“The John Lennon Letters” edited by Hunter Davies

“In a hundred years from now,” John Lennon sang in a satirical home demo he recorded in New York in 1978, “they’re going to be selling my socks, like Judy Garland! And I hope they get a good price!” So the founder of the Beatles predicted this day would come — and as editor Hunter Davies makes clear in his prefatory remarks to “The John Lennon Letters,” even the ex-Beatle’s unsigned grocery lists and skimpiest doodles now command five figures at Sotheby’s.

A massive deposit of freshly excavated notes, screeds, asides and howls, each lavishly reproduced and carefully annotated, “Letters” is the most intimate book ever published about Lennon. In its revelation of the man’s psychology, it far surpasses all previous accounts by wives, lovers, half-siblings, ex-aides and even the best biographers. This is Lennon unfiltered and characteristically defiant, scrawling ferociously across lined paper, homemade Christmas cards, Indian novelties, fading Apple Corp. letterheads. Fans of the Beatles and Lennon, students of popular culture, armchair lovers of English and Irish wit, and anyone fascinated by the inner workings of the creative mind: All will find Davies’s book essential.

(Little, Brown) - ’The John Lennon Letters’ by John Lennon

Those partial to the Beatles’ early Motown covers may be pained to read Lennon’s casual dismissal of them, on American Airlines stationery, in September 1971: “ ‘Money’, ‘Twist ’n’ Shout’, ‘You really got a hold on me’ etc. . . . I always wished we could have done them even closer to the original.”

“Letters” also delivers the earliest known explanation of why Lennon left his wife and son for Yoko Ono. “She’s as intelligent as me (you can take that any way!),” he writes about Ono to his Aunt Harriet, his mother’s sister, in 1968. “She’s also very beautiful — in spite of reports in the press to the contrary — she looks like a cross between me and my mother — has the same sense of humour too!”

Captured here, too, are Lennon’s views on creativity, as set forth in a 1967 letter to a cheeky student from Quarry Bank High School, the prototypical dehumanizing British institution where Lennon, a decade earlier, had honed his rebel persona. “All my writing,” Lennon says, “I do it for me first — whatever people make of it afterwards is valid, but it doesn’t necessarily have to correspond to my thoughts about it, OK? This goes for anybody’s books, ‘creations,’ art, poetry, etc. — the mystery and [expletive] that is built around all forms of art needs smashing, anyway.”

The present owner of that two-page gem is a dentist in Arkansas. Davies’s detective work in uncovering the book’s 286 entries and tracing their complicated provenance makes for an entertaining divertissement. No one is more qualified. Two of the letters reprinted herein were addressed to Davies himself. To research “The Beatles,” the acclaimed authorized biography he published in 1968, he spent the years 1966-68 hanging out with the band — in their homes, at Abbey Road studios, around Swinging London.

Of that book, still an indispensable work, Davies writes here that despite urgent pleas from Mimi Smith — the stern-faced Liverpool aunt who raised Lennon and demanded the excision of all references to his youthful swearing and thievery — he “changed nothing.” This conflicts with Lennon’s 1970 Rolling Stone interview, in which he trashed “The Beatles” and added: “It was written in this sort of Sunday Times [style]. . . . No truth was written, and my auntie knocked all the truth bits out about my childhood and me mother and I allowed her.”