The Flattery of Courtiers
SHORTER, KINGSLEY
Writers & Writing THE FLATTERY OF COURTIERS BY KINGSLEY SHORTER The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (Delacorte, 156 pp., $5.95) is misnamed. A selection of Beatles lyrics it is, and very welcome too....
...Remember, John Tenniel's drawing of the caterpillar sitting on the toadstool, puffing on his hookah and holding forth to a round-eyed Alice...
...Aldridge himself is the main offender, though the others are not far behind...
...What an opportunity was missed...
...I once passed McCartney on a footpath in Rishikesh...
...Mike Mclnnerney (who did excellent artwork for the album of The Who's rock opera, Tommy) contributes a couple of inoffensive but inapposite sketches...
...They have never forgotten how to be themselves...
...Psychedelic my arse...
...To everyone else they may be "trendiness" incarnate...
...You can never meet "a Beatle...
...The Beatles have been among the prime movers of the Pop revolution, but they themselves, as befits royalty, remain largely unmoved...
...read the news today oh boy, about a lucky man who made the grade...
...Like most of the stuff in this book, these pictures convey nothing but a sort of slick, self-congratulatory modish-ness...
...Their humor is hilarious...
...There are some banal photographs...
...This is the key to their effortless supremacy in the frantically competitive world of popular music...
...Again, the blurb: "His style is distinctive and immediate, fantasy with a hard edge...
...their ribaldry is full-blooded, Elizabethan...
...We are in effect paying them to play for us, to act out the untrammeled creativity we sense in all our faculties but may not experience...
...Thus Alan Aldridge, the young British designer who edited the book and provides much of the artwork...
...There are some mildly pleasing (if pointless) takeoffs of Henri Rousseau...
...Illustrated it isn't...
...This nasty book altogether fails to convey either their personal charm or the intimate magic of their songs-things for which they will be remembered and loved long after the fripperies of the sixties have passed into richly deserved oblivion...
...and "I'm only sleeping," a moderately endearing overhead view of John Lennon and (presumably) his wife Yoko tucked up in bed, while bright visions of the night flit across the coverlet...
...The Beatles, however, are properly careless of their crown...
...Peter Max contributes a number of his familiar designs...
...The entire book is remorselessly "with it...
...To identify them and their matchless songs with the minor stylistic spinoff of that revolution is to misread their role badly...
...If the Beatles have expanded anybody's consciousness, you certainly wouldn't know it from these "lavish color illustrations," agleam with plastic chic like futuristic bathroom fittings...
...It is this isolation that has enabled them to preserve their integrity as individuals and to pursue intensely private lives in the goldfish bowl of continuous publicity...
...A few other things are just about passable...
...They simply have not had time to start compromising or making allowances for other people's views, with the result that like children, and unlike almost everybody else, they do things for the only good reason there is-because it's fun...
...For "Cry baby cry" he gives us a great bloated baby sitting haunch-deep in a sea of tears, each roll of fat a different shade of orangy pink...
...It's just a hobby, that's all...
...For "You won't see me," he hangs a giant telephone in a sky of puce and duck-egg green, amid imitation-Magritte clouds...
...We put our feet up and enjoy it all the time...
...The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics is the flattery of courtiers, a camp follower's tribute to the supreme pacesetters of our time...
...The cynicism and despairing vulgarity of Pop Art are utterly alien to the Beatles...
...the way things are going, they gonna crucify me...
...They watch us (Lennon is said to spend much of his time gazing at tv) in the very way we watch and listen to them, through a one-way mirror...
...But with few exceptions, his contributions and those of the 44 other "internationally known artists" illuminate one thing only: their keen awareness of what is currently most fashionable in commercial graphics...
...Like the astronauts-their homologies in the physical sciences --the Beatles are true 20th-century pioneers, pushing back the frontiers of human experience, testing the limits of the possible, transcending themselves again and again-and doing it in full view of their public...
...I believe that the illustrations in this book may illuminate [the Beatles'] contribution to the style of their generation...
...As to the rest, it is impossible to convey the sheer physical ugliness of Aldridge's productions: the bulging excrescences of highly polished flesh, the harsh metallic tints, the graceless jumble of breasts and buttocks and eyes and teeth...
...And Aldridge has the gall to announce himself as a "graphic entertainer" whose goal is to "add wit and charm to things that have been dull for three hundred years...
...The one contributor who even attempts to do this is Seymour Chwast, with his fine illustration for "The continuing story of Bungalow Bill...
...Something in us would like to see them fall, just as something in us waits in horrified anticipation for the inevitable day when we finally see an astronaut come to grief, right there on our living room screen...
...Listen to the blurb: "The psychedelic design and format reflect the atmosphere the Beatles live in, and that of the whole generation and Pop culture they have influenced...
...It is no accident that Chwast's piece is strongly reminiscent of the work that used to accompany children's classics...
...The Beatles' situation is now unprecedented...
...it's too bad they could not have been better served by their illustrators...
...This is a far higher order of vicariation than the original Beatlemania, which was little better than raw idolatry.We have gone way beyond hero worship into a new and uncharted realm...
...not, that is, if by "illustration" you understand an artist's attempt to capture the spirit of a song or story in his own mute medium...
...If only the artists, instead of using the lyrics, in Aldridge's words, as "a springboard into the imagination," had tried to feel their way into the worlds the Beatles have already created...
...Though we nodded to each other, I could not bring myself to say hello, to reach through the glass to someone whose image I knew so intimately, but whom I now perceived to be a total stranger...
...Yet, what conceivable pleasure or relevance is there in Rudolf Hausner's gangrenous figures and doom-laden landscapes...
...They haven't had to see themselves through other people's eyes since October 1963, when Fame engulfed them like an act of God and effectively isolated them from ordinary interaction with the world...
...Consider the rumors about McCartney's death that swept the United States a few weeks ago: There's obviously a strong sacrificial component in the Beatles' role...
...Two of his things are fair: "Nowhere man," which depicts a question mark in the shape of a frustrated gray man jumping on his gray hat in a gray-green cell...
...Pop Art plus Surrealism, actually, executed with technical virtuosity, but largely devoid of the wit of the one and the dreamlike vividness of the other...
...tears (again) fall from the receiver onto an umbrella'd figure below...
...the bawling baby's tears turn into exotic fish as they splash down, while a doll-like Paul McCartney floats in a boat between the monster-child's knees...
...And who is "The fool on the hill" if not the great-grandson of the Dong with the Luminous Nose...
...their wit is mother wit, not the cold snigger of camp...
...But it wasn't statistics alone that prompted Lennon's notorious remark about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus Christ, or that inspired "The Ballad of John and Yoko" ("Christ you know it ain't easy, you know how hard it can be...
...They are unashamedly sentimental, and above all, they are warm...
...Even the best of the illustrations are nothing but would-be clever marginalia...
...or in Art Kane's "vision" of "Within you and without you," a nightmare of Rorschach-blot Siamese twins...
...but trendiness, like sex appeal or the attributes of royalty, exists only in the eyes of the beholder...
...The Beatles are producing instant classics for the desperate grownup children of our time...
...The suddenness of their success also explains why they have come far closer to genuine cultural autonomy than all others in the Pop world...
...Statistically, the Beatles may be the most famous people who have ever lived...
...In his biography of the Beatles, Hunter Davies says that Lennon used to write nonsense verse in the style of "the Jabberwock...
...for poetically, the Beatles are in the direct line of descent from Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear-to both of whom they appear to pay tribute in "I am the walrus...
...For "Penny Lane," that exercise in cheerful nostalgia, he presents an incoherent clutter of the song's images, in a sub-Leger style whose deliberate unattrac-tiveness is unredeemed by any sense of personal vision...
...their visions of love have a Blakean innocence and intensity...
...Folon has done a Paul Klee-ish man-bird floating in delicately tinted space to illustrate "Blackbird," one of McCartney's most beautiful songs, but quite fails to convey its joyous feeling of resurrection...
Vol. 52 • November 1969 • No. 21
