Last Undercover

December 1980, Rolling Stone/Unpublished

“Undercover” ran in Rolling Stone from 1975 through 1980.

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One learns many things as a practicing book critic.  One learns, for example, never to use the term “quite simply” (as in, “Quite simply, this is the best novel in the history of Western Civilization”). One also learns that the book reviewing media are, if anything, less reliable than the record reviewing media. I used to tell people, as a joke, that I was the only book reviewer they could trust. There came moments—as when, one time too many, an author’s good friend wrote fulsomely of the author’s new book in the pages of the New York Times Book Review without ever suggesting to the reader that anything was at stake but the greater good of literature—when I began to believe it was not a joke at all.

Writing from Berkeley, with almost no contact with publishers, publicists, publication parties, other reviewers or literary cliques, I saw New York publishing as far more invidiously bound up in hype than the record business. Assuming a book is not plainly beyond the pale (assuming, say, it is not a Gothic romance or a Western), big ads can guarantee prominent reviews. What is more, or worse, a high promotional budget can almost guarantee that a book will be treated with respect. It may be questioned, it may even be panned, but it will not be dismissed out of hand. How else to explain the reaction to Clan of the Cavebear, a big lump of a Roots-style novel (Roots for everyone, since it’s about the emergence of modern humans) that has been reviewed from here to there as a serious book, and which is now high on the best-seller lists—just as, months ago, its publisher promised (not predicted) it would be?

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Though I don’t believe half the people who wrote about this book read more than half of it, no one has called fraud.  Instead, one reads that while the writing may have its weaknesses as fiction (it is, after all, the author’s first book), the anthropology (she spent years in the library, even learned wilderness survival skills as part of her research) more than makes up for that—or, conversely, that while the anthropology may be a bit fanciful, the writing is so gripping only a pedant could quibble. The self-fulfilling prophecy is a good part of a debacle like this one: when galleys circulate for months before a book is published, along with “100,000 copy first printing, Book-of-the-Month-Club Alternate Selection, $100,000 ad budget, major author tour” press releases, book review editors start saving space—their bosses, the arts editors of newspapers and news magazines, don’t want to be left behind. If the review editors of the major publications dealing with rock & roll received a hype like that for an unknown group, they would respond with suspicion—or they would laugh.

In the same way, well-known, respected authors, especially novelists, get a free ride from book critics that respected rock & rollers do not get from rock critics. There may be more illiterate raving and more mindless adulation in rock criticism than in book criticism, but there’s also a keener focus, less sense that criticism is mere housekeeping. The review will not be passive: the critic will judge the record on his or her terms, not on the artist’s.

The better rock critics care more than the better book critics, possibly because they’re still inventing the form and because the music itself is still taking form. Betrayal figures heavily in rock criticism—one reads all the time of the artist’s betrayal of his or her talent, or of the audience. Such a notion is foreign to most book reviewing: when was the last time a major newspaper or magazine made the case that Saul Bellow or John Updike or William Styron was nothing more than the product of the need of a few people to have a great writer to celebrate? Would it hurt terribly to suggest—let alone claim—that while Philip Roth writes beautifully, he really has nothing to say? Would the New York Times lose a lot of advertising if it allowed a critic to argue that television has done less damage to literacy than Kurt Vonnegut?  Uh-huh.

In the last five years, I’ve worked on the assumption that Rolling Stone has at least—wild guess—20,000 readers interested in anything, and I’ve written accordingly. In 112 columns that dealt with 332 books (not counting The Dead Cat, which I made up), I’ve felt free to devote twenty-five words to books most critics canonize and thousands of words to books a lot of reviewers never saw. Never once has an editor demanded I review a book; never once has a piece been killed. All I’ve been asked for are an opinion and an argument.

I value the freedom I’ve had at Rolling Stone greatly, and I’m sorry to give it up—but I have a book of my own to write, so “Undercover” will, for a long time being, cease with this issue. I hope to be back in these pages occasionally when the moment calls for it.

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“Never once has a piece been killed.” But this farewell column never ran. The issue in which it was supposed to appear was ripped up at the last minute because of the murder of John Lennon. For that I wrote the following piece instead. And after that there seemed no point.

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Life and Life Only

To hear that John Lennon had been murdered by a fan, that he had been killed for who and what he was, was like watching someone you love being hit by a car. The mind struggles with the contradiction between concrete fact and disbelief, fights off the normal progression of time—stops time, trying to unmake the event. The mind turns the fact over and over, testing the words that convey the fact in order to see if the words really mean what they say.

One reads that the shooting of John Lennon is just one more example of an anonymous nobody seeking notoriety by knock­ing off a celebrity, but not only does this not seem to have been Mark Chapman's motive, there do not seem to be any other examples. I don't think there are any precedents for the mur­der of a public figure by a person who was tied to his victim strictly through the roles both played as members of a popular culture. Because this has never happened before, we have to ask two questions: why John Lennon, and why now?

The Beatles and their fans played out an image of utopia, of a good life, and the image was that one could join a group and by doing so not lose one's identity as an individual but find it: find one's own voice. This was an image of utopia that could encompass every desire for love, family, friendship, or com­radeship; while the Beatles were the Beatles, this image in­formed love affairs and it informed politics. It shaped one's sense of possibility and loss, of the worth of things.

At the heart of this cheeky, joyful, shiny utopia was roman­ticism: the best account of pop hopes and dreams anyone had ever heard. But that utopia was grounded—by John Lennon—in wit, worry, contingency, doubt, and struggle. John Lennon was part of the pleasure principle of the Beatles; no one who heard him sing "Eight Days a Week" could miss that. But he was also the reality principle of the Beatles, and that is why so many became obsessed with him. If the Beatles were a common adventure, John Lennon was its point man and its center. It was John Lennon who was never satisfied with pop rewards, who kept questions open and alive while the Beatles continued—What is the group for? What can it do? When must it be abandoned?—and it was John Lennon who, once the Beatles ended, sustained the struggle over an image of utopia. He broke that image in "God," but a new image of utopia, of what it might mean to live a good life, to discover what a good life is, was formed in the impossibly beautiful way he sang the last few lines of that song: the way he sang, "I was . . . ," the way he sang, ". . . but now."

Whatever else John Lennon was after that, he was never again a pop star. Far more than Paul, George, or even down-to-earth Ringo, John Lennon made himself real. Far more than they or anyone else in post-Beatle culture, he communicated the truth that some image of utopia was necessary—be it the utopia of the great, Brontean passion he pursued with his wife or the utopia of a song in which he said exactly what he meant and was understood. This image of utopia was not solipsistic. Out of reach and all the more precious for that, it always as­sumed the existence of other people, depended on their pres­ence, be they Yoko Ono, or you, me, or Mark Chapman—and because of the way John had sung "Anytime at All," "There's a Place," "Money," "In My Life," or "Don't Let Me Down," and because of the way he went on to sing "God," "Well Well Well," "Oh Yoko," "Stand by Me," or "Just Because," it never quite lost its force. That is why it was John Lennon who was shot, and not one of the celebrities now checking out the bodyguard services.

Why now? Well, that is trickier. Yes, Mark Chapman seems to have snapped. Yes, after five years John Lennon was speak­ing to an audience again, trying to find out what he had to say to it and what it had to say to him. Neither fact addresses the overriding truth that nothing like Lennon's killing has hap­pened before. What does address it, I think, is the radical change in the nature of public discourse in the United States over the past year.

The secret message behind the election of Ronald Reagan on November 4th was that some people belong in this country, and some people don't; that some people are worthy, and some are worthless; that certain opinions are sanctified, and some are evil; and that, with the blessing of God, God's messengers will separate the one from the other. It is as if the Puritans have reached across three hundred years of American history to re­claim the society they once founded—accepting the worst vul­garization of their beliefs if it means that, once again, God and his servants will be able to look upon America and tell the elect from the reprobate, the redeemed from the damned.

Such a message likely did not, in any logical manner, inspire Mark Chapman. But such a message, which tells people they are innocent and others are to blame, can attach a private mad­ness to its public justification. It can inform love affairs and it can inform politics. If Klansmen and Nazis had the right to kill Communists in Greensboro, and a jury said they did, then on a certain moral level you and I and Mark Chapman have the right to kill whoever it is that troubles our lives. I think this is why this unprecedented event has occurred now, and not be­fore.

As critic Jim Miller has written, rock 'n' roll works as com­mon experience and private obsession. The two cannot really be separated; indeed, one fuels the other. I have my own rea­sons for caring about John Lennon—a song, or a moment in Help!, that may never have affected you—but you have rea­sons that are fundamentally the same, and that is why it was other people's reactions to John Lennon's murder that produced in me the most overwhelming despair. To open the door and find a friend whose eyes were red; to see a man going about his business and then to catch the strip of black cloth around his arm; to walk into a friend's store and notice the picture of John Lennon she had placed behind the counter—those were the things that did it, that made the last sixteen years collapse on my head as if now it was time to pay for every moment of pleasure, affection, and friendship they had contained.

Four days after John Lennon was shot, when I woke up to find Beatle music off the radio and the story off the front page, that process by which the mind struggles with a fact it will not accept was still working. I scanned the front page again, to see if I'd missed anything; I ran the radio dial across the stations. Nothing. Does this mean, I thought, that it's over? That he's not dead anymore?

- Rolling Stone, January 22, 1981

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