To say that Germaine Greer is no fan of biography is an understatement. She’s said: “I fucking hate biography. If you want to know about Dickens, read his fucking books”. She also called her previous biographer, Christine Wallace (author of 1997’s Untamed Shrew), a “parasite” and “brain-dead hack”. Which must have put a crimp in her fellow Australian Elizabeth Kleinhenz’s attempts to encapsulate “one of the most important radical and controversial women of 20th- and 21st-century feminism” and persuade people to talk about her.
Some people did talk (Fay Weldon among them), but Kleinhenz seems to have been left rather dependent on the 82-metre-long Germaine Greer archive at the University of Melbourne (Greer was paid $3m for the archive, donating the money to her Rainforest charity).
Greer’s attitude to biography seems all the more bizarre coming from feminism’s most consummate self-publicist, though it would be reductive and unfair to claim that this is all she’s ever been. As Kleinhenz relates, Greer, 79, had a difficult, intellectually and culturally stifling Melbourne upbringing with her troubled mother, Peggy, and cagey father, Reg. (Later, Greer wrote a book about her father’s lies about his origins.)
Greer went on to study at Cambridge (Clive James was a contemporary), embarking on her stellar academic career (she’s a respected Shakespeare scholar), while participating on the frontline of hippy counterculture, involving herself in everything from Oz magazine to the misguided “clean porn” venture Suck, in which a photo of Greer appeared – a defiantly explicit naked backwards yoga pose.
In 1970, The Female Eunuch, which argued that women had become psychologically and emotionally “castrated”, turned Greer into an internationally renowned feminist, leading to other works, including Sex and Destiny (1984), The Change (1991, updated in 2018) and The Whole Woman (1999). In a chapter entitled “The commercialisation of Germaine Greer”, Kleinhenz examines not only the heavy-duty marketing of Greer (reminding us that, in 1971, Life magazine excruciatingly labelled her “The saucy feminist that even men like”), but also Greer’s genius for self-promotion: “From carelessly blithe hippy, she metamorphosed into a media-savvy professional.”
Kleinhenz observes how, while not always lauded by fellow feminists, Greer (tall, striking, unapologetically sexual, outrageous) struck such a chord with ordinary women that, almost half a century on, she remains a household name. Kleinhenz also notes how, with increasing frequency, what I’d term “shock-jock Germaine” has offended and upset people with her views on issues including FGM, transgender, #MeToo and (too recently for this book) rape. Certainly, at times, some among us have shuddered to behold this extraordinary, influential woman posturing like some rad-fem Katie Hopkins, with boorish outbursts that often misrepresent the more erudite, nuanced views in her writing. Kleinhenz flags this key shift in the public perception of Greer: “Being out of step was not new to her, but she was more used to being in the vanguard of public opinion than behind it.” While Kleinhenz doesn’t go deeply enough into attempts to no-platform Greer (one of the more worrying anti-free speech developments of recent times), she clearly admires her individualism. “Inconsistent she may well be, but no one can accuse her of being politically correct for the sake of it.”
In this biography, Greer doesn’t always come across as a nice person – tales abound of her cutting, undermining behaviour towards other girls and women (who’d have thought that the author of The Female Eunuch would turn out to be such a Mean Girl?). However, I enjoyed the late Jill Tweedie’s line about Greer’s detractors: “Small minds, small spirits affronted by the sheer size and magnetism of the woman”.
Certainly, she remains a compelling character who isn’t afraid to change her mind. Greer (who had a short-lived, disastrous early marriage to Paul de Feu, and myriad lovers, including Federico Fellini, Warren Beatty and Martin Amis) ended up feeling that women paid for the sexual revolution in ways that men didn’t, most devastatingly with their fertility. Reading of Greer’s failed attempts to have a child is heartbreaking – she seemed to find solace in her animals and by surrounding herself with young helpers when she lived at the Mills, a farmhouse in Essex.
Kleinhenz ends up banging on rather too long about Greer’s new Australian rainforest abode in Cave Creek, Queensland, though that could have been desperation. This is clearly not the book that she set out to write and her mounting frustration with her elusive subject gusts out from the pages. Still, she is generous enough to note that her working title, Behind the Mask, was ditched, because with Greer, “what you see is what you get”.
Increasingly, what some of us “see” and “get” is a controversy-seeking missile who’s in grave danger of trashing her own amazing legacy. Still, despite everything, I, for one, wouldn’t have missed Germaine Greer for the world.
• 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
