A Long Summary Of Barbara Amiel's "Confessions," Part 1

This summary makes no pretensions to either literary or scholarly merit; essentially, it's a long book review, and not a very meritious one at that. I wrote it because Confessions is long out of print, and is not easy to find. Since it was an autobiographical work, it provides a detailed glimpse into Mrs. Black's mind at the time she wrote it, at the close of the 1970s, when she was still Barbara Amiel and married to George Jonas. I have, of course, skipped over many details in the book, even though this summary is only of the first ten chapters of it. Page references are for the 1981 paperback edition, published by Totem Books.

Two webbed biographies of Mrs. Black are linked to in this entry.


Confessions opens with a July 3, 1978 lunch, in mid-Toronto, in which her writings are questioned about by the rabbi who officiated at her wedding with George Jonas. That rabbi was a member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission at the time, and it was a “lunching” approved by the Commission itself.

As a child in London, England, she had learned that the root cause of World War 2 was racism. She counterpoints this with a September, 1977 interview with John Tyndall, then-leader of the National Front, who declares that it was fought to save the British Empire. Despite what she was told about the defeat of racism, though, she heard “jewing” used casually, and the word “n***er” used instructionally at the school she went to, North London Collegiate. (It was run by Anglicans when she was there.) She was sized up as her fellow schoolmates as a Communist type.

[On this webpage, you'll find the term 'n***er brown" used in the School Uniform/ Girls/Winter part of the 1959 "Wolverhampton Municipal Grammar School Prospectus." The city of Wolverhampton is near Birmingham, in the West Midlands. Thanks to Dr. Dawg for finding this item.]

She was actually looked after by a London Communist, Mr. Sedley, who proceeded to bring her into the CP's orbit, through entertainment as well as instruction. One of her uncles was a Communist; another, her uncle Bernard, was a Maoist. Her non-immediate relatives and near-ancestors were, broadly speaking, left-wing. Her father, who made colonel while serving in the U.K. army in World War 2, was a left-Labourite. (He committed suicide in 1956.) Because the Liberal Party was the underdog in the 1950 election, she plumped for the Liberals at school, but soon became a social democrat. She explains this in Confessions as a natural result of her upbringing, one permeated with the belief that socialism and the future went hand-in-hand, which she treats as her childhood’s conditioning. She won a scholarship to a posh British boarding school, but couldn’t go because her mother decided to move to Canada, in November 1952. This move was undertook for the sake of her stepfather, an electrician without university training, whose prospects were limited in the U.K.

The job promised to her stepfather proved not to be there. At first, her family was so poor, they had to fend on one meal a day; she and her sisters used to fantasize about wealth that would allow one to eat when one pleased. They qualified for public housing in Roxborough Park. Life without government-provided heath care was harder in Canada back then, but the British NHS doctors were brusque, with a monopolist’s attitude, and even surly at times. Given her socialist pre-conditioning, the state of Ontario health care, pre-OHIP, was a pleasant surprise. “Patients were treated like clients, not liabilities” by Canadian health-care practitioners (p. 29) –even in the charity wards. A memorable quote, from p. 31: “It is, after all, the community that has to bear the cost of the health care….Some advocates have used [this argument] in the campaign, as yet embryonic, to outlaw cigarette-smoking. It may yet be invoked to restrict the consumption of fatty foods or to introduce compulsory jogging.” [Remember: this was first published in 1980.]

At fourteen, she stayed in Hamilton when the rest of her family moved to St. Catherine’s, and tried to fend for herself, renting a room in a garage mechanic's house. She resolved to be an editorial columnist, writing left-wing editorials to the masses, but Amiel notes wryly that her younger self pursued opportunity in a way that she, at the time, would argue was closed to everyone except for the elite. At fifteen, she got a job in a drugstore where her older schoolmates, from Delta Secondary School, hung out. She got a better job, moved into a basement apartment in a house owned by a colourful Polish-Canadian family, and began hanging out with the “wrong crowd,” a gang composed partially of natives. Her intellectuality didn’t matter to them; she and they got along fine. Infected cuts gotten at a third job, in an E.D. Smith packing plant, got her re-united, temporarily, with her family. She experienced small-town Canada as humane, and saw Orwell’s “ordinary decency” in the working class. (She also describes Canadians as informal, but inhibited.) Help was there, but it was given on a spot basis. She notes that formalized problem-finding, when done in the poorer or more vulnerable parts of the world, becomes, to an extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy, and drains away a necessary stoicism from the people in those groups. While still at high school in St. Catherine’s, she exhibited a precocious flair for journalism. Before going to the University of Toronto, she heard David Lewis speak to a small group of supporters, including her, but believed at the time that he wasn’t left-wing enough.

She got seriously interested in Communism in 1962, in part because of a date with a pro-Communist fellow attending Balliol College, Oxford. Her “godfather” and his family, whom she re-visited while in London to claim an inheritance from her deceased grandfather’s estate, got her a ticket to the World Communist Youth Festival [formally, the "World Festival of Youth and Students"] in Helsinki, Finland, one she herself had to pay for. The trip package included a three-week tour of East Germany, Warsaw and Leningrad and started in East Berlin. Before and while traveling on the train, she saw sights that planted later doubts in her mind – especially the encounter between she and her group’s translator in East Berlin, Gertie, who begged young Barbara to get her out of there. Gertie later conveyed the impression to two East German policemen, or soldiers, that she had been taken advantage of by a foreign “fascist” – namely, Miss Amiel herself. (pp. 49-50.) While at a stop in East Germany, she got her picture on the front page of an East German paper with an eight-year-old “Young Pioneer” giving her handicrafts. While at the conference itself, she disclosed the less-than-paradisical sights she saw while there, including Gertie’s tears, in the spirit of self-criticism. No-one gave her the normal round of applause afterwards. She left an anti-totalitarian. After she got back to Canada, the papers were full of stories about the RCMP opening dossiers on Communist student activists, which frightened her into asking the Member of Parliament in her riding, Liberal Perry Ryan, if she herself was under surveillance. He didn’t answer, but informed her that if she was worried, she should become an RCMP informant, which would make her safe. This answer “confounded” (p. 55) her, as such practices seemed closer to Soviet practice than liberal ideals.

After becoming addicted to codeine pills, and receiving help from the Addiction Research Foundation for it because they ended up inflaming a pre-existing anxiety condition that included claustrophobia, she moved into the trendy circuit in Montreal as of 1963. Shortly after her arrival there, she saw regular use of harder drugs, including heroin. She group-experimented with cannabis, but found, after trying marijuana, that it aggravated her anxiety condition. Being put on an anti-depressant by an endocrinologist, at a dose level normally used for seriously disturbed people, was one of the experiences that led her to reflect that left-liberals often label beliefs, or hunches, as “scientific truth,” (p. 65) with statistical correlations often used as evidence. The ultimate result, if such an ideology prevails universally, is a society where all blame is externalized.

By this time, she had gotten a job with the CBC, where she discovered that truth was secondary to trendiness, as mediated by a left-liberal worldview encased in the humanities and cultural anthropology. She also learned that her fellow government employees were, as a rule, untouchable. By 1967, she was on-camera, although her delivery was remote at first because of the anti-depressant’s effect. She grew into the job later, though. As a result, she was assigned to gather data for a “scientific” prediction of the winner of the 1968 Liberal convention, which proved to be difficult to get because of delegate unavailability and/or reticence. She discloses in the book that, as a result of pressure from the producer of the show and also her boss, she made the results up. She did predict the winner, Pierre Trudeau, but the older Amiel expresses qualms about the fast one that her younger self pulled back then. Dismissing the possibility that her “little fraudulent poll” (p. 77) changed the results, she nevertheless discloses that she “crowned” the CBC staff’s choice, and notes how easy it was to swim with the left-lib “syndrome” (p. 78,) one more pervasive than a mere conspiracy. It prevailed in the CBC, and in the Canadian media generally. A then-young Henry Champ, then with CTV’s W5, suffered on account of this mindset, when he deviated from the acceptable line by questioning the appropriateness of the World Council of Churches’ support of Rhodesian guerrillas. (p. 80.) She notes that the American media has a greater diversity of viewpoints.

She herself went on an extensive working trip to America with a director boyfriend, George Bloomfield, starting in late 1968, and met: Ann-Margret; Marlo Thomas; and, the first American woman to bull-fight, who was the subject of an Amiel interview for the CBC Radio program Matinee. Amiel was still there in 1970, at the time of the Kent State shootings, and found legitimate outrage, over the killing of the four student protestors, mixed in with an already-established indulgence for left-wing student activists. These activists were not above using intimidation tactics that included the physical variety. The pervasive indulgence in the university of left-wing activists was accompanied by a coldness towards any conservative student activists at the time. The intimidation was also turned on centrist liberals as well; the need for them to stay meek was one of the crucibles for mixing together the present neoconservative movement. (It almost certainly was for Mrs. Black’s own brand of conservatism.) At the time, it was trendy amongst the CBC staff to put American draft resistors, or dodgers, on camera; at about that time. Native Canadian activists got airplay out of what could be called “competitive guilting” by Canadian left-liberals.

While down in the United States, she saw that “poverty” in the U.S. of A. was more affluent than what she had been led to believe, courtesy of Canadian media reports and (of course) her own then-current biases. In October 1970, Jane Fonda called Trudeau a “fascist” to her face, as a criticism of him invoking the War Measures Act after securing Parliamentary consent to do so. At the time. Ms. Fonda's criticism prompted nationalistic feelings in Miss Amiel, but ironic half-agreement later from Mrs. Amiel Jonas.

While living the life of a left-wing dinner hostess in London, further doubts crept into her mind as she saw that the “workers” seemed the most resentful of the influx of black immigrants to Britain. As of that time (1971,) she also saw that her Maoist uncle, Bernard, was unaverse to turning a few bucks his way through real-estate acquisition. He had already made a modest fortune through running an import-export business for goods from China, and he was quick to echo the “Chinese exceptionalism” argument for the claim that China was not really totalitarian. She and her boyfriend returned to Montreal in the fall of 1971, to find that Mao’s China was “Very Hot.” (p. 107) Shortly afterwards, she and Mr. Bloomfield split up. George Jonas, her second husband, was soon to enter her life.


Part 2 of the summary, which will concentrate on the rest of Confessions, is here.