Someone Please Do Fanart Of Paul At Noël Coward's Feet, Learning How To Be Satirical.

“MCGOUGH: There are poets who believe that when a poem arrives you write it down, catch the moment, as it were, and then that is it. Whereas other poets revise and rework until something shines through. What is your method? PAUL: For me, how art works is I get a mood, a desire to do the thing, usually writing songs, but sometimes this passion to paint. The feeling has to be there. I do it for pleasure. I’m not a great one for, as Linda used to put it, “Beating myself with a wet noodle.” So with a poem, a line comes to me and I sort of doodle with it in my head. I can’t stop it. I realised the other day that the great thing about being a composer is that you are doing nothing. What a doss! I was recently on holiday in India, having a fabulous time doing nothing, and I wrote three songs that I’ve just recorded. It’s a lovely thing to be able to say in my profession, “I have to be doing nothing.” MCGOUGH: Do you use a computer? PAUL: Pencil and paper. I’m not a typist. Funnily enough, John became a red-hot typist towards the end of his life. He had always had this “Arts Correspondent in Kowloon” kind of dream. But for me it’s pencil and paper by the bed… those moments between falling asleep and just before waking are good. I’ve got this little book that Stelly [his daughter, Stella] gave me and it’s full of scribbles and drawings. MCGOUGH: Are you interested in poetic forms? Have you tried your hand at writing a villanelle or a sonnet? PAUL: I really haven’t got into structure yet, but I can see how it can be effective from reading other poets. Like a mantra. Allen [Ginsberg] always used to say, “First thought, best thought.” And I’d think, “Oh, brilliant.” But the joke is, of course, that Allen was always revising. I think he was the first person I showed my poetry to. He came over to the house in Sussex to ask me if I knew anybody who would accompany him on guitar at a gig he was doing at the Albert Hall. So I suggested Dave Gilmour and Dave Stewart and a few others. Then when he’d gone it dawned on me that he wanted me to do it, so I rang him and said OK. So we met up and I stuck a little Bo Diddley jinkity-jink behind his Ballad of the Skeletons, a really cool poem, and he introduced me to the audience as his accompanist. He loved to be the Don, did Allen, the controller, and I loved to give him that. Anyway we sat down with my poems and he knocked out all the “thes”, and any word ending in “-ing”. And I said, “Allen, you’re going to make me into a New York Beat poet, and it’s just not me.” In the end I thanked him for going over them, and it was good to have an annotated version in my drawer, The Ginsberg Variations, as I called them, but I wouldn’t be using them. It was a lovely process, though, and I should be so lucky.”

— Paul McCartney, interview w/ Roger McGough for the Telegraph. (March 10th, 2001)

"He capered before them down towards the forty-foot hole, fluttering his winglike hands, leaping nimbly..." On Instagram

From Japan Through John Lennon's Eyes: A Personal Sketchbook

Literature and 'authenticity'

Reading Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, I was struck by this passage:

"Bob conceived it his duty to get wildly drunk and do mad things. He had no authentic craving to do so: he merely objectivised himself as an abused and terrible character, and surrendered to the explicit demands of drama... In deciding to get wildly drunk and do mad things, Bob believed he was achieving something of vague magnificence and import, redeeming and magnifying himself - cutting a figure before himself and the world."

So funny and true! And considering this was written in the 20s, film and TV has had a thousand times more influence over what we often suppose to be spontaneous expression of joy or anguish since then. Something to think about....

Twenty Thousand Streets... is full of astute observations like this, and is an unnerringly true and compassionate look at the lives of early 20th-century working-class people. A good review of The Midnight Bell, the first volume of the trilogy, can be found here. 

Obviously the second part of this quote gets the most attention but I really love the first part because it's so true! Read a page of Finnegans Wake aloud and tell me you don't hear John.

“John spoke the way James Joyce wrote. To me, he was the Beatles. He was always the spark. In a late wee-hour-of-the-morning talk, he once told me, ‘I’m just like everybody else Harry, I fell for Paul’s looks.”

— Harry Nilsson speaking about John Lennon.

Quotes from “John & Paul: A Love Story In Songs”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“This book germinated during the lockdowns of 2020, when I wrote and published, via my newsletter, a ten-thousand-word essay called ‘64 Reasons to Celebrate Paul McCartney.’ I didn’t expect many people to read it — it was just something I needed to write. But they did, in great number. Surprised by the scale and intensity of the response, I started to wonder if I could write a whole book about the group I have loved since childhood, and when I asked myself which aspect of the story I was most interested in, the answer quickly became obvious. I’d like to thank all previous Beatles authors for not getting there before me.”

“Perhaps the most important aspect of the podcast subculture is that it has introduced many more female voices into the Beatles conversation, raising its level of insight and emotional intelligence. It was through podcasts that I discovered two Beatles experts who have been reshaping a narrative formed mostly by men: Erin Torkelson Weber, the historiographer and author of The Beatles and the Historians, and Christine Feldman-Barrett, author of A Women’s History of the Beatles. I am grateful to the all-female Another Kind of Mind for its penetrating exploration of the group’s relationships. I owe a special debt to Diana Erickson, creator and presenter of One Sweet Dream. Diana’s deeply insightful podcast, and her generosity as a conversation partner, have been vital to John & Paul.”

I enjoy your blog and opinion especially father and son McCartney. I don't mean anything bad with this post. I just try to understand Paul a bit more. Can you give some opinion about Paul's relationship with his Mother Mary, the aunts, and the stepmother and sister Ruth. I've seen some posts and read a few biographs but it doesn"t really seem to fit. Do you think his Mother would have allowed Paul to become a part if the band? And this is just a personal question to you. Do you think that Paul's father might have thought about the queer posibilty with Paul and John?

Hahaha you're like "you do know he has other family members too, right?"

And you are so correct! Thanks for asking this, I'm really excited to get into my thoughts on these extremely niche, rare Beatles characters lol.

Long rambling road under the cut

Mary:

Born to an Irish immigrant father and a Liverpool-Irish mother in Liverpool.

When her mother died when she was very young, her father lost everything in a horse racing bet and moved them back to a tiny farm in Ireland where she was expected to become the new mother to her younger siblings

When her father remarried, his new wife basically acted like Cinderella's step mother to Mary, so she found shelter with some aunts in Liverpool.

At 14, she started working full time as a nurse, while continuing to train to expand her skill set.

By the time WWII came around, she was a state registered nurse and midwife.

She was 31 when she met Jim. At that age at that time, she was considered a spinster. Secondary sources say she was too career-driven to have thought of marriage, and that's possible. But my theory is she just wasn't interested in the whole husband and kids thing after her childhood experiences. Whatever the case, Jim won her over easily, according to sources.

Jim also won her over when it came to religious studies. Apparently, before Jim Mary was a somewhat faithful Catholic, and though it mattered enough to her to have her boys baptized (or christened or whatever it is they do to babies) and taught the basics of the religion at home, she agreed they would not go to Catholic school or attend mass. My theory is this was a class climbing thing.

Because they were part of the war effort, Jim and Mary were allowed to live in government housing, and they continued doing so after the war because Mary continued working for the government.

Paul and Mike always say it was her choice to constantly be moving to slightly nicer apartments in slightly nicer areas. I don't know if she earned that choice through just being really dedicated to her job or through diplomacy with whoever was in charge of that or both, but I would love to know. We know Paul got his diplomacy skills from Jim and trauma, but could be also have some from Mary's side?

Mary was apparently quite strict with her children, had extremely high expectations for academics, behavior, cleanliness, and even accent. She must have approved at least to some degree of Jim's corporal punishment, because she would threaten to call him in when she was very upset with her sons (for example, when Paul drew a nude woman at school). She was the more affectionate parent, but neither Paul nor Mike describe her as notably cuddly or doting, and if she only managed to say to her husband that she loved him on her death bed, it's not entirely out of the realm of possibilities that she did the same to her children.

When Paul has been asked about his earliest memory, he has mentioned three things that I'm aware of. 1. Waiting to hit some bully over the head with a crow bar (sounds too crazy to be true but also too crazy to be a lie) 2. A neighbor gifting his mother a porcelain doll in gratitude for her work to bring their baby into the world (he says people would bring gifts often) 3. His mother bicycling to work in the snow (she continued to ride her bicycle to work even doubled over in pain during her struggle with breast cancer, and she was on call at all hours of the night and day)

Although Mary worked very hard outside the home and always made more money than Jim, it seems she also took on the majority, if not the entirely, of the housework. Before her death, Paul remembers her heaping piles of pancakes on shrove Tuesday, sugar butties, scouse, and yorkshire pudding with golden syrup. After Mary's death, Mike remembers eating bread fried in lard, fighting over it with Paul, and ending up throwing it at the wall, leaving a stain, and getting in trouble. Paul also took on cooking responsibility after Mary's death. Mary kept the house immaculately clean. She refused to own a clothes washer, saying it was immoral. When she was literally about to die from tumors in her breasts and brain, Mary deep the whole house and laid out her children's clothes, so everything would be ready if she didn't come back. (Which is insane on multiple levels. 1. That poor woman. Why did she feel like she had to do all that? 2. As a mom, I'd rather spend that time doing some activity my children enjoyed or talking with them or writing them letters or something, but for whatever reason, either Mary just didn't have that in her, or she genuinely thought the house was more important)

Paul definitely has (or had) a lot of strong feelings about Mary. Two of his biggest regrets as far as things he wishes he hadn't said had to do with her. The first was while she was alive. She, as mentioned before, was very big on the Received Pronunciation accent because she was very big on giving her sons a better life than she'd been given and at the time that was a major key to the class ladder. Anyway, once, when they had company over, Mary was trying to talk posh, and Paul corrected her in front of the company and she was clearly very embarrassed and he immediately regretted it and continued to regret it for decades. Then there's the infamous (VALID!) "what are we going to do without her money?" quote, which has been talked about. I bring it up here to point out that pre-teen Paul very much depended on his mother financially. Speaking of memories of his mother, though, Paul said, in the early 2000s I believe, that if he could go back in time for any reason, it would be to spend more time with his mother.

The family didn't have money for a marked grave at the time (I assume) and her grave remains unmarked to this day, probably for privacy and respect, but someone on the Mohin side of the family made a big stink about it on the internet because Paul was apparently stingy with that side of the family. Whatever.

My I guess nutshell take on Mary is this. Paul didn't really think his mom was cool like he thought his dad was, but he understood that she was the parent he needed to model himself after if he was going to be successful, so he tried to be practical, hard working, perfectionistic, ambitious, stoic, dependable, gentle, strong, etc like she was.

Mike:

I really think this quote sort of defines the complication and depth of love in their relationship.

Everybody was quite confident that Paul would pass the eleven-plus – for Mum and Dad thought of him as the brains of the family. And of course, he didn’t let us down, because he was a natural at exams. When I passed in my turn, it was so unexpected, apparently, that Mum burst out crying – I think the idea that she had two “intelligent” sons was too much for her! They say sensitivity often goes with intelligence and certainly I’d say this was true of Paul. Although on the surface he tried to give the impression that he was a fairly tough, swashbuckling, mildly-tearaway character, underneath there was a great deal of thoughtfulness and real tenderness.” – Mike McCartney, 1965

They also did all the normal sibling stuff like dangerous dares, rough housing embarrassment, stupid shenanigans, etc, and there are stories of Paul coming to Mike's aid when it came to bullies at school and their dad. There's all the great pictures Mike took of Paul with the camera Paul got him, the McGear album, and Paul being Mike's best man.

My take is that they were and are very close and loving and protective of each other despite being sort of accidentally pitted against each other by the toxic family roles they fell into.

Aunts:

Just on Jim's side there were six aunts, and on Mary's there were potentially three, though I'm not sure how close they were with that side of the family.

btw very weird naming going on. There's an Ann and an Annie as well as having an auntie Jin, Jim's older sister.

Jim's side actually started having these "family sing songs" when he was very young for the purpose of making money for the family the minute they were gifted that piano Paul learned on. They'd advertise and charge for admission to these things. They kept them up, just for a family bonding experience, long after they'd all got grown up jobs and spouses and kids. Paul remembers these events extremely fondly, credits them for much of his success as a composer, and brings them up any time anyone asks about his family life growing up. The drunken singing aunties generally feature prominently. Paul also kept up the tradition at least into the late seventies.

Paul and Mike were sent to live with a few different aunties for a few months after Mary's death while the family tried to get Jim's suicidal ideation etc under control. Accounts vary, but I believe it was once of these aunts who told them the news about their mother and sent them to school that very day.

Some of the aunts would take turns coming on about a biweekly basis to help Jim Paul and Mike around the house after Mary's death. We don't know if this continued indefinitely or just until they could get their feet under them again. Either way, they definitely get points for doing that.

Auntie Jin once told Mike and Paul off for looking unhappy soon after their mother's death and reminded them to think of their father and stop acting so sad. Well meaning, I'm sure, since she was probably terrified for them that one little thing could result in their losing a second parent in the most horrible way. But. Definitely scaring.

Auntie Jin was known as "control" and was very much the Queen Bea of the family.

Once Paul got money, he began paying for extended family expenses, like phone bills, hospital stays, or new furniture. This obviously includes the aunties.

When the extended family heard he was getting into weed, they sent Auntie Jin to go talk some sense into him, but he converted her and she went home and converted the whole family.

My general take on the aunties is this. They all seem to be doing their very very best with very very little. I don't even begrudge the emotional abuse because they genuinely didn't have a better option. I do wince at the financial exploitation, but only slightly. It's one of those things where you would hope they'd have a little more empathy for their nephew holding up the family like Louisa from Encanto, but nobody is perfect.

Angie:

Married a man almost 30 years her senior after meeting him five times to make sure he had full access to his millionaire son's bank account.

Enabled, or at least did nothing to stop, her husband's crippling gambling addiction, instead allowing her stepson to cover the damages.

Resented when said unlimited bank account turned into an allowance upon said son's marriage and fatherhood.

Panicked when her ancient husband kicked it and immediately sold off the famous son's personal childhood mementos while he was conveniently in another country for work.

Got pissed and went to the press when stepson cut her off.

Calls herself Mrs McCartney to this day for marketing purposes and milks that dead relationship like an abused dairy cow.

Do I blame her for getting that bag? Not really. Am I a fan? Not really.

Ruth:

Remembers thinking Jim's new mansion and the nice things inside it were impossibly huge and fantastic when she first met him.

Remembers Jim as kind, gentle, and stoic.

Remembers Paul's time with Jane Asher very fondly and seems almost to credit her for her positive early memories of Paul, such as them (she also remembers John) teaching her how to ride a bike or taking her shopping. Paul bought her a dog and they'd play in the backyard and experiment when being parents on her and she loved it.

Her remembrances shift dramatically with the arrival of Linda. The shared bank account closed, Paul was focused on his actual children, and she has a few memories of Paul verbally taking out his pain on her similar to the apple employees.

Then, she gets almost Francie Schwartz levels of bitter after Paul cut her and her mother off. She was almost seventeen, and Paul had paid for her to go to all the best schools all her life and set her up with every possible advantage, not to mention the famous connection she'd go on to drag into the next century. I don't feel bad at all.

My basic take on her is this. Spoiled brat. Excellent source on Paul and his dad.

Did Jim think John and Paul might've been gay for each other?

My gut tells me yes, but there's really no way of knowing. Jim might've hated John because he was worried about Paul's sexuality, or he might've just hated John for being a positive presence in his son's life who encouraged independence. Who knows?

Beatles in Colour → John in BLACK For @sgt-revolver

Victorian sexplorer and cross-cultural relationships

Richard Burton

Last night I watched a documentary on Richard Burton presented by Rupert Everett (The Richard Burton in question was the 19th century explorer, writer and translator of the Kama Sutra, not, as Everett put it, ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s fifth and sixth husbands’). Unsurprisingly, considering its lubricious presenter, the documentary focused on Burton’s exploration of sexuality in various parts of the world and his rejection of hypocritical Victorian mores.

I’ve seen Everett in presenter mode before, in a documentary on Byron a few months ago, and while he can be insufferably irritating, I’ve always quite admired his consistency of personality, This was even more evident in this programme, where he was filmed wandering around Egypt, India and Goa among other places. Whether talking to old ladies in the Indian streets, bantering with nuns in a Goa convent or quizzing an Egyptian masseur on his sexual preferences, Everett didn’t substantially change his personality or delivery to fit in with his surroundings. Even when quizzing an imam on the position of homosexuality in Islam (unsurprisingly, verboten!), he was still himself, understandably a heavily dialled-down version for his own safety, but essentially unchanged. The almost jarring sight of a Western person just being relaxed and normal in foreign countries shows us how most TV presenters (and many travellers) take on a fake, simplified persona to interact with ‘natives’. Does this spring from lack of confidence in one’s own personality, or a persistent Western concept of darker-skinned people as eternally ‘other’? Probably a bit of both.

Somebody like Everett, who is clearly an unapologetic egoist, simply doesn’t think to behave any differently – he does not seem hamstrung by post-colonial guilt, which ironically causes many British travellers to be more condescending to their former subjects than if they weren’t plagued by it. The only other TV personality I can think of who displays the same unselfconsciousness is Hector Ó hEochagháin, who shares Everett’s qualities of being intensely annoying and deeply engaging. I remember seeing him in a travel programme where he crossed part of the Sahara, and was struck by the ease with which he interacted with the men accompanying him, drinking and bantering around the campfire. It shouldn’t be striking to see a group of people from different countries interacting normally, but western attitudes and the disparity of wealth between the First and Third Worlds usually places a stranglehold on normality.

Burton found it very easy to interact in the various countries he lived in, mainly due to his skill in assimilating. Local prostitutes (male and female) and mistresses taught him about a world of sexuality miles away from the whalebone corsets of his upbringing. However the key issue of sexual relationships between people of vastly differing wealth appears to have changed little since his time. In the documentary, an unnamed Egyptian masseur gave insight into this as he tried to entice Everett into a ‘hard sex’ or ‘soft sex’ massage. Politely deflecting the proposition, Everett asked the man if he liked men or women, who replied that he preferred women. When Everett asked how he could perform sex acts on men if he was not homosexual, the man seemed confused and replied ‘it’s my job.’ Therein lies the key issue in relationships that cross these kinds of boundaries. Even outside the world of prostitution, how often do the people from the poorer countries actually love their richer partners, and how much of the attachment is driven by monetary need? Is their even a division in the mind of a very poor person between loving attachment and financial security? How much does the richer partner even mind if their lover really cares for them or not? Is a separate homosexual identity a purely western invention, when a married man with children living in a poor country sees no discord in performing sex acts on other men for money?

There’s no doubt that some cross-cultural relationships work very well, but it seems that in many of them a certain amount of delusion is required on the part of the richer partner that they won’t be abandoned if the money runs out. This sounds like an offensive cliché, but I don’t mean it that way at all – primarily it’s not cultural reasons that lead to this disparity in expectations, but simple economics. It’s impossible to underestimate the effect poverty has in shaping personality, and the same for wealth. Coming from a middle-class background, there are dozens of things I used to take for granted – the idea that people can follow any career they wish, that the norm for romantic relationships is financial and gender equality, that only ‘bad’ people commit violent crime – but these assumptions are founded on the comfortable base of coming from generations of professionals who worked hard to give me such an easy view of the world. There’s no shame in coming from such a background, but it’s crucially important to recognise that our views on life are often hopelessly narrow and things sometimes assumed to be universal are impossible for thousands of people, due to the financial inequality of the world. I could be biologically the same person but I would have vastly different views of the world, life, work, marriage and my sense of self if I had been born in Calcutta, Burundi or even deprived parts of Dublin.

The scandals involving the poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh and his Nepalese boyfriends showed how little has changed since Burton’s day. From watching the documentary, it seemed fairly obvious that few, if any of the young men would have identified as homosexual in the Western sense, but they were happy to play that role (and the role of obsequious, shoe-cleaning servants) for their rich white benefactor. Again, the lines between avarice and affection seemed blurred – the men were not in love with Ó Searcaigh, but they had affection for him nonetheless. From the poet’s point of view, it didn’t seem to matter a great deal to him whether they cared deeply for him or not. The documentary on Ó Searcaigh was keen to portray the Nepalese boys as helpless victims of an evil predator, but this was simplistic and condescending – it seems unlikely they were not at least partly driven by personal gain. The relationships were essentially exploitative, but not hugely more so than many so-called ‘equal’ Western marriages. Maybe the real scandal should be that an economic situation still prevails in the world that allows such relationships to thrive.