Lynn Barber’s older man

Some blogger whose archives I was mining mentioned seeing the film An Education, based (loosely, as I understand it) on Barber’s memoir of the same title. Thanks to inter-library loan, I got my hands on a copy, so now we can compare Barber’s older man to Mary Quant’s. Difference #1 is that Barber was never in love with hers. But the parents certainly encouraged him. All quotations from Lynn Barber, An Education, New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.

It is important to note that her parents “were effectively first-generation immigrants to the middle class, having arrived by way of grammar school” (4), and that they were heavily invested in ensuring that their daughter received a good education, “to pass every possible exam, gain every possible scholarship, and go to university—Cambridge if I was mathematically inclined like my father, or Oxford if I proved to be ‘artistic’ like my mother” (5). So their reaction to Simon was unexpected.

“I met him when I was sixteen and he was—he said twenty-seven, but probably in his late thirties” (24). Barber was waiting at a bus stop when he offered her a lift in his car. “I liked the smell of his cigar and the leather seats” (24). Her excuse for not going out with him, when asked, was that she was in rehearsals for a play and had no free time. He sent flowers to her on opening night, then once again drove her home. “I wasn’t exactly rushing headlong into this relationship; he was far too old for me to think of him as a boyfriend. On the other hand, I had always fantasised about having an older man, someone even more sophisticated than me, to impress the little squirts of Hampton Grammar. So I agreed to go out with him on Friday week, though I warned that he would have to undergo a grilling from my father” (25).

“This time, for once, my father made no fuss at all. He asked where Simon and I had met; I said at Richmond Little Theatre, and that was that. He seemed genuinely impressed by Simon, and even volunteered that we could stay out till midnight, an hour after my normal weekend curfew” (26).

“Besides taking me out at weekends, Simon would sometimes drop in during the week when he said he was ‘just passing’. . . .On these occasions, he would stay chatting to my parents, sometimes for an hour or more, about news or politics—subjects of no interest to me. Often the three of them were so busy talking they didn’t even notice if I left the room. . . . In theory, Simon represented everything my parents most feared—he was not one of us, he was Jewish and cosmopolitan, practically a foreigner! He wore cashmere sweaters and suede shoes” (25) [oh dear, shades of Marc Mandell]. “Worst of all, [he] boasted that he had been educated in ‘the university of life’—not a teaching establishment that my parents recognized. And yet, inexplicably, they liked him. In fact, they liked him more than I ever liked him, perhaps because he took great pains to make them like him. He brought my mother flowers and my father wine; he taught them to pay backgammon; he chatted to them endlessly and seemed genuinely interested in their views” (25-26).

Simon is not sexually importunate; he seems happy to take Barber out to meals and on weekends to Paris and other Continental cities, without a great deal of reciprocation from a girl whose “role in the relationship was to be the schoolgirl ice maiden: implacable, ungrateful, unresponsive to everything he said or did” (29).

“The affair—if it was an affair—drifted on, partly because no proper boyfriends showed up, partly because I had become used to my strange double life of schoolgirl swot during the week, restaurant-going, foreign-traveling sophisticate at weekends” (31). I must admit, this double role would have had enormous appeal to me when I was 16 or 17, and it’s probably a good thing that I never had the opportunity to try it out. Barber never let Simon meet her friends, not wanting them to realize that he was “not the James Bond figure I had described, but this rather short, rather ugly, long-faced, splay-footed man who talked in different accents and lied about his age, whose stories didn’t add up” (31).

“On the evening I finished sitting my A-levels, Simon took me out to dinner and proposed. I had wanted him to propose, as proof of my power” [oh, God, girls!] “but I had absolutely no intention of accepting because of course I was going to Oxford” (38). She relays the proposal to her parents, expecting them to share her understanding that of course university trumps marriage to this man who hardly seems very desirable. But her father says “Why not?” and “‘You’ve been going out with him for two years; he’s obviously serious, he’s a good man, don’t mess him around.’ I turned to my mother incredulously but she shook her head. ‘You don’t need to go to university if you’ve got a good husband’.

“This was 1962, well before the advent of feminism’ [sic]. But even so, I felt a sense of utter betrayal, as if I’d spent eighteen years in a convent and then the Mother Superior had said, ‘Of course, you know, God doesn’t exist'” (38).

So it turns out (duh) that Simon is married, and planned to commit bigamy; he also goes to prison for bouncing checks. Barber goes to Oxford as planned. In the time she went out with Simon, she “learned about expensive restaurants and luxury hotels and foreign travel . . . about antiques and Bergman films and classical music. All this was useful when I went to Oxford . . . . But actually there was a much bigger bonus than that. My experience with Simon entirely cured my craving for sophistication. By the time I got to Oxford I wanted nothing more than to meet kind, decent, conventional boys my own age, no matter if they were gauche or virgins” (46).

And that, I have to say, is a decent ambition. When I was in my mid- to late teens, I longed to be Simone de Beauvoir; I had experience of European travel thanks to my parents, and of classical music thanks to them and some of my friends, Bergman films thanks to a local arts theater (not that I liked Bergman much), but it did take boyfriends and their families to teach me about expensive restaurants and antiques. My experience of luxury hotels remains limited, though thanks to conference travel I’ve stayed in a few places that have been higher-end. I think, even as an experience-hungry teenager, I would have drawn the line at a long-term relationship with someone like Simon, but I definitely had a few first-and-last dates with older men who thought I would be bowled over by their sophistication and were a bit surprised to find that I was not. Also I had a strong preference for sleeping with men my own age, so I don’t think I could have run a Simon unless I had had a “proper boyfriend” as well, and then why bother?

But I think my mother would have agreed with Lynn Barber’s parents. It is alarming how late these ideas lasted. (I hope the past tense is justified: are there still such parents?)