John Lennon and The Beatles’ original bassist Stuart Sutcliffe became friends before their musical collaboration and remained close after Sutcliffe left the band. Before The Beatles were the biggest band in the world, they struggled to make their music career work. A frustrated Lennon wrote about these difficulties in his letters to Sutcliffe. He included original poetry that reflected his state of mind.
John Lennon sent poems to Stuart Sutcliffe
After Sutcliffe left The Beatles, he moved to Hamburg to study art. The distance between Lennon and Sutcliffe did little to impact their friendship. They wrote lengthy letters to one another, swapping jokes and stories about their lives. As time went on and The Beatles still struggled to find success, though, Lennon’s letters grew increasingly glum.
“It’s all a s****y deal,” he wrote, per the book The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “Something is going to happen, but where is it?”
Lennon also sent Sutcliffe poetry. He typically kept these writings private, but he allowed Sutcliffe to read them. These poems reflected his mental state during this period of his life.
“I can’t remember anything/ without a sadness/ so deep that it hardly becomes known to me/ So deep that its tears/ leave me a spectator/ of my own stupidity,” he wrote in one.
John Lennon was devastated by Stuart Sutcliffe’s death
Not long after Sutcliffe left The Beatles, he died of a brain hemorrhage. Lennon viewed him as a soul mate and was devastated when he heard the news of his death. Sutcliffe’s girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr, broke the news to The Beatles and noted that Lennon had the strongest reaction.
“John went into hysterics,” Kirchherr said, per The New Yorker. “We couldn’t make out . . . whether he was laughing or crying because he did everything at once. I remember him sitting on a bench, huddled over, and he was shaking, rocking backward and forward.”
Lennon’s wife, Cynthia, said that he felt overwhelmed by guilt after Sutcliffe’s death. While there was nothing he could have done to prevent Sutcliffe’s death, he felt agonized by the fact that he was alive and his longtime friend was not.
He eventually published a book of some of his poems
While Lennon hesitated to show anyone but Sutcliffe his poems in the early 1960s, he grew more comfortable with sharing his work. In 1964, he published the book In His Own Write, a collection of short stories, poetry, drawings, and witticisms. It was a runaway success.
“The book was an immediate bestseller,” Cynthia wrote in her book John. “Bookshops that had ordered only a few copies demanded more and it was reprinted twice in the week it came out. John was pleased if bemused by the attention it got, and even more so when we heard that a Foyle’s Literary Luncheon had been arranged in his honour at London’s Dorchester Hotel. A Foyle’s luncheon was a great accolade for any author, and for John’s the demand for tickets was unparalleled.”
As Lennon grew as a songwriter, he put his poetic abilities on display in his music.
