Author: Serene Sargent

I make 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, the Pay Per View Beatles guy. #DYRBRY

A brief assortment

Paul McCartney’s Cavern quote, sourced to Melody Maker in Tune In. (20-18) This Cavern quote looks like either a Frankenquote or a fully mistaken citation instead of a fabrication. Mea culpa. I have learned my lesson about limbs and crawling out on them going forward, but despite my misclassification, it was based on an accurate…

Read More

A TENDENCY TO FABRICATE HISTORY

The reason all historical associations put so much emphasis on historians being transparent is that they fully comprehend the power of the inherent trust—“the implicit assumption of honesty”—that we are forced to place in a historian. We have to trust that a relator of history is representing sources honestly and transparently because if readers cannot take that on faith historians cease to have value. The discipline of relating history collapses if we cannot trust The Historian.

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.