All sources agree that, on September 20, 1969, John Lennon told Paul McCartney that he wanted "a divorce" from The Beatles. However, when Paul and John were interviewed separately by Ray Connolly and Jan Wenner respectively in 1970, they gave conflicting accounts of the meaning of that statement. Paul told Connolly, in an interview that appeared in the Evening Standard on April 21, that it was a "trial separation" and portrayed the period as one in which John's return to the group was still considered by him to be a realistic possibility:
Anyway, I hung on for all these months wondering whether the Beatles would ever come back together again…and let’s face it I’ve been as vague as anyone, hoping that John might come around and say, “All right lads, I’m ready to go back to work,” and naturally enough, in the meantime, I began to look for something to do. And the album, McCartney, turned out to be the answer in my case (The Ray Connolly Archive, Kindle Edition, pp. 86-87).
Lennon's description of the period to Wenner in December 1970, printed in Rolling Stone as "Lennon Remembers", is clearly a contradiction of Paul's understanding. For example, Lennon claimed to Wenner that "It’s like he knew really that this was the final thing; and six months later he comes out with whatever." McCartney clearly did not describe September 20 as "the final thing" but rather something far more provisional. The problem this created for the historiography of The Beatles is that Wenner's interview shaped the dominant narrative of the break-up in subsequent biographies, and this has not yet been properly debunked.
Historians who still support Lennon's claim may point to Paul's interview with Life, published on November 7, 1969, in which he stated that "the Beatle thing is over. It has been exploded, partly by what we have done, and partly by other people." However, the comment was only a measure of how Paul felt at that moment and does not preclude his waking up on other days feeling more hopeful, in the manner he explained to Connolly in April. It is also unclear whether Paul meant the phrase "the Beatle thing" to refer to all Beatles projects or just, say, joint Lennon-McCartney songwriting credits on future Beatles albums and collaborations on each other's arrangements in the studio. Furthermore, Lennon's own position in December 1969, as outlined to Alan Smith in the NME, was far more provisional than the one he presented to Wenner a year later, and far closer to McCartney's April 1970 description:
“The Beatles split up? It just depends how much we all want to record together. I don’t know if I want to record together again. I go off and on it. I really do.
“The problem is that in the old days, when we needed an album, Paul and I got together and produced enough songs for it. Nowadays there’s three if us writing prolifically and trying to fit it all onto one album. Or we have to think of a double album every time, which takes six months.
“That’s the hang-up we have. It’s not a personal ‘The Beatles are fighting’ thing, so much as an actual physical problem. What do you do? I don’t want to spend six months making an album I have two tracks on. And neither do Paul or George probably. That’s the problem. If we can overcome that, maybe it’ll sort itself out."
The Wenner narrative would have to assume that John was camouflaging his true feelings in this interview, but there is no reason why John needed to maintain a fiction indefinitely into 1970. It is not convincing that he would have remained silent just to maintain the commercial interests of the "Get Back" project, which Lennon cared little for and which still made money after the group's split became public knowledge in April 1970 (arguably it made more money than if the band had still been together).
A more plausible narrative is that John and Paul became more convinced of the split in early 1970. John recorded 'Instant Karma' without offering it as a Beatles project, and Paul escalated his work on his solo album around the time that 'Instant Karma' came out. This supports the idea that Paul was still waiting for John to make a move up to February 1970 and viewed the release of 'Instant Karma' as Lennon's confirmation that he was not coming back.
Where does this leave us on motivation, psychology and the dynamics of interpersonal interaction between two close but bitter friends? John had an incentive after the break-up to present himself as decisive and Paul as Machiavellian. In reality, John and Paul were experimenting tentatively and indecisively with a trial separation while keeping the band alive and future options still, to a degree, open. However, both of them went through three changes between September 1969 and February 1970. Firstly, John was getting used to being a 'Plastic Ono Band' performer; his identity as a non-Beatle was becoming more plausible to him. Paul equally was expanding his home studio work and becoming less centred on London. Secondly, as with many separated couples, the resentment was simmering and absence was making the heart grow colder. Grievances that could be smoothed over by daily contact were being allowed to fester. Thirdly, their ability to communicate with each other seems to have collapsed. Whatever signals they had been using to give each other reassurance were replaced by behaviours that each other perceived as provocations. They were not viewing each other's signals through rational eyes. These three processes, alongside the longer-standing issues of managerial conflict, song credits and suitable song choices for albums (Revolution 9, Cold Turkey, Maxwell's Silver Hammer) eventually convinced John to make the split permanent with the Instant Karma release, which Paul correctly perceived to be the final nail in the coffin.
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