With the Beatles by Louis Lapham
Hoboken: Melville House, 2005
ISBN: 0-97665-832-1
US$12.95, paperback original

With the Beatles is Louis Lapham's featherweight book about the infamous goings-on at a Indian meditation retreat attended by the Liverpool lads in the hippy-dippy 60s. A beautifully produced volume by a new publisher, Melville House, it is hardly more substantial than gossip, and simply delicious!

What a scene it was: Mia Farrow, crushed and devastated by the breakup of her marriage to Sinatra, has made the journey with her brother and sister. The majordomo of the ashram, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, makes a big fuss over her, giving her paper hats to wear and posing her near him at photo-ops. The singer Donovan, dressed in a silk overblouse and pajama pants, has also come to meditate, fortified by cartons of cigarettes; Beach Boy Mike Love shows up wearing robes and an Astrahkan hat; supermodel Marisa Berenson steps out of a helicopter onto the ashram's private landing pad adorned by a mink coat and a good-looking baron.

Staked out by hundreds of reporters clamoring at its barbed-wire gates, the holy compound in Rishikesh (a town of many temples along the upper Ganges) was off-limits to the press, but Lapham, sent to the Himalayas on assignment from The Saturday Evening Post, promises the management lots of publicity. They let him in.

By that time, George, John and their wives are already in residence, having avoided the press by riding donkeys through a secret forest route. Meditators sit around the encampment in the lotus position while tiny bells ring. Hungry monkeys watch from the trees, cows poke their noses into the kitchen, scorpions hide in bathtub drains, huge snakes lurk in the woods.Vegetarian food, served in a communal tent, is boiled to the point of tastelessness so as not to arouse the appetites. The guru sleeps on the skin of a dead antelope.

This is not a Beatle-bible, like Bob Spitz' thousand-page tome of scholarly research into the band's evolution and dissolution, nor an intimate confessional like Cynthia Lennon's John books, it's an outsider's wide-eyed, now-I've-seen-everything look at the antics on Mount Olympus, where the gods live -- in this case, Rishikesh.

The book reprises a much shorter account of the trip published as a two-part magazine article in 1968. Working from sixty pages of notes taken at the time, Lapham has produced a delightfully cynical narrative of spiritual seekers and the Maharishi who took them over. Here he describes his first meeting with the great yogi:

"His voice had a musical resonance in it, and it was his way of ending his sentences on a rising note of near hysteria that suggested the twittering of birds. The sound of the wind banging through the house inspired him to prophecy, 'When Ringo comes, the storm clears the passage...in the clear, Ringo comes.' (Mike) Love murmured an obligato composed of variations on the words 'yeah' and 'wow.'"

The Maharishi became known to the public in 1957, when he toured the world to promote his Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement, travelling to Southeast Asia, America and England. By 1960 he had established 250 TM centers in over 50 countries. His face appeared on the covers of numerous magazines including Life, Time, Newsweek, Esquire, and Look. He also appeared at Madison Square Garden and on The Johnny Carson Show.

His disciples included not only the Beatles, the Farrow siblings, Donovan, Love and Berenson, but also Marianne Faithfull, Yoko Ono, Mick Jagger, John Densmore, Ray Manzarek, Al Jardine, Paul Horn, Candice Bergen and supposedly Cher, Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds and Jane Fonda.

Lapham dispels the pious atmosphere generated by "the big M" -- as George Harrison calls the guru -- by exposing the self-serving agenda hidden within the Maharishi's religiosity, tracing the arc of belief and disillusionment the Liverpool boys move through as the Beacon of the Himalayas shamelessly uses them to promote his movement, going so far as suggest they donate a quarter of their annual earnings to TM. Their cosmic smiles fade even faster when rumors circulate about the guru's lustful encounters with various disciples: an Australian nurse, a California coed, and even pale Mia herself, who has dashed off without a goodbye after a private meditation session with the guru in his cave-like chamber. "What if it turned out that the sacred water was polluted with the weed of lust?" Lapham wonders.

John Lennon wrote a scolding tune about the yogi's make-believe celibacy that began, "Maharishi, what have you done/you made a fool of everyone…" George, who remained a believer longer than the rest, made Lennon swap "Sexy Sadie" for "Maharishi." (In The Beatles: A Biography, author Bob Spitz reports that during the band's ashram gambit John and Paul composed 40 songs, including "Dear Prudence," for Mia's reclusive sister, as well as "The Continuing Saga of Bungalow Bill," "Julia," "Rocky Raccoon," "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Across the Universe.")

Although Melville House promotes this slight (147 smallish pages) volume as the record of a world-changing cultural event, and despite the few paragraphs of historical hindsight that Lapham -- editor of Harper's for many years with a reputation as a social commentator to uphold -- tacks on to the end of the book, the book simply lacks gravitas. Those who do not believe that the Beatles' transition from suited mop tops to long-haired meditators was a pivotal moment in Western history are free to savor Lapham's voyeurism and wit as delightful ends in themselves.

Because With the Beatles is a lark, a giggle, a pleasure. It's fun seeing the most famous rockers in the world posing around a beady-eyed little man in cotton pajamas (the photos are nifty), fun to know that the musicians themselves are being played, even more fun to see the Fab Four cotton on to the set-up, as the great yogi morphs before thier eyes into a traditional Indian fakir. Awareness, after all, is what they came for, and they depart in good humor, with John comparing the Maharishi to Lewis Caroll. As one of the spiritual pilgrims in Rakishesh tells Lapham, "at the fifth level of realization, everything becomes hilarious."

Diana Manister is a member of the American Branch of the International Critics Association (AICA). A former editor of Women Artists News and Artview Magazine, she currently reviews visual art for www.artezine.com as well as poetry for About.com and the Small Press Exchange. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in many print and online literary publications including Waterworks and www.NYCBigCityLit.com, and her poetry has been anthologized in Distance From the Tree and The Company We Keep.

She was one of ten winners of the Lyric Recovery Festival in 2000, selected by Dana Goia and read her work at the 2000 Festival at Carnegie Hall. This review originally appeard at About.com