2018-11-03 The Spectator

you can’t contain a beast as big as Greer on

a canvas this flat. Those who are cubist in

character need to be painted as such.

While Greer has never written a dull

sentence, Kleinhenz has yet to write a good

one; and her vagueness on certain impor-

tant issues is careless and insensitive —

Greer ‘suffered at least one breakdown’;

‘she loved Roelof Smilde [a fellow Mel-

bourne libertarian] for quite a long time’.

Having little feeling for words or form (or

even Greer herself), Kleinhenz’s structur-

al model is the school essay: she explains

in her introduction what she is going to

say, she then says it, after which, in a chap-

ter appropriately called ‘Full Circle’, she

repeats what she has just said. The pover-

ty of her prose, punctuated by exclamation

marks and ‘ironic’ asides (‘Surely not!’ and

‘Why, indeed!’), is put in stark relief when

she quotes from Greer herself, who despite

her first-person narratives is bored by the

topic of her own evolution. ‘I don’t want

to explain myself,’ Greer has said. ‘I don’t

know why I am the way I am.’

Nor does Kleinhenz know why Greer

is the way she is: why she is so fluent, so

frightening, so bloody contradictory. But

rather than giving us Greer in full gear —

the whole woman in her many dimensions

— Kleinhenz despairs over her character

as though she were a disappointed moth-

er confronting a messy bedroom. She had

wanted to call the book ‘Behind the Mask’,

Kleinhenz says, before ‘realising that there

is no mask... if [Greer] is hiding anything

of significance about herself I have not

been able to find it’. But Greer’s absence

of masquerade has always been her point

of difference from other women. ‘Her

behaviour can be as puzzling as it is annoy-

ing,’ despairs Kleinhenz. ‘Despite her singu-

lar intelligence, she can be as inconsistent

and irrational as she is insulting... A com-

plete contradiction.’

Greer’s contradictions, however — the

fact that she can believe opposing things

simultaneously — are the bedrock of who

she is and precisely what her biographer

should set out to explore. For example,

she argues in The Change that Hormone

Replacement Therapy is the medical

industry’s attempt to pathologise meno-

pause and should therefore be avoided

by women, but also that HRT is a wonder

drug that every menopausal woman should

be given. And in Germaine Bloody Greer

she complains that Beyoncé ‘has always

got to be fucking naked and have her tits

hanging out’, while remembering the time

she posed naked herself in a yoga position

for Suck magazine: ‘There I was: anus, vagi-

na and face.’

But where Kleinhenz’s duty to her sub-

ject fails most seriously is her disregard of

Greer’s literary scholarship. Greer’s MA

thesis, ‘The Development of Byron’s Satir-

ic Mode’, is treated as a joke: ‘Little won-

der that Germaine was in love with Byron,’

mocks Kleinhenz, what with his being

‘brooding, impossibly handsome, aloof,

angry, intelligent, sensual’ etc etc. There is

no sign that she has read Greer’s thesis, or

her book on Shakespeare, or her work on

what Kleinhenz calls ‘women’s literature

and the rest’.

If you want to know about Greer, you

should read her bloody books because her

character is encoded across them like hier-

oglyphics. Had she pecked a little harder,

Elizabeth Kleinhenz might have reached

the ‘truth’ she was looking for.

When Greer turned up at her parents’

one Christmas, her mother screamed

hysterically and hid in the cupboard

Contradictions are the bedrock

of who she is: Germaine Greer

photographed in 1993

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