Rereadings

by Anne Fadiman

  At John Lennon’s direction, the record’s brilliant producer, George Martin, created the swirly, Victorian, and very English effects in the sawdust circus world of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” Martin found recordings of old-fashioned steam organs, then scissored the tape into fifteen-inch segments, instructing Geoff Emerick, the recording engineer, to toss the lengths of tape into the air, pick them up, and resplice the bits into a new whole. That kind of Dadaist approach, while emblematic of the experiments that made Sgt. Pepper a mirror image of its time, could work musically only within the formal structure that Lennon and McCartney and Martin actually felt most comfortable inside. The lyrics of “Mr. Kite” may have sounded far-out to the ear in 1967, but “a splendid time is guaranteed for all” and the rest were sentences transposed verbatim from an 1843 circus poster that John Lennon had bought in an antiques shop in Sevenoaks, Kent.

  Throughout Sgt. Pepper, English place-names (Bishops-gate; the Isle of Wight; Blackburn, Lancashire), British institutions (the old school; teatime; the House of Lords; the English army; the Royal Albert Hall), and English types (the grandchildren, Vera, Chuck, and Dave; Mr. Kite; the Hendersons; the man from the motor trade; Rita, the meter maid) are presented alternately as extensions of British greatness or as fading rays in the imperial sunset. The album’s themes are anchored, more than I realized, in a period when England was looking back—part wistfully, part skeptically—to a world in which, more often than not, the “English Army had just won the war,” although the 1967 narrator of “A Day in the Life” can remember the Empire’s glory only from seeing it in a movie. The “twenty years ago today” that seems to invite the audience of a brass-band concert to recall an earlier, better time is actually pinpointing 1947 as the date from which the rest of the “show” follows—a year when Great Britain, lately in command of one-quarter of the world’s landmass, was coming to terms with its decline. Awash in historical nostalgia for what had been, the English could easily recognize the symbols in John Osborne’s bitter play The Entertainer, in which a collapsed music-hall player says, “Don’t clap too loud, it’s a very old building,” a reference less to anything architectural than to the weakening of England itself.

  The Beatles, grandchildren of Victorians, understood in their twenties that they were witnessing the end not just of English folk arts—such as the music-hall variety show and the brass bands that had played green parks in every stronghold of the Empire—but of something significant about the English character. Their lives had begun during the last crucial test of the British people. The births of Richard Starkey in July of 1940 and John Lennon in October of 1940 and Paul McCartney in June of 1942 and George Harrison in February of 1943 coincided with England’s darkest but finest hours. Hitler’s blitzkrieg, the Nazi seizure of Paris, the fall of France, the collapse of the Chamberlain government, the rise of Churchill, the bombing of England, and the Battle of Britain all took place in the five months before John Winston Lennon’s mother and aunt gave him a middle name inspired by Churchillian greatness. Twenty-five years later, in January 1965, Sir Winston’s death and state funeral marked the final organizing moment of Britain’s decline and the full flowering of Victorian nostalgia.

  By 1967, the Beatles, driving force of the New and the Now, stood on the infamous cover of Sgt. Pepper like the gatekeepers of history. They had learned from their brief lives as world-renowned celebrities that things were not always as they appeared to be. In The Beatles Anthology, the millennial recounting of Beatles history by the Beatles themselves, Paul McCartney notes that “what we were saying about history [was that] all history is a lie, because every fact that gets reported gets distorted.” Every kind of falsehood and misinterpretation had by then been reported about the Beatles and their music; untruth had freed them to create their own narrative, choose their own heroes, reinvent history.

  Behind them, in a collage meant to illustrate their sense of the precise present moment of 1967, stood their handpicked representatives of the collective cultural past. Into this pantheon the Beatles elevated a host of American movie stars and comedians, along with gurus and yogis, writers and painters (though not many musicians), Liverpool soccer heroes, and some seemingly conventional British figures whose lives contained surprise twists, such as the writer Aldous Huxley, who had experimented with mescaline and LSD in the early 1950s. Although the fictitious military bandleader Sergeant Pepper appeared only as a handout that came with the album—on a square of cardboard that also included bonus mustaches, badges, sergeant stripes, and other paraphernalia—I was interested to learn that there had been a real-life figure named Pepper: one of the many retired army officers of the British Raj in India who used their military ranks when playing for the local cricket team. Sergeant Pepper played for Uttar Pradesh.

  Peering into the cover tableau now, I notice that the famous marijuana plants were, of course, nothing but greenery—a spiky houseplant whose Latin name, Peperomia, was another inside joke. I look at John, Ringo, Paul, and George, and see them consciously distancing themselves from the viewer. The band is photographed through a filter, with a deep-focus lens, and there’s an extreme, almost death-like stillness on every surface. After the fantastic energy of their first five years, the Beatles are stepping back into the depths of time. The atmosphere of mourning that fanatical fans inferred from the Sgt. Pepper tableau, which they believed contained a set of clues to the unannounced death of Paul McCartney, is, in a more real sense, a eulogy to lost childhood. The four young men on that record have no idea how, or even if, they are going to grow up, and if they do, how they will ever stay together as a band. Standing among the totems of their Liverpudlian Eden, pantomiming the gestures of a dying Empire, the Beatles were taking a first step out of their dizzyingly successful unadult lives and looking back to the solid England of Lennon’s and McCartney’s boyhood dreaming.

  I had a similar feeling of deliberate distance in a bookstore the other day, when I noticed that Paul McCartney had printed some of the Sgt. Pepper lyrics (among others from the Beatles songbook) in a spotlessly dust-jacketed volume of poetry—as if, in other words, they weren’t songs and really had been poetry all along. I picked up the tidy white book and tried to read the familiar words in the state of aural blankness it demanded. But some right-brain part of me kept letting in the music. Great big gusts of studio instrumentation blew into Sir Paul’s spotless white Parnassian tent, ruining his sherry party. It was an odd reaction: when I was a boy, I read these lyrics on the back of the album as poetry, whereas now, dressed up in white tie and tails, they seemed to have lost their poetry. Published formally, Sgt. Pepper’s words no longer looked excitingly Now; they looked very Then.

  During my preteen and teen years, most records entered my system for a while; I had favorite songs for various moods—an up song, a down song, a daydreaming song, a rebel song—and I memorized them all. After a season or two, those songs would pass out of me, and the record itself would remain a fixed piece of a fixed time in the past, part of my increasingly obsolete vinyl collection, an artifact of a lost age. Sgt. Pepper—the name as an abstraction; the image I carry in memory of its cover; even the original object itself, with the outline of the record within visible as a rubbed white circle on the cardboard without—remains in and with me, like a surgical plate connecting halves of a broken bone. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had healing power, and in the summer of 1967 I needed something I couldn’t have found in the tourniquet instructions in the Boy Scout Handbook. The Bowman’s Medal I brought home from camp, which I thought would somehow change everything, seemed as theatrical and obsolete as the medals on the Beatles’ military tunics.

  After my father left my mother, she always awoke at five in the morning and lay in bed, thinking that he would come to his senses, walk out on the woman for whom he had walked out on her, and return home, to his side of the bed, where he belonged. So far as I know, my father had no intention of ditching my stepmother or her children, with whom he had
formed a second family; and when it turned out that my mother wasn’t going to choose a permanent replacement for Dad’s side of the bed, I began to spend as much time as I could away from my own bed, too. I used to daydream myself into other families, and some of them actually took me in and let me live, without pauses, in the kind of extended living and eating plan that the early 1970s seemed to specialize in.

  If the melody of “She’s Leaving Home” now sounds melodramatic almost to the point of parody, I can still read in the words the strangely disembodied feeling my nine-year-old self tried on when I first encountered the song: Was this how it felt to have no home? To abandon and be abandoned? The story of my house and the household in the song did not match, but since my mother’s day always began at five o’clock, the hour of the day’s start in the song, and the hour before which I took some of my own exits from Eden, the lament of the refrained farewell—bye bye—still squeezes my heart.

  Anne Fadiman

  Rereadings

  Anne Fadiman is the Francis Writer in Residence at Yale. The former editor of The American Scholar, she is the author of Ex Libris (FSG, 1998) and The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (FSG, 1997), recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award. She and her family live in western Massachusetts.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  KATHERINE ASHENBURG has been a producer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the arts and books editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail. She frequently writes about travel for The New York Times. Her most recent book is The Mourner’s Dance: What We Do When People Die; her next one is Clean, a social history of bathing. Ashenburg lives in Toronto.

  SVEN BIRKERTS is the author of five books of essays and a memoir, My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time. A member of the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he also edits the journal Agni, based at Boston University. He has recently completed a book of essays on rereading the formative novels of his life, as well as a short book on the craft of memoir. Birkerts lives with his wife, Lynn, and their two children, Mara and Liam, in Arlington, Massachusetts.

  ALLEGRA GOODMAN, a former member of The American Scholar’s editorial board, is the author of two collections of short fiction, The Family Markowitz and Total Immersion, and three novels, Kaaterskill Falls (a finalist for the National Book Award), Paradise Park, and, most recently, Intuition. A recipient of a Whiting Award and a Salon Magazine Award for fiction, Goodman has been named one of America’s best writers under forty by The New Yorker. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  VIVIAN GORNICK is the author of a memoir, Fierce Attachments; two essay collections, Approaching Eye Level and The End of the Novel of Love (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist); and a guide to literary nonfiction, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. She lives in New York City

  PATRICIA HAMPL is a Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, a member of the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Program, and a MacArthur Fellow. Her most recent book, I Could Tell You Stories, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her prose works include the memoirs A Romantic Education and Virgin Time as well as Spillville, a meditation on Antonin Dvoák’s 1893 visit to Iowa. Hampl’s next book is The Silken Chamber, a study of the odalisque in Western art; her essay on rereading Katherine Mansfield will appear in it as one of several portraits of writers and artists in the South of France when Matisse was painting his Orientalist figures there. She lives in St. Paul.

  PICO IYER is the author of several books about the romance between cultures, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and Abandon. Born in Oxford to Indian parents, he was raised in England and California and now lives in Japan. His most recent book is Sun After Dark.

  JAMIE JAMES is a native of Texas who has lived in Indonesia since 1999. He is the author of two novels, Andrew and Joey: A Tale of Bali and The Java Man. He has also published several nonfiction books, including The Music of the Spheres. A travel writer and critic, James has been the American arts correspondent for The Times of London and an art critic for The New Yorker. He and his partner recently moved from Jakarta to Bali to open a restaurant in the coastal village of Seminyak.

  DIANA KAPPEL SMITH has been a writer, a botanist, a farmer, a painter, an illustrator, and a landscape designer. She is the author of three books of essays: Wintering, Night Life: Nature from Dusk to Dawn, and Desert Time: A Journey Through the American Southwest. Born in Connecticut, she now lives in Arizona.

  ARTHUR KRYSTAL is an essayist and screenwriter. He is the editor of A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling and the author of Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, a finalist for the 2003 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay Although his next book is titled Who Speaks for the Lazy?—and Other Essays, Krystal somehow managed to co-write the film Thick as Thieves, starring Alec Baldwin and Rebecca De Mornay, and is currently developing a film project on the early-nineteenth-century boxer Tom Molineaux. He lives in New York City.

  PHILLIP LOPATE has championed the personal essay as the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay and the author of four collections: Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Getting Personal: Selected Writings. His other books include Waterƒront: A Journey Around Manhattan; Totally Tenderly Tragically, a collection of film criticism; and Being with Children, an account of his experiences as a writer-in-the-schools. Lopate is the John Cranford Adams Professor at Hofstra University and a member of the graduate faculty of M.F.A. programs at Columbia, the New School, and Bennington. His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Cheryl, and their daughter, Lily.

  DAVID MICHAELIS is the author of N. C. Wyeth: A Biography, winner of the 1999 Ambassador Book Award for Biography, given by the English-Speaking Union of the United States. His previous books include a collection of biographical sketches, The Best of Friends. Michaelis’s work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler, American Heritage, and The New York Observer, for which he regularly reviews books; he is currently working on a biography of Charles M. Schulz. He lives in New York City.

  DAVID SAMUELS has written about atom bombs, dog tracks, anarchists, rappers, forgers, demolition men, and religious visionaries for Harper’s Magazine (of which he is a contributing editor), The New Yorker, and other publications. He and his wife live in Brooklyn, next to a mosque.

  LUC SANTE is the general editor of the Library of Larceny and the author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, Evidence, and The Factory oƒ Facts. He has been the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Grammy (for album notes). Sante teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College, and lives in Ulster County, New York.

  VIJAY SESHADRI was born in India and grew up in the Midwest. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Long Meadow (winner of the James Laughlin Award) and Wild Kingdom. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, The Paris Review, and other publications. Seshadri teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

  BARBARA SJOHOLM is the author of the new travel memoir Incognito Street and The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, and Slate, among other publications. Under the name Barbara Wilson, she is the author of Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood as well as a detective series about a translator-sleuth named Cassandra Reilly. One of the Reilly mysteries, Gaudf Afternoon, won a British Crime Writers’ Association Award and became a film. Sjoholm has translated several books from Norwegian, including the stories of Cora Sandel, for which she won a Columbia Translation Center Award. Sjoholm is cur
rently at work on a travel narrative about northern Scandinavia in winter. She lives in Seattle.

  EVELYN TOYNTON is the author of the novel Modern Art. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. Not long after completing the essay in this volume, she moved to Norfolk, England. She is at work on a second novel.

  MICHAEL UPCHURCH is the author of the novels Air, The Flame Forest, and Passive Intruder. His reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His short fiction has appeared in Christopher Street, Glimmer Train, and the Carolina Quarterly. Since 1998 he has been the book critic for The Seattle Times. He lives with his partner, the film critic John Hartl, in Seattle.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Jean Stipicevic and Sandra Costich, of The American Scholar, for shepherding these essays through their original publication, and me through an editorship that would have faltered without their kindness; the Scholar’s readers for making me realize, both during my tenure and in retrospect, that the Rereading department embodied all that I loved most about the magazine; Bill Whitworth for giving me warm and wise advice; Robert Lescher for being the perfect literary—and I mean literary—agent; Jonathan Galassi and Annie Wedekind for offering this book sanctuary and guidance; Susan Mitchell and Jonathan Lippincott for making it beautiful; George Colt for editing, reading, criticizing, appreciating, and galvanizing; and John Bethell for showing me, over the last thirty-five years, that whether one is distinguishing between “which” and “that,” between a so-so typeface and an exquisite one, or between an uneven draft and a polished piece, editing matters.