Germaine Greer has never wanted a biography written about her. The first person to publish one – Christine Wallace, whose Untamed Shrew first appeared in 1997 – was called a “dung beetle”, a “tapeworm” and a “brain-dead hack” by Greer, who also threatened to “kneecap” her if she dared to talk to her mother. In a way, it was nothing personal: all biographers, Greer had written in reply to Wallace’s request for an interview, were “parasites”. She demanded that her own would-be biographer wait until after her death to proceed, and wrote to her solicitor in an attempt to have Wallace’s book blocked, or at least modified.
Greer’s second and latest biographer, Elizabeth Kleinhenz, met with a similarly hostile response. Like Wallace, she persisted. After all, if Greer objected to writing about the still living, why had she done so much of this herself – often in ways that people who had counted her as a friend found inappropriate, even brutal? Her determination to inhibit others from writing about her own life sat uncomfortably with her longstanding opposition to censorship. Besides, Greer had spoken so freely about herself that there was little about her personal life that was not already in the public domain. In writing this new account of Greer’s life and work, Kleinhenz has the advantage of access to the Germaine Greer Archive, a vast collection of her research and personal correspondence that she sold to the University of Melbourne in 2013.
Greer, whose first book The Female Eunuch made her a household name at the age of 31, is now almost 80 and arguably the most famous feminist alive. Born into a lower-middle class family in Melbourne, educated by Catholic nuns, she spent time as a student in the milieux of the “Drift” association of artists in Melbourne and the “Push” in Sydney. Greer moved to Britain, where she researched love and marriage in Shakespeare’s comedies at Cambridge before becoming a charismatic star of the counterculture (writing for Oz magazine and so on). Her private life – her relationships with her family, with her many lovers (among them Federico Fellini, Warren Beatty, Martin Amis), friends and enemies – has been as eventful and tumultuous as her public one. Greer’s candidness and continual proximity to the limelight have often blurred the boundary between the two.
While detailed enough to lend vividness to the story, Kleinhenz’s treatment avoids what is probably the biggest danger for such biographies: a suffocating and gratuitous examination of the minutiae of the subject’s life. She has written a page-turner, though not by means of cheap sensationalism. Although the less pleasant aspects of Greer’s character arguably make for a better story (for instance, the details of her buying a property in London and having the squatters evicted), this is no exposé – again, there would be little left to expose. Kleinhenz’s tone is respectful, even affectionate towards the woman who, she writes, “changed my life and the lives of millions across the world in the middle years of the twentieth century”.
Just as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had spoken to the legions of unfulfilled and disaffected housewives of 1960s American suburbia, the publication of The Female Eunuch in 1970 was transformative, reaching “ordinary” women in a way that was rare for an explicitly feminist text. (It argued that “traditional” family life is sexually repressive for women.) A book can perform a valuable function at a given moment without necessarily being good or original, or even clear. And in the eyes of some of the most prominent women within second-wave feminism, The Female Eunuch was none of the above. In a 1984 letter to the Sunday Times, eight such activists were moved both to emphasise the weakness of Greer’s connection to the women’s movement and to deliver a withering verdict on her brand of feminism: “Her thoughts are her own and they are based not on history, not even on the present, but on a sentimental misalignment of information plucked from a dozen sources, countries, cultures and centuries.”
Greer’s defenders might put the contemptuous reception of her first book by fellow feminists down to a combination of envy and elitism, but her subsequent work has also attracted serious criticism. Her 1984 study Sex and Destiny combines the crude sentimentalisation of all things non-western – in truth, the flipside of the racist imperialism it outwardly rejects – with an apparent endorsement of eugenics: the western aversion to infanticide saddles us with “genetically incompetent” children. Later, in The Whole Woman (1999), she argues that the willingness of governments and doctors to perform male-to-female sex change operations is indicative of a view of women as “defective males”. This is a strange idea, conveniently overlooking as it does the far more salient historical and continuing social unwillingness either to perform such operations or to accept the person as a “real” woman afterwards (Greer, for example, calls transgender women “pantomime dames”). In case that one doesn’t stick, she adds that gender reassignment is an “exorcism of the mother”, because when “a man decides to spend his life impersonating his mother (like Norman Bates in Psycho) it is as if he murders her and gets away with it”. For good measure, she throws in the obligatory insinuation of a link between trans women and rapists.
Greer is perhaps not best placed to make the much-aired argument against the inclusion of trans women in women-only spaces that hinges on the alleged threat of rape (one that I and others have argued is in any case flawed and implicitly prejudiced), given her own views on rape and sexual assault. Probably the best that can be said for those is that they are unclear. She is right to depict rape as pervasive rather than exceptional. Given the low proportion of rapes that ever get near a courtroom – and also given the good reasons feminists and others have for not wishing to pursue carceral solutions to social problems – she may also be right not to demand harsher sentences (though what can be achieved through her call for less harsh sentences for rapists remains obscure). She also has a point when she suggests that women who are raped can suffer as much, or more, from the ordeal of legal proceedings, and from a societal attitude that sees some “legitimate” rape victims as irreversibly ruined, as from the event of rape itself.
But while it is possible to say all these things without legitimising the culture that belittles the seriousness of rape and the suffering it causes, Greer’s purportedly feminist position seems to legitimise precisely this when, in her latest book, On Rape, which has appeared since the publication of Kleinhenz’s biography, she describes rape as “a jagged outcrop” on a “vast monotonous landscape of bad sex”. She does not seem to intend by this the plausible point that rape culture can permeate sexuality in such a way that many interactions that are not rape in the legal sense nevertheless carry its traces. She seems to mean that rape – or at least, most rape – is not that bad: “just lazy, careless and insensitive”, as she has put it recently. And her insistence that it is not rape itself but only the way we think about it that can have devastating consequences for women’s lives is as useless as it is offensive to the many whose experience of rape is otherwise.
While Kleinhenz is correct to see Greer’s contribution to second-wave feminism as that of a populariser unafraid to “challenge the challenger”, we may take issue both with the nature of the challenge and with the version of feminism Greer has popularised. Kleinhenz acknowledges the criticisms and leaves the reader to decide what to make of it all. The Greer that emerges is a complex character whose powers of insight and invention are consistently confounded by her enthusiasm for controversy. Kleinhenz’s achievement is to have produced a sympathetic, thoroughly readable portrayal of an ultimately unsympathetic figure.
• The Life of Germaine Greer by Elizabeth Kleinhenz is published by Scribe (£20). To order a copy for £13.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
