21 Early Days
Childhood obsessions and the elusive 'Looking Glass' (1957/9?).
“I used to live Alice” - John Lennon.
In the Beatles’ output it’s the ‘golden’ years of 1967 & 1968 — the height of psychedelia — that see the most overt Alice songs, from ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ on Sgt Pepper to Magical Mystery Tour’s ‘I Am The Walrus’ and onto ‘Cry Baby Cry’ from The White Album, which we covered last week.
No doubt about it, this is their peak Alice period.
But as we’ve been showing each week on Alice & The Eggmen, it doesn’t end there and it certainly doesn’t start there either. Although, as we’ve seen, Paul was also a big Carroll devotee — and he and John were in the habit of trading Alice quotes as casually as trading cigarettes — for John Lennon, Lewis Carroll really was a life-long obsession.
And it started early: according to Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn, John was “given Carroll’s books as birthday presents aged 7 or 8 (probably by Aunt Mimi) and read them over and over”.1 Here they are in outside Mendips, Mimi’s house at 251 Menlove Avenue in Liverpool.
John was an all-round artist and wrote and drew constantly. As he himself remembers: “I was passionate about Alice in Wonderland and drew all the characters. I did poems in the style of ‘Jabberwocky’. I used to live Alice”.2
Lewisohn comments that John “feasted” on Carroll “every few months and had folded Lewis Carroll’s vocabulary into his own”.3 And part of John’s creative output at school was a satirical / surreal magazine he produced and that got handed round the teachers too, called The Daily Howl. There are definite traces of Carrollian imagery and language, from the Tweedle-like Tony Curtis twins…
…to some of those Jabberwocky-infused poems he mentioned, like this, ‘The Land of Lunapots’, with its mention of a “twillig thud” (“brillig”, anyone….?).
Alice wasn’t just inspirational, a mental wonderland where John could indulge his fantasy brain, it was aspirational: “I always set out to write a children’s book, I always wanted to write Alice in Wonderland”.4 The aspiration was to escape: “when I was fifteen I was thinking, ‘If only I can get out of Liverpool and be famous and rich, wouldn’t it be great”.
Later, during Beatlemania, John would constantly “admit” to his love of Lewis Carroll, as well as artists like Ronald Searle, and his beloved Goons.
"Oh, Lewis Carroll. I always admit to that because I love 'Alice In Wonderland' and 'Alice Through The Looking Glass' […] And I usually read those two about once a year, because I still like them.”5
And again: "my main influences for writing were always Lewis Carroll and The Goon Show, a combination of that."6
or "you know, I was determined to be Lewis Carroll (giggles) with a hint of Ronald Searle."
To say that Carroll, and Through The Looking-Glass, was John’s primary literary influence, is an understatement, and as we’ve seen, looking-glass language shows up time and again:
“looking-glass ties” (‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’)
“Looking through a glass onion” (‘Glass Onion’)
“Through the mirror go round round” (‘#9 Dream’)
It’s also there in Paul’s ‘I’m looking through you’ as well as in the multiple Magritte mirrors in his album art and promo materials. Paul’s schooling was equally literary and he often said that being an English teacher would have been his plan B.
Now it so happens that my first school recitation when I got to secondary school was ‘Jabberwocky’ (easy enough to remember, weird enough to impress). But I didn’t recite it in Latin. One of Paul’s teachers did.
As Paul recalls in Barry Miles’ biography:
‘I had a teacher at school, a swotty guy called Dodd, who could recite 'Jabberwocky’ in Latin. One of the less useful things in life…’
Which brings us to one of my more recent discoveries, an early instrumental, probably from 1959, though it could be earlier, entitled….wait for it… ‘Looking Glass’.
While no recording has surfaced — yet — it’s listed in McCartney’s letter of 1960 to potential promoters, in which he lists it as one of the group’s original compositions.
Dear Mr Low,
I am sorry about the time I have taken to write to you, but I hope I have not left it too late. Here are some details about the group. It consists of four boys: Paul McCartney (guitar), John Lennon (guitar), Stuart Sutcliffe (bass) and George Harrison (another guitar) and is called…
This line-up may at first seem dull but it must be appreciated that as the boys have above average instrumental ability they achieve surprisingly varied effects. Their basic beat is off-beat, but this has recently tended to be accompanied by a faint on-beat; thus the overall sound is rather reminiscent of the four in the bar of traditional jazz. This could possibly be put down to the influence of Mr McCartney [Senior], who led one of the top local jazz bands (Jim Mac’s Jazz Band) in the 1920s.
Modern music, however, is the group’s delight, and, as if to prove the point, John and Paul have written over fifty tunes, ballads and faster numbers, during the last three years. Some of these tunes are purely instrumental (such as “Looking Glass”, “Catswalk” and “Winston’s Walk”) and others were composed with the modern audience in mind (tunes like “Thinking Of Linking”, “The One After 909”, “Years Roll Along” and “Keep Looking That Way”).
The group also derive a great deal of pleasure from rearranging old favourites (“Ain’t She Sweet”, “You Were Meant For Me”, “Home”, “Moonglow”, “You Are My Sunshine” and others).
Now for a few details about the boys themselves. John, who leads the group, attends the College of Art, and, as well as being an accomplished guitarist and banjo player, he is an experienced cartoonist. His many interests include painting, the theatre, poetry, and, of course, singing. He is 19 years old and is a founder member of the group.
Paul is 18 years old and is reading English Literature at Liverpool University. He, like the other boys, plays more than one instrument – his specialities being the piano and drums, plus, of course…
[surviving text ends here]
Although Paul’s had a penchant for instrumentals, ‘Looking Glass’ is just as likely to be by John, a fact that an exchange during the Get Back sessions implies.
On January 24, 1969, McCartney at the end of a run-through of the early song ‘Hot As Sun’ (which will show up on McCartney), Paul turns to John to ask how “how did Looking Glass go”. Lennon replies that he has no idea – but the fact that McCartney didn’t know it, especially given Paul’s incredible musical memory, suggests it’s a Lennon creation.
Have a listen for yourselves:
It’s intriguing to say the least.
Of the other early songs we can also cite ‘Love Me Do’, which I think it’s fair to see as yet another instance of Lennon & McCartney using Carroll-era language to create lyrical intrigue. The refrain contains echoes — to these ears — of a 19th Century use of “do” as emphasis which crops dozens of times in the Alice books. Just to list a few:
“Mouse dear! Do come back again”
“Oh, Kitty, do help to settle it!”
“Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone.”
“Now do try, there’s a dear!”
And, at the risk of repeating myself, ‘I’ll get you’, from 1963 and the B-side of ‘She Loves You’, opens with the word ‘Imagine’, one of the pair’s repeated Carrollian ‘moves’ — identified as such by Paul — an invitation to creative visualisation, to “picture yourself”, to imagination.
Words and images, smuggled into mop-top songs, not yet fully-fledged Alice narratives, Carroll is nonetheless there, beneath the surface, waiting for an opportunity to come into the light.
Hunter Davies, The Authorised Biography
Lewisohn, Tune In, 2013, p3.
The Beatles, Anthology.