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John, Paul, George and Ringo . . . and Lewis
15 June 2006For a young American reporter looking for an overseas assignment in early 1968, Vietnam would have been a logical destination.
The war was about to turn worse for the US and, as Lewis Lapham asks in this extraordinary little memoir: "Where else do journalists forage for the news if not in the deserts of misfortune?" Instead, he was despatched by the Saturday Evening Post in New York to the "mountains of infinite bliss" - the foothills of the Himalayas, to be precise -
to spend time with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guru of transcendental meditation, and his newest, very famous disciples, The Beatles.
This tiny book - about the size of a CD case and only 110 pages long - is a reprint of Lapham's newspaper essays on the experience.
Twenty pages of grainy photographs capture the weirdness of it all (Beach Boy Mike Love, folky Donovan Leitch and actresses Mia Farrow and Jane Asher were also present), as everyone apparently tried hard to look suitably serene.
An act of vanity or publishing suicide?
Not at all. As the only reporter to be admitted to the inner sanctum
of the Maharishi's ashram, the author is not only an eyewitness to oddball history, but also a keen observer of the Western spiritual hunger that had probably peaked in the previous year's "Summer of Love" and was now about to crash and burn in the Tet Offensive, Nixon's murderous foreign policy and the eventual break-up and disillusionment of the fab four themselves (although they did get much of The White Album out of their Indian retreat).
And Lapham can write almost as well as Lennon and McCartney could compose. A long- serving editor of Harper's Magazine, he is a wise and gifted social and political commentator, whose talents must have been obvious to his own editor back in 1968, too. The America he documents so deftly, and, once inside the compound, the picture he draws so economically of the pop stars searching for transcendental enlightenment, combine to wonderful effect.
Neither sentimental nor cynical, With the Beatles is like a great pop song: irresistable, uplifting and just the right length.
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