Book Review - A Late Education by Alan Moorehead

A Late Education: Episodes in a Life by Alan Moorehead

London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970                           ISBN 0241019869

Alan Moorehead was for a time one of the most successful writers in the English-speaking world. He made his name as a war correspondent, and went on after the conflict to produce a dozen or so non-fiction books on subjects as diverse as the Gallipoli Campaign, and a history of the Nile River. He had a fascinating life, and A Late Education gives us some insight into what he did and thought (for an excellent biography of Alan Moorehead, I can highly recommend Our Man Elsewhere by Thornton McCamish).

The book is divided up into chapters that deal with various events in his life, each an individual essay. The exception to this are the interspersed chapters entitled "To the Edgeware Road" (I-V), which document his close friendship with fellow correspondent Alex Clifford. We learn from the various essays that Moorehead was not a great scholar, although he attended both Scotch College and Melbourne University. He knew from quite an early age that writing was what he wanted to do, and so began his journalistic career in Melbourne, before heading off to London in the 1930s. He was very keen to leave Australia and be where the action was, and he tells us of his early days in Europe, where he was drinking in life, having affairs with engaged women, and travelling around Europe trying to find a story. He was in Berlin during the Olympics, and spent quite a while in Gibraltar during the Spanish Civil War, trying to find a way to get in to Spain.

He never made it into that country for longer than a few days, but his descriptions of the berthing of the Deutschland to bury its dead after being attacked by the Spanish Republican airforce, the effect of the German retaliatory bombardment of Almeria, of running the blockade in a tanker ship, and of seeing refugees enter France after crossing the Pyrenees bring - as always with Moorehead's writing - the scenes alive in the reader's mind.

After a chapter describing his life in Paris just before the war, we are then taken to Tuscany and I Tatti for an appreciative short description of Bernard Berenson, who helped Moorehead so much in his early literary forays.

Meanwhile throughout these adventures, Moorehead has been describing his friendship with Alex Clifford. After an icy first meeting, they quickly became friends, although they had opposing personalities - the cerebral, tentative Clifford turned out to be the perfect foil for the assertive brash Moorehead, and together they made a great team as they followed the armies through the desert, on to Italy and France. It is obvious that Moorehead deeply loved his friend, and was so happy for him when he finally found love and married. Tragically not long after Clifford was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease and the last installment of "To the Edgeware Road" describes Clifford's last years of life and his death. Clifford had "a morbid notion that he would die in the Edgware Road", which to him epitomized dreary middle-class moralities and life. It is here that the irony of naming this section becomes clear as, on his death, Clifford was in fact buried from a funeral parlour on the Edgware Road.

This hides a greater irony: that A Late Education, while written by Moorehead, was not edited, assembled, or published by him. In 1966 Moorehead suffered a severe stroke, and was unable to write again (he died in 1983). A Late Education was brought together by his wife Lucy from pieces he had written earlier in his life, and it became the last book issued under his name.

If you like good writing, you should read it.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell