In His Own Write

In His Own Right

I just re-read John Lennon’s book In His Own Write, which I won as the English prize at my school in Blackpool. I last read it at age sixteen, sixty years ago. It consists of short stories composed of malapropisms and invented words. I still found it as clever and funny as I did when I first read it. I now see that it must have taken a lot of work, because it can’t have been easy to think up all those verbal solecisms (e.g., “hippoposthumous”). Strange that he never wrote anything else apart from songs, because he has a real feeling for language, especially nonsense language (the best kind).