It’s difficult to imagine how The Beatles might have fared without John Lennon. He fell into the role of group leader in the early years and honed a collaborative songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney. Together, they would forge future classics like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ and ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’.
Even as they grew apart creatively, the pair remained integral to the band’s writing process. While McCartney was the driving force behind contemplative classics like ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Yesterday’, Lennon led on the experimentalist ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and the psychedelic ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’.
He had a penchant for pop writing infused with emotional storytelling, but his interest in writing wasn’t limited to song. Even when he wasn’t writing hits, he still kept his pen to paper. Throughout the years, he collected writings ranging from poetry to complete nonsense to doodles, eventually gathering them all in one place and publishing them as In His Own Write in 1964.
The collection of nonsense is one that even Lennon found difficult to describe. “It’s about nothing,” he once declared in The Beatles Anthology, “If you like it, you like it; if you don’t, you don’t. That’s all there is to it. There’s nothing deep in it; it’s just meant to be funny. I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pocket. When I have enough, I have a book.”
Though Lennon may have seen nothing in it and believed it only secured publication because of his position in The Beatles, it did serve as further proof of his instinctual pull to write. “There was never any real thought of writing a book,” he continued, “It was something that snowballed. If I hadn’t been a Beatle I wouldn’t have thought of having the stuff published.”
Still, he seemed to believe that this instinctive desire to write would have persisted even if The Beatles had not prevailed. Imagining how he might have continued his trade as a writer without them, he pictured himself as a broke writer akin to the Beat Generation. “I would have been crawling around broke and just writing it and throwing it away,” he stated, “I might have been a Beat Poet.”
Fortunately for fans of the Fab Four, and perhaps for Lennon himself, he escaped that fate and instead became one of the most famous musicians of all time. Rather than writing Beat poetry, he provided his poetry to the sounds of the Beatles.
