LFC Article - The Beatles as Poets

. . . it all came down to a serious relationship with Eleanor Rigby

Just when I thought there was nothing new that The Beatles could possibly say to interest me, I stumbled across a quote from Paul McCartney which revealed how he and John Lennon wrote Eleanor Rigby, and I was hooked all over again. Eleanor Rigby, McCartney explains, "started off with sitting down at the piano and getting the first line of the melody, and playing around with the words. I think it was 'Miss Daisy Hawkins' originally; then it was her picking up the rice in a church after a wedding. That's how nearly all of our songs start, with the first line just suggesting itself from books or newspapers."

The Beatles were a legitimate musical group, only lyricists by avocation. Yet, it is surprising how similar their writing methods were to those of regular, starving-artist poets. Scraps come along from real life. They get played back in the tape recorder of the mind. Names get changed, places drift about until they find a happy home, where everything begins to feel right.

"Ah look at all the lonely people," the song begins. Why "Ah"? There she is, Miss Eleanor Rigby. She "picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been." I think all good poetry starts with a single good line or a set of words that get formed up into a single blockbuster line that contains the whole story in a nutshell. There it is. McCartney continues, "I saw I'd said she was picking up the rice in church, so she had to be a cleaner; she had missed the wedding, and she was suddenly lonely. In fact she had missed it all--she was the spinster type." "I saw I'd said." That's it exactly. The line spoke to the poet's subconscious mind first, and only later returned to make sense of itself.

More than ten years after the song was written, McCartney still recalls the process of discovery that made the words come forward. Many poets have this experience. Both the waking and the sleeping mind dwell on a set of words that aren't quite right. They knit at the ideas. They worry the corners. They fidget and squirm while the body is doing something else. That's what keeps the creative process fresh and interesting.

Next McCartney talks about the incidental circumstances around the writing of the poem. The mind on the trail of a poem has its own agenda. It has no respect for the rest of life or whatever the body thinks it is up to that day. "Jane [McCartney's actress friend] was in a play in Bristol then, and I was walking around the streets waiting for her to finish. I didn't really like 'Daisy Hawkins'--I wanted a name that was more real. The thought just came: "Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice and lives in a dream--so there she was."

Non-writers read this sort of explanation with tremendous skepticism. "This sort of thing never happens to me," they say, and they are right. Artists and writers have a certain tap into the subconscious, but it doesn't turn on when you apply counter-clockwise pressure to the handle. It comes when it comes. "--so there she was."

Then comes the problem of Father McCartney. "It was going to be Father McCartney, but then I thought that was a bit of a hang-up for my Dad, being in this lonely song. So we looked through the phone book. That's the beauty of working at random--it does come up perfectly, much better than if you try to think it with your intellect." Serendipity created both characters in a way. One arrived half by sound and half by memory, and the other arrived from free-association with the phone book. Of course, a phone book is a big book, and you have to start your search somewhere. There are thousands of names in a phone book. Did they start with McCartney and work both ways? Some element of surprise was undoubtedly combined with some element of planning in the selection. Still, that's the magic.

"Anyway there was Father McKenzie, and he was just as I imagined him, lonely, darning his socks. We weren't sure if the song was going to go on." Now this is an odd thing for Paul to say. Here he was in the middle of writing one of the finest songs of the twentieth century, and he says he was thinking about tossing the whole thing away before it was done. Why? To tell the truth, that's part of the creative process as well. Half the stuff that makes a start out of your mind never reaches the finish line. Sometimes, for no good reason at all, the whole thing skids to a halt, for minutes, hours, days, years, decades. Every writer has this sort of scrap heap somewhere around. Stuff just dies on you, for no good reason.

As frequently happens, extraneous ideas float into the words which force them off-track. McCartney explains that "In the next verse we thought of a bin man [garbage collector], an old feller going through dustbins; but it got too involved--embarrassing. John and I wondered whether to have Eleanor Rigby and him have a thing going, but we couldn't really see how." .Or why. Like many poets, the dynamic duo had allowed the story to get shanghaied in a foreign port, where the whole idea got mugged and dropped into an alley somewhere. Luckily, they deep-sixed the garbage collector.

Lennon and McCartney may have just been writing a song, but in McCartney's explanation of how this lyric was written he has revealed methods used by all poets. In so doing, he reinforces, if reinforcement was ever needed, the notion that The Beatles were true poets, as well as the greatest songsters of our era.

Quotes from The Beatles: In Their Own Words [Omnibus Press, 1978]