Outside of a Dog

by Rick Gekoski

  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:

  I think of the filthy two-roomed house in

  Calabria where people came and went freely,

  where I never heard a child scream except in

  pain, where the twelve-year-old aunt sang at

  her washing by the well, and the old father walked

  in the olive grove with his grandson on his arm.

  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.

  Women have little idea of how much men hate them... Men do not themselves know the depth of their hatred.

  If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood – if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go baby.

  A clitoral orgasm with a full cunt is nicer than a clitoral orgasm with an empty one (as far as I can tell at least).

  The Female Eunuchis 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.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked incredulously, turning on her bedside light to reveal me, shoulder to bureau, huffing across the room.

  ‘Shh!’ I said, in my loudest whisper. ‘They’ll hear you!’

  Barbara looked round, alarmed.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Be quiet! They’re right outside!’

  ‘Who is? For God’s sake, is it burglars?’

  ‘Worse. Shh! From outer space!’ I said. ‘Help me barricade the door. Quick!’

  ‘C’mon now,’ she said kindly and softly, as if talking to an hysterical toddler, ‘come back to bed, it’s just a nightmare.’

  Bureau finally in place, I did. I sat up in bed all night, rigid with anxiety lest the aliens get in. How it was that they could make their way across the universe to get me, only to be thwarted by a blockaded door was unclear, but I watched the bureau intently for any signs of the inward movement that would signal our doom.

  In the morning, alien attack successfully averted (they only get you in the dark), I set off for university, fuelled by caffeine, utterly exhausted. As I entered my office Germaine (whose room was just across the hall) looked in, concerned. Propinquity had led us to an easier relationship, and we occasionally popped into each other’s offices for a quick natter or a gossip.

  ‘You look like shit,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘What’s the matter?’

  I told her everything, even about the aliens. She raised her eyebrows, said nothing, and suggested we had a coffee.

  ‘You need to move,’ she said, ‘it makes no sense living in such an isolated place. It isn’t fair to Barbara.’ She was right.

  ‘Come to dinner next Thursday night,’ she suggested. ‘Can you make it?’

  We had absolutely no social life, and had hardly been out save for a stiff evening at Professor Hunter’s obligatory greet-the-new-members-of-staff dinner party, so I could accept – sad old me – without looking at my diary.

  By this time we’d both read The Female Eunuch, Barbara with an excited sense of new possibility, though with some serious reservations. As one with a commitment to psychotherapy, some of Germaine’s views seemed misplaced: ‘The revolutionary woman must know her enemies, the doctors, psychiatrists, health visitors, priests, marriage counsellors . . . all the authoritarians and dogmatists who flock about her with warning and advice.’

  Nevertheless, there was a smell of freedom in the air. Women who had previously described themselves ruefully as ‘having problems making relationships with men’, freed themselves from this condescending category, and replaced it with the larger and more satisfying notion that such problems were those of women in a dominant and uncongenial male culture. This culture, of course, included me. Barbara joined a woman’s group, and was delighted to find that her sisters felt similarly (though not always about me).

  I resisted this as best I could. Though numbers of my male friends and colleagues created a mea culpa culture in sympathy with the women’s movement, I was inclined to regard a men’s group as something that met on the first tee, or over a poker table. Happy to avow myself as a sympathetic first-generation feminist (equal rights, equal pay, equal most anything), I regarded the aggression of the new women’s libbers, who often presented themselves, shockingly, as victims in the way that blacks had been victims, as morally wrong-headed. My reserves of sympathy for the world’s victims, I was often heard (pompously) to claim, had their priority with the people of the third world, with children dying of starvation, with the genuine dispossessed. You can get compassion fatigue, and I wanted to apportion mine where it best belonged, and not with a bunch of privileged middle-class women who had come to regard the term ‘man’ as one of amusement, exasperation and abuse. I said so, as frequently as I was allowed. ‘Just like a man to say that,’ I was told. I had learned, by then, not to say ‘just like a woman to argue so badly,’ but I think my face showed me thinking it.

  Germaine was aware of this problem, though it took her some time to acknowledge it. In the Foreword to the twenty-first anniversary edition of The Female Eunuch, she observes that:‘The Female Eunuch does not deal with poor women (for when I wrote it I did not know them) but with the women of the rich world, whose oppression is seen by poor women as freedom.’ The apparent solipsism of this – can you only consider the wretched of the world if you ‘know’ them? – is, I assume, caused by sloppy writing, not mere self-reference.

  Germaine lived in a Regency house in Lea
mington, her flat exuberantly decorated with Moroccan scarves and artefacts, colourful and welcoming, with exotic smells of good food, incense and marijuana. She’d cooked a lamb tagine, and was thoroughly engaged, amusing, and intently related. It was just the three of us, and Barbara, warmed by the atmosphere, attention, and a few glasses of wine, overcame her usual aversion to academic people, and opened up considerably. By the end of the evening she and Germaine were chatting away merrily, while I sat back in an absurdly comfy bucket chair, stoned and happy, a million miles away from my inward aliens, or they from me.

  The next day Germaine popped into my office between classes.

  ‘Thanks so much,’ I said. ‘That was so generous of you.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘and I wonder if you’d like to move in with me for a while, until you find a flat in Leamington?’

  It was an extraordinary, totally unexpected offer. Germaine was given to impulsive acts of high generosity, which were sometimes beyond the boundaries of what she could really manage – and, in this case, well beyond the scope of what her flat could contain. Her second bedroom was small, and the proffered living arrangement would have been quite impossible, even for a short time. I said so to Barbara, a little wistfully, as we sat over a glass of wine that evening. It was tempting, if improbable; it would have been fun, at least for a while.

  ‘Do you think Germaine fancies me?’ she asked.

  ‘You seemed to get on pretty well,’ I said, rather turned on by the thought. ‘Do you fancy her?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’d be terrified,’ she said. ‘I think I’d end up as a pile of bones at the bottom of the bed.’