GIMME SOME TRUTH: THE JOHN LENNON FBI FILES
by Jon Wiener
(University of California Press) $17.95

It’s well known that the Nixon administration considered John Lennon a troublesome
fellow. The FBI placed him under surveillance in 1971 after he appeared at a
rally for John Sinclair, manager of the MC5, who’d been imprisoned for selling
marijuana. When it was learned that Lennon and friends were planning a concert
tour to drum up anti-Nixon support during the 1972 election year, Senator Strom
Thurmond forwarded a memo to the White House suggesting “if Lennon’s visa is
terminated it would be a… countermeasure.” Thus began Lennon’s immigration
woes, a battle ultimately won in 1976.

For most people, that’s where the story ends — but it’s just the forward
to Jon Wiener’s Gimme Some Truth. Wiener filed a Freedom of Information
Act request for Lennon’s files in 1981, when he was working on his Lennon bio,
Come Together. Come Together was finally published in 1984, by
which time Wiener’s request had mushroomed into an Orwellian odyssey of its
own. The FBI withheld 70 percent of the Lennon files, claiming their release
would threaten personal privacy, confidential source information, and “national
security” (10 documents are still being withheld). The ACLU argues the real
reason for the FBI’s withholding of documents is that they’d reveal illegal
— or embarrassing — activities by the Bureau.

This is supported by the documents reproduced in the book, in both censored
and uncensored versions. One withheld document simply contains lyrics to Lennon’s
song “John Sinclair,” lyrics publicly available since 1972. The ACLU also contended
the FBI had no legitimate reason for investigating Lennon; a document describing
plans for a peace rally was withheld for reasons of confidentiality, but, as
Wiener notes, such rallies are constitutionally protected forms of dissent.
But the hands-down favorite is the FBI’s eye for detail in a document noting
that an activist’s parrot “interjects ‘Right On’ whenever the conversation gets
rousing.”

Familiar names pop up throughout the story; when the case makes it to the
Supreme Court, it’s Ken Starr who argues the case for the government. But Gimme
Some Truth is less Lennon’s story than it is a scathing indictment of the
lengths the government will go to in order to justify their blatant disregard
of the laws they are supposedly bound to uphold. GILLIAN G. GAAR

 

GETTING NAKED WITH HARRY CREWS: INTERVIEWS
edited by Erik Bledsoe
(University Press of Florida) $24.95

A writer who owed his reputation as much to his hellraising, dangerous approach
to life as his caustic, hilarious, freak-filled Southern fiction, Harry Crews
has always been a fascinating subject. Fellow Southerner Erik Bledsoe has compiled
26 interviews that span his career from 1972 (after he’d already published five
novels in five years) to 1998 (when his 23rd and last book, the superb retirement
comedy Celebration, was published).

Although he has gained more favor in the last dozen years, being heralded
by the likes of Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller, Crews has remained an outcast
among various groups of people: George Plimpton wouldn’t run an interview with
Crews in the Paris Review because he did not appreciate Crews’ “rough”
sort of fiction; fellow instructors at the University of Florida avoided him
due to his gruff attitude, late-night drinking with students, tattoos, and Mohawk;
and when Crews returned to Georgia to visit after his first books were published,
his own mother expressed amazement that people would pay him to “write something
that wasn’t true.”

The interviews in Getting Naked run the gamut. The earliest are informative
and well-mannered, with Crews actually seeming slightly appreciative and humble
(his self-critiques often ring true). After A Childhood came out in 1978,
Crews found that the spiritual and psychological toll of writing about his tragic
childhood drove him to alcoholism, drug abuse, and numerous bar fights. Crews
did not publish another novel until 1987.

His impatience is evident during this time. When Tom Graves mentions blood
sports, Crews (talking about an article he wrote on dogfighting) says, “This
article is no defense of it. Rather it is an effort to see whether we tell the
truth rather than being hypocritical, hippy-dippy, bullshitting jack-offs about
it.” Later, when Graves asks him about his use of allegory, Crews goes off:
“The greatest saints were some of our greatest sinners, cheaters, fuckers of
ladies, dicers, you name it. St. Paul, who was on the road to Damascus, was
a real son of a bitch.” In another interview, Crews gives a lesson on how not
to be a family man: “They send you out for a loaf of bread, and you come back
three days later all beat and broken up and full of vomit. They naturally don’t
like that.”

By 1991, our cranky old man is getting cleaned up as he tells of going on
the wagon, not eating meat, and even practicing yoga. In a 1996 interview, however,
it seems Harry’s back on the drink and frisky as ever, telling us how to shoot
Dilaudid.

Getting Naked with Harry Crews isn’t constantly as engaging or weird
as his books, but as a document on the ups and downs of an American writer who
went from eating dirt on a Georgia farm to being the bad boy of Southern literature,
it’s a keeper. KEVIN SAMPSELL