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I was surprised and curious when I heard of Anthony Elliott's new book on John Lennon. I know Elliott, the author of Subject to Ourselves , Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction (reviewed in JPCS 1:2 [1996]), and Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition , as a psychoanalytic social theorist and commentator. He is now, I thought, doing psychobiography. Then I saw the title, The Mourning of John Lennon, and I expected cultural psychoanalysis—of us, not Lennon. Elliott's latest turns out to be both—the “mourning” is both Lennon's and our own—together with a bit of hagiography and some psychobiography of Lennon's biographers.
While hagiography has pejorative connotations, Elliott is convinced that after Albert Goldman's caricature in The Lives of John Lennon and Frederic Seaman's bitter The Last Days of John Lennon , a sympathetic treatment is in order. Moreover, Elliott is aware of (indeed quotes) Freud's warning that biographers “fixated on their heroes,” tend to idealize and “smooth over” imperfections (qtd. 31-32), and Elliott even criticizes Ray Coleman's two-volume John Lennon for “cleaning up … the messiness of lived experience” (32). Coleman's account of the “heavy toll” taken on Lennon's first marriage by the stress of life with a pop star, and by drugs that “entered” that marriage “quite innocently” (qtd. 31), sounds like the audio-tape that visitors to Graceland hear in portable headsets (Elvis was “taken from us,” etc.). Even as Elliott works hard to avoid hagiography, he is a great fan of Lennon—Lennon's music, lyrics, social criticism, and death obviously influenced Elliott profoundly, and the more he researched his subject the more impressed he became.
For Elliott, Lennon was not only a stunningly original songwriter who “used his fame to advance the cause of world peace” (3); Lennon's life is a triumphant example of one who overcomes the pathologies of his own childhood and of celebrity to live life on his own terms and to create a phenomenal art