Outside of a Dog (18 page)

But if Roy was constitutionally able to cope with his burdens, I wouldn’t have predicted Ruthie would be able to deal with hers.
I
certainly couldn’t have. Within a few years
she became bread-winner, mother, nurse. It was grievously difficult and unrelenting, and she expanded to fill the space that she needed to inhabit. If she fell apart they all would have. I would
not have supposed that grace under pressure could involve so many tears, so much mucus, such desperation and bravery. I thought it was something Hemingway’s heroes did, with wars or lions or
fishing in the sea.

By the time Roy died, some twenty years later, she’d not only survived the fires, but been refined by them. She became more confident, filled the room with laughter and ebullience as well
as storms of tears, enlarged and matured in ways that no one could have predicted for the poignantly withdrawn little girl she had been. At Roy’s funeral she said she could not have wished
for a better husband and family, or a different life.

Anyway, after going through the experience of my mother’s death, all of that Laingian stuff seemed fatuous, merely a set of gestures, and I derived no comfort from it in my grief. Pink
elephants, rebirthing, Chinese dancing? Give me good old-fashioned ‘common unhappiness’ any day. Isn’t that what Freud considered the result of a successful analysis?

10

A few weeks after my appointment as lecturer in English at the University of Warwick, in the autumn of 1970, Professor George Hunter, the chairman of the department, invited me
for a visit and tour round the university, prior to joining the department in the new year. Having opened only a few years earlier, Warwick was still being gouged out of the earth, and didn’t
so much resemble a building site, it was one. Our vice-chancellor Jack Butterworth and his appointed architects York Rosenberg were progressively revealing a fetishist fascination with white
tiling, and the recently finished Library, in which the Department of English was situated, was a first class example: it looked like a gigantic urinal.

George’s office was at one end of a dreary institutional corridor, and we had a short and unproductive meeting with my immediate colleague in the philosophy and literature department, John
Newton. Dressed entirely in black, Newton was a largely silent and quiveringly sensitive Leavisite, clearly somewhat at a loss outside Cambridge, where he had previously studied and taught. His
demeanour, in which sentences were haltingly produced in an almost inaudible voice, each word charged with significance, seemed to suggest both how extraordinarily sensitive he was, and (by
implication if not intent) how crass his more loquacious interlocutors were. I had rarely met someone so intimidating. I was later told that he had boxed for Cambridge, and that his method was to
attack furiously until either he or his opponent was exhausted.

In company like this I tend to babble. The more I talked, the more Newton withdrew, and the more alarmed and disapproving Hunter became. I outlined my opinions about the syllabus, suggested a
range of possible new avenues and courses, worried about reading lists, formulated new methods of examination, suggested a variety of innovative forms of assessment, including assessment of
teachers, recommended my dad’s recipe for turkey tetrazzini (add sherry!), chose the next England football team, and gave a quick account of my position on nuclear proliferation. John gazed
at me steadily, as if I were mad. I talked some more. I’m lucky he didn’t punch me.

‘Perhaps,’ George said sternly, ‘we might go downstairs for a sandwich?’ Newton looked relieved, and said he had work to attend to. I was desperate for anything to put in
my mouth to stop it chattering.

It stopped soon enough. It fell open, and stayed open. As we re-entered the corridor heading for the lift, a quite extraordinary figure came striding towards us: a woman of heroic proportions,
moving as if carried by the very force of the zeitgeist itself, trousered in purple suede. Gauchos, I think they were called. As she rushed towards us it became clear that she was strikingly
attractive in an androgynous way: strong cleft chin, high shoulders, a mass of dark hair cunningly disarranged, hips thrust forward like a figure mysteriously released from some Teutonic myth, or
the young Robert Mitchum in drag.

George stepped in front of her, impeding her headlong progress.

‘Germaine,’ he said firmly, implicitly upbraiding her apparent rudeness, ‘may I introduce our new colleague, Rick Gekoski?’

She stopped abruptly.

‘Do you realize,’ she said, fixing him with a look of such manic intensity that it made me yearn for the return of John Newton, ‘I’ve just shit my pants?’

What is one to say to that? Germaine rushed off. I looked at Hunter, seeking confirmation that this had really happened. He gave a minute shrug of the shoulders.

‘That’s Germaine,’ he said philosophically, as the author of the just published
The Female Eunuch
rushed off to the women’s toilets.

I stood there gawping like an idiot. It happened so quickly, and so unexpectedly, that it would have taken considerable reserves of self-confidence and urbanity to handle it, and her, lightly. I
had neither. She was clearly out of my league, and even in extremis determined to assert it from the start. I stuttered, looked at the floor, said nothing. The lesson was clear: she, even with her
pants full, was a figure of authority, control, audacity. Me? I was a hick.

What a department! Hunter was tougher than me, Newton more sensitive, that Greer person sassier and hipper. Thank God I didn’t get introduced to anyone else.

Germaine’s remarks were, I was soon to learn, typical of her. She loved to shock, and to play the uncouth Aussie that she so palpably wasn’t. She was imposingly sexy, bright and in
your face, anxious either to assert dominance or to determine whether she might just be in the presence of one of her (few) equals. She was, likeably and democratically, equally insouciant in the
presence of her peers. Shortly after the publication of
The Female Eunuch
she confided to her friends the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and his wife that she was now so in demand by the
newspapers that ‘if I peed on the paper, they’d print the stain’.

I may have looked like that hairy hippy, Freewheelin’ Franklin of the
Furry Freak Brothers
, but my response would have earned the approval of the local vicar. I was shocked. Not so
much by the earnestly playful scatology: as any four-year-old can attest, if you say poo-poo and botty sufficiently loudly in company, you are bound to get a response. No, what shocked me was the
context. What was a luminous, foul-mouthed creature like her doing at Warwick University? Why would she say such a thing, not so much to me – I sort of looked the part – but to her
starchy, Calvinist head of department? Did she have no restraints?

She had come from Melbourne to do a PhD at Cambridge – one of a generation of brilliantly outrageous, raspberry-blowing Aussies – Barry Humphries, Richard Neville, Clive James,
Robert Hughes – who hit London like a fart of fresh air in the mid-sixties. They were jesters, entertainers, thinkers, drinkers and druggies, anxious to subvert and to provoke:
‘reverence before authority,’ Germaine wrote, ‘has never accomplished much in the way of changing things.’ Merely trying to describe these Aussies seemed to demand strings
of adjectives, buckets of oxymoron.

I had, in fact, come across Germaine without knowing who she was: the ‘Dr G’ of Neville’s
Oz
magazine, and ‘Rose Blight’ of
Private Eye
, though I
didn’t know she also had backstage groupie privileges with Led Zeppelin. She clearly regarded sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll as her favoured and natural milieu, but she was also a
talented academic, and determined to inhabit both worlds. She regarded herself, she explained to
Rolling Stone
in 1971, as an infiltrator: ‘I’m still into converting the
straights. That’s why I teach. I guess the university doesn’t really know about all the things I’m involved in. I don’t push it down there.’

That was the rock and roll version of herself, but as an academic she wasn’t nearly so subversive as this might suggest. The reverse, rather. Like her equally talented, beautiful, and
socially and sexually adventurous colleague Gay Clifford, Germaine was a stickler for the rules of academic discourse: a hard marker, insistent on academic protocol, likely to be on the right wing
in any argument about rules, rubrics, or students’ rights. Our colleague Bernard Bergonzi memorably observed that Gay ‘played Mussolini to Germaine’s Hitler’.

But on the publication of
The Female Eunuch
Germaine became something more than an ultra-smart groupie and academic, she became a celebrity. Reporters from the tabloids would camp outside
her office, cameras and notebooks at the ready, waiting for her to emerge. All of a sudden she was everywhere: in the papers, on TV and radio, endlessly quoted by a host of people, and most
especially by herself.

The basic position of
The Female Eunuch
is relatively straightforward. Women have been remorselessly depotentiated, castrated, by patriarchal culture. They must collectively and
individually resist any offers of ‘equality’ with men, because the model they are being offered is not worth having. Instead they must develop (the key terms of the book) self-reliance,
pride, spontaneity, impudence, vociferousness. They must renounce marriage, the consumer society and the claustrophobic atomism of the nuclear family.

The ideal society is based on Greer’s experience of southern Italian peasant society:

This romantic idyll is most remarkable for what it leaves out, which is more or less everything: the grinding poverty, the incest, the gossip, the feuds between families and villages, the
distrust of outsiders, the hatred of sexuality except in marriage, the baleful effects of the Mafia and the Catholic Church, the relentless exodus of the young people. Other than that it sounds
pretty pleasant, though Dr Greer seems not to have stayed for long.

Never mind. The book’s strength is in its negative positions, its criticism of women’s compliance in the scraps that they are patronizingly offered, and weaker where it suggests some
model of culture and society which would be preferable.

Germaine didn’t argue, she asserted. Though
The Female Eunuch
had its scholarly elements, it had none of the defensiveness that disfigures and depotentiates academic discourse. It
wasn’t disinterested, rather the reverse, it was remorselessly interested. It had a case to plead, and every rhetorical excess was employed to its ends. Germaine Greer was a queen of
hyperbole, unworried that this or that might be overstated, or even wrong.

The Female Eunuch
is an admirably narcissistic book: an object lesson in what it promulgates. Be like me, it suggests. Say what you need to say, live as you wish to live, fuck who you want
to fuck, proudly, without shame. And, Greer insists, do this for your own sake, not because I told you to: I don’t wish to lead, nor to be regarded as a model. (Nobody believed
that
.)
Her position didn’t repay attention, it demanded it.
The Female Eunuch
was – those terms so often used to deride women – strident, provocative, attention-seeking
self-dramatizing, intense, compulsive, frequently illogical. And
right
, most often, and viewed as a whole, quite right.

That was the hard part. Greer’s description of the claustrophobia of the nuclear family, the diminished, thankless and exhausting role of housewife, and the arrogant and sexually
domineering role of the average husband – even those of us of benevolent and liberal disposition,
particularly
of those – seemed accurately, if tendentiously, to describe
something Barbara and I were experiencing, aged twenty-six, in our isolated cottage outside Leamington Spa.

We were extravagantly unsettled. Barbara was uneasy coming back to Warwickshire, where she’d had dismal experiences at school, and was distinctly ambivalent about living within easy reach
of her parents and brothers. I was preparing to teach three new courses (English Poetry, the European Novel and an Introduction to Literature course for first years) and anxious to make a good
impression on my colleagues and students. I would leave early in the morning, and come back anxious but exhilarated, needing to spend the evenings reading for the next day and week.

Barbara didn’t drive, and the cottage was a ten-minute walk from the nearest corner shop, though there was an intermittent bus service into Leamington. When I got home at night I would
find her, agitated and depressed, having passed a day reading and going for walks, cooking something for dinner, watching TV or listening to music. We’d made the decision to take the
relatively isolated cottage hastily, beguiled by the pretty garden, and the chance to have a place entirely to ourselves.

It was a bad mistake. One evening, with a gale blowing and the branches of the trees whipping against our bedroom window, I awoke with the perfectly clear and distinct feeling – no, more
than a feeling, to the terrifying truth – that aliens were outside, and would soon be trying to get in through the bedroom door. I was far too frightened to cry out, and though I don’t
recall the hair on my head standing on end, that on my arms most certainly did. I crept out of bed and began to push the enormous mahogany bureau across the floor, to barricade the door. The
screeching woke Barbara up.