Author: Serene Sargent

I make beautiful jewelry and try to read everything on the US Civil War and Reconstruction that comes out, (thereby knowing many smart people.) I know a bit of law, care about Beatles historiography and love the Nagras. Jane Austen whispered her Emma secrets to me across many miles and 200 years. ✨ My father was Bill Sargent who produced The TAMI Show. #DYRBRY

We find ourselves at a crossroads: The Mark Lewisohn Disaster

The only way to preserve Beatles history—but more importantly, the only way to uncover that history in the first place—is to make it accessible. Universal. Free. The more it is shared, the more it is preserved. That is the only thing that ensures its survival. Knowledge monopolized is knowledge doomed to perish.

A TENDENCY TO FABRICATE HISTORY

Everything that Alex Haley did in a single quote, Mark Lewisohn does on page after page. And both seem to fall prey to the same Satan: wanting to end with a bang. And why the last line of Tune In—asserted as a John Lennon quote—is a Lewisohn Original.

Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen

“…even if the pangs of outraged vanity, or the heat of moral wrath, urged us to improve away a world so full of spite, pettiness, and folly, the task is beyond our powers. … No touch of pettiness, no hint of spite, rouse us from our contemplation. Delight strangely mingles with our amusement. Beauty illumines these fools.”

DESIGNING LEWISOHN: Where was Paul when John needed him? Who could know?

Mrs. Harrison is saying that she sent George to get John out of his house so they could all play together “in their group.” Not, where was Paul? “It could be they didn’t see much of each other”—but could it? It could be that Paul went ice skating in Sweden, EXCEPT HE FUCKING DIDN’T. Why are you lying to me in legalese in a Beatles biography?

DELUSIONAL LEWISOHN

The confidence with which Lewisohn recounts a series of events that only shows beyond all doubt that “the extraordinary story” he’s about to convey was not “unearthed,” but concocted—or dreamed—while clearly expecting the listener to see how it fits together and proves his narrative seems inexplicable to me by anything but delusion. Or if there is a rational explanation, it lies beyond my earthbound grasp.

A basic Lewisohn fabrication: add a coke, a few requests, and shove a retrospective opinion into Paul McCartney’s mouth (Ch 20-Footnote 18)

While perhaps not a murder, this rewrite is still a felony and shows many of the hallmarks of both Lewisohn’s worst as well as his more seemingly-innocuous butcheries. Specifically, they usually begin or end with a wholly invented line that Lewisohn uses as a thesis statement. And they all show an unbelievable disregard for truth and a license to insert and represent his own words as those of a historical figure that cannot fail to shock the conscience of a scholar.

Lewisohn literally ends ‘Tune In’ with a fabricated John Lennon quote

Okay, I admit that ‘it was just a matter of time before everybody else caught on’ is a much more satisfying end to John’s thought and definitely a better closing line to the book than ‘you play me those tracks and I want to remake every damn one of them,’ but that doesn’t mean you just get to make up a better line and pretend John said it.