THE BEATLES
535
Most remarkably, the song doesn't sort out its social satire from
its implicitly positive treatment of drugs. Bob Dylan often puns with
roughly the same intention, as in "Rainy Day Woman #12
&
35," a
simple but effective example:
Well, they'll stone you when you're trying to be so good,
They'll stone you just like they said they would.
They'll stone you when you try to go home,
Then they'll stone you when you're there all alone.
But I would not feel so all alone:
Everybody must get stoned.
In the Beatles' song, the very same phrases that belong to the plati–
tudes of the "beautiful people" belong also, with favorable connota–
tions, to the drug scene. The question, "And have you travelled very
far?" is answered by Lennon, the "beautiful" person, with what social–
ly would be a comfortable cliche: "Far as the eye can see." But the
phrase is really too outmoded for the jet age and thus sends us back to
the original question and to the possibility that the "travel" can refer
to a "trip" on LSD, the destination of which would indeed be "as
far as the eye can see." Most of the lyrics operate in this double
way, both as social satire and drug talk: "How often have you been
there? / Often enough to know," or "What did you see when you
were there? / Nothing that doesn't show" or "Some do it naturally"
(presumably an acidhead by nature) to which the answer is "Happy
to be that way." The song could pass simply as social satire, though
to see that and that only is also to be the object of satire, of not know–
ing what implications are carried even by the language you make
fun of for its imprecisions. The point, and it's one that I'll come
back to, is that the argot of LSD isn't much different from the
banalities of question and answer between a "beautiful" person and
his bedazzled interviewer. The punning genius of Lennon is evident
here perhaps more effectively than in his two books,
In
My
Own
Write
and
A Spaniard in the Works,
with their affinities to Edward
Lear as well as to the Joyce of
Finnegans Wake.
The Beatles won't be stuck even within their most intricate
contrivances, however, and they escape often by reminding
Us
and
themselves that they are singers and not pushers, perforiners and not
propagandists. The moment occurs in "Baby You're a Rich Man,"
as it does in other songs, near the "end, in the question "Now that
you've found another key / What are you going to play?" Necessarily
