In the private archives at Graceland, there is a book. Not a Bible, though Elvis owned many of those. Not a music theory text or a biography or any of the categories of reading that people associate with performers of his stature. The book is called The Impersonal Life. It was written in 1914 by a man named Joseph Benner and published anonymously under the byline by the author.
It is a book about consciousness. About the relationship between the individual self and something larger that the author calls the I Am. It is not a mainstream book. It has never been a mainstream book. Elvis Presley read it more than any other book he owned. The evidence for this is in the margins.
Every page is marked. Not lightly. Not the casual pencil underlining of a reader moving through a text. Heavily. With multiple colors of ink, with exclamation marks and question marks and asterisks and, in several places, full sentences written in the narrow margins in Elvis’s own handwriting. The book was given to Elvis in 1964 by his hairdresser and close friend Larry Geller.
Larry had been hired to work on Elvis’s hair for a film shoot and had arrived at Graceland with a box of books, spiritual texts, philosophical writings, things that he believed might interest Elvis. The Impersonal Life was in the box. Larry Geller described what happened when Elvis picked it up in his 2008 memoir If I Can Dream, Elvis’s Own Story.
He said Elvis opened the book randomly.” He read a few lines. He set it down. He picked it up again. He read a few more lines. He started crying. “This is my book.” Elvis said. “This is the one I’ve been looking for.” Larry Geller described the following hours. He said Elvis read for the rest of the afternoon, canceling commitments, sending people away.
He said he had never seen Elvis read with that quality of absorption. Not in the years before and not in the years after. He said it was the reading of someone who was not discovering something new. It was the reading of someone recognizing something they had always known. The annotations in the book, which have been reviewed by researchers who were granted access to the Graceland archive, tell a story that no biography of Elvis has fully told.
They tell the story of a man thinking not about music, not about performance, not about the career or the image or the commercial machinery that surrounded every hour of his public life. About the question of what he was. The book’s central argument is that the human individual is not separate from a larger consciousness.
That the I am, as Bena calls it, speaks through people rather than to them. That creativity and insight and the specific unrepeatable quality of something that moves people, these are not produced by the individual. They are transmitted through the individual from something that does not have a name.
In the margins next to this argument, in a section of the book that deals specifically with the relationship between the artist and the source of the art. Elvis wrote four words. This is what happens. Not a question. Not a challenge. Not the notation of someone who is uncertain. A confirmation. The researcher who found this specific annotation, a woman named Patsy Guy Hamontree, who wrote an academic study of Elvis’ reading habits, described it in a paper published in 1985.
She said she had reviewed hundreds of books from the Graceland library. She had found annotations in many of them. But this was different. She said the annotations in The Impersonal Life were the only ones that read as a continuous private conversation. Not a reader responding to a text. A person talking to something that understood them.
Elvis carried the book with him on tour. This is documented by multiple members of his road crew who described a worn, heavily marked paperback appearing regularly in his dressing room and on his tour bus. Not displayed. Kept close. In the final years of his life, the years that most people describe as his decline, the years of the jumpsuits and the Las Vegas residencies and the medications, the book continued to appear in the accounts of the people closest to him.
His nurse at Graceland, Marian Cocke, mentioned it in her own memoir. She said she had seen it on his bedside table in the months before he died. Same book. Same heavy annotations. Same worn cover. The book he had called the one he had been looking for. What was he looking for? This is the question that the annotation suggests he was asking from 1964 until the end of his life.
Not the question that his biographers have tended to ask, which is what happened to Elvis, what went wrong, how the arc of decline is to be understood. A different question entirely. The question of where the music came from. Not in the industry sense, not in the biographical sense. The gospel tradition, the black musical influences, the Sun Records sessions.
In the personal sense. When something happened in a performance, when the voice found something that had no technical explanation, when the presence in a room changed in the specific way that the people who were there and the people who watched the recordings all described in the same terms. Where was that coming from? Elvis Presley had been asking this question since he was a boy in a Pentecostal church in Tupelo, Mississippi.
Hearing people sing with a quality that went beyond what he could explain. He had been asking it in every performance. He had been asking it in his gospel recordings, which he always described as the most important thing he did. And he found a book in 1964 that seemed to have an answer. This is what happens.
The book is still in the Graceland archive. The margins are still full. The annotation in four words is still there next to the paragraph about the artist and the source of the art. It sits in a collection of personal effects that most visitors to Graceland never see. Most visitors see the jumpsuits, the cars, the gold records.
The book is in a box in an archive room with four words in the margin of a page that describes exactly the thing Elvis Presley spent his whole life doing without being able to explain. Transmitting something from somewhere through himself to everyone in the room. He didn’t know where it came from but he knew it when he read about it.
This is what happens. Four words in the margin. From a man who spent his entire life being the thing the book was describing.
