Literary London, from parlor to arty mews, has been one great wide open door for noble primitives, even though London literati still live in the mental atmosphere of the 19th-century aristocracy, in the world of the universities, nutty sherry, curly Shelley hair, parlor floor libraries with trestle ladders, and mandarin wit. The enthusiasm for genius-savages has been in part a guilty sympathy for the proles and primitives and in part a romantic awe of raw vitality. Nevertheless, the case of John Lennon is exceptional. He is one of the few Englishmen whom English literati have hailed as a genius of the lower crust. He comes out of the very vortex of something intellectuals all over the West have begun to turn to as a new fashion in artistic taste: namely, mass culture, which has been the material, in painting, for the genre known as "pop art." The pop artists sit on the floor wearing levis and Zorrie sandals in the same old calcimined lofts painting pictures of comic strips, tail fins, motel archways, tuxedo ads, housing development floor plans. But Lennon steps right out of mass culture, the "Beatlemania," without benefit of a middle man, we are assured, and becomes the artist himself….

[The stories and poems in In His Own Write are] nonsense writing, but one has only to review the literature of nonsense to see how well Lennon has brought it off. While some of his homonyms are gratuitous word play, many others have not only double meanings but a double edge.

His inspiration in verse seems to be Lewis Carroll…. (p. 4)

But Lennon adds an anarchic cynicism that, for better or worse, goes beyond Carroll's kind of jabberwocky:

             With faithful frog beside us,
             Big mighty club are we
             The battle scab and frisky dyke
             Deaf Ted, Danoota, and me.

He seems to take the general format for his stories, fables, playlets, poems and drawings from a British humorist named Spike Milligan. But the underlying bitterness of much of what Lennon writes about marriage and family life, for example, as well as his Joycean excursions into language fantasies, are something else altogether. (pp. 4, 10)

The time to watch will be next time around. Nonsense humor is a bit of an easy crutch, even for James Joyce. John Lennon's real test will come when he turns loose his wild inventiveness and bitter slant upon a heavier literary form. (p. 10)