Together, the Beatles wrote some of the world’s most enduring love songs. John Lennon’s love letters, on the other hand, reveal a different, earthier type of poetry — and take a swipe at Paul McCartney for good measure.
One of these letters is now up for auction at Christie’s in London on July 9, when it is expected to fetch up to £40,000 ($54,000).
Pining after his future wife, Cynthia Powell, while away in Hamburg, Germany, the then 21-year-old Lennon wrote: “I love love love you and I’m missing you like mad … I wish I was on the way to your flat with the Sunday papers and chocies (chocolates) and a throbber! Oh yes!”
Elsewhere in the four-page letter, Lennon complained about McCartney’s snoring: “Paul’s leaping about on my head (he’s in a bunk on top of me and he’s snoring) … Shurrup Mcarntey (sic).”
For Thomas Venning, Christie’s head of books and manuscripts, “there’s something quite poignant about the giddily, playfully smutty nature of the letter.”
“It shows us Lennon and Cynthia as two young people in love, and gives us a wonderfully carefree, unguarded view of Lennon in particular,” Venning told CNN on Wednesday.
Lennon wrote the letter — which Powell cut two small sections out of, presumably to censor it — over a six-day period between April 19 and April 24, 1962 while the Beatles were playing their first residency at the Star-Club in Hamburg.
“You sense that life is quite simple for him at this point: it’s about playing music with the Beatles and going home to see Cynthia,” Venning added.
“He is absolutely living in the present, exhausted but happy, worried about nothing more pressing than Paul snoring in the bunk above him. Within six months everything would change, and life would never be as simple again.”
During this time, the still relatively unknown band, whose lineup featured drummer Pete Best instead of Ringo Starr, toiled away, playing to indifferent crowds.
“The club is massive and we only play three hrs one night and four the next — and we play an hour — then an hour break so it doesn’t seem long at all really … God I’m knackered it’s 6 o’clock in the morning and I want you,” Lennon wrote.
Just nine days before he started writing his letter, another former member of the band — bassist Stuart Sutcliffe — died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage at age 21.
Lennon’s letter opens referencing the death of his close friend and his anxieties about going to visit Sutcliffe’s fiancée. “I haven’t seen Astrid since the day we arrived I’ve thought of going to see her but I would be so awkward … I won’t write any more about it ‘cause its not much fun,” he wrote.
He moves on to a different topic and attempts to dissuade Powell from sharing a house with Dot Rhone, Paul McCartney’s then girlfriend, in Liverpool.
“I don’t like the idea of Dot moving in permanently with you ‘cause we could never be alone really,” he wrote. “Imagine having her there all the time when we were in bed — and imagine Paul coming all the time — and especially when I wasn’t there.”
Lennon and Powell married later that year, in August 1962, and had a son, Julian, in April 1963 before divorcing five years later.
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