John Lennon and Paul McCartney met and fell for each other in the summer of 1957. John was 16, Paul 14. Paul came to see John play with his skiffle group, the Quarry Men, at a village fete. Introduced afterwards, they almost immediately formed a connection that went beyond the bounds of normal male friendship.
Lennon and McCartney were not sexual partners, as far as we know. But in every other sense, their relationship was a romance: intoxicating, tender and bittersweet. Passionate male friendships like this are rare, but not unique, and a remarkable number of them have changed the world, transforming our ideas about music, art, poetry and human nature. John and Paul were, without knowing it, part of an extraordinary lineage.
After impressing John with his guitar-playing and his ability to remember all the words to a song, Paul accepted John’s invitation to join the Quarry Men. The pair began sharing the front of the stage; this was no longer just John’s group. They were fascinated by each other. Paul admired John’s coruscating wit and teddy boy swagger. John admired Paul’s musical abilities and pop star good looks. They made each other laugh more than anyone else they knew.
They made for an odd couple: John spiky, full of bravado, prone to anger; Paul more temperate and socially subtle. But each thought the other the most brilliant person they knew and they shared a fierce ambition. On weekday afternoons, they would bunk off from school (for Paul) and college (for John) and go to one of their houses to play songs.
Anyone who has shown someone their own creative ideas knows how terrifying it can be. Since they were writing in the idiom of pop, these were songs about feelings – desire, yearning, jealousy. Through music, John and Paul became vulnerable to each other. They allowed the other a glimpse of their soul.
The friendship was deepened by shared pain. Paul’s mother, Mary, died from cancer eight months before he met John. About a year afterwards, John’s mother, Julia, died after she was hit by a car. Later, McCartney said that while they didn’t talk much about losing their mothers, just knowing the other had been through the same thing brought them closer. It also reinforced a sense of being different from their peers – different and special.
As their group, now with different members and a new name, conquered the world, the two remained tight. Friends remarked on how they seemed to be able to read each other’s minds and finish each other’s sentences.
Their chemistry was inherently volatile. John liked to dominate any group he was in, Paul hated to be pushed around, both were strong-willed. John, whose childhood was marked by abandonment and uncertainty, felt increasingly insecure about the most meaningful relationship in his life. He became more reliant on drugs and found it hard to keep pace with Paul’s relentless productivity.
As the 60s went on, they began to argue more. The partnership sparked as it splintered; that their tensions were creatively productive is evidenced by the remarkable evolution of the Beatles’ music. But when John and Paul got together with the loves of their lives – Linda Eastman, for Paul, Yoko Ono, for John – they found it hard to sustain their closeness. Finding themselves on opposite sides of an argument over the Beatles’ business affairs, they fell out bitterly.
Both were disoriented and depressed by the rupture. But even when John recorded a vicious song about his former partner, entitled How Do You Sleep?, their relationship never felt exhausted. During the 70s, they exchanged messages of reconciliation and affection in songs, and gingerly re-established relations in person. While they found it hard to recapture the easy intimacy of their younger days, they never stopped being enthralled by each other.
I don’t think we have ever quite understood the depth, significance or strangeness of this friendship. The two of them are talked about as mates, “brothers”, rivals and enemies. Yet to my mind they don’t fit into any of these prefabricated categories, which perhaps helps to explain why they were able to envisage new possibilities for music. This was an intense, platonic friendship between two men: loving, torrid, explosively creative. Friendships such as this have made a mark on cultural history several times. They seem more likely to be formed in the crucible of an artistic or intellectual revolution. It’s as if the intensity of the personal bond creates a kind of protected space where radical new ideas can incubate.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge met in 1795 when both in their early 20s (Wordsworth was two years older). They bonded over disappointment with the French Revolution and a love of hikes in the English countryside. Temperamentally, they were very different: Coleridge voluble, excitable, a brilliant talker, deeply insecure and prone to depression; Wordsworth more even-keeled, reserved and methodical. But they shared a vaulting ambition to remake the world through poetry.
Wordsworth’s steadiness helped ground Coleridge; Coleridge’s enthusiasm energised Wordsworth. They critiqued each other’s work and planned poems. Out of this friendship came Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and a whole new movement in poetry. Over time, Wordsworth grew frustrated with Coleridge’s inability to complete projects and increasing dependence on opium. Coleridge felt judged and constrained by Wordsworth’s more disciplined approach, both to life and to poetry.
They fell out badly after Coleridge found out that Wordsworth had criticised his character to their friend Thomas De Quincey. While they reconciled somewhat in later years, they never regained their former intimacy. By the 1830s, they could meet cordially, but the bright flame of their early friendship was gone. Coleridge never really got over the rupture, continuing to process it in his writing until his death in 1834.
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There are other examples of passionate and creatively radical male friendships: Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche; Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin; CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien; Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. But perhaps the closest analogy to John and Paul comes not from the arts but the social sciences. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky met in 1969 at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, forming the most productive partnership in the history of psychology (a story told in Michael Lewis’s book The Undoing Project). Their work revolutionised multiple fields, from economics to medicine, challenging fundamental assumptions about human rationality and decision making.
They were very different: Kahneman self-doubting, pessimistic and quiet; Tversky confident and quick-witted. But their communion transcended these differences in personality. They would shut themselves away for hours before emerging with groundbreaking insights into decision making and judgment, often without being able to remember who had contributed what.
Their enthusiasm for their ideas couldn’t be separated from their enthusiasm for each other. This was a romance, a mutual absorption. “Their relationship was more intense than a marriage” said Barbara Tversky, Amos’s wife. “Just to be with [Amos],” Kahneman told Lewis. “I never felt that way with anyone else, really. You are in love and things. But I was rapt.”
The partnership became strained after they moved to North America to work for different universities, putting physical distance between them. Professional acclaim generated competitive tensions, and they had terrible rows over the phone. The friendship endured until Tversky’s death in 1996, but it was frayed.
There are several examples of intense male friendship in ancient texts. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles and Patroclus have a bond so profound that when Patroclus dies Achilles is driven to inconsolable grief and murderous rage. In the Bible, the souls of Jonathan and David are said to be “knit together”. When Jonathan dies, David laments: “Your love to me was more wonderful than the love of women.”
There is a strain of sadness to all these stories. Society finds it hard to categorise passionate male friendships, and the difficulty can be shared by the friends themselves. 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.”
Era-defining partnerships such as John and Paul’s exist in the space our culture struggles to name, neither friends nor lovers. Yet in that nameless space, new worlds are born.
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie is published by Faber.
