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Ian Leslie’s “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs”: towards the end:
There are several reasons why we get Lennon and McCartney so wrong, but one is that we have trouble thinking about intimate male friendships. We're used to the idea of men being good friends, or fierce competitors, or sometimes both. We're used to the idea, these days, of homosexual love. We're thrown by a relationship that isn't sexual but is romantic: a friendship that may have an erotic or physical component to it, but doesn't involve sex. Our ancestors had a better grasp of this. In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes describes how a pair of friends can be "lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy" yet unable to "explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of sexual intercourse, but of something else, which the soul of either evidently desires but cannot identify." As Aristophanes suggests, the anomalous nature of these relationships can make them hard for the participants to understand, let alone onlookers.
When the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne was young he had one such friendship, with the writer and jurist Etienne de La Boétie. They were friends for six years before La Boétie died at the age of thirty-two in 1563. They were in love: rejoicing in each other's company, minds and souls deeply connected. This is how Montaigne described the start of their friendship:
We sought each other before we met... from reports we had each heard of the other... And at our first meeting, which happened by chance at a great feast and town gathering, we found ourselves so taken with each other, so well acquainted, so bound together, that from that moment on nothing could be as close as we were to one another.
When La Boétie died, Montaigne was brokenhearted. He never stopped grieving for him, and his pain only increased with age. In an essay called "On Friendship" he wrote about his feelings for La Boétie, without naming him, transmuting the deeply personal into the universal. He struggled to articulate why he loved his friend so much, what it was that made them soulmates. In the end, after multiple scratchings out, he settled on a simple formulation:
"Because it was him; because it was me."
That's a nice allusion that recasts their relationship into something grander than all the granular details illustrate through the book. While there is lots of laughter and playfulness and obvious pleasure in being in each other's company, there is also what seems like John's unrequited sexual interest in Paul and Paul's ability (?) penchant for (?) tendancy to (?) write lyrics where the words darling and "my friend" and "love" work as ambiguous referants to both John and a woman.
As I think about it now, it's like John (and Paul) had many feelings that couldn't easily be put into words or "normal" social myths.
Here's a nice bit from T Bone Burnett's review of the book in the NYT:
In our culture, music is most often written about in terms of sales, streams and chart positions. That is, of course, the least intelligent way to think about or talk about music.
Ian Leslie’s “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs” is unconcerned with all that, but rather it explores the way two extraordinarily gifted young men combined and exchanged their gifts while inspiring, challenging, teaching and learning from each other.
That seems consistent with my reading, the book also addresses the deeply complex dynamics of their relationship after the first flush of stardom. The two collaborated to an astounding degree, with John starting a song and Paul adding a middle 8 or guitar riff, or vice versa. But also were deeply (and maybe increasingly) competitive, often inspired by (or another term), like when "Strawberry Fields" leads almost immediately to Paul's "Penny Lane." There are a number of examples of this. And John becomes increasingly jealous of Paul's financial and popular success.
John, post 1970, comes across as lost and mean. He is vicious in the press and his songs to Paul. He writes diss tracks. He does many interiews where he lights Paul up as irrelevant and selfish.
On This Day (11/08):
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