John Lennon and 'I Am The Walrus'

“Decius: This by Calphurnia’s dream is signified. 

Caesar: And this way have you well expounded it.”

-            ‘Julius Caesar’, 2.2.95

 

““But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.””

- ‘Through the Looking-Glass’, ch.6

                     "That ignorance and haste may mourn the dead,

                       It is believing, it is believing."

                      - 'Tomorrow Never Knows'

1966

Illustration to 'The Walrus & the Carpenter', John Tenniel, 1871.

  

The Beatles get into one’s bones. They are a permanent latent obsession which circumstances cause to recur.

Recently, I have been listening repeatedly to ‘I Am The Walrus’.  It was released in November, 1967, so after Sgt. Pepper & before the White Album. It is a considerable understatement to say there is a lot going on in this track. In this piece, I don’t want to interpret the song line by line but to suggest some of its themes and sources.

Here are the lyrics:

I am he
As you are he
As you are me
And we are all together

See how they run,
Like pigs from a gun,
See how they fly.
I'm crying.

Sitting on a cornflake,
Waiting for the van to come.
Corporation tee shirt,
Stupid bloody Tuesday
Man, you been a naughty boy,
You let your face grow long.

I am the eggman, (Ooh)
They are the eggmen, (Ooh)
I am the walrus,
Goo goo g' joob.

Mister city p'liceman sitting pretty
Little p'licemen in a row
See how they fly,
Like Lucy in the sky
See how they run
I'm crying.
I'm crying, I'm crying, I'm crying.

Yellow matter custard,
Dripping from a dead dog's eye.
Crabalocker fishwife pornographic priestess,
Boy you been a naughty girl,
You let your knickers down.

I am the eggman, (Ooh)
They are the eggmen, (Ooh)
I am the walrus,
Goo goo g' joob.

Sitting in an English
Garden waiting for the sun.
If the sun don't come,
You get a tan from standing in the English rain.

I am the eggman.
They are the eggmen.
I am the walrus.
Goo goo g' joob g' goo goo g' joob.

Expert texpert choking smokers,
Don't you think the joker laughs at you?
See how they smile,
Like pigs in a sty, see how they snied.
I'm crying.

Semolina pilchard
Climbing up the Eiffel Tower.
Element'ry penguin singing Hare Krishna,
Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.

I am the eggman, (Ooh)
They are the eggmen, (Ooh)
I am the walrus,
Goo goo g' joob..
Goo goo g' joob,
G' goo goo g' joob,
Goo goo g' joob, goo goo g' goo g' goo goo g' joob joob

 

Quarry Bank High School for Boys, school photo, 1957. 3rd row down 3rd from right is John Lennon, 4th from right is Pete Shotton.

The Quarry Men playing at St. Peter's Church in Woolton, July 6 1957. John centre and Pete to his right. This is the occasion Paul McCartney was first introduced to John.

John and Pete in 1967.

Pete Shotton had been Lennon’s friend since their school days together at Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool. He wrote a very interesting memoir called ‘John Lennon: In My Life’. In it he says that John wrote the song to be deliberately hard to interpret. It is worth quoting Shotton’s account of the origins of this song in full:

 

“Songs like ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ caused John and Paul to be hailed not only as their generation’s spokesmen, but also its poet laureates. Though John was naturally pleased and flattered to have his work taken seriously, he often found the critics’ interpretations of his lyrics fell woefully short of the mark. It particularly irked him to see his own songs subjected to the same sort of heavy-handed analysis with which our schoolmasters had ruined his own appreciation of, say, Shakespeare and Keats.

One afternoon, while taking "lucky dips" into the day's sack of fan mail, John, much to both our amusement, chanced to pull out a letter from a student at Quarry Bank. following the usual expressions of adoration, this lad revealed that his literature master was playing Beatles songs in class; after the boys all took turns at analyzing the lyrics, the teacher would weigh in with his own interpretation of what the Beatles were really talking about. (This, of course, was the same institution of leaning whose headmaster had summed up young Lennon's prospects with the words: "This boy is bound to fail.")

John and I howled with laughter over the absurdity of it all. "Pete," he said, "what's the 'Dead Dog's Eye' song we used to sing when we were at Quarry Bank ?" I thought for a moment and it all came back to me:

Yellow matter custard, green slop pie, /All mixed together with a dead dog's eye, /Slap it on a butty, ten foot thick, /Then wash it all down with a cup of cold sick.

"That's it !" said John. "Fantastic !" He found a pen and commenced scribbling: "Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog's eye ..." Such was the genesis of 'I Am The Walrus.' (The Walrus itself was to materialize later, almost literally stepping out of a page in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.)

Inspired by the picture of that Quarry Bank literature master pontificating about the symbolism of Lennon-McCartney, John threw in the most ludicrous images his imagination could conjure. He thought of 'semolina' (an insipid pudding we'd been forced to eat as kids) and 'pilchard' (a sardine we often fed to our cats). "Semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower, ..." John intoned, writing it down with considerable relish.

He turned to me, smiling. "Let the fuckers work that one out, Pete."

- ‘In My Life’, p.124

 

That last quote in authentic Lennon. You can hear him saying it.

Pattie Boyd. I take it this is from 1964 if that's a new copy 'A Hard Day's Night.' Pattie appeared in that film, which is where she met George.

Pattie Boyd in her memoir ‘Wonderful Today’ adds the detail that ‘semolina pilchard’ was a mickey-take of Sergeant Pilcher (p.129 – I have the book but Wikipedia reminded me of this fact. Both Pete and Pattie’s accounts are compatible and not contradictory in my opinion, since Pete simply seems unaware of the Pilcher double-meaning in “semolina pilchard”. Of course there is no reason why "semolina pilchard" can't refer to both Pete and Pattie's explanations.) This makes sense because that was just the kind of transformation John often did, for instance ‘my husband and I’ into ‘my housebound and eyeball’. Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher is well-known to fans of the music of that time as the drug squad officer who seemed determined to bust all the rock stars. Lennon himself was not actually busted until October 1968. However Pilcher was already notorious by the time ‘I Am The Walrus’ was written, because he had conducted the raid against Keith Richards and Mick Jagger at Richards’ house Redlands in February 1967, which resulted in a trial which was a cause célèbre in the early summer that year, among other arrests.

The Revd. C. L. Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll. Self-portrait c.1857.

The Rossetti Family by Lewis Carroll, 1863. Left to right, Dante Gabriel, Christina, Frances (their mother), William Michael.

John Ruskin by Lewis Carroll, 1875.

‘Semolina pilchard’ is not only a typical Lennonism, it is apparently meaningless but does actually mean something. ‘Jabberwocky’ occurs in ‘Through The Looking-Glass’, which as Pete Shotton points out is the source of the Walrus, specifically in the poem ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ which is recited by Tweedledee in Chapter 4, ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee’. ‘Jabberwocky’ is surely lurking about in the background of ‘I Am The Walrus’ because they are both full of words and phrases which don’t at first glance seem to mean anything but really do.

 

“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:/All mimsy were the borogroves,/And the mome raths outgrabe.”

 

Humpty Dumpty explains these words in Chapter 6, for instance Carroll’s portmanteau words, two meanings packed into one word: ‘slithy’ being ‘lithe’ and ‘slimy’; ‘mimsy’ being ‘flimsy’ and ‘miserable’. (It is remarkable to note that Carroll coined the words ‘burble’ and ‘chortle’ in ‘Jabberwocky’.)   Notice that ‘Jabberwocky’ is not just a string or pile of nonsense words, it is nonsense verbs, nouns and adjectives in a grammatical skeleton. We are in a setting, and guided through a sequence of events, however baffling the details. In ‘I Am The Walrus’ the recognisable structure of a song gives the piece coherence as the recognisable structure of a poem does in ‘Jabberwocky’.  As Alice says when she first encounters ‘Jabberwocky’:

 

““It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate—””

-‘Through the Looking-Glass’, ch.1

'The Jabberwock', Tenniel, 1871.

  

Humpty Dumpty and Alice. Tenniel, 1871.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Tenniel, 1871.

                                  

Another side of Tenniel. He was a cartoonist for Punch for many years. Here in 1881 we see him depicting an Irishman as being subhuman and brutish. The maiden that Britannia is sheltering has Hibernia written on her belt. The Irishman has Anarchy on the band of his hat.

Here we see his image of the British response to the Indian Rebellion in 1857, what were in fact our reprisals and atrocities at that time.

‘Through The Looking-Glass’ has several characters from childhood rhymes who come to life, as John makes the Walrus come to life in his song. These memories of childhood rhymes are a theme in the track. There’s the Walrus itself, as I have said. There’s the horrible rhyme Pete Shotton recalled which John condensed to:

“Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye.”

No doubt that the reminder of school days from the Quarry Bank pupil’s letter brought that to John’s mind. Using it is a sarcastic jab at the teachers interpreting Beatles songs. “Expert texpert” is along the same lines, and also a wider hit at critics solemnly interpreting Beatles lyrics.There’s the line ‘pretty little policeman in a row’ which consciously or unconsciously both on John’s part and on the part of contemporary listeners recalls the last line of ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’:

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary,/How does your garden grow ?/ With silver bells, and cockle shells/And pretty maids all in a row.”

Whether John or we are aware of that link, it is quite clearly there.

by William Wallace Denslow, 1901

Similarly, when the backing singers say “Ooompah, ooompah, stick it up your jumper”, that is a childhood rhyme, and I suspect but don’t know that “Everybody’s got one !” is as well, a piece of schoolboy suggestive humour as well as an undeniably true statement.

The “pretty little policemen in a row” links with “semolina pilchard” to make a theme of scornful references to the police.

“Pigs” are referred to twice in 'I Am The Walrus', and occur in ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ in the line “And whether pigs have wings”. Lennon says:

"See how they run/Like pigs from a gun/See how they fly."

i.e. there are traces of the memory of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ in the apparent nonsense of ‘I Am The Walrus’. Note that the sequence they run/gun/fly is later inverted to become they fly/sky/run:

"See how they fly/Like Lucy in the Sky/See how they run."

 ‘See how they smile/Like pigs in a sty/See how they snied’ seems to me to be talking contemptuously about materialistic and envious people - the association of ideas is reinforced by the assonance of smile/sty/snied - as George Harrison does in ‘Piggies’:

“Everywhere there's lots of piggies
Living piggy lives
You can see them out for dinner
With their piggy wives
Clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon.”

“Snied” I think is “snide”, an adjective turned into a verb, meaning – ‘make snide remarks’, ‘think snide thoughts’, ‘behave snidely’. I note that that is a lot of meaning packed into a few words, which is one attribute of poetry. While you hardly need to go to Lewis Carroll to get the commonplace image of humans as pigs, I note that pigs crop up two other times in ‘Through the Looking-Glass’: when Humpty Dumpty is explaining the first stanza of ‘Jabberwocky’ in chapter 6, he says “Well, a ‘rath’ is a sort of green pig.”; and when the guests at Alice’s party in chapter 10 are drinking her health, the description concludes –

 

“. . . and three of them (who looked like kangaroos) scrambled into the dish of roast mutton, and began eagerly licking up the gravy, ‘just like pigs in a trough !’, thought Alice.”

I want to make a few random interpretations. “Man, you been a naughty boy/You let your face grow long” refers to Lennon’s periodic depressive episodes, as in ‘Help!’ and ‘Nowhere Man’. This obviously balances with “Boy, you been a naughty girl/You let your knickers down”, which is Lennon referring to his affairs, his unfaithfulness to Cynthia, as in ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’. The phrase "naughty boy" is in keeping with the context of school days. “Pornographic priestess” I take to be a reference to Yoko. "If the sun don't come you get a tan from standing in the English rain" could be one of the White Queen's six impossible things before breakfast.

“Man you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe” has a trace I believe of the memory of a fight Stuart Sutcliffe got into, which in retrospect has become a part of Beatles lore. This happened in January 1961 at Lathom Hall in Seaforth on Merseyside, a well-known venue for beat groups at the time. Stuart was attacked outside the venue after a gig by a group of Teddy Boys. John and Pete Best went out and rescued him. Stuart was either kicked in the head or had his head thrown against a brick wall. It is not known for certain but this may have contributed to Stuart’s early death in 1962 from a ruptured aneurysm in his brain.

 I make this link because Stuart Sutcliffe, Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe are all depicted in the crowd on the front cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, I’m assuming at John’s instigation, and therefore suggesting that they were linked in his mind. Stuart Sutcliffe is on the 3rd row down, far right: Edgar Allan Poe is in the middle of the top row; and Lewis Carroll is 2nd from left on the 3rd row down. The three faces form a triangle, but this I’m assuming is down to Peter Blake not John Lennon. But John may have made the link subconsciously from his familiarity with this front cover. It may be easier to see on an excerpt from the cover:

Edgar Allan Poe and Stuart Sutcliffe both died prematurely. “Them kicking Edgar Allan Poe” also refers to hostile critics attacking and not realising the worth of who they’re dealing with, as happened to Poe.

 

 

At the end of ‘I Am The Walrus’, John fed in a radio broadcast of ‘King Lear’. How exactly this was done, what John’s intentions were, and whether what is highlighted from this broadcast was done deliberately or left to chance I do not know, nor does it matter for my purposes here. The extracts are from Act 4, scene 6. There are a few stray sentences and then a main block of continuous text:

 

• Oswald. Slave, thou hast slain me. Villain, take my purse.
  If ever thou wilt thrive, bury my body,
  And give the letters which thou find'st about me
  To Edmund Earl of Gloucester. Seek him out
  Upon the British party. O, untimely death! Death!

He dies.

• Edgar. I know thee well. A serviceable villain,
  As duteous to the vices of thy mistress
  As badness would desire.

• Earl of Gloucester. What, is he dead?

• Edgar. Sit you down, father; rest you.

- ‘King Lear’, 4.6.243-252

You can make all this out once you know what it is, but for all the years I listened to the song without knowing what the text was, the three parts which stood out and stand out are:

“O, untimely death !”

“A serviceable villain”

“Sit you down, father; rest you.”

What is remarkable to me is that is there is one phrase which fits John Lennon like few other people, it is “O, untimely death !” The quantity of untimely deaths around Lennon is striking, including of course himself. And not just deaths of any kind, they were also all people who were highly emotionally significant to and formative for him. I would say I was partly aware of this, but it's only when you list them that it brings home the really unusual extent of it. These are all in addition to being abandoned by his father. No wonder he was such a volcano.

First, John's beloved Uncle George, Mimi's husband, died of a liver haemorrhage in June 1955 when he was 52.

Uncle George and John.

Second, as everyone knows, John's mother Julia was knocked down and killed by a drunk driver in a car on the 15th July 1958, at the age of 44.

John and Julia.

Third, John's best friend Stuart Sutcliffe died as described above on the 10th April 1962, at the age of 21.

Stuart and John.

Stuart Sutcliffe.

Fourth, Brian Epstein died of an overdose on the 27th of August 1967, at the age of 32.

Brian Epstein

Finally, John himself on the 8th December 1980, at the age of 40.

John in 1980 by Annie Liebovitz.

"As the Knight sang the last words of the ballad, he gathered up the reins, and turned his horse’s head along the road by which they had come. “You’ve only a few yards to go,” he said, “down the hill and over that little brook, and then you’ll be a Queen—But you’ll stay and see me off first?” he added as Alice turned with an eager look in the direction to which he pointed. “I shan’t be long. You’ll wait and wave your handkerchief when I get to that turn in the road? I think it’ll encourage me, you see.”

“Of course I’ll wait,” said Alice: “and thank you very much for coming so far—and for the song—I liked it very much.”"

- 'Through The Looking-Glass' ch.8