John Lennon Was Accused of Plagiarism in His Second Book
In 1965, John Lennon published his second book, a collection of nonsensical stories and drawings called A Spaniard in the Works. His first book, In His Own Write, sold well and received critical acclaim. His second book sold fewer copies and did not go over as well with critics. According to Lennon, this was partly because critics accused him of stealing portions of another book.
John Lennon said people accused him of stealing portions of his second book
When Lennon put together In His Own Write, he pulled from years worth of writing. With A Spaniard in the Works, he had to write a new book from scratch. While this was a major challenge for him, he wrote longer stories for A Spaniard in the Works.
“Most of A Spaniard in the Works is longer than the bits in the first book,” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “But my mind won’t stay on the same thing. I forget who I’ve brought in, I get lost and I get fed up and bored. That’s why I usually kill the lot off. I killed them off in the first book, but with the second book I tried not to; I tried to progress.”
Still, it wasn’t long enough for his publisher. They urged him to write a bit more and sent an Italian dictionary as a form of inspiration.
“I’d done most of it and they needed a bit more, so the publisher sent along a funny little dictionary of Italian,” Lennon said. “He said, ‘See if you get any ideas from this.’ I looked in, and it was just a howl on its own.”
He liked the dictionary so much that he couldn’t bring himself to change much of it. This was a major problem for reviewers.
“So I changed a few words (which is what I used to do at school with Keats or anything; I’d write it out almost the same and change a few words) but then they put in the reviews: ‘He’s pinched the whole book!’”
John Lennon received critical acclaim for his first book
Lennon’s first book, In His Own Write, did not face such problems. The fact that people bought the book came as no surprise given his Beatles fame, but critics also praised it.
“The book was an immediate bestseller,” his wife Cynthia explained in her book John. “Bookshops that had ordered only a few copies demanded more and it was reprinted twice in the week it came out. John was pleased if bemused by the attention it got, and even more so when we heard that a Foyle’s Literary Luncheon had been arranged in his honour at London’s Dorchester Hotel. A Foyle’s luncheon was a great accolade for any author, and for John’s the demand for tickets was unparalleled.”
The Foyle’s Literary Luncheon was a considerable honor. Unfortunately, the crowd turned on Lennon at the event when he failed to give a substantial speech.
He said the book gave him an emotional boost
A Spaniard in the Works did not do as well as In His Own Write. Still, Lennon was proud of it. He had accomplished something difficult.
“A Spaniard in the Works gave me another personal boost,” he said. “OK, it didn’t do as well as the first, but then what follow-up book ever does? In any case, I had a lot of the stories in the book bottled up in my system and it did me good to get rid of them — ‘better out than in.’”
He also felt it was a step up from the writing he did in his first book.
“The book is more complicated; there are some stories and bits in it that even I don’t understand, but once I’ve written something what’s the point of letting it hang around in a drawer when I know I can get it published?” he asked. “The plain unvarnished fact is that I like writing, and I’d go on writing even if there wasn’t any publisher daft enough to publish them.”
