Saturday, November 14, 2015

My hero / John Lennon by Kevin Barry

John Lennon

My hero: John Lennon by Ken Barry


For great artists time is unfixed, and they can tune into the essences of other eras. I came to see John as a kind of Edwardian type – he’s the Melancholy Dandy

 Saturday 14 November 2015

I
f there is a way in through the veins of a song, it may be with “Gimme Some Truth”, a headlong rant against the uptight and the narrow-minded, against the egocentric and the paranoiac, but here, as in all of John Lennon’s very best work, there is a simple, radical truth underpinning the barbed words and the bitter incantation – it doesn’t have to be this way, and we can be who we want to be.

To try and get his voice on to the page of Beatlebone was difficult because the reader brings an expectation of what he should sound like, but also because that voice is so capricious. Lennon could go from fluffy to spiky in the course of half a sentence; his humour lurched always into the surreal; he was an obsessive about the future but locked forever in the past. A method I found useful was to try to imagine him before the great and unprecedented maelstrom of fame and attention raised up its whirling forces. Who was he back then? He was a 17-year-old art college kid in Liverpool. He was maybe a bit shouty down at Ye Cracke, his boozer, sometimes. The first of the famous photographs come from this time and he’s pretty sharp, bequiffed and leather-jacketed, though with perhaps the remnants of a teenage pudginess about the chops still. He knows how to stare down the camera. It looks very 1950s, of course, but there is something older there, too. For great artists, always, I believe, time is unfixed, and they can tune at will into the essences of other eras, and somehow I came to see John as a kind of Edwardian type – he’s the Melancholy Dandy. He clarified a little for me in this light.
Soon there will be all of the fame, and the making of a new iconography, and the words and the music that he will bring to us will be rich and will cut deep, will be sometimes lyrical and sometimes thorny, but almost always beautiful.
• Kevin Barry won the Goldsmiths prize for his novel Beatlebone.

THE GUARDIAN






2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016




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