BOOKS & ARTS
BOOKS
‘I don’t want to explain myself’
Germaine Greer is no fan of biography – especially when she’s the subject.
If you want to know about her, read her books, says Frances WilsonGermaine: The Life of
Germaine Greer
by Elizabeth Kleinhenz
Scribe, £20, pp. 480
There is an African bird called the ox-
pecker with which Germaine Greer, con-
versant as she is with the natural world, will
doubtless be familiar. Oxpeckers ride on the
backs of large mammals — giraffes, buffalo,
wildebeest and the like — feeding off their
lice. Once thought an example of mutualism,
the relationship between diner and host is
now understood to be more complex than
this. On the one hand oxpeckers reduce the
larvae, and on the other they jab their beaks
into any open wounds on the hide in order
to keep the blood fresh.
Elizabeth Kleinhenz is Germaine
Greer’s ox- (or rather Oz-) pecker. A few
years younger than Greer, who is now 79,
and raised in the same Melbourne neigh-
bourhood, Kleinhenz has been pecking
away in the archives of the University of
Melbourne where, in 2013, Greer depos-
ited 82 metres of letters, manuscripts,
clippings, contracts, commissions, drafts,
diaries, photographs and research files (the
$3 million fee received for her papers was
donated by Greer to her Rainforest char-
ity). Greer’s whole life is boxed up here
— even the hate mail. ‘Shut your mouth
fucken bitch or I’ll slam you in your fucken
mouth,’ reads one letter, filed by her under
‘Nutters’.
An instinctive autobiographer, Greer is
no fan of biography. She called her first biog-
rapher, Christine Wallace, whose Untamed
Shrew appeared in 1997, a ‘dung beetle’, an
‘amoeba’, and a ‘brain-dead hack’. Despite
being ‘shocked’ by Greer’s ‘venomous
attacks’ on Wallace, Kleinhenz has none-
theless persisted in her own search for ‘the
truth’ about the world’s most famous femi-
nist. In her single exchange with her subject,
Kleinhenz tells us that she ‘wrote politely’
to ‘Dr Greer’ to introduce herself, only to
be ‘admonished for failing to get her title
right. She was ‘Professor’, not ‘Dr’. Greer
addressed her ‘rude’ response to ‘Mrs Klein-
henz’ when she ‘knew full well that my title is
‘‘Dr’’’. Round One goes to Professor Greer,
but you have to feel for Kleinhenz.
‘I fucking hate biography,’ Greer told
Claire Beavan, director of the recent docu-
mentary Germaine Bloody Greer. ‘If you
want to know about Dickens, read his fuck-ing books.’ And if we want to know about
Greer, we should read her books too, or
at least her acres of journalism, because
everything interesting that can be said
about her — as Kleinhenz admits — she has
already said herself. Greer, who was in the
Cambridge Footlights with Clive James and
Eric Idle, is not only a scholar but a stand-
up comedian. ‘If a woman never lets her-
self go,’ she wrote in The Change, ‘how will
she ever know how far she might have got?’
‘I seduced a bulldozer driver,’ she wrote
to a friend. ‘Actually it was done with so
much dispatch that he may have thought he
raped me.’
Her life, as Greer tells it, can be read as
a series of comic scenes: there was the time
(confessed to Dr Anthony Clare) when
she was feeling lonely one Christmas and
turned up uninvited at her parents’ house:
her mother, claiming to be afraid of her,
screamed hysterically and hid in the cup-
board. And the time when her father soiled
the trousers of his cream silk suit after see-
ing his daughter again after 17 years. There
was the time she got married for three days
and then realised she wasn’t wife materi-
al; the time she slept with Federico Fellini
who kept his ‘insatiable dragon’ in a pairof brown silk pyjamas; the time (described
in a letter to her then lover, Martin Amis)
that she got crabs from another lover, and
Frank Zappa, who she ran into at break-
fast, took her to the pharmacy in his Rolls-
Royce to get some blue ointment. And
the time she slew Norman Mailer in the
‘Town Bloody Hall’ debate; and invited
the nation’s homeless to live with her,
only to be besieged by journalists pos-
ing as down-and-outs; and was held hos-
tage in her study by a demented fan;
and gave up her fellowship of Newnham
College because they appointed a trans
woman (Greer’s views on transsexu-
als are described by Kleinhenz as ‘ques-
tionable’); and stormed out of Celebrity
Big Brother because she had been ‘bul-
lied’ by the racing pundit John McCrir-
ick and fellow amazon Brigitte Nielson.
The life and times of Germaine Greer is
the nation’s favourite reality show; so what
does Kleinhenz add to the brew?
Her aims, Kleinbenz explains, are two-
fold. She wants to evaluate Greer’s ‘con-
tribution to second-wave feminism’, which
she does by assessing the influence of The
Female Eunuch, which, when it appeared in
1972, made the 31-year-old Greer an inter-
national celebrity. And she wants to find out
who Germaine Greer ‘really’ is. To measure
Greer’s effect on the average reader, Klein-
henz invents a Melbourne housewife called
Cheryl Davies, who is the same age as Greer
but followed the path of typing pool, mar-
riage and children. Cheryl pops up through-
out the narrative in the unlikeliest of places:
‘Who is it sitting at the L’Oréal cosmetics
counter in the David Jones store?’, Klein-
henz asks. ‘Yes, it’s Cheryl. Cheryl Davies.’
If the role of Cheryl Davies is unclear, it
is partly because — as the Chinese premier
Zhou Enlai remarked in 1972 of the impact
of the French Revolution — it is ‘too early
to say’ how The Female Eunuch has marked
the world. As for Kleinhenz’s second aim,Kleinhenz despairs over Greer as
though she were a disappointed
mother confronting a messy bedroom