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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.
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.
Not Everyone's Hut!
