Long Night's Journey Into Day

She wrote about Dostoevsky, but the words have always reminded me of John Lennon. We only know a small part of what really has happened to him in the years since he met Yoko Ono in 1966 at the Indica Gallery in London. The details belong to John Lennon alone. But we know how the other Beatles stood in judgment ("like a jury") on Yoko. We know how viciously the press in England sneered at them and attacked them. Yoko saw the artist in him: "John is like a frail wind..." But reviewers were already saying that Yoko had ruined his art.

Christ! You know it ain't easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going,
They're going to crucify me.

There was no literal crucifixion, but John moved through everything else: Bed-Ins, peace posters, a phony drug arrest, the acorns planted in the plastic pots in the Coventry Cathedral. He followed Yoko into the rare air of the avante-garde, banging up against Cage and Bartok, undergoing a re-barbarization of his music as if running to some older, purer vision he had of himself, created in the loneliness of the Liverpool art school when he was convinced he was a genius. Bagism, Shagism, Rubin and Hoffman, acid and anger; the marriage in Gibraltar, seventeen stitches in a car crash in Scotland, the MBE handed back to the Queen, the Plastic Ono Band, his hair long, his hair short, the neat, precise features wearing a series of masks, his life with Yoko a series of public events. Working Class Hero. Some Time in New York City. Power to the People. And ever deeper into America: into its crazed, filthy Nixonian heart and the immigration case, and that form of the Higher Paranoia that comes because you are a victim in a time when all the other victims have proof and you have none.

"All we are saying..."

It was a long way from Chuck Berry.

Until finally people started to write him off. His records were selling but it wasn't like the Beatles, it wasn't even like the other ex-Beatles. John wasn't the one Who Had Gone Too Far.

A year ago, he and Yoko split up and some people cheered. We live in strange times.

And then, as if from nowhere, came Walls and Bridges. John had a big hit single with "Whatever Gets You thru the Night." And the music was wonderful: full of invention, tenderness, remorse, more personal than anything he had written before; the music clearly showing the effects of his time with Yoko. More than anything else, though, the songs were essays in autobiography, the words and music of a man trying to understand a huge part of his life. "I've been across to the other side/I've shown you everything, I've got nothing to hide..."

What follows is a result of two long talks with John Lennon at the end of a difficult year. As an interview, it is far from definitive, but nothing will ever be definitive in John Lennon's life: He is the sort of artist, like the aforementioned Picasso, who is always in the process of becoming. I think of this as kind of interim report from one of the bravest human beings I know. Oh yes: He looked happy.

What's your life like right now?

Well...Life: It's '75 now, isn't it? Well, I've just settled the Beatles settlement. It must've happened in the last month. Took three years. (pause) And on this day that you've come here, I seem to have moved back in here. In the last three days. By the time this goes out, I don't know...That's a big change. Maybe that's why I'm sleeping funny. As a friend says, I went out for coffee and some papers and I didn't come back. (chuckles) Or vice versa: It's always written that way, y'know. All of us. You know, the guy walked. It's never that simple.