"I was damaged by my education": a review of Lynn Barber's An Education.
From Friday, 9 March to Saturday, 10 March, I read Lynn Barber's memoir, An Education (NY: Atlas & Co. Publishers [distributed by W.W. Norton & Company], 2009 [first published in the UK by the Penguin Group]; 173 pps.); this was an expansion of the article she'd had published in Granta, which was the basis of the eponymous 2009 film (which I've yet to see), starring Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard, written by Nick Hornby, and directed by Lone Scherfig. I checked it out through inter-library loan; oddly enough, only one of the libraries within my home library's immediate lending circle of dozens of libraries had it.
Lynn Barber is a multiple award-winning British journalist who specializes in the celebrity interview, and who is most celebrated for her celebrity take-downs, a fact that irks her: yes, she presented noted BBC broadcaster Melvyn Bragg (host of the weekly intellectual discussion programme on Radio Four, In Our Time), actor and rakehell Richard Harris, and damaged chanteuse (and one of Mick Jagger's ex-girlfriends) Marianne Faithful in a less-than-flattering light, but she also wrote "thoughtful" pieces on the likes of Rudolf Nureyev, Roald Dahl and Muriel Spark that weren't as memorable to her readers as her hatchet jobs (pps. 122-23). Her take-no-prisoners approach to interviewing celebs earned her the ambivalent nickname of "Demon Barber" (a punning reference to Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street), but she is also the author of two well-received and wildly different books: an early sex self-help manual for women titled How to Improve Your Man in Bed (she notes that her husband "had to put up with his Polytechnic students asking him 'Are you improved?'"; p. 99), and "a hefty tome called The Heyday of Natural History about the effect of Darwinism on popular Victorian natural history books" (pps. 105-06). Her remarks about writing the latter are enough to give any auto-didact pause:
"The book got excellent reviews, and still counts as my calling card with people like Sir David Attenborough, but I bitterly regret doing it. It was five years' hard work, for almost no money, and proved what any of my Oxford tutors could have told me -- that I had no natural vocation for scholarship. The saddest outcome was that, before I wrote Heyday, I used to love reading Victorian natural history books and searching for them in second-hand bookshops, but afterwards I could hardly bear to look at them, even the real beauties like Philip Gosse's [the subject of his son Edmund's scathing 1907 memoir, Father and Son] Tenby."
The strongest chapter, of course, is the one concerning her oddball affair with a charming -- and married, as well as nearly middle-aged -- conman when she was 16 years old; not only did her parents know of this relationship, but, according to Barber, they all but pushed her into his bed, so taken were they with him. She notes that her "boyfriend" got on better with her parents than he did with her; she has also taken some heat for "publicly shaming" her parents, who are both in their nineties and far from being in the bloom of health, with this account. Barber underplays the sexual abuse that she suffered at his hands ("I think the word that best describes my entire sex life with Simon is negligible....although I spent many nights in bed with Simon, often in foreign hotel rooms, very little ever happened"; p. 31); to her, the real deleterious effect of this affair was to her moral compass, and her respect for her parents, which she doesn't seem to have recovered.
Indeed, in the next chapter, summarizing her career at Oxford University, she notes that she was more interested in following her ad hoc erotic syllabus than the one she was supposed to be studying: "I probably slept with about fifty men in my second year" (p. 57); one is torn between a bemused, grudging respect for her "veddy British" getting on with it, and a kind of pity that she doesn't seem to realize -- or accept -- just how badly the attentions of Simon affected her, and sidetracked her development as a person.
Still, this is not a heavy-handed, Oprah-courting memoir, but rather a glancing and pithy look at the state of British journalism in the last thirty-odd years, as well as lower middle class life in England in the last fifty-odd years, and one person's experience in it. The chapter concerning her tenure at the London offices of Penthouse (I had no idea that Penthouse started in London before moving to Manhattan) is a light-hearted, though hectic and at times head-shaking, romp, and the other highlights in her career pass agreeably enough until the final two gloomy, though controlled, chapters concerning the death of her husband and her first taste of widowhood. Barber doesn't neglect to drop the interesting bit of trivia even here, such as when she observes, "many of the top haematologists are Cypriots because Cyprus has an endemic blood disease, thalassaemia" (p. 160). Barber's postscript sounds perhaps the strongest existential note, and may well leave the reader with the strongest ambivalent feelings about her; one might be tempted to chalk up her ungenerousity of spirit to her having been a sharper's gull (and having been betrayed by her parents, not to put too fine a point on it), if it weren't for the fact that she doesn't exactly come across as being terribly empathetic before she met Simon. Yes, yes, selfishness and self-absorption are functions of childhood; however, it's always striking, and disheartening, how some of us -- many of us -- never leave this part of childhood behind.
Lynn Barber is a multiple award-winning British journalist who specializes in the celebrity interview, and who is most celebrated for her celebrity take-downs, a fact that irks her: yes, she presented noted BBC broadcaster Melvyn Bragg (host of the weekly intellectual discussion programme on Radio Four, In Our Time), actor and rakehell Richard Harris, and damaged chanteuse (and one of Mick Jagger's ex-girlfriends) Marianne Faithful in a less-than-flattering light, but she also wrote "thoughtful" pieces on the likes of Rudolf Nureyev, Roald Dahl and Muriel Spark that weren't as memorable to her readers as her hatchet jobs (pps. 122-23). Her take-no-prisoners approach to interviewing celebs earned her the ambivalent nickname of "Demon Barber" (a punning reference to Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street), but she is also the author of two well-received and wildly different books: an early sex self-help manual for women titled How to Improve Your Man in Bed (she notes that her husband "had to put up with his Polytechnic students asking him 'Are you improved?'"; p. 99), and "a hefty tome called The Heyday of Natural History about the effect of Darwinism on popular Victorian natural history books" (pps. 105-06). Her remarks about writing the latter are enough to give any auto-didact pause:
"The book got excellent reviews, and still counts as my calling card with people like Sir David Attenborough, but I bitterly regret doing it. It was five years' hard work, for almost no money, and proved what any of my Oxford tutors could have told me -- that I had no natural vocation for scholarship. The saddest outcome was that, before I wrote Heyday, I used to love reading Victorian natural history books and searching for them in second-hand bookshops, but afterwards I could hardly bear to look at them, even the real beauties like Philip Gosse's [the subject of his son Edmund's scathing 1907 memoir, Father and Son] Tenby."
The strongest chapter, of course, is the one concerning her oddball affair with a charming -- and married, as well as nearly middle-aged -- conman when she was 16 years old; not only did her parents know of this relationship, but, according to Barber, they all but pushed her into his bed, so taken were they with him. She notes that her "boyfriend" got on better with her parents than he did with her; she has also taken some heat for "publicly shaming" her parents, who are both in their nineties and far from being in the bloom of health, with this account. Barber underplays the sexual abuse that she suffered at his hands ("I think the word that best describes my entire sex life with Simon is negligible....although I spent many nights in bed with Simon, often in foreign hotel rooms, very little ever happened"; p. 31); to her, the real deleterious effect of this affair was to her moral compass, and her respect for her parents, which she doesn't seem to have recovered.
Indeed, in the next chapter, summarizing her career at Oxford University, she notes that she was more interested in following her ad hoc erotic syllabus than the one she was supposed to be studying: "I probably slept with about fifty men in my second year" (p. 57); one is torn between a bemused, grudging respect for her "veddy British" getting on with it, and a kind of pity that she doesn't seem to realize -- or accept -- just how badly the attentions of Simon affected her, and sidetracked her development as a person.
Still, this is not a heavy-handed, Oprah-courting memoir, but rather a glancing and pithy look at the state of British journalism in the last thirty-odd years, as well as lower middle class life in England in the last fifty-odd years, and one person's experience in it. The chapter concerning her tenure at the London offices of Penthouse (I had no idea that Penthouse started in London before moving to Manhattan) is a light-hearted, though hectic and at times head-shaking, romp, and the other highlights in her career pass agreeably enough until the final two gloomy, though controlled, chapters concerning the death of her husband and her first taste of widowhood. Barber doesn't neglect to drop the interesting bit of trivia even here, such as when she observes, "many of the top haematologists are Cypriots because Cyprus has an endemic blood disease, thalassaemia" (p. 160). Barber's postscript sounds perhaps the strongest existential note, and may well leave the reader with the strongest ambivalent feelings about her; one might be tempted to chalk up her ungenerousity of spirit to her having been a sharper's gull (and having been betrayed by her parents, not to put too fine a point on it), if it weren't for the fact that she doesn't exactly come across as being terribly empathetic before she met Simon. Yes, yes, selfishness and self-absorption are functions of childhood; however, it's always striking, and disheartening, how some of us -- many of us -- never leave this part of childhood behind.