Lennon never finished the course but some of the results can be heard on the 1970 album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. At its simplest, the idea was that neurosis is best treated by summoning up the repressed trauma of childhood and comprehensively re-experiencing it in order to release the otherwise stored toxicity. Screaming therapy is something Lennon began in 1970 after reading The Primal Scream by the American psychiatrist Dr Arthur Janov. Barry’s Lennon has returned nine years later in search of solitude and in order to “scream his fucking lungs out” and “at last to be over himself”. The island in question is Dorinish in Clew Bay, County Mayo, which the real‑life Lennon bought in 1967 at “the knock‑down price of £1,550” – and which he briefly visited with his first wife, Cynthia, and then with Yoko Ono. The story opens as he arrives by night and incognito on the west coast of Ireland in May 1978 “all he asks” is to “spend three days alone on his island”.
I mention this because Lennon is the protagonist of Kevin Barry’s second novel, and one of the many pleasures of Beatlebone was that it sent me back into my own past relationship with Lennon and, as Barry has it, “all the sweet and thorny emotions he routinely sprang in his brilliant and nerveless song-writing”. Throughout, Harris is the opposite of incisive, but his warm, respectful, almost innocent presence seems to relax Lennon into being unusually open and collusive sure, the acerbic wit and that compulsive self-awareness are there as always, but in the last few seconds, Lennon dissolves with playful delight into a character halfway between Peter Cook and Peter Sellers. M y favourite interview with John Lennon was by “whispering” Bob Harris in 1975.
0 kommentar(er)
