English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  Sometimes Greer embraces the warm, smelly, blood-soaked physical destiny of being a woman. Sometimes she dreams of women escaping from their fleshly burdens and living in sisterly bliss with their children. In The Female Eunuch, for example, she imagines communes where children are free to choose their parents, while grown-ups stroll from one weightless love to the next. All her major books (Sex and Destiny much less so, being the least showy, least remembered and, I think, best of the three) are peppered with these inconstancies. But that is part of their appeal, their vivacity. And inconsistency is not the kind of accusation likely to slow the author down. As Walt Whitman pointed out, that’s the only way to sing the Song of Myself: ‘Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself / (I am large, I contain multitudes)’.

  The Whole Woman is made up of four sections – Body, Mind, Love, Power – each divided into half-a-dozen ‘chapterkins’ averaging ten pages each and devoted to specific topics, such as ‘breasts’, ‘shopping’, ‘sorrow’, ‘wives’ and ‘emasculation’. It has not, I think, been much noticed that The Female Eunuch follows exactly the same pattern, uses several of the same headings and, alas, quite a few of the same arguments. Still, every page she writes is never less than readable and sometimes fizzes with sardonic aperçus, but taken as a whole this method doesn’t work too well. The array of topics is so overwhelming and the chapters are so short and packed with statistics and chunks from teen zines, interspersed with boxed quotes from feminists, most of whom are a good deal wilder or sillier than Dr Greer, that the total effect is filling but curiously unsatisfying, like a meal in a Chinese restaurant. Arguments are pursued with great ferocity, then undercut or dropped.

  This choppiness also prevents any coherent historical analysis of what has happened to women, let alone to men, over the past thirty years. There is a curious reluctance to mention the most obvious landmarks since 1969 – the advent of women priests, the appearance of women prime ministers all over the place (Margaret Thatcher is mentioned only as the victim of a ‘sexist’ putsch – after eleven years in power, surely a rather slow-burning sort of sexism). In some cases, Greer actively refuses to take note of change in the real world, continuing to assert, for example, that newspapers are all run by older men, when in fact Rosie Boycott, among other things, has edited the Independent, the Independent on Sunday and the Daily Express, and tabloids have been edited by women, not to mention the phalanx of younger female deputy editors on the broadsheets. The truth is that achieving too much reform is bad for business. For rage and indignation must be maintained at boiling point. Greer has a reputation to keep up. The victims’ club accepts only life members. It is hard not to feel that she is a victim herself, a victim of success, and that her supple mind has been prostituted to the need to keep her audience whooping.

  More damaging still, we are left with the impression that the ‘women’s movement’ or the ‘feminist revolution’ started more or less from scratch in 1969. There is no mention of Simone de Beauvoir, let alone of the suffragettes or Marie Stopes. This short perspective is no accident, since to refer back to that earlier movement would be to recall a struggle which really did have implacable declared enemies. The eerie thing about the post-sixties feminism is that it has had few proper opponents willing to show themselves. The gates of each decayed Bastille turned on their rusty hinges – the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, the Stock Exchange, the Jockey Club – to reveal only a handful of frightened middle-aged men falling over themselves to show their new colleagues around.

  The only serious fight that could be picked – and Greer is nothing if not a scrapper – was within the sisterhood, with men as bemused bystanders. This ideological equivalent of female mud wrestling (an analogy Greer herself uses in The Whole Woman) was not exactly new. Its terms of engagement had changed little since the days of the New Woman and Mrs Humphry Ward. In the red corner, there was the insistent and uncompromising quest for equality between the sexes always and everywhere. In the blue corner, there was the claim that women were deeper, more creative, closer to the mysteries of life, in harmony with the moon and the tides, singled out not by a curse but by a wise wound, white witches, goddesses. These two driving principles, one of absolute sameness, the other of profound difference, do not have to be driven very far before they come into conflict. Nor is either of them entirely unfamiliar or even uncongenial to some of the male bystanders: gender equality has been part of the egalitarian ideal from 1789 onwards, and it has been a central theme among authors from Goethe to Graves, men who would no more have dreamed of joining the women’s movement than of taking up ice hockey, that only das ewig weibliche can revivify the poor dried-up male and reconnect men to the roots of being.

  Greer herself wobbles a bit here. Now and then, she rehearses the standard line that there is a natural condition of ‘femaleness’ which has been overlaid by a false and oppressive social construct of ‘femininity’ (the same for men, of course, except that both the natural condition and the social construct seem to be pernicious). But as the book goes on, femaleness seems to envelop almost everything, leaving only flirting and a taste for frilly underwear as the affectations of femininity. Women, it seems, by nature love more passionately, bear pain more uncomplainingly, work harder, are averse to violence, are endlessly forgiving. Towards the end, even conventional feminist assertions about the ill effects of gendered upbringing – boys are demand-fed, potty-trained later – give way to a resigned admission that ‘no matter how gender-free their upbringing, children will invent gender for themselves’.

  Greer frequently sneers at the sort of ‘feminists everyone can like’ who are content to work for mere equality. Women, she says, should not waste their lives trying to imitate men and clawing their way into those oppressive male hierarchies, such as Parliament or the armed forces. Yet, of course, a good deal of what she demands depends on just those dowdy campaigners for equality in pay, in political representation, in access to the professions and so on. If they expect any gratitude from Dr Greer, they can forget it. Some of these campaigners happen to be men. If they expect any recognition of this fact, they can forget that too. She can write acutely and touchingly, and does so here now and then, about motherhood and children, for example, or in her chapterkin on the necessary place of sorrow in life. But even there she feels duty-bound to go over the top: every woman has to learn that men will never admit her to true comradeship, we are living ‘in a poisoned world that becomes crueller and more unjust every day’, in which ‘there is no longer any free space where individuals might develop alternative cultural and social systems’.

  Turn over to the next chapterkins, of course, and you will find little parenthetical admissions that, on the contrary, women’s lives are better, if more challenging now, ‘the forces of darkness having been by and large routed’, that women are carving out free spaces for themselves and that quite a lot of machinery to remedy discrimination against women is now in operation – although naturally she has to complain that it is warped and inadequate. But these qualifying asides are brief, and the diatribe quickly picks up steam again.

  The chapterkin on daughters is almost entirely taken up with the subject of father-daughter incest. ‘These behaviours’, we are told, ‘are less aberrant than normal. They may be outlandish, but they are manifestations of the governing principle that runs the everyday.’ The only fathers who have not yet got around to doing a bit of manifesting are, it seems, those who have already deserted the nest to avoid their obligations – or those who are too busy beating up their wives. The chapter on fathers is entirely composed of horror stories about violence and delinquency. Not that staying home to help raise the kids will earn you any remission of guilt. You will merely be perpetuating the oppression of women and adding to the laundry bills. Perhaps Greer’s fiercest condemnation – fiercer even than her fury against cosmetic surgeons and the ‘fertility moguls’ – is reserved for housework in general and the washing machine in particular. Far from these domest
ic appliances being a boon to the ‘housewife’ – ‘an expression that should be considered as shocking as “yard nigger”’ – they have made cleaning more time-consuming than ever. Yes, and switching on the heating is so much more exhausting than chopping firewood.

  The Whole Woman shares with other great dogmatic texts – Marx, Freud, Foucault – the quality of being irrefutable. Any instances that might on the surface seem to weaken or contradict the teachings of liberation feminism can be shown in reality to reinforce them. You might think, for example, that because female genital mutilation is now condemned as a violation of human rights by every international organization, while male genital mutilation is ignored, women for once were better off. Not a bit of it. The campaign against female circumcision merely shows Western man’s determination to impose control on women in the Third World. Again, the obsessive determination to improve screening for cervical cancer, while prostate cancer is neglected, is not a sign that we care more about women’s health but rather one more example of the determination of men to control the sexuality of women. Nor should you imagine that male doctors are attempting to bring joy to childless women by inventing new fertility treatments. On the contrary, ‘fertility treatment causes far more suffering than it does joy’, and the ‘fertility magnates’ are simply exploiting women for their own gain and glory.

  I would not advise any male suffering from our sex’s deplorable excess of testosterone to retort that women continue to live on average five years longer than men, that five times as many young men as women commit suicide, that men are twice as likely to be unemployed and find it twice as hard to get another job, that men are infinitely more likely to suffer industrial accidents and diseases which may destroy their lives. None of these apparent disadvantages begins to compare with the misery – Greer’s favourite word – daily endured by women, and in any case men deserve it. Men can’t win and shouldn’t. Who needs them anyway? Greer entertains a suspicion that ‘if heterosexuality is not in future to be buttressed by law and religion and family pressure, it will collapse’. Not that Greer cares that much for gays; to her they look just as violent as and rather more promiscuous than other men. She is not even very enthusiastic about lesbians, and she is positively contemptuous of transsexuals’ blundering efforts to deny their biological nature.

  But there remains, of course, one small problem in a world where men are properly marginalized and left to stew in the pub and the locker room. How are children to be brought up? Even after we have consigned to history’s dustbin ‘the ghastly figure of the Bride’, there remains the awkward fact that, in her words, ‘A woman without a partner and with children is usually a woman in trouble.’ Greer, in a significant shift, concedes that ‘In The Female Eunuch I argued that motherhood should not be treated as a substitute career; now I would argue that motherhood should be regarded as a genuine career option.’ And now that they have this licence to breed professionally, women should be paid enough to raise a child in decent circumstances.

  But who is to pay them? Who is to be the ‘partner’? Not, of course, a man, though every social statistic screams that a child brought up by two parents does better in life. Not the extended sisterhood of traditional society, the loss of which she mourns now as in 1969. Sisters may provide a network of comfort and support, but they cannot be expected to win the bread. Naturally the answer is the age-old one of all utopians: the state must be the new father. The state doesn’t snore or get drunk, the state doesn’t beat you up or waste its weekend gawping at muddied oafs or torturing fish, the state doesn’t call out ‘nice tits’ as you walk past and it never says ‘how like a woman’. And if it seems a touch paradoxical that a movement that yearns for total liberation from oppression and commitment should end up by shackling itself to the railings of Whitehall, that would not be the first time this has happened. Egotism has a habit of drifting into statism. That is why egotism is not enough, as I am sure Nurse Cavell would have said if she had survived to see the women’s movement in full flow. Everything that Greer argues – and in places she argues so magnificently, with such wit and zap – leads, it seems to me, to precisely the opposite of the conclusion that she sets out to draw.

  Ghastly as men are – in fact, precisely because they are so ghastly – the only hope of even half-civilizing them, and their male children, must lie in some social institution, some pattern of shared obligations, which looks remarkably like old-fashioned marriage, looser, more equal, purged of its grosser patriarchal aspects but nonetheless recognizably marriage. Many marriages are unhappy and most marriages have their unhappy patches, but Greer’s insistence that, at the deepest level, women today are no happier than they were thirty years ago does not suggest that she has found a better option.

  EARLY MODERNS

  Historians today attach a lot of importance to what they call the Early Modern Period. For such a supposedly significant period, the suggested dates wobble alarmingly: did it start in 1300, or about 1560, and when did it end – with the Restoration in 1660 or the Great Reform Bill in 1832? In any case, this seems to me a twisted, self-regarding way of looking at the past, not for its own sake and on its own terms, but as a clumsy prelude to modernity, by which of course we mean Us.

  I use the phrase here with a quite different purpose: to cover writers who lived through a brief and fairly precise historical moment, from 1890 to 1930. And I do so, not to mark out the march of progress but rather to identify a period of great apprehension and ambiguity, in which fear throbbed as hard as hope.

  There was plenty of hope all right. As the Guardian’s man in Moscow, Arthur Ransome, observing the Russian Revolution at the closest possible quarters, was filled with joy to have shared in this ‘wonderful experience’ and to have had the privilege of knowing Lenin, who was ‘like a lighthouse shining through fog’. John Maynard Keynes prophesied that the future would see ‘the euthanasia of the rentier’ and that under the new state capitalism (he envisaged something rather like China today) all the economic problems would be solved and human beings would scarcely need to work at all, at most three hours a day. ‘The spontaneous, joyful attitude now confined to artists and free spirits’ would be ‘diffused throughout society as a whole’. The world would become one glorious giant Bloomsbury.

  There were more modest, and as it turned out, more realistic hopes voiced too: E. M. Forster’s quiet insistence that human beings should treat each other with a certain minimum decency; Virginia Woolf’s hopes for the equality of women, so robustly, yet good-humouredly argued in those essays which I think are the best part of her.

  But there was fear out there too, a dread all the more unnerving and disabling because it was often impalpable: that the world was on the edge of irreversible, uncontrollable change, and not change for the better; that, after a century of peace in Europe, we were on the brink of a terrible war (this fear had been expressed as far back as the 1870s); that the British Empire was liable to collapse, or, perhaps worse still, to a fatal moral degeneration (for all his cocky character, never was there a more worried imperialist than Rudyard Kipling); that the last enchantments, the last whispers of the divine were fading from a coarse, materialist universe, desperate intimations expressed in different ways by Arthur Machen, M. R. James and George Gissing.

  It is this intense sensitivity to the fragility of the world around them, this agonized and accelerating fear that the old certainties were crumbling, that marks out the Early Moderns. I can’t think of another period quite like it, except perhaps the years of the English Civil War.

  RUDYARD KIPLING: THE SENSITIVE BOUNDER

  He was a noisy boy from the start. At the age of two, he was taken out for walks in order not to disturb his ailing grandfather and he would march down the main street of Bewdley shouting, ‘Ruddy is coming!’ Or sometimes, ‘An angry Ruddy is coming!’ Despite these precautions, his grandfather died and Kipling’s aunts and uncles believed that Ruddy’s tantrums had hastened and embittered his end. When he left the United Serv
ices College at Westward Ho! and returned to India, he quickly gained a reputation in the Punjab Club for boorish and bumptious behaviour. A visiting colonel wanted to thrash him for making disparaging remarks about the Indian Civil Service; two lawyers were so annoyed by his persistent interruptions that they kicked him down the club’s front steps. He didn’t mind who he was rude to or about, from the Viceroy and the C-in-C to the smartest ladies of Simla and South Kensington. When Mrs Macmillan, wife of the publisher, told him that India was now fit to govern itself, he told her that she was suffering from hysteria because ‘you haven’t got enough to divert your mind’. Literary curmudgeons of our day – Sir V. S. Naipaul, Sir Kingsley Amis – seem models of tact and discretion by comparison. Every brigadier and boxwallah from Bombay to Calcutta would have agreed with Max Beerbohm that ‘the schoolboy, the bounder and the brute – these three types have surely never found a more brilliant expression of themselves than in Rudyard Kipling.’

  Few of Beerbohm’s drawings have skewered their victim more memorably than the one captioned ‘Mr Rudyard Kipling takes a bloomin’ day aht, on the blasted ’eath, along with Britannia, ’is gurl’. Britannia has swapped her helmet for Ruddy’s bowler, while the beetle-browed Nobel laureate in a vulgar check suit is tootling through his moustache on a penny trumpet. Yet for all his cruel cartoons and parodies, Max felt compelled to admit, sotto voce, that Kipling was ‘a very great genius’, though one who was not living up to the possibilities of his genius. Henry James instantly identified Kipling as ‘the most complete man of genius’ he had ever known. But he too couldn’t stand the public poetry, ‘all steam and patriotism’. And he implored Kipling to chuck public affairs, which are an ignoble scene, and stick to your canvas and your paintbox. There is the truth. The rest is humbug. Ask the Lama.