke about country music illustrates how quickly and easily simple truths can morph into hokey conventions. What happens when you play a country song backward? You get your woman back, you get your pick-up truck back, and you get your dog back. In their day, the rustic poetry of Burns, Wordsworth, and Scott occasionally aroused the same kind of ridicule. In an 1814 review of Wordsworth’s The Excursion, Francis Jeffrey tartly declared “This will never do!” and went on to task Wordsworth for trying to evince eloquent simplicity “by sprinkling up and down his interminable declamations a few descriptions of baby-houses, and of old

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hats with wet brims.”43 Personal preference will have to determine whether calling Wordsworth the great grandfather of country music constitutes the lowest insult or the highest praise. Suffice it to say that for all the ridicule that country music generates in blue-state America, the lives of tens of millions of red-state Americans play out against the background of country music, which serves as the soundtrack of real life. If it tells us nothing else, the story of Wordsworthian songcatching in America demonstrates that at least two Romanticism’s most bracing innovations—the breaking down of the wall separating high and popular culture and the dedication to seeing the timeless truths of humanity wherever they can be found—have been so universally accepted that it’s easy to forget there was a time when people did not believe in what David Bromwich has called Wordsworth’s “sense of radical humanity.”44 Contrary to what is taught in chronological surveys of English literature, Romanticism did not end—or become obsolete—when Victorianism arose in the 1830s. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the founding principles and central tenets of Romanticism continued to underwrite much popular culture, to justify repeated primitivist revivals in all the arts, and to sustain the association of rural life—particularly its contemporary folk expression in country music—with essential human nature. This last association played a definitive role in the rise of the Beatles, for it made country music the avenue through which they gained their first access to the self-creating—that is, poetic—potential for popular music.

Robert Burns, Hank Williams, and Music that Matters Though eighteenth-century immigration and the settlement patterns of the Anglo-Scots-Irish transplanted British rural culture to the American backcountry, and entertainment trends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sustained interest in that culture on both sides of the Atlantic, Romanticism itself was not at first a mass movement. English literary Romanticism originated in the efforts of just a few writers—chiefly Wordsworth—who wanted to replace what they saw as the stilted diction and baroque form that had dominated literary verse since the time of Pope and Dryden with poems to which everyone, not just the classically educated, could relate. This new poetry would drastically differ from conventional late eighteenth-century verse. Near the beginning of the preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth warned his readers that “They who have been

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accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title.”45 Poets have imposed these gaudy and inane works upon the public, Wordsworth explained, because they mistakenly assumed that the purpose of poetry is to please a highly cultivated taste: contemporary poets “think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation.”46 In place of these exercises in linguistic ornamentation, Wordsworth proposed not only a plainer style of poetic composition, but also a new poetic function: his poems were, he wrote, guided by a “worthy purpose,” to “discover what is really important to men.”47 Wordsworth wanted to write poems that would not merely appeal to an overrefined palate, but which would enlighten, strengthen, and purify his readers. He wanted to write poems that mattered. Much of the impetus for Wordsworth’s championing the poetry of personal importance came from the spirit of the Romantic age, which emphasized the dignity and significance of ordinary individuals to a historically unprecedented degree. But Wordsworth was also inspired to write poetry that mattered by his admiration for the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–1796). Just eleven years older than Wordsworth, Burns epitomized much of what the younger poet thought essential to transform poetry from a decorative art to a revolutionary force in manners and morals. Burns’s works illustrated the ways in which humble customs and rural settings evince the essential elements of humanity. Burns’s homespun, yet haunting lyrics demonstrated the evocative power of everyday language, a category of speech pushed to its logical extreme in the Scottish dialect in which Burns usually wrote. Above all, Burns embodied the democratic spirit of Wordsworth’s commonlanguage poetics, as this spirit was expressed in Wordsworth’s explanation of why he wrote “Michael,” his masterpiece of rural life: “to shew that men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply.”48 In an elegy of 1803, composed only seven years after Burns’s death, Wordsworth lauded his adopted poetic ancestor for having “showed my youth / How Verse may build a princely throne / On humble truth.”49 There was much more, though, to Wordsworth’s admiration for Burns than just shared tastes and aims. For the first generation of

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English Romantics, Burns embodied the new, democratic poet—a man of the people, rising from humble origins and living in ordinary circumstances, and therefore emblematic of humanity; but also possessing and capable of manifesting a fully formed literary individuality. There had been, before Burns, plenty of “rustic” poets, as well as a gaggle of barely literate or working-class versifiers from a variety of ordinary professions: washerwoman poets, poulterer poets, bricklayer poets.50 At first glance, Burns resembled these short-lived pop culture phenomena, drawing sentimental portraits of rural Scottish life in dialect poems like “To a Mouse” and “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.” But serious poetic aspirants like Wordsworth saw more in Burns than just the spectacle of an Ayrshire ploughman miraculously touched by the muses. Burns’s works furnished first-generation Romantics with both a charming picture of country life and manners and an example of how a sophisticated literary sensibility could blossom without extensive cultivation. Possessed of all the quaintness and native wisdom of an ancient, anonymous balladeer, Burns was also a contemporary and countryman: the village in which he lived his last years and died was only three days’ walk from Wordsworth’s home in the English Lake District. Fearlessly and unapologetically incorporating his own passions, joys, and sorrows into his verses, Burns showed how poetry could be both confessional—that is, individualized—and universally relevant. What Burns had, and what, by implication, the cultivated and high literary poets from whom Wordsworth sought to distinguish himself lacked, were what the later Romantic and fellow Scotsman Thomas Carlyle identified as “sincerity” and an “indisputable air of truth.”51 To Carlyle, Burns was above all the poet of the actual. “Here are no fabulous woes or joys; no hollow fantastic sentimentalities; no wire-drawn refinings, either in thought or feeling: the passion before us has glowed in a living heart; the opinion he utters has risen in his own understanding, and been a light to his own steps. He does not write from hearsay, but from sight and experience.”52 Wordsworth also saw Burns’s particular strength as his courageous resolve to write from life: Neither the subjects of his poems, nor his manner of handling them, allow us long to forget their author. On the basis of his human character he has reared a poetic one, which with more or less distinctness presents itself to view in almost every part of his earlier, and, in my estimation, his most valuable verses. This poetic fabric, dug out of the quarry of genuine humanity, is airy and spiritual:—and though the materials,

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For Romantics like Wordsworth, the fact that Burns wrote both high literary poetry and songs only bolstered the ploughman-poet’s dual identity as natural man and artist. Wordsworth equated musicality with spontaneity and emotional immediacy, because to him the human spirit sang before it spoke, and the soul resonated to the intrinsic rhythms and harmonies of the universe. “The mind of man is framed even like the breath / And harmony of music,” he wrote near the beginning of his great autobiographical poem The Prelude, there is a dark Invisible workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, and makes them move In one society.54

For Wordsworth music was thus the unsurpassed vehicle for the communication of essential human feelings, the things that matter, and have always mattered, to all people, despite differences in language, culture, sex, and even time and space. Wordsworth’s belief in the unique capacity of music to reveal the fundamental elements of human nature is evident throughout his works, but appears as the explicit theme of “The Solitary Reaper,” a lyric inspired by the 1803 tour of Scotland on which he first visited Burns’s grave. Happening upon a young woman reaping and binding grain alone in a field, Wordsworth is arrested by the “melancholy strain” of the Gaelic song she sings as she works. Though he cannot understand her words, her song appears to emanate from the deep wells of both her individuality and the cultural memories of which she is—as a peasant woman—a living repository: Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago: Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of today? Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain That has been, and may be again?55

For northern British Romantics like Wordsworth and Carlyle, Burns’s works also convey essential human feelings, because—like

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the Highland girl’s song—they lie at the intersection of the personal and the universal. As Carlyle wrote, Burns’s songs “do not affect to be set to music, but they actually and in themselves are music; they have received their life, and fashioned themselves together, in the medium of Harmony, as Venus rose from the bosom of the sea. The story, the feeling, is not detailed, but suggested; not said, or spouted, in rhetorical completeness and coherence, but sung in fitful gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, in warblings not of the voice only, but of the whole mind.”56 The keening notes that spill from the peasant girl of the Highlands and Burns’s poems and songs matter because they express and evoke the timeless emotional truths of the human condition, the experiences born of love, sorrow, courage, sacrifice, and joy that have structured life since the human species emerged. But Burns and the Highland girl are the originators of their songs; they sing them from within the inviolable boundaries of their autonomous individuality. Despite linguistic, class, and gender barriers, these songs are arresting and intelligible to her auditor Wordsworth, who draws reassurance from these songs that he shares a fundamental humanity with the Scottish ploughman, the Highland girl, and, by implication, everyone. Country songs—simple, spontaneous, and true—strengthen the sophisticated poet’s conviction that his own heartfelt songs also arise from the immutable elements of human nature. The singing of these Scottish bards in turn strengthens Wordsworth’s conviction that his song—if sung passionately—will touch the essential chords of humanity, and will matter to his readers. Country music is poetry as nature designed it, and expresses two core human experiences, as timeless as they are universal: the loneliness that comes after we realize that our autonomy makes the full range of our thoughts and emotions incommunicable to others, and the faith that we are all bound together, at the deepest levels, by ties of common origin and currents of universal feelings. From Wordsworth’s day down to the present, country music figures these contradictory tendencies by having solitaries—like the Highland girl and the lonesome cowboy—sob the melancholy strains of natural sorrow. More completely and dramatically than any other precursor, Robert Burns figured for Wordsworth this poetic combination of an individual sensibility and universal human truth. For reasons that will be explored in more detail in chapter two, Wordsworth was constitutionally reluctant to acknowledge artistic dependencies on others; hence he wrote only three poems explicitly about Burns, though verbal echoes of Burns’s works turn up in a wide range of Wordsworth’s poems.57 But another dimension of Burns’s life and works had a

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powerful effect on Wordsworth, and consequently on the development of the Romantic self. Burns was a poet not because he wanted to be, but because he had to be—by writing verses, Burns was only following the impulses of his own irresistible feelings. Rather than directly shaping his poems, Burns’s greatest influence on Wordsworth came through the intersection in Burns’s life of his temperament and his art. Burns wrote gripping and vital poems; but his works also conveyed an extra charge of human truth because Burns was passionate. “I first committed the sin of RHYME,” Burns wrote in an autobiographical letter of 1787, under the influence of “a certain delicious passion” inspired by a “bonie, sweet, sonsie lass” with whom he was partnered for the autumn harvest. “Among her love-inspiring qualifications,” Burns explained, this girl “sung sweetly; and ’twas her favorite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme.”58 Burns’s own works, and what was known in Wordsworth’s day of Burns’s life, exemplified Wordsworth’s ideal poetic temperament. As Wordsworth wrote in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, the new, common-language poet is “endowed with a more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind.”59 Burns also lived up to Wordsworth’s description of the poet as a man of great feeling, capable of rousing within himself the full range of human emotion: To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present: an ability of conjuring up in himself passions which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves:—whence, and from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.60

This is Wordsworth’s recipe for poetry that matters. But Wordsworth knows that a danger lurks in his recommendation that poets speak with the “language really used by men.” Such language is, after all, that of “ordinary life,” with all its “vulgarity and meanness”— qualities that can have no place in literature that has a worthy purpose. Wordsworth is aware of this danger, and tries to evade it by carefully

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distinguishing between the rustic everyday language of his verses and the coarse speech of rural drovers, carters, and farmers. He also insists that the common-language poet exercise a “principle of selection” in order to remove “what would otherwise be painful or disgusting” in the passions that the poet conjures.61 But sanitizing common-language verse while celebrating Burns as a model of poetic sincerity proved difficult for Wordsworth and other first-generation British Romantics, for a great deal of Burns’s appeal lay in the unbridled passion with which he lived, and that he infused into his works. Wordsworth was a university educated gentleman, and—after a flirtation in early manhood with French revolutionary politics during which he fathered an illegitimate child—comported himself among his rural Lake District neighbors with gentlemanly decorum. Burns, on the other hand, was an earthy man, a heavy drinker and tireless womanizer, whose early death at the age of thirty-seven was probably hastened by the riotous way of life he carried on from his teens. Much of the “indisputable air of truth” of Burns’s poems and songs arose from the honesty with which this poet dramatized in his works his own struggle to reconcile his exquisite aesthetic sentiments with his always passionate, frequently chaotic, and sometimes marginally violent behavior. For English Romantics, Burns was not only the seminal figure in the persistent association of rural life with essential human characteristics. He was also the source of another far-reaching Romantic conception: that feelings are more significant than thoughts, and the more manifestly passionate the feelings, the more authentic the self. As Burns was to Wordsworth, Hank Williams was to the pioneers of 1950s rock—especially Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Carl Perkins—who inspired and were emulated by the boys who became the Beatles. Williams was the American Burns—not only because both he and his Scottish precursor rose from rural obscurity to superstardom, or because both lived hard and died young. As Burns had modeled for Wordsworth the correspondence between a passionate nature and a poetic vocation, Williams inspired generations of poetically aspiring American singer-songwriters by spectacularly living what he sang about. Both were, like Wordsworth’s ideal poet, earthy and ethereal, at once ordinary and extraordinary in traversing the space between the lowest strata of human experience and the highest realms of thought and feeling. Their passionate natures, moreover, sounded the keynotes of their personalities; and if their extravagant feelings occasionally broke through the bounds of civilized decorum, that was an acceptable price to pay (or risk to run) in order to access the most

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universal dimensions of the human psyche. Both overindulged in the pleasures of wine, women, and song, but this was not ultimately seen as something to be apologized for. Instead, living out of control was taken to be the natural result of the overabundance of life-energy that flowed through them, and made them poets in the first place. Though born a century and a half and an ocean apart, Burns and Williams came from similar backgrounds. Both were born into relatively poor, though not destitute country families, and both had their artistic sensibilities shaped by both high cultural and folk influences. Though only a humble gardener and tenant farmer in Ayrshire, Scotland, Burns’s father, William Burnes, admired the Scottish Enlightenment and wanted his sons well educated. When declining finances prevented Robert and his younger brother Gilbert Burns from attending the local school, William hired John Murdoch, an eighteen-year-old student from the University of Edinburgh to instruct the boys in reading and writing. Murdoch supplemented the boys’ English lessons with some music instruction; and, most importantly for Robert Burns’s future vocation as farmer-poet, introduced them to Scottish schoolmaster Arthur Masson’s A Collection of Prose and Verse (1768), in which Burns read English verse from Shakespeare and Milton through eighteenth-century contemporaries like William Shenstone (1714–1765) and the proto-Gothic Mark Akenside (1721–1770). But for all that these readings in the classics did to discipline Burns’s metrical compositions and give him the ability to write verses in both Scottish dialect and standard literary English, his poetic imagination was fired by one of his mother’s maids, who “had, I suppose, the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery.” Though the maid’s stock of folklore “cultivated the seeds of Poesy” in Burns, it also produced “so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I keep a sharp lookout in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of Philosophy to shake off these idle terrors.”62 Burns made use of this cast of mythical forest creatures in one of his best-known works, “Tam O’Shanter,” the comic tale—in Scots dialect—of a drunken farmer’s daring escape on horseback from a brood of witches. Like Bishop Percy, Walter Scott, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Wordsworthian songcatchers, Burns also enlivened his own works with borrowings from folk songs. He transcribed “Auld Lang Syne,” he wrote, down “from

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an old man’s singing”;63 and Burns adapted “John Anderson, my jo,” a tender testimony to enduring marital love, from a bawdy traditional song in which a wife mocks her aging husband’s diminishing sexual potency. Both literate and folk traditions also contributed to Williams’ musical education. When he was three, little Hank sat at his mother’s side as she played the old dissenters’ hymns on the organ in Mt. Olive Baptist church in rural Alabama. Honky-tonk, Hank’s signature style, combined these sacred songs with the earthy rhythms and gritty realism of Delta blues, to which the young Williams was introduced by Rufe Payne, also known as Tee Tot, an itinerant black singer, guitarist, and storyteller who performed on the streets of Georgiana, Alabama. From Tee Tot Hank learned the ubiquitous I-IV-V chord progression that still today structures blues, country, and rock and roll. Tee Tot also gave Hank a firsthand account of the sorrow of the social outsider, an identity that Williams explored extensively in his own songs. What Burns and Williams share above all, though, is a curiously split personality, equally composed, on the one hand, of an exquisite sweetness and overabundance of sensitivity, and, on the other hand, destructiveness. Beneath these two character facets lie the Wordsworthian poet’s extraordinary susceptibility to emotional stimulation and heightened capacity for feeling, which put these two personality characteristics into a vicious self-perpetuating cycle. The poet’s “more lively sensibility” and “more comprehensive soul” enable greater appreciation of goodness and beauty; but the price the poet pays for this appreciation is a heightened sensitivity to psychic pain. And it follows that the more tightly wound the poetic sensitivity, the more keenly the inevitable pangs of loneliness and disappointment will be felt, and what’s to stop anger and resentment from turning against the self? Burns was the archetype of the self-destructive poet in Rock Romanticism, a trope eagerly—if unwittingly—taken up by Hank Williams 150 years later. After Burns’s sentimental and humorous Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect made him famous in 1786, he traveled to Edinburgh to make the acquaintance of the literati in the Scottish capital, who celebrated the “heaven-taught ploughman” for having confirmed their sentimental conceptions of the Scottish peasantry in poems like “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” But however decorous Burns the poet was, Burns the man, as an Edinburgh socialite wrote, was “strong and coarse,” and had a “most enthusiastic heart of love.”64 Burns had come to the Scottish capital to further his literary career, but ended up spending most of the winter of 1786–1787 flitting from one dinner party—and public house—to another. And

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though he had already fathered a child in 1785 with an Ayrshire girl named Betsey Paton, and Jean Armour, whom he would later marry, had borne him twins in early September 1786, in Edinburgh Burns was an eager philanderer, pursuing serving girls and society matrons indiscriminately. For all the tender sweetness of poems like “To A Mouse,” “To A Mountain Daisy,” and “Afton Water,” Burns displayed his strong and coarse nature by collecting and composing traditional Scottish bawdry; and he frequently amused his correspondents with pornographic versions of his poems, such as this variation on “Green Grow the Rashes”: Green grow the rashes O, Green grow the rashes O, The lasses they hae wimble bores [small holes] The widows they hae gashes O.65

Though mystery surrounds the exact cause of Burns’s death at the age of thirty-seven on July 21, 1796—he may have succumbed from a chronic illness dating back to his teens—there can be little doubt that years of carousing had taken a heavy toll on his health. In his letters Burns frequently refers either to being drunk or suffering the after-effects of having been drunk. Burns biographer Alan Bold has argued that the poet “suffered from the guilt-edged insecurity of the bout-alcoholic.” Bout-alcoholism, writes Bold, “with its euphoric self-indulgence dissolving into remorse as the bout shakily ends, is often associated with manic depressive behavior which, in turn, is often found in highly creative individuals.”66 Like Burns, Hank Williams had a strong and coarse nature and an enthusiastic heart of love. Hank was also an inveterate alcoholic, womanizer, and hell-raiser, and spent much of his own short life either blind drunk or begging someone’s forgiveness for some outrage he had committed while drunk. Hank’s reiteration of the Burnsian paradigm of the drunken country poet, though, took the pattern a step farther, with Williams adding something to the mix that was not as pronounced in the life of his Scottish precursor: violence. In Williams, Burnsian self-destructiveness was augmented by the tendency to lash out at others, a tendency exacerbated by the potent mix of liquor and drugs with which Hank dosed himself for various physical and psychic ailments. Williams was a mean drunk, and had an infamous, volcanic temper. In the early 1950s, June Carter, the daughter of original Carter Family member Maybelle Carter and a country music star in her own right, came between a drunken Hank and his wife

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Audrey during one of their frequent marital blow-ups. When the fight escalated from words to blows, June tried to keep Williams from getting at Audrey, and Hank pulled a gun and fired, missing June’s head by inches.67 When drunk or stoned, as he often was while performing, Williams fought with band members, audiences, and once even threatened to break his guitar over comic Milton Berle’s head for hamming it up and upstaging other performers during a show in which the two coheadlined.68 Williams died in the backseat of his Cadillac on January 1, 1953, en route to a performance in Canton, Ohio, that he hoped would revive a career that had been floundering for over a year after he had been fired from the Grand Ole Opry for drunkenness. Though the official cause of Williams’ demise was listed on his death certificate as “acute ventricular dilation,”69 the floor of his car was littered with empty beer, whiskey, and vodka bottles, as well as a vial of the powerful sleep medication chloral hydrate. Only a few days before his death, Hank had announced to family and friends in Montgomery, Alabama, that he intended to stop drinking and get his life back on track; but his new resolve was short-lived. When he left Montgomery for Canton, his left arm was bandaged, having been injured in a barroom fight the night before. As the first Anglo-American out-of-control entertainment star of the modern era, Burns originated the now familiar rock and roll lifestyle of promiscuity, raucous self-indulgence, and chemical dependency, which Williams revived and passed along to the country-rock pioneers of the mid 1950s. Some of this recklessness and excess comes from the rural Southern culture in which Williams grew up, which had an organic connection with Burns’s Scottish folk culture, as most of the white inhabitants of the American South descended from Anglo-Scots-Irish immigrants. A paradox runs through this rough-and-tumble culture: though more religiously observant and politically conservative, both the north of Britain and the American south have always had higher rates of illegitimacy, divorce, and violent crime than the more urbanized regions in both Britain and the United States. The social instability and violence that—in the opinion of Bishop Percy—had played so important a role in the development of a vital folk literature and song in Scotland and northern England were transported and reproduced on American soil by the British immigrants to the American backcountry, where the surprising coincidence of social conservatism and individual libertinism persists to the present day. The murder rate for 2005 in the South was 6.6 per 100,000 inhabitants; in the same year the rate was 4.2 in the Northeast, 4.7 in the Midwest, and 5.7 in the West.70 Charles

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Woodmason, a nineteenth-century Anglican missionary in the Carolina mountains, estimated that 94 percent of the backcountry women he married in one year of itinerant preaching in the South were pregnant on their wedding day.71 This pattern also migrated from the old world to the new: as David Hackett Fischer writes, “rates of illegitimacy and pre-nuptial pregnancy had long been higher in the far northwest of England than in any other part of that nation,” running three times higher in the Anglo-Scots border regions than in the east of England as far back as the 1500s. In their own lives, both Burns and Williams embodied this aspect of country life with gusto, each fathering at least one acknowledged illegitimate child, and both leaving behind at their deaths women in the late stages of pregnancy. Burns’s wife Jean was unable to attend her husband’s funeral because she was in labor with Maxwell Burns, their ninth child; and just five days after Williams died, his mistress Bobbie Jett gave birth to Antha Belle Jett, who today performs what she calls “traditional country music” as Jett Williams. Jett’s half brother Hank Williams, Jr. has been a country music star since the early 1960s; and today Hank Jr.’s son Hank Williams III is carrying on not only the family tradition of writing and singing country songs, but also his grandfather’s reckless way of life. Hank III, as he is known, signed his first record contract to support his $300 a week marijuana habit. To date, Hank III has released three albums of what he calls “cowpunk” or “hellbilly” music, with the titles of his records paying tribute to his grandfather’s legacy: Rising Outlaw, Lovesick, Broke & Driftin’, and his most recent release, Straight to Hell. The careers of both Burns and Hank Williams followed a similar arc: a sudden rush of fame and widespread acclaim, quickly succeeded by disappointment among their admirers and then premature death. Burns was the toast of Edinburgh literary society in late 1786, and in the following year toured Scotland to gather material for another book of poems through which he seemed poised to conquer the poetic world. But as the number of his children, both legitimate and illegitimate, mounted over the next few years—he had fathered at least eleven children by three different women at the time of his death in 1796—Burns took a job as a tax collector and scratched out a meager living as his health declined. Williams, too, rose to fame quickly and just as quickly burned out. In his first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry in May of 1949, Hank Williams was called back for six encores. Only three years later, his backup band, the Drifting Cowboys, left him because Hank’s bar bills at the honky-tonks they played were exceeding their pay for the gigs. The Grand Ole Opry

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fired Williams in October 1952, and by the turn of the New Year he was dead. Within a few years, though, memories of the drunken blackouts, tawdry affairs, and violent outbursts faded, and both country poets were recast in the public mind from drunks and sexual predators into eloquent spokesmen for the necessary connection between titanic passions and literary excellence. Self-indulgence and destructiveness became the hallmarks of the true artist—behavioral guarantors that the singer-songwriter really had the passionate nature that poets after Wordsworth had to have in order to make music that mattered. Shortly after his death, Williams was transformed from a brawling, chronically drunk honky-tonker to tragic boy-poet, cut down—like Chatterton, Keats, and Shelley—in his prime, just as Burns was changed in the first few decades after his demise from hell-raising amateur pornographer to the spokesman for Scottish sentimentality and nationalism. Both men left behind works of manifest genius, with many of Williams’ songs rightfully enshrined in the American songbook: “Cold, Cold Heart”; “Your Cheatin’ Heart”; “Jambalaya”; “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You.” Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne” is annually sung by hundreds of millions to mark the passing of the old year. In the late 1950s and through the 1960s, Williams became the paragon of poetic sensitivity and artistic excellence for at least two generations of singer-cum-folk-poets in both country and rock music, all of whom followed Williams in turning, in the style of Burns, their subjective traumas and struggles with conscience into art, and whose public images corresponded to the manifestly personal, intimate style of Burns and Williams. Bob Dylan recalled identifying with Williams through his songs from “a young age,” and wrote, “I didn’t have to experience anything that Hank did to know what he was singing about. I’d never seen a robin weep, but could imagine it and it made me sad.”72 When Dylan began writing his own songs, he “became aware that in Hank’s recorded songs were the archetypal rules of poetic songwriting. The architectural forms are like marble pillars and they had to be there. Even his words—all his syllables are divided up so they make perfect mathematical sense.”73 Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet and singer-songwriter whose song “Suzanne” appeared in the third through the fifth editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, put Williams on a par with the poets King David, Homer, Dante, Milton, and Wordsworth, saying in a 2004 interview: “When I wrote about Hank Williams ‘A hundred floors above me in the tower of song’, it’s not some kind of inverse modesty. I know where Hank Williams stands in the history of popular song. Your Cheatin’ Heart, songs like that, are sublime, in his own tradition, and

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I feel myself a very minor writer. I’ve taken a certain territory, and I’ve tried to maintain it and administrate it with the very best of my capacities. And I will continue to administrate this tiny territory until I’m too weak to do it. But I understand where this territory is.”74 The seminal country-rock artists of the 1950s who inspired the Beatles—especially the “Million-Dollar Quartet” of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis of Sam Phillips’ Sun Studios in Memphis—all broke into the music business in the immediate aftermath of Williams’ fame, and emulated Williams in manifesting the Burnsian combination of heartfelt, intensely personal and poetic songwriting with an out-of-control lifestyle. Williams, and by extension Burns, can therefore be identified as the sources of the destructive side of Rock Romanticism. In the early years, the aura of danger that emanated from rock and roll was not the phantom of middle-class anxiety about the roots of this music lying in “Negro” culture. Rock and roll really was violent, because of its origins in the curiously split personality of the country bard in whom intense natural passions continually struggled with rustic traditions of piety and order. In Williams this struggle appeared in the two types of lives he celebrated in his songs. Hank the hell-raiser sang—with wit and bracing conviction—about the pleasures of carousing around in “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “Honky-Tonkin’,” and “Settin’ the Woods on Fire.” Williams was equally convincing, though, in his heartsick and repentant modes, as in “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Lost Highway,” and “I Saw the Light.” Jerry Lee Lewis, who called himself “The Killer” and who had been married three times by the age of twenty-three, was tortured by the contradiction between the pious traditions in which he was raised and the ungodliness of what he did for a living. Johnny Cash remembers Lewis frequently haranguing his fellow performers with dressing room sermons “about rock ‘n’ roll leading us and our audiences to sin and damnation. ‘I’m out here doing what God don’t want me to do, and I’m leading people to hell!’ [Lewis would] declare fervently. ‘That’s exactly where I’m going so long as I keep on singin’ this kind of stuff, and I know it.’ Then he’d tell us we were all going to hell with him.”75 Before he became sober in the late 1960s, Cash also followed Hank Williams’ example of ingesting copious amounts of booze and pills, and lashing out, though not against people, but—thankfully—against things. “I kicked them, I punched them, I smashed them, I chopped them, I shot them, I stuck them with my bowie knife.” Cash writes, acknowledging that “the kind of motel vandalism I pioneered is now a kind of totem of rock ‘n’ roll rebellion, a harmless and even admirable

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mixture of youthful exuberance and contempt for convention.” But, he continues, “that’s not what it was for me. It was darker and deeper. It was violence.”76 To varying degrees, all the Beatles indulged themselves in the rock and roll traditions of intoxication and destructiveness, particularly during their first stint in Hamburg, where they drank heavily, took the stimulant Preludin, and broke furniture, instruments, and the floorboards of stages in the course of their frenetic performances. As his early affinity for Hank Williams might have predicted, John Lennon was the Beatle who most embodied the Burnsian mixture of sensitivity and violence. Though an indifferent student, Lennon had the greatest literary ambition of all the four Beatles. As a boy, he began composing illustrated nonsense verses, some of which he made into The Daily Howl, a notebook Lennon put together and circulated among his friends. Helen Shapiro, the teenage singing sensation with whom the Beatles toured as “Please Please Me” climbed the charts in the winter of 1963, remembers Lennon passing the time on the tour coach reading avant-garde poetry.77 In 1964 and 1965, Lennon published two books of poems and short stories illustrated with his drawings, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. Though he disliked authors that he had encountered at school— Shakespeare, he said in a 1965 interview, “doesn’t mean anything to me”78 —Lennon had an affinity for writers from Gaelic backgrounds, like the Irishman James Joyce and Welshman Dylan Thomas. Paul McCartney called Thomas “the main influence on both [Bob] Dylan and John [Lennon],” and said that he thought “John started writing because of [Thomas], and the fact that Bob Dylan wrote poetry added to his appeal. John was already doing it ‘in his own right.’ He was writing before he’d heard of Bob Dylan.”79 Like Burns and Hank Williams, Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) was a hard drinking poet in a tempestuous marriage, who died from the complications of alcoholism before he reached the age of 40. “I hold a beast, a madman, and an angel in me,” wrote Thomas, “and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.”80 He was a fitting role model, therefore, for Lennon, both the most sentimental and wildest member of the Beatles. As a songwriter, John composed masterpieces of heartfelt simplicity and tenderness like “In My Life,” “Julia,” “Dear Prudence,” and “Nowhere Man.” In his life, however, Lennon was a welter of contradictions: alternately self-loathing and self-aggrandizing, peace activist and domestic abuser, cutting-edge conceptual artist and throwback rock and roller. Though remembered today as at best a

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secular saint and at worst a zoned-out hippie, Lennon was a coarse and earthy northern Englishman, with a biting wit and a furious temper when he was drunk, which he frequently was before LSD and heroin became his drugs of choice in the late 1960s. At a backyard party for Paul McCartney’s twenty-first birthday on June 18, 1963, a drunken Lennon, enraged by Cavern Club emcee Bob Wooler’s joke that John and the Beatles’ Jewish homosexual manager Brian Epstein were lovers, leaped on Wooler, punching and kicking him before pounding him with a shovel handle. “I was out of my mind with drink,” Lennon recalled in 1972. “You know, when you get down to the point where you want to drink out of all the empty glasses; that drunk. And Bob was saying, ‘Come on, John, tell me about you and Brian—we all know.’ You know when you’re twenty-one, you want to be a man—if somebody said it now I wouldn’t give a shit, but I was beating the shit out of him, hitting him with a big stick, and for the first time I thought, ‘I can kill this guy.’”81 Lennon could be heartbreakingly nasty to those closest to him, and seemed to derive particular delight from ridiculing the fragile Epstein, who by all accounts was in love with him. When Epstein was sounding out the members of the Beatles on a title for his soon-to-be published autobiography, Lennon suggested “Why don’t you call it ‘Queer Jew?’” While recording “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” Lennon amused himself by altering a line of the chorus to “Baby, you’re a rich fag Jew.”82 Onstage, Lennon frequently mocked what he called “spastics and cripples,” contorting his face and clumsily clomping his feet in a grotesque parody of the developmentally disabled when McCartney would invite the audience to “clap your hands and stamp your feet.”83 For the country-rock poet, outbursts of violence, cruelty, and selfdestructiveness are the natural results of the Romantic emphasis on the indispensability of passion in making music that matters. When Wordsworth declared that poetry henceforward would be the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” the passionate life became the well-lived life, sweeping away the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason, emotional suppression, and a stoic attitude toward life’s vicissitudes. “Feelings are the artist’s only law,” said the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, and Rock Romanticism takes this imperative to its farthest logical extreme. If he is to be honest and authentic, the Romantic must obey his impulses. The more he obeys those sacred inward imperatives, the more spontaneous and passionate his works become. All this unbridled emotion is thrilling, to be sure; but like all thrilling experiences, excitement is not unmixed with genuine danger. Indeed, the danger is as real as the

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feelings. In pursuit of stronger feelings, the Rock Romantic seeks ever more powerful stimulants, and, like Ernest Dowson (1867–1900), yet another English poet who drank himself to death before his fortieth birthday, cries out for “madder music and for stronger wine,”84 only to find that a cruel law of diminishing returns governs the desperate quest for the artificial stimulation of emotions. Drunkenness breeds cruelty and violence, which brings on shame, the pangs of which the drunk tries to palliate with more drink, which starts the cycle again and dooms many Rock Romantics to the lethal spiral that took the lives of the “27 Club” of rock stars who died at age 27: Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, who drowned in his swimming pool while drunk in 1969, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and, more recently, Nirvana founder Kurt Cobain. “They are not long, the days of wine and roses,” wrote Dowson in “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetet Incohare Longam” [the brevity of life prevents us from entertaining far-off hopes]. 85 Life’s shortness only makes the Romantic imperative of self-expression more powerful, and gives music that matters more grounds for universal appeal. In choosing to make their own music rather than sing someone else’s, the Beatles were both following and furthering a core Romantic tradition, spectacularly displayed by the tragic fates of Robert Burns and Hank Williams. But as we will see in the next chapter, making music in a group is only an intermediate step on the way to realizing the highest artistic aspirations of the Romantic: preserving one’s unique self through the medium of song.

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Chapter 

T h e Now h e r e M a n a n d Mo t h e r Nat u r e’s Son: Col e r i dge/ L e n nonWor ds wor t h/ McC a r t n e y a n d t h e P roduc t i v i t y of R e se n t m e n t

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal. The good artist really does copy a great deal. —William Blake, “Annotations to the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” in Adams, 449

On February 13, 1967, the Beatles released one of their finest and

most influential records, “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever.” A glimpse of the new direction the group was taking in their Sgt. Pepper’s sessions, “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever” was also something of an anomaly both for the Beatles and the pop music industry at the time. Contrary to marketing practices dating back to the 1930s, the new single had no A side—that is, it was understood that neither song was to receive the prestige and publicity push normally given to a new song. Previously, the A side of a single was reserved for songs that all four Beatles agreed possessed extraordinary commercial appeal; the B side was filler. Record sleeves of prior singles had identified the A side graphically by setting that song’s title in larger type. But on the cover of “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever” both titles appeared in identical type style and size. The single was to be considered a double A record.

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Their sales history—and advance orders for the new record of over one million in the United States—granted the Beatles the freedom on this and several other occasions to break the rules of the music business. But there is more to the lack of a B side on “Penny Lane/ Strawberry Fields Forever” than just the Beatles’ ability to overturn long-established entertainment-industry practices. In this case, the naked commercialism behind so many of the Beatles’ previous artistic decisions gave way to a new consideration. Instead of asking, “Which of these two songs is the leader, and which is the follower?” Lennon and McCartney released the record as a two-sided artwork. “Penny Lane/ Strawberry Fields Forever” is therefore a watershed event in the unique collaboration between Lennon and McCartney, because it is with this record that they announce their ascension to the status of poets. Of the 216 songs the Beatles released, 160 give composing credit to “Lennon-McCartney.” Early in their acquaintance, John and Paul agreed that songs written by either of them would carry both names, even though equal collaboration was rare. Mostly, each composed his own songs alone and entire, occasionally asking the other for minor assistance with a difficult chord change or lyric. Putting “Words and Music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney” on all their songs was the pair’s way of arrogating to themselves, while still schoolboys, the panache of great songwriting teams like George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, and Gilbert and Sullivan. But as their craft matured, the different, even opposed temperaments and styles of Lennon and McCartney came to assert themselves in their songwriting more openly. It became easier over time, in other words, to recognize which of the two had written a particular song, even when, as in the case of “Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane,” two songs share the same theme, and are properly regarded—as the lack of an A side implies—as companion pieces. Both McCartney’s “Penny Lane” and Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” explore childhood memories of a particular Liverpool locale, but from drastically different points of view. “Penny Lane” giddily swirls about a busy urban street scene in which sights and events—though droll and quaintly incongruous— are presented with a glittering clarity and immediacy. Penny Lane, sings Paul in his clear and enthusiastic tenor, is in his ears and eyes, vivid under the clear blue sky. In contrast, John’s lyric for “Strawberry Fields Forever,” electronically rendered distant and disaffected, meanders through a languid dreamscape that manages—in true 1960s psychedelic style—to be at once eternal and unreal. “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever” symbolizes the delicate artistic and personal balance that lay at the core of the Beatles

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phenomenon. Two wildly different, nearly incompatible worldviews are separated by the thickness of a vinyl disc. “No two temperaments,” Philip Norman has written, “could have been more unalike. John, dour and blisteringly direct, fought against authority and inhibition in any form. Paul, baby-faced and virtuous, hated to be on anybody’s wrong side.”1 Much of the energy, originality, and wit of LennonMcCartney songs was the product of a constant struggle between these opposite sensibilities for artistic supremacy, a struggle that for most of the group’s history was channeled toward creative ends. But energies as titanic as Lennon’s and McCartney’s cannot be contained forever. The inevitable byproduct of competition between collaborators is resentment, which builds until it reaches intolerable levels, and then breaks out into the kind of conflict that is necessarily fatal to continued collaboration. Compared to previous cultural paradigms, Romanticism is unparalleled in its ability to wring positive results from competition, conflict, and resentment; but even the capabilities of this most resilient of eras are occasionally stretched beyond their limits by the intense creative energies its resilience releases. This was the case for Lennon and McCartney, who in their solo recordings of the first few post-Beatle years traded musical recriminations and insults with much of the vitality and cleverness that had contributed so enormously to their initial popularity. In “Dear Boy,” on Ram (1970), McCartney’s first post-Beatles album, Paul fired the first salvo in what would turn out to be a long battle, informing John that he never realized how much Paul loved him, and expressing the hope that Lennon would be spared the painful realization of how much he would end up missing his former partner. In “How Do You Sleep,” from Imagine (1971), John replied that McCartney’s songs sounded like Muzak, and that the “Paul is dead” hoaxers had been right. Only an extraordinarily intense competitive collaboration could produce such a bitter dissolution. When, in the fall of 1969, Lennon told the other three Beatles that he was leaving the band, he said (as McCartney recalled in a 1971 Life magazine interview), “That’s it. I want a divorce.” The metaphor is apt, in light of the legendary bitterness of the Beatles breakup. The Beatles’ rapid slide from harmony to acrimony is spectacular, but not unprecedented. A century and a half before John Lennon and Paul McCartney were born, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, the founders of English literary Romanticism, uncannily prefigured the relationship between John and Paul, even down to the length of time that elapsed between the initial intimacy and eventual break-up. The similarities between these two pairs of parallel

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lives are astonishingly precise. Both sets of competitive collaborators saw their friendship and common artistic aspirations shattered by disagreements surrounding (among other things) money and drugs. The period of friendship and intense competitive collaboration for both pairs lasted about twelve years, and ended with a sudden, fierce row. And for Coleridge and Wordsworth as for Lennon and McCartney, the loss of the other’s companionship was artistically crippling: on his own, each suffered a marked decline in the quality of his creative output. The Lennon/Coleridge-Wordsworth/McCartney connection poignantly illustrates one of the central dilemmas of creation after the Romantic revolution. Romanticism exalted the self-sufficiency of the individual, but at the same time asserted a universal family of humankind, which implied that no one person can reach his or her highest potential in solitude. Cooperation with others—whether for the material betterment of the human race or merely to heighten one’s creativity—is a Romantic imperative; but the Romantic artist always strives for a solo career. Apprenticeship, imitation of precursors, and collaboration are necessary to enter into even an antitraditional tradition like Romanticism; but Romanticism’s insistence on the parthenogenesis of the imagination puts an ultimately unbearable strain on collaboration. The longer such collaboration continues, the less enabling it seems, and the more it begins to feel like an intolerable dependence. Lennon and McCartney, like Coleridge and Wordsworth, embodied this central dilemma in Romantic culture, a dilemma that can be most clearly expressed as a question: how can my voice be truly my own if someone else’s voice plays a vital role in bringing my voice into being?

Romanticism, Imitation, and Resentment The Romantic is distinguished from his or her pre-Romantic counterpart by a radically different attitude toward artistic tradition. Classical, Renaissance, and neoclassical artists venerated the accomplishments of the ancients, and devoted themselves to long years of study and imitation of the canonized masters of the arts, whose works were presumed to have stood the test of time by virtue of their having captured and expressed the deathless truths of human nature. Before Michelangelo carved his David and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he spent countless hours learning his craft by copying classical statuary and reproducing the works of Giotto and Leonardo da Vinci. Pre-Romantic poets openly acknowledged that their highest goal was to equal the magnificent achievements of the ancients,

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whose works lived on after their creators’ deaths as spurs to greatness for those still living. Before Romanticism, imitation was not only the sincerest form of flattery, but also the only path to artistic fame and a place in posterity. Advising aspiring writers on how to manifest in their own works the sublimity of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Sappho, the first-century literary critic known as Pseudo-Longinus recommends “the imitation and emulation of previous great poets and writers.” Only this, Longinus continues, can provide true inspiration, for “from the great natures of the men of old there are borne in upon the souls of those who emulate them (as from sacred caves) what we may describe as certain effluences, so that even those who seem little likely to be possessed are thereby inspired and succumb to the spell of others’ greatness.”2 Dante took this advice so to heart that he portrayed himself in the Divine Comedy walking through Hell side by side with the Roman poet Virgil, for him the greatest writer of all time. Only with the assistance and approval of a venerated precursor, Dante seems to be saying, can he entertain any hope of reaching the heaven of his artistic ambitions. Six hundred years after Dante, the most influential English poet of the neoclassical eighteenth century, Alexander Pope, still held Virgil up as the model for all novice writers to emulate. The neoclassical art of Pope’s age—like classical and Renaissance art before it—aimed at faithfully reproducing nature, and for Pope, the beauty and accuracy of Virgil’s depictions of nature were unparalleled. But Virgil’s capabilities in this regard were neither inborn nor acquired through long years of painstaking observation. Virgil learned about nature, writes Pope, not by tramping through the countryside, but by making the works of Homer his “study and delight”: Virgil “read them by day, and meditate[d] by night.” “Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem,” Pope tells the would-be poets of his age; “To copy nature is to copy them.”3 The premium that the pre-Romantic model of aesthetic education placed on imitation and worship of artistic ancestors ran counter to the spirit of the Romantic age. Ezra Pound supposedly captured the spirit of Modernism, the age conventionally said to have immediately followed Romanticism, by urging himself and his fellow Moderns to “Make it new!” But making it new was just as imperative for the Romantic as it was for the Modern. The Romantic’s newfound conviction of the dignity and significance of individuality created a new standard of artistic excellence, in which originality and spontaneity became the highest aesthetic values. Imitation of artistic precursors thus became the mark of obsequious indebtedness; to write like Virgil or Dante, or even to homage them in one’s works, was to run the

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risk of being labeled unoriginal and derivative. Unlike the classical, Renaissance, and neoclassical artist, the Romantic sought to escape tradition rather than submit to it. And since the tradition sustained itself through successive acts of imitation, the surest way to avoid its implicit devaluation of individual significance was studiously to avoid imitation. So long as my works are free of traditional themes and forms, the Romantic hopes, no one can say that I am not original. However satisfying this ideal was to the Romantic’s longing for an irreproachable originality, avoiding all imitation proved practically impossible. At the very least, one must imitate, and therefore submit oneself to some kind of tradition, to learn to read and write at all. “What happens,” asks Harold Bloom, “if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing. You cannot write or teach or think or even read without imitation, and what you imitate is what another person has done, that person’s writing or teaching or thinking or reading.”4 The imperative to “make it new” attempts to ignore the reality that culture runs through the channels carved by its pioneers; subsequent floods of creativity may temporarily obliterate those channels, but their traces remain when the floods subside. Poetic composition—or musical composition, since the two are, in the work of the Beatles, the two sides of one coin—cannot happen in a vacuum, and no tradition, even when confronted with an antitraditional tradition like Romanticism, is ever fully erased. The impossibility of getting rid of imitation altogether thus confronts each Romantic with a troubling conflict between theory and practice. Imitation, originality’s opposite, plays an unavoidable part in the development of a unique artistic sensibility. How, then, the Romantic asks, can I reconcile the fact that my precursors, teachers, and friends have influenced me—perhaps, even, in ways I can’t fully perceive—with the age’s demand that I manifest a wholly new and unique aesthetic self? Romantics do not want to stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them; they want to ascend to the heights of fame and glory all on their own. But how can imitation and a troubling consciousness of indebtedness be avoided if, as Bloom writes, “nothing happens” outside of some sort of tradition? In Bloom’s view, these questions are never finally answered. Instead, writers concoct various strategies—some conscious, and some unconscious—for managing what he calls the “anxiety of influence.” In the Romantic age, the new emphasis on originality makes this anxiety especially acute. But to varying degrees, the writers of every age are susceptible to the anxiety of influence, which invokes the familiar

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ambivalence of the child-parent relation. On the one hand, children are grateful receivers of the customs, knowledge, and wisdom their parents pass down to them. On the other hand, children struggle to create an identity that is distinctive and uniquely their own, independent of what they have been bequeathed by their ancestors, both immediate and distant. Every disciple longs to break free of the master by establishing a distinct artistic individuality. At first, the disciple reveres the master for having initiated the aspirant into the tradition. But over time, the master’s command of the tradition looks less and less to the disciple like the stepping stone to greatness and more like a barrier to the fulfillment of what the disciple increasingly views as his or her unique artistic destiny. As the disciple’s self-confidence grows, so does resentment of the master. Pre-Romantic culture kept this resentment in check by emphasizing group cohesion, in the form of national and religious identity, over the claims of individuality. What is today celebrated as self-actualization was denigrated before the Romantic revolution as excessive self-regard; genuine and lasting self-fulfillment lay in shuffling off one’s inherent egotism and adopting the ideals, values, and characteristics of the true Greek, Roman, Christian, or Englishman. Thus pre-Romantic culture saw an artist’s failure to adapt his or her unique vision into the established forms and themes of the tradition as, at best, the mark of aesthetic immaturity. This was only tolerated—and even then, barely—in the works of women, children, and the marginally literate. Those who aspired to a place among the ancients were expected to homage the tradition appropriately in their works. Thus a Renaissance poet like John Milton saw it as a necessity that Paradise Lost, his monumental explanation of “the ways of God to men,” employ—as Milton writes in his introduction—“Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin.”5 Pre-Romantic writers, Bloom argues, surreptitiously and ambivalently expressed their resentment at having to submit to the tradition. For example, Milton—in contrast with what one would expect from a devout Christian—made Satan the apparent hero of Paradise Lost by reserving for the ostensible villain of the piece the most developed personality and the most magnificent poetry. Satan’s attractiveness, writes Bloom, arises from the strength of the fallen angel’s resentment, which served Milton as a vicarious means of venting his own ambivalence toward the two incompatible aesthetic masters he felt called to serve: the epic tradition, and his own towering literary ambition. The Romantic writer, in contrast, is emboldened by the Romantic age’s inversion of the pre-Romantic hierarchy of values concerning

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group identity and individuality to attack the very foundations of the tradition’s claims on the literary aspirant. Romantic poets did not condemn Milton’s Satan as the author of human misery, but instead lauded him for his resistance to tyranny; in the words of Percy Shelley, Satan showed “courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force”6 in his defiance of God’s command that he submit. For Shelley, Satan served as the model for the Romantic’s rebellion against familial, social, and political oppression. But Satan’s stated reason for refusing to “bend the supple knee” to God—that the begotten owe no automatic debt of gratitude to the begetter— also strikes a receptive chord with the Romantic’s desire to evade the self-denigrating implications of submitting to the tradition. When another rebellious angel tells him that as a created being Satan owes unquestioning obedience to his creator, Satan responds with a classic statement of the Romantic’s desire for an unimpeachable claim of self-generation: remember’st thou Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being? We know no time when we were not as now; Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais’d By our own quick’ning power.7

Girded by an unprecedented conviction of the significance of the self, Romantics refused to honor tradition’s claims, even to the point of making the expression of hostility, not gratitude, toward the tradition the mark of a genuine poet. The Romantic revolution thus legitimized resentment as the motive force of great artistic achievement. The pivotal figure in English Romanticism’s legitimization of the creative power of resentment is William Wordsworth. Like his great precursor and fellow Cambridgian Milton, Wordsworth was possessed by a prodigious poetic ambition. And that ambition, in turn, spawned a proportionally great anxiety of influence. Wordsworth’s most important contribution to the spirit of the age was to establish the means by which Romantic poems would, as he put it, “create the taste by which they were to be enjoyed.” But for Wordsworth, attaining this goal required more than just dismantling his era’s unquestioning acceptance of the preceding age’s ideas about poetic form and function. In addition to modeling the archetypal Romantic’s rebellion against literary tradition, Wordsworth also created a new literary identity to go along with the new literary era he hoped to inaugurate: the pissed-off poet, openly contemptuous of both neoclassical traditions and his contemporary poetic rivals.

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Wordsworth came gradually to this new identity, though. His first two books of verse, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches (both 1793), show that at the outset of his career Wordsworth was a typical literary novice, aiming at little more than reproducing the standard tone and texture of polite late eighteenth-century English poetry. These rambling works are written in rhyming couplets, and have frequent recourse to what Wordsworth’s education would have held up to him as poetry’s indispensable linguistic characteristics: inverted syntax, personification, and periphrasis, as in this passage from An Evening Walk: How pleasant, as the sun declines, to view The spacious landscape change in form and hue! Here, vanish, as in mist, before a flood Of bright obscurity, hill, lawn, and wood; There, objects, by the searching beams betrayed, Come forth, and here retire in purple shade; Even the white stems of birch, the cottage white, Soften their glare before the mellow light; The skiffs, at anchor where with umbrage wide Yon chestnuts half the latticed boat-house hide, Shed from their sides, that face the sun’s slant beam, Strong flakes of radiance on the tremulous stream.8

In the half decade between 1793 and 1798, however, Wordsworth self-consciously, even defiantly rejected the neoclassical poetic conventions drummed into him during his years in school, evolving the common-language poetic ideal—based, as he wrote in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, on the premise that “there neither is, nor can be, an essential difference between the language of prose and that of metrical composition”—that guided the writing of his and Coleridge’s hugely influential collection of poems. In addition to praising the moral superiority of simple rural life, the poems Wordsworth wrote for Lyrical Ballads quietly but insistently endorse the psychic gifts that accrue to those who adopt a stance of “wise passiveness” toward nature and the social world. But there is nothing passive about the prefaces Wordsworth wrote to introduce and explain the various editions of Lyrical Ballads. The note of pettish self-justification running through the prefaces, as well as Wordsworth’s acerbic comments on the state of contemporary literature, betray how deeply this seminal figure needed to establish an irreproachable claim of originality. That Wordsworth went to the extraordinary lengths that he did to make sure that Lyrical Ballads

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were not misapprehended illustrates how anxious he was to be considered both a genius and a literary revolutionary in an age in which these two designations were not thought of as they are today—as concomitants of one another. The means upon which he stumbled to create this impression in his readers’ minds—the manifestation of an unshakable confidence in one’s own significance—established a new identity for the poet, an identity that finds its way through nineteenth-century poetic practice and twentieth-century music into the Beatles. For the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote a 500-word “Advertisement” in which he called “the majority of the following” poems “experiments . . ., written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.”9 For the two-volume, expanded edition of 1800, Wordsworth wrote a new preface of some six thousand words, to which he added another thousand words for the third edition of 1802. The final version of the preface to Lyrical Ballads is now widely anthologized in histories of criticism as a founding document of English literary Romanticism. But describing the form and function of a new literature for the dawning Romantic age is only one of the tasks the preface is meant to accomplish. In the preface, Wordsworth also recommends a new social and literary role for the poet, one that will enable this creator of a new literature for new times to be both cognizant of the literary tradition and above it. In Wordsworth’s implicit formulation, glimpsed in the rhetoric he employs in the preface, the new Romantic poet has to have what is today called attitude—that is, indifference to or disdain for others, the purpose of which is to establish an aura of unimpeachable self-sufficiency. Indifference and disdain repeatedly poke through the apparently placid surface of the preface, particularly when the drift of Wordsworth’s arguments push him to provide objective criteria for the aesthetic superiority of the new model of poetry he presents. For example, at the outset of the preface to the second edition, Wordsworth makes the disingenuous claim that he decided to enlarge the much-shorter advertisement for the first edition only at the insistence of “friends” who were “anxious for the success of these Poems.” Wordsworth was hardly indifferent to the reception of Lyrical Ballads; as we will see, his stake in both the critical and financial success of the collection was both personal and weighty. He goes on to say that his reluctance to write the preface was fortified by the conviction that “the Reader would look coldly upon my arguments,

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since I might be suspected of having been principally influenced by the selfish and foolish hope of reasoning him into an approbation of these particular Poems.”10 Masquerading as a disinterested circumvention of any misapprehension of his motives, this statement implicitly characterizes those who don’t like the poems as foolish people who persist in arguments about taste, over which, as the old critical adage puts it, there is no disputing. After explaining why he chose to depict “incidents and situations from common life” in “a selection of language really used by men,” Wordsworth unnecessarily lambastes his contemporary poets for having assisted industrialization and urbanization in reducing “the discriminating powers of the mind” to “a state of almost savage torpor” by flooding the public with “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.”11 Both statements portray those who fail to respond to Lyrical Ballads as suffering from diseased tastes. If these poems don’t move you, Wordsworth implies, you are either a snob or a victim of the crassness of currently popular literature. Calls for artistic renewal must always justify themselves with an explanation of how and why the existing tradition is deficient. But Wordsworth’s protests against the current state of poetry are overwrought, suggesting that a fair amount of ego gratification was also at stake in the success of this ostensibly disinterested and progressive project to replace the stilted and formulaic poetry of the eighteenth century with a literature “well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and not unimportant in the quality and in the multiplicity of its moral relations.”12 Keats called Wordsworth the poet of the “egotistical sublime”; and though Keats probably meant this as a tribute to Wordsworth’s remarkable capacity for realizing his unique self in his works, it is hard to overlook the less flattering— but accurate—implication of this personality assessment. Like many poets, Wordsworth had a big ego. But protecting his carefully wrought image as poetic everyman required Wordsworth to keep that ego under wraps. To manifest plainly the self-confidence that enables Wordsworth to present his thoughts and feelings as universally significant is to risk alienating readers, who might all too easily find themselves the objects, not the sharers, of the poet’s disdain. Nevertheless, that confidence must somehow be communicated, since Romantic art rejects the traditional criteria upon which artists based their claims of meriting public attention: long years of study, technical excellence, or a demonstrably exquisite sensibility. As we saw in the previous chapter, Romantics like Wordsworth presume that their perspective is at once unique and universally intelligible by virtue of the Romantic

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faith that underneath differences in time, custom, language, and manners, all human beings share the same essential characteristics. But if the same heart beats in all, why should the poet be listened to? Wordsworth answers this all-important question by begging it, and his answer is the answer given by all lyric poets after him, including poetically aspiring pop songwriters like the Beatles. Originality for the Romantic consists in the unique willingness to assert one’s individuality. The Romantic who is asked, “why are your thoughts and feelings important, if they’re fundamentally the same as mine?” responds, “Because I’m willing to make them into poetry.” “What is a Poet?” asks Wordsworth in the preface: “He is a man speaking to men: . . . a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.”13 In other words, a poet is an ordinary human being, only more so. What separates the ordinary human being from the poet, then, is not so much some inherent intellectual or emotional characteristic, but merely the willingness to follow the impulses and volitions that impel all of us to search for the meaning of the “goings-on of the Universe.” Poets in the Romantic age are people who, like Wordsworth, want to be poets, and do not shrink from acting on that desire. Their willingness to assume the poetic mantle is bolstered by a stronger than normal conviction of the significance of their unique individuality. A poet’s greatness in this, our persistently Romantic age, is commensurate with his or her self-regard, or egotism. Somehow, Lennon and McCartney knew that poetic success was more a matter of egotism than literary education and expertise, and that poeticizing rock and pop music meant that they, like Wordsworth, would be responsible for creating the taste by which they were to be enjoyed. In modeling themselves on the great singer-songwriters of the Anglo-American folk, country, and blues traditions, John and Paul followed the Romantic imperative of self-genesis, and by doing so they inaugurated a new era in the music industry, an era that continues to this day. Before the Beatles, bands and combos were interpreters, not originators: they played the music of others, even if, as during the jazz and swing eras, they only reinterpreted Tin Pan Alley standards in a new style. Early on in their partnership, Lennon and McCartney made a pact: they promised each other that as soon as they got a record deal, they would do everything they could to release as singles only their own compositions. Even as imitative musical apprentices, in

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other words, John and Paul were confident of the significance of their unique artistic visions, and pressed those around them to acknowledge that significance. Never content merely to remain pop idols and hitmakers, the Beatles always thought of themselves as artists, even in the days when the artistic product they were capable of mustering was no more sophisticated than “Love Me Do.” Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the famous story of how the Beatles came to record their first number one record. When the modest success of “Love Me Do” gave the Beatles the opportunity to release a second record, producer George Martin presented the band with professional tunesmith Mitch Murray’s “How Do You Do It?”, telling them that this song had what it took to make it to the top of the charts. Martin’s thinking was based on established music-business practice of the time, which recommended that energetic and attractive performers play the compositions of seasoned songwriters, whose business it was to tap into the entertainment trends of the moment. The Beatles dutifully learned and recorded “How Do You Do It?”, then lobbied Martin to record a new original, “Please Please Me.” After the group had finished, a chastened but happy Martin congratulated them over the studio intercom for having recorded their first “number one.” When “Please Please Me” reached the top of the British charts in February 1963, a new pop music paradigm came into being. The folk, country, and rhythm and blues model of the singer-songwriter moved from its previously marginalized relegation to race and hillbilly records to the center of pop music. The Beatles were responsible for this transformation. Even Bob Dylan has said that without the Beatles, he would have labored his life away in the obscurity of all 1950s coffee-house folksingers. The Beatles’ example of the commercial and poetic viability of writing and singing one’s own songs made Dylan’s fame possible. “Please Please Me” is the true beginning of the Beatles’ elevation of pop music to the status of poetry not only because it was their first hit, and therefore started them on the career that would eventually produce poeticized pop songs like “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever” and “A Day in the Life.” Beneath the pact that prompted Lennon and McCartney to persuade Martin to allow them to record “Please Please Me” lay the Wordsworthian, that is, poetic conviction that the particular view of an ordinary, relatively uneducated individual possessed universal significance. The broad and immediate appeal of the Beatles’ early hits came not despite, but because of the simplicity of their language. The first line of “I Saw Her Standing There,” for example, draws the listener’s gaze to the sight of the

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seventeen-year-old subject of the song, going on from there not to elaborate on her appearance, but to assert that both the singer and listener know what the singer means. As Wilfred Mellers has noted, the second phrase of the first line evokes a specific world, the imprecise, inarticulate world of the teenager, a relatively novice user of language.14 In the eighteenth century, such an imprecise phrase would have appeared either laughably inept or offensively vulgar. After Wordsworth, however, such evocations of everyday language and phrasing acquired poetic authenticity, even respectability, because they were real. There is more to Wordsworth’s project, however, than just the simplification of language. Elaborate, learned language is in the Romantic era a barrier to the perception of humanity’s essential characteristics; simplicity leads directly to the universal truths that are best expressed in common, everyday speech. The “principal object” of his poems, Wordsworth wrote, was to throw over scenes from everyday life “a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.”15 The combination of everyday language and imaginative coloring would reveal, Wordsworth continued, “the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.”16 Both “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” are written to Wordsworth’s order: Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane are both actual Liverpool locales; but the songs filter these locales through a distinct and idiosyncratic consciousness. The purpose in both cases is less to render the specific sights and sounds of these places than to depict the striking ways in which mind interacts with environment. Strawberry Fields, the name of an orphanage not far from Lennon’s childhood home, is depicted not as the Victorian building it is, but as an actual field of strawberries, where one can find a blissful respite from the world’s merciless tyranny of logic and grammar. The second verse begins with an incoherent sentence—that is, not a sentence at all, but a mere collocation of words that, despite its incoherence, manages to evoke a confused pensiveness. “Penny Lane” also mixes the genuine with the dreamlike: though the characters passing through this actual roundabout are all identified by occupation (barber, banker, nurse, fireman), the meanings of their actions remain just out of reach, which McCartney indicates by ending two of the verses with the phrase “very strange.” Experiences like these are presumed to be universal because they are by definition individual: the blending of dream and reality necessarily occurs only within a solitary consciousness in which

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self-absorption is so deep that the imaginary can be substituted for the actual. Dreams have their origin in waking experiences, but in ways that are, as McCartney put it, “very strange.” A fully evolved Romantic consciousness, then, is ultimately in conversation not with others, but with itself. Early Beatles songs prominently feature first and second personal pronouns because they inhabit and evoke an emphatically social world in which speakers address others who are presumed by the situation of the song to be present: “She Loves You”; “I Want to Hold Your Hand”; “From Me to You”; “I’ll Get You”; “Do You Want To Know A Secret”; “I’ve Just Seen a Face”; “And I Love Her”; “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You.” But as Lennon’s and McCartney’s songwriting becomes more self-consciously poetic, personal pronouns occur less frequently, and the songs grow increasingly introspective. The conversational early style gives way to narrative and meditation. Other people—the “she’s” and “you’s” and “her’s” and “him’s” of so many early and middle Beatles songs—recede into the background. Only the first personal pronoun appears in “Penny Lane,” and the “you” repeated in “Strawberry Fields Forever” is clearly self-referential. Just as the Romantic poet learns from, and then turns against the tradition in the ultimate act of self-definition, the Romantic mind begins by talking to others, but ends up talking to itself. This degree of self-absorption satisfies the Romantic’s desire to make the artwork into an immediate and authentic expression of the artist’s unique individuality. But, despite the Romantic’s faith that each individual consciousness contains the veritable infinity of humankind within itself, self-absorption in practice constitutes a dead-end. Romantics who burn with a particularly intense desire to plumb the depths of their own consciousnesses are notorious for living short lives. Lord Byron died in 1824 at the age of thirty-five. Just shy of his thirtieth birthday, Shelley drowned in 1822. Keats died of tuberculosis in 1821 at the age of twenty-five. All three poets left behind substantial bodies of work, especially Byron, whose collected poems and letters run to fourteen volumes. Wordsworth and Coleridge lived longer than the second-generation Romantics that followed them, but both had written their best verse before the age of forty, and wrote very little worth reading after that. The relatively short careers of English Romantics are usually attributed to the unprecedented emotional intensity demanded by the Romantic paradigm. Romanticism, the argument goes, is a game for the young: its rebelliousness demands youthful energy, and revolutionary ardor inevitably fades when middle age ushers in political, social, and personal conservatism. But the history of the Wordsworth/Coleridge

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and Lennon/McCartney collaborations, considered in light of the anxiety surrounding imitation in the Romantic age, suggests that Romantic burn-out may have its source elsewhere than in the incompatibility between Romanticism and growing old. The desperate yearning for a uniquely significant individuality ultimately separates the Romantic from the only reliable sources of inspiration—other creative individuals. The story of how Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s revolutionary poetic collaboration soured and eventually disintegrated offers insight into why the Beatles—the most successful musical act in entertainment history—stayed together for only ten years.

Two Pairs of Competitive Collaborators The two most momentous meetings in the history of English poetry occurred almost exactly 160 years apart. Paul met John on July 6, 1957, and in September of that year played his first gig with John’s band, the Quarry Men. Though they probably had met briefly in 1795, Wordsworth and Coleridge became friends and poetic collaborators after Wordsworth moved in 1797 to within two miles of Coleridge’s cottage in southwest England. Just as Lennon and McCartney shared a passion for skiffle and rock and roll, Wordsworth and Coleridge resonated to the cultural energies of their time: both were early supporters of the republicanism and democracy that were sweeping Europe after the French Revolution, and both were repulsed by the Reign of Terror’s perversion of the Revolution’s noble ends. Both were also caught up in the desire to reimagine literature for the new social and political realities that emerged in the 1790s, though at the time they met, Coleridge— two years younger than Wordsworth—had a wider poetic reputation. But for all they shared, there were significant differences between Coleridge and Wordsworth. They were temperamental and intellectual opposites. Wordsworth would gladly have assumed the designation that McCartney applied to himself in a song from the White Album: he was “mother nature’s son,” a lover, as he put it in “Tintern Abbey,” of the “meadows and the woods, / And mountains” of the English Lake District. Coleridge, like Lennon, was a “nowhere man,” inhabiting the “nowhere land” of his powerful but demonhaunted intellect, desperately seeking an escape from those demons by successively hatching futile plans and schemes that would, he vainly hoped, channel his prodigious energies toward the elusive goal of self-satisfaction. Though in The Prelude he admitted to having a melancholy side, declaring his partiality to “a pensive sky, sad days, and

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piping winds, / The twilight more than dawn, Autumn than Spring,” Wordsworth was, on balance, a happy man, as was McCartney, who didn’t disagree when Lennon accused him of being “all pizza and fairy tales.”17 Coleridge was susceptible to depression and tormented by self-castigation; Lennon song titles like “I’m a Loser” and “Help!” would have resonated with Coleridge, who, like Lennon, sought relief from his psychic struggles through drugs and alcohol. Moreover, Coleridge’s restless intelligence made him, like Lennon, easily bored and impatient with the slow germination of ideas and the steady application of effort. Though his collected works currently fill seventeen volumes (with more on the way), Coleridge is often held up as one of the most spectacular examples of squandered genius in English literature, a man whose deep-seated insecurity, procrastination, and meandering interests prevented his reaching the literary attainments of which he was capable. Though a prodigious reader and tireless scribbler, Coleridge was plagued by self-doubt and hamstrung by a short attention span. In a 1797 letter, he described himself as “indolence capable of energies.”18 Thomas Carlyle said that Coleridge’s conversation “wanders like a man sailing among many currents, whithersoever his lazy mind directs him.”19 In a 1966 interview, Lennon called himself “physically lazy,” and declared “I don’t mind writing or reading or watching or speaking, but sex is the only physical thing I can be bothered with anymore.”20 George Martin recalled that Lennon was particularly impatient in the recording studio. “The extremely difficult, John thought of as par for the course; only with the utterly impossible were you allowed to take more time. Once he had an idea, it had to be captured quickly. If it did not materialize in very short order, he tended to wander off and lose interest.”21 Two of Coleridge’s most famous poems, “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel,” were published as fragments, as if the poet simply couldn’t stomach continuing to work on them after the excitement of his initial inspiration died down. In contrast, Wordsworth worked on The Prelude for nearly fifty years; it was published for the first time posthumously, as if he couldn’t bear to describe his life until it was decisively over. The similarities between these two pairs of lyric poets are striking, but not intentional. Lennon and McCartney did not self-consciously emulate the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge. Though they were probably exposed to the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge in school, Lennon and McCartney were indifferent students of literature—Lennon especially so—though both were avid readers. It is doubtful, in fact, that Lennon and McCartney would have been able to name more than one or two poems by Wordsworth

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or Coleridge, much less recount the poets’ biographies and the particulars of their relationship. The temperamental dichotomy between Wordsworth and Coleridge repeated itself in Lennon and McCartney because the literary culture instituted by Wordsworth and Coleridge made uniqueness and singularity the supreme aesthetic values. To the extent that an artist had to be manifestly original, that artist could not be dependent in any way upon someone else. After Wordsworth and Coleridge, poetic collaborators walked—in the words of a rhythm and blues song of the early 1970s that Lennon and McCartney might have heard in the aftermath of their breakup—“a thin line between love and hate.” The great songwriting teams on which Lennon and McCartney modeled their collaboration— particularly Gilbert and Sullivan—were nearly as famous for how much they loathed each other as for their music and lyrics. Again, this is not to say that Lennon and McCartney eventually feuded because they wanted to emulate Gilbert and Sullivan or Rodgers and Hart. Songwriting collaborators feuded because Romantic literary culture insists that all artists—no matter how convenient or even mercenary their original motivations—strive for aesthetic authenticity by manifesting a unique and self-generated sensibility. Songwriting calls for collaboration because words and music make songs into bifurcated things, the construction of which appears to require distinct knowledge and capabilities that only rarely occur in a single individual. But as songwriting aspires—as it must in the Romantic age—to the status of poetic authenticity, collaborative composition becomes increasingly untenable. Great songs are written by teams, great poems by individuals of overweening self-assurance. William Wordsworth’s ascension in the dawning Romantic age to the status of genuine poet necessitated two steps. First, he had to move out from under the shadow of what he considered a stultifying tradition. Second, he had to transform himself from a songwriter—half of the team that wrote the Lyrical Ballads—into a symphonic composer, the creator of a work tellingly titled The Prelude. To legitimize himself as an artist, Wordsworth had to work alone. Lennon is to Coleridge as Wordsworth is to McCartney. Both Lennon and Coleridge struggled throughout their lives with addictions, Coleridge to alcohol and the widely available opiates that in his age were used to treat a wide array of diseases and chronic conditions, from tuberculosis to toothache, Lennon to alcohol, marijuana, LSD, and, toward the end of his time with the Beatles, heroin. As either the cause or effect of these addictions, both men exhibited high levels of emotional instability and depression, and both were prone to the

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sort of intellectual and moral despair Lennon described in songs like “Nowhere Man,” “Yer Blues,” and “I’m So Tired,” which partake of a mood similar to that described by Coleridge in “Dejection: An Ode”: A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, That finds no natural outlet, no relief In word, or sigh, or tear— This, Sara! well thou know’st, Is that sore Evil, which I dread the most, And oft’nest suffer!22

Both Coleridge and Lennon also extensively mined their dreams and drug-induced hallucinations for poetic material, and both were led by these explorations to that venerable metaphor for the mystical dimensions of human consciousness: the river. In a prefatory note he wrote for the publication of “Kubla Khan” in 1816, Coleridge claimed that the entire poem had come to him in a dream he had during a deep slumber brought on by taking “an anodyne” that had been prescribed for “a slight indisposition.” The first part of the poem follows the course of “Alph, the sacred river,” as it winds from Kubla’s “stately pleasure dome” through a haunting dreamscape before it empties, after “five miles meandering,” in “tumult to a lifeless ocean.”23 In “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Lennon tells his listener to relax, switch off his rational mind, and be carried downstream. A river also figures prominently in Lennon’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” with its images of boats, bridges, and oversized, psychedelic flowers that grow along the banks. Tonal and temperamental similarities run through the works of McCartney and Wordsworth as well. “Mother Nature’s Son” is McCartney’s most Wordsworthian song; accompanied in the first verse by only a single acoustic guitar, Paul depicts himself as a simple country bard, singing songs for everyman alongside a burbling mountain brook, his only companions a brace of sun-drenched daisies. “Mother Nature’s Son” seems, if not specifically, at least incidentally to recall Wordsworth’s famous poem on daffodils, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

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From Bl a k e to the Beatles Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. 24

At first, the contrasting voices of Wordsworth-Coleridge and LennonMcCartney appear happily to complement each other, to harmonize through their equal attention to both sides of the Romantic world’s depiction of phenomena as the result of creative conflict between categorical opposites—as in Blake’s “innocence and experience,” to which I will return in chapter four. When the innocence of Wordsworth/ McCartney encounters the experience of Coleridge/Lennon, the comprehensiveness of each’s vision is increased through the labor of assimilating (as much as possible) the opposing view of the other. At its best, this process yields a complex and subtle dialogue, like that between Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” both written in 1798, when the friendship between the two poets was strongest and they were in almost daily contact. Both poems are first-person, blank verse monologues, as if the poet is speaking his thoughts aloud. And both of these masterpieces, like “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” explore the same theme, what might be called the dynamics of memory, or the ways in which an immediately present visual image can awaken surprisingly significant recollections. “Tintern Abbey” opens with Wordsworth standing on a promontory overlooking the Wye River valley in Wales, a green and picturesque gorge beneath him. Less striking than the immediate beauty of this sight, though, is Wordsworth’s realization, as he gazes at the valley below, that during the five years since he last stood on these “steep and lofty cliffs,” he had mentally pictured this prospect of the valley on numerous occasions. From these memories, Wordsworth writes, he had derived “sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, / And passing even into my purer mind, / With tranquil restoration.”25 “Frost at Midnight” also begins in the present, shifts to a powerful distant memory, and then returns to the present with renewed hope for the future. As he sits in his cottage on a silent winter night, Coleridge catches sight of a fluttering ash on the fireplace grate, which returns him to his unhappy childhood at a boarding school when, “pent ’mid cloisters dim,” he had longed for a visit from a “townsman, aunt, or sister more beloved” to interrupt the habitual gloom of his life in “the

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great city.”26 Most important, though, both poems obliquely homage the temperamental keynote of the other. Wordsworth’s celebration in “Tintern Abbey” of the restorative powers of imagination and nature is tinged with a Coleridgian melancholy and skepticism about the final reliability of the human sensorium. “The picture of the mind revives again,” says Wordsworth, but with “somewhat of a sad perplexity.”27 Coleridge’s imaginary revival of the sadness of his city-bound childhood concludes with an uncharacteristically optimistic apostrophe to the infant son lying cradled at his side: “But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags / Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds.”28 Much of the power of these lyrics—like the best Beatle songs— comes from this blending of disparate voices, or the harmony that results from the struggle to assimilate an opposite point of view. When this harmony worked as well as it could, the two pairs of competitive collaborators managed to incorporate defining characteristic of his opposite into his works. Lennon’s tendency to spin out of control into savage wit and self-pity was tempered by McCartney’s caution and optimism, and the fact that McCartney’s eagerness to please and schmaltziness had to pass through the gauntlet of Lennon’s sharp intellect gave Paul’s Beatle songs a dimensionality lacking in his solo work. McCartney’s “Yesterday” is a masterpiece of disciplined sentimentality, and Lennon’s “In My Life” is a masterpiece of plain-speaking (though guarded) hopefulness. Songs like these are made possible for their creators by the powerful mental presence of his opposite. As a spur to creativity, this kind of opposition is unsurpassed. But creatively struggling with one’s temperamental opposite also invokes a tragic countertendency. Instead of reinforcing the need for a continuation of the subtle dialogue that brought them into being, magnificent successes like “Tintern Abbey,” “Frost at Midnight,” “Penny Lane,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” convince their creators of their artistic self-sufficiency. This is especially true for inherently self-assured poets like Wordsworth and McCartney. However valuable Coleridge’s temperamental differences were in bringing his poetic distinctiveness into sharper relief, Wordsworth eventually felt the need to disengage even from implicit dialogue with the Coleridgian sensibility. In this regard Lennon and McCartney both resembled Wordsworth, for as their songwriting became more selfconsciously poetic, they felt increasingly limited rather than liberated by their artistic and temperamental differences. Again, Wordsworth and Coleridge uncannily anticipated Lennon and McCartney, as can

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be seen with particular clarity in the publication history of what has become one of the best-known and most widely reprinted English poems: Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Wordsworth and Coleridge originally conceived of Lyrical Ballads as a moneymaking scheme: needing a little cash to finance a walking tour to the Valley of Stones, a late eighteenth-century tourist destination in western England, they thought they might cowrite a few poems for publication in magazines. But the more they cogitated the notion of writing together, the more serious and systematic the project became, until, as Coleridge wrote in Biographia Literaria (1815): The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. 29

It fell to Coleridge, the nowhere man, to write the first class of poems, and to Wordsworth, mother nature’s son, to write the second class. For the first edition, Coleridge wrote four poems and Wordsworth nineteen; but the most memorable and momentous of Coleridge’s works “directed to persons and characters supernatural” was “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the pseudo-medieval tale of a sailor haunted by the ghostly consequences of his thoughtless killing of an albatross. The first edition of Lyrical Ballads was published anonymously, and in the brief introductory “Advertisement” Wordsworth wrote for the volume he carefully avoided suggesting that the collection was the product of two poets. After highlighting his own poems “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” “The Thorn,” and “Expostulation and Reply,” in the Advertisement Wordsworth declared that “THE RIME OF THE ANCYENT MARINER was professedly written in imitation of the style as well as of the spirit of the elder poets,” allowing the impression to linger in the reader’s mind that this Coleridge composition had been produced by the same hand.30 “Ancient Mariner” also appeared first in the collection. The collection was a moderate success—the first edition sold out in about a year, prompting the publisher to solicit

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Wordsworth and Coleridge for a second, expanded edition. When that edition appeared in 1800, however, Wordsworth had written all the additional poems, and his name—not Coleridge’s—appeared on the title page as the author. Moreover, “Ancient Mariner” was moved from its initial position as the first poem in the collection to near the end of volume I. Wordsworth also appended a note to this edition only, in which he distanced himself from “Ancient Mariner,” claiming that he had agreed to reprint the poem against the wishes of the still unnamed “Author,” who, because of his “knowledge that many persons had been much displeased with it,” had expressed his wish that the “Ancient Mariner” be “suppressed.”31 “The Poem of my Friend has indeed great defects,” wrote Wordsworth, but because it also was graced with “many delicate touches of passion,” some “beautiful images,” and “an unusual felicity of language,” he had been able to prevail upon this “Friend” to permit him to republish it. Wordsworth’s ostensible reason for including this note—which appeared only in the 1800 edition—was his impression that “Ancient Mariner” ’s prominence of place in the first edition had hurt sales. On June 24, 1799, he wrote to his publisher: You tell me the poems have not sold ill If it is possible, I should wish to know what number have been sold. From what I can gather it seems that The Ancyent Marinere has upon the whole been an injury to the volume, I mean that the old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on. If the volume should come to a second edition I would put in its place some little things which would be more likely to suit the common taste.32

This eagerness to “suit the common taste” contradicts the confidence of the preface’s declaration that the poems would “create the taste by which they were to be enjoyed.” But Wordsworth’s growing discomfort with the “Ancient Mariner” did not really arise from the supposedly off-putting “strangeness” of its language. Rather, its theme and tone jarred with what Wordsworth increasingly saw as the consistency of “his” Lyrical Ballads. This was the reason for his decision to excise “Christabel,” another mock-medieval tale of the supernatural that Coleridge wanted to include—unfinished, as if it were discovered in fragment form—in the second edition. “It is my wish and determination that (whatever the expence may be, which I hereby take upon myself) such Pages of the Poem of Christabel as have been printed . . . be cancelled,” Wordsworth wrote his publisher in early 1800. “I mean to have other poems substituted.” His reason

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for this request was straightforward: the “Style of this Poem was so discordant from my own that it could not be printed along with my poems with any propriety.”33 In fairness, it must be granted that readers of the Lyrical Ballads faced a substantial challenge in having to negotiate the tonal shift from “Ancient Mariner” ’s depiction of “Life-in-Death,” whose “skin was white as leprosy” and who “thicks man’s blood with cold” to Wordsworth’s It is the first mild day of March Each minute sweeter than before The red-breast sings from the tall larch That stands beside our door.34

Beatle fans face a similar challenge from the drastic mood swings of the White Album, which ranges from the Wordsworthian sweetness of McCartney’s “Martha My Dear” to the Coleridgian weirdness of Lennon’s “Revolution 9.” But Wordsworth’s attempts to nudge Coleridge out of Lyrical Ballads stem from more than just their aesthetic differences. As Wordsworth’s confidence in his voice grew, the temperamental dichotomy that had initially stimulated him changed into a source of annoyance. No doubt Coleridge’s tendency to fawn on Wordsworth’s superior poetic powers exacerbated this tendency. From the start, their outwardly mutual admiration had been, in fact, uneven: “Wordsworth is a very great man,” wrote Coleridge shortly after they met, “the only man to whom at all times & in all modes of excellence I feel myself inferior.”35 In late 1800 he wrote to Francis Wrangham that Wordsworth “is a great, a true Poet—I am only a kind of a Metaphysician.”36 In December of that year, Coleridge wrote to John Thelwall, “As to Poetry, I have altogether abandoned it, being convinced that I never had the essentials of poetic Genius, & that I mistook a strong desire for original power.”37 By the turn of the century Coleridge effectively conceded victory to his collaborator/opponent, telling William Godwin in 1801 that “The Poet is dead in me. . . . My imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies, like the cold snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed & mitred with Flame. . . . If I die, and the Booksellers will give you any thing for my Life, be sure to say— ‘Wordsworth descended on him, like the Γνθ σ«αντον [Know thyself] from Heaven; by shewing to him what true Poetry was, he made him know, that he himself was no Poet’.”38

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But this supposedly dead writer would be pricked by his rival into composing a major work in verse at least one more time before lapsing into poetic silence for good. In 1805, Coleridge, his opium addiction worsening and his domestic life a shambles, traveled to the Mediterranean to get away from his family and try to recover his health. This proved a vain effort, and after two years he returned to the England. During his absence, Coleridge found, Wordsworth had completed the long autobiographical poem he had been contemplating and Coleridge had been urging him to write since 1799: the Prelude. Over the course of several evenings, Wordsworth read the poem to Coleridge, who was moved by the experience to respond with a poem of his own. In “To William Wordsworth,” tellingly subtitled “Composed on the night after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual mind” (italics mine), Coleridge describes with touching honesty the confusion of elation and self-castigation roused in him by his friend and onetime collaborator’s achievement. The first part of the poem apostrophizes Wordsworth as “Friend of the Wise!” and “Teacher of the Good!” and goes on to predict that this poem will ensure for its author a place “in the choir / of everenduring men.” A little over halfway through his poem, though, Coleridge moves from praise of Wordsworth to an examination of his own state of mind, and the confused feelings that Wordsworth’s recitation had aroused: Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn, The pulses of my being beat anew: And even as life returns upon the drowned, Life’s joy rekindling roused a throng of pains— Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart; And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of Hope; And Hope that scarce would know itself from Fear; Sense of past Youth, and Manhood come in vain, And Genius given, and Knowledge won in vain.39

Here the “cradled infant” from “Frost at Midnight”—a Wordsworthian child that is father to the man—wakes turbulent from his sleep, and will not be comforted. However he might have intended them, it is difficult to miss what must have struck Coleridge as the cruelty of Wordsworth’s actions: the “great poet” welcomes his onetime soul mate back to a cherished home and hearth with some seven thousand lines on the “individual mind.” Wordsworth’s most momentous act of poetic self-definition to date repeated the callous expulsion

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of Coleridge first attempted by ridding the Lyrical Ballads of the discordant “Christabel” and “Ancient Mariner.” If this gesture’s aim was to purify Wordsworth’s lyric voice by purging its Coleridgian discordancies, it sadly missed the mark: by expelling the internalized Coleridge Wordsworth dried up the most vital wellspring of his creativity. By the end of 1807, Coleridge had left the Lake District for good, and Wordsworth began a poetic decline that continued until his death in 1850. Though he achieved a modicum of popular success with the publication of The Excursion in 1814, his reputation among his Victorian admirers and today’s readers has relied almost entirely on verse written between 1797 and 1807, not coincidentally the period of his greatest intimacy—and struggle— with Coleridge. This decline in poetic power is generally viewed as the natural result of age and its supposed concomitants, political conservatism, and religious orthodoxy. While there can be little doubt that these played some role in the decline, the contemporaneous departure of Coleridge and poetry suggests that Wordsworth’s struggle with his “realizing opposition” was the key to his lyric excellence. By ridding himself of what increasingly appeared to be Coleridge’s ontological obstacles to self-realization, Wordsworth unwittingly invited what Thomas De Quincey called this poet’s “extreme, intense, unparalleled onesidedness” to hold unchecked sway over his life and works.40 The absence of Coleridge’s realizing opposition severely vitiated Wordsworth’s lyric powers: no amount of interpretive ingenuity can uncover in the “Duddon River Sonnets” the undeniable power of the “Lucy” poems or the “Intimations” ode. Coleridge made “Tintern Abbey” possible, just as Lennon made McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby” (one of the most frequently covered songs in the history of popular music) possible. In both cases, friction against the other honed disparateness into an energetic harmony. In the case of the Beatles, that harmony’s constituent tones grew more distinct as the band lumbered through the 1960s, with the distance between Lennon and McCartney reaching its widest point on the White Album. Like Coleridge, Lennon initially attempted to match McCartney’s energy and output, but after the death of Beatles manager Brian Epstein in 1967, John slipped into a depression that increased his drug intake. McCartney stepped into the leadership vacuum created by Epstein’s death and Lennon’s lassitude, becoming de facto chief of the group that Lennon had begun. McCartney’s taking over the reins of the Beatles was resented by Lennon, but not violently opposed; instead, like Coleridge when confronted with Wordsworth’s insensitivity, John channeled his desire to avenge himself into his art,

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producing, for instance, such songs as “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” in which Lennon obliquely mocks McCartney for his social climbing and avant-garde pretensions. Occasionally the tension between the two did come out, however, particularly after Lennon introduced Yoko Ono into the previously exclusive world of the four Beatles. A taped conversation between Lennon and McCartney in 1969, made shortly before the group broke up, shows John conceding victory in the struggle for artistic supremacy between them to his onetime collaborator, now acknowledged rival: You’d come up with a “Magical Mystery Tour.” I didn’t write any of that except “Walrus”; I’d accept it and you’d already have five or six songs, so I’d think, “Fuck it, I can’t keep up with that.” So I didn’t bother, you know? And I thought I don’t really care whether I was on or not, I convinced myself it didn’t matter, and so for a period if you didn’t invite me to be on an album personally, if you three didn’t say, “Write some more ’cause we like your work,” I wasn’t going to fight!41

Statements like this show that the Beatles broke up not because, as many have argued, Yoko Ono came between John and Paul. Yoko may have been the pretext, but she was not the cause of the Beatles’ break-up, which was destined to occur as soon as Lennon and McCartney, two poetic aspirants of opposite temperaments, found each other and unleashed the energy contained in their mighty opposition. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lennon and McCartney at first enjoyed an astoundingly successful and harmonious honeymoon period, then diverged as they became increasingly aware of their artistic interdependence. After thirteen years, both pairs ended their collaborations and friendships with violent rows. The Beatles’ dissolution became public in the spring of 1970, when McCartney released his eponymous first album, a step that signaled the end of Lennon and McCartney as a songwriting team. A flurry of lawsuits, in which the former bandmates sued each other, their management, and the company, Apple Corps, they had founded together, followed shortly thereafter. Lennon and McCartney mocked each other’s music and personae through the first couple of years of the 1970s: inside the sleeve of Walls and Bridges, Lennon wrestles a pig, a satire of McCartney’s photograph of himself with a sheep on the cover of Ram (1970). After his sojourn in the Mediterranean failed to achieve its desired result of breaking his opium addiction, Coleridge spent the next three years shuttling between London and the Lake District. In

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the capital Coleridge gave lectures on Shakespeare and the English poets; in the northern city of Penrith, he attempted to maintain some semblance of contact with his estranged family, and in 1809 and 1810 published a weekly newspaper titled, The Friend, conceived by Coleridge as a means “to found true principles, to oppose false principles, in criticism, legislation, philosophy, morals and international law.”42 The stress of writing and editing The Friend worsened his opium addiction, and when a declining readership forced him to cease publication after twenty-eight issues, Coleridge found himself yet again casting about for something to do. He caught a ride to London with Wordsworth’s friend Basil Montagu, a teetotaler who was annoyed by Coleridge’s tippling during the journey. At the end of the trip, Montagu exploded, telling Coleridge Wordsworth had warned Montagu against taking Coleridge into his home or loaning him money, telling Coleridge that Wordsworth had described his collaborator on the Lyrical Ballads as an “absolute nuisance” and a “rotten drunkard.”43 To his notebook Coleridge confided an anguished response, recalling how “fourteen years” of “reverential admiration” for Wordsworth, had cost him his “own literary reputation,” and resulted in his passing “among those, who were most disposed to think highly of me, for a deluded Fanatic on account of my firmness in maintaining and my vehemence and enthusiasm in displaying, the moral & intellectual Superiority of my Friend.”44 For the next two years, Coleridge refused to speak to Wordsworth. In both cases, the period of bitter recrimination succeeded to a rapprochement; and things were somewhat patched up. Through the intervention of friends, Wordsworth proffered an apology to Coleridge in April 1812, and in 1828 the two traveled to Germany together. In 1974 McCartney and Lennon reconnected in California, where Paul brokered John’s return, after a year and a half of separation, to Yoko. Lennon and McCartney visited from time to time between 1974 and John’s death in 1980. For both pairs of competitive collaborators, however, reconciliation did not reestablish their previous intimacy. Relations were polite, but not close. This is why the Beatles as a group were immeasurably greater than the sum of their parts. The highly charged, occasionally bitter and resentful relations between the members of the group—particularly Lennon and McCartney—paid great artistic dividends, though they also meant that the group could not last. John and Paul needed each other to reach the artistic heights of which each was capable—indeed, they needed to be around each other every day. The more stifling their propinquity, the better their songs. Lennon and McCartney

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were at their most spectacularly productive when they were spending ten to fourteen hours a day together during the first few years of Beatlemania. And their best solo work came in the first two years or so after the Beatles’ break-up, when for each, the other was still a powerful mental presence. As the keenness of their competition dulled in the mid- and late-1970s, the quality of their songwriting plummeted. The best-selling post-Beatle McCartney songs—“My Love,” “Silly Love Songs,” and “Mull of Kintyre”—are marred by Paul’s self-aggrandizing sentimentality. When he was a Beatle, Paul’s self-indulgent tendencies could not be expressed as they issued forth from his consciousness; they had to fight their way through Lennon’s cynicism and irony. Out of this struggle came masterpieces like “For No One” and “The Fool on the Hill,” songs for which there are no counterparts of equal power in McCartney’s sizable body of solo work. Sad to say, Lennon, without the goad of McCartney standing on the other side of the stage or sitting across from him in the recording studio, lapsed into banality. “Imagine,” celebrated for its message of peace and universal brotherhood, is a tedious, tuneless sermon; and “Woman,” from Lennon’s final album Double Fantasy, is frankly an embarrassment. The worst of the seven songs Lennon quickly tossed off for the soundtrack of A Hard Day’s Night—say, “When I Get Home”—features more imaginative vitality and creativity than the sum of his post-Beatles work. Lennon’s and McCartney’s solo careers are marked by the kind of extreme, intense, unparalleled onesidedness that De Quincey saw in Wordsworth’s life after Coleridge. This makes John and Paul undeniably artists in the Romantic mold, but not solely because they stood in relation to each other as Wordsworth and Coleridge did. Romanticism in the Beatles is more than just a set of themes or the repetition of a telling biographical pattern. For this group, Romanticism is a structuring principle that helps to account for their unprecedented appeal. Even in their happy-go-lucky moptop stage, there is an intensity in John and Paul that their respective wit and cuteness mask, but do not conceal altogether. The artistic evolution that they underwent gradually brought the source of that glimpsed intensity to the surface, where it revealed itself as an essential element of human existence in the Romantic era: the incompatibility of group solidarity and individual significance. Groups—even small groups like the Beatles—acquire their cultural power by marshalling the energies of the individuals that comprise them. For Paul and John, being one of the Beatles, especially early in their career, meant something—the identity and recognition each derived from the group gave Lennon

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and McCartney fame and riches beyond their wildest dreams. The group also formed the background against which these powerful and opposite temperaments were able to manifest their distinctiveness. The struggle between group identity and individuality in the Romantic age emerges as a double bind, if only because the value of individuality is amplified, ultimately becoming the categorical opposite of conformity. The group is therefore necessary, but its necessity becomes the basis of resentment that is both productive and destructive. Resentment prodded John and Paul to their greatest achievements, but also destroyed the means by which those achievements might have been continued. This is the real source of Romanticism’s notorious penchant for brief flurries of productivity followed by death or long, slow declines. The tendency of simmering resentment to escalate into open conflict from which there is no backing down condemns Romantics to short, if brilliant, careers.

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Chapter 

George H a r r is on a n d B y ron ic I n-Be t w e e n-n e ss You ought to stop lookin’ so scornful. It’s twistin’ your face. —Ringo to George in A Hard Day’s Night You’re tearing me apart! —James Dean as Jim Stark in Rebel without a Cause

J

ust before the end of the tumultuous Idyllwild Airport press conference held upon their arrival in the United States on February 7, 1964, the Beatles did a favor for the mob of reporters and photographers covering their much-anticipated first arrival in North America: each shouted his first name—Paul, George, Ringo, John—over the din of shouted questions and popping flashbulbs. The boys were individually identified again two days later during their first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show: as they played “Till There Was You,” the camera moved left to right across the stage for a series of head shots in which each Beatle’s name was flashed beneath his televised portrait. This would be the last time anyone needed help matching the Beatles’ names with their faces. After those hectic first few days in New York everyone knew that the four Beatles were John, Paul, George, and Ringo. The ease and speed with which the Beatles came to be known by their first names distinguishes them from practically all other rock groups, and identifies an indispensable aspect of their appeal. For their public, the Beatles were not just entertainment idols. They were like a family, quickly identifiable by both name and personality.

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John was the witty one, Paul the cute one, George the quiet one, and Ringo was—well, Ringo. Like a family, they physically resembled each other, in the early days through their matching hairstyles and stage suits, during the Sgt. Pepper era by growing moustaches, and, toward the end of their time together, by dressing in the Carnaby Street mod/hippie style of the late 1960s. “Happy families are all alike,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, but “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”1 As we have seen, despite the impression of group unity they projected as they evolved from boyish pop idols to the avatars of 1960s counterculture, the Beatles were an unhappy family. Their outward harmony and jocularity belied the anger, resentment, envy, and insecurity that all, at one time or another felt for each other, and which were perceptible in their songs, public appearances, and the ways in which their personalities were represented in their films. As John Lennon unwittingly acknowledged when he referred to the band’s break-up as a divorce, the Beatles were bound by familial ties. They loved and fought one another as only a family can; and, like a family, they had a unique group dynamic, in which their relations to each other can be seen as the result of familial circumstances like age and birth order. In the Beatles family, Lennon and McCartney were the feuding older brothers, simultaneously fascinated and repelled by each other, and madly competing for the top spot in both the group and among the Beatles’ public. George Harrison was the overlooked middle child, taciturn and sulky, but also struggling to be noticed and complimented by his older brothers. Ringo was the baby, a role and identity to which I will return in chapter four. Harrison’s role in this dynamic is symbolized by his habitual position and demeanor on stage: standing in between McCartney on the left and Lennon on the right. Blunt-browed and glowering, concentrating fiercely on playing his guitar parts as impeccably as possible, George managed at once to participate in and disdain Beatlemania. “I’m here, but I’m having none of it,” his posture and mien seemed to say. Even in the early years, when the exuberance of “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” defined the group’s image, there was something forbidding about Harrison. While John and Paul urged their fans to “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me,” Harrison sounded the keynote of his personality in the title of the first song he wrote: “Don’t Bother Me.” In a way, English Romanticism is also an unhappy family in which the second-generation poet Lord Byron stands in relation to the first-generation poets Wordsworth and Coleridge as Harrison stands

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in relation to McCartney and Lennon. Just as Byron acted like a disrespectful younger brother to his Romantic forebears Wordsworth and Coleridge, Harrison is just as often the Snotty Beatle as he is the Quiet One, obliged by historic circumstances to occupy the same stage as his higher-profile siblings, but resenting the limited role to which—by virtue of their precedence in the birth order—they would confine him. Rarely smiling on stage, pursuing weird Eastern preoccupations, like sitar music and transcendental meditation, and writing angry and bitterly mocking songs like “Piggies” and “Taxman,” Harrison was the rebel in the Beatles’ family. Like Byron (as described by the nineteenth-century literary critic William Hazlitt), Harrison “scorn[ed] all things, even himself.”2 But there is another dimension to this role that manifests itself as a distinguishing characteristic of the Byronic/Harrisonian self. Just as the satiric Byron of Don Juan was balanced by the heartfelt Byron of Hebrew Melodies and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the scowling Harrison of “Don’t Bother Me” and “Think for Yourself” is offset by the tender Harrison, who wrote some of the Beatles’ most authentically moving and honest love songs: “I Need You” and the sublime “Something.” Like Byron in the family drama of English Romanticism, Harrison represented in-between-ness in the family dynamic of the Beatles. As the overlooked genius standing between Lennon and McCartney, Harrison is the group’s excluded middle, the aperture through which the titanic resentments aroused by the Beatles’ unprecedented fame could be glimpsed and expressed. In addition, Harrison manifested psychic and philosophical in-between-ness by oscillating, as Byron did, between emotional extremes of disgust and delight, despair and transcendent faith, and by continually seeking to broaden the narrow range of thought and expression that the circumstances of his birth and his status as member of a group—the English lower-middle class, the Beatles, even the human race—made available to him. Like Byron, Harrison had a passionate nature, a keen and restless intellect, and sincere spiritual longings. These characteristics come to men like Harrison and Byron, however, as both blessings and curses, and produce what appear to be deeply riven, even contradictory personalities: depending on their mood, the Byronic type can be a cynic or a holy man, a sybarite or a stoic, a haughty mocker or a heartfelt rocker. In his in-between-ness, Harrison presented a striking alternative to the modes of ambitious selfhood modeled by Lennon and McCartney, and by doing so added another dimension to Rock Romanticism. The break-up of the Beatles breached the dam that had blocked Harrison’s creativity while he was in the band, releasing a torrent

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of catchy, authentic, moving, artistically complex, and intellectually mature songs—works that put the insipid pop tunes of Lennon and McCartney’s solo years to shame. Though Lennon and McCartney began the process of poeticizing rock and pop music by infusing it with Wordsworthian introspectiveness, Harrison adds Byronic complexity and philosophic weight to Rock Romanticism. Both Georges, though—Byron and Harrison—brought this depth to English Romanticism not by devotedly following the artistic path marked out by the founders of the movement to which they belonged, but by doing something that has come to be an archetypical Romantic gesture: scornfully rejecting the previous generation.

Romantic Generations and the Problem of Freedom Though Romanticism today forms—as rock historian Robert Pattison writes—the “ideological currency of the Western masses,”3 the movement in England started with a group of writers small enough to have been a family. In fact, the major Romantic poets were separated by almost exactly one generation: Burns, the oldest, was thirty-seven when Keats, the youngest, was born, and Shelley and Byron were nineteen and seventeen years younger than Coleridge and Wordsworth respectively. But while the second-generation poets were young enough to be the sons of Burns, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, the family dynamic that emerged over the nearly three decades that their lives overlapped more resembled sibling rivalry than father-son conflict. Like the two subgroups of quasi-brothers in the Beatles—the front men John and Paul and the “economy class” Beatles George and Ringo—the elder and younger Romantics regarded each other with the intense, familial mixture of admiration, envy, neglect, contempt, and disappointment that people who start out loving one another are especially prone to develop. For despite all the quarrels, rows, and lawsuits, the Beatles loved each other. The bitterness with which they fought testifies to that love. “The Beatles is over,” said John shortly before his death in 1980, but “I still love those guys!” “No matter how much we split, we’re still very linked,” said Paul.4 And for all their differences in manners, age, and lifestyle, the two generations of Romantics loved each other too. They were a family because they arose from the same intellectual current, and they shared the same hopes for humankind. Both generations believed in the dignity and significance of the individual, and both were convinced that greater freedom, whether political, artistic, or social, would substantially improve the lives of those

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ordinary people. But the first- and second-generation Romantics differed on the best means of realizing that freedom; and, like the Beatles, their disagreement acquired greater intensity from the background of love and common aspirations against which it played out. Freedom was both desirable and advantageous, to be sure—but how much individual liberty could an orderly society tolerate? At what point does freedom become merely a license for anarchy, in which Hobbes’s “war of all against all” is revived? This is the problem of freedom, and it arose as a contentious issue between the elder and younger siblings in the Romantic family when Wordsworth and Coleridge, who had been role models of personal liberation for many in the second generation, entered middle age and began espousing conservative opinions. Their rightward turn disillusioned their onetime admirers Shelley and Keats. And while on the surface he treated it with characteristic irony and scorn, Byron was also deeply disturbed by the failure of the first-generation Romantics to sustain the idealism of their youth. But for Byron the issue goes deeper than just Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s apparent failure of nerve. Their abandonment of the cause of political liberty resonated with Byron’s own profound skepticism about the possibility of real human freedom. For Byron, the question of political freedom necessarily raised the issue of existential freedom. Did Wordsworth and Coleridge abandon their youthful devotion to liberty because they were always, at heart, timorous conservatives, or because real freedom is impossible to attain? Politics, for Byron, leads to cosmology, and to a disconcerting confirmation of the existential fears that haunt him: that our subjective impressions of freedom are cruel illusions, foisted upon us by a creator who laughs at our futility; that as material beings we are forever caught between what we can imagine and what we can attain; that only by transcending our physicality—through trance, or death’s oblivion—can we truly be free. Did the elder Romantics fail to realize their utopian dreams because they lacked will, or because utopias are impossible? Is the human condition a state of perpetually unfulfilled longing? If so, are we condemned always to live in between what we can imagine, and what we can attain? To ask these questions is to struggle with in-between-ness, the existential state of which Byron is the premier Romantic elaborator. He begins, though, with the sad spectacle of Wordsworth and Coleridge turning, in middle age, from icons of English liberalism into spokesmen for Tory politics starting in about 1809—that is, when Shelley was seventeen, Keats sixteen, and Byron twenty-one. In their youth, Wordsworth and Coleridge were far enough on the

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left of the political spectrum to be suspected during the late 1790s of spying for the enemy during an alarm over an impending French invasion.5 As these onetime radicals grew older, though, their politics moved rightward. In 1810, Wordsworth published a pamphlet condemning the Convention of Cintra, a truce negotiated between Lord Wellington’s and Napoleon’s armies, under which the French forces in Portugal, stretched to limits of their supply lines and facing certain defeat, were allowed to retreat out of the country with their arms and equipment intact. By opposing the truce, which he saw as a wasted opportunity to deliver a crippling blow to France’s expeditionary forces, Wordsworth aligned himself against lingering admiration for French revolutionary ideals during the Napoleonic era, and with Tory critics of Wellington’s conduct of the war. Wordsworth solidified his association with the conservative party in 1818, when he campaigned against Whig Henry Brougham for a parliamentary seat that had been held by the Tory Lowther family since 1775.6 To Wordsworth’s second-generation admirers, this was the ultimate outrage. When Keats, on a walking tour through Scotland and Ireland in the summer of 1818, called on Wordsworth, he found the family out, and was chagrined to learn later that (as he put it in a letter to his brother) the poet he had admired for the progressivism of his poetics had spent the previous few days “canvassing for the Lowthers. What think you of that—Wordsworth versus Brougham!! Sad—sad— sad.”7 In 1816, the twenty-four-year-old Shelley wrote a sonnet to Wordsworth, chiding the “Poet of Nature” for having deserted the “honored poverty” in which “thy voice did weave / Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,” leaving Shelley to “grieve, / Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.”8 Byron showed his disgust with Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s rightward tilt by deriding the unintelligibility of their works and by habitually altering the spelling of Wordsworth’s name in his correspondence to “Turdsworth.” In an early satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1807), Byron ridicules “the simple Wordsworth” for creating a verse style in which “Poetic souls delight in prose insane.”9 In the “Dedication” of Don Juan, the satiric masterpiece left unfinished upon his death in 1824, Byron mocks Wordsworth as the author of “a rather long ‘Excursion,’” (I think the quarto holds five hundred pages), Has given a sample from the vasty version Of his new system to perplex the sages; ’Tis poetry—at least by his assertion,

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And may appear so when the dog-star rages— And he who understands it would be able To add a story to the Tower of Babel.10

Also in the dedication, Byron chides Coleridge for having abandoned poetry for philosophy, noting that Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, But like a hawk encumbered with his hood,— Explaining Metaphysics to the nation— I wish he would explain his Explanation.11

In Canto III of Don Juan, Byron twits Coleridge and fellow Lake District poet-turned conservative apologist Robert Southey by reminding his readers that shortly after their university days, the two had hatched a scheme called Pantisocracy, in which they hoped to found a communist utopia on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. These onetime radicals, Byron writes, had turned apostate to their early progressivism, with Southey rising to Poet Laureate after composing verses praising Viscount Castlereagh, foreign secretary of the repressive Tory government from 1812 to 1822, and with Coleridge contributing to the Morning Post, a notorious outlet—to liberals like Byron—for right-wing propaganda. To the younger Romantics, it was bad enough that the poets who had done so much to shape their own liberal sympathies had gone over to the other side. Worse still was their apparent abandonment of liberty as a core principle of the Romantic movement. If Wordsworth and Coleridge could align themselves against the progressivism that seemed to underlie the literary revolution they instigated, what would become of Romanticism’s hopes for universal equality and liberty? But Coleridge and Wordsworth hadn’t really abandoned the liberalizing foundations of Romanticism. Rather, they discovered, through their experiences with the French Revolution, the inescapable conflict between the two types of freedom: positive and negative. Negative liberty, writes Isaiah Berlin, is freedom from coercion by others: “If I am prevented by others from doing what I otherwise could do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved.”12 Positive liberty, by contrast, “derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master,” and the concomitant desire to be “somebody, not nobody; a doer—deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by

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other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them.”13 By weakening the power of the classical canons of literary form and content, and by welcoming the urgent need for large-scale political and social change, the elder Romantics seemed to open up a vastly expanded field for human action in which individual liberty could be exercised to an unprecedented degree. In both their literary theories and their political sympathies, in other words, the young Wordsworth and Coleridge embraced a view of literature and society that maximized freedom from coercion by aesthetic and political tradition. This freedom, they hoped, would in turn extend positive liberty, creating an intellectual and artistic atmosphere from which a more personally relevant and socially transforming literature would emerge. Ideally, negative liberty increases positive liberty. By mapping out a new direction for English poetry away from slavish obedience to neoclassical conventions, Wordsworth and Coleridge hoped that freedom from the classical canon’s restrictive tendencies on individual imagination would release a fresh stream of literary works that would both reflect and further the spirit of the Romantic age, in which the dignity, significance, and freedom of ordinary individuals would be more prized than ever before. But maximizing individual freedom always carries some danger. Because negative liberty amplifies positive liberty, increased freedom from legal and moral restrictions on individual behavior heightens the possibility that people acting on their freedom to will encroach upon the liberty of others. Thus as negative liberty was gradually spread by the democratic politics of the Romantic era, societies found themselves struggling to balance individual liberty and collective security. The French Revolution presented the first-generation Romantics with a vivid example of how the sudden accession of too much negative liberty created too much positive liberty, resulting in a form of oppression worse than the monarchical oppression the revolution was meant to sweep away. In 1789, the revolutionary motto of liberty, fraternity, and equality promised freedom from the system of inherited aristocratic privilege that had stunted individual initiative and creative evolution in France for generations. But when the positive liberty unleashed by those ideals turned, during the Reign of Terror, into a license to execute summarily anyone deemed an enemy of the revolution, a new kind of tyranny emerged. The Terror of 1793–1794 did more, however, than merely disillusion first-generation Romantics about the efficacy of politics as means of effecting widespread and rapid change in the human condition.

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Robespierre and the guillotine shook Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s naïve faith in radicalism. Like many late-Enlightenment intellectuals, Wordsworth and Coleridge viewed the ancien régime as an affront to their politics and an offense against reason itself. Impatient to see the old order—and all the injustices committed in its name—swept away, Wordsworth and Coleridge were enthusiastic supporters of the first popular uprisings in France. As Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude, “Bliss it was” in the dawn of the French Revolution “to be alive, / But to be young was very Heaven!” In those heady first days, “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways / Of custom, law, and statutes” were overthrown, and “the whole Earth / The beauty wore of promise—that which sets . . . / The budding rose above the rose full blown.”14 The Terror betrayed the Revolution’s initial promise, though, as “Tyrants, strong before / In wicked pleas, were strong as demons now,” and even thinking minds Forgot, at seasons, whence they had their being, Forgot that such a sound was ever heard As Liberty upon earth: yet all beneath Her [liberty’s] innocent authority was wrought, Nor could have been, without her blessed name.15

What looked to the second-generation Romantics like a cowardly betrayal by the first generation of their youthful idealism was really, then, a reluctance—understandable, given what Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others of their generation had seen in the rapid unraveling of the French Revolution’s initially noble aims—to embrace extremism. In literature, Wordsworth and Coleridge endorsed revolution, but balked at advocating full-blown rebellion. As a result, a certain hesitancy and caution run through their poetry, despite the antitraditional thrust of their works after Lyrical Ballads. Just as Wordsworth and Coleridge argued for sweeping away political and social tradition in their early enthusiasm for the French Revolution, they quickly and readily dismissed centuries of English poetic tradition by abandoning conventional poetic diction and exploring in verse individual emotional experiences that would have struck late eighteenth-century standards of taste as unworthy of the poet, whose task it was to express timeless verities. “The business of the poet,” wrote the arch-critic of the eighteenth century, Dr. Samuel Johnson, is “not to number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades of the verdure of the forest.” The neoclassical poet “must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard present laws

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and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same.”16 Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s call for a literature that “would interest mankind permanently” based on the evocation of individual, and therefore essential human feelings, coupled with their youthful political progressivism, promised to overturn both the old canons of taste and the implicit endorsement of moral conventionality that was carried along with those canons. In practice, though, Wordsworth and Coleridge were cautious literary revolutionaries. They therefore restrained themselves from following through as much as they might have on the radical implications of their literary principles. For all the boldness of Wordsworth’s calls in the preface to Lyrical Ballads to explore extraordinary states of feeling and to test the limits of real language in poetry, he stops short of endorsing the sort of literary naturalism toward which his principles point. Though he wrote that “there neither is, nor can be, an essential difference between the language of prose and that of metrical composition,” Wordsworth was careful in the preface to Lyrical Ballads not to conflate the languages of prose and poetry, in order to prevent opening the door to free verse. “The end of poetry is to produce excitement in coexistence with an overabundance of pleasure,” he continued. “If the words, however, by which this excitement is produced be in themselves powerful, or the images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with them, there is some danger that the excitement be carried beyond its proper bounds.” To guard against poetry arousing excess excitement, Wordsworth recommended that poets continue to employ meter, which, he said, softens the feelings aroused or described by poetry. “Meter,” he wrote, throws “a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence” over verse.17 The possibility of free verse must have suggested itself to Wordsworth; but the lack of a formal distinction in free verse between poetry and transcribed speech—which veers dangerously close to arousing real, rather than aesthetic experiences of joy and sorrow—led him to reject free verse for the danger it carried of provoking what would have been to him painful levels of excitement. Freedom from traditional constraints on poetic subject matter did not, in other words, grant the poet unlimited freedom to manipulate the emotions of his reader. Doing so would violate the underlying egalitarianism of Wordsworth’s poetic project, by allowing the poet to tyrannize over the feelings of his readers. This formal guardedness is consistent with the moral universe of Wordsworth’s poems, which—somewhat surprisingly, in light of his definition of poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”—consistently endorse a kind of everyday stoicism, and

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single out for praise people who restrain themselves from crying out histrionically in the face of life’s harsh realities. The old man traveling in “Animal Tranquility and Decay” to take a last leave of his son, “dying in an hospital” of wounds sustained in a sea battle, earns Wordsworth’s admiration through the “settled quiet” with which he pursues his way, and for appearing to be “one to whom / Long patience has such mild composure given, / That patience now doth seem a thing, of which / He hath no need.”18 The steadfast leechgatherer of “Resolution and Independence” administers a tonic to Wordsworth’s troubled mind through his example of dogged perseverance in the face of discouragement, and provides a “strong admonishment” to the gloomy self-absorption and morbid grief in which Wordsworth is indulging himself at the poem’s opening.19 In “Expostulation and Reply,” Wordsworth identifies the ideal approach to life as “wise passiveness.”20 Coleridge—particularly in his early poems—recommended a similar stoicism. In “The Nightingale,” a “conversation poem” written for Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge blames generations of melancholy associations with this bird’s song on a self-absorbed poet, “some night-wandering man whose heart was pierced / With the remembrance of a grievous wrong.” Led by his own all-consuming grief into making “all gentle sounds tell back the tale / Of his own sorrow,” this ancient poet had forgotten that “In Nature there is nothing melancholy” and so had deliberately misrepresented the nightingale’s song, which, instead of spreading sorrow, says Coleridge, brings “love / And joyance” to the night, as it disburdens the bird’s “full soul / Of all its music!”21 Even those poems in which Coleridge does indulge in self-pity frequently register his remorse for doing so: in “Dejection, An Ode,” Coleridge complains that distress and misfortune have “grown almost the habit of my soul,” but in the very next stanza cries “Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, / Reality’s dark dream!”22 France’s example of revolution carried too far showed Wordsworth and Coleridge what literary critic Wayne C. Booth has identified as the double bind of negative and positive liberty: “All the freedom from in the world will not free me to make an intellectual discovery or to write a novel unless I have somehow freed myself to perform certain tasks. Such freedoms are gained only by those who embrace disciplines and codes invented by others, surrendering for long enough to develop the ‘virtues’ required for excellence in some ‘practice.’ In short, some freedoms to require the sacrifice of some freedoms from.”23 The quick succession of hope and disappointment that Wordsworth and other early supporters of the French Revolution experienced showed them that rebellion—whether political or artistic—entails

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more than just turning the past on its head. As Booth explains, literature and criticism since the Romantic revolution could easily be seen “as a sequence of glorious castings-off, as a freeing from. But all revolutionaries depend on their oppressors far more than they know. Revolutionary critics are enslaved by a nasty law of nature; I can only say what I can say, and that will be largely what I have learned to say from the kings and queens I would depose.”24 Less schooled in this nasty law of nature, however, the secondgeneration Romantics threw off the tentativeness of the first, and defiantly courted the degree of positive liberty—the freedom to make their deepest pains and darkest desires the focus of their writings— which Wordsworth and Coleridge pointedly denied themselves. Like Coleridge, Keats wrote a nightingale poem; but instead of following Coleridge’s lead in stripping this most poetical bird of its melancholy associations, Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” luxuriates in the very sort of self-pity and melodramatic overstatement Coleridge condemns. To Keats, the bird’s song reveals the world as a place “where men sit and hear each other groan, / Where palsy shakes a few last, gray hairs . . . / Where but to think is to be full of sorrow / And leadeneyed despairs.” Hearing the nightingale’s plaintive notes fade into the distance, Keats muses that “Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”25 Shelley too indulged in these overheated emotions and extreme states of being, embracing the most extreme form of sorrow in “Stanzas Written in Dejection”: Yet now despair itself is mild Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and yet must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me, And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.26

Of the second-generation Romantics, though, Byron carried this luxurious indulgence in storm and stress farthest, declaring in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that “There is a very life in our despair, / Vitality of poison” and asking “What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?”27 But Byron differs from Keats and Shelley in the degree to which he engaged directly with Booth’s “nasty law of nature”—the inevitable trade-off between freedom from and freedom to. Byron the literary

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celebrity and sexual athlete did not want to accept the necessity of such a trade-off: for him, anything less than absolute freedom is a logical contradiction; in order to be truly free, freedom cannot be qualified. But Byron the poet and man recognized that imagination confronts us with the limitations of our own existence. Even more than he disparaged Wordsworth and Coleridge for their middle-aged conventionality, Byron seemed wounded by their failure to make good on the implicit promise of absolute freedom they made by starting the Romantic revolution in the first place. Their goal of freeing the self from what Wordsworth called “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways / Of custom, law, and statutes” raised the hopes of second-generation Romantics that complete personal liberty was possible—freedom from all prior restraints, with a corresponding freedom to realize whatever the imagination can conceive, even to the point of transcending our material existence. In freeing literature from the oppressive weight of tradition, the first-generation Romantics emboldened the second generation to hope for a world in which what Shelley despairingly called “the desire of the moth for the star”28 could actually be realized. In Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron longs for a language that might leap over the barrier between representation and reality, declaring I do believe Though I have found them not, that there may be Words which are things,—hopes which will not deceive, And virtues which are merciful, nor weave Snares for the falling: I would also deem O’er others’ griefs that some sincerely grieve; That two, or one, are almost what they seem,— That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream. 29

Of course, these are hopeless hopes. The moth cannot reach the star because to do so requires transcending the fixed limits of our existence. In his desperate statement of belief in hopes that will not deceive, there is a tragic shortfall between the freedom that Byron can imagine and what he can attain. This is the persistent theme of his work, and stood as the consistent preoccupation of his life as well. Byron soliloquizes on this theme in his drama Manfred (the title character of which is a Faust-like stand-in for himself), as he catches sight of an eagle flying over his head: Beautiful! How beautiful is all this visible world!

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From Bl a k e to the Beatles How glorious in its action and in itself! But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we Half dust, half deity, alike unfit To sink or soar, with our mixed essence make A conflict of its elements, and breathe The breath of degradation and of pride, Contending with low wants and lofty will, Till our mortality predominates And men are—what they name not to themselves, And trust not to each other.30

This is the in-betweenness that most torments Byron, and stands as the real hallmark of his works. To his later nineteenth-century imitators and admirers, Byron’s contribution to the literary tradition consisted of the paradoxical “Byronic hero”: exquisitely sensitive, but reckless; passionate but sardonic; aristocratic in taste but democratic in politics. These characteristics do, in fact, constitute Byron as both poet and man. But these are behaviors that all arise from a wrenching existential dilemma that Byron felt all the more keenly because he was a second-generation Romantic. Manically pursuing pleasure, thumbing his nose at conventional morality, pushing the envelope of socially acceptable conduct are modes of being in the world, all underwritten by a single purpose: to comfort a perturbed soul caught between the infinity his imagination opens up to him and the inescapable physicality—and therefore limitedness—of life. In inaugurating the Romantic revolution, and then backing down from pursuing rebellion with the fervor that revolution seemed to call for, the first-generation Romantics earned the scorn of their younger siblings, who saw their elders’ caution not as a principled rejection of extremism, but as a failure of nerve. Adopting the radicalism their elders rejected, however, brought the second-generation Romantics up against a barrier even more insuperable than the pragmatic difficulties of overcoming centuries of social inertia. Invited by the first generation’s endorsement of freedom from conventional and traditional constraints to enjoy an unprecedented freedom to imagine new states of being, the second generation encounters the insurmountable obstacle to absolute freedom: material being. This is why so many of Keats’s and Shelley’s paeans to the glories of imagination— like the lines from “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Stanzas Written in Dejection” quoted above—lead to despair and fantasies of selfannihilation. Pushing the freedom to imagine to its farthest logical extreme leads to the transcendentalist conclusion that the body is either superfluous or an impediment to ultimate self-realization.

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Of the second-generation Romantics, Byron felt the pain of this existential dilemma most keenly. The figure of the Byronic hero, a persona formulated first as a poetic character and later enacted by Byron in his life, is a Satanic violator of all standards of decent civic and familial duty. But this way of life was the effect, not the cause, of his in-between-ness. Tantalized by the idealistic dreams his imagination was capable of weaving, but held fast in place by the brute fact of his physicality, Byron—“alike unfit to sink or soar”— alternated in his works between two modes of responding to this no-win existential situation. Byron’s poetry is either tender or tough. In the tender works—such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and confessional lyrics like “When we two parted,” “Stanzas to Augusta,” and “Maid of Athens, ere we part,” Byron related his joys and, more often, his sorrows with touching genuineness and simplicity, as if the pain in his soul could only be ameliorated by honest expression. The tough mode is equally expressive of pain and longing, though those feelings are hidden under a mask of forced playfulness. In the tough works, Byron expresses himself with mockery and sarcasm. Though Byron employed this mode of composition throughout his career, it was most spectacularly pursued and realized in Don Juan, a long, mock-heroic send-up of everything from “ladies intellectual” to cannibalism in an open boat. It is tempting to dismiss or discount Byron’s sincerity in either of these two modes because they are so exaggerated—did he indulge in these emotional extremes merely for effect? If so, what better way to assert one’s claim to poetic credibility than by displaying the traditional unpredictability of the artistic temperament? But for all the extravagance of his lifestyle—keeping a menagerie in his Italian villa, bedding three hundred women and who knows how many men, dying of a fever while fighting with the Greeks against Turkish imperialism—Byron still managed to project in his works a touching authenticity and genuine conviction. His life could be seen as an elaborate pose, and in some ways it probably was. Yet somehow Byron’s works manifest the presence of a consciousness that is really suffering. Beneath his carefully constructed image, a real person struggled with real feelings. An anecdote originally recorded by Byron’s wife poignantly captures the anguish of in-between-ness that Byron usually hid behind some potent intellectual defenses: Occasionally Annabella [Lady Byron] assumed some cheerfulness and softened him so that he talked familiarly of his “little [deformed] foot,” saying pathetically that some allowance must be made to him on the

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Judgment Day, for he had often wished to revenge himself on Heaven for it. She now saw that Voltairean skepticism, which before marriage she had believed was the source of his Satanic pose, influenced only the surface of his intelligence; whereas, deeply ingrained in his unconscious mind, a gloomy Calvinism made him feel that the majority of men and he in particular had the mark of Cain on them and were slated for damnation. After exhausting his powers of reason, wit, and ridicule in trying to refute the arguments of religion, he would often say with violence: “The worst of it is, I do believe.”31

To ping-pong between sneering nihilism and simple faith; to trumpet one’s superiority over the common herd while concealing convictions of personal worthlessness; to scorn haughtily all things, even oneself—these are the hallmarks of the Byronic persona. Byronism entails the laborious creation and maintenance of a split consciousness comprised, on the one hand, of a real self, and, on the other, another self, just as genuine, that stands aside, observing, assessing, appreciating, criticizing. The model of selfhood that Byron gave to the world, and which found its way into Harrison, is irreducibly dualistic and performative. To be Byronic in our persistently Romantic world requires, as Sarah McLachlan put it in a 1997 song, “building a mystery.” It is to present the world with a tantalizingly complex persona of conflict, contradiction, and capriciousness—to swing wildly between madcap foolishness and profundity, callousness and compassion, inscrutability and clarity. It is to be, like Holly Golightly, the protagonist of Blake Edwards’ 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s—a real phony. This is the fallback stance of the self in the post-Byronic world: to view life as a pose, but to respond to that view not by rejecting poses, but by posing earnestly. George Harrison, the embodiment of the Byronic persona in the Beatles, poses earnestly in his self-incarnation as Hindu holy man, as in “Within You Without You,” his single contribution to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “Within You Without You” drones on, in apparent earnestness, about the ability of love to save the world. The song seems to be what it is: George’s arrogating to himself the prerogative of a swami, presenting spiritual guidance to a mixed-up world. But right at the end, barely audible, he put a few seconds of the sort of canned laughter one hears after jokes on a TV sitcom. The laughter undercuts the philosophical seriousness of the lyrics, as if to suggest that all this rot about love and spirit is just so much mumbo-jumbo. This puts “Within You Without You”—as its title suggests—in a state of in-between-ness, in this case, in between profundity and nonsense.

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Mean, Moody, and Magnificent: The Two Georges In a February 24, 1964 Newsweek cover story that tried to make sense of Beatlemania to the parents of teenagers who had spent the last month screaming themselves hoarse for the Fab Four, George Harrison is identified as the Beatle “who looks like a poet.”32 And what does a pop star poet in 1964 look like? By way of explanation (in a section of the article subtitled “Tough”), Newsweek consulted fourteen-yearold Girl Scout and nurse’s aide Pat Hagan, “a Beatles convert who previously dug ‘West Side Story,’ Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. ‘They’re tough,’ she explained solemnly. ‘Tough is like when you don’t conform. It’s not hoodlum. A leather jacket that’s tailored—that’s tough. Jimmy Dean was in the same class as the Beatles because he was tough. You’re tumultuous when you’re young, and each generation has to have its idols.’”33 As we saw in chapter one, a certain strain of toughness came into rock and roll, via country music, from disorderly northern British and southern American rural culture. But the tailored toughness of James Dean is different from the outlaw toughness of Robert Burns, Hank Williams, and Johnny Cash. The country poets’ drunken rampages made them—to employ Pat Hagan’s distinction—hoodlums. The tailored—or tender—toughness of James Dean and the Beatles, by contrast, partakes of what Irving Babbitt described as the “Romantic melancholy” of second-generation poets like Shelley, Keats, and Byron. Their “quest for the thrill superlative,” wrote Babbitt in Rousseau and Romanticism, led them not to happiness, but to frustration, as their desires for absolute freedom remained unfulfilled: “Every finite satisfaction, by the very fact that it is finite, leaves [the Romantic] unsatisfied.” But, continued Babbitt, “to submit to any circumscribing of one’s desires is to show that one has no sense of infinitude and so to sink to the level of the Philistine.”34 Romantic melancholy is Byron’s legacy to the poets who came after him. Even more important, though, after Byron the experience of being suspended between titanic forces pulling in opposite directions became the sign of personal depth and an artistic sensibility, not just for poets, but for everyone. This hyperbolic in-between-ness produces the tortured nonconformity and muted intensity of Dickinson’s, Frost’s, and Barrett Browning’s poetry. It also underlies the identity of twentieth-century pop culture icons like James Dean, whose anguished cry in Rebel without a Cause could serve as the motto of Byronic in-between-ness: “You’re tearing me apart!”

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Pat Hagan was insightful beyond her years in linking James Dean (whose middle name, as it happens, was Byron) with the Beatles and a certain type of poetic identity. Historians of culture conventionally view Dean as the embodiment of the 1950s teenage angst, which arose from the unique cultural conditions of the period immediately following World War II. But Dean’s brooding handsomeness, rebelliousness, and tormented in-between-ness hearkens back to Byron, not only the most famous English Romantic writer, but also the creator of the still-current archetype of poetic identity for the Western world. If upon his arrival in the United States in 1964 George Harrison looked to Newsweek magazine like a poet, it was because he was, like Byron and James Dean, darkly handsome, sardonic, scornful, but above all, mysterious. Dean was the immediate transmitter of this persona to the Beatles, but it came to him after nearly a century and a half of what Byron’s biographer Fiona MacCarthy has called “the complex and fascinating intertwining of his personal celebrity and literary reputation.”35 Like the Beatles in the early 1960s, Byron rocketed to fame for having captured the emerging temper of the times in a form for which there was an eager and ready market. After all five hundred copies of the first edition of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the work in which Byron introduced the tenderly tough literary version of himself later known as the Byronic hero, sold out in only three days, the poet awoke one morning in March of 1812 “and found myself famous.”36 This fame had come, however, after nearly four years of trying to break into the London literary scene. Over the next twelve years his fame grew, fueled by public fascination with the ways in which Byron’s own life mirrored that of the self-tortured, dashing, and reckless heroes of his works. He married in early 1815; but only a year later separated from his wife, living out the rest of his days in Italy and Greece, writing poems that continued to sell well (by 1820 Byron was earning by his pen £2,000 per year) and running through a succession of mistresses numbering in the hundreds. When Byron died on April 19, 1824, he was as renowned throughout Europe— and as controversial—as Napoleon. Though his self-imposed exile from Britain and shabby treatment of his wife had earned him the disapproval of the English establishment, when he left England for good in 1816, he walked to his cross-channel ferry through ranks of well-wishers who had turned out—as Beatle fans would later do—to catch a glimpse of a celebrity. And when his body was brought back to England for burial, thousands lined the roads for the three-day funeral procession from London to his grave on the family estate in Nottinghamshire.

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As one of the Anglo-American world’s first entertainment superstars, Byron had a far-reaching influence not only on the poets who came after him, but also on the shape of individual identity in the postRomantic era. He inaugurated a fashion for theatrical self-presentation that changed the course of literature and established a new identity norm for men, in which the tortured toughness epitomized by James Dean challenged the Enlightenment ideal of gentlemanly amiability. Since Byron was a poet, writers took the lead in effecting this paradigm shift. In England, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and the Brontë sisters were all ardent admirers of Byron, and in their own lives and works, sustained Byron’s cultural afterlife. Tennyson made a career of developing his own brand of Byronic melancholy, while Arnold—as a young, aspiring poet—adopted Byron’s dandified dress and, for a time, a tame version of Byron’s reckless lifestyle. Byron is the original of Heathcliff, the brooding hero of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, while—as Fiona MacCarthy has observed— Edward Rochester in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre resembles Byron “in his past sexual transgressions, his doomed marriage, the secret horror of the madwoman hidden in the attic, his arrogant attempt to inveigle Jane into an illegal wedding.”37 Oscar Wilde, whose portrait appears among the Beatles’ heroes assembled for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover collage, admired Byron as a fellow philhellenist and, as MacCarthy writes, modeled himself visually on his poetic precursor: for a series of photos taken in New York in 1882, Wilde, in knee breeches and a black velvet jacket, reclined “on a fur rug placed on an Eastern carpet.”38 These reincarnations kept the Byronic persona, with its existential implications about the double bind of freedom, current through the substantial societal and intellectual transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus, when James Dean created his breakthrough movie roles in the mid 1950s, he both caught the mood of the disaffected postwar teenager and revived a venerable cultural trope. Dean’s brooding intensity was Byronic in-between-ness, reconfigured for cinema-era America. The words that Lady Caroline Lamb used to describe Byron— “mad—bad—and dangerous to know”39 —could serve as the teenage male ideal of the 1950s. In their rollicking Hamburg days, prompted by the Deanesque, tough singers Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, the Beatles cultivated a similar image, donning leather jackets and trousers, and tearing up the stage and their instruments during performances characterized more by theatrical mayhem than musical inventiveness. In those days, though, the Beatles’ Byron was not Harrison, but Pete Best, the band’s drummer from 1960 to the

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summer of 1962. Dark haired, with Byron’s full lips and smoldering gaze, Best was considered at the time to be the best-looking member of the band, more manly and handsome than the boyishly cute Paul McCartney. But looks alone did not make Pete into Byron. Best also affected—though probably without intending to—Byronic disdain, an unfailingly attractive attitude. Beatle historian (and John Lennon’s Liverpool college mate) Bill Harry recalls that because Best “sat concentrating on his drums with his head down, [he] developed a somewhat moody image”40 that captivated the group’s female fans. Interviewed in 1963, Cavern Club doorman Pat Delaney said, “Before the Beatles recorded, Pete was inclined to be more popular with the girls than any other member of the group. . . . Girls were attracted by the fact that he wouldn’t smile, even though they tried to make him. They also tried to attract his attention on stage, but he wouldn’t look at them.”41 In a review of a late 1960 show at Litherland Town Hall in Liverpool, Cavern Club DJ Bob Wooler called Best “musically authoritative and physically magnetic,”42 and when introducing the band members at the Cavern Club, Wooler would inflame McCartney’s jealousy by calling Best “mean, moody, and magnificent.”43 Studied indifference to the acclaim of the world he worked so hard to inspire was a key element of Byron’s appeal as well. Byron knew that an averted gaze was more alluring and powerful than a direct one. The 1815 G.H. Harlow drawing of Byron—frequently reproduced—shows the poet’s left profile, looking down through half-shut eyes, the corner of his mouth dropping into the suggestion of a sneer.44 Disdain was also a frequent poetic subject for Byron, as in this passage from Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: I have not loved the world, nor the world me; I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed To its idolatries a patient knee,— Nor coined my cheek to smiles, nor cried aloud In worship of an echo; in the crowd They could not deem me one of such; I stood Among them, but not of them; in a shroud Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could, Had I not filed [sharpened] my mind, which thus itself subdued.

But Best’s Byronism was, in the end, only skin deep. After Pete was sacked and replaced in the drummer’s chair by Ringo, George put on the Byronic mantle in the group, a role for which he was suited by his own brooding good looks. But George was also deeper

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than Pete—he had more native intelligence, and a quiet intensity on stage that hinted at greater intellect and emotional complexity than McCartney’s show-biz flash or Lennon’s bottled-up fury. Another factor made George the Beatles’ best representative of the Byronic cultural legacy: his loner status in the band. For despite being a founding member of the Beatles, George—as the neglected middle child in the group’s family dynamic—was always a bit of an outsider. Much of this was the result of his youth, relative to the other members of the band. Born February 25, 1943, he was about two-and-a-half years younger than Ringo, the oldest Beatle, and twenty-one months younger than Lennon. When George first met John, then, in the fall of 1957, Harrison was only fourteen, McCartney was fifteen, and Lennon was sixteen or seventeen. Harrison could have been the kid brother of both Lennon and McCartney, and that age difference was made all the more significant by the fact that all three were still teenagers when they met. “I think [George] was about one and a half years younger than me,” recalled Paul McCartney in 1995. “That’s quite a big age difference at that time. So I suppose I used to talk down to him a bit, as you do to a kid who’s one and a half years younger than you . . . Might have been a failing of mine, to tend to talk down to him, because I’d known him as a younger kid.” In fact, McCartney was eight-and-a-half months older than Harrison. “He was always about nine months older than I,” said George in response to McCartney’s recollection of their age difference. “Even now, after all these years, he is still nine months older.”45 Though a virtual baby in his eyes, Lennon invited Harrison to join his band on the basis of George’s superior musical skills: at McCartney’s invitation, Harrison auditioned his way into The Quarry Men by playing a note-perfect version of The Shadows’ hit “Raunchy” as he, John, and Paul rode together on a Liverpool bus. To Lennon and McCartney, Harrison never lost the kid brother identity he had at first, and others in the Beatles’ inner circle picked up on this attitude. “I think the trouble with George was that he was never treated on the same level as having the same quality of songwriting, by anyone—by John, by Paul, or by me,” said George Martin. “The other problem was that he didn’t have a collaborator,” Martin continues. “John always had Paul to bounce ideas off. Even if he didn’t actually write the song with Paul, he was a kind of competitive mate. George was a loner and I’m afraid that was made worse by the three of us.”46 George was young in the early days of the Beatles. Indeed, the fact that George was under eighteen—and therefore ineligible for a work permit—during the group’s first stint in Hamburg served as

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the pretext for the band’s humiliating deportation from Germany in 1961. And the first management contract the group signed with Brian Epstein had to be invalidated because both George and Paul were under twenty-one, and therefore required parental permission to enter into such an agreement. His youth isolated him; and this isolation, intensified by the competitive fascination that kept Lennon and McCartney focused on each other, heightened George’s innate introspectiveness. In the early, moptop days, Lennon and McCartney were the teeny-bopper idols, but Harrison deliberately pursued an alternate identity of greater moodiness and seriousness, though at first these qualities found expression as little more than opposition to whatever John and Paul were doing. While Lennon and McCartney were churning out tunes that would appeal easily and immediately to their pubescent female fans—simple songs with June-moon rhymes and puppy-love sentiments, like “From Me to You” and “Hold Me Tight”—George wrote his first song: “Don’t Bother Me,” a minorkey lament for lost love in which Harrison is as forbidding to the girl as Lennon and McCartney are inviting. Where John and Paul had, in “Please Please Me,” implored the new love to “come on,” in “Don’t Bother Me” George tells her to go away and leave him alone. The Byronic hero was also a loner, declaring, in Manfred, “The Lion is alone, and so am I.” Liverpool playwright Alun Owen, screenwriter of A Hard Day’s Night, picked up on George’s intrinsic Byronism, and consequently wrote Harrison’s character for the film as taciturn or sardonic, grudgingly taking part in Beatlemania, but always with an ever-so-slight smirk of mockery playing about the corners of his mouth. In the press conference scene, a reporter asks George the clichéd question, “Has success changed your life?” “Yes,” George replies robotically, with a blank stare. “What do you call that hairstyle you’re wearing?” asks another reporter. “Arthur,” answers George, in a tone of transcendental boredom. The ease with which Harrison slides into Byronic cynicism also underwrites the film’s funniest scene: the spokesmodel audition. Killing time between rehearsals, George— looking resplendently Byronic in his black boots, drainpipe trousers, black turtleneck and narrow-lapelled charcoal jacket—wanders into the office of a supercilious advertising executive, where he is mistakenly assumed to have reported for an audition as a spokesmodel for clothes for teenagers. The executive—played by Shakespearean actor Kenneth Haigh—affects a Byronic contempt for the manufactured teenage culture of which the Beatles themselves were supposedly a product, deriding the clothes he wants George to hawk as “fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles.” But his cynicism is no match for

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George’s. The executive gives himself away when the conversation turns to Susan Canby, a doe-eyed model whom the executive breathlessly describes as “our resident teenager.” “You have to love her,” he tells George, “she’s your symbol,” “Oh, you mean that posh bird who gets everything wrong?” says George. “The lads frequently sit round the television and watch her for a giggle,” he goes on. “In fact, once we sat down and wrote these letters about how gear she was, and all that rubbish.” “She’s a trendsetter,” says the executive, his face glowing with pride. “She’s a drag,” says George, “a well known drag. We turn the sound down on her and say rude things.” “Get him out of here!” shouts the executive. “He’s knocking the program’s image!” “Have I said something amiss?” asks George, smiling faintly as he’s hustled out. Haughty bemusement at the spectacle of human foibles, accompanied by ridicule of the meretricious idols of popular worship, characterize both Georges, Byron, and Harrison. Like Byron, Harrison criticized the very celebrity culture that made him rich beyond his wildest dreams. Though he lacked Lennon’s explosive temper, Harrison was more melancholy than his band mates, and occasionally his resentment of his loner status in the group caused him to lash out. During their first U.S. tour in the summer of 1964, Harrison brought the group their first bit of bad American publicity when, at a Los Angeles nightclub, he tossed a drink at a pesky photographer. As their plane whisked the Beatles away from their last public concert in San Francisco on August 29, 1966, Harrison announced, “Right— that’s it. I’m not a Beatle anymore.”47 Byron, too, had a scornful temperament. After meeting him for the first time, Annabella Milbanke wrote in her diary, “His mouth continually betrays the acrimony of his spirit. I should judge him sincere and independent. . . . It appeared to me that he tried to control his natural sarcasm and vehemence as much as he could, in order not to offend; but at times his lips thickened with disdain, and his eyes rolled impatiently.”48 Both Georges channeled their reflex scornfulness into their art. Stung by bad notices in the Edinburgh Review of his early volume of poems Hours of Idleness, Byron published English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers, a satiric attack on virtually every living English poet, from Wordsworth, whom Byron calls an idiot, to Coleridge, “the bard who soars to elegize an ass.”49 George Harrison was the only real satirist in the Beatles, who recorded two examples of his comically bitter invective, “Taxman” and “Piggies.” “Taxman,” George wrote in his autobiography, I Me Mine, “was when I first realized that even though we had started earning money, we were actually giving most

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of it away in taxes; it was and still is typical. Why should this be so? Are we being punished for something we have forgotten to do?”50 A poison-pen letter to both the Labour government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Conservative party heir apparent Edward Heath, “Taxman” complains about the 94 percent tax bracket into which the Beatles success had thrust them by 1966. In the song, George, speaking as the taxman, announces the imposition of new levies on drivers (he’ll tax the street), people who sit in chairs (he’ll tax the seat), and walkers (he’ll tax their feet). The acme of Harrisonian satire, though, is “Piggies,” from the White Album, an attack on the greedy vulgarity of the superrich, complete with a mocking harpsichord introduction and real porcine grunts at the end. Satiric invective comes from one side of the split Byronic consciousness. Satire is complemented, however, by another mode of simple sincerity—a mood as authentic an unironic as the satiric mode is artificial and cynical. Harrison’s lovely ballad “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” exemplifies this melancholy sincerity. Alternating images of universal states and processes—an unswept floor, the earth’s rotation—with an obliquely told story of unsaid love and betrayal, “While My Guitar” juxtaposes the quiet suffering of an individual (figured by the wails of the electric guitar, played by Harrison’s friend Eric Clapton) against the indifference of the world, as in this rejected stanza from the song: I look at the trouble and hate that is raging, While my guitar gently weeps. While I’m sitting here, doing nothing but aging, While my guitar gently weeps.51

Both Georges, though, could express this kind of sincerity without its melancholy accompaniment. Despite their proclivities for haughtiness and satire, when in the presence of beauty or possessed by love, Byron and Harrison were capable of expressing themselves with astonishing directness and simplicity. Harrison’s two late masterpieces with the Beatles, “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” from their final album, Abbey Road, are as refreshingly honest and straightforward as “Taxman” and “Piggies” are sardonic. With “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun,” Harrison finally earned the artistic respect he had sought from Lennon, McCartney, and George Martin, and showed that his particular gift lay in expressing himself with an earnestness and depth seemingly unavailable to John and Paul, who were diverted from this degree of inwardness by the creative war they fought against

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each other. It was as if Harrison’s isolation from the more high-profile members of the band gave him a heightened awareness of the natural and spiritual beauty that surrounded him. Lennon and McCartney, consumed by their rivalry and, in John’s case, battling inner demons, never seemed able—even at their best—to write love songs as heartfelt and poignant as “Something.” Despite all the inner demons he battled, Byron was similarly capable of feeling and expressing an untroubled appreciation of beauty and love, as in the famous lyric “She Walks in Beauty,” in which he describes the lustrous light falling from the dark hair of a ravishing woman he met at a ball in 1814: One shade the more, one ray the less Had half impaired the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress Or softly lightens o’er her face; Where thoughts serenely sweet express How pure, how dear their dwelling place.52

What gave the two Georges the ability to express themselves with this kind of depth and honesty was the unlikely spirituality toward which both gravitated. Spirituality is an unlikely characteristic for the two because both were hostile to religion. “I would sooner be a Paulician, Manichean, Spinozist, Gentile, Pyrrhonian, Zoroastrian, than one of the seventy-two villainous sects who are tearing each other to pieces for the love the Lord and hatred of each other,” wrote Byron in 1811 to a friend who was about to take religious orders. “Nobody I know in the Christian religion seems to have a deep enough understanding of the science of God to be able to translate it into human terms. Church leaders are purveying a kind of nonsense because they don’t understand it themselves. So they blind you with ignorance like a government does, as if the power of the Church has become reason enough for you not to question anything it says. It’s like, ‘You don’t know anything about Christ and God because we’re the ones who own the franchise,’” said George in 1995.53 But despite their contempt for religious institutions and mainstream doctrine, both Georges were spiritual, and particularly drawn by Eastern philosophy, religion, and spirituality. Not surprisingly, Harrison’s quest for spiritual enlightenment began musically. On the set of Help!, Harrison saw his first sitar while shooting the Indian restaurant scene. The sitar led him first to Indian music, and Indian music in turn led him to Hinduism. In late 1966 Harrison and his wife Pattie went to India to study Hindu thought and transcendental meditation. And it was Harrison who

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introduced the other Beatles to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi while the transcendental meditation guru was in England for a lecture tour in the summer of 1967; that meeting led the group to spend the first two months of 1968 at the Maharishi’s Rishikesh, India, ashram. Byron’s spiritual longings also led him to the East. During the Mediterranean tour of 1809–1811, during which he collected the material for Cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron fell under the spell of the Western Asian landscape. He set his wildly popular verse romances The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and The Giaour in the East. But throughout his life the East was more to Byron than just a suitably exotic locale for the swashbuckling adventure tales that solidified his fame—and enriched him—between 1814 and 1816. The mysterious rituals and doctrines of the East represented for Byron a spiritual alternative to the harshly Calvinistic Scottish Presbyterianism in which he was reared, and which his dissipated lifestyle was meant to repudiate. Byron was contemptuous of the Christian doctrine of the afterlife. “I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are all miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another. If men are to live, why die at all? and if they die, why disturb the sweet and sound sleep that ‘knows no waking’?” he wrote in 1811.54 Curiously, though, the East provided him with a substitute faith for this intolerable dogma in what he called the Turkish concept of fate. After their separation, Byron’s wife recalled that her husband “often spoke of a mysterious necessity for his return to the East, and vindicated the Turks with a spirit of Nationality, admiring above all their complete predestinarianism. He would say ‘The East—ah, there it is,’ . . . and he has two or three times intimated to me that he abjured his religion there. In the autumn in London, he said with a shudder of conscious remembrance, ‘I was very near becoming a Musselman.’ He preferred the Turkish opinions, manners & dress in all respects to ours.”55 For both Georges, much of the appeal of the East lay in its dissimilarity with the grim northern English settings in which both had grown up. Though Byron’s family seat, Newstead Abbey, lies in the midland county of Nottinghamshire, the first nine years of little George’s boyhood was passed in Aberdeen, Scotland, on the frigid North Sea. When, in 1809, Byron left England for the Mediterranean, he encountered a glorious change from the climate of his native land, where “the sun shines but two months a year,” as he put it in “Beppo.” In Greece, Byron found, the copious sunshine both made every day more pleasant and created a wholly different way of life. As Leslie Marchand put it, “the open brightness as opposed

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to the clouded murkiness of the English weather” created a “freedom and frankness of life and manners in contrast to the English reserve and hypocrisy.”56 The East held a similar allure for Harrison, son of a bus driver, born in Liverpool to a large and boisterous family all crammed into a “two up and two down” house with the toilet in the back garden. Though George reports that he had a happy childhood, he grew up in the era of postwar rationing and scaled-down expectations in an old, industrial city, with its months of grey and short winter days, and where the sea-fogs and brittle ice storms came with a vengeance off the Irish Sea. As they did for Byron, for Harrison, Asia and the Mediterranean promised both a splendidly different climate of plentiful sunshine and liberation from the class-bound society that would keep a bus driver’s son, and maybe his son as well, trapped in the working classes, capable of doing no better than the job of department-store window dresser George held before he began playing music full time with the Beatles. It is no accident that one of Harrison’s best-loved songs with the Beatles—“Here Comes the Sun”—celebrates rebirth, renewal, and freedom from the cold and lonely winter of both his childhood and what he increasingly came to see as his imprisonment in the Beatles. Like his precursor Byron, who praised Athens as a place where “rain is extremely rare, snow never lies in the plains, and a cloudy day is an agreeable rarity,” Harrison was a sun-worshipper because the sun confers freedom: freedom from the second-class role he unwillingly played in the group that made him famous but also made him crazy; freedom from the low expectations imposed on him by the English class structure; a degree of freedom even from the pain of in-between-ness, for the land of the sun is the land of the mystic trance, in which the spiritual striver transcends division and fragmentation to experience the Om, the oneness of all things. Byron, too, found in the East a sunny refuge from the destiny to which the precise circumstances of his birth and English upbringing would confine him: unenthusiastic aristocrat, bored family man, hounded celebrity. When George makes his first appearance in the animated film Yellow Submarine, he’s stumbled upon by Ringo, who has just endured a pop-art, Warholesque setting of “Eleanor Rigby,” amid a desolate and drab phalanx of midland terraced houses—the two up, two down dwellings of both Ringo’s and George’s Liverpool childhood. George is meditating, amid the drone of an Indian raga. This is Harrison’s mature persona in the Beatles: the Scouse mystic, whose Eastern sympathies and interests are thrown into sharp

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relief by the Liverpudlian background against which they arose in George’s life. For however far Harrison moved, both physically and mentally, from Liverpool, it was always there, not least in the thick Lancashire accent he never lost. Even at the height of his immersion into Hinduism, George still evoked the Liverpool of decayed dockyards, dingy tea shops, council houses, and a schoolboy world in which Englishness was forced down your throat with the brutality that nurses reserved for administrations of castor oil. Like Byron, George remained in-between his native and adopted cultures. Less than a year after the Beatles broke up, Harrison released a triple album, largely comprised of songs he had written, but had been unable to record because of the dominance of the Beatles’ playlist by Lennon and McCartney compositions. Some of these songs, like the number one hit “My Sweet Lord” and the lovely “All Things Must Pass,” reflected Harrison’s earnest, Byronic, Eastern spirituality. Others, like “What is Life,” homaged George’s country-rock roots—the side that prompted him to adopt “Carl Harrison,” in honor of Carl Perkins, as his stage name for the Beatles first professional tour with Johnny Gentle in 1960. Even his Byronic penchant for satire continued into George’s solo career. “Sue Me, Sue You Blues,” a send-up of the Byzantine legal entanglements that followed the Beatles’ break-up, appears on Harrison’s second studio album, Living in the Material World, released in the summer of 1973. Unlike Lennon and McCartney, Harrison was artistically liberated by the dissolution of the Beatles. No longer working in the shadows of John and Paul, George enjoyed a newfound freedom to let his own wide-ranging intellect express itself with the range and depth of which it was capable. Just as Byron’s explorations of the existential dilemmas of freedom brought added depth and a wider ranging philosophic dimension to the first-generation Romanticism elaborated by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Harrison—whose importance to the Beatles was unthinkingly downplayed by Lennon, who called George “just a guitarist”—brought intellectual and philosophic weight to the Beatles. Without him, the group would have been able to present only the spectacle of Lennon and McCartney vying for supremacy. George gives the Beatles a middle way, an alternative to John’s and Paul’s showily ambitious self-making. In the next chapter, we will see how the group’s enactment of a family dynamic allowed another overlooked member of the band—the hapless Ringo—introduce another set of existential issues to their music and very public career.

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Chapter 4

R i ng o Sta r r a n d t h e A n x i e t y of Rom a n t ic C h i l dhood

Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear. —William Wordsworth, The Prelude

T

here’s a moment in the Beatles’ August 1, 1965 television appearance on “Blackpool Night Out” that beautifully captures Ringo’s Beatle persona. “And now we’d like to do something we don’t often do,” he says during a break between songs. “Give someone a chance to sing who doesn’t often sing. And here he is, all out of key and nervous, singing ‘Act Naturally’ . . . Ringo!” The boys go right into Buck Owens’ bouncy tune about newfound stardom and the secret of making it big in the movies—all he has to do is act naturally. If Ringo is nervous, he hides it well. Though he struggles a bit with pitch control, he is not out of key, and he sings the song with winning humor, all the while maintaining the rock solid beat for which he was famous. The moment is trademark Ringo: skilled and steady, but presented with the disarming self-effacement of a talented child suddenly thrust into the limelight, whose performance acquires extra charm from the touch of uncertainty with which it is carried off. This is the part Ringo plays in the Beatles: the buoyant child, happy to be part of the group, but haunted by the fear that a huge mistake has been made, that no one like him could have been so lucky. As we saw in the last chapter, in the family dynamic the group enacted, John and Paul were the feuding elder brothers, George the neglected middle son, and Ringo was the baby—the late addition to the line-up,

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innocent and fresh, but always a little unsure that he really belongs. He is nervous because, as he says in “With a Little Help from My Friends,” he might sing out of key and show that he doesn’t really harmonize with the group. Ringo exudes childish insecurity. As he did with George’s scornfulness, A Hard Day’s Night screenwriter Alun Owen picked up on this, and made it the basis of the character he created for Ringo in the film. Early in A Hard Day’s Night, as the Beatles’ train makes its way to London, George comes upon Ringo standing alone between cars, looking sadly out the window. “What’s the matter with you, then?” asks George. “It’s his grandfather,” says Ringo. “I can tell he doesn’t like me. It’s because I’m little.” “You’ve got an inferiority complex, you have,” observes George. “I know,” agrees Ringo. “That’s why I play the drums. It’s me active compensatory factor.” A moment later, walking through the train, the two spy an attractive woman through the window of a first-class compartment, who throws Ringo a come hither look and beckons him inside. “Go on in, then,” George urges. “No,” says Ringo, “she’ll only reject me in the end and I’ll be frustrated.” “You never know,” George persists, “you may be lucky this time.” “No, I know the psychological pattern. It plays havoc with me drum skins,” says Ringo, resignedly blowing the woman a rueful kiss and moving on. In light of the success of his pre-Beatle musical career, the role a of diffident, self-doubting child was an unlikely one for Ringo. The oldest member of the band (born July 7, 1940, more than three months before John’s birth on October 9, 1940), before he joined the Beatles, Ringo was known as both the best drummer in Liverpool and a formidable ladies’ man. With Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, for whom he played from 1960 to 1962, Ringo had a featured spot, Starr Time, which showcased what Liverpool impresario Sam Leach remembers as the drummer’s consummate professionalism and studliness. “From his neatly-combed beard to his well-manicured hands—one of his conquests did them for free—to the gold rings and mandatory gold medallion swinging from his hairy chest,” Leach wrote, Ringo “was always immaculate.”1 When he joined the Beatles, though, Ringo transformed himself from swinging sexpot into anxious schlemiel. With Rory Storm, Ringo had set that band’s standard for slick hipsterism; but with the Beatles he became the butt of the jokes in A Hard Day’s Night and the slapstick victim in Help! Desexualized, in the Beatles, Ringo reverted to childhood, adding what Steven Stark has called “an essential element of ordinariness to the group,” which pleasingly contrasted with the other three’s cultivation of arty trendiness.2 In the Beatles, Ringo

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sang the songs that expressed the child’s desire for fantasist escape (“Yellow Submarine”; “Octopus’s Garden”), innocent longing (“I Wanna Be Your Man”; “Boys”), lovesick bewilderment (“What Goes On”; “Honey Don’t”; “Don’t Pass Me By”), and the apprehensive songs about wanting to belong and be liked (“With a Little Help from My Friends”). When John invites all the children to sing after each verse of “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” it is Ringo who leads the chorus. By bringing the tentativeness and tender sensitivities of the child to the Beatles, Ringo both fills out the group’s enactment of a family dynamic and connects the Beatles to one of the most pervasive and influential Romantic themes. The Romantics followed Rousseau in celebrating the joy, spontaneity, and natural creativity of children. Instead of seeing childhood as a life stage to be done with as quickly as possible, the Romantics viewed children as exemplars of pristine human nature, to be cherished and nurtured as God made them rather than warped away from their innate goodness by educational and religious institutions. The post–World War II youth culture that created the Beatles and that they strengthened and spread hearkens back to this Romantic exaltation of the child—in Wordsworth’s famous phrase—as “father of the man.” It is sometimes said that children and childhood were discovered by the Romantics. But childhood and youth had been celebrated by previous generations of writers, particularly the sentimental mideighteenth-century poets of sensibility like Thomas Gray and William Cowper. But the Romantics did a great deal more than just exalt childish spontaneity and innocence. By writing from a child’s unique perspective instead of merely writing about children, the Romantics discovered the delicate and surprisingly complex texture of the childish mind. The inner life of the child is not, the Romantics found, merely an uninterrupted bliss of unspoiled joy and spotless purity. Instead, to the Romantics the child’s mind is inescapably dualistic. Innocence is shadowed by anxiety and spontaneous happiness by causeless sorrow. Most important, the child’s powerful imagination, worshipped by the Romantics as proof of humankind’s innate creativity, can as readily lead to spectacles of terror as it can to visions of wonder. The idea of the child’s mind as both complex and precariously suspended between categorical opposites originated with William Blake, whose Songs of Innocence painted a arrestingly multifaceted picture of what it feels like to be a child. Wordsworth too saw the childish mind as irreducibly bifurcated: in his own childhood, he said, he was “fostered alike by beauty and by fear.” But it was Lewis Carroll—an

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avid admirer of both Blake and Wordsworth—who transmitted this conception of the childish mind directly to the Beatles. In Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, the child’s imaginative play, figured as the nonsense the Beatles loved, is juxtaposed with the frightening realities of disorder, transience, and violence glimpsed in the interpolated poems and in the behavior of the phantasmagorical figures—the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, and the screaming Queens—who are these books’ most memorable characters. Ringo resembles the Romantic child depicted by Blake and Wordsworth and that filters into the Beatles through Lewis Carroll: cute, affable, self-effacing, and eager to please, but always a little anxious. This immediately recognizable state of being—reminiscent of the childhood through which we all have passed—comprises Ringo’s unique contribution to the Beatle phenomenon, and contributes a great deal to their initial and continuing appeal. Ringo brings innocence and playfulness into the Beatles. But he also brings the sadness and insecurity that for the Romantics were the necessary accompaniments of that innocence. Though Ringo is sometimes derided as the beneficiary of history’s luckiest break, he is, in fact, an indispensable part of the group, as indispensable as the other three, despite what the old bandleader’s joke says: what do you call a guy who hangs around with musicians? A drummer. Ringo is a great drummer; but with the Beatles he was more than just a drummer. He was the touchstone in the Beatles of a truly universal psychological experience: what it feels like to be a child.

Micronee Finger: Beauty and Fear in Blake, Wordsworth, and Carroll In addition to a signature sound, the Beatles had a particular sense of humor, and a winningly childlike playfulness with language on frequent display, especially in the early years, in their press conferences and other public appearances. An impressive example of their inventive wit appears in the Maysles brothers’ 1964 documentary film The Beatles: First U.S. Visit. During the group’s train ride from New York to Washington, D.C., George calls to John, from off camera, “John, have you got a cigarette for me, please?” “I think I’ve got one for you here, George,” John replies, pulling a packet out of his pocket. “It’s a Marlaboro, with the micronee finger.” A what with the what? John’s off-the-cuff witticism hearkens back to an earlier moment in the film, when the Beatles are riding in the back of a limousine from the airport to the Plaza Hotel. As Paul listens to the patter of

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American advertising—fittingly, on a transistor radio in the shape of a Pepsi vending machine—a spot for Kent cigarettes comes on. “Looking for a filter cigarette that really satisfies?” asks the silkenvoiced announcer. “One that will give you the pleasure you want in smoking?” “Yes, I am,” Paul answers with put-on earnestness. “Well, look no more,” continues the announcer. “There is a cigarette that gives you the filter action you’re looking for.” “Which one?” asks Paul with mock eagerness. “Kent,” replies the announcer, “with the exclusive micronite filter.” At that moment, the frame shifts to Lennon, who takes a drag on his own cigarette, and stares, a little blankly, into the camera, while the slogan plants itself in his mind. A few days later, on the train, micronite filter returns as micronee finger, a foreshadowing of the nonsense wordplay that would figure so prominently in surrealistic Lennon songs like “I Am the Walrus” (for example, “crabalocker fishwife”) and “Come Together” (“monkey finger,” perhaps a further riff on “micronee finger”). Lennon acquired his knack for this kind of nonsense wordplay from his childhood love of what George Orwell called the tradition of “amiable lunacy”3 in British humor. As a boy, John was a devoted fan of the Goon Show, the wacky radio comedy created by Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Seacombe. The Goons specialized in nonsense and off-the-wall satire, like the “Ying tong Song,” in which the phrase “ying tong tiddly-i-po” is repeated over and over, and sketches like “Six Charlies in Search of an Author,” a weird send-up of absurdist drama. Before the Goons, John had heard the Liverpool comic Tommy Handley (who appears as one of the Beatles’ heroes in the Sgt. Pepper’s cover collage), star of a World War II radio show called ITMA (an acronym for “It’s that man again,” the phrase used by British newspapers to refer to Hitler). Handley’s bits included fauxserious wartime bulletins from “the minestrone of information” and the slightly off-color catchphrases of recurring characters like Mrs. Mopp, the office cleaning lady, who always asked, “Can I do you now, sir?” “Professor” Stanley Unwin (1911–2002), ubiquitous on British radio, films, and television from the mid-1940s through the 1970s was another comic influence on the young Lennon. Unwin’s specialty was word-association gobbledygook, as in “Goldiloppers,” his version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears: “Once apollytito and Goldiloppers set out in the deep dark of the forry. She was carry a basket with buttere-flabe and cheesy flavour.”4 The Beatles’ characteristic humor—displayed in the Magical Mystery Tour film and the song “You Know My Name, Look Up the Number”—carried on this strain of British popular culture. John

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employed an Unwinesque playfulness with language in In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. The title of the first puns on write/right, and the second humorously alters the British expression “a spanner in the works” (for which the American equivalent is “a wrench in the machinery”). Lennon’s prose in these works is thoroughly Unwinized, as the author’s biographical notice on the back of In His Own Write demonstrates: About the awful: I was bored on the 9th of Octover 1940; the Nasties were still booming us led by Madalf Heathump (Who only had one). Anyway they didn’t get me. I attended to varicous schools in Liddypol. And still didn’t pass—much to my Aunties supplies. As a member of the most publified Beatles my and (P, G, & R’s) records might seem funnier to some of you than this book, but as far as I’m conceived this correction of short writty is the most wonderful larf I’ve ever ready. God help and breed you all.5

But British nonsense has a long history, stretching back at least to the nineteenth century. Before the Goons, Handley, and Unwin captivated the imagination of the young Beatles, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll had invited several generations of English-speaking young people to make playthings of their words and concepts. Both Lear and Carroll were powerful indirect and direct influences on the Beatles. Repeatedly cited as important a precursor for the Beatles as Elvis Presley, Carroll was also Lennon’s literary role model.6 Of The Daily Howl, the newspaper John wrote and illustrated as a teenager to amuse his schoolmates, Lennon said “I was determined to be Lewis Carroll with a hint of [English cartoonist] Ronald Searle.”7 Even after he started composing hit songs for the Beatles, Lennon continued to write and draw. When the band first went out on the road, John took along a typewriter and could be frequently found writing between shows. “An awful lot of the material was written while we were on tour. . . . I suppose it was all manifestations of hidden cruelties. [The stories and pictures of In His Own Write] are very Alice in Wonderland and Winnie the Pooh.”8 But nonsense—whether in the comic form of the Goons, Handley, and Unwin or in Carroll’s more self-consciously literary version—was not just child’s play for Lennon, the Beatles, or even the English literary tradition. Nonsense takes the Wordsworthian ideal of poetry as spontaneous overflow to its logical limits. Nonsense is automatic imaginative expression—as in “micronee finger.” Like Surrealism as defined by André Breton in 1924, nonsense is “pure psychic automatism.”

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To the Romantic, the child’s delight in nonsense provides additional proof that in contrast to adults, children possess maximal imaginative freedom. Moreover, a child at play is a natural poet, because children do with their playthings what poets do with language: recombine existing elements into new forms and functions; break down stable denotations and conventional categorical distinctions between things; take something old, stale, and tired, and make it into something fresh, new, and startling just by exercising their instinct for improvisation. The pompous, pseudo-scientific blather of “micronite filter” becomes the silly, ever-so-slightly naughty “micronee finger.” The absurd puns of the Goons, Unwin, and Handley and the bizarre dreamscapes of children’s literature represent a species of natural creativity celebrated by the Romantics as the unique gift of the young. But the child’s natural imaginative spontaneity cuts two ways. The freedom and power of the childish imagination enables children to delight in nonsense; but the price they pay for all this imaginative power is a greater susceptibility to the unpleasant emotions—anxiety and even terror—that the imagination is capable of stirring. For many Romantics, this was an acceptable bargain; some even wore their fearfulness and anxiety as badges of honor, psychic guarantees that they still possessed a child’s imagination, undiminished in power by their accession to adulthood. As we saw in chapter one, Burns was unapologetic, even a little proud, that his boyhood fears of supernatural beings still dogged him as an adult. In “Witches and Other Night-Fears,” the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb lamented his loss in adulthood of the vivid, if terrifying, nightmares he had experienced as a child after reading a book about witchcraft in his father’s library. When he was a boy, Lamb wrote, “I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude, and the dark, were my hell.” As childish superstition gave way to adult reason, though, the vividness of both his nightmares and pleasant dreams faded. Terrifying visions of a “hag that nightly sat on my pillow” were replaced by prosaic dreams of “architecture and buildings,” and now, he complains, “my stretch of imaginative activity can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife.” The culprit for this imaginative drop-off, he continues, is “credulity,” which “is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength,” and, as a result, “my night fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. . . . Fiendish faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look at me; but I know them for mockeries.” 9 Ingesting copious amounts of LSD starting in late 1966 helped Lennon to minimize the natural diminution in the vividness of his dreams. But John’s childhood immersion in the works of Lewis Carroll

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had also introduced him to the anxious underside of nonsense; this is what John was struggling to articulate when he said that the “hidden cruelties” of life on the road to which he was exposed during the maelstrom of early Beatlemania shadowed the stories and drawings he did for In His Own Write. In the Alice books, Carroll depicted childhood as an oscillation between opposite emotional states of delight and terror. Playful—that is, controlled—nonsense produces delight. But when nonsense spins out of control—as it inevitably does—and verges into disorder, discord, and violence, the result is terror. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass dramatize this dualistic nature of childhood experience by juxtaposing play—in the form of nonsense poems and satiric word games—with peril, either experienced by Alice herself or by the various characters she encounters in the imaginary world. Alice experiences the splendors of imaginative freedom through the play of nonsense, which delightfully explodes the social and linguistic restrictions within which children are particularly confined. But the flip side of this freedom is perplexity, anxiety, and fear. Nonsense unfolds against the background of weird, even proto-Kafkaesque situations and events. Alice is a curious, good little girl who is frequently delighted by the surrealistic worlds she finds down the rabbit-hole and through the looking glass. In Wonderland she is, though, just as frequently perplexed, despondent, and frightened. As do all children in the Romantic paradigm, the price Alice pays for her childish power of imaginative transport is a heightened susceptibility to imaginative terrors. The Alice books influentially transmit this vision of childhood into the twentieth-century Anglo-American culture inherited by the Beatles. But Lewis Carroll is not the creator of this dualistic conception of childhood: he absorbed it from William Blake and William Wordsworth, whose poetry Carroll fervently admired. Though they developed their ideas independently, Blake and Wordsworth shared a view of childhood as ineluctably divided between mighty opposites: dream and nightmare, light and shadow, bliss and terror, or, as Wordsworth famously put it, beauty and fear. Blake named this duality innocence and experience. Though in the subtitle to The Songs of Innocence and Experience Blake identified these as “the contrary states of the human soul,” his first poetic excursion into both these dimensions of the childish mind had in fact taken place through The Songs of Innocence (1789). The Songs of Experience, which Blake appended to the Songs of Innocence in 1794, make explicit a theme that had been only implicitly present in the Songs of Innocence: the

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inescapable anxiety and dread that necessarily shadows the child’s apparently carefree existence. Writing, as Harold Bloom has observed, from innocence rather than about innocence,10 Blake avoided making the Songs of Innocence merely an exercise in nostalgia for the lost joys of childhood. Instead, Blake evoked the delicate texture of the child’s consciousness, which is innocent in the legal sense— that is, free of guilt and sin—but shot through with what Lamb called the objectless fear that “predominates in sinless infancy.” The simple conceptions, play, and feelings of the denizens of Blake’s Innocence are surrounded by intimations of confusion, toil, and disillusionment. Even before Blake explicitly depicted these worldly realities by adding the Songs of Experience to the Songs of Innocence, they were obliquely present in the state of innocence, because, as Robert Gleckner has written, “the shadow of experience constantly impinges on the sunlit area of innocence.”11 Blakean innocence is always under threat, however dimly perceived that threat may be by the innocents themselves. It is worth taking a close look at how deeply intertwined anxiety and innocence are in Blake’s Songs, for Blake’s view of childhood was deeply influential on Carroll, whose funny, but also mad and scary vision of the child’s life found its way into the Beatles via the potent cultural afterlife of the Alice books. Though Blakean childhood anxiety lacks the overlay of madcap fun in the Alice books, Blake is an important philosophical precursor for Carroll’s psychically dimensionalized depiction of children. An anxious undertone comes into the Songs of Innocence at the very beginning of the collection. Though at first glance the “Introduction” appears to be little more than a “happy song” that “Every child may joy to hear,” upon closer examination the poem yields a story with profound psychological, even anthropological implications. In the “Introduction,” a piper—a natural poet from the pastoral tradition—sees a child in a cloud, who, delighted with the wordless melody about a lamb that the piper has played, asks him to “pipe that song again.” The song wrings tears from the child, who then instructs the piper to drop his pipe and sing his songs, which again make the child weep “with joy to hear.” Finally, the child tells the piper to “sit thee down and write / In a book that all may read.” As Maureen McLane has observed, the “Introduction” narrates a hypothetical scene of transformation at the “oral-literate conjunction,” thereby providing readers of the Songs of Innocence with a whimsical story “of the preconditions of its existence: the book in our hands was desired, requested, by a child ‘on a cloud.’”12 In the

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final stanza, though, the child vanishes from the piper’s sight after making his final request, which injects an ambivalent note into this seemingly innocent idyll: So he vanish’d from my sight And I pluck’d a hollow reed. And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear.13

In the beginning, all is happiness and light, but at the end, a tragic tone shadows this vaguely Rousseauian scheme of the hypothetical evolution of language—from joyful, spontaneous, nonlinguistic vocalizations to the spoken word, and finally to writing. But each step along the way from joyful noise to scriptural permanence necessitates the loss of something putatively more prior and original: “pleasant glee” gives way to a “song about a lamb”; in order to sing the piper must “drop” his pipe; and the movement from spoken to written language both makes the child vanish and requires the piper to sit down in, pluck, and stain the pristine nature glimpsed in the “valleys wild.” As the Songs of Innocence unfold, the pedal tone of dimly glimpsed sorrow and loss that builds through the “Introduction” is sustained, sometimes growing louder, as in those poems that invoke childhood’s terrors or the horrors of nineteenth-century economic exploitation of children, like “Little Boy Lost,” “The Chimney Sweeper,” and “The Little Black Boy.” More often, though, as in “The Lamb,” “Spring,” and “Infant Joy,” the note of sorrow is almost inaudibly soft. But anxiety—or something other than the carefree state conventionally associated with childish innocence—is always there, usually finding its way to the surface of Blake’s verse in a stray word or phrase, or an unexpected and ever-so-slightly discordant image, as, for example, in “The Ecchoing Green.” This paean to the pleasures of play opens, like so many of the Songs of Innocence, with a scene of conventional pastoral happiness: the sun rises, bells ring, and “the sky-lark and thrush” sing joyfully as if in accompaniment to the children’s cheerful shouts “On the Ecchoing Green.” But there is a marked shift in the poem’s direction between the first and the final two stanzas: Old John with white hair Does laugh away care, Sitting under the oak,

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Among the old folk, They laugh at our play, And soon they all say. Such such were the joys. When we all girls & boys, In our youth-time were seen, On the Ecchoing Green. Till the little ones weary No more can be merry The sun does descend, And our sports have an end: Round the laps of their mothers, Many sisters and brothers, Like birds in their nest, Are ready for rest; And sport no more seen, On the darkening Green.14

The buoyant first-person celebration of play in the first stanza gives way, at the start of the second, to the image of “Old John with white hair,” a reminder of the course to which the lives now sporting on the green are inescapably bound. This juxtaposition of carefree youth and careworn age casts a pall over the second half of the poem, and the picture of the “weary” little ones returning to their mother’s laps in the third stanza takes on slightly mournful, perhaps even resentful overtones as a result. The children are fatigued by their sports, to be sure—but they also seemed spooked by Old John, the large old oak tree, the descending sun, and the image of the “darkening green” with which Blake chooses to end the poem. Inevitability—though metaphorically evoked, by an implicit comparison between the earth’s diurnal course and the transition from girlhood and boyhood to the cares that Old John laughs away—shadows the scene, giving “The Ecchoing Green” something of the sad fatality that structures the “Introduction” to the Songs of Innocence. This inexorable movement away from childish innocence—which is only perceived in the midst of its own evanescence—also structures “The Blossom”: Merry Merry Sparrow Under leaves so green A happy Blossom Sees you swift as arrow Seek your cradle narrow

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From Bl a k e to the Be atles Near my Bosom. Pretty Pretty Robin Under leaves so green A happy Blossom Hears you sobbing sobbing Pretty Pretty Robin Near my Bosom.15

Each stanza begins with three lines that lull the reader into expecting an uncomplicated pastoral treatment of a conventional pastoral subject. But in the first stanza, Blake rhymes “sparrow” with “arrow,” and in the second, “robin” with “sobbing.” Subtly turning the pastoral images against themselves, Blake evokes both the innocent’s longing to see nature as beneficent and kindly and the intuition that the state of nature will not conform itself to that fond, but unfulfillable human hope. As it is in Tennyson’s nightmare vision later in the nineteenth century, Blake’s nature is, on close examination, red in tooth and claw. Two of nature’s most important constituent elements—flora and fauna—are at odds: violence and sorrow stalk the birds, while flora—synecdochically figured in the blossom—carries on, happily indifferent to the animals dying and mourning around it. The final two Songs of Innocence, “A Dream” and “On Anothers Sorrow,” bring the collection to a close in a decidedly minor key. Blake sounds this note by steadily increasing in these two poems the disturbing presence of weeping that discordantly entered into the “Introduction.” The boy of “The Little Boy Lost” weeps in the deep mire, and in “Night,” angels weep away the howls of “wolves and tygers” while the “lions ruddy eyes . . . flow with tears of gold.”16 But the childish speaker of “Night”—more inward and self-conscious than even the speakers of “Little Black Boy” and “The Chimney Sweeper”— “pitying” drops “a tear” for the lost ant. This taps a well of previously unexpressed sadness and anxiety in “On Anothers Sorrow.” Here the tears fall thick and fast, and the assurance that “thy maker” can replace grief and pain with joy is offered, then undercut by the word that ends both this poem and the Songs of Innocence with a cry of anguish that anticipates what will be an extended wail in the Songs of Experience. For Romantics like Blake, the deeper significance of these poetic evocations of the inner life of the child lies in the insights they offer into essential human nature. As Lamb wrote, to search out the origins of children’s objectless fears “might afford some probable insight into our antemundane existence, and a peep at least into the shadow-land of pre-existence.” Even more than for Blake, this was the

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purpose of Wordsworth’s extended treatment of childhood in his poetry. But where Blake had written from childhood in The Songs of Innocence, Wordsworth wrote about childhood—his own, under the assumption that his experiences could be taken as typically human. Like Blake, Wordsworth saw the child’s sinlessness and simplicity as proof of humanity’s divine origin. As he wrote in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!17

Again like Blake, Wordsworth saw childhood and youth as an inevitable fall from this primal unity into knowledge and experience that turns the heaven of our infancy into what Wordsworth calls in the “Intimations” ode the “prison-house” of everyday life. Wordsworth’s child, like Blake, senses this inevitable course of life, which Wordsworth dramatizes in his poems by shrouding his recollections of early life with feelings of dread, though in a manner different from that of Blake. In Wordsworth, the anxious background of Blake comes into the foreground of the child’s experience, helping Wordsworth to formulate a theory of the formation of the adult self in which fear and dread play an indispensable role in creating that adult self. “Fair seed-time had my soul,” he wrote in The Prelude, summing up his earliest years, “and I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.”18 Both beauty and fear pervade Wordsworth’s recollections of his own childhood, in which a strange sadness, verging on remorse and shame, clings to many evocations of what he calls in “Tintern Abbey” “the innocent pleasures of my boyhood days.” For instance, Wordsworth depicts imaginative awakenings as shrouded in guilt and sadness: in “Tintern Abbey,” he remembers himself running o’er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loves.19

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The Prelude, Wordsworth’s most extensive treatment of his own childhood, frequently returns to this dimension of the child’s experience. Nearly all of the recollections Wordsworth identifies in The Prelude as having had the greatest influence on the character of his adult consciousness relay feelings of guilt, dread, or shame. In Book I, Wordsworth recalls how, in “an act of stealth / And troubled pleasure,” he stole an unattended boat for a nighttime row on a lake ringed about with mountains. As he struck out to the middle of the lake on the moonlit night, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned, And through the silent water stole my way Back to the covert of the willow tree; There in her mooring-place I left my bark,— And through the meadows homeward went, in grave And serious mood; but after I had seen That spectacle, for many days, my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts There hung a darkness, call it solitude Or blank desertion.20

Other vivid childhood scenes depicted in The Prelude, which Wordsworth calls “spots of time” by which “our minds / Are nourished and visibly repaired,” also focus on moments of fear, sorrow, and heartbreak. In the first of these spots of time depicted in Book XII of The Prelude, Wordsworth recalls how, as a boy so young that “yet my inexperienced hand / Could scarcely hold a bridle,” he lost his way and, dismounting, came to a valley bottom where in former times A murderer had been hung in iron chains. The gibbet-mast had mouldered down, the bones And iron case were gone; but on the turf, Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wrought Some unknown hand had carved the murderer’s name.21

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Despite the “visionary dreariness” of this and another memory of the sight of a “blasted hawthorn” on a bleak winter day, these became in adulthood “kindred spectacles and sounds / To which I oft repaired, and thence would drink, / As at a fountain. . . .”22 On the one hand, the spots of time revivify the adult consciousness through their assurance that, despite the inevitable forgetfulness of advancing age, nothing is entirely lost to memory. They also reassure Wordsworth that his life comprises a unified whole, that even moments of desolation have a role to play in giving him the poetic vision he enjoys as an adult, even if the “glad animal movements” of his childhood are lost forever. But, as Michael Vander Weele has written, Wordsworth was as much a poet of consciousness as he was of nature, and the childish consciousness he celebrates and describes in his verses is not one to whom trouble, fear, and mourning are alien.23 The varieties of anxious innocence depicted by Blake and Wordsworth come together in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which vividly portray the juxtaposition of the child’s fantasy life and the sorrow, violence, and cruelty of the world the child must inhabit, even if those elements are dimly perceived if at all. Carroll deeply admired, and was an avid reader throughout his life of the poetry of both Blake and Wordsworth. Though the Victorians predominantly celebrated Wordsworth as a nature poet, incisive readers like Carroll knew that his real purpose was to chronicle the development of an individual consciousness. As Carroll was just coming into his teens in the mid-1840s, Wordsworth was at the height of his fame, having been appointed Poet Laureate in 1843. And while it is likely that from an early age Carroll was well acquainted with Wordsworth’s verses, Blake was less well known in Carroll’s time, with his works circulating only in the small quantities Blake himself produced until 1839, when the first printed edition of Songs of Innocence and Experience was published. In the words of his biographer, though, Carroll was a serious reader, even as a child, and was especially “devoted to the writings of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dickens, and Tennyson— all Romantics and all variously commentators on the nature of the child and the child’s place in the universe.”24 Carroll may first have read Blake when he was still a child; in any event, Carroll’s writing of the Alice books coincided with a new flush of interest in Blake that accompanied the publication of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of Blake in 1863. Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the first sketch of what would eventually become both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, was begun in 1862 and completed by 1864, and the first edition of Wonderland was published in late 1865. Blake was very

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much on Carroll’s mind, then, when he was writing the Alice books. When he was twenty-three, Carroll included both Wordsworth and Coleridge on a list of “whole poets” he intended to read.25 In 1863, Carroll commissioned an Oxford printer to produce some copies of the Songs of Innocence that he may have distributed to child friends.26 Morton Cohen has written that Carroll shared Blake’s and Wordsworth’s view of the child as “both deceptively simple and intricately complex,” and, again like the earlier poets, Carroll “revered the mystic combination [in the child] of the primitive and the pure, the noble, and the divine.”27 But while Carroll saw, as he wrote in the preface to Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, “divinity in a child’s smile,” and the child as “a spirit fresh from God’s hands,” like Blake and Wordsworth, Carroll nevertheless recognized that children were beings on whom “the outermost fringe of the shadow of sorrow . . . has fallen.”28 The shadow of sorrow enters the Alice books as the undertone of threat that lurks beneath the playful freedom and lunacy of life in Wonderland. As Peter Coveney has written, the Alice books begin in their author’s dreamy, sentimentalized vision of untroubled childish innocence. But when it comes to peopling the worlds created by those dreams, Carroll has no choice—if he is to remain true to the realities of the child’s consciousness—other than to incorporate into those dreams the shadow lands that encircle them. In Carroll’s first and greatest work, writes Coveney, “there is a content not far removed from nightmare.”29 At first, the loopy anarchy of Wonderland and Looking-Glass House seem to offer Alice some respite from the dreary routines, restrictions, and seemingly pointless regulations that govern her life as a child in mid-Victorian England. But the farther she goes into Wonderland, the more she finds that the rules are not so much suspended as grotesquely inverted. A spirit of misrule reigns in Wonderland, but there are still rules, even if they are underwritten by crazy logic. Hoping to enjoy a degree of freedom unavailable to her in the everyday world, in Wonderland Alice instead encounters a dizzying array of antiregulations and confusing or vague demands, all swirling in constant motion against a background of anxiety. Practically everyone in Alice in Wonderland is anxious. Upon his entrance, the white rabbit pulls a watch from its waistcoat pocket and cries, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late.”30 The mouse and birds who join Alice’s caucus-race in chapter three are alarmed by references to her cat Dinah, a predator to whom they all are prey. Alice rushes through Wonderland to the queen’s croquet match, only to find a screaming despot threatening to behead everyone, as gardeners busily painting white roses red throw themselves “flat upon their faces”

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when this bloodthirsty tyrant arrives. Alice spends much of her time in Wonderland in, at best, a state of confusion, but just as often she is frustrated and frightened. Alice cries bitter tears when her mismanagement of the potions for growing smaller and larger leaves her too tall to fit through the door to the beautiful garden. And when the cook starts flinging pots, pans, and kitchen utensils around the Duchess’s cottage, Alice experiences “an agony of terror.”31 Nowhere, though, is the background of violence and cruelty of the Alice books more pronounced than in the animals the little girl encounters in Wonderland and Looking-Glass House. At first, Alice is naturally delighted at the idea of talking and thinking animals. But their reactions to her and the stories they tell show that the law of the talon—the brutal necessities of predator and prey—are as operative in this alternate world as they are in Blake’s “Blossom.” As in the Blake poem, though, these realities recede to the background of consciousness—they are there, but not explicitly perceived. Carroll dramatizes this by creating in Wonderland demonic parodies of the Victorian sentiments in which well brought-up girls like Alice would have been schooled—those morality tales in sing-song verse that were intended to preserve in children their ignorance of what John Lennon called, in his comment on his own ventures into Carrollian nonsense, the “hidden cruelties” of life, and to see nature in terms morally congruent with human wishes. After falling down the rabbit hole, Alice tries to orient herself in her new surroundings by reciting one of these sentimental children’s verses, Isaac Watts’s “Against Idleness and Mischief”: How doth the little busy bee Improve each shining hour, And gather honey all the day From every opening flower! How skillfully she builds her cell! How neat she spreads the wax! And labours hard to store it well With the sweet food she makes.

What comes out, though, is not Watts’s sweetly anthropomorphized fable of nature’s intrinsic industriousness, but a similarly anthropomorphized vision of the cruel, Darwinian reality of life in nature: How doth the little crocodile Improve his shining tail, And pour the waters of the Nile On every golden scale!

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In Looking-Glass, “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” recited by the battling brothers Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, continues this sweetly said but accurate revelation of nature as a battle of all against all. Like “How doth the shining crocodile,” “The Walrus and the Carpenter” infernally parodies the sweetly simple moralizing of Victorian children’s verse. The walrus, who reappears in John Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus,” looks in John Tenniel’s illustrations for Looking-Glass like a portly Victorian gentleman, a gruff but lovable city banker; but his trade is to entice oysters out of their beds to a feast at which they are the main course. In the end, he and the carpenter weep crocodile tears for the oysters they have devoured.33 In the Alice books innocent nonsense stands alongside these comic but chilling allusions to the violence, cruelty, and terror that typify nature and that arise spontaneously in children’s imaginations. Nonsense mocks sense; but in mocking it, it evokes it; nonsense pays unwitting homage to sense. The ethical freedom conferred by nonsense quickly spirals out of control into nightmare. Because it is transgressive, nonsense at first appears to confer freedom; but that freedom manifests itself as the freedom to be cruel. In Wonderland, the demonic mockery of sense turns moral admonition into a license for wickedness. In mocking sense, in other words, by holding it up to a mirror and creating nonsense, Carroll paradoxically underscores the need for sense. This is what distinguishes Carroll from the other leading light of English nonsense, his contemporary, Edward Lear. Lear’s limericks and gibberish poems are nothing more than the language play they appear to be. The owl and pussycat sail away to the land where the bong tree grows; and though there’s a hint of transgression in mating the feline with the avian, there is little more to this story than meets the eye. There is no background of threat, no lurking anxiety as there is in the Alice books. In Lear, nonsense and sense do not, as they do in Carroll, confront each other. In Wonderland, nonsense, strangely, authorizes cruelty; it is a world in which “Speak gently to the little child! / Its love be sure to gain; / Teach it in accents soft and mild— / It may not long remain” becomes Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy, Because he knows it teases.34

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Carroll took from Blake and Wordsworth the image of the innocent child in a world effectively lying in wait to strip away that innocence, and made this the explicit content of his works, which feature both an amplified innocence and an amplified anxiety that accompanies that innocence. Though celebrated throughout the twentieth century for his entrancing depictions of childish fun, Carroll was not blind to the dark side of the child’s imagination. The signal achievement of the Alice books lies in their uncannily acute recognition and subtle depiction of the coexistence in the child of both innocence and anxiety. Carroll’s literary legacy is twofold: he is the English tradition’s foremost portrayer of childish delight, and at the same time a powerful transmitter to later artists of the psychically complex Blakean and Wordsworthian child. Both of these elements found their way, through a chain of intermediaries, into the Beatles, especially in the songs and personae of John Lennon and Ringo Starr.

“And a Child Shall Lead Them . . .” More than any other nineteenth-century British writers, Blake and Carroll enjoyed revivals of interest in the folk and rock-inflected counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s. Beat poet and godfather of the hippie movement Allen Ginsberg was an avid reader and devotee of Blake, as well as an important inspiration for the poetically oriented pop and folk singers of the Beatles era. In 1948, Ginsberg experienced an auditory hallucination of Blake reading the Songs of Experience, “Ah, Sunflower” and “The Sick Rose” as he sat in his Harlem apartment.35 Bob Dylan was also an avid admirer of Blake, and even provided accompaniment for Ginsberg’s singing of several Blake poems on a New York public television special in October 1971.36 Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek took the name of the band they started in 1965, The Doors, from Plate 14 of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”37 Blake’s visionary works were admired in the 1950s and 1960s for their labyrinthine mythic systems, but their accompanying images were especially cherished for their protohallucinatory intensity—natural precursors to the mind-expanding acid trips of Ginsberg’s “angelheaded hipsters.”38 Blake’s politics and social views also harmonized with the hippie culture of the 1960s. In the 1780s, Blake’s home and studio became a meeting place for many of the leading lights of late eighteenth-century English liberalism, such as Joseph Priestly, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Thomas Paine. Like Wordsworth, Blake was an early supporter of the French Revolution; and though he was similarly disillusioned by

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the Reign of Terror, unlike Wordsworth, Blake never lost his taste for political radicalism, avidly supporting the American rebellion and tirelessly criticizing government abuses of liberty in England. Blake was also an early advocate of female equality and sexual freedom: in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, he lambasted the ways in which mores enforcing chastity prevented men and women from enjoying the divine gift of “Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind!”39 and celebrated the deliciousness of The moment of desire! the moment of desire! The virgin That pines for man; shall awaken her womb to enormous joys In the secret shadows of her chamber.40

The bizarre dreamscapes of Carroll’s Alice books also gave them a long afterlife, in which they were transformed from the harmless nursery tales they were to the Victorians into adumbrations of the early twentieth-century modernist explosion of form. Whereas Alice in Wonderland had so delighted Queen Victoria herself that she left a standing order for Carroll’s next book, later writers saw Carroll as a harbinger of Modernism’s rejection of realism. Carroll inspired André Breton, the founder of surrealism, who praised the author of Alice in Wonderland as a “surrealist in nonsense.” In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the Alice books came to represent bold rebellions against conventionality and the tyranny of logic—inspiring, among others, James Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake, as Michael Holquist has pointed out, could scarcely exist without portmanteau words, and Vladimir Nabokov, who translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian in 1923.41 Walt Disney reintroduced a sanitized, Victorian version of Carrollian nonsense to the postwar generation with a feature-length animated version of Alice in Wonderland in 1951. But to the 1960s generation, experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, the Alice books became—as they had been for the surrealists—harbingers of the artificial paradises that were accessed through LSD, mescaline, psychedelic mushrooms, and a host of other illicit pharmaceuticals. Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 acid-rock classic, “White Rabbit,” recasts episodes from Wonderland and Looking-Glass—the hookah-smoking caterpillar and the upside-down white knight—as images from an LSD trip. The song, from the album Surrealistic Pillow, was a million seller, and peaked at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 in the second week of July, 1967, only a month after the release of the Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The entry points for Carroll and Blake into the Beatles, though, were John and Ringo. Lennon, ever the risk-taker and transgressor,

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represented the fear side of the beauty/fear duality, taking as his impetus the hallucinogenic dimension of Carroll’s Blake-influenced Alice books. These became the basis for the group’s weird, formally experimental, psychedelic songs, especially “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” inspired by a painting by four-year-old Julian Lennon of his nursery school mate Lucy O’Donnell. The song’s images of languidly floating on a river past yellow and green, “incredibly high” flowers were taken, according to Lennon, from chapter five of Through the Looking-Glass, in which Alice, accompanied by a knitting sheep, rows a boat down a river past a panoply of ever-changing sights. “Both of us had read the Alice books and always referred to them, we were always talking about ‘Jabberwocky’ and we knew those more than any other books really,” said Paul McCartney. “And when psychedelics came in, the heady quality of them was perfect. So we just went along with it.”42 The transgressive, aggressive side of Carroll’s protopsychedelic scenes and characters also inform Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus,” its central image taken from Through the Looking-Glass. This song is more of a bad trip than the languid, pleasant trip of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—the verbal chaos and riot of images in “Walrus” evoking a hallucinogenic experience gone out of control. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Lennon with respect to the beauty/fear duality stands Ringo, a dedicated homebody, the unassuming background man in the most famous quartet the world has ever known. Ringo is the Blakean child to Lennon’s Carrollian dream-weaver. Where Lennon is witty, visionary, and dangerous, Ringo is innocent, charming, and simple. After the Beatles made the decision to stop touring at the conclusion of their summer 1966 U.S. tour, the band scattered for some much-needed vacation time. Their activities were characteristically far-flung and grandiose. John went to Germany and Spain to act in Richard Lester’s film How I Won the War; Paul threw himself into the avant-garde art scene in London; George went to India to continue his investigations of Hinduism and Eastern music. Ringo, though, stayed home at Sunny Heights, his mansion in the south London suburbs. “Nothing made him happier than sitting at the kitchen table, eating Corn Flakes, with [wife] Maureen and [son] Zak,” said Ringo’s interior decorator Ken Partridge.43 This was typical of Ringo; as Bob Spitz observed, the drummer’s success with the Beatles was more than he had ever dared hope for: “A house in the country was more than he’d ever expected from life. Having a good job—a very good job—and an adoring family was enough to seal his contentment, and aside from a few material indulgences, he refrained from the temptation to set his sights higher.”44 The songs Ringo sang with the Beatles reflect both his deep-dyed

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modesty and his status as the child of the band. With the Beatles, Ringo is credited as composer on only four of the 214 songs the group released (and on two of these, “What Goes On” and “Flying,” he shares credit with John, Paul, and George). “What Goes On,” which began as Ringo’s idea but was completed with the help of John, sets the tone of both the songs Ringo sang and the few he wrote. In the song, Ringo is a helpless, lovelorn man, torn apart by the unkindness of his girl, and baffled by her neglect. “Don’t Pass Me By” is a virtual remake of “What Goes On,” down to the country treatment both songs get; the difference between them is that “Don’t Pass Me By” introduces a darkly comic, Carrollian twist to the story of Ringo as lovelorn and neglected: the girl hasn’t paid attention to him because she was in a car crash, in which she lost—of all things—her hair. This is Ringo’s initial incarnation in the band—that of forgotten outsider. It originated with his late arrival to the Beatles. Once the group acknowledged their dissatisfaction with Pete Best, everyone associated with the Beatles—their manager Brian Epstein, John, Paul, and George—wanted Ringo to join. Coming to the Beatles seemed fated to happen ever since Ringo had sat in with the band during Best’s absences or during late night, bluesy sessions in Hamburg, when the Beatles and Ringo’s band Rory Storm and the Hurricanes were playing neighboring clubs. George Harrison said that when Ringo would sit in with the band, “it seemed like, ‘this is it.’”45 Paul shares George’s view of Ringo as the fated fourth member of the Beatles. “We really started to think we needed ‘the greatest drummer in Liverpool,’ and the greatest drummer in our eyes was a guy, Ringo Starr, who had changed his name before any of us, who had a beard and was grown up and was known to have a Zephyr Zodiac [a mid-sized, not inexpensive car],” McCartney remembers.46 But despite his professionalism and reputation, because Ringo came late to the band, he was never able entirely to shake the insecurity he felt at having been the last to join. This childlike identity became his character in the band. He became, for the Beatles, their symbol and embodiment of innocence. This is the character Ringo enacts when he sings with the Beatles: the child, yearning desperately for some unmistakable sign that he belongs, but incurably insecure. It is the same child, self-effacing and surprised by his own fame and desirability, that Ringo presents when he disarmingly introduces himself in the third person before singing “Act Naturally.” The same sad sack sings “I Wanna Be Your Man,” “Honey Don’t,” and “With a Little Help from My Friends.” The same persona—though a little differently expressed—underwrites the two songs with which Ringo’s name and style are most associated in

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the Beatles: “Yellow Submarine” and “Octopus’s Garden.” The first was conceived by Paul as a children’s song to be sung by Ringo. The singer’s story of the yellow submarine is not, however, his own story, but the reported recollections of a man from his hometown who went to sea—“sort of an ancient mariner,” Paul once said47—who regales the children of the town with stories of his life in the land of submarines. Ringo is one of these children, entranced by the magical undersea world evoked in the sailor’s stories. “Yellow Submarine” was an immediate number one in both the United Kingdom and the United States upon its release in early August 1966, and since then has become “a pub sing-along favorite in Britain with ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown.’”48 Much of the charm of “Yellow Submarine” derives from its sea-chanty simplicity, brought to the fore by Ringo’s ever-so-slightly wavering vocal, which again expresses insecurity, and a concomitant hint of longing for the insulated underwater life aboard a submarine. But the song delicately evokes childish anxiety as well, in portraying the willingness to escape life’s difficulties as desperate enough to prompt the singer to exchange life on land for a cramped undersea vehicle. Ultimate refuge from the stresses of adult life, the song implies, can only be found by immersing oneself in the depths of the sea. The same image underlies “Octopus’s Garden,” which, like all of Ringo’s songs, gets a country treatment. But anxiety about the stresses of the world, exacerbated by the crazy life of being a Beatle, is registered in this song as it is in “Yellow Submarine” by the desire to make the ultimate getaway: under the sea. It is a desire at once childlike and wistful, signature Ringo, who adds the child’s brand of anxiety and longing for refuge from the cruelty and violence of the world to the catalogue of universal themes explored in the Beatles’ songs. The story of how “Octopus’s Garden” came to be written illustrates how deeply ingrained Ringo’s childlike identity in the band had become, even after he had been with the Beatles for several years. In the summer of 1968, with John, Paul, and George increasingly going off in their own musical directions, Ringo was underutilized during the White Album sessions, sitting around the studio doing nothing but playing cards with Beatles roadie Mal Evans while he waited for the infrequent summons to provide some sort of percussion on a song by one of the other three. Frustrated, Ringo abruptly quit the band. “I felt two things,” he said, remembering the episode in 1995, I felt I wasn’t playing great, and the other three were really happy, and I was an outsider. I went to see John, who was living in my apartment in Montague Square with Yoko since he moved out of Kenwood. I

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said, “I’m leaving the group because I’m not playing well and I feel unloved and out of it, and you three are really close.” And John said, “I thought it was you three!” So then I went over to Paul’s and knocked on his door. I said the same thing: “I’m leaving the band. I feel you three guys are really close and I’m out of it.” And Paul said, “I thought it was you three!”49

Leaving word that he was going on holiday, Ringo took his family to Sardinia for two weeks, where he went out one day on Peter Sellers’ yacht. After being served squid for lunch, Ringo was chatting with the captain, who told him that octopuses “hang out in their caves and they go around the seabed finding shiny stones and tin cans and bottles to put in front of their cave like a garden. I thought this was fabulous, because at the time I just wanted to be under the sea too.”50 After receiving a telegram from John, Paul, and George reassuring him that he was “the best rock ‘n’ drummer in the world” and urging him to “come on home—we love you,” Ringo returned to find his drums bedecked with dozens of flowers, and the band carried on to finish the album. This episode is uncannily anticipated by the plot of A Hard Day’s Night. The film chronicles the Beatles making a trip from Liverpool to London for a television appearance; but to provide additional comic possibilities, they are accompanied by Paul’s grandfather, unforgettably played by British character actor Wilfrid Brambell, who, Paul tells his bandmates, is “nursing a broken heart” and needs a change of scenery to cheer himself up. His purpose in life, and only joy, however, is to stir up mischief: early in the film Paul tells their managers Norm and Shake, who have just been goaded into an argument by the old man, that the grandfather is “a king mixer. He hates group unity so he gets everyone at it.” After attempting to sow discord among all the Beatles, the grandfather finally, in the climax of the film gets to Ringo. As the two sit in the studio canteen, Ringo is reading a book. The old man shoots him a disgusted look and says, “Look at him, sitting there with his hooter scraping away in that book! When you’re not pumping them pagan skins you’re tormenting your eyes with that rubbish! Have you no natural resources of your own? Have they even robbed you of that? You poor unfortunate scrub! They’ve driven you to books, with their cruel unnatural treatment! Exploiting your good nature. Ah, that lot’s never happy unless they’re jeering you! And where would they be without the steady support of your drumbeat? That’s what I’d like to know!” Ringo is vulnerable to this attack because the others have teased him throughout the film: early on,

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he asks John, “Do I snore?” “You’re a window rattler, son,” replies Lennon, and Paul adds, “With a hooter like that, it’d be unnatural if you didn’t.” The grandfather’s ribbing has its desired effect: Ringo slams his book shut, picks up his camera, and storms from the theater to go out “parading.” Wandering about the streets of London, Ringo misses the final rehearsal, is pinched by the police, and finally rescued by John, Paul, and George just in time to make the televised performance. The plot device reflected an actual, though as yet unacknowledged dimension of the Beatles—their own fragility, and the delicate balance that the indispensable four had to maintain in order to stay together as a group. Their public image contrasted with the reality: four jolly lads, inseparable, even slightly indistinguishable, but, as we have seen in the previous two chapters, structured by a series of powerful but only barely glimpsed resentments: John versus Paul, George versus John and Paul, and Ringo, feeling left out and unloved. But, in fact, as his leaving the band showed, they all felt unloved and left out, just as in a family. If there was anyone who was truly indispensable in this mix, though, it was Ringo. The last to arrive, and the Beatle who always felt most tentative about his place in the band, Ringo was the key to the Beatles puzzle. Not only did he anchor the band musically with his rock-solid sense of rhythm and dependable, if unspectacular style of playing, but he also brought the Beatles together, to the extent it was possible to bring them together. In the last days of the band, when the tensions of more than a decade of working together had broken out into open hostility, the other three enlisted Ringo—affable, unflappable, dependable Ringo—to act as a go-between while McCartney negotiated a release date for his first solo album that wouldn’t conflict with that of Let it Be. In an effort to negotiate, John and George sent Ringo, in the spring of 1970, to Paul’s house on Cavendish Avenue in London to talk. As Paul remembers it: Ringo came to see me. He was sent, I believe—being mild mannered, the nice guy—by the others, because of the dispute. So Ringo arrived at the house, and I must say I gave him a bit of verbal. I said, “You guys are just messing me around.” He said, “No, well on behalf of the board and on behalf of The Beatles and so and so, we think you should do this,” etc. And I was just fed up with that. It was the first time I ever told anyone to GET OUT! It was fairly hostile. But things had got like that by this time. It hadn’t actually come to blows, but it was near enough.51

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Told now, the story captures the mood of the Beatles at a crucial moment in the life of the band: those tense last days when the break-up was imminent, after the intrusion of Yoko Ono and ten years of bandaged-over but unhealed slights and swallowed resentments had critically eroded the extraordinarily close-knit group unity of the quartet. But when Ringo made life imitate art in leaving the Beatles because he felt unloved, it showed—as his depiction of George showed—that Alun Owen’s reading of the band that came to be the script for A Hard Day’s Night really did perceive the essential truth about the Beatles. Ringo really was insecure about belonging with the band (a feeling that all three, in recognition of the stresses they were under, strangely shared). This insecurity stemmed from a longstanding, initially Romantic insight into the surprisingly complex mental life of the child. In the Beatles’ all-important family dynamic, Ringo represented that child, with its sense of fun, its charming selfeffacement, and its winning simplicity and naiveté. Ringo’s image of childhood was also, however, fully equipped with the dark side of the child’s mental life: its dimly understood but powerful perceptions of sorrow, loss, and violence; its fears; and its anxieties about belonging. Ringo had to be in the Beatles, because no one else—not Lennon, not McCartney, not Pete Best—could have convincingly brought this identity to the group. As the anxious child, Ringo provided an essential touchstone of relevance for the group, another means by which Beatles fans could find depth and lasting meaning in the group’s works. Often underestimated as just an affable, happy-go-lucky, carefree child, Ringo was much more than that. He was the thoughtful, haunted, fretful child, straight out of Blake, Wordsworth, and Carroll. This was his consistent role in the band, and he enacted it through the songs he sang and wrote. It was an extremely important part to play, for it provided a point of continuity for the young fans of the group. It also served to tie the group importantly together. As the child, Ringo completes the Beatles, and is essential to their popularity. They simply wouldn’t have been who they were, or as successful as they were, without Ringo.

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Chapter 5

“ Wh at M at t e r s is t h e S Y S T E M !” Th e Dis a ppe a r a nc e of G od a n d t h e R ise of C onspi r ac y Th e or i z i ng

[John Lennon] was a countercultural revolutionary, and the government takes that kind of shit really seriously historically. He was dangerous to the government. If he had said, “Bomb the White House tomorrow,” there would have been ten thousand people who would have done it. These pacifist revolutionaries are historically killed by the government, and anybody who thinks that Mark Chapman was just some crazy guy who killed my dad for his personal interests is insane, I think, or very naïve, or hasn’t thought about it clearly. It was in the best interests of the United States to have my dad killed, definitely. And, you know, that worked against them, to be honest, because once he died his powers grew. So, I mean, fuck them. They didn’t get what they wanted. —Sean Lennon, The New Yorker, April 20, 1998

I

n music and worldview, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Not only has Sean Lennon followed his father John in seeking pop music fame, but the son of the Beatles’ founder appears also to have inherited his father’s penchant for hatching conspiracy theories. According to Albert Goldman, John Lennon revealed this facet of his personality in the early 1970s, during the televised appeal hearings for James Earl Ray. Asked by a family friend “What’s the real story behind the murder of Martin Luther King?” Lennon exploded, “Who the hell cares . . . ? What matters is the system!” To Lennon, Goldman

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continues, James Earl Ray was “a guy who was framed. The Ray hearings fascinated Lennon. . . . ‘Look at him,’ Lennon would yell. ‘It’s obvious! He doesn’t have to ask for a glass of water or take a leak. He’s drugged!’”1 It’s a pity that John did not live to see the Internet, the most rapid and effective machine ever devised by human ingenuity for creating and spreading conspiracy theories. On the World Wide Web Lennon could have gorged himself on tens of millions of sites offering conspiracy theories on everything from the Kennedy assassination, to Elvis’s faked death, to the U.S. government cover-up of the 1948 crash of an alien spacecraft outside of Roswell, New Mexico, to the belief that British secret service agents, acting on orders from a shadowy “New World Order,” engineered Princess Diana’s fatal car crash because she refused to marry President Bill Clinton.2 John could have subscribed to Paranoia magazine, an online journal that promises to expose the “cryptocracy’s agenda” from “the Ruby Ridge FBI fiasco, to the WACO travesty, to the OKC bombing and the Twin Towers air raid.”3 Of course, the Internet also houses—as Sean Lennon’s statement suggests—thousands of conspiracy theories about his father’s murder, including one in which Mark Chapman is a look-alike patsy for the real shooter, author Stephen King, who killed Lennon on orders from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.4 Thanks to the unprecedented power of the Internet to gather and disseminate information widely and rapidly, conspiracy theories thrive online. “I think when Princess Diana died,” says Alasdair Spark, director of the Centre for Conspiracy Culture at the University of Winchester in England, “the first emails and the first five web pages alleging that her death was mysterious were generated within a matter of minutes, and really anyone who wants to promote a conspiracy now has literally at their fingertips, via the keyboard, the means to do that. . . . Of course one web page leads to another and to another and to another.” But despite the randomness with which these stories spread, in the end, Spark argues, conspiracy theorizing is more than “just a game of Chinese Whispers, in which people just pass information on to each other, and every time it gets a little bit corrupted.”5 The explosion of conspiracy theorizing since the late 1980s, Spark writes, reflects the spirit of the present age: spinning tales of diabolical plots and cover-ups has become “a discourse which is now fully part of the public realm, and a popular cultural manifestation which is symptomatic of contemporary concerns.”6 Conspiracy theories are the myths of our age, in which the random and chaotic events of life are retrospectively ordered into a story with an explanatory purpose.

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The Beatles are often referred to as both myth-makers and the products of a resurgence of mythologizing in the 1960s.7 But what is a myth? Anthropological literary critic Eric Gans writes that “myth is etiological: it explains the origin of a custom or technique through divine activities and desires.”8 Myths are stories, in other words, that account for the existence of things or events as manifestations of supernatural interventions in human affairs—miraculous visitations from the gods that cure raging plagues or furnish sustenance to the starving, like the manna in the wilderness in the Book of Exodus. Myths are therefore often the byproduct of crisis, and the more severe the crisis—that is, the more disturbing the event precipitating the myth is to the social order—the more dire the need for an explanation. Like myths, conspiracy theories arise from the need to explain. But despite their functional similarities, there is an important difference between a myth and a conspiracy theory. Whereas myths account for things and events by attributing agency to the supernatural, conspiracy theories reject supernaturalism, seeing events instead as the product of mysterious networks of people, who, though carrying out an evil purpose, are as ordinary as you and me. Despite this difference, though, both myths and conspiracy theories arise from the same human desire: to feel that the universe is not utterly contingent and random, but guided by or expressing an underlying logic or purpose. Each in their own way, both myths and conspiracy theories offer this reassurance and confer an odd comfort to those who believe in them, paradoxically by depicting ordinary people as relatively powerless to influence their own fates. Under the mythic view, the efficacy—even the possibility—of human action is always circumscribed by the will of the gods. Whatever I do may be undone by divine fiat or whim. Conspiracy theories also make people effectively powerless, by arguing that—despite appearances—the world is ultimately under the control of immensely powerful hidden forces. From the conspiracist point of view, free will and spontaneous individual action are illusions foisted upon us by those in control in order to keep us in state of docile compliance with the power brokers’ aims. The conspiracy theorist operates under the assumption that appearances hide, rather than reflect, the truth. Thus both Sean and John Lennon, like legions of Kennedy assassination theorists, dismiss as “naïve” or “insane” a lone gunman hypothesis. Instead, James Earl Ray and Mark Chapman are pawns or fall guys of a vast, immeasurably complicated web of coordinated agents, who together form what Sean Lennon calls “the government” and John Lennon called “the system.” Sean’s theory of his father’s assassination illustrates two

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other hallmarks of conspiracy thinking: the system’s ruthlessness in eliminating dissidents (“My dad was a countercultural revolutionary. . . . If he had said, ‘Bomb the White House tomorrow,’ there would have been ten thousand people who would have done it.”) and the ability of the system to conceal perfectly its malevolent operations. Sean offers no evidence that his father was killed by the government other than an unsubstantiated claim of historic precedent: “These pacifist revolutionaries are historically killed by the government.” In fact, by demonstrating that the conspiracy has successfully concealed its own existence, the lack of evidence is offered as further proof of the plot. When the Beatles arrived on American soil in early February, 1964, they found a people still in shock over the assassination of President Kennedy only a little more than two months earlier, on November 22, 1963. The country was in crisis, and clearly needed both a human and cosmological explanation of that crime, the enormity of which seemed beyond the reach of a pathetic, muttering loser like Lee Oswald. What did it mean about the ultimate purpose of the universe that one disaffected nobody with a twenty-dollar rifle could, in a matter of seconds, bring the world’s most powerful nation to its knees? What kind of a world is it in which such a thing is possible? If the Beatles were the premier mythmakers of the 1960s, this was at least partly because the times urgently demanded far-reaching explanations. Like the 1790s, the decade in which Romanticism emerged, the 1960s was a decade of sweeping social, political, and artistic change—one of those periods in which the old verities of humanity’s divine provenance and purpose were suddenly and radically called into question. An event like the Kennedy assassination seemed to suggest that God as humanity’s guide and protector had withdrawn from the world, and violence, hysterical celebrity worship, and a dark cabal of evil powers—the establishment, the military-industrial complex— had taken His place. As the most spectacular pop culture phenomenon of this tumultuous age, the Beatles found themselves at the center of a desperate yearning for meaning in the 1960s, a yearning that the band both helped to shape and to satisfy. But the tumult of the times brought out the ever-present tendency of myth to slide into conspiracy theory. The Beatles were inevitably swept up in the paranoid mythologizing of the 1960s, and ended up presiding at the birth of conspiracy culture. The starting point for the Beatles’ careers as both creators and objects of conspiracy theories was the “bigger than Jesus” controversy of the summer of 1966. This episode in pop culture history was

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more than just the flash point for long-smoldering anxieties about the relevance of religion to postwar Anglo-American society. The uproar that erupted over John Lennon’s claim that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” demonstrated for this pop-star cum social commentator that outbursts of hysterical celebrity worship—like the Beatlemania that spread from Britain and America around the globe between 1963 and 1966—originated in the same psychic and cultural forces that in the past had produced eruptions of mass religious fervor. Lennon learned this by comparing his first-hand experiences of Beatlemania with the picture of first-century Palestine he found in Hugh Schonfield’s 1965 book The Passover Plot, which Lennon read shortly before uttering his infamous remarks. Schonfield also taught Lennon, however, to view history conspiratorially—that is, to look for the ways in which the powerful weave the chaotic profusion of events, conflicting interests, and contradictory testimonies into an apparently seamless eschatological narrative. To manifest and capitalize on their quasi-religious importance in the lives of their fans, Lennon realized, the Beatles needed merely to provide a plenitude of tantalizing, apparently disjointed details; their adherents, like the early church fathers, could be counted on eagerly to weave from those data a personally and culturally meaningful narrative. Two aspects of the Beatles’ later career—the iconographic and musical experimentalism of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Paul-is-dead rumor—show the two directions in which the yearning for meaning can go. In its benign and playful mode, the yearning takes the form of mythmaking, which stems from and illustrates a particular kind of intellectual ingenuity—the ability to assemble an interesting, even pleasing mosaic from the randomness of events as they happen. In its sinister mode, though, the yearning assumes that some overarching purpose is always at work—the “system” has its dark aims—and intellectual ingenuity gives way, eventually, to paranoia.

“More Popular than Jesus” In “Dover Beach,” published in 1867—exactly a century before the release of Sgt. Pepper—Matthew Arnold offered a moving dirge for what he saw as the death of religious faith in his age. There was a time, he writes, human life was suffused with the intangible, but comforting presence of divine care: The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

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The absence of the protective embrace with which the sea of faith had once encircled human life, Arnold continues, imposes a duty on people to provide for themselves some of the care that in past times had come from God: for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Arnold’s poem poignantly captures the personal and cultural loss occasioned in the nineteenth century by what J. Hillis-Miller has called “the gradual withdrawal of God from the world.” This withdrawal, writes Hillis-Miller, left “many Western writers during the last hundred and fifty years” in a state of spiritual “disconnection: disconnection between man and nature, between man and man, even between man and himself.” 9 And while it is impossible, Hillis-Miller argues, to know exactly why the old harmony of “man, society, nature, and language” fell apart, since the “untuning of the sky”—which began at the end of the medieval era—the world has become progressively humanized: great cities—like the ones the Beatles conquered between 1962 and 1964, Liverpool, London, and New York—were built, and the ancient conviction of an ever-present possibility of communion with God was replaced by subjectivism and feelings of spiritual isolation. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, writes Hillis-Miller, God becomes “a Deus absconditus, hidden somewhere behind the silence of infinite spaces, and our literary symbols can only make the most distant allusions to him, or to the natural world which used to be his abiding place and home.”10 The disappearance of God and consequent sense of disconnection from the world and others leaves the Romantic with an aching void that clamors to be filled. Separated from God by industrialization,

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urbanization, and an intellectual tradition increasingly dominated by skeptical philosophy, the Romantics redirected their transcendental yearnings toward myth, either reconfiguring—as Keats did in his Hyperion poems—old stories to reflect new concerns, or fashioning new myths, either tricked out as ancient ones (Macpherson’s Ossian) or built from scratch, as in Blake’s visionary Milton and Jerusalem. Old or new, this contemporary mythologizing was undertaken to try to restore the sense of purpose and meaning that had been blunted in lives—as Gerard Manly Hopkins put it in “God’s Grandeur”— “smeared, bleared with toil” by the modern world. God’s withdrawal from immanence and transcendence in the industrial age prompted a desperate search for replacement experiences of communion with the infinite. Instead of bestowing on humanity a new birth of freedom—as religious skeptics of the Enlightenment, like Rousseau, had predicted— the disappearance of God left people grasping for transcendence wherever they might find it. And, as Nietzsche observed in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), the nineteenth century’s revived interest in history and archaeology indexed this desperation for something before and beyond the everyday: Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and digs frantically for roots, be it among the most remote antiquities. What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless other cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?11

In the early days of Beatlemania, some academics and cultural commentators saw the Beatles’ pointing the way back to that mythic home as the secret of their appeal. Beatle concerts, they observed, exhibited telling resemblances to the ecstatic religious behavior of ancient and traditional societies. The Beatles made their fans twist and shout—that is, the girls screamed and gyrated like the Dionysian revelers who tore Pentheus to pieces in Euripides’ The Bacchae. This atavistic return to the primal was either horrifyingly contemptible, as it was for Paul Johnson, who called Beatlemania “a collective grovelling to gods who are themselves blind and empty,”12 or a refreshing, even necessary escape from the crushing regimentation of modern life, as it was for David Dempsey, writing in the New York Times Magazine in February 1964: It is generally admitted that jungle rhythms influence the “beat” of much contemporary dance activity. Every man, according to this theory, is instinctively aboriginal in his feet, if not in his heart; much of

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today’s jazz-dancing—as anybody knows who has seen it—is strongly reminiscent of those tribal dances performed to the tune of a nose flute and the beat of a tom-tom. Aboriginal society being collective, however, the group catharsis that takes place is not only highly ritualized, but is frequently carried out as a supplication to certain mythic beings—the god of the hunt, or of fertility—that are lacking today. . . . By comparison, contemporary rock “n” rollers lack a social focus for their energy, which is thereby visited on the godlike individual. According to this notion, modern society, with its emphasis on decorum, suppresses a need in man for uninhibited kinetic self-expression. Today’s music is a throwback, or tribal atavism, made endemic through mass communication. It is probably no coincidence that the Beatles, who provoke the most violent response among teen-agers, resemble in manner the witch doctors who put their spell on hundreds of shuffling and stamping natives.13

The transformation of the Beatles from the bemused objects of this kind of primal worship into self-conscious artists occurred through their recognizing and taking control of the quasi-religious dimension of their appeal. At first, they were content to be idols; but later, as their artistic aspirations elevated, they transformed themselves from ritual objects into the creators of their own mythology. The turning point in this gradual transformation was the “more popular than Jesus” controversy, for this was how they—and especially their leader, John Lennon—came to understand and reflect upon the deep, common roots in human nature that connect fame, celebrity, and long-lasting cultural significance. The “more popular than controversy Jesus” began in early March of 1966, when John Lennon, comfortably ensconced in a mockTudor mansion in suburban London’s “Stockbroker Belt,” gave an interview to his old friend Maureen Cleave, pop music reporter for the London Evening Standard. Cleave’s article, titled “How does a Beatle live? John Lennon lives like this,” ran on March 4; her theme was Lennon’s transformation—now that he had reached the ripe old age of twenty-five—from teenybopper idol to public intellectual: Experience has sown few seeds of doubt in him; not that his mind is closed, but it’s closed round whatever he believes at the time. “Christianity will go,” he said. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that. I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” He is reading extensively about religion.14

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The statement went unnoticed in Britain; as Mark Lewisohn has observed, “People were used to [Lennon’s] caustic remarks, and besides, it was a valid comment.”15 But on July 29, just two weeks before the scheduled start of the Beatles’ annual U.S. summer tour, the American teen magazine Datebook reprinted extracts from Cleave’s article, using the quotation’s most volatile phrase—“I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity”—as its page one banner. Within three days, Lennon’s remarks were front-page news throughout the United States. Popular versions of Beatles’ history portray the “bigger than Jesus” flap as the scandal from which the group’s fortunes never entirely recovered and the real reason why the Beatles never gave a public concert after August 29, 1966. While the episode was a turning point for the group, the public outcry was not nearly as widespread as might be assumed from frequently replayed newsreel footage of young people tossing publicity photos and album sleeves onto bonfires. Lennon’s statement got the group and their music banned in South Africa; but in the United States, expressions of outrage were largely confined to the South. In Nashville, for example, the Ku Klux Klan organized an anti-Beatle demonstration, but it drew eight thousand to a locale across the street from where the Beatles played two sold-out concerts to a total of more than twenty-four thousand paying customers. Outside of the Bible belt, reactions ran the gamut from amusement to pedantry. The Washington Post wryly noted that in the two years since their last appearance in the capital city, the Beatles had acquired a couple of “reluctant theologians.” Radio station KRLA in Los Angeles, a sponsor of the Beatles’ August 28 appearance at Dodger Stadium, used the controversy to give its listeners a lesson in constitutional history: “If you remember . . ., a group of British subjects came to America to avoid public censure of their religious beliefs. After many hardships, they won . . . religious freedom,” a freedom that “Americans . . . still enjoy. Therefore, we here at KRLA do not believe it is our right to question the religious beliefs of the Beatles or any other talent.”16 At any other time Lennon’s remarks would have aroused indignation, especially in those parts of the United States where public avowals of Christian fideism had not yet acquired the patina of lowclass enthusiasm they wore in the more sophisticated cities of the north and west. John’s comments were, nevertheless, particularly ill timed, for in the summer of 1966 the United States was a jittery nation. The previous summer had seen race riots in several major cities, including Washington D.C., Detroit, and Los Angeles, and in the three weeks immediately prior to the start of the Beatles’ tour,

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the country found itself having to absorb two shocking instances of mass murder. On July 14, eight student nurses were found strangled in a hospital-owned apartment house on the south side of Chicago. A petty criminal and mental patient named Richard Speck, identified by a survivor who remembered that he had the phrase “Born to Raise Hell” tattooed on his left upper arm, was eventually caught and charged with the crime. On August 1, a heavily armed former U.S. Marine, Charles Whitman, killed fourteen and wounded fortyone in a forty-five-minute shooting spree from the top of the bell tower at the University of Texas at Austin. At the same time, the war in Vietnam was quietly ramping up, and making deeper inroads into the lives of America’s young people. On August 5, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Defense Department “issued a call Thursday for 46,200 draftees in October—the highest for any month since the Korean war.” The higher draft quota was necessitated both by lagging enlistments and accelerating casualties: of the 4,569 Americans killed in Vietnam since January 1, 1961, more than half—2,721—“were killed in the first seven months of [1966] alone.” On August 24, the New York Times reported Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara’s announcement that “40,000 draft rejects and substandard volunteers, most of them with ‘poverty-encrusted’ backgrounds, would be ‘salvaged’ for military duty in the next 10 months.” Though the media drew no direct connections between the state of the nation’s religious life and the summer’s outburst of violence, it was a short step for Americans to go from their own growing awareness of being in the midst of a spiritual decline to the horrors of Speck and Whitman. American worries about the weakening importance of faith and the question of God’s existence had been on the public mind at least since the spring, when the cover of the April 8, 1966 issue of Time magazine posed the question, “Is God Dead?” That cover story, titled “Toward a Hidden God,” reported that a number of radical Christian theologians believed that “God is indeed absolutely dead,” with a less extreme faction holding “that at the very least God in the image of man, God sitting in heaven,” was no longer a sustainable belief among many leading Protestant thinkers. The events of the summer and Lennon’s statement seemed to reaffirm the woeful conclusion of the Romantic and Victorian writers that God had indeed withdrawn from involvement in the human world. Moreover, that the “more popular than Jesus” statement issued from the lips of a man who had experienced first hand the fastest and most intense onrush of fame the world had ever seen lent Lennon’s statement a certain credibility. Despite his northern English solecisms

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(“It’s them twisting it . . .”), this young pop singer had put his finger on an emerging cultural trend: in the future, it seemed, cycles of hysterical celebrity worship would increasingly satisfy the transcendental longings that traditionally were the pretext for and province of religion. The faithful were offended, in other words, not so much by the blasphemous drift of Lennon’s comments as by their accuracy in describing the contemporary state of religious faith both in America and around the world. Though Lennon later said that during the controversy he was “terrified” by the anti-Beatles rhetoric in the United States, at press conferences in nearly all of the fourteen cities the Beatles played that summer, he refused to back down. Apologizing for the offense he caused but declining to retract his statement, Lennon told assembled reporters in Chicago: If I had said television is more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it. You know, but as I just happened to be talking to a friend, I used the word “Beatles” as a remote thing—not as what “I” think as Beatles—as those other Beatles like other people see us. I just said “they” are having more influence on kids and things than anything else, including Jesus. But I said it in that way which is the wrong way. Yap yap.

Challenged by a reporter with “Some teenagers have repeated your statements: ‘I like the Beatles more than Jesus Christ.’ What do you think about that?” a nervous, but clearly exasperated Lennon replied, Originally I pointed out that fact in reference to England, that we meant more to kids than Jesus did, or religion, at that time. I wasn’t knocking it or putting it down, I was just saying it as a fact. And it’s true more for England than here. I’m not saying that we’re better or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person or God as a thing or whatever it is. You know, I just said what I said, and it was wrong. Or it was taken wrong. And now it’s all this.17

That “popularity” suggested itself to Lennon as the basis of his comparison shows how the Beatles and Beatlemania had by 1966 altered the Anglo-American cultural landscape. The unprecedented financial success of the Beatles and the other entertainers that followed in their wake suggested that celebrity had, once and for all, established itself as the indisputable sign of cultural significance, and that from then on, society would anchor its conceptions of worth more firmly than ever in the quantifiable realm of the market. But Lennon was prompted to

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make his offending comparison by more than just his having caught the spirit of the emerging culture of celebrity. The immediate impetus for the comments, as Maureen Cleave told her readers, was Lennon’s “extensive” reading about religion, which, it turns out, was probably not all that extensive, since it seems to have consisted of one book: Hugh Schonfield’s 1965 bestseller The Passover Plot. Though born some forty years apart, Schonfield and Lennon were in many respects kindred spirits. Both were nonconformist autodidacts, and both were animated by utopian hopes for the future. A Jewish Christian, Schonfield had made headlines in 1956 by founding The Commonwealth of World Citizens, an antinationalist “servant nation” dedicated to promoting world peace through universal brotherhood. Recalling Romantic utopias like Coleridge and Southey’s Pantisocracy, The Commonwealth of World Citizens— which Schonfield referred to as the “Mondcivitan Republic,” its name in Esperanto—embodied the ideals of pacifism, transnational fraternity and goodwill, and transcendent justice that Lennon would later celebrate in his 1971 song “Imagine.” In The Passover Plot, Schonfield argued that the fictional premise “used . . . by George Moore in The Brook Kerith and by D.H. Lawrence in The Man who Died”—that Jesus survived the crucifixion—really happened.18 To the task of proving this thesis, Schonfield brought a prodigious command of scripture, new insights (largely gleaned from the recently published Dead Sea Scrolls) into the Jewish sectarianism of first-century Palestine, and forty years of studying early Christian history. He also brought a conspiratorial worldview that led him to weave from all the ancient sources available to him a story that explained on entirely rational and historically plausible grounds all of the events mentioned in the Gospels. The miracles and mysteries that serve to establish Christ’s divinity in the church’s official narrative are to Schonfield telltale signs of a plot—masterminded by Jesus himself—the purpose of which was to prove that this son of a Galilean carpenter was the Messiah whose coming had been predicted by certain Jewish sects since about a century and a half before his birth. Steeped from his youth in the religious ferment of his day, Schonfield’s Jesus gradually becomes convinced that it was incumbent upon him to manifest his Messiahship by ensuring that his demise conformed to the prophesied pattern. To this end, writes Schonfield, Jesus minutely planned and orchestrated the events of Passion Week so they would culminate in his crucifixion on Friday afternoon. For the Passover Plot, timing is everything; delaying the Messiah’s predicted ordeal until just before the Sabbath, writes Schonfield, would enable Jesus to survive

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crucifixion by faking his death. The custom of removing the bodies of the crucified from their crosses before the Sabbath meant that Jesus’ time on the cross would be minimized, allowing him to receive quickly the medical attention he would need. And by appearing to die on his own, Jesus would be spared having his legs broken, the usual means by which the Romans hastened the deaths of crucifixion victims. Every conspiracy theory needs a leap of faith; Schonfield’s is the precise means he thinks Jesus used to fake his death. Jesus’ words “I am thirsty,” writes Schonfield, were a signal to Joseph of Arimathea, who dispatched a servant with a vinegar-soaked sponge on the end of a twig of hyssop. But, says Schonfield, there was more than just vinegar in this sponge. Had this liquid consisted of the “the normal wine vinegar diluted with water,” he writes, “the effect would have been stimulating. In this case it was exactly the opposite. Jesus lapsed quickly into complete unconsciousness. His body sagged. His head lolled on his breast, and to all intents and purposes he was a dead man” (191–192). As John Lennon might have said, had he witnessed the scene as Schonfield drew it, “He’s drugged!” Having created the illusion of premature death, Schonfield’s Jesus is taken down from the cross and immediately laid in the tomb. Sometime on Saturday night, however, Jesus’ confederates return to the tomb to carry out, as Schonfield put it, “the entirely legitimate purpose of reviving him” (196). The Roman soldier’s lance thrust, however, had made Jesus’ chances of recovery “slender”; after regaining “consciousness temporarily,” Schonfield writes, Jesus “finally succumbed” (196). It being “much too risky, and perhaps too late, to take the body back to the tomb, replace the bandages left there, roll the stone across the entrance, and try to create the impression that everything was as it had been on Friday evening,” Jesus’ coconspirators “quickly and reverently” interred the remains elsewhere, “leaving the puzzle of the empty tomb” (196–197). This enticing puzzle, continues Schonfield, may accurately be seen as the real basis of Christianity, since from it the early church, by tying together a quilt of conflicting eyewitness accounts, bits of unrelated historic data, and even snatches from works of fiction like Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, wove its authoritative and authorizing narrative of Jesus’ death and resurrection. But this was only phase one of the Passover Plot, set in motion by Jesus himself, and carried out with the help of his disciples. Phase two is the early church’s “official” narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection. Over a period of three hundred years, scores of influential theologians and early church fathers tied together and tidied up the loose ends and

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unaccountable details left behind by Jesus’ own, partially successful, conspiracy, producing, by about the end of the third century, a myth capable in Schonfield’s opinion of instituting a great world religion. But as that myth was reverently scrutinized, accumulating through the years a weighty interpretive tradition, its loose ends continued to turn up and demand explanation. As Christianity spread after 300 C.E. to an increasingly educated and intellectually sophisticated populace, the need for a stable originary narrative—capable of withstanding the skepticism of friend and foe alike—became more urgent. Schonfield argues that the early church stabilized the myth of Jesus’ life and works first by obliterating any lingering traces of the Passover Plot, and finally by linking whatever could be spun as an Old Testament prophecy of the Messiah’s coming to the New Testament’s history of Christ’s life. This is how, Schonfield argued, the two parts of the Bible were revised into a seamless cosmological narrative. To Schonfield, though, in the end this narrative is just a story, carefully and tendentiously abstracted from a chaos of events related only by their having occurred in roughly the same region at about the same time. Those events are capable of being woven into a different narrative, and this is precisely what Schonfield did. This is what struck Lennon more than anything else in Schonfield’s book. The insights John took from The Passover Plot were more cognitive and historiographic than theological: at no time did Lennon state that he believed Schonfield’s hypothesis in all its particulars. He said later that his “views on Christianity” had been “directly influenced” by Schonfield’s book, the premise of which, in John’s words, was “that Jesus’ message had been garbled by his disciples and twisted for a variety of self-serving reasons by those who followed, to the point where it has lost validity for many in the modern age.”19 As the interview in the Evening Standard suggests, reading the book seems also to have prompted Lennon to consider his own fame and the phenomenon of Beatlemania in their broader cultural and historic contexts, and to conclude that the psychic, political, and cultural forces that went into the making of Christianity had been revived by Beatlemania. The world of Jesus’ birth was characterized, in Schonfield’s words, by “an extraordinary fervour and religiosity in which almost every event, political, social, and economic, was seized upon, scrutinized, and analyzed, to discover how and in what way it represented a Sign of the Times and threw light on the approach of the End of The Days. The whole condition of the Jewish people was psychologically abnormal. . . . People were on edge, neurotic. There were hot disputes, rivalries and recriminations” (30). In 1966—that

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is, well into its third year—Beatlemania still greeted the band when they went on tour, confirming for the Beatles that they had somehow touched off a three-year episode of mass neuroticism. Teenagers still thronged airports when the Beatles arrived, and lined their motorcade routes; and while they were in New York for the 1966 summer tour, two girls climbed to the twenty-second floor of the Warwick Hotel, where the Beatles were staying, and threatened to throw themselves off unless Paul came to see them. Recalling Beatlemania, George Harrison said that in the 1960s, “the world used [the Beatles] as an excuse to go mad, and then blamed us for it.”20 Other experiences must also have contributed to Lennon’s sense that the Beatles had aroused a new era of religiously tinged psychological abnormality. Ringo recalled that during their tours, the Beatles frequently found themselves presented with the sick and afflicted: Crippled people were constantly being brought backstage to be touched by “a Beatle,” and it was very strange. It happened in Britain as well, not only overseas. There were some really bad cases, God help them. There were some poor little children who would be brought in in baskets. And also some really sad Thalidomide kids with little broken bodies and no arms, no legs, and little feet.

Lennon, presented with the same spectacle, was equally struck by the religious overtones of these encounters, though his response was, predictably, more callous than Ringo’s: It’s always the mother or nurse pushing them on you. They would push these people at you like you were Christ, as if there were some aura about you that would rub off on them. . . . In the states, they were bringing hundreds of them backstage, and it was fantastic. I can’t stand looking at them. I have to turn away. I have to laugh, or I’d just collapse from hate. They’d line them up, and I got the impression The Beatles were being treated as bloody faith healers. It was sickening. It was sort of the “in” joke that we were supposed to cure them.21

The possible parallels between Beatlemania and Schonfield’s picture of mass insanity in first-century Palestine really came home to Lennon, though, during the Beatles’ tour of Japan and the Philippines just a few weeks before the flap over John’s “more popular than Jesus” statement broke in the United States. Upon arrival at the Tokyo airport on June 27, 1966, the Beatles were hustled into a VIP lounge, where Japanese police told them that a cult of reactionary students, opposed to the spread of Western culture, had threatened to kill them.

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Booking agent Vic Lewis, who had helped arrange the tour, recalls that some Tokyo “hooligans” found the idea of “allowing the Beatles inside the Budokan, where no Westerner had set foot . . ., offensive, an insult to the great warriors of Japan. If they played there, it was said, they would not leave Tokyo alive.” As a result, the Beatles were virtually imprisoned in their hotel. “Aside from going to the gigs,” said Lewis, “no one was permitted to leave their rooms.”22 When it came time to play the shows, the Beatles were brought to the arena under armed guard, where three thousand police officers watched grimly over an audience of nine thousand who were so polite and subdued that for the first time in years, the boys could actually hear themselves play. In Manila, though, the atmosphere could not have been more different. Though their arrival in the Philippines brought out the usual hordes of screaming fans, welcome turned to menace after the boys failed to respond to a luncheon invitation—an order, really—from Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Lounging in their hotel after two successful and well-attended shows, the Beatles were stunned to find themselves suddenly vilified in television and newspaper reports for having snubbed the Marcos family, who had waited “hours” for them to arrive. Deprived of their police escort and any help with their baggage and equipment, the Beatles made their way to the airport through jeering crowds and, finally, a gauntlet of police, soldiers, and governmental officials who kicked and punched them and members of their entourage. Only after paying a “transport tax” equal to the total of their concert receipts were the Beatles allowed to leave the country. Back in London, John told reporters of being shoved into a transit lounge by uniformed men who shouted, “You treat like ordinary passenger! Ordinary passenger!” “We heard [Manila] was a terrible place anyway,” said George, “and it was proved.” Asked what the Beatles learned from their experience in Asia, John replied, “We’ll just never go to any nuthouses again.” To Lennon, fresh from reading Schonfield’s minute-by-minute account of Holy Week, Tokyo and Manila must have borne a chilling resemblance to Jersualem’s violent swing from adulation to excoriation of Jesus between Palm Sunday and Good Friday. Perhaps this is why Lennon refused to recant his statements during the U.S. tour, since each day presented further proof that his original intuition—that Beatlemania and Schonfield’s version of Christianity were parallel phenomena—was on target.

“Paul is Dead, Man, Miss Him, Miss Him” There was more to this parallel, however, than just Jesus’ and the Beatles’ shared identity as foci of adoration and scorn. By 1966 the

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Beatles’ longevity—unprecedented for pop stars at the time—had made them and their music objects of the kind of scrutiny and study previously reserved for venerated religious figures and sacred texts. Their every move was chronicled by fan magazines, music trade publications, and even the mainstream press. The daily newspapers of every city on the 1966 U.S. tour printed a front-page story about the Beatles on the day after their appearance. After reading Schonfield, Lennon realized that the Beatlemaniac’s insatiable thirst for every scrap of information about his/her idols was functionally identical to the religious acolyte’s hunger for a more comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of the divine. Both are satisfied only by obsessively poring over every available tidbit, which is wrung for hidden messages and archetypal significances. Schonfield also showed Lennon that such an understanding was always predicated on a story—that is, a purposeful narrative stitched together from life’s jumble of contingencies. These two realizations, combined with the “more popular than Jesus” controversy and its aftermath, pointed out a new direction for the Beatles, one in which they could broaden their cultural significance by exploiting and amplifying—rather than obscuring or repudiating—their quasi-religious status. The first step they took toward manifesting this new identity was to withdraw from the public eye—after their performance at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29, 1966, the Beatles played no more public concerts. Though the given reasons for this decision were exhaustion and disgust with the madness of touring, not appearing in public had another accidental but welcome effect. In violation of showbiz wisdom, which held that artists who didn’t tour risked losing their following, retiring from concretizing only heightened the aura of sacredness that had grown up around the Beatles. Disappearing for several months added mystery and anticipation to the group’s bag of entertainment tricks. “What will they do next?” wondered their millions of fans, patiently, even faithfully, awaiting the release of the next record. Deciding not to play in public also reflected the degree to which— after only three years in the limelight—the Beatles felt entitled by their unprecedented acclaim to reject the entertainment-industry formulas on which they had built their success in order to forge for themselves new identities as full-fledged poets. After the summer of 1966, no longer would the Beatles wear matching stage suits; no longer would John Lennon struggle myopically through public appearances because his teenybopper fan base presumably wouldn’t tolerate seeing their idol wearing eyeglasses. When the Beatles emerged from their self-imposed hiatus nearly a year after their last

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concert with a new album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, they presented themselves as more individually differentiated than before: all four sported new hairstyles, drooping moustaches, and they wore vaguely psychedelic versions of the quasi-military uniforms of northern English community brass bands. Most important, John Lennon proudly wears his National Health-issued round spectacles as a sign of the bookishness and intellectualism that he had previously concealed to protect his everyman identity. These iconographic alterations signaled that the Beatles had transformed themselves from history’s most successful purveyors of rock and pop for teenagers into artists—that is, weavers of complex, subtle, and deep narratives about humankind’s enduring questions. But despite these signals and the hoopla that greeted the new album, the music on Sgt. Pepper was not any deeper, more evocative, or more experimental than what the group had been doing for the previous year and a half. The music appeared more meaningful and capable of sustaining a more sophisticated interpretive inquiry, though, because of the way it was packaged. With Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles took a great deal more care than they had taken before in attempting to narrativize the album. Sgt. Pepper presents itself as a frame tale: it opens with the statement of a theme: the two decade career of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, introduced music hall style. That band, manifestly an alter ego of the Beatles, plays a varied selection of songs, after which they reprise their theme song before closing with a grand finale, “A Day in the Life.” Though now frequently identified as pop music’s first concept album and a manifesto of the 1960s, in actuality the conceptual unity of Sgt. Pepper, by its own creators’ admission, is the result of an after-the-fact impression rather than an intended effect. The songs putatively played by the Lonely Hearts Club Band comprise a musical hodgepodge, framed by the title song and a brief repeat of that song in the penultimate track. “All my contributions to the album,” said John Lennon, “have absolutely nothing to do with this idea of Sgt. Pepper and his band; but it works, because we said it worked, and that’s how the album appeared. But it was not put together as it sounds, except for Sgt. Pepper introducing Billy Shears, and the so-called reprise. Every other song could have been on any other album.”23 Lacking real thematic and conceptual unity, Sgt. Pepper nevertheless manages to be taken as a coherent whole because its very randomness evokes High Modern obscurantism. Like the purposeful narrative of Christianity that Schonfield deconstructed into the conspiracy theory of the Passover Plot, what matters is the system.

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Provide what appears to be at least a carefully composed image, and, despite the appearance of randomness and disconnection, people will look for, and find, a system. In the case of Sgt. Pepper, all the Beatles had to do was establish a frame—the introduction and repetition of the theme song—and the fans would find the commonalities. They would, in fact, have no choice but to do so, because the Beatles were already for the fans a means of filling the void of meaninglessness left by the disappearance of God. Four years of ecstatic worship proved that Beatlemaniacs were eager to apotheosize the group, to make them the focus of a mythology for the times we live in. With Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles gave that ongoing process another shot in the arm. Nowhere is this employment of High Modern randomness more explicit than in Sgt. Pepper’s famous cover. In the beginning, the sleeve art for Beatles albums was little more than head shots of the John, Paul, George, and Ringo as figures against a patterned or solid ground—four moptops staring at the camera. As their music became more idiosyncratic and experimental between 1964 and 1965, though, the sleeve art followed suit, growing more self-consciously artistic, first by employing moody lighting (Beatles for Sale), next by having the boys strike mysterious poses that mimicked semaphore (Help!), then by using psychedelic distortion (Rubber Soul), and ending with their first attempt at pop-art montage (Revolver). But the Beatles made a quantum leap in the artiness of their album sleeves with Sgt. Pepper. “This album was a big production,” said Paul, “and we wanted the album sleeve to be really interesting.”24 Bedecking themselves in shimmering satin tunics, the Beatles enlisted pop-art superstar Peter Blake to execute an image of the Beatles standing in front of life-size cutouts of their personal heroes, which included everyone from Albert Einstein to radio comedian Tommy Handley and bombshell starlet Diana Dors. Weaving together the individual and the cultural, the cover photo of Sgt. Pepper—one of the most recognizable and imitated images of the modern era—represents both the Beatles’ attempt to forge a new artistic direction for themselves and their assertion of their own cultural significance. In fleshing out the Sgt. Pepper alter ego—that is, by being people other than the famous Beatles—the four paradoxically asserted for themselves an even greater historic importance. This assertion comes, however, via a hermeneutic puzzle, in which the customary configuration of Beatles as the image’s focus gives way to a mosaic of faces in which the Beatles, though foregrounded, appear as members of a community. But what unites this community? Who is the man in dark glasses (French film star Jean-Paul Belmondo)? What

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is his relation to Sonny Liston, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Marlene Dietrich, and Shirley Temple? What story does the quilt of faces tell, and what role in that story is played by the other objects in the picture, such as the small television set on the right? The cover is like an obscure sacred text, full of prophetic mumbo-jumbo, but needing an interpretive key to make sense of it all. Turn the sleeve over, and you encounter the second quasi-religious dimension of Sgt. Pepper: for the first time on a pop album, all the words to the songs are transcribed. The lyrics thus acquire the stable, fixed status of scripture, which can now be pored over and studied with the kind of Talmudic intensity that the Beatles knew their fans possessed. When Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was issued as a compact disc in 1987, it came with a legend that matched the faces on the cover with their names, spoiling the fun of a new generation of Beatle fans who otherwise could have experienced the thrill of recognizing in the sea of faces such notables as Aleister Crowley and Fred Astaire. The LP didn’t have such a key, because the album’s original buyers were meant to derive additional aesthetic enjoyment from having figured out for themselves who these people were and why they made it to the cover—and why others did not. A key cheats the viewer of one of the chief pleasures of a visual text like this—the satisfaction gained from having solved the puzzle. This is the benign starting point for conspiratorial narrativity. At first, the jumble of discrete images, unified only by their proximity, is assembled into a myth. That this myth is meant to be participatory and quasi-religious is indicated by the inclusion, in the record sleeve, of mass-produced sacred relics: each copy of Sgt. Pepper came with a sheet of cardboard cut-outs—a moustache, badges, rank insignia. The iconographic density of the Sgt. Pepper cover invites interpretation through the sequential perusal of its details. Interpretation is initiatory: decoding the cover grants the Beatlemaniac admission to the new cult of the Lonely Hearts Club Band, membership in which can be demonstrated by wearing the Sgt. Pepper regalia. Interpretive decoding also produces the aesthetic pleasure that Aristotle identified as the particular cognitive gift bestowed by analysis: the ability to see the organic connection between the particular and the universal. As an interpretive tradition accumulates around the object, however, the meaning of a mythic image like this one inevitably grows more sinister. Words and pictures tied together only by their spatial propinquity begin to be related by cause and effect; they acquire the systematic interrelationship that in his Poetics Aristotle identified as the indispensable characteristic of a plot. The more public the

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object—that is, the greater the number of people who study it—the more elaborate the plot becomes, since each brings a new interpreter who builds on prior elucidations of the “hidden messages,” which, taken together, constitute a coherent narrative. But such collective interpretations are both cumulative and structured by a covert analytic one-upmanship, in which each interpreter—like someone spreading a conspiracy theory across the Internet—tries to outdo the previous interpreter in uncovering depth and complexity. As this oneupmanship continues, at a certain point the playfulness of mythmaking gives way to the paranoia of conspiracy theorizing. In The Passover Plot, Schonfield traced this process in reverse, showing Lennon how rich mythic narratives can be composed by simply stringing together a chain of images. This was how many of the Beatles’ psychedelic masterpieces came into being. John and Paul wrote “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” for example, simply by sitting across from one another and speaking incomplete phrases that the other would finish. The mythmaking of Sgt. Pepper began as an effort to include the audience in this process of composition by random assembly. Since the fans wanted meaning, why not let them create their own, with a little help from their friends in Sgt. Pepper’s band? And this is precisely what Beatle fans did, eventually turning the myth of Sgt. Pepper into a Byzantine conspiracy theory cum hero’s resurrection myth: the “Paul is dead” rumor, which reached its crescendo in November 1969.25 This bizarre episode, so revealing of the religious importance the Beatles had assumed in their fans’ lives, began only two weeks after the release of Abbey Road on September 26, 1969, when Detroit disc jockey “Uncle” Russ Gibb announced on the air that Paul McCartney had died nearly three years before in an early morning traffic accident. Gibb had ascertained that Paul was dead, he told his listeners, by decoding the symbolic message contained in the cover photograph of Abbey Road, the now iconic image of the four Beatles in a crosswalk outside their north London recording studio. The picture, said Gibb, represented a funeral procession, with John in white, leading the way as the priest, Ringo in a black frock coat representing the undertaker, then Paul, as the barefoot corpse, with an unlit cigarette (symbolizing his snuffed-out life) in his right hand, and, finally, George in workman’s denim, representing the gravedigger. Just to be sure that the message was received, Gibb continued, the license plate of a Volkswagen Beetle parked in the background reads “28IF,” indicating that Paul would have been in his twenty-eighth year “if” he were still alive. As other disk jockeys at Gibb’s station fleshed out the story with more clues scoured from Beatles songs and sleeve art, wire services

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picked up the rumor, which quickly spread across the United States. Soon a stable and authoritative account of Paul’s death emerged from the mountain of evidence that had been amassed by the amateur sleuthing of millions of Beatle fans. The story, as summarized in Paranoia magazine in 1996, went like this: While out driving about 5:00 a.m. one Wednesday morning in November, 1966, Paul let his attention drift to a good-looking meter maid, and, failing to notice that the traffic signal had changed, got into a horrible accident, which destroyed his handsome young face and smashed his teeth out of his head, rendering identification by dental records impossible. Before he could escape the wreckage, the car burst into flames. Of course, a crowd gathered to witness the fiery spectacle, and a few onlookers thought the young man, however disfigured, looked familiar. The subsequent newspaper story was pulled before it hit the streets, beginning the cover-up.26

This story, like the authoritative myths of Christianity that Schonfield claimed were invented to cover-up the Passover Plot, can also be reverse-engineered to reveal how it was cobbled together from lines and titles of Beatles songs, most of which are on Sgt. Pepper. The girl in “She’s Leaving Home” creeps out of her parents’ house to meet a man from the motor trade on the same day, and at the same time, as Paul’s supposed accident. The pretty meter maid who distracts Paul is “Lovely Rita.” The rest of the details of the crash are drawn from the first stanza of “A Day in the Life”—the original inspiration of which, according to Lennon and McCartney, was a newspaper account of the fatal traffic accident of Guinness heir Tara Browne, who died early in the morning of December 18, 1969, after running a red light and crashing his Lotus Elán sports car into a van. After Paul’s death, the story went, he was replaced by a look-alike named William Campbell, an ordinary bloke who had won a Paul McCartney look-alike contest, and who learned to play bass, guitar, and piano, and who could sing like Paul. To pay tribute to their lost comrade, however, the surviving Beatles supposedly laced their songs and album covers with intimations of the manner and circumstances of Paul’s death. Displaying astonishing ingenuity, Beatlemaniacs over the years have identified hundreds of these clues, both visual and auditory, throughout the band’s oeuvre. The most famous are the instances of “backward masking” on the White Album. The repeated phrase “number nine” in “Revolution 9,” for example, supposedly says “Turn me on, dead man” when played in reverse on a turntable. And reversing John’s gibberish at the end of “I’m So Tired” reportedly

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yields “Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him.” But it was in the imagistically dense pop-art of Sgt. Pepper, supposedly the first album completed after Paul’s death, that Paul-is-dead conspiracy theorists found the lion’s share of clues. On the back cover, for instance, the words “without you,” from the title of “Within You Without You,” emanate from Paul’s head, indicating that the group is without him. George’s right index finger points to the first line of “She’s Leaving Home,” which specifies the day and hour of Paul’s demise. Also on the back cover, John, George, and Ringo face forward, but Paul has his back to the camera, symbolically registering his nonpresence. On the inside of the sleeve is a large photograph of the four smiling Beatles in their brightly colored Sgt. Pepper band uniforms. On Paul’s left sleeve, where on a military uniform one might find a rank insignia, is a black patch that reads “O.P.D.” Paul-is-dead theorists argue that this patch is an abbreviation for “Officially Pronounced Dead,” the British equivalent of the American phrase “dead on arrival.” (The initials on the patch are actually “O.P.P.,” which stands for Ontario Provincial Police—a gift from Canadian officers who had guarded the Beatles during one of their North American tours.) Though Paul appeared on the cover of Life magazine’s November 7, 1966 issue to say that “For the record: Paul is not dead,” and told the Associated Press that “I’m alive and well and concerned about the rumors of my death,” Paul-is-dead conspiracy theorists were undaunted. Any allusion to death in any song on any album—no matter how oblique—was construed as a reference to Paul’s demise. There were more clues on Magical Mystery Tour, the next album after Sgt. Pepper. Viewed upside down, the word Beatles, written in stars on the cover of Magical Mystery Tour, allegedly transformed itself into the phone number of a London mortuary. In a still from the film that appeared in a souvenir booklet that came with the record, Paul is shown sitting at a desk, with a psychedelically rendered sign reading “I Was” in front of him. And in the climactic dance number at the end of the Magical Mystery Tour film, all the Beatles wear red carnations except for Paul, whose boutonniere is black. Even pictures, albums, and songs produced before the date of Paul’s supposed accident were offered in evidence of both the death and the cover-up. For instance, the cover photograph of Rubber Soul, in which the camera looks up at the Beatles’ faces, was said to depict them looking down into Paul’s grave, in an apparent instance of precognition, as that album came out in late 1965. Clues were found in the rejected “butcher cover” photograph of the American Yesterday and Today album, as well as in several songs on Revolver: “Taxman,” for its

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advice to “those who die”; “Eleanor Rigby,” which describes a sad, sparsely attended funeral (since Paul’s death was covered up, “nobody came” to his funeral); and even “Yellow Submarine”—the submarine was, becoming, according to the theory, a symbolic coffin. Despite Paul’s public appearances and plea, made to a Life magazine reporter who found him at his farm in Scotland, “to spread it around that I am just an ordinary person and want to live in peace,” the rumor continued through the fall of 1969 and into 1970. It was pushed off the front pages only by a bit of even more startling news that came with the release of Paul’s first solo album on April 17, 1970: the Beatles had split up. Even that, though, failed to kill the rumor entirely, which still shows up from time to time as an easily recognizable illustration of 1960s madness. “Hey, Dad,” says Tom Hanks’ eight-year-old son, holding up a copy of the White Album in the 1993 film Sleepless in Seattle, “if you play this song backwards, it says that Paul is dead.” And though Paul has called the rumor “a bloody nuisance,” it did have its financial rewards. Like the frenzy of Beatle burnings that followed John’s “more popular than Jesus” comment, which helped the group sell more records—as Ringo observed, they burned them and then “went out and rebought them”27—Paul’s death rumor put more money in the Beatles’ pockets. In the fall of 1969, both Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour reappeared on the sales charts as Beatlemaniacs scoured them for clues. In the end, the strength and staying power of the Paul-is-dead rumor and conspiracy theory demonstrate—as if such a demonstration is needed!—that the Beatles really had become the focus of mythologizing in the 1960s. Like the Romantic age that the 1960s in so many ways resembled, the social tumult of the Beatles’ decade needed explanation, and it was only natural that the most visible cultural phenomenon of the time would be called on to provide some direction in troubled times. M.H. Abrams’ description of the mood of the late eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries could serve as a sketch of the 1960s. “The Romantic era,” he writes was one of technical, political, and social revolutions and counterrevolutions—of industrialization, urbanization, and increasingly massive industrial slums; of the first total war and postwar economic collapse; of progressive specialization in work, alterations in economic and political power, and consequent dislocations of the class structure; of competing ideologies and ever-imminent social chaos. To such a world of swift and drastic change, division, conflict, and disorder, the inherited pieties and integrative myths seemed no longer adequate to hold civilization together.28

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If anything, the inability of the old pieties and myths to withstand the assaults mounted by all this turmoil was even more obvious in the 1960s, when the Kennedy assassination, the mounting deaths in Vietnam, and urban upheaval seemed to indicate that God, the most powerful integrative myth of all, had turned his back on his human children. Whether it’s the 1790s or the 1960s, though, the mind abhors the cognitive vacuum of effects without causes; and where those causes are not self-evident (and sometimes even where they are), a story will be concocted to account for them. To John Lennon (who ought to know), Hugh Schonfield was the unacknowledged master theorist of Beatlemania, for this amateur scholar and Romantic utopianist unintentionally, but accurately, pointed to the mythopoetic potentialities lurking behind the spectacle of mass-communication-era celebrity worship. Sadly, John Lennon little suspected, as he sprinkled his songs and album covers with tantalizing details that he hoped would secure for the Beatles a place in his culture’s pantheon of myths, that he would someday be the subject of his own son’s paranoid conspiracy theory, which emerges as the nightmarish incarnation of the myths woven in this media-saturated age around our celebrities. The deluge of information that both creates and is fueled by the mechanisms of contemporary celebrity worship drops into an ever faster and more efficient mass-communication machine, which spreads it around the globe in the wink of an eye. The jumble of evanescent images, publicity, rumor, anecdote, and conflicting eyewitness testimony that surrounds celebrities cries out to be arranged into a story that makes sense, a narrative. The more information that accumulates the more conspiratorial or paranoid the narrative, as all those details need to be accounted for. But a myth is always a conspiracy theory just waiting for its paranoid elaborator, and paranoia is plentiful in times of social crisis, like the Romantic era and the 1960s. Perhaps John Lennon knew even this (a little); for in 1968 he seems to have had a premonition of the posthumous reputation that his yet-unborn son would someday claim for him. As his marriage was crumbling under the onslaught of Yoko Ono, John was dosing himself at home with LSD one night, when he suddenly announced to his drug-addled companion and boyhood friend Pete Shotton, that he was Jesus Christ, back from the grave. Lennon ordered Pete to convene an emergency meeting of Apple Corps the next day, at which he repeated the announcement of his newfound identity to his bandmates. “This is my thing,” he told them; but after lunch the matter was forgotten.29 Yet when

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Sean Lennon said that “once [my father] died his powers grew,” he closed the circle between simple faith in “the system” and its paranoid counterpart, which is just as faithful. With this statement Sean also testified both to the mythic stature that his father retains in the public mind, and the deep, inextricable bonds between that stature and conspiracy theorizing.

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Epilogue

A Ne w Br i t ish E m pi r e This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. —Shakespeare, Richard II, act II, scene I, lines 40–50

I

n a speech at the United States Military Academy on December 5, 1962, Dean Acheson, former secretary of state in the Truman administration (1949–1953), architect of the Marshall Plan and enthusiastic proponent of the North American Treaty Organization (NATO), made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic by announcing the death of the United Kingdom as a world power. “Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role,” Acheson said, and “the attempt to play a separate power role—that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being the head of a ‘commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength . . ., this role is about played out.”1 This gloomy declaration was especially unanticipated coming from Acheson, the son of English immigrants and known during his years at the State

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Department as an “unabashed Anglophile,” who had looked and acted “like the American version of a model British diplomat, sartorially and otherwise.” But while the Kennedy administration rushed to distance itself from Acheson and London tabloids fulminated against his “astonishing anti-British speech,” and “verbal kick in the teeth,”2 no one denied the truth of what Acheson said. They scarcely could, for as 1962 drew to a close, it was clear that the United Kingdom really had lost an empire. Only four decades earlier, the British Commonwealth of Nations held sway over roughly 458 million people on about one quarter of the world’s land mass. But by the time the Beatles charted their first number one hit in February 1963, the commonwealth was a shadow of its former self, having been dismantled by independence movements in former colonies large and small, from India, the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire, to little British Honduras, the last colonial possession in the Americas. At the same time that the Beatles were inducing unprecedented mass hysteria among British youth, the adults of their home country were mired in a profound crisis of national confidence, struggling to accommodate themselves to their sudden and apparently irreversible loss of status among the international powers. But only a year after Acheson’s declaration of the end of both the British Empire and the “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States, Beatlemania was sweeping through Britain and Scandinavia, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo were about to conquer America. By the end of 1964, the Beatles had become the world’s first truly global entertainment phenomenon, with hundreds of millions of worshipers throughout Europe, the Americas, and the Near and Far East. But in one of the great ironies of twentieth-century history, at the very moment that the Beatles were extending the sway of British culture father than it had ever gone before, Britain remained mired in pessimism and defeat, castigating itself and searching about for a reason why the nation had fallen so quickly and so far from its prior eminence. Britons can be forgiven, perhaps, for failing to notice that the Beatles were establishing a new British Empire to replace the one they’d recently lost, for this new empire looked nothing like the old one. The old commonwealth was a hard empire, won by conquest and retained through military force and economic domination. The new empire of the Beatles was, by contrast, a soft one of shared values, culture, and lifestyle, whose subjects gave their fealty not by compulsion, but voluntarily. Furthermore, the new empire wasn’t only British. Instead, it was an Anglo-American empire, in which the deeply rooted, longstanding culture of Britain

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joined with the energetic, swiftly evolving, and adaptable culture of the United States to spread Rock Romanticism’s conviction of individual dignity and significance throughout the world. A closer relationship between the two great Anglophone nations on opposite sides of the Atlantic had been building since the first few decades of the twentieth century. But as the 1960s dawned, something was needed to reestablish the ties between Britain and America once and for all, and to carry the Anglo-American cultural legacy of individual worth and liberty to the rest of the globe. That something was the Beatles, who—again—happened to be in the right place and the right time to make history. The power of the Beatles to establish a new empire is glimpsed not only in the way they changed music, manners, and lifestyle in the 1960s. Even after their break-up, the Beatles possessed formidable might to effect far-reaching social change. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Beatles and their Rock Romantic progeny weakened the cultural and political dominance of Soviet-style communism first in Eastern Europe, and finally in the USSR itself. In addition, then, to establishing an empire, the Beatles brought down an empire—an empire that, for all its supposed political might and ideological purity—crumbled quite easily in the face of Rock Romanticism’s assertion of the necessity of personal liberty and the preciousness of the individual. The old 1960s cliché that the Beatles changed everything—about which even John, Paul, George, and Ringo were dubious—turns out to have been true. One morning in December, 1991, only twenty-one years after the end of the Beatles’ golden decade, the world woke up to the news that the Soviet Union no longer existed. With the demise of the USSR, the world that people like Dean Acheson saw as irretrievably split between two opposed, but equally mighty systems of social organization—Westernstyle democracy and Eastern socialism—suddenly was no more. Would the Soviet Union have fallen if the Beatles had never come along? Probably—eventually its internal contradictions would have caused the whole shaky edifice to fall in upon itself. But there can be little doubt that the soft empire of Anglo-American Rock Romanticism—of which the Beatles were the first and most captivating ambassadors—accelerated the inevitable downfall of Soviet totalitarianism. The Beatles showed the oppressed people of those nations what the Romantic conviction of individual dignity and liberty looked like at their best. They showed them what they were missing. People living daily lives in the lies promulgated by their repressive governments saw in the Beatles an optimistic, truthful, and affirming picture of the human condition. The Beatles’ popularity—the

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love they initially aroused, and continue to inspire—is the product of the loving conception of humanity they inherited from Romanticism, and that their music still communicates to every new generation that encounters it. Old-line statesmen like Dean Acheson (who was born in 1893) were ill-equipped to see how a new, soft Anglo-American empire was emerging through a pop culture phenomenon like the Beatles, because their conception of empire was based on nineteenth-century ideas of political dominance and projected military power. By these measures, Britain had lost almost everything by the beginning of the 1960s. After taking control of the Mandate for Palestine in 1923, Britain commanded an empire on which, it was said, the sun never set. But the next twenty-five years were some of the hardest in the nation’s history: economic depression in the 1930s depleted British resources already strained to the breaking point by World War I; and just when recovery appeared imminent, Germany invaded Poland in 1939, plunging Europe into an even more destructive conflagration. Victorious but exhausted after World War II, Britain emerged from the conflict unwilling to quell agitation for self-governance among the increasingly restive populations of its far-flung colonial possessions, which began to fall away almost immediately after the conclusion of hostilities in Europe. First to gain its independence was the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan in 1946. India followed in 1947, then Burma and Ceylon in 1948. The expiration of the British Mandate for Palestine, also in 1948, resulted in the creation of Israel and open warfare between the former Palestine’s Arab and Jewish inhabitants. In the late 1950s and 1960s it was Africa’s turn to decolonize, beginning with the independence of Ghana in 1957, followed by Nigeria in 1960, Uganda in 1962, and Kenya and Zanzibar in 1963. All this rapid decolonization, unopposed by Britain, portrayed the nation as politically weak. The Suez Crisis of 1956 did the same to Britain’s once vaunted reputation as a military power. The crisis began on July 26, when Egypt—angered by the withdrawal of offers of American and British aid in building the Aswan Dam—nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been a neutral zone under British protection since 1888. In late October, a joint strike force of French and British paratroopers invaded Egypt and retook the canal; but the Eisenhower administration engineered a United Nations resolution requiring the withdrawal of British and French troops, to be replaced by UN peacekeepers. Pressured by American threats to collapse the pound sterling and withhold petroleum exports, and rebuked by the prime ministers of Canada and Australia, British Prime Minister

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Anthony Eden ordered a British and French cease-fire on November 5, 1956, and resigned in disgrace in early January. As Daniel Yergin has written, “Suez was a watershed for Britain,” not so much because it presaged Britain’s decline as a world power, but because the crisis “made obvious what had already come to pass.” This, in turn, caused “as severe a rupture in British culture as it did in that nation’s politics and its international position.”3 Thus Acheson’s statement, coming only six years after the Suez Crisis, rubbed salt into an open national wound. But that wound had been festering since at least the late 1940s, when the struggle to accommodate themselves to what economist and historian Barbara Ward called the “vanishing in a few decades of an absolutely preeminent position in the world” had put Britons “in a mood of almost morbid introspection.”4 By the mid-1950s, that mood had produced the “Angry Young Men” of English literature like John Osborne, and, toward the end of the decade, the “kitchen sink” style of gritty naturalism in drama and film. Though originally coined to describe a group of English painters who took as their subjects “every kind of food and drink, every utensil and implement, the usual plain furniture and even the babies’ nappies on the line. Everything but the kitchen sink? The kitchen sink too,”5 the term was later broadened to refer to the thoroughgoing pessimism engendered by Britain’s postimperial malaise, and displayed in art, theater, film, and even television. Focusing on the ugly realities of real life became a way of expressing the conviction that Britain’s best days were behind it, and that the overweening self-confidence of the imperial age was no longer tenable. The pessimism of kitchen-sink cinema reached its apogee in John Schlesinger’s film Darling, released in the summer of 1965—well after, that is, the Beatles had shown they weren’t just another musical flash in the pan, a realization that under other circumstances might have pumped a little optimism into Britons that there was hope for the old nation yet. But Darling offers an unremittingly bleak portrait of life in mid-1960s Britain. That portrait focuses on what New York Times film reviewer Bosley Crowther called the “aging and seedy title-bearers, vulgar and pushy new-rich, [and] B.B.C. intellectuals” of London’s smart set.6 But instead of attributing the shallowness and immorality of Diana Scott, the “Darling” of the title (played, in an Oscar-winning performance, by Julie Christie), to her desperate struggle to gain entry into this dissipated class, the film presents her as a reflection of Britain’s national decline. To Schlesinger, the country hasn’t fallen as a result of individuals like Diana choosing to

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lead trivial lives. Instead, people like Diana lead trivial lives because Britain has lost the magisterial dignity and sense of purpose it possessed when it was a first-tier world power. Two sequences early in the film particularly illustrate this unexpected dimension of Schlesinger’s critique. The first explicitly refers to the Acheson quote. Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde), a television journalist who leaves his family to become Diana’s lover, conducts a series of man-on-the-street interviews, which he introduces by saying, “An American statesman recently said that Britain is a country which has lost pride in itself. Have we so much to be ashamed of, I wonder? Let’s find out.” His respondents, drawn from across the British class spectrum, present a patently kitchen-sink picture of the low state of British intelligence in the mid-1960s. First to speak is a spotty teenager with a Beatle haircut, but he is flummoxed by the question: “Can’t fink of nofink,” he mumbles, before coming out with “Traffic—it’s a bit congested.” “Some people don’t work hard enough,” says a weak-chinned working-class man. “I work hard in Bristol for one person—I do it for one person. Her name’s Margaret Robins—I’ve got the photograph on me.” “People expect to get something for nothing,” says a glassy-eyed policeman in a West Country accent. Last, an upper-class twit businessman complains about “how rife homosexuality has become in London itself. Two or three years ago you were very blatantly sort of approached by different people in different places . . ., but it’s one of those things that you have to live with.” This glimpse of the stupidity of the lower and middle classes segues to a look at the cynicism, cupidity, and hypocrisy of the upper classes. While Robert is out of town, Diana goes to an upper-crust gambling party that benefits hunger relief. In attendance are the dissolute aristocrats and up and coming celebrities of the dawning media age, including the guest of honor, cosmetics magnate “Charles Glass, Mr. Honeyglow himself,” whom Diana calls (in voiceover) “a terrible sweetie.” At the conclusion of a charity auction officiated by Diana, “The Right Honorable Basil Willet, M.P.” delivers a speech, telling his well-heeled audience that “our brothers of every creed, race, and color” are at that moment suffering “humiliation, degradation, shame, and the agonies of malnutrition.” In ironic counterpoint to Willet’s speech, as he blathers on, the frame switches to images of bejeweled aristocrats gambling, adjusting their makeup, and gorging themselves on sandwiches. During the “every creed, race, and color” phrase, we see the bored faces of black serving boys, looking like slaves dressed in powdered wigs and eighteenth-century footmen’s livery, circulating among the guests with enormous boxes of chocolates.

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After concluding his speech, Willet is introduced to Diana, whom he invites upstairs to his library. They go in, and then, as the picture fades in from an equestrian portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, we see Diana holding a large folio of Shakespeare, from which she reads—in a voice dripping with maudlin overstatement—John of Gaunt’s famous tribute to England: This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.7

Taken together, Robert’s vox populi interviews and Diana’s mocking recitation of Shakespeare’s paean to English patriotism display English self-loathing at its worst. The harsh picture in Darling of the contemporary state of “this blessed plot” no doubt struck many at the time as an accurate, even courageous acknowledgment that Britain’s best days were over, and that the country needed to accommodate itself to the likelihood of continuing to be a second-tier nation. But even as it came out, this message was out of date. At the very moment that Darling was dragging Shakespeare—who before the Beatles had been England’s best-known cultural export—through the muck of British self-castigation, John, Paul, George, and Ringo had already set in motion the process by which a new British empire would be established, an empire built in a spirit of cooperation, rather than competition, with the United States. But this empire was not the product of a deliberate political alliance, treaty, or trade agreement. Instead, a new soft empire of lifestyle and values, transmitted across the Atlantic through movies and music, formed spontaneously through the Beatles, who built a stable transatlantic bridge that drew Britain to its American offshoot more closely than ever before. Though The Treaty of Paris ended the War for American Independence and established the political autonomy of the United States in 1783, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Britain continued to exert a powerful cultural influence on America. Attempts to distinguish the newly emergent American culture from

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the old British one led some in the new world occasionally to express Anglophobia, like that of Boston poet James Russell Lowell, whose 1848 “Fable for Critics” recommends that American writers no longer look Eastward for inspiration: Forget Europe wholly, your veins throb with blood, To which the dull current in hers is but mud: Let her sneer, let her say your experiment fails, In her voice there’s a tremble e’en now while she rails . . . O my friends, thank your god, if you have one, that he ’Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea.8

But Lowell’s advice was half-heartedly followed. Even as New World writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman strove to establish an American literary tradition, their models and inspirations continued to be the acknowledged masters of British literature: Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Scott. Some later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers—for instance, Henry James and T.S. Eliot— were so Anglophilic, in fact, that they left the United States to live and work in England. Sometimes, political ties between the United Kingdom and the United States were close; other times, during the Civil War, for example, relations were strained. But there was always a steady stream of literary and cultural exchange between the two countries, though it largely flowed from England to America during the nineteenth century, only to reverse course in the twentieth with the rise of cinema as the dominant form of mass culture. Movies especially drew the two nations together. Through its first few decades, the Hollywood film industry was practically a joint Anglo-American venture. Charles Chaplin was born in London in 1889, and learned the slapstick comedy that made him cinema’s first superstar as a member of English music-hall impresario Fred Karno’s troupe, with whom he toured the provincial English theaters between 1910 and 1913 before starting his Hollywood career in 1914. Many stars of Hollywood’s golden era of the 1930s and 1940s were Britons, like Cary Grant, who was born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England, in 1904. Grant showed that he was still an Englishman at heart—even after living in the United States for nearly two decades—by donating his entire fee for The Philadelphia Story to the British war effort in 1940. Vivien Leigh, who played the archetypal southern belle Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, was born in India in 1913 to a British military officer, and trained on the English stage for her outstanding, though tragically short career in American films. The list of prominent English film stars in America includes Greer Garson, a

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six-time Academy Award nominee, born in London in 1904; Ronald Colman; Leslie Howard (who played Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind); Claude Rains; David Niven; and the English director Alfred Hitchcock, who was lured to Hollywood in 1939 after a long and successful career in the British film industry. American films also drew heavily on British writers and history for their subject matter. In the 1930s Hollywood produced film versions of four Kipling stories and seven Dickens novels. Because the percentage of the population who attended the movies at least once a week in the 1930s was much higher than it is today, cinema was an effective means for both Britain and America to maintain cultural ties. Audiences on both sides of the Atlantic for filmic depictions of the other nation were sizable. In the second half of the decade, more than one third of American adults— and more than half of American children—went to the cinema at least once a week.9 This meant that a significant proportion of the U.S. population had at least a cinematic acquaintance with (an often sentimentalized) view of British culture and the English literary classics. The same was true of Britain, where American films, like American music, were extremely popular. In 1939, twenty-three million cinema tickets were sold in Britain a week, at a time when daily newspaper circulation was 10.5 million and only nine million families had radios. And though Britain had its own home-grown film industry, American movies were much better attended and more popular. As a cinema manager in the West End of London put it in 1937, British audiences “like good pictures, good American pictures, pictures of movement and action. They won’t stand British pictures here at any price.”10 But for as large a role as movies played in keeping Americans and Britons connected with each other through the first third of the twentieth century, it was World War II that pulled the two peoples into a common cultural orbit once and for all. All the Beatles were war babies, born between July 1940 and February 1943, and therefore experienced—albeit when they were very young—the “friendly invasion” of roughly three million American servicemen and women soldiers who passed through England, Scotland, and Wales between early 1942 and the late spring of 1945. This was not the first time, however, that an American expeditionary force had sojourned in Britain—beginning in July 1917 and continuing until Armistice Day on November 11, 1918, more than a million servicemen (and about seven thousand army nurses) came through Britain on their way to the front during World War I. But England was just a way station for the doughboys, whereas in the 1940s the total number of American GIs who visited Britain amounted to something like 7 percent of the

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prewar population of the United Kingdom, and they stayed for up to three and a half years. This widespread and prolonged intercultural contact confirmed some prejudices and exploded others. A popular one-liner of the period called the GIs “oversexed, overpaid, overfed, and over here” (which the Americans countered by calling the British “undersexed, underpaid, underfed, and under Eisenhower”).11 With time, though, the friendly invasion gave both Britons and Americans a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of their transatlantic cousins than they’d ever had. Americans found in Britain a compact, but delightfully varied landscape, and a reserved but friendly people, who cherished the age and tradition of their homeland more than they did its industrial and imperial preeminence. To the Americans, the British were also surprisingly robust and resilient in the face of their wartime ordeal. As an instructional pamphlet given to American servicemen put it, “The British are tough. The English language didn’t spread across the oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps because these people were panty-waists.”12 To the British, the energy, wealth, and bluff self-assurance of the Americans were a little off-putting at first. American GIs were paid, on average, about three times more than their British counterparts, and even lowly American privates had fancier uniforms than British noncommissioned officers.13 Their higher pay and swaggering air gave American GIs a distinct advantage over British Tommies when it came to attracting female companionship. A wartime joke said that English girls were wearing new, “convenience” knickers: one Yank and they’re off. Over time, though, a grudging respect built between the two armies, especially after Americans and British had had more opportunities to fight side-by-side against the enemy. Americanisms began increasingly to appear among the British. Late in the war, for example, a mixed squadron of British and American fighter planes was patrolling over France. Sighting a formation of German bombers, the squadron leader called over his radio an attack signal: the traditional English call to the hunt, “Tally ho!” The Americans in the group responded with Texas swing bandleader Bob Wills’s signature cry, a drawn out, falsetto “Ah hah!” Before long, British pilots picked this up, and, were shouting Wills’s call before swooping down on enemy planes.14 Overall, the prolonged intercultural contact of the friendly invasion and occupation of Britain by American GIs during World War II reknit many of the old ties between the two nations that had been severed by time and the width of the Atlantic. First-hand experience of the more direct threats to Britain posed by the war also gave Americans

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a chance to see some of the ways in which what they considered exclusively the American virtues of freedom and resistance to tyranny might have originated in ancient English values and institutions. Before 1942, America had, to a degree, vicariously participated in Britain’s struggle for survival via Edward R. Murrow’s radio dispatches from London during the Blitz, as well as through newspaper and newsreel accounts that depicted British steadfastness as a cultural trait that Americans—by virtue of America’s British origins—could understand and share. “It is twelve o’clock in London,” intoned an editorial in the New York Times on July 24, 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain: Is the tongue of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Milton, of the King James translation of the Scriptures, of Keats, of Shelley, to be hereafter, in the British Isles, the dialect of an enslaved race? . . . It is twelve o’clock in London. Not twelve o’clock for empire—there is no empire any more. . . . Twelve o’clock—and the wisest prophet in Christendom cannot say what is to come. The old, old towns of Britain, the hills and cliffs and shores and meadows rich with history, the homes and lives of forty-five million people, the great British traditions of human worth and dignity, the folk sayings, the deep wisdom and long-suffering hopes of a race—these, not being pleasing to Hitler, are condemned. We know little, and for a time shall know little of this unparalleled spectacle of the nation rising, as by a single impulse, to defend “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”15

The friendly invasion gave more than three million Americans an opportunity to appreciate “this England’s” rich history and “traditions of human worth and dignity” to an unprecedented degree, and they brought that appreciation back to the United States at the end of the war. Though the American experience in Britain during World War II, as historian David Reynolds has written, accelerated an Americanizing trend “that began during the Jazz Age of the 1920s and continued on via the gyrations of Elvis Presley into the present day,”16 cultural influence flowed in the other direction as well. If in the early 1940s Britain received a sudden inrush of American culture, in the late 1940s and through the 1950s the cultural tide reversed its flow, sending a steady stream of British entertainment and pop culture to the United States. Television was a key player in this postwar British invasion of American culture. In the early 1950s, Hollywood film producers refused to allow recent movies to be shown on television, apparently thinking that by doing so they would starve the upstart medium out of existence. Desperate for content,

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television networks turned to British film producers like J. Arthur Rank and Sir Alexander Korda, who were eager to profit from expansion into this lucrative foreign market. Reversing the trend of the 1930s, in the 1950s British producers flooded America with English films. As a result, as Jack Gould wrote in the New York Times in 1955, Sunday prime-time viewers of two of the three major networks could choose between two outstanding British films. NBC aired The Constant Husband, starring Rex Harrison and Margaret Leighton, while ABC showed the first half of Bernard Shaw’s big-budget Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), with Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains. In one week of October 1955, New York station WWOR showed Captain’s Paradise, The Man in the White Suit, Brief Encounter, and David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946).17 All this exposure gave a new generation of British actors an American following. “Cheeky, cheery” Kenneth More, star of the charming 1953 antique-car comedy Genevieve, which won a Golden Globe award for best foreign film in 1955, was the subject of a feature article in the Chicago Daily Tribune on July 14, 1957, in which he was credited with “leading a new British invasion of the American movie market.”18 By creating a taste among Americans for English entertainment fare, the 1950s British invasion of American television started an invasion of American theater in the first few years of the 1960s, immediately prior to the arrival of the Beatles. Some of the biggest hits on Broadway between 1961 and 1963 featured British actors in plays about British subjects, like Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, the story of Catholic martyr Thomas More, set during the time of Henry VIII. Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey also had successful Broadway runs, as did John Barton’s The Hollow Crown, a history of the English monarchy from King Arthur to Queen Victoria. The biggest British hit on Broadway in 1963, though, was Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, a musical adaptation of Dickens’s Oliver Twist. In fact, Oliver! was still going strong in early 1964: the Ed Sullivan Show on which the Beatles made their first American appearance also featured two songs from Oliver! performed by the Broadway cast. In 1963 no fewer than seven London stage hits crossed the Atlantic to make successful runs in New York: in addition to Oliver! and The Hollow Crown, Beyond the Fringe, Stop the World—I Want to Get Off, Photo Finish, a revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 comedy The School for Scandal, and Rattle of a Simple Man all played to packed houses. The British invasion of American culture was felt in other realms as well. A New York Times article from early 1958 reported that in

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the previous year, nearly a hundred thousand British cars “worth $111,000,000 were shipped to the United States.” This was “twice the total for 1956.”19 Even sports were affected. The most all-American of sporting events, the Indianapolis 500 auto race, saw the arrival in 1962 of small, lightweight cars with the engine in the rear, examples of cutting-edge European technology that far outclassed the larger, front-engined American-built roadsters that had dominated the race since its inception in 1911. In 1964, Scotsman Jim Clark, who had won the Formula One world driving championship the previous year, led most of the race in a British-built and -powered Lotus before retiring with mechanical problems; in 1965 Clark won, setting a speed record. In 1966 Graham Hill, an aristocratic-looking Londoner, drove another Lotus to victory. Thus the Beatles’ arrival on American shores in February 1964 did not so much begin a British invasion as continue the one that had been going on since the end of World War II. There was, nevertheless, something different about the Beatles. The spectacular embrace of the Beatles by the American public indicated that Anglo-American relations had reached both a culmination and a turning point. The hysteria the Beatles engendered in the United States suggests that Americans had been waiting for something like the Beatles to effect the final union, after two hundred years of back and forth cultural exchange, of the two great Anglophone nations on the opposite sides of the Atlantic—a people, it was said, separated by the barrier of a common language. As we saw in chapter one, the Beatles reacquainted America with the British roots of country and blues, musical traditions that Americans had come to think of as totally homegrown. To a great extent, John, Paul, George, and Ringo accomplished this by manifesting characteristics that were, at the same time, alien and familiar. The four lads from Liverpool were distinctly English—they had English accents, used English slang expressions, and made casual reference to a culture that was definitely not American: they ate “jam butties” and talked about their “mums.” But they played American music, and when they sang, their English lilts gave way to the drawls, raw screams, and guttural shouts of rural American life. They were, in short, British and American at the same time. The Beatles’ Americanisms endeared them to their fans in the United States, who could identify with them; but their Englishness made them into a living link to what the New York Times editorialist had called in 1940 “the old, old towns of Britain, the hills and cliffs and shores and meadows rich with history” and the “the great British traditions of human worth

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and dignity.” This link to Britain answered a deep and longstanding need in American culture. For all the bluff braggadocio Americans derive from the power and might of their rich land, a secret insecurity dogs the American character. Compared to John Bull, Yankee Doodle is a relative newcomer on the world scene, and therefore lacks the long history and deep cultural tradition on which Britons can draw, and of which their landscape, packed with ancient buildings and stirring monuments, daily reminds them. Americans long for a tradition that stretches back through millennia rather than just a few centuries. When the first English colonies were struggling to get a foothold in the New World in the early 1600s, many British cathedrals had already stood for nearly a thousand years. The universities at Oxford and Cambridge predate Harvard and Princeton by more than seven centuries. As Englishmen, the Beatles carried some of the accumulated glory of the British tradition across the Atlantic to America. But by being American as well—that is, by playing American music— the Beatles affirmed the young, fresh, and energetic culture of the United States. Beatlemania in Britain represented a prodigal son moment in the history of the United Kingdom. In screaming for the Beatles, Britons welcomed their wayward onetime colony back home. Beatlemania in America was the United States’ grateful response to the gift of British culture. Beatlemania in the rest of the world initiated a new age in which the vacuum left by the collapse of Britain’s hard empire was filled by a resurgent Anglo-American soft empire of ideas, based on the Romantic convictions of individual significance and liberty. This time, those ideals would be spread not by conquest and industrialization, but by the unstoppable power of electronic mass communications—a force exponentially more powerful, in the end, than the British Navy or Henry Ford’s production line had ever been. It’s frequently said that in only a few years, the Beatles and their Rock Romantic progeny changed everything, from music and fashion to lifestyle, manners, and morals. The Beatles continued to exert a powerful influence on the world, though, well after their break-up, with their most astonishing alterations in the fabric of modern society occurring decades after they no longer played together, even well after the death of their founder John Lennon in 1980. The Beatles not only inaugurated an empire, they also set in motion social and political forces that eventually collapsed an empire—the domination of Russia and Eastern Europe by Soviet communism. Mikhail Safonov, senior researcher at the Institute of Russian History at St. Petersburg was an avid Beatle fan in Russia during the 1960s, and has written a fascinating first-person analysis of the

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role the Beatles played in undermining communist authority in the Soviet Union. Just as the names of murderers, writes Safonov, become indissolubly associated in the public imagination with their famous victims—“Brutus and Caesar, Charlotte Corday and JeanPaul Marat,” and “Lee Harvey Oswald and John Kennedy”—John Lennon’s name should be “linked with the name of the Soviet Union,” because “it was Lennon that murdered the USSR.” Though “Lennon would not live to see the collapse of the USSR, and could not have predicted that the Beatles would cultivate a generation of freedomloving people throughout this country that covered one-sixth of the Earth’s surface,” Safonov writes, “without that love of freedom the fall of totalitarianism would have been impossible, how ever bankrupt economically the Communist regime may have been.”20 The history of the Beatles in the Soviet Union presents a textbook illustration of the politically subversive power Rock Romanticism is capable of wielding. When Beatle music first started to trickle into the Soviet Union, the authorities barely noticed. But, says Safonov, when Russian youth realized that admiration of the group and its music constituted “an unconscious oppositional stance”—a chance, that is, to rebel against the behavioral conformity demanded by Soviet socialism—the Beatles were looked upon first as a corrupting influence and then as a threat to the ideal of collectivism. Crackdowns followed; but official condemnation and ridicule of the Beatles only made them more attractive and exposed the irrelevance and ineffectuality of the government. “One of the Leningrad schools staged a show trial against the Beatles,” Safonov remembers. “A mock public prosecutor was appointed, and the proceedings were broadcast on the radio. The schoolchildren proclaimed themselves outraged by all that the Beatles had done. The verdict of the trial was that the Beatles were guilty of anti-social behavior. All this reeked of 1937.” To Russian Beatle fans, though, the proceedings were just an exercise in empty posturing. “Even in Stalin’s time,” writes Safonov, “show trials were not held for famous foreigners of this kind, who had become almost an integral part of the way of life of the Russian people.” The Communist Party’s hysterical and unsuccessful efforts to stem the spreading tide of Beatlemania in the USSR ended up fatally discrediting Soviet officials, particularly among the postwar generation who, in the 1960s, were about to take up the reins of leadership in the nation. Denunciation and ridicule of the Beatles by old guard communists showed how far out of touch they had grown; and once their authority had been undermined, it was a short step to a weakening of all Soviet doctrine. “The more the authorities fought the corrupting

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influence of the Beatles—or ‘Bugs’ as they were nicknamed by the Soviet media (the word has negative connotations in Russian),” says Safonov, “the more we resented this authority, and questioned the official ideology that had been drummed into us from childhood.”21 Picking up on this resentment, the authorities tried even harder to heap contempt on the band, but succeeded only in making themselves look more ridiculous. Safonov remembers a television broadcast in the late 1960s in which “two artists in incredible wigs, with guitars in hand, walked around the stage back to back, hitting one another and making a dreadful cacophony with their instruments. They sang a parody of a Beatles tune: ‘We have been surrounded by women saying you are our idols, saying even from behind I look like a Beatle! Shake shake!!!’ Here we don’t play to the end, there we sing too much. Shake shake!!!” Though members of the Komsomol—the youth arm of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—“raved wildly at this caricature,” to Safonov and other Russian admirers of the Beatles all they accomplished was additional “self-exposure of the idiocy of Brezhnev’s rule. The more they persecuted something the whole world had already fallen in love with, the more they exposed the falsehood and hypocrisy of Soviet ideology. Despite gloomy forecasts of the imminent collapse of the Bugs, no collapse transpired. Instead the Beatles became more and more of a phenomenon in the cultural life of the entire planet, something impossible to ignore. Once the endorsement of folk liberty and anti-authoritarianism of the Beatles made their way through the iron curtain, there was no expelling them.”22 Safonov writes that the Beatles weakened the foundations of Soviet ideology not by “being political,” but merely by offering a vital alternative to the lifeless abstractions of communist dogma. The Beatles’ contagious enthusiasm and tacit endorsement of freedom encouraged their Russian fans to emulate them, and it was this spirit of emulation that posed such a potent threat to the Soviet regime. Safonov illustrates this by comparing their influence to a scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film The Mirror, in which a boy undergoes a doctor’s examination. The doctor skillfully encourages him to lower his defenses and a flood of confession starts. The creativity of the Beatles can be compared to such a flood from which all barriers have been removed. . . . This flood washed into the collective consciousness. Becoming swept away by it, Soviet citizens started to be aware that the individual is highly valuable, and individuality is in itself one of the most important values of life. This was in such contradiction to the socialist message of the primacy of the collective that, when a

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person had educated himself in the culture of the Beatles, he found he could no longer live in lies and hypocrisy.23

The history of the Beatles in the USSR came full circle on May 24, 2003, when Paul McCartney played a concert in Moscow’s Red Square. In the audience that night were former general secretary of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Earlier that day, Putin gave McCartney a personal tour of the Kremlin, during which he told the former Beatle that though the band’s music was “considered propaganda of an alien ideology” in the 1960s, the Beatles had been “like a breath of fresh air, like a window on the outside world” when he was a youth in Soviet Russia.24 In 2001, exiled Czech film director Milos Forman, whose One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest won the Oscar for best picture in 1975, said that it was the communist regime’s criticism of the “fabulous” Beatles that punched a hole in their own credibility. “Suddenly the ideologues are telling you this is decadent, these are four apes escaping from the jungle. I thought I’m not such an idiot that I love this music and suddenly these political ideologues were strangers.”25 In 1990, on the eve of the final dissolution of the Soviet Union, historian Timothy Ryback wrote, “In a very real sense, the triumph of rock and roll in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has been the realization of a democratic process. Three generations of Soviet-bloc youths have compelled governments to accept the outgrowth of Western capitalism. In the course of thirty years, rock bands have stormed every bastion of official resistance and forced party and government to accept rock-and-roll music as part of life in the Marxist-Leninist state.” 26 Beatle-inspired Rock Romanticism played an even more direct role in the fall of the communist regime of Czechoslovakia. As the geographically westernmost of the Eastern Bloc states, Czechoslovakia had always been more directly exposed to rock and roll than its neighbors located farther behind the iron curtain. For example, A Hard Day’s Night was first shown in Prague on October 1, 1964, only three months after its premiere in the West. Despite the usual official disapproval, rock culture took hold in Czechoslovakia. In 1974, a musical group called (in homage to Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band) The Plastic People of the Universe (known to their fans in the west as the PPU) recorded an album titled “Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned,” tapes of which were distributed (illegally) throughout Czechoslovakia and then smuggled to Western Europe, where they found an avid following, especially England and Germany. In the West the group was admired both for the psychedelic anarchy of

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their music and their dissident courage. In 1976, after thousands of fans were turned away from a planned PPU concert, two members of the band were arrested and charged with “organized disturbance of the peace.” For Czechs across the political spectrum, still resenting the brutal Soviet crackdown that ended the “Prague Spring” of 1968, the persecution of the PPU represented another in a long string of humiliating infringements of personal freedom, but this time the government had gone too far. In response to the arrest and trial of the PPU, a group of Czech intellectuals and artists that included playwright and future Czech Republic president Vaclav Havel wrote Charter 77, a groundbreaking document in the fall of communist totalitarianism. Signed by 243 Czech citizens from a wide variety of professions and religions, Charter 77 criticized the government for quashing democracy, failing to protect individual liberty, and ignoring fundamental human rights. It circulated clandestinely in Czechoslovakia, but was published in full in British and German newspapers. As Havel has explained, the arrest and trial of the Plastic People of the Universe was a prime motivation for drafting Charter 77, because the government’s harassment of the group threw into sharp relief how much of their intrinsic liberty the Czech people had lost: Their trial was not a confrontation of two differing political forces or conceptions, but two differing conceptions of life. On the one hand, there was the sterile Puritanism of the post totalitarian establishment and, on the other hand, unknown young people who wanted no more than to be able to live within the truth, to play the music they enjoyed, to sing songs that were relevant to their lives, and to live freely in dignity and partnership. These people had no past history of political activity. They were not highly motivated members of the opposition with political ambitions, nor were they former politicians expelled from the power structures. They had been given every opportunity to adapt to the status quo, to accept the principles of living within a lie and thus to enjoy life undisturbed by the authorities. Yet they decided on a different course. Despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, their case had a very special impact on everyone who had not yet given up hope. Moreover, when the trial took place, a new mood had begun to surface after the years of waiting, of apathy and of skepticism toward various forms of resistance. People were “tired of being tired”; they were fed up with the stagnation, the inactivity, barely hanging on in the hope that things might improve after all. In some ways the trial was the final straw. Many groups of differing tendencies which until then had remained isolated from each other, reluctant to cooperate, or which were committed to forms of action that made cooperation difficult,

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were suddenly struck with the powerful realization that freedom is indivisible. Everyone understood that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on a most elementary and important thing, something that in fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notion of living within the truth, on the real aims of life. The freedom to play rock music was understood as a human freedom and thus as essentially the same as the freedom to engage in philosophical and political reflection, the freedom to write, the freedom to express and defend the various social and political interests of society.27

As in the Soviet Union, rock music mattered in Czechoslovakia not primarily because it served as a means of expressing forbidden feelings and ideas, but because it stood for freedom—the freedom, as Havel puts it, to assert one’s intrinsic dignity and to live in truth. After the trial of the PPU and Charter 77, rock became increasingly linked in the minds of Czechs with opposition to communist totalitarianism. The murder of John Lennon in 1980 prompted another outpouring of spontaneous antigovernment agitation, when Lennon’s Czech admirers drew a memorial portrait of the slain Beatle on a section of a churchyard wall in Prague. Quickly whitewashed over by the police, the portrait was just as quickly redrawn, and over the next several weeks expanded with Lennon’s sayings, lines from his songs, and anticommunist slogans. As in the Soviet Union, the Czech authorities tried to suppress these static demonstrations, but eventually gave up in the face of the persistence of graffitists who braved arrest and imprisonment for antisocial activity, and kept adding to the wall. The Lennon Wall, as it has come to be known, still stands, having become in the new Czech Republic a spontaneous, folk monument to the role rock music played in bringing about the Velvet Revolution of 1989, which ended nearly forty-five years of communist rule in the nation formerly known as Czechoslovakia.28 Some form of the word “revolution” is often used to describe both the character of the Beatles and their effect on the world. The Beatles themselves are at least partially responsible for their revolutionary identity: the only title reused in their catalogue of 216 songs is “Revolution.” The Beatles recorded three different tracks under this title: “Revolution,” the hard-rocking B-side of the “Hey Jude” single released August 30, 1968; “Revolution 1,” a slower, mostly acoustic version of the same song (with a slightly different lyric) that appeared on the White Album; and “Revolution 9,” John and Yoko’s eight-minute conceptual-art auditory collage, also on the White Album. Important figures of the 1960s counterculture picked up on the Beatles’ rebellious identity, lauding the group as both cultural

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and political revolutionaries in that turbulent decade. Timothy Leary called John, Paul, George, and Ringo “prototypes of a new race of laughing freemen: revolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species.”29 Jerry Rubin, cofounder of the Youth International Party (better known as the Yippies), the anarchist political party whose pitched battles with police disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, said “I felt the Yippies was Beatles music put to politics.”30 Allen Ginsberg, arguably the poetic godfather of 1960s counterculture, met the Beatles in 1965, and was so impressed with them that he spent a week in Liverpool, which he then called “at the present time the center of the consciousness of the human universe.”31 More recently, the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, where the Beatles-themed Cirque du Soleil show “Love” has been playing to packed houses since its premiere in June 2006, opened the Revolution Lounge, featuring “cutting-edge, interactive experiences” designed “to create a psychedelic sensory environment and a contemporary interpretation of the Beatles era.”32 Calling the Beatles revolutionaries constitutes high praise, both in the 1960s and today, but that’s only because, again, the spirit of the contemporary age continues to reflect the spirit of the Romantic era, the great paradigm shift two centuries ago when, in the course of only two generations, everything seemed to change. In 1825, the English journalist and literary critic William Hazlitt published a book of essays titled The Spirit of the Age in which he profiled twenty-five men from the worlds of literature, politics, philosophy, and religion who emblematized what Hazlitt saw as the temper of his times. Though (in a different work) Hazlitt defined the spirit of his age as “the progress of intellectual refinement, warring with our natural infirmities,”33 in The Spirit of the Age he repeatedly identifies the keynote of his era as revolution. Wordsworth’s poetry, for example, “partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary movement of our age.”34 Robert Southey, Hazlitt writes, is “decidedly revolutionary” because he is “pragmatical, restless, unfixed, full of experiments, beginning everything a-new, wiser than his betters, judging for himself, dictating to others.”35 If revolution and Romanticism go hand in hand, and the Beatles are revolutionary, then it follows that they are also Romantic. And so long as the Beatles continue to speak to new generations of admirers, they will carry the spirit of the Romantic age forward. Like all epochs in human history, Romanticism has been tamed, and is largely encountered today as merely an object of

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academic inquiry—a subject suitable for study in school, identified by generalizations about how people thought and what they valued, and how their thoughts and values were expressed, reflected, or challenged by poets, novelists, composers, and artists. Though cultural historians emphasize different aspects of Romanticism in attempting to identify the era’s essential nature, just about everyone agrees that it was a time of sudden change. Romanticism “was an attempt to sustain the inherited cultural order against what to many writers seemed the imminence of chaos”;36 the Romantic artist was “an inspired seer revealing his inmost thoughts in a spontaneous upwelling of emotion”37 in a “time of tremendous social upheaval”; the Romantic age “a remarkable shift in sensibility, in dominant assumptions, [and] in intellectual preoccupations.”38 Each in its way, these statements capture something of the essence of the Romanticism that emerged in Western life and letters between about 1780 and 1830. But in seeing the movement as a reaction to a specific historic crisis or frame of mind, assertions like these encourage us to view Romanticism as having leaped into the continuum of human history, run its course, and then retired from the world supplanted by new sensibilities, assumptions, and preoccupations. Romanticism never consented to be restricted to this historic straitjacket. Romanticism was a thorough reorientation not just of the arts, but of practically all human activity, from politics and philosophy to economics and science, and those changes have been written indelibly into our culture, and are still discernible today. English literary Romanticism—the poems of the small group of writers—Blake, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Carroll—was gathered in by the hungry maw of nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular and mass culture and repackaged as the intellectual background against which ordinary life is lived today. The revolutionary ideas their works advanced—the innate dignity and worth of the individual, the glories and pains conferred by the human faculty of imagination, the fragile beauty of the child’s mind—have become our common wisdom, so universally accepted that it’s difficult to conceive of a time when people thought any differently. This book has shown how the Beatles inherited, expressed, and played a crucial role in spreading the revolutionary ideas of Romanticism from the Western context in which they originated to much of the rest of the world. This is why the Beatles generated such wild acclaim in the beginning, and why they have retained their uncanny ability to be loved through three generations of fans. The Beatles phenomenon sprang from the persistently Romantic spirit of our age, a spirit that is always revolutionary and new, but at the same

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time deeply rooted in a centuries-old literary tradition. The Beatles are not just the pop culture fad that won’t die or the focal point for history’s most prolonged nostalgia trip. After its modest, tightly contained beginning, Romanticism snowballed, finding its way, through education, music, and the entertainment media into the lives of four ordinary individuals, who, through a magic combination of native talent and the historic accident of being in the right place at the right time, took it in and made it into a music and a lifestyle that swept the world. Moreover, Beatlemania, which continues—more subdued, to be sure, but just as keen—to this day, is not an ephemeral reaction to the particular historical conditions of the early 1960s. The Beatles must now be recognized as a signal event in the broad sweep of history, a sweep that begins with the Romantic assertion of the dignity and significance of the individual, continues through the decline and fall of the British and Soviet empires, and brings us to today’s soft empire of lifestyle, liberty, and love. For, in the end, Romanticism’s affirming view of the essential characteristics of the human endorses the authenticity and efficacy of love. Though their personal journeys with the band took them through resentment, recrimination, sorrow, and even to the brink of madness, when all was said and done the Beatles were about two things: optimism and love. Summing things up in 1970, just months after the break-up, John had this to say about the whole experience: “I think the Beatles were a kind of religion . . . I think the Sixties was a great decade. I think the great gatherings of youth in America and in the Isle of Wight might have just been a pop concert to some people, but they were a lot more than that. They were the youth getting together and forming a new church, as it were, and saying, “We believe in God, we believe in hope and truth and here we are, 20,000 or 200,000 of us, all together in peace.”39 Paul agreed with his lost band mate and onetime composing partner that despite all the apparent insanity they induced in their fans and in themselves, the Beatles left the world a little better than they found it: “I think we gave some sort of freedom to the world. I meet a lot of people now who say The Beatles freed them up. If you think about it, the world was slightly more of an upper-class place till The Beatles came along. Regional actors had to have also a very good Shakespearean voice, and then it started to be enough just to have your own accent, your own truth. I think we set free a lot of people who were blinkered, who were perhaps starting to live life along their parents’ authoritarian lines.”40 In his own quiet way, George, too saw the Beatles as force for good: “The Beatles somehow reached more people, more nationalities, more parts that

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other bands couldn’t reach. I think we gave hope to the Beatle fans. We gave them a positive feeling that there was a sunny day ahead and that there was a good time to be had and that you are your own person and that the government doesn’t own you. There were those kind of messages in a lot of our songs.”41 And in keeping with the keynote of his personality, Ringo locates the essence of the Beatles in the space between the personal and the universal: They became the closest friends I’d ever had. I was an only child and suddenly I felt as though I’d got three brothers. We really looked out for each other and we had many laughs together. In the old days we’d have the hugest hotel suites, the whole floor of a hotel, and the four of us would end up in the bathroom, just to be with each other. . . . So the four of us were really close. I loved it. I love those guys. . . . We were honest with each other and we were honest about the music. The music was positive. It was positive in love. They did write—we all wrote— about other things, but the basic Beatles message was Love.42

It’s fitting that affable, childlike Ringo would sum up the Beatles in one word, and the word would be love. But in doing so he demonstrates, yet again, the genetic ties between the Beatles and Romanticism. Though often scoffed at both in the nineteenth century and our own day as a hopelessly naïve, sappily sentimental illusion, the idea that all you need is love to change yourself and the world was an undisputed truth for many influential Romantic thinkers. “Thou demandest what is love?” asked Percy Shelley in “On Love”: It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves. If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another’s; if we feel, we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood. This is Love. This is the bond and the sanction which connects not only man with man, but with everything which exists.43

Even when their notion of love was still that of a teenager, and the best they could do was to write songs urging the girl to “Love Me Do,” assure a friend that “She Loves You,” or lament how “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” the Beatles were looking toward Shelley’s

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ideal of love as an innate sympathy with all living things, the cement of human relations, and the best means of making the world a kinder place. What makes this faith in love Romantic is not its dreamy utopianism, but its optimism—its refusal to give in to cynicism, dejection, and hopelessness. People have loved the Beatles because love emanates from the Beatles—love as the courageous recognition and acceptance of the full range of human feelings, from joy to sorrow; love as longing and delight and anxiety; love as hope for the future. From the early 1960s until this moment, the Beatles have sung our song, and our song is the life-affirming, optimistic song of individual worth and liberty originally sung by the Romantics. And our song is not to be denigrated or discounted, no matter how silly or sentimental it might appear to the wised-up Postmodern consciousness. “Love you,” sing John, Paul, and George on “The End,” as they duel with hard-rocking electric guitar solos in a final display of their musical virtuosity before calling it quits with the Beatle thing once and for all. Of all the grand finales on the Beatles’ albums—which include dramatic masterpieces like “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “A Day in the Life”—“The End” is surely the grandest finale of them all: a fitting conclusion to the Beatles, full of the drama and exuberance they exhibited all the way from their breakthrough performance at the Litherland Town Hall on December 27, 1960, to their last recording session together.44 Not only does each Beatle, for the first time, take an instrumental solo, but the song wraps up the Beatles with a poetic figure. In loving homage to Shakespeare, who often marked the end of an act by providing his audiences with a rhyming couplet, Paul “followed the Bard and wrote a couplet.”45 Their intellectual, historic, and literary ties to Romanticism—an age that taught the future to believe in love, the perfectibility of the human condition, and the preciousness of an authentically lived life—ensured that McCartney’s two-line summing up of the Beatles essence and effect was accurate: in the end, the love they displayed equaled the love they made.

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No t e s

Introduction 1. Bill Gleeson, “How much is the Beatles legacy worth?” Liverpool Daily Post, June 27, 2007. 2. The chronicles are Barry Miles’ The Beatles Diary (London: Omnibus, 2001) and Mark Lewisohn’s The Beatles Day by Day; Lewisohn’s The Beatles: 25 Years in the Life (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1987) covers the band from 1962 to 1987. The encyclopedias are Bill Harry’s The Ultimate Beatles Encyclopedia and multivolume treatments of their performing and recording careers edited by Neville Stannard and John C. Winn. Ray Coleman’s two-volume biography of John Lennon from 1984 is the most exhaustive; for a less f lattering view of Lennon see Albert Goldman’s The Lives of John Lennon. Barry Miles’ Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now was written with its subject’s cooperation; see also Coleman’s McCartney: Yesterday and Today (London: Boxtree, 1996). Alan Clayson’s George Harrison: The Quiet One (London: Sanctuary, 1989) is the standard biography; more recently Marc Shapiro in Behind Sad Eyes (London: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003) and Joshua Greene in Here Comes the Sun: The Mystical Journey of George Harrison (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2006) have chronicled the Beatles’ final years. Alan Clayson is also the author of Ringo Starr: A Life (London: Sanctuary, 2005). 3. Churchill’s first use of the phrase was in his “Sinews of Peace” address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946. That speech, in which Churchill popularized the phrase “iron curtain” to describe post–World War II division of Europe between Eastern and Western spheres of inf luence, also called on Englishspeaking peoples to maintain “fraternal ties.” “Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organization will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples . . . a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States.” See Churchill, Never Give In, 417–418. 4. Newsweek, February 24, 1964, 55. 5. Braun, 137. 6. The Beatles Anthology I, Apple, CDP 7243 8 34445 2 6, 1995.

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Notes

7. “The Beatles Anthology 3,” ABC television, November 23, 1995. 8. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Adams and Searle, 715. 9. For an overview of the ways in which the “cognitive revolution” in neuroscience impacts prevailing paradigms of cultural and linguistic activity, see Mary Thomas Crane and Alan Richardson, “Literary Studies and Cognitive Science: Toward a New Interdisciplinarity,” Mosaic 32:2 (1999), 123–140. Patrick Colm Hogan’s Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2003) introduces (in layman’s terms) the research technology, and provides an excellent overview of how cognitive science affords new opportunities for understanding the physical bases of artistic experience. See also Hogan’s articles “Literary Universals,” Poetics Today 18:2 (1997), 223–249 and “The Possibility of Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics 34:4 (1994), 337–349. For Internet resources and bibliographies, see Alan Richardson’s Web site Literature, Cognition, and the Arts (www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb) and The Literary Universals Project (http://litup.unipa.it/docs/index.htm). 10. Norman, 35. 11. Beatles Anthology, 14. 12. Spitz, 48. 13. Abrams, 14. 14. Mellers, 23. 15. Mellers, 23. 16. Hobbes, 221. 17. Rousseau, 146–155. 18. Orwell, Inside the Whale, 2707.

Chapter 1 The Transatlantic Roots of Rock Romanticism 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

Beatles Anthology, 12. Beatles Anthology, 11. Beatles Anthology, 11–12. Beatles Anthology, 11. Quoted in Kevin Howlett’s liner notes to The Beatles Live at the BBC, Capitol B000007MVD. Beatles Anthology, 12. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 791. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 791. For Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems in 1835, Wordsworth wrote a postscript in which he laid out his views on poverty relief, trade unionism, and the state of English religion. See Poetical Works, 817–825. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 791. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 656. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 654. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 656.

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205

14. Between 1768 and 1769, Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770) published a series of purportedly antique manuscripts written by a fifteenth-century English monk named Thomas Rowley. The Rowley materials, which included contrived historical chronicles, lyric poems, and dramas, earned Chatterton a brief renown, and he resolved to make a living as a professional writer. But his plans for a literary career foundered on the realities of the London publishing world of the late 1760s, and on August 25, 1770, Chatterton was found dead in a garret, surrounded by scraps of paper and an empty arsenic bottle. Though his death may have been accidental (arsenic was sometimes used to cure gonorrhea), Chatterton served as a powerful symbol of the self-sacrificing artist for later English romantic poets. Coleridge wrote a “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”; Wordsworth called him “the marvelous boy” in “Resolution and Independence”; and Chatterton appears in “Adonais,” Shelley’s elegy for Keats. It was Keats himself, though, who fell most under the spell of Chatterton’s image as an untutored genius: Keats dedicated Endymion, the long narrative poem he wrote in 1815–1816 as a “trial of my powers,” to Chatterton. See Keats, Letters, 27. 15. Macpherson, Ossian, 1:89. 16. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 798. 17. See Robert Mayo, “The Contemporaneity of Lyrical Ballads,” PMLA 69:3 (June, 1954), 486–522; Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Lyrical Ballads (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). For a more focused discussion of the stylistic similarities between Wordsworth’s poetry and traditional ballads, see Stephen Parrish, The Art of the Lyrical Ballads, especially 121–125 and 173–177; and Paul Sheats, The Making of Wordsworth’s Poetry (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard, 1973), 184–187. For the history and evolution of high-cultural ballad imitations by canonical poets, see Malcolm G. Laws, Jr., The English Literary Ballad (Carbondale, Ill: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971). 18. Quoted in Child, 1:xi. 19. Quoted in Wordsworth and Coleridge, 246. 20. Wilentz and Marcus (p. 7) reproduce an early nineteenth-century broadside of “Barbara Allen’s Cruelty.” For the history of broadside ballad publication in England, see Hyder Rollins, “The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad,” PMLA 34:2 (1919), 258–339. 21. Ambrose Philips’ A Collection of Old Ballads came out between 1723 and 1725 and Allen Ramsay’s The Ever Green and The Tea-Table Miscellany both appeared in 1724. 22. Quoted in Wilentz and Marcus, 9. 23. Addison, 4:237. 24. Quoted in Stewart, 140.

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206 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Notes Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 606. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 612. Parrish, 85. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 650. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 653. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 654. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 655. Wordsworth was middle aged when he made this statement, but there is little reason to doubt that as an adolescent, he was as caught up in the Ossianic craze as any of his contemporaries. A volume of Ossian was in his library when he died, and one of a series of poems he wrote after a tour of the Scottish highlands in 1833 is titled “Written in a Blank Leaf of MacPherson’s Ossian.” Lunsford (1882–1973), who called himself “The Minstrel of the Appalachians,” was born in South Turkey Creek, near Leicester, North Carolina. The composer of the hillbilly standard “Old Mountain Dew,” Lunsford also collected Anglo-American ballads, and claimed that he knew more than three thousand folk songs. In 1949, Lunsford spent a month in Washington D.C., recording some 325 songs for the Library of Congress. Lunsford sings “Bonny George Campbell” on Ballads, Banjo Tunes, and Sacred Songs of Western North Carolina, Smithsonian/Folkways SF 40082. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 112. Fischer, 654. Fischer, 652. Child, 1:xxv. Child, 1:xxvii–xxviii. The Carters recorded “Single Girl, Married Girl” several times between 1928 and 1943. The original Victor recording can be heard on The Anthology of American Folk Music, ed. Harry Smith (Smithsonian Folkways 40090 / A 28750). Zwonitzer and Hirschberg, 25. This was Maybelle Carter’s signature style, and is still known in country music as the “Carter Scratch.” The crisp electric-guitar bass notes on Johnny Cash’s recordings of the 1960s—especially in “Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk the Line,” and “Orange Blossom Special”—were derived from the Carter Scratch. Cash met Maybelle Carter, then touring as the Carter Family with her daughters Anita, June, and Helen, shortly after breaking into the music business in the 1950s, and in 1968 became Maybelle’s son-in-law when he married June. Dylan, 165. Carter, 32. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 79–80. Quoted in David Perkins, 463, 467. Bromwich, 7.

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Notes 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

207

Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 791. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 791. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 791. Letter to Charles James Fox, January 14, 1801, quoted in Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, 2:170. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 295. For a history of the intersection between educated and uneducated poets in the Romantic era, see Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, “The Romantic ‘Peasant’ Poets and their Patrons,” The Wordsworth Circle 26 (1995), 77–87. See also Scott McEathron, “Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 54:1 (June, 1999), 1–26. Carlyle, 1:265. Carlyle, 1:265. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 699. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 129. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 299. Carlyle, 1:283. See Russell Noyes, “Wordsworth and Burns,” PMLA 59:3 (September 1944), 813–832 for a comprehensive survey of Wordsworth’s borrowings from Burns. Burns, Life and Work, 2:402. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 794. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 794. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 794. Burns, Letters, 1:106. Quoted in McIntyre, 230. Quoted in McIntyre, 106. Burns, The Merry Muses of Caledonia, 77. This book reprints more than a hundred of Burns’s bawdy songs—most of which he wrote but some of which he collected—and was published privately within three or four years of his death; Burns’s name, however, was not definitively associated with the collection until the 1890s. Bold, 121–122. Wilentz and Marcus, 296–297. Koon, 56. Koon, 79. “Crime in the United States,” FBI Uniform Crime Reports, http:// www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_04.html accessed on January 28, 2008. Fischer, 681. Dylan, 96. Dylan, 96. Tim de Lisle, “Who Held a Gun to Leonard Cohen’s Head?” The Guardian Unlimited, September 17, 2004, http://arts.guardian.

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75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

co.uk/fridayreview/story/0,1305765,00.html accessed on January 28, 2008. Cash and Carr, 123. Cash and Carr, 208–209. Norman, 175. Beatles Anthology, 176. Beatles Anthology, 158. FitzGibbon, 65. Beatles Anthology, 98. Spitz, 686. Beatles Anthology, 142–143. Dowson, 28. Dowson, 2.

Chapter 2 The Nowhere Man and Mother Nature’s Son: Coleridge/LennonWordsworth/McCartney and the Productivity of Resentment 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Norman, 45. Pseudo-Longinus, On the Sublime, in Adams and Searle, 103. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in Adams and Searle, 556. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 23. Milton, 210. Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound, in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Cameron, 300. Milton, 344. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 5. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 591. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 790. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 792. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 790. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 793–794. Mellers, 33–34. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 791. Wordsworth, ed. Gill, 791. Miles, 588. Coleridge, Letters, 1:260. The Life of John Sterling, in Carlyle, 13:54. Thompson and Gutman, 74. Quoted in Miles, 563. Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode,” in Poetry and Prose, ed. Baker, 107. Coleridge, Poetry and Prose, 64. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 311.

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Notes 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

209

Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 91. Coleridge, Poetry and Prose, 75. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 92. Coleridge, Poetry and Prose, 75. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 168. In Chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge claimed sole authorship of “The Ancient Mariner.” The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. D. and S. Coleridge (1852), tells a slightly different story, however. A reprinted letter from the Rev. Alexander Dyce to Hartley Coleridge tells of meeting Wordsworth, who stated that “‘The Ancient Mariner’ was founded on a strange dream, which a friend of Coleridge had, who fancied he saw a skeleton ship, with figures in it. We had both determined to write some poetry for a monthly magazine, the profits of which were to defray the expenses of a little excursion we were to make together. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ was intended for this periodical, but was too long. I had very little share in the composition of it, for I soon found that the style of Coleridge and myself would not assimilate. Besides the lines (in the fourth part), ‘And thou art long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand,’ I wrote the stanza (in the first part), ‘He holds him with his glittering eye— The wedding guest stood still, And listens like a three-years’ child: The Mariner hath his will,’ and four or five lines more in different parts of the poem, which I could not now point out. The idea of ‘shooting an albatross’ was mine; for I had been reading Shelvlocke’s Voyages, which probably Coleridge never saw. I also suggested the reanimation of the dead bodies, to work the ship.” Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 39. Wordsworth, Early Letters, 226–227. Quoted in Gill, 187. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 82. Gill, 143. Coleridge, Complete Letters, 1:698. Quoted in Fruman, 328–329. Quoted in Fruman, 329. Coleridge, The Major Works, 125–126. De Quincey, 190. Miles, 562–563. Quoted in Doughty, 337. Gill, 288. Coleridge, Notebooks, 3:4006.

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Chapter 3 George Harrison and Byronic In-Between-ness 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Tolstoy, 2. Hazlitt, 11:69. Pattison, 30. Beatles Anthology, 353. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge recounted how a government shadow commissioned to listen in on the conversations of the two poets reported to his superiors that he thought his quarry were on to him: they kept repeating, he said, the phrase “spy nosy.” The actual subject of discussion was the philosopher Spinoza. See p. 106. See Douglas, especially 443–445 and 447–449. Keats, Letters, 101. Shelley, Complete Works, 1:206. Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 1:236. Byron, Don Juan, “Dedication,” stanza 4, lines 2–8. Byron, Don Juan, “Dedication,” stanza 3, lines 5–8. Berlin, 122. Berlin, 131. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 203. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 191. Johnson, Rasselas, in Works, 16:43–44. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 796. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 96. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 282. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 83. Coleridge, Complete Poetical Works, 1:264–265. Coleridge, Complete Poetical Works, 1:367. Booth, 386. Booth, 387. Keats, Poems, 370–371. Shelley, Complete Works, 3:207. Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 2:88. Shelley, Complete Works, 4:89. Canto III, stanza 114. Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 4:63–64. Marchand, 193–194. Newsweek, February 24, 1964, 54. Newsweek, February 24, 1964, 54. Babbitt, 307. MacCarthy, xi. Quoted in MacCarthy, x. MacCarthy, 557. MacCarthy, 565. Quoted in Marchand, 118.

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Notes 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

211

Harry, 91. Harry, 91. Harry, 396. Spitz, 299. See plate 23 of MacCarthy’s Byron: Life and Legend. Beatles Anthology, 27. Beatles Anthology, 340. Spitz, 640. Marchand, 120. In “To a Young Ass” (1794), Coleridge had used the sight of a tethered donkey as the impetus for a disquisition on unearned oppression. Harrison, 94. Harrison, 120. David Perkins, 858. Beatles Anthology, 263. Elwin, 139. Elwin, 270–271. Marchand, 97.

Chapter 4 Ringo Starr and the Anxiety of Romantic Childhood 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Leach, 81. Stark, 117. Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, 4:45. Obituary of Stanley Unwin, BBC News Online, January 14, 2002 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/enterta inment/t v_ and _ rad io/ 1759706.stm accessed on September 19, 2007. Lennon, back cover. John Lennon, Review of The Goon Show Scripts, New York Times, September 30, 1973. Beatles Anthology, 176. Beatles Anthology, 134. Lamb, 368. Bloom, Introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Songs of Innocence and Experience, 2–3. Gleckner, 84. McLane, 428–429. Blake, 7. Blake, 8. Blake, 10. Blake, 11, 14. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 355. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 128.

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 92. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 129. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 210. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 211. Vander Weele, 6. Cohen, 106. Cohen, 114. Cohen, 108. Cohen, 107. Quoted in Cohen, 105. Carroll, 331. Carroll, 7. Carroll, 7. Carroll, 16. Carroll, 140–144. Carroll, 48–49. See Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind, 36–37. With the accompaniment of a pianist and percussionist, Ginsberg sang versions of all of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience in December, 1969. They can be heard at http://writing.upenn.edu/ pennsound/x/Ginsberg-Blake.html. Blake, 188. Ginsberg, Howl, 9. Blake, 205. Blake, 205. Holquist, 146–147. Miles, 312. Spitz, 596. Spitz, 596–597. Beatles Anthology, 72. Beatles Anthology, 71. Miles, 287. Miles, 287. Beatles Anthology, 311. Beatles Anthology, 312. Beatles Anthology, 351.

Chapter 5 “What Matters is the S YSTEM !” The Disappearance of God and the Rise of Conspiracy Theorizing 1. Goldman, 14. 2. This theory, which has been widely circulated on the Internet, was first propounded by “Ru Mills,” a pseudonym derived from “Rumor Mills,” in an article titled “Whoever Controls Princess

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

213

Diana Controls the World.” See http://www.freedomdomain.com/ assassinations/diana01.html. See http://www.paranoiamagazine.com. See http://www.lennonmurdertruth.com. Transcript of interview with Anna Hipsley, May 1, 2005, ABC National Radio (Australia), http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/ stories/s135959701.htm. Spark, “Conspiracy Thinking and Conspiracy Studying,” paragraph 1. See Spitz, 855–856 and 861. Chapter five of Devin McKinney’s Magic Circles examines the Paul-is-dead hoax in illustration of how the Beatles became the nexus of a widely shared cultural desire to explain death and the end of the universe through myth. See especially 260–261 and 277–279. Gans, 95. Hillis-Miller, 1–2. Hillis-Miller, 6. In Adams and Searle, Critical Theory since Plato, 692. “The Menace of Beatlism,” reprinted in Thompson and Gutman, 41. Reprinted in White, Pop Culture in America, 223–224. Dempsey’s article was one of many that appeared during the first flush of worldwide Beatlemania in the winter and spring of 1964. See also the London Times, May 28, 1964, and Dr. Joyce Brothers’ syndicated newspaper column, February 12, 1964, reprinted in Braun, 112–114. On the morning after the Beatles’ first appearance on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” the New York Times ran three front-page articles analyzing the Beatles from three points of view: “publicitywise,” “moneywise,” and “peoplewise.” Reprinted in Thompson and Gutman, 72. Lewisohn, 212. Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1966. Beatles Anthology, 226. Schonfield, 187. Further references to The Passover Plot will appear parenthetically in the text. John Lennon obituary, Boston Globe, December 12, 1980. “The Beatles Anthology 3,” ABC television, November 23, 1995. Beatles Anthology, 143. Spitz, 616. Beatles Anthology, 241. Beatles Anthology, 248. For the history of both the rumor and its pop culture afterlife, see Andru Reeve, Turn Me On, Dead Man: The Beatles and the “Paul is Dead” Hoax. R. Gary Patterson’s The Walrus Was Paul: The Great Beatle Death Clues presents the “evidence” for the death in greatest detail. Rogers, 15.

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Notes

27. Beatles Anthology, 226. 28. Abrams, 292–293. 29. Spitz, 763.

Epilogue 1. McNay, 196. 2. “Acheson Draws Fleet Street Fire,” Washington Post, December 7, 1962. 3. Yergin, 495. 4. Barbara Ward, “A Briton Explains Insularity,” New York Times, February 15, 1953. 5. Tate Online, “Kitchen Sink Art,” http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/ glossary/definition.jsp?entryid5149 accessed on June 22, 2007. 6. Bosley Crowther, “‘Darling’ is Selfish, Fickle, Ambitious,” New York Times, August 4, 1965. 7. II, i, lines 40–50. 8. Lowell, 2:64–65. 9. Reynolds, 32. 10. Quoted in Reynolds, 38. 11. Reynolds, xxiii. 12. Instructions for American Servicemen, 6. 13. Reynolds, 326. 14. Townsend, 107. 15. “Twelve O’clock,” New York Times, July 24, 1940. 16. Reynolds, 438. 17. Jack Gould, “TV: Movie Invasion from Britain,” New York Times, November 2, 1955. 18. Gwen Morgan, “Kenneth More—Britain’s Best,” Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1957. 19. “British Invasion: Small Cars for the Auto-Rich U.S.,” New York Times, January 24, 1958. 20. Safonov, 46–47. 21. Safonov, 49. 22. Safonov, 50. 23. Safonov, 50. 24. “Arts Briefing,” New York Times, May 27, 2003. 25. “Beatles Brought Down Communists,” BBC News Online, March 21, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/ 1235862.stm accessed on September 22, 2007. 26. Ryback, 233. 27. Havel, 154–155. 28. See the official Czech government tourism site, http://www.prague. net/john-lennon-wall, for the history, location, and photos of the John Lennon wall in Prague. 29. Harry, 372.

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30. Giuliano and Devi, 307. 31. Quoted in Harry, 268. In October 1995, Ginsberg recited his poem “The Ballad of the American Skeletons” at the Albert Hall in London, accompanied by Paul McCartney on electric guitar. 32. http://w w w.mirage.com/nightlife/entertainment_nightlife_ revolution.aspx accessed on September 29, 2007. 33. Hazlitt, 12:128–129. See also Patrick Story, “Hazlitt’s Definition of the Spirit of the Age,” The Wordsworth Circle 6 (1975), 97–108. 34. Hazlitt, 11:87. 35. Hazlitt, 11:81. 36. Abrams, 68. 37. Applebaum, iii. 38. Lawall, 651. 39. Beatles Anthology, 356. 40. Beatles Anthology, 356. 41. Beatles Anthology, 356. 42. Beatles Anthology, 356. 43. Shelley, 6:201. 44. See Spitz, 3–12, for a vivid re-creation of the Litherland Town Hall concert, the performance in which, he writes, they became the Beatles. 45. Miles, 558.

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Carter, Janette. Living with Memories. Maces Spring, Virginia: Carter Family Memorial Music Center, 1983. Cash, Johnny, with Patrick Carr. Cash: The Autobiography. New York: HarperPaperbacks, 1998. Child, Francis James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. New York: Cooper Square, 1962. Churchill, Winston S. Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches. New York: Hyperion, 2003. Cohen, Morton. Lewis Carroll: A Biography. New York: Vintage, 1995. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. London: J.M. Dent, 1975. ———. Complete Letters. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1957. ———. Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1912. ———. The Major Works. Ed. H.J. Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———. Notebooks. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. 4 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957. ———. Poetry and Prose. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Bantam Classics, 1965. De Quincey, Thomas. Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. Doughty, Oswald. Perturbed Spirit: The Life and Personality of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981. Douglas, Wallace W. “Wordsworth in Politics: The Westmorland Election of 1818,” Modern Language Notes 63:7 (November, 1948), 437–449. Dowson, Ernest. The Poems of Ernest Dowson. London: John Lane, 1895. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles, Vol. I. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Elwin, Malcolm. Lord Byron’s Wife. New York: Harcourt, 1962. Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. FitzGibbon, Constantine. The Life of Dylan Thomas. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1966. Fruman, Norman. Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel. New York: George Braziller, 1971. Gans, Eric. Originary Thinking. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1959. ———. Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958–1996. Ed. David Carter. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Giuliano, Geoffrey and Vrnda Devi. Glass Onion: The Beatles in their Own Words. New York: Da Capo, 1999. Gleckner, Robert. The Piper and the Bard. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1957. Goldman, Albert. The Lives of John Lennon. New York: Morrow, 1988.

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Harrison, George. I Me Mine. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. Harry, Bill. The Ultimate Beatles Encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion, 1992. Havel, Vaclav. Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990. New York: Vintage, 1992. Hazlitt, William. Complete Works. Ed. P.P. Howe. 20 vols. London: Frank Cass, 1967. Hillis-Miller, J. The Disappearance of God. Harvard: Belknap, 1975. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Holquist, Michael. “What is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism,” Yale French Studies, 43, 1969. Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain in 1942. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2004. Johnson, Samuel. Works. Ed. Gwin J. Kolb. 18 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Keats, John. Letters of John Keats. Ed. Robert Gittings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———. Poems of John Keats. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: Belknap, 1978. Koon, Bill. Hank Williams, So Lonesome. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Lamb, Charles. Works. Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1857. Lawall, Sarah, general ed. Norton Anthology of World Literature. Vol. E. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Leach, Sam. The Birth of the Beatles. Cincinnati: Pharaoh Press, 1999. Lennon, John. In His Own Write. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Leonard, William Ellery. Byron and Byronism in America. New York: Haskell House, 1964. Lewisohn, Mark. The Beatles Day by Day. London: Macmillan, 1988. Lowell, James R. Poetical Works. 2 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1858. MacCarthy, Fiona. Byron: Life and Legend. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Macpherson, James. The Poems of Ossian. 2 vols. London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1796. Marchand, Leslie. Byron: A Portrait. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. McIntyre, Ian. Dirt and Deity: Life of Robert Burns. London: Trafalgar Square Publishing, 1996. McKinney, Devin. Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. McLane, Maureen. “Ballads and Bards: British Romantic Orality,” Modern Philology 98:3 (February, 2001), 423–443. McNay, John T. Acheson and Empire: The British Accent in American Foreign Policy. Columbia, Missouri: The University of Missouri Press, 2001. Mellers, Wilfrid. Twilight of the Gods. London: Faber & Faber, 1973. Miles, Barry. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.

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Milton, John, Complete Poetry and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Macmillan, 1957. Norman, Philip. Shout! The Beatles in their Generation. New York: MJF Books, 1981. Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell. Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. 4 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. ———. Inside the Whale, in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, vol. 2, ed. David Damrosch, Christopher Baswell, Clare Carroll, and Kevin J.H. Dettmar. New York: Longman, 1999. Parrish, Stephen Maxfield. The Art of the Lyrical Ballads. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973. Patterson, R. Gary. The Walrus Was Paul: The Great Beatle Death Clues. New York: Fireside, 1998. Pattison, Robert. The Triumph of Vulgarity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Perkins, Carl, and David McGee. Go, Cat, Go! New York: Hyperion, 1996. Perkins, David. British Romantic Writers. 2nd ed. Harcourt, 1995. Phillips, Kevin. The Cousins’ Wars. New York: Basic, 1999. Pope, Alexander, An Essay on Criticism, in Eighteenth-Century English Literature, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell, and Marshall Waingrow. New York: Harcourt, 1969. Reeve, Andru. Turn Me On, Dead Man: The Beatles and the “Paul is Dead” Hoax. Bloomington, Indiana: Author House, 2004. Reynolds, David. Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945. New York: Random House, 1995. Rogers, Joyce A. “The Paul is Dead Hoax: How Hysterical Teenagers and Respectable Journalists Were Duped into Thinking Paul McCartney Was Dead, and Why,” Paranoia: The Conspiracy Reader 15 (Winter 96/97), 14–19. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. In The Essential Rousseau, translated by Lowell Bair. New York: Meridian, 1975. Ryback, Timothy W. Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1954–1988. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Safonov, Mikhail. “You Say You Want a Revolution,” History Today 53:8 (August 2003), 46–51. Schonfield, Hugh. The Passover Plot. London: Element, 1988. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Complete Works. Ed. Roger Igpen and Walter E. Peck. 10 vols. London: Ernest Benn, 1965. ———. Selected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1951. Spark, Alasdair. “Conspiracy Thinking and Conspiracy Studying” www2. winchester.ac.uk/ccc/resources/essays/thinkstudy.htm accessed August 27, 2007.

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I n de x

Acheson, Dean, 179, 182 “Act Naturally” (Buck Owens song), 29, 127, 148 Addison, Joseph, 36 Adonais (Shelley), 205n “Afton Water” (Burns), 60 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 141–3 Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (Carroll), 141–2 “An Evening Walk” (Wordsworth), 77 Anglo-American cultural relations, 3–7, 10–14, 179–81, 185–91 “Animal Tranquility and Decay” (Wordsworth), 109 “Another Girl” (Beatles song), 29 anxiety of influence, 74–5 Aristotle, 172 Arnold, Matthew, 157–8 Atkins, Chet, 28, 29 “At the Grave of Burns” (Wordsworth), 52 “Auld Lang Syne” (Burns), 58 Babbitt, Irving, 115 “Babes in the Wood” (traditional ballad), 33, 36, 46 “Baby Let’s Play House” (Elvis Presley song), 29 “Baby You’re a Rich Man” (Beatles song), 66, 95 Baez, Joan, 50 “Barbara Allen’s Cruelty” (traditional ballad), 35 Barrett-Browning, Elizabeth, 115

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Beatlemania, 5, 7–8, 163, 200 Harrison’s attitude toward, 100–1, 167, 200–1 Lennon’s attitude toward, 7–8, 200 McCartney’s attitude toward, 8, 200 quasi-religious aspects of, 159–60, 166–9 Starr’s attitude toward, 201 Beatles and American folk music, 12–13 as archetypal Rock Romantics, 3, 6–7, 22 Britishness of, 14, 191–2 continuing popularity of, 1–3, 7–9, 15, 168–9, 200–2 and the creation of a soft AngloAmerican empire, 3–4, 163, 181–5 and country music, 11–12, 25, 27–32, 48 and the dissolution of communist rule in Eastern Europe, 181, 192–7 humor of, 130–2 as pseudo-family, 99–101, 127–8, 152 See also Harrison, George; Lennon, John; McCartney, Paul; Starr, Ringo Berlin, Isaiah, 105–6 Berry, Chuck, 11, 25, 30 “Beppo” (Byron), 124 Best, Pete, 117–18, 148

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224

Index

bigger than Jesus controversy, 156–7, 160–4 See also Beatlemania, quasi-religious aspects of; conspiracy theories as modern myths; Paul is dead hoax Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 90, 209n, 210n Blake, Peter, 171 Blake, William, 129, 145–6 Bloom, Harold, 74–5, 135 “Blue Moon of Kentucky” (Bill Monroe song), 28 “Blue Suede Shoes” (Carl Perkins song), 28 Bogarde, Dirk, 184 “Bonnie George Campbell” (traditional ballad), 40 Boone, Pat, 7 Booth, Wayne C., 109–10 “Boys” (Beatles song), 129 Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961 film), 114 Breton, André, 132, 146 Brezhnev, Leonid, 194 British empire, twentieth century decline of, 179–83 British immigration to North America, 12, 42–4 British Invasion of post-World War II American pop culture, 1, 189–91 Bronte, Emily, 117 Brothers, Dr. Joyce, 213n Burns, Robert, 26, 37, 52–65, 102, 115 Byron, George Gordon, 20, 83, 100–2 and the “Byronic hero,” 113–14, 116 “Can’t Buy Me Love” (Beatles song), 29 Carlyle, Thomas, 10, 53, 55, 85 Carroll, Lewis, 10, 129–30, 133–4, 141, 145

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Carter, A.P., 47–50 Carter Family, The, 25, 47–8 Carter, June, 60–1 Carter, Maybelle, 47, 206n Cash, Johnny, 29, 34, 64–5, 115, 206n Cash, Roseanne, 29 Chaplin, Charles, 186 Charles, Ray, 11 Charter, 77, 196–7 Chatterton, Thomas, 33, 205n Child, Francis James, 45–6 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), 110–11, 118 Chopin, Frederic, 6 Christabel (Coleridge), 85, 91–2 Christie, Julie, 183 Churchill, Winston, 3, 203n cinema, British actors in American, 186–7 Clark, Jim, 191 Cleave, Maureen, 160–1 Cochran, Eddie, 117 Cohen, Leonard, 63–4 Cohen, Morton, 142 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 30, 84 compared to Lennon, 85–7 conservatism of, 103–8 relationship with Wordsworth, 71–2, 90–4 “Come Together” (Beatles song), 131 “Comin’ thro’ the Rye” (Burns), 53 conspiracy theories as modern myths, 154–5 The Convention of Cintra (Wordsworth), 104 “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” (Burns), 59 country music as influence on the Beatles, 25, 27–32, 48 and northern British folk culture, 26, 30–1, 44–5, 55

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Index and Romanticism, 6, 26–7, 30–2, 51, 55 Crane, Mary Thomas, 204n Darin, Bobby, 5 Darling (1965 film), 183–5 “A Day in the Life” (Beatles song), 81, 174, 202 De Quincey, Thomas, 94, 97 Dean, James, 114–17 “Dear Boy” (McCartney song), 71 “Dear Prudence” (Beatles song), 65 “Dejection: An Ode” (Coleridge), 87, 109 Dempsey, David, 159–60 Dickinson, Emily, 115 Donegan, Lonnie, 12–13, 27–8 Don Juan (Byron), 104–5 “Don’t Bother Me” (Beatles song), 100, 101 “Don’t Pass Me By” (Beatles song), 29, 129, 248 Doors, The (1960s psychedelic rock band), 145 Dowson, Ernest, 67 Dylan, Bob, 27, 34, 49, 50, 63, 145 “Eleanor Rigby” (Beatles song), 48, 94, 176 Eliot, T.S., 21, 186 Endymion (Keats), 205n English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (Byron), 104, 121 Epstein, Brian, 66, 120, 148 “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” (Wordsworth’s Poems of 1815), 32–3, 38–9, 48 The Excursion (Wordsworth), 49, 94 “Expostulation and Reply” (Wordsworth), 109 folk music, 4–5, 12–13, 26–7 “The Fool on the Hill” (Beatles song), 97 Forman, Milos, 195

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225

“For No One” (Beatles song), 97 freedom, 102, 105–7, 109–13, 155, 197 See also Charter 77; Beatles and the dissolution of communist rule in Eastern Europe; Havel, Vaclav; individualism; Rock Romanticism; Romanticism French Revolution, 106–9 friendly invasion, 13, 187–9 “From Me to You” (Beatles song), 120 “Frost at Midnight” (Coleridge), 88–9 Frost, Robert, 115 Gans, Eric, 155 Garson, Greer, 186–7 Ginsberg, Allen, 145, 198, 212n Gleckner, Robert, 135 Goldman, Albert, 153–4 Goon Show, The, 131 Grant, Cary, 186 “Green Grow the Rashes” (Burns), 60 Guthrie, Woody, 34, 50 Handley, Tommy, 131 A Hard Day’s Night (Beatles film), 120–1, 128, 150–1 Harris, Emmylou, 29 Harrison, George, 100–2 compared to Byron, 101–2, 114, 118–26 cynicism of, 120–2 spiritual quest of, 123–6 Havel, Vaclav, 196–7 Hazlitt, William, 101, 198 Help! (Beatles film), 2, 123, 128 “Help” (Beatles song), 85 “Here Comes the Sun” (Beatles song), 29, 122–3, 125 “Here, There, and Everywhere” (Beatles song), 29

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“Hey Good Lookin’” (Hank Williams song), 64 Hillis-Miller, J., 158 Hitchcock, Alfred, 187 Hobbes, Thomas, 17–18 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 204n “Hold Me Tight” (Beatles song), 120 Holly, Buddy, 25, 30 “Honey Don’t” (Beatles song), 29, 43, 129, 148 “Honky Tonk Blues” (Hank Williams song), 27 “Honky-Tonkin” (Hank Williams song), 64 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 159 Howard, Harlan, 27 “How Do You Sleep” (Lennon song), 71 “I Am the Walrus” (Beatles song), 95, 131, 147 “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” (Beatles song), 29 “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” (Elvis Presley song), 28 “I Need You” (Beatles song), 101 “I’ll Cry Instead” (Beatles song), 28 “Imagine” (Lennon song), 97, 164 “I’m a Loser” (Beatles song), 29, 85 “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry Over You” (Elvis Presley song), 28 “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (Hank Williams song), 64 “I’m So Tired” (Beatles song), 174–5 individualism, 3–5, 22, 30–1 See also freedom; Rock Romanticism; Romanticism In His Own Write (book by Lennon), 131–2 “In My Life” (Beatles song), 48, 65, 89 “I Saw Her Standing There,” 81

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“I Saw the Light” (Hank Williams song), 64 “I’ve Just Seen a Face” (Beatles song), 29 “I Wanna Be Your Man” (Beatles song), 129, 148 “Jabberwocky” (Carroll), 147 James, Henry, 186 Jefferson Airplane (1960s psychedelic rock group), 146 Jeffrey, Francis, 50–1 “John Anderson, my jo” (Burns), 59 Johnson, Paul, 159 Johnson, Samuel, 107–8 “Julia” (Beatles song), 65 Keats, John, 79, 83, 102, 104, 159 Kennedy, John F., 8, 154, 156, 177 kitchen-sink realism, 183–5 Kittredge, George Lyman, 35 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge), 85, 87 Lamb, Charles, 133, 138 Leach, Sam, 128 Leary, Timothy, 198 Leigh, Vivien, 186 “Lend Me Your Comb” (Carl Perkins song), 28 Lennon, John attitude toward Beatlemania, 7–8, 200 and “bigger than Jesus” controversy, 160–4 compared to Coleridge, 85–7 as devotee of conspiracy theories, 153–4 influenced by Hank Williams, 27, 65–6 influenced by Lewis Carroll, 145–7 relationship with McCartney, 69–71, 82–95 as pop music poet, 21, 65–6, 69–71

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Index

227

Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership compared to literary partnership of Wordsworth and Coleridge, 71–2, 92–8 Lennon, Sean (son of John), 153, 155–6, 177–8 Lennon Wall (in Prague), 197 “Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns” (Wordsworth), 53–4 Lewis, Jerry Lee, 64 Lewis, Vic, 168 Lewisohn, Mark, 161, 203n Liszt, Franz, 7 Little Richard, 25 “Lost Highway” (Hank Williams song), 64 love, 181–2, 200–2 “Love Me Do” (Beatles song), 19, 81, 201 “Lovely Rita” (Beatles song), 174 Lowell, James Russell, 186 Lunsford, Bascom Lamar, 43 “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (Beatles song), 147, 173 Lyrical Ballads (WordsworthColeridge), 90–2

in Russia, 195 McLane, Maureen, 135 The Merry Muses of Caledonia (Burns), 207n Milton, John, 75–6 The Mirror (1975 film by Andrei Tarkovsky), 194–5 Monroe, Bill, 28 More, Kenneth, 190 “Mother Nature’s Son” (Beatles song), 29, 87 “Mull of Kintyre” (McCartney song), 97 Murrow, Edward R., 189 “My Love” (McCartney song), 97 “My Sweet Lord” (Harrison song), 126 “Mystery Train” (Elvis Presley song), 29

Macpherson, James, 32–3 Magical Mystery Tour (Beatles album), 175, 176 Magical Mystery Tour (Beatles film), 95, 131, 175 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 124 Manfred (Byron), 111–12 Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Blake), 145 Martin, George, 85, 119 “Matchbox” (Carl Perkins song), 29 McCartney, Paul compared to Wordsworth, 84–7 death rumors about, 173–6 and Pete Best, 118 as pop music poet, 21, 69–71 relationship with Lennon, 69–81, 82–95

“Octopus’s Garden” (Beatles song), 29, 129, 149–50 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (Wordsworth), 139 “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 110 Oliver! (Broadway musical), 190 “On Love” (Shelley), 201 “One Word is Too Oft Profan’d” (Shelley), 111 “One After 909” (Beatles song), 29 “Only the Lonely” (Roy Orbison song), 28 Ono, Yoko, 22, 152, 177 Orbison, Roy, 28 Orwell, George, 22, 131 Osborne, John, 183 Ossian (Macpherson), 32–3, 206n

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Nietzsche, Friedrich, 159 “The Nightingale” (Coleridge), 109 northern British folk culture, 26–7, 44–5 “Nowhere Man” (Beatles song), 65, 87

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228

Index

Oswald, Lee Harvey, 156 Owens, Buck, 29 Pattison, Robert, 102 Paul is dead hoax, 173–6 See also Beatlemania, quasi-religious aspects of; bigger than Jesus controversy; conspiracy theories as modern myths Payne, Rufe (Tee Tot), 59 Peer, Ralph, 47 “Penny Lane” (Beatles song), 69–71, 82, 89 Pepys, Samuel, 36 Percy, Thomas, Bishop of Dromore, 30, 37 Perkins, Carl, 25, 29–30, 64 “Piggies” (Beatles song), 101, 121–2 Plastic People of the Universe (Czechoslovakian underground rock band), 195–7 “Please Please Me” (Beatles song), 28, 81 pop music as poetry, 16–17, 19, 30, 80–3 Pound, Ezra, 73 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth), 30–2, 33, 38, 51–2, 56, 77–9, 82, 108 The Prelude (Wordsworth), 37, 50, 54, 84–5, 93, 107, 139–41 Presley, Elvis, 7, 25, 29–30, 64, 154 Profumo Affair, 8 Putin, Vladimir, 195 “Raunchy” (Shadows song), 119 Rebel Without a Cause (1955 film), 115 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (Percy), 30 resentment, creative power of, 76–80, 97–8, 151–2 “Revolution” (Beatles song), 197 “Revolution 1” (Beatles song), 197

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“Revolution 9” (Beatles song), 174, 197 Revolution Lounge (Las Vegas), 198 Revolver (Beatles album), 171, 175 Reynolds, David, 189 Richardson, Alan, 204n “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge), 90–2, 209n “Rock Island Line” (Lonnie Donegan song), 12 Rock Romanticism and country music, 26–7 and the creation of a soft Anglo-American empire, 181 defined, 5–6, 66, 101–2, 192 See also Anglo-American cultural relations; Beatles and the dissolution of communist rule in Eastern Europe; freedom; individualism; Romanticism “Rocky Raccoon” (Beatles song), 29 Romanticism, 4, 16, 72, 82–4, 156, 176–8 and artistic tradition, 72–4 and the celebration of childhood, 129–30, 133–41 and country music, 26–7 and the disappearance of God, 157–9 and love, 200–2 as the paradigm of contemporary popular culture, 15–17, 19–22, 51 and resentment, 76–80 and revolution, 20–1, 197–9 Rousseau’s influence on, 18–19 and the special relationship between the United States and Britain, 10–14, 180–1, 190–2 as a two-generation phenomenon, 100–3 See also freedom; individualism; French Revolution; Rock Romanticism Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 18–19, 159

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Index Rubber Soul (Beatles album), 175 Rubin, Jerry, 198 “Run for Your Life” (Beatles song), 29 Ryback, Timothy, 195 Safonov, Mikhail, 192–5 Schlesinger, John, 183 Schonfield, Hugh, 157, 164–7, 173, 177 Scott, Walter, 26, 30, 36, 37 Searle, Ronald, 132 “Settin’ the Woods on Fire” (Hank Williams song), 64 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles album), 2, 170–3, 176 Sharp, Cecil, 46–7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 76, 83, 102, 104 “She dwelt among the untrodden ways” (Wordsworth), 40–1 “She Loves You” (Beatles song), 83, 201 “She’s Leaving Home” (Beatles song), 174, 175 “She Walks in Beauty” (Byron), 123 “Silly Love Songs” (McCartney song), 97 Sinatra, Frank, 5, 7 “Single Girl, Married Girl” (Carter Family song), 47–8 skiffle, 12, 27–8, 34 Sleepless in Seattle (1993 film), 176 “A slumber did my spirit seal” (Wordsworth), 40–1 “The Solitary Reaper” (Wordsworth), 54–5 “Something” (Beatles song), 101, 122–3 songcatching, 34, 45–7 Songs of Innocence and Experience (Blake), 134–8 Southey, Robert, 198 Soviet Union, Beatles’ popularity in, 192–5

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229

Spark, Alasdair, 154 special relationship between the United States and Britain, 3, 179–80, 203n Speck, Richard, 162 Spitz, Bob, 147, 215n “Stanzas Written in Dejection” (Shelley), 110 Starr, Ringo as child in Beatles’ pseudo-family, 127, 147–52 and country music, 29 “Strawberry Fields Forever” (Beatles song), 19, 69–71, 82, 89 “Sue Me, Sue You Blues” (Harrison song), 126 Suez crisis, 13, 182–3 “Sure to Fall” (Carl Perkins song), 28 “Tam o’ Shanter” (Burns), 58 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 194–5 “Taxman” (Beatles song), 101, 121–2, 175–6 Taylor, William, 36 Tennyson, Alfred, 117 “That’s All Right Mama” (Elvis Presley song), 28 “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” (Beatles song), 129 “The End” (Beatles song), 202 “Think for Yourself” (Beatles song), 101 Thomas, Dylan, 65 Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll), 141, 144 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 84, 88–9, 139 “To a Mountain Daisy” (Burns), 60 “To a Mouse” (Burns), 53, 60 “To a Young Ass” (Coleridge), 211n Tolstoy, Leo, 100

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Index

“Tomorrow Never Knows” (Beatles song), 87, 202 traditional balladry, 34–9 Unwin, Stanley, 131–2 Van Gogh, Vincent, 6 Vander Weele, Michael, 141 Vietnam war, 162, 177 Vincent, Gene, 117 Visions of the Daughters of Albion (Blake), 146 Ward, Barbara, 183 Watts, Isaac, 144 Weisbuch, Robert, 4 “What Goes On” (Beatles song), 29, 148 “What is Life” (Harrison song), 126 “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (Beatles song), 122 “White Rabbit” (Jefferson Airplane song), 146 Whitman, Charles Lee, 162 Wilde, Oscar, 9, 117 Williams, Hank, 27, 28, 30, 57–64, 115 Williams, Hank III (Hank Williams’ grandson), 62 Wills, Bob, 25, 188 “With a Little Help from My Friends” (Beatles song), 128, 129, 148 “Within You Without You” (Beatles song), 114, 175

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“Woman” (Lennon song), 97 Wordsworth-Coleridge, compared to Lennon-McCartney, 69–71, 82–94 Wordsworth, William, 6, 10, 26, 129, 198 and the creative power of resentment, 76–80, 97–8 conservatism of, 103–8 and the French Revolution, 106–8 relationship with Coleridge, 71–2, 90–7 and traditional balladry, 34–9 World War II, 10 American and British cultural exchange during, 187–9 See also Anglo-American cultural relations; British Invasion of post-World War II American pop culture; friendly invasion Yellow Submarine (Beatles film), 125–6 “Yellow Submarine” (Beatles song), 29, 149, 176 “Yesterday” (Beatles song), 48, 89 Yesterday and Today (Beatles album), 175 “You Know My Name, Look Up the Number” (Beatles song), 131 “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” (Beatles song), 201 “You Win Again” (Hank Williams song), 28

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