John and Paul

Imagine a man who has another man in his life with whom he is deeply intimate and has been for a number of years, a person who understands him as no one else understands him — and he understands the other in the same way and to the same degree. One just looks at the other and knows what he is thinking. Moreover, these two men have a creative partnership, and their intimate friendship feeds creative partnership, and vice versa.

Now, imagine further that these two men are not lovers, but rather friends — and, moreover, friends in a society which has no real vocabulary for describing such intimate friendship, and sees no reason why such intimacy should ever happen, much less be encouraged and nurtured.

Imagine also that these two men are sexual beings, and however intense their friendship is, they still want sex with women, companionship with women, maybe even marriage with women. Imagine further that their pursuit of women, coupled with certain other (largely economic) circumstances, tends to limit the amount of time that they can spend with each other. Each of them also develops a distinctive set of artistic and intellectual interests not usually shared with the other, so that over time the intimacy which has sustained them emotionally, and has sustained their creative partnership, is diminished.

And now, finally, imagine that all of these forces that diminish the friendship eventually become strong enough to bring the partnership to an end. Inevitably, the friendship itself will then be damaged, perhaps beyond repair. It’s a kind of vicious circle in which the circumstances that weaken the partnership weaken the friendship also, which in turn makes the partnership even less plausible. The two men never cease to be connected, but the connection becomes less predictable, and is often interrupted. It never again will be what it once was, and both of them realize it, and oscillate among regret and acceptance and anger. They think: It didn’t have to be this way, it didn’t have to end and It ended and it’s your fault and … many other things.

That’s John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs, by Ian Leslie. People will read it because they love the music of the Beatles — I read it because I love the music of the Beatles — but it’s really a sobering and moving meditation on the possibilities and impossibilities of male friendship in the culture we inhabit. It’s an outstanding book, and an immensely sad one. I’ll keep it on my shelf next to the best book about the band’s music, Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head.