Getting ready to tackle the complete works of Germaine Greer, stacked in a formidable tower on the library desk, I pull my pen and paper hankies out of my bag and a small oblong of stiffish paper flutters to the cork floor. It is a sticker from the album Calciatori 1998-99. Dario Hubner and Francesco Marino stare out at me, dressed in the blue and white strip of Brescia football club (in Italy's second division, Serie B). Dario, on my left, is grizzled and weather-beaten, with frown lines between his eye-brows like the ones my mother notes sadly that I am developing. Francesco is young and smiling. (Perhaps they are only briefly to be seen side by side, like two passengers in adjacent glass elevators in a hotel, Dario on his way down, Francesco going up.)
Paper relics of my stay in the Ospedale Meyer in Florence, where my son and I recently spent four days, Dario and Francesco don't seem to want to go away. A couple of days later they turn up on my table at home in a cairn-like agglomeration, including a ragged green teddy, a Casio calculator and a lump of fool's gold which my daughter insists that I always have there. Desultorily, I peel off the sticker's backing sheet and press it on to my noticeboard, reflecting that the shabby mound of little objects has necessary metonymic significance. Dario and Francesco help to explain that, although in most respects a metropolitan middle class mother, I have spent almost all of my adult life abroad, most recently in Italy, and my travels have taken the edge off my Englishness and my sense of belonging.
This says much about how I am going to read Greer. I am too young to have read her best book, The female eunuch, other than retrospectively. I have visited Britain often enough to be aware of her presence in British cultural life, but not often enough to have been anything other than an intermittent visitor to the theatre of her celebrity-with its quarrels, contradictions and Situationist-style acts of "producing confusion, to stimulate creative thought," as she has put it. There is no prior history to our encounter; I have no axes to grind. So, notwithstanding the objects on my desk, I am determined to approach her work from the point of view of what it says and not who says it, the more so because she has denounced biographers as flesh-eaters, and I myself am a biographer.
The eunuch, published in 1970 when Greer was 31, took an axiom of the left-that the oppressed, suffering from false consciousness, were willing collaborators in their own oppression-and gendered and sexualised it. Ranging boldly across disciplines, Greer offered what she later described as "an analysis of sex oppression in the developed world in the second half of the 20th century." Women have become eunuchs, she asserted, because they have allowed the interests of patriarchy and capitalism (which in the 1970s could be seen as synonymous and named without the blush of quotation marks) to castrate them, to remove their "constant sexual desire," their curiosity, creativity, intelligence and capacity to love. Generations of women, she declared, have taken part in a cycle of self-mutilation, bringing up their daughters to be like themselves: creatures of male desire, victims of the absurdities of romantic love, chief consumers of the productions of capitalism and nurturing in their children an unhealthy dependence upon them. The time had come for the oppressed to cast off these shackles and embrace the heady uncertainties of freedom.
It is a testimony, perhaps, to the veracity of Greer's analysis that her shackled and castrated readers did not rise as one and hurl her book into the Thames. For she had laid a heavy burden upon them: first to take upon themselves all the sins of the western world and then, without help, to break their chains and emerge into the unknown world of liberty. It was a female burden because, although men are acknowledged not only as the begetters of capitalism but as its victims, too, they are given no role in either understanding or ridding the world of its iniquities. Although Greer offered something of a political analysis, she did not offer then and has never offered since any kind of structured political solution. She sees freedom in purely individual, redemptive terms, even if she hopes that groups of individuals-in Tuscan farmhouses, say-may form new kinds of social units. "What will you do?" she demands of her reader in the book's last sentence.
But Greer did give her readers a snapshot of what the liberated woman might look like. Reunited with her own anatomy, and guided by the "pleasure principle," she would express a joyful promiscuity-something quite different from "compulsive promiscuity or inability to say no"-and would be able to secure love as "a cognitive act" from "our dying consumer culture." In short, she would "have something to desire, something to make, something to achieve, and at last something genuine to give."
From a distance of 29 years it is hard to see that there was one sentence in The female eunuch which could have been of any practical help to anyone. But it was a huge bestseller and made its author famous. Riding the crest of the "second wave of feminism," its readers believed that it helped to ferment an atmosphere in which they could summon the confidence to push at closed doors. With hindsight we can see that the demands of the labour market were already silently opening those doors from within, but at the time the book seemed a formidable battering ram.
Its success, like that of most manifestos, was as much a triumph of style as substance. Its cover, showing a rubberised female carapace suspended from a pole, with nipples like the ends of pistol barrels and handles on the hips, was provocative. The text was nattily broken up with inset boxes containing pithy quotes from Wollstonecraft and Astell, Blake and Veblen, in the manner of Whistler's teasing, ironic, marginalia in his Ten O'Clock lecture, or the bold exhortations in Wyndham Lewis's Blast. The written style was raunchily journalistic, but with enough literary flourishes to remind readers of Greer's career as a literary scholar. And the author seemed to embody the triumphant woman the book demanded. She was young and beautiful. She had a biting wit and a dominant personality. She could pull off the astonishing feat of both condemning the beauty business and wearing a shoulderless black dress and fox-fur stole when appearing on a platform to discuss feminism in New York a few months after The eunuch's publication. She was enough of an Australian outsider to be able to criticise the cultural establishment in Britain, yet enough of an English insider-as a Cambridge Shakespearean scholar-not only to retain the establishment's goodwill, but also to confirm to itself its own British tolerance. So, she was already the Greer we are familiar with today; a commanding contradictory celebrity of whom we can say both that she tries to use her status to create a vortex into which to hurl ideas, and that the solecism and self-regard for which she condemns women poets in Slip-shod sybils are only too evident in her own life and work.
Greer was born in 1939 in a Melbourne suburb, daughter of Margaret Lafrank, a milliner's apprentice and one-time model turned housewife, and Reg Greer, the Melbourne advertising salesman for an Adelaide-based newspaper group, Advertiser Newspapers. She has described her childhood and adolescence in the 1989 memoir, Daddy we hardly knew you, and in several articles and interviews. Academically gifted and personally flamboyant, the pull of bigger stages-first Melbourne and Sydney Universities, then England and beyond-was irresistible. "I am a bolter," she told Anthony Clare in a 1989 interview, implying that personally and intellectually she demands change and finds commitment difficult.
Greer's histrionic capacities, well-developed at school, found ready outlets in Melbourne and Sydney, in Cambridge, as one of the first female members of the Footlights, and then on British television, before being brought brilliantly to bear on the creation of what she herself has called "the ersatz phenomenon of Germaine Greer, celebrity."
This fear of the falsity and shallowness of her own persona points to an unresolved tension in Greer's sense of identity, and takes us to the heart of her writing. As she herself pointed out, polemics need polemicists and "festivals of the oppressed" need mistresses of ceremonies. But Greer remains resolutely uneasy about her stardom and that makes us question it, too. On the face of it, there need be no tension between Greer's feminism and her self-promotion. The difficulty lies in her own understanding of celebrity. If there is one consistent theme in her work, one driving conviction that binds the whole corpus together, it is that there is something prior, something antecedent, to the forms of corruption which we have allowed consumer society to visit upon us; something positive and pure that is beyond and before the capitalism of which celebrity is a trashy handmaiden. So while inviting us to consume her as a celebrity, she demands in her written work and her recorded remarks that we understand this to be false and limiting. A real something, a kernel of purity, is what she strives towards, and urges upon us. But she offers us no public model of the authenticity she promotes. It is a trap from which there seems no way out. Whereas other cultural celebrities-Martin Amis, for instance, or even Fay Weldon-have the option of a kind of self-mocking, ironic, post-modern promotion of their own fame, Greer does not. The recovery of authenticity is the intellectual site from which she begins. She can make no accommodation with post-modernism. Yet she cannot stop self-promotion either.
This lifelong search for a still point in the turning world is Greer's greatest strength and ultimate weakness. It gives her work consistency, despite the fact that her critics-often from within the feminist movement-have accused her of backsliding and betrayal. But it is accompanied by a limited and ultimately unimaginative vision which seems inadequate to the world clustered on my desk top, and in which most of her audience live.
Although she left her job at Warwick University when The eunuch gave her financial independence, Greer-unlike her Cambridge room-mate Clive James-has never abandoned the academy. She had a spell at the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa from the late 1970s until 1983, subsequently returning to Cambridge as tutor at Newnham College. She has recently become Professor of English Literature back at Warwick (where her salary will be a bare 10 per cent of the reported £500,000 advance she has received in Britain alone for her new book, the whole woman).
A series of scholarly monographs has accompanied this progress: The obstacle race about women artists (1979); Shakespeare (1986); Kissing the rod (1989), an anthology of 17th century women's verse; and The Slip-shod sibyls (1995) about women poets. In addition, Greer has poured her own time and cash into her Stump Cross Books, which reprint forgotten women writers. Money, then, has not been the motivation behind her academic career.
It is obvious from Daddy that from adolescence onwards, when she began to read in the Melbourne public library, Greer identified the library with the world prior to and beyond capitalism; a place of safety and, almost, a womb. "In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed," she writes. Cambridge (although perhaps not Tulsa, where she had a row about money for her Centre for the Study of Women's Literature) has also been given the same status. In an extraordinary passage from Daddy, surely written as a commentary on the opening of Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, Greer writes of a dinner at high table in St John's College: "I loved it; I loved the limed oak panelling, and the stylised stucco grape vines that rioted symmetrically above my head. I loved the scent of good coffee and fine tobacco and the bouquet of my burgundy so carefully decanted by the college servants." Whereas Woolf used her dinner to move into a playful analysis of the relationships between wealth, creativity and gender, Greer, implicitly contrasting her own achieved acceptance with Woolf's privileged outsideness, puts her head down among the oxymorons (rioted symmetrically?), reiterating, "I loved it, I loved it, I loved it."
Many intellectuals who lived through the excitement of 1968, when the challenge to capitalism appeared to be emanating from the universities, still feel the same, although few would perhaps go so far as to include the bouquet of burgundy and the servants. Some of Greer's generation on the left-Perry Anderson and Juliet Mitchell, for example-have also returned to the academy, and many on the Continent never left. Greer's motivation seems as much personal as political, but she is living a willed simplification, the kind of myth most of us pull around ourselves for a bit of warmth and hermeneutic dignity. Perhaps we should not begrudge her bibliotechnic paradise, even if Cambridge and Oxford are Britain's premier forcing-houses for the very system she seeks to get beyond.
Outside the academy, Greer's polemical work has been voluminous, clamorous and designed to produce as much publicity as possible. Her books have developed into a kind of serial autobiography and they should be partly understood as such. The eunuch which elaborated her own persona as a liberated woman, was followed in 1984 by Sex and destiny, an attack on western sexuality written when Greer, at 45, must have been coming to terms with her own childlessness. It was followed in 1989 by the most self-contradictory of all her books, Daddy we hardly knew you, in which Greer turns biographer and goes in search of her father; The change, produced in 1991 when she herself was going through the menopause; and now the whole woman, which is a condensed, updated and more considered version of all her books about women. With the exception of Daddy, Greer's motivation in each of her books is the same: to uncover, describe and celebrate what in women's experience capitalism has not managed to distort and destroy. In The eunuch it was sexuality-or promiscuity, as Greer called it. Greer does not argue in The eunuch for lots of sex every-which-way; in fact, her attitude to sex has been relatively consistent throughout her career. "Real" sex has always been for her the untainted expression of individual feeling, despite the odd scherzo in underground magazines; and from the beginning she was against what she saw as its "taming" and commercialisation. Her recent campaigns for women's right to "say no," her embrace of chastity, her hostility to penile primacy and penetration, and her dislike of Viagra, are all consistent with this stance. Something, she argues, must be rescued from the market, must still constitute self-expression and individual identity, and there is nothing in her lexicon more fundamental to human identity than sexuality, in both its tenderest and most aggressive or dangerous forms.
It is in this context that the much-attacked Sex and destiny must be read. A jeremiad against the export to the third world of western attitudes to childbirth, sexuality, marriage and child-rearing, it demanded cultural relativism at a time when most people in the women's movement were still confidently universalist. The argument hoisted Greer on her own petard, and was a dangerous line of reasoning for one whose whole temperament seems to incline her to tell others what to do. Preaching against preaching, how could she sensibly or democratically suggest that the west should not export childbirth clinics or fistula hospitals to the developing world when women there were begging for them? Reverence towards her subjects-the same reverence she felt towards the Calabrian peasants whom she lived among in 1967-led her astray. While she was extolling their untamed simplicity, or seeming, in the case of African women, to endorse clitoridectomy, her subjects' lives were changing in ways they believed were for the better. No one who has read the testimonies of southern Italian peasants who moved north, in Paul Ginsborg's History of Contemporary Italy, can be in any doubt that they valued their new life because it meant that their families were healthier, safer and better off. For them and for millions of others, capitalism delivered. Greer has never accepted this-and never confronted the challenge of that success. None the less, Sex and destiny did raise the issue of relativism, which was to split the feminist movement a decade later and which is only now receding a little.
The change, subtitled "women, ageing and the menopause," was essentially The eunuch without the sex. Greer argues that women should not ignore menopausal symptoms, but should confront, cope with and even celebrate them. Why, the reader asks, after wading through pages of grim description? Because, in the process of desexualising women, the menopause also removes them from the market, liberating them into that space occupied by the uncastrated, where a woman "may be allowed to turn into herself." "The middle-aged woman no longer has the option of fulfilling the demands of patriarchal society," Greer says. "She has sooner or later to recognise that she has been junked by consumer culture... Only if she lets go can she recover her lost potency."
By the time The change appeared in 1991, Greer's belief in "something prior" seemed old-fashioned, to say the least. The Wall had fallen, capitalism was triumphant and the challenge to the left was not to destroy the market but to establish a critical identity within it. Greer has not moved with the times. She believes that women have and want to have identities separate from those they love and depend on, and that, come the menopause, their ties, dependencies and love received from partners, children, siblings, friends will melt away to reveal some irreducible core. That is just plain wrong: Dario and Francesco say so; the green teddy, the calculator and even the fool's gold say so. The events, the relationships they represent are part of us, and their presence on our desktops shows both that they are demanding and intrusive and that we want them to be there. Even men proudly carry teddies in their briefcases nowadays. We are not "ourselves." We are ourselves and others; inconvenient weighty molecules of identity made up of masses of untidy atoms of experience, memory and feeling, scraps of people, places, reactions; infinitely complicated machines for loving, hating and getting on with life.
Loving? That's the rub, all the way through, and that's the reason why, reading Greer's work, I veer between reverence, boredom and something more splenetic. Reverence, because she invigorates and stimulates; because she is beautiful, still there and still passionate about art and, for all its absurdities, about the still point in the turning world where she thinks we can be ourselves. Boredom, because celebrity is dull and because celebrity culture, with its constant demand for sensation and simplification, is no place from which to launch a revolution. It is hopelessly old-fashioned. As an agent for change, celebrity culture is stumbling along in the baggage train, while the battle (if it is still a battle) is being fought out in front, in kitchens, schools and offices all over this country and many others. And finally, spleen, because at the point where she could become really interesting, at the point where she could tell us why we would actually want to be decastrated or recover our lost potency, Greer refuses-or can't. True enough, she says in The eunuch that love is a "cognitive act," and decades afterwards in The change she declares that after the death of sexual passion older women "can discover of what bottomless and tireless love their hearts are capable." But nowhere in the whole corpus of her work-not even in Daddy-does any other figure emerge from the giant shadow of her own personality-and nowhere is there any recreation of a relationship which might give us an idea of how tireless love works, hour by hour. Yet love is what makes us human, sticks us together and keeps us going-love of art and ideas; of fool's gold and real gold, yes, but love between people, too. Love is more than a cognitive act (cognitive!) and more than tireless. It's a tiring, jumbled, lived, exhilarating mess which somehow rewards us with connectedness even as it creeps along through the detritus of everyday life. It's Serie B (with the odd cup tie), not Serie A. We need not make a religion of the quotidian; but the challenge of feminism is to give everyone the chance to wade through the ordinary as fully and as well as possible.
Let's be fair. the whole woman has a section entitled "love" and a chapter within it called "the love of women" which begins promisingly, rephrasing Wilde with typical panache and declaring that women "do not kill the things they love, but cherish them, feed them, nurture them." But after a page or so it descends into bathos-"the vast well of non-sexual love remains hidden. More than 80 per cent of RSPCA volunteers are women"-and then shifts back into a discussion of forms of sexuality.
Assertion, rather than elaboration or explication, is still Greer's strong suit. Although she approvingly draws attention to the words of the feminist artists the Guerrilla Girls, "I'm a Guerrilla Girl and I'm not angry. Anger is not part of our vocabulary," she rallies her readers by declaring, "It's time to get angry again." Invective and outrage peep, a bit mockingly, round the considerable edifice of the whole woman, destabilising its measured tone. They still have the best lines; Greer just cannot resist the punchy and extreme. Carried away on the current of "A few men hate women all of the time, some men hate some women all of the time, and all men hate some women some of the time," we are far out to sea before we say, "There's something wrong there," almost drowning before we splutter, "Not true!"
Love, in the whole woman, as in the rest of Greer's written work, is too anaemic and too tender a plant to withstand her tidal wave of rhetorical ire, although there are signs there that she would like it to do so. Yet it is surely true that, in our own daily lives, love is a more robust shoot than Greer thinks. And-whisper this-its strength has something to do with the fact that many of us allow men to help with its cultivation. It may have been a mistake to have put Adam in the garden in the first place; he certainly passed the buck once he was there. But he is not going away and I see no alternative to getting Adam to help with the seeding, the mulching and the pruning-and to trying to make sure that "hand in hand through Eden" we take our solitary way.
