The best-written recent nonfiction: John & Paul by Ian Leslie
Read the opening pages below
Prologue
9 December 1980
Paul McCartney emerges from the recording studio in which he has been working all day to face a group of reporters holding microphones towards him under blinding lights. They ask for his reaction to John Lennon’s murder, the night before. McCartney is chewing gum. His answers are short, laconic. ‘Er, very shocked, you know. It’s terrible news.’
‘How did you find out about it?’
‘I got a phone call this morning.’Â
‘From whom?’
‘From a friend of mine.’
‘Are you planning to go over for the funeral?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Have you discussed the death with any of the other Beatles?’
‘No.’
‘Do you plan to?’
‘Probably, yeah.’
‘What were you recording today?’
‘I was just listening to some stuff, you know, I just didn’t want to sit at home.’
‘Why?’
McCartney visibly loses patience. ‘I didn’t feel like it.’Â
The reporters run out of new questions.
‘It’s a drag, isn’t it? Okay, cheers,’ McCartney says, and makes for his car.
*
More than half a century after they stopped making music, the Beatles continue to permeate our lives. We listen to their songs while driving and dance to them in clubs and in kitchens; we sing them in nurseries and in stadiums; we cry to them at weddings and funerals and in the privacy of bedrooms. They are not likely to be forgotten any time soon; if anything of our civilisation is remembered a thousand years from now there is a good bet it will be the chorus of ‘She Loves You’ and an image of four men crossing a street in single file.
We’ve barely begun to recognise or understand the wild improbability of the achievement. In 1962, nobody could have foreseen that America’s cultural hegemony was about to be rudely disrupted, or that the hegemon would surrender so blissfully to the disrupter. The heist was sprung from a grey island at the edge of the Old World whose glories were behind it. Britain seemed stuck in some long-gone era of top hats and dirty chimneys, all vitality spent. But from its damp soil sprouted a life force so vigorous that it jump-started a new epoch. It didn’t come from the country’s capital, either, but from the suburbs of a provincial city in industrial decline, streets forlorn with war damage. Here two teenage boys invented their own future, and, in doing so, our present. Neither John Lennon nor Paul McCartney studied music; they couldn’t even read the notes. They schooled one another, and then they schooled the world.
When Peter Jackson’s documentary Get Back was released in 2021, many viewers commented on how strangely modern the Beatles seemed, as people. The footage showed us London streets populated by gents in pinstripe suits and hippies in Afghan coats, everyone timestamped by the historical moment. But when John, Paul, George and Ringo were in frame, we felt as if they could walk out of our screens, into our living rooms, without missing a beat. It wasn’t so much how they dressed as their demeanour: how they talked to each other, the way they sat, the jokes they made. That isn’t a coincidence. The critic Harold Bloom argued that we recognise ourselves in Shakespeare not just because he captured something eternal in human nature but because he wrought our very idea of what a person is – an introspective, self-fashioning individual. Similarly, the Beatles were crucial to the creation of a post-1960s personality: curious, tolerant, self-ironising, unaffected, both feminine and masculine. Timothy Leary declared, ‘The Beatles are mutants.2 Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species.’ The micro-culture of the Beatles, which had such a decisive impact on our culture, germinated in the many hours that John and Paul spent in Paul’s front parlour or in John’s bedroom, guitars on laps, making songs, poetry and laughter.
This is a book about how two young men merged their souls and multiplied their talents to create one of the greatest bodies of music in history. The partnership of Lennon and McCartney was responsible for 159 of the Beatles’ 184 recorded songs, and they were the dominant creative decision-makers within the group. ‘There is no doubt in my mind that the main talent of that whole era came from Paul and John,’3 said George Martin. ‘George, Ringo and myself were subsidiary talents.’ This is also a love story. John and Paul were more than just friends or collaborators in the sense we normally understand those terms. Their friendship was a romance: passionate, tender and tempestuous, full of longing, riven by jealousy. This volatile, conflicted, madly creative quasi-marriage escapes our neatly drawn categories, and so has been deeply misunderstood.
We think we know John and Paul; we really don’t. A popular narrative about the group and its central partnership emerged in the wake of the Beatles’ demise in 1970. It was drafted by John Lennon in a series of dazzlingly articulate interviews, and fleshed out by a generation of rock critics who idolised him. In the 1970s, John was the hero the world wanted: ostentatiously anti-establishment, charismatically tormented – a figure who matched not just the moment, but also much older ideas of genius. Paul was deemed a ‘straight’, a bourgeois poser with no substance. A dualism took hold that has persisted ever since, with John presented as the creative soul of the Beatles, and Paul as his talented but facile sidekick. After Lennon’s untimely end in 1980, this narrative became canonical. Somehow it survives, albeit in a moth-eaten form, even though it says more about the cultural and political preoccupations of a bygone era than about what actually happened. ‘John versus Paul’ is still the polarising shorthand by which fans and writers discuss the Beatles. But as the protagonists themselves often acknowledged, there was no ‘John’ without ‘Paul’, and vice versa. Their collaboration, even at its most competitive, was a duet, not a duel.
"We think we know everything, but author Ian Leslie proves otherwise. His new book, 'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,' is, astonishingly, one of the few to offer a detailed narrative of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s partnership. And it’s a revelation." ―Los Angeles Times
"It is stunning to follow Leslie’s insights into how far and fast John and Paul traveled, how profound their preternatural alliance was, and how epic their heroic journey. I’m sorry John isn’t here to read this book. I hope if Paul does read it he feels the depth of appreciation and gratitude and intelligence it contains." ―The New York Times
A paid subscription to Auraist gives readers access to our full archive of dozens of author articles on prose style, hundreds of picks from recent releases and prize shortlists, and the best-written books of the century. Or you can join the 40K+ discerning readers who’ve followed us or subscribed for free access to posts for a fortnight after publication.
NONFICTION TITLES CONSIDERED THIS MONTH
The Last American Road Trip by Sarah Kendzior
John and Paul by Ian Leslie
The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road by E.A. Hanks
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara
Eminent Jews by David Denby
The Jew Who Would Be King by Adam Rovner
Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life by Dan Nadel
America, América: A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin
More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker
Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future by Alan Weisman
The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood by Matthew Specktor
So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs—and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease1 by Thomas Levenson
Ancestors: Identity and DNA in the Levant by Pierre Zalloua
Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America by Michael Luo
The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley
Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
Bad Friend by Tiffany Watt Smith
Enough Is Enuf by Gabe Henry
Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman
Chopping Onions on My Heart by Samantha Ellis
The Elephant in the Room by Liz Kalaugher
Underdogs: The Truth About Britain’s White Working Class by Joel Budd
Same River, Twice: Putin’s War on Women by Sofi Oksanen
The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club by Sepideh Gholian
The Sleep Room by Jon Stock
Children of Radium by Joe Dunthorne
When the Going Was Good by Graydon Carter
Story of a Murder by Hallie Rubenhold
Submitting work to Auraist
We offer writers a fast-growing audience of tens of thousands of discerning readers, including many world-class writers, major publishers and literary agencies, and journalists at the highest-profile publications.
If we publish your work, we’ll invite you to answer our questions on prose style. Your answers will be considered for inclusion in the published collection of these pieces by many of the world’s best writers.
The following submissions are welcome:
Books published in the last year
Works serialised on Substack
Short stories
Start the process by signing up for a paid subscription below. Then email your work to auraist@substack.com.
We look forward to reading it.