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| Germaine Greer In Her Prime |
Germaine
Greer’s celebrity status must have made it hard for the lowly
publisher's boy to have read her tome in draft form and said, “Well
yes, Ms. Greer, it contains some super stuff, but does it really have
to be such a hotch podge?” Myself, I'm not totally against the
sprawling baggage of it – it’s all about women poets, yes – but
it's less a book than a great bundle of notes. There’s a fair
tranch of literary sleuthing here, the drafts of three different
postdoctoral theses, and piles of memos towards a crusader’s
manifesto. Oh, Germainey Greerson!
I’m
coming to this owl feminist treasure a bit late in life, having read
nothing much by her (not even The Female Eunuch). I first stole
glances at Kate Millet back in the 70s, so I suppose I wasn’t
looking for much else in the way of wimmin's literary criticism.
Miller destroyed DH Lawrence & Norman Mailer in one fell swoop,
did anyone else need doing? Well, yes, of course; but not.. glancing
over my shoulder... necessarily with my collusion... Ostensibly,
Greer’s book sets out to knock women poets off their lowly
pedestals. But the reason I pick out Slip-Shod Sibyls (1995, hrdbck,
v. gd cnd, Xfm, Bld St. L1, £3.95 ) is because their author has most
recently been having a go at transgender folk, and I’m curious to
know what makes her tick, as well as thirsty for a cheap take on
Sappho. On the positive side, I get some of what I’m looking for;
so thanks Dr Greer, you have delivered; though not in the way I was
expecting. Was it ever.
Is
this really yet another book on Sappho? Well, that would be taking a
liberty with it. But Slip-Shod Sibyls does exactly so with its
readers. Here goes, then... Who exactly was Sappho, when she was at
home? Back in the day (ie the Classical Era onwards) she was
sometimes called The Female Homer. She was also known as The Woman
Poet, as if that made her one of a kind. But staying with Homer for a
kick off, what does it mean to be his female equivalent?
He,
blind, led by a boy, came down from Mount Ida with two complete epic
poems in his head. Each piece was long enough to take several days to
perform. He’d have toured from state to city state, from the shores
of Western Anatolia, across the islands and mainland of Greece, to
the badlands of Macedonia; possibly he even crossed the Adriatic to
work the Greek colonies on the nearside of Italia. His source
material came from generations of previous bards. Modern scholars
identify some sections of the epics where the style differs (uses a
different vocabulary, has alternative word forms, displays other
grammar structures). These are usually considered to be
interpolations or corruptions of the original text. But there is
always the possibility that they were Homer’s additions to a common
corpus. And it’s also possible that Homer wasn’t one person, but
himself an amalgam of bards. His blindness, and therefore his
illiteracy, could also have been exploited and copied by tribute
acts. He may even have performed with a troupe of musicians, though
the semi-staged form of epic verse performance – the dithyramb –
probably came later on. What is certain, however, is that at some
point his work began to be transcribed, and thus ceased to exist in a
purely oral form.
Unless
Homer was a former soldier, blinded by a barbarian arrow - which
surely would have been noted somewhere - he didn’t compose from his
own experience. The craft was storytelling, and what we get from him
is the skill to redress well-known stories in more entertaining garb.
There is a religious aspect to the art form he used, and which we
have come to know as epic poetry. In fact by the late classical era,
his Iliad and Odyssey were being studied in the same way the Old and
New Testaments were poured over by scholars of the early modern era.
So when a Greek scroll jockey of the late classical period refers to
Sappho as the Female Homer, was does it mean?
There’s
not much Boys’ Own stuff in Sappho, just references to her
brother's Káraksus's voyages. Was he an early Sinbad of the Aegean?
But who knows what else was there, because there’s not much of
anything in Sappho. Her work was largely exterminated by the
iconoclasts of Byzantium (between the sixth and ninth centuries AD).
Not content with destroying Christian images, successive waves of
Orthodox Puritans also burned the titillating books of ancient
authors. Sappho’s fall from Female Homer to seedy pornographer left
only references to her work in the notes of the classical literati.
Ironically,
while Homer’s true origins are disputed by rival city states,
Sappho’s are far easier to reconstruct in time and place. Probably
during the eighth or early seventh century BCE, her grandfather(s) or
great-grandfather(s) joined a band of Aeolian adventurers from
mainland Greece that seized the island of Mytilene (also called
Lesbos) from its aboriginal rulers. Quite what ‘aboriginal’ means
in this context is not clear, but the archaeological evidence points
to less sophisticated groups of inhabitants until the late archaic
period. Enslaving the indigenous folk (to live off their labour, the
fruits of the land, and the surrounding sea) gave Sappho’s lot
aristocratic status. This meant she’d’ve had sufficient leisure
to to spend her days on extra murals. It’s thought that she and her
contemporary, the soldier-poet Alcaeus, suffered under a new
political regime on Mytilene, which had taken over from the
descendants of the island’s conquerors. But whereas Alcaeus’s
faction failed in its attempt to seize an outpost on the mainland
(and restore their fortunes), Sappho’s family got into trade,
although this too may not have been enough to maintain her status.
Later in life she seems to have left the island and to sing for her
supper, as it were, like Homer on an extended tour of Greece.
Turning
back to what little we know of Sappho’s output, these fragments
could hardly be more different from Homer. No epic works are cited,
all her known pieces were song-length verses in a variety of rhythms.
Some were hymns to the gods, others appear to have been occasional
verses associated with events, such as an annual celebration of
female beauty, or the anticipated return of Káraksus from
a trading voyage. She gets the credit for strumming the kitara (a
type of harp) with a plectrum, which would highlight the rhythmic
quality of her grooves. She composed in the Aeolian dialect of Greek;
and the enduring popularity of her verses, along with those of
Alcaeus and the earlier soldier poet Archilochus (of Paros), must
have contributed to its survival into the Hellenistic and Roman eras.
Sappho was not the first Greek poet to have used her own erotic japes
as source material for songs (Archilochus's humorous love ditties for
inst.), but since her verses were collected in nine volumes, the
quantity as well as the quality of the catalogue must have been
impressive. Nor were Sappho and Alcaeus the first popular and
innovative stars to have been discovered on the island. Arion of
Mythymna (on the North East corner) had flourished at Periander’s
court over in Corinth about half a century earlier. Tribute acts to
all four of these Aeolian bards were active from the late fifth
century onwards. Another major point to point out is that as
Archilochus and Alcaeus both innovated by including their less
reputable behaviour in song (eg, getting roaring drunk, and running
off battlefields), whereas Sappho celebrated love for both men and
women in verse (and that may not have been considered odd at the
time). Later on, she gained a reputation for what became known as
lesbianism, while Archilochus got himself banned in Sparta.
If
Homer's work sprang from a pre-existant tradition of epic
story-telling, what did Sappho have to draw on? Songs sung to give
thanks or to plea for help at religious gatherings certainly; and
also work songs – women's work in particular, and Eressos (the area
Sappho's family are associated with) is on one of the largest
agricultural plains that occur here and there between the dry, rocky
hills of Mytilene. We also know sailors and sea fishermen of all
countries and times have used song as a means of bonding to carry out
arduous and repetitive tasks. Sappho's family included seafaring
folk, so it's logical to assume she would have heard sea shanties
sung by the men at home. There's a tradition on the island that a
“beauty contest” took place somewhere near the head of the Gulf
of Gera, and it's possible a female beauty cult may even have existed
prior to the Aeolian invasion. Again, this occasion may be seen as
partially religious as, for example, the ancient Olympics were; but
music would be the natural accompaniment to such a gala, whether it
was a civic or a religious rite. And then there is the strong
possibility that marriage ceremonies would have been the setting for
musicians and singers to gather, so for Sappho to have travelled
there – even by boat, as it is two or three days' gruelling walk
from Eressos – could have been a regular fixture of her year.
Alcaeus is said to have composed for symposia - a posh name for
drinking parties - and since it's known he was familiar with her
work, it's also possible that women either took part in these, or
held similar parties of their own.
While
Homer's work was seen to embody virtues and failings such as valour,
pride, betrayal, heroism and despair – we know that Sappho's work
was valued for its portrayal of emotions. Because the canon we have
is so pitiful, we can only speculate on some of the areas she touched
on. Love, longing and envy we can be sure of. There seems to be a
certain amount of voyeurism, and since Sappho's feelings transcended
gender, and because her affections were not purely sexual anyway, it
seems she might have sung of sisterhood as well as brotherhood, and
possibly parenthood. If she was not universally revered in the
ancient world – as Homer was – she was beloved of many. Any
woman, whether housewife or hetaira, who could sing Sappho's songs
would herself have been revered.
What
does Germaine Greer have to say about the context Sappho wrote in,
and why her work – after circulating for a thousand years -
gradually and effectively disappeared? I’m afraid the lengthy
chapter on Psappha, as she prefers to call the woman, is mostly an
engagement with those translators and critics who have spent much (if
not the whole!) of their careers on what would otherwise have been an
obscure literary backwater, given the paucity of material to work
from. Sappho must hold the record for the greatest number of words
written on the scantiest of fragments. Yet every other year, out
comes another major translation, flooding the market with page upon
page of prefaces, footnotes, endnotes, agendas addendas, pudendas and
acknowledgements to be flogged at twenty-odd quid the hit. And so we
have Greer throwing her oar into this wet and dry fray and I wonder
if she has anything of real value to add? The basic premise of her
book is that women poets never really got started in this male
preserve, and we do them a disservice by holding them up to the same
standards as their male colleagues. But I don’t think this close
textual analysis of Sappho’s flimsy remnants sorts the myths from
the perceived history. In fact, I think it would be misogynistic to
suggest that the purging of Sappho was anything other than her being
lumped with the other ancient writers who were subversive, and whose
work least conformed to early puritan values.
Instead,
Greer chooses to benchmark her view of women poets on the legacy of
Sappho; showing how her work was first imitated or recycled by the
Romans Catullus and Ovid, and then reconstructed from the Renaissance
onwards. She shows how being compared to Sappho has fared through the
ages, reaching a very low point at the turn of the eighteenth
century, when the term “a Sappho” was used for a kind of literary
prostitute, ie: a woman poet who traded on her sex. (Our author,
having served time in the porn racket, might know something about
that.) But this much is true, male poets - Rochester, for example -
are never referred to as "an Alcaeus" or "an
Archilochus".
But,
oh dear, I'm afraid have struck out far beyond Greer’s scheme of
work. So what? In fact, her book gets going with a hundred pages on
what it means to be a woman poet, and on the Tiresian hermaphroditism
of much poetry. The latter serves as both as benchmark for the notion
that poetry shouldn’t need sexing at all; and the ground rule that
male and female poets may write from the viewpoint of either sex. In
the former, Greer kicks off the global, multilingual cross-era scope
of these studies by quoting a bunch of Italian Renaissance women
poets in the original (transliterated as footnotes). Here, she says,
women could compose poetry without reference even to the framework of
courtly expectation. In a sort of Pre-Raphaelite approach, she evokes
a golden era of versifying by women unconstrained by market forces.
Publication being a disaster for young women who, in the centuries to
come, would shoot to sudden fame in England (and elsewhere).
Dealing
with “the enigma of Sappho” in chapter four, then, is a somewhat
retrograde move, before resuming the early modern thread she left off
in Renaissance Italy. Greer roughly divides the women poets of
seventeenth century England into those whom class and leisure gave
the opportunity to write - and writers for a living. Aphra Behn,
being literally first and foremost of the professional female
scribes, gets two chapters. But mostly it’s the aristocratic ladies
- who wrote for coteries of friends, and whose works were either
bootlegged by pamphleteers or published as vanity works - that get
most of her attention. Indeed, she seems to prefer those women who
could write without worrying about paying the bills. But it’s the
extent to which the work of both groups was altered before
publication - in some cases while simply being transcribed – that
most interests her. Women submitting their work to men for approval
(either as upper class amateurs, or as women writing to order (the
lower class professionals), meant them not merely having a few
spelling or grammatical mistakes edited out; but the frequent
excision of whole verses and the complete rewriting of lines was
their lot. And the fact this seems to have been done most often with
their approval seems to suggest that women naturally accepted men’s
superiority in literary matters. Greer argues that the devaluation of
women poets has its roots in women’s lack of education at this
time, in the tendency to demure to the opinion of better educated
men. She reinforces this argument with page upon page of quotations
illustrating discrepancies between manuscript poems and their printed
versions. Whereas with Sappho, where the close reading is in the
interpretation of ambiguous or missing Greek words, the distinctions
are much less open to dispute...
It's
at this juncture that I begin to think of Greer as someone muttering
in a shed. These pages of proofs are challenges to various obscure
academics, rather than pertinent examples to be set before the
public. I go back to the transliterations (the word-by-word
translations she quoted alongside the Renaissance Italian poems) and
I can’t help wondering if she has read the originals at all? I
wonder if all that ancient Greek wasn’t just Greek to her, or is
she really qualified to do more than read the ancient alphabet and
pronounce the words? I wonder if, like some literary
Jack-of-all-trades, she isn’t just trying to trump all academics in
all fields in order to make her view more widely accepted? I’m
sorry to labour the argument, but I wonder if she isn’t a 2-Sheds
Greerson, muttering in pseudo Italian in one hut, and bastard Greek
in the other? I wonder if, like in the Monty Python sketch I’m
alluding to (the interview with "Arthur 2-Sheds Jackson")
she shouldn’t be brought to book, not on the new symphony she has
written, but on the need for two sheds? Gustav Mahler, after all,
wrote nine whole symphonies in ONE shed (let’s call a hut a shed,
eh?). OK, this is getting silly. But so is dragging us bystanders in
on one academic dispute after another. I mean, there may be room for
argument here, but surely not for contradiction; let's just agree
that women, like all writers, have been edited, bowdlerised,
marginalised, cheated, plagiarised, pilloried and plain dumped; and
that most anyone determined to make a living by their pen is apt to
be exploited.
But
to be driven to suicide or subjected sexual abuse are other matters
indeed. Greer quite rightly points out that the incidence of suicide
and early death amongst successful women poets of both the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries is appalling. L.E.L., a woman poet in the
early nineteenth century is an early example of the phenomenon.
Shooting to fame as a teenage poet in the 1820s, by the mid 30s, with
a successful on-going writing career, she married a colonial officer,
moved to the Cape Colony, and within a few months had taken her own
life (with poison she had taken along for the job). From L.E.L. to
Sylvia Plath, who gassed herself in 1963, the poetry scene is
littered with female suicides, and the dead bodies of female bards -
from Browning to Bishop – whose lifestyle choices - addictions -
brought them early death. Greer doesn’t crassly try to explain
these deaths, she points out the common factors. One is early fame,
another is self harm or abusive relationships. Also, many of these
women poets who killed themselves have written about suicide, or
their work shows a strong interest in death or dying. Furthermore,
there seems to be an association of poetry with suffering, which
affects more women than men.
The
Duke of Rochester’s niece may or may not have been abused by him,
though it seems one Restoration aristocrat or another did abuse her
as a child. In another century, L.E.L. may have been blackmailed out
of her youthful earnings either by an abuser himself, or by someone
who knew she had been abused. The early Victorian period was an
extreme reaction to the excesses of the previous generation. Two
centuries before, while London was recovering from the puritanism of
the Interregnum, liberty suddenly brought exposure to market forces.
Women writers without an income had little to keep them from the
debtors’ prison than to sell themselves in one way or another.
Aphra Behn may even have had to become a spy in order to maintain her
standing at the court of Charles II. But in contrast to what she says
about the suicide of women poets, Greer doesn’t present much
evidence of sexual or other abuse appearing in the work. The line
seems to be that women poets – like Sappho, the Renaissance
Italians or whoever let love rule their emotional lives - would end
up being damaged by it. At the same time, women poets who eschewed
carnal love in their work, for example Christina Rossetti or
Elizabeth Bishop, would become cold and remote. Women poets, it would
seem, often suffer from an addiction to pain, which for some
originates in their abuse as children or teenagers.
I
read somewhere that Germaine Greer eschews biography. It may have
something to do with the way she has been portrayed over the years.
But she has courted publicity for six decades now, and her latest
tirades against transgender folk are typical of the controversial
stance she has taken over several great issues. Back in the Sixties
and Seventies, she was deliberately aligning herself with Hugh
Heffner, to the horror of her sisters in the feminist movement. And
her appearances in Playboy - both in print and a swimming costume -
were actually child's play compared to some of her other exposures.
Neither should it be forgotten that she's made shed-loads of money
out of books, magazines and associated activities; and including just
one very brief brush with the law, this notoriety has only boosted
her sales and appearance fees. At one point she owed so much in back
revenues that, like many of the pop stars of the day, she bunked off
into tax exile. I'm sorry, but I find it impossible to take anyone's
controversial stance too seriously when it's clear they get a sales
hike every time they take one
But
to get back to biography, as it appears in this book, the cases of
Aphra Behn, Anne Wharton (Rochester’s niece) and especially L.E.L.
deserve Greer's special insight, sleuthing and comparative Lit.
Crit.. If you exclude all the notes and index, almost a quarter of
the book is taken up by Letitia Landon. Known to her public as L.E.L.
(her middle name, btw, was Elizabeth), she was beloved as the writer
of epic verse fantasies set in Renaissance Italy. This was a genre
not unfamiliar to the generation before her short lifespan (1802-38),
for example in the gothic romance novels of Charlotte Dacre. But by
writing in verse and adopting a pseudo Byronic tone, she succeeded in
carving out a decent living from a loyal fanbase. Greer gives us a
comparative analysis of the work, showing that despite the fantastic
nature of her stories, their fatalistic plots pointed towards a
flawed psychology that would lead, ultimately, to her own suicide.
Setting her life alongside that of many other young women poets who
died before their primes - by taking their own lives or having
unhealthy lifestyles - would have been sufficient. But for some
reason we are then treated to a full-on account of her love life, a
literary scandal she was embroiled in, speculation on the blackmail
theory, pages of asides around the London literary and art scene, and
finally we are plunged into pure biography territory with the
introduction of George Maclean - a dour Scot and sub-specimen of the
David Livingstone species with whom L.E.L. falls, apparently in love.
Two thousand words serve just to introduce him. There follows a dozen
ups and downs in as many pages, before they marry and then, after
another well documented delay, take off for the Cape. True, as
history, it's fascinating stuff, but writing that veers so far off
track could almost be a different author's work. While a twenty or
thirty pages are enough for Greer to cover Elizabeth Barrett Browning
and Christina Rossetti's equally complex and puzzling lives, why
L.E.L.'s warrants a hundred baffles me. This is serious muttering in
a hut, arguing with phantom critics in a wash-house, getting all
academic in the john. Because, if she wasn't such a snob about
biography, perhaps the writer could have cut to the chase and done a
decent, modern, scholarly job on L.E.L.’s?
And
here's where my big question kicks in: what makes Dr. Greer tick?
What drives her into this position where women have not made great
poets because the poetry world has been run by men, and so it follows
that women poets have never truly been themselves?
Greer
believes in women’s liberation, but she’s never been an equal
rights activist. For her, men and women are different creatures. As
long as women have to play by men's rules, they'll always come second
or third. She's an apocalyptic feminist, one who believes in a
revolution where women will break away from men and set up their own
rules. She doesn’t tell us when this will come about, which comet
will be flying past at the time; or if she does tell us, we'll have
to buy another of her books to find out.
For
many people feminism and socialism are two sides of the same coin.
For the others, the balancing force is wicca or some other natural
order. They're opposing viewpoints, because whereas the former speaks
to reason and common sense, the latter is essentially religious. And
those who use dialectical argument to explain supernatural concepts
are mavericks. True, from the neck down, men and women have two or
three fundamental differences; but from the neck up the differences
are literally all in the mind. It's true that hormones can affect our
mental state, but who was it that went around banging the drum for
HRT a few decades back? And how many middle aged women sat up and
took notice of her? Gynaecologists were rubbing their hands.
Winning
an argument does not mean simply telling the truth. You can floor the
opposition with a pithy put-down, with a gem of pseudo science, with
an emotional appeal to loyalties, or with a nugget of
prejudice masquerading as proof. Has Greer defended suttee
– the burning of a wife on her husband's funeral pyre - for its
cultural value? I think not, but she has said that female genital
mutilation is an enduring cultural practice that people in the West
should stop trying to stamp out. In other words, she invokes
anti-imperialism in order to defend an extreme form of sexual
violence against girls. If I begged to point out that the excision of
the clitoris was as irreversible as beheading the victim, I might
just win the argument. But I don't need to say more than selling
millions of books did not make Hitler's views on race acceptable, or
truthful.
It's
a shame I had to say that, because Germaine Greer has probably done
more good than any other advocate of women's liberation and - despite
her contrarian views - for equality. Her outspokenness and
the appeal she's had to both sexes (for whatever reasons) have raised
crucial issues, and her own years in the limelight have served as a
beacon to far more than just her own worth. I wonder if sometimes she
doesn't just argue for the sake of it, knowing that awareness is
raised no matter how or why.
To
sum up, I would argue that of course there IS some truth in Germaine
Greer's point of view – that women have often failed to be in
favourable comparison with men (as poets and many other professions)
because men have made the rules. But as can be seen from the
preeminence of Sappho in the highly personal, emotional verse of late
antiquity onwards, women - unhindered by precedence, convention or
economy - can make an art form their own. And while women have
colluded in the exploitation of their sex by excluding themselves &
limiting their own opportunities, it isn't right to denigrate what
they HAVE achieved. Not enough Mary Shelleys have come to the fore;
and women painters and composers have had a lousy deal over the
years. But the idea it will take a revolution that sets men and women
apart to see the emergence of female equivalents of Homer,
Shakespeare et al is messianic defeatism. That leaves Germaine Greer
in a rather poor light, I'm afraid. But I don't think she gives a
damn, and we kind of love her for that.
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Not Everyone's Hut!
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