“Their friendship was a romance: passionate, tender and tempestuous, full of longing, riven by jealousy.” No, I’m not referring to Trump and Bibi. It’s Ian Leslie’s take on McCartney and Lennon. Dominic Green returns to the Weekend Beacon with a review of John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs.
“Bound by ambition as well as love, John and Paul applied their shared subjectivity to their task. They would ‘strum and chatter in a dreamy, seemingly aimless state until the germ of an idea emerged, at which point they went to work.’ … They began ‘She Loves You’ on the bus in June 1963 and completed it that night after the show, in a ‘twin-bed hotel room in Newcastle.’ They had come across Existentialists in Hamburg, and Paul had the idea of a movie-type song in which the protagonist was not a lover but the third wheel; Truffaut’s Jules et Jim had been released in Britain a month earlier. ‘She Loves You’ is a boy-girl song, but it’s also a boy-boy song. Paul’s male protagonist is telling his male friend that he is loved and should be glad.
“‘The narrator presents himself as a detached and rational friend but is more deeply invested in this triangular story than he knows,’ Leslie writes. ‘”She Loves You” secretly wants you to notice how much I love you.’ Later, when John was falling in love with Yoko, Paul would use the same device on ‘Hey Jude,’ and tell his male friend to cheer up and ‘go out and get her.’ Both lyrics mask their emotional complexity in near-nonsensical affirmation (‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ and ‘Na, na na, na-na na-na’). But by ‘Hey Jude,’ the romance of John and Paul had curdled.
“After 1966, John and Paul resemble René Magritte’s ‘The Lovers II’ (1928). They kiss with their heads entirely veiled. They are deeply intimate and thoroughly depersonalized. In Leslie’s telling, John’s belligerence and insecurity stemmed from jealousy of Paul’s swelling talent. This was compounded by John’s massive ingestion of LSD and his musical limitations, and by Paul’s convenient belief that producing industrial quantities of the best possible music would not imbalance the founding pact that John, who was a bit older and much louder, was the leader.
“Both of them felt their loss and could not fully describe it. The recent Get Back documentary shows the pair running through ‘Two of Us.’ Paul has said that he came up with the idea while driving around the countryside with Linda, who was pregnant with their first child. But the lyric is an elegy. As Paul admitted later, the song is ‘more about trying to get in touch with the people we once were.’ Paul and Linda, Leslie notes, did not have ‘memories / Longer than the road that stretches out ahead.’ That was Paul and John. It was also Paul and John who had stood ‘wearing raincoats … solo in the sun,’ at the bus stop in Penny Lane, and who were ‘chasing paper’ with the lawyers as the band fell apart.”
Meanwhile, back in the USSR, secret agents were being trained to live abroad. Sean Durns explains in his review of The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker.
“Many of these spies would spend decades under their assumed identities and names, their neighbors, coworkers, friends, and in some cases, spouses, none the wiser. For those in the United States and elsewhere, it is an almost surreal level of commitment to contemplate. A religious-like devotion to communism and Russia were prerequisites. As George Blake, the British KGB agent and infamous turncoat, once bragged, ‘Only an intelligence service which works for a great cause can ask for such a sacrifice from its officers.’
“Russia painstakingly engineered their backstories, referred to as legends, before employing them against her enemies. It often took years for these men and women to be ready for deployment on the intelligence battlefield.”
“Illegals working in the United States faced significant hurdles. They were often forced to adopt working-class trades, their prior educational backgrounds and certificates of little use. Consequently, many illegals had trouble penetrating the elite institutions the center had in its sights. As Walker implies, for all of the crucial work in building and maintaining their cover, the illegals operating in the United States often produced comparatively little that justified the center’s investment. In fact, the program’s greatest feats were often outside of America’s borders. For example, illegals were key to Operation PROGRESS, the Soviet effort to penetrate and discredit counterrevolutionary groups in communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s.
“The illegals program was costly in other ways too. Living a life built on lies, and destroying lives in the process, eventually consumed many spies. Not a few succumbed to depression, drink, and divorce, ultimately broken by a job underpinned by betrayal and paranoia. Even the most capable couldn’t go on forever.”
On an unrelated note, Temple Cone makes his Weekend Beacon debut with a review of I Am the Arrow: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems by Sarah Ruden.
“Drawing on her classicism, Ruden connects Plath to earlier poetic traditions, including Metaphysical poets like Donne and Herbert in the way that she brings together ‘outrageous opposites with an artistic result that transcended, almost to annihilation, the things themselves.’ She identifies formal echoes of Sappho in Plath’s use of truncated lines, which signal ‘that words fail the poet at the end of each unit of thought or memory: emotion is too strong, an impression too powerful.’ And Ruden’s study of Plath’s misuse of the Roman “toga” to describe the robes of a Greek figure in “Edge” is masterful in its historical nuance.
“Ruden … acknowledges the challenges in Plath’s life, including her father’s early death, her mother’s perfectionism, and her abusive marriage to Ted Hughes. But she rejects the ‘Ariel legend’—the narrative, meticulously cultivated by Hughes as executor of her estate, that depicted Plath’s ‘pathology’ as sweeping her ‘beyond her marriage, beyond all human help, and into witchy heights of infuriated genius consubstantial with suicide.’ Ever the even-handed interpreter, Ruden notes that while both poets might have rewritten their accounts of the marriage, Hughes had a good 35 years longer than Plath to perfect his revision.
“No hagiographer, Ruden willingly takes shots at Plath’s excesses, noting that many of her poems ‘are sometimes tiring to read, full of too many portentous stunts.’ She acknowledges that Plath ‘could not notice the weather without rehearsing metaphors, [and] she abused Roget’s Thesaurus like a drug.’ And in reference to Plath’s brief experience as an au pair in ‘The Babysitters,’ Ruden notes that the fussy boy who made Plath match his socks with his jersey ‘was interviewed as an adult and pronounced on Plath’s shortcomings as an underling.’ Yet these criticisms humanize rather than diminish Plath, who emerges as neither angel nor demon but as a driven artist whose linguistic compulsions were both weakness and strength.
“Perhaps the book’s most unexpected insight is its emphasis on Plath’s humor. Ruden regularly compares Plath’s jarring juxtapositions to Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations—particularly in ‘The Applicant,’ with its pitch-perfect ‘mimicry of salesman patter.’ This revelation exposes how ideological readings flatten complex works. The progressive narrative needs Plath as a tragic victim, not as a mordant satirist, so crucial dimensions of her art have often been ignored. Ruden restores these dimensions, allowing us to appreciate Plath’s full range as an artist rather than as a political symbol.”
See? No gaslighting here!
Happy Sunday.
Vic Matus
Arts & Culture Editor
Washington Free Beacon
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