SOURCE: “Mother Country,” in The New Republic, March 26, 1990, pp. 33-5.

[In the following review, Lee offers positive evaluation of Daddy, We Hardly Knew You.]

The real problem is Mummy. “Reg Greer” is called Daddy by his middle-aged daughter, even after his death, because she would still like to love him, and would like him to have loved her. But Mummy, very much alive, is never called anything else but “Mother,” a word, we are told at the outset, “admirably adapted for saying through clenched teeth.” As the world's most famous feminist sets out, teeth clenched, across the world in search of her father's true life story, she is balked, mocked, and misled by her terrible mother, who sits perpetually tanning her aged body on her sunbed in a Melbourne suburb, made up to the nines and shrieking with demonic laughter.

It's an Australian version of Conrad's grimly knitting ladies, placed like Norns or “tricoteuses” at the gateway of Marlow's journey toward the fraudulent Kurtz. To account for the catastrophic ill luck and frustration that dog her quest toward her own particular heart of darkness, Greer evolves a fantasy of a primal elder's curse, like Noah's curse on his sons for uncovering his nakedness. One myth tends to leak into another with this global thinker, so the biblical curse turns into a pact with an Indian goddess and a pursuit by the Eumenides. These Furies bear a marked resemblance to one inescapable figure. Who forced the father to plead and sob, who “foamed at the mouth” like a “mad dog,” who took all the old man's possessions and threw him out to die, who never cared enough to find out who he really was? Who called the daughter a foul-mouthed liar and told her that everything she ever achieved was rubbish? Why, mother, mother, mother!

It might seem surprising that Germaine Greer, whose life as a performer and writer has been dedicated to establishing a coherent system of values for women, should present us with “mother” as the embodiment of sadism and stupidity. In fact, the combination of terrible mother and fraudulent daddy is the key to her life's work. Daddy, We Hardly Knew You is an autobiography (and a detective novel, and a travelogue, and a history of Australia, and a collection of the usual breathtakingly opinionated Greerisms) that reveals the autobiographies inside the earlier “public” works.

Greer introduced her 1988 collection of essays, The Madwoman's Underclothes, with a euphoric reminiscence of her first experience, twenty years before, of peasant life in Calabria. Like Daddy …, it is a story of pride before a fall: one of Greer's most endearing characteristics is that she never minds looking a fool. Arriving with a baggage of hip Western prejudices about freedom, independence, and sexiness, she began to learn the virtue of traditional communal life from her neighbors' extended families. The son of the shepherd next door was embarrassed for her that she had no husband and no mother:

His voice would drop to a whisper, as if he was asking something deeply shameful, “Why did your mother send you away?” I tried a hundred ways of answering that one, but to Mariuzz, not loving your mother above all earthly things was unimaginable. If I tried to explain that I left home at eighteen and neither my mother nor I ever tried to make contact, his face became haggard with trying to understand such a nightmare.

The memory culminates in an emotional celebration of “the only perfect love … not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love.”

This early education in nontechnological, extended family living was the basis, she says, of all her writing. Lately, Greer has been accused of betraying her past. Those who cut their teeth on the radical liberationism of The Female Eunuch were dismayed by Sex and Destiny's reactionary and sentimental preference for matriarchal peasant families over the liberated, “child-hating” West. Certainly the tone has changed from the raunchy outrageousness of Greer's sixties style: the voice of the Oz trial and the Town Hall Mailer duel and the Amsterdam Wet Dream Film Festival and Suck (“the first non-sadomasochistic sex paper”), telling us to drink our own menstrual blood, abandon the missionary position, and throw away our underwear. Now it's all heartfelt polemic about the evil effects on the underdeveloped world of Western technology, or the inadequate international responses to the Ethiopian famines.

Still, she is right to insist on her consistency. She has always taken a high moral tone on the nastiest effects of capitalism, from cultural imperialism to pornography. “It is curious,” she says in The Madwoman's Underclothes, “to find myself an architect of the permissive society, when all the time I was one of its bitterest opponents.” Her romantic attraction to Third World matriarchies provided her from the start with an antidote to the sexual narcissism of the West. Now we can see the roots of the argument.

Daddy … is full of alternative family models, like the calm, graceful (and wholly idealized) Brahman household of her hosts in India, or the good-humored friendliness of a Queensland country party. What they contrast with, of course, is “mother.” After her first visit to a rural Australian family home, at fifteen, Germaine told her father that “these country women were real people”:

If we lived in the country I reckoned Mother's energy would be absorbed, and not frittered away in flightiness. “I didn't know women could be like that,” I said. “Like what?” Resourceful, straightforward, capable, funny, proud, independent, you know.” I might have said, “Not vain, capricious, manipulative, unreliable, girlish, affected, infantile.”

That unspoken reply became The Female Eunuch.

Since so much of her writing consists of prescriptions for family life, Greer's own childlessness is a bitter irony, which this book touches on with dignity. (I was less moved by her compensating soppiness about animals, from the red Essex cat who shares her moods to the squashed kangaroos on the Queensland roads.) “A woman with neither father, husband, nor son,” she sets out, in a sense, to give birth to her own father, to re-create him, to take possession of him: “I wanted to find my own father, not my mother's husband.” Giving birth to the real “Reg Greer” is a process as painful, mentally, as parturition, and comes to feel more like a death than a birth. But it involves a more positive form of re-creation, too, a subversive rewriting of the male history that created female eunuchs like “mother” and failed fathers like “daddy.” So the book takes an exhilarating revenge, not only on a father and mother, but also on a mother-country.

Revenge, though, is embroiled with the need to know and the need to forgive. (These mixed motives are compounded, as “mother” is the first to observe, by the need to earn back a large advance from Heinemann. At times, as Germaine tours the world, appears on chat shows, and consults famous friends in her pursuit of the Greers, the whole thing takes on the look of a canny promotional package: great locations, great plot, and all that human stuff.)

There seems to have been a great deal to forgive. What she remembers about Daddy is, first, that he wasn't there. When she was five, he came back from the war, looking old and ill. That was in 1944. Thereafter, he kept his clever, aggressive, curious daughter at bay. He never hugged her. He never praised her. He favored her brother. He made silly jokes when she asked him questions. He told her nothing about himself. He despised everything that was beginning to interest her: books, music, culture, the wider world. She “hardly knew him”—and then she left home.

Forty years after his return from the war, she went back to Australia because he was dying, and found him, abandoned and pauperized, in a horrible derelicts' hostel: “In every subtle and crazy detail the work of my mother.” Rescuing him, and watching him die, her ignorance of him began to obsess her. In an article written before this book, she described (with a typical mixture of vulgar sentimentality and urgent curiosity) “a certain expression” that she found in his face in the last few months of his life, “an almost indescribable look which contained elements of trust and puzzlement, of skepticism and innocence. It was as if all the veils of social attitudinizing and defensiveness had been stripped away and for an awful moment I could see into my father's soul.” What was in there?

She knew a few things. Reg Greer was a newspaper advertising salesman, but he was “posh”: dapper, leisured, condescending to his peers. He was supposed to be English, born in South Africa to parents passing through Natal on their way to a “temporary sojourn” in Australia, and brought up in Launceston, Tasmania. In 1937, when he was thirty-two, he married Peggy LaFrank, a part-Italian Catholic nineteen-year-old would-be model, whose family, in true Australian style—“no names, no pack drill is the Australian way”—didn't bother to find out anything more about him than that he seemed “a good bloke.” In the war, he worked on secret “cipher duties” in Cairo and Malta. He told everyone he had endured the terrible siege of Malta in 1942. Invalided out for “bronchial catarrh” and “anxiety neurosis,” he came home via India, which he hated. For the rest of his life, he resisted any attempts to fill in the gaps in this patchy and dubious biography.

“Reg Greer” turns out to be a hollow man, a set of ignominious secrets. One of the few true facts, his war work for ULTRA, the Allied operation for decoding German signals, seems too good to be true, since Germaine's decoding of Reg Greer's ciphers begins and ends with misleading documents. She has a passion for libraries—places where Reg Greer would never have set foot—and (hence) takes a naive and touching pleasure in describing herself in them. She forges through bureaucracies worthy of an Australian Dickens: the Registrar-General's Offices in Hobart and Melbourne, the Archives Office of Tasmania, the Melbourne Veterans Affairs building. Like the RAF intelligence officers in wartime (“our deception people,” as the bosses called them), she “sinks up to her armpits in bumf”: her parents' marriage certificate, back issues of Tasmanian newspapers, passenger lists of ships, her father's RAF forms, his repatriation file. … What she can't track down is his birth certificate. As she tours the world and comes back full circle on her “demented pilgrimage,” “Daddy” falls apart.

His war illness, it transpires, was anorexia—a pitiable and “girlish” disease—not the strain of the Malta bombardment, which he in fact missed by several weeks. Like the faked-up war record, the “posh” manner, the “English” background were all an act. There were no English Greers going from Natal to Australia, no Greers in Tasmania, no Greer journalist on the Launceston paper, no “Reg Greer” at all. “Daddy” was the illegitimate child of a domestic servant, who was the daughter of a farm laborer, granddaughter of convicts, and he was fostered, along with numerous adoptive siblings, by a remarkable woman (also from a family of convicts and laborers) called Emma Greeney, whose name, family, and upbringing Reg Greer entirely repudiated. It's this betrayal of the true mother, the extended family, the working-class Australian history, that his daughter cannot forgive.

By the end of the quest, no piece of him seems real to her. He smoked a pipe to make himself look more distinguished. His “beautiful teeth,” which he said were lost in the war through poor diet, were a false set. His dark hair and mustache, which made him look so like the English actor Basil Rathbone, were dyed. He is like Edgar Allan Poe's “The Man That Was Used Up,” an impressive-looking military man who, deconstructed piecemeal by the amazed narrator, turns out—chest, scalp, voice box, and all—to be a total artifact: the “real man” is, horrifyingly, a squeaky little lump of blubber.

Poe's story makes a grotesque satire on male heroism. Greer wanted her father to be a hero, not a bounder, but she recognizes the desire as a weakness. Her quest is, in the end, not merely personal. It sabotages the official male version of war and colonization, and rewrites her father's history as “herstory,” “puncturing” the false ideology that made him pretend to be toff, a hero, and an Englishman. The deconstruction of Daddy involves, too, a demystification of Australian facades: genteel pretensions, suburban domestic respectability, picturesque tourist spots, and unecological agriculture are all vociferously exposed.

The tone is bossy and enraged. Germaine Greer loves to lecture, she is relentlessly moralistic, and she has a passion for educative details. So there are energetic sermons on the Australian ecology and some splendid effusions, for instance on pioneering life in a small Tasmanian town, circa 1910:

They arranged fêtes, bazaars, raffles, contests, made cakes, garments, bibelots, etc. for the fêtes, bazaars and so forth, attended race meetings, cricket matches, regattas, football, cycling, hockey, rifle shoots, lectures on theosophy, hypnotism, spiritualism, exotic religions, gave parties for engagements, weddings, anniversaries, visitors from the mainland, retiring dignitaries, grew things, cooked, embroidered and preserved things for the local show, and competed in practically every human activity including rabbit-skinning, sheep-shearing, and the wood-chop.

If her research takes her to a 1919 Launceston menswear shop, we get a lip-licking list of the fabrics on sale (“the taffetas, in fashion shades of mole, mastic, putty, nigger and bottle”); if to a local theater, we get the full program of shows and artistes. No opportunity is lost for a display of horticultural or culinary know-how. Maltese goat an unpalatable wartime diet? No problem!

If the goats' meat had been properly hung or marinaded in a smidgen of garlic and oil in sour goats' milk or yogurt, or rubbed with pepper, it would not have smelled so disgusting that only the starving dogs and cats would eat it.

But fear and dread underlie the bustling energy; and that's what makes this an impressive and troubling document. Greer says of the book's heroine, Emma Greeney, that she knew that “the doctrine of inherited moral defect was a doctrine of despair.” She herself emphasizes all the points of difference between herself and her father. But these differences may, rather, be reactions: because he was secretive, she won't put up with anything “hush-hush”; because he obscured himself, she became an exhibitionist. “There is no bucking the genes.” And if she is like Daddy, she may also—a much worse thought—be like Mother. The specter of determinism, the “doctrine of despair,” looms over this superstitious narrative. One of the contemporary world's most redoubtable, self-invented public characters confronts the possibility that she has had no choice. She looks in the mirror, and sees the staring face of a woman possessed.