Alan Durband: the teacher who inspired Paul McCartney’s respect for literature
Paul McCartney has been praised for writing some of the more sensitive and emotional lyrics in The Beatles’ back catalogue – but where did that sensitivity come from? According to his recent This Cultural Life podcast appearance, Macca puts it down to an early kinship with some of the greatest works of English literature.
Discussing his attitude when he was a young lad at school, McCartney noted: “[I was] a bit of a skiver really, but [only] until you had to knuckle down. Teachers were pretty brutal in those days, you know. They were allowed to whack you, and so they did. And then there was a period where I was getting very near exams. I didn’t do brilliantly, but, you know, those couple of years, I paid attention a bit more.”
However, despite the occasional truancy, McCartney owes his adult love for literature to one particular teacher. “I had a brilliant English literature teacher who was called Alan Durband,” he said, “And I didn’t realise the significance of it, but he’d been taught but F.R. Leavis from Cambridge. I’m just some Liverpool guy, and he’s trying to teach us Chaucer, and we’re just not having it. Like, ‘Hey, Sir, what’s this about?'”
As Macca professes, Durband had been taught by F.R. Leavis, who was a significant English literary critic for most of the first part of the 20th Century. He taught at Downing College, Cambridge, for much of his career, before later working at the University of York. McCartney added, on his respect for Durband: “He was great, he was a very good teacher, and he got me to get interested by telling me about The Miller’s Tale, and when I read it, I thought, ‘this is great’. It’s really dirty, and it gave me a lot of respect for Chaucer, and then it got me interested in other bits of literature.”
From Chaucer, McCartney developed an interest in other significant works of drama. “I became really interested in going to the Royal Court in Liverpool and watching plays and reading plays,” he said. “He’d done the thing that great teachers do. Salome, you know, plays that were considered to be good. I did Hamlet and Henry V.”
The love for literature from that early age has stuck around with Macca even to this day. He added: “The great thing is that you had to learn bits, so to this day, when we’re talking Shakespeare [I can quote him]. So it gave respect for great literature. At one point, I was thinking I would love to direct a few plays. Hamlet was one. I’d be hopeless.”
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