Germaine is the issue
Michael Davie
DADDY WE HARDLY KNEW YOU by Germaine Greer
Hamish Hamilton, £13.95, pp.311
Ms Greer's account of her search for her father makes a tremendous book. It opens like a detective story, and never relaxes its grip — though really it is not a whodunnit but about love and forgiveness.
'It is silly of me, a middle-aged woman, to call my dead father Daddy', Ms Greer begins. Cogent reasons are given why she does so. Soon she is in a dreadful hostel in Melbourne, where her dying father has been dumped by her mother. Her father always used to be a snappy dresser. A photograph of him, Reg Greer, taken when he was the Adelaide Advertiser's advertising representative in Melbourne, and reproduced on the book's cover, shows a well-dressed, smiling, pleasant looking man with a high forehead and long face, very much like his daughter. In the hostel, he is a physical wreck, dressed in cast-offs. Germaine and her sister move him into a home run by the Returned Servicemen's League; Reg had been in the war, and had been repatriated with an 'anxiety neurosis', the RSL records showed.
Ms Greer began to wonder about the man she had scarcely known. When he came home from the war, not in good shape, she was five. Why had he shown her no affection? He had taken no interest in her academic prowess. After she left for overseas, she did not see him for 17 years. Her mother could tell her nothing of his origins or background. 'He was a man without a past.' Ms Greer remembered his banal, racist opinions, how he used to sing, 'Oh for the weengs of a derve' in the shower, and how he spent as much time as he could out of the house. She grew up thinking of herself as middle-class. But was Reg really the 'toff he pretended to be? Some people thought he was English.
With his death, Ms Greer began to fantasise about the 'anxiety neurosis'. He had mentioned once that he had been seconded to RAF intelligence in the war; suppose he had known about Ultra, and had been brainwashed by the Allies to expunge all memory of it? Suppose the brainwashing was the cause of his lack of affection for her? She knows this is 'a mad suspicion'; but having conceived it she feels she has no choice but to find out who was this Reg Greer, and why he had never talked about his relations, or his past.
In Tuscany, where Ms Greer owns a house, her friend Jeffrey warns her to take care. 'You mustn't face up to facts too much. Make little excuses for yourself, and your father.' Then the chase begins: to Tasmania, India, Queengland, Cambridge (on the Ultra trail), Malta. Ms Greer became obsessed, and her writing, which can be dogmatic and clotted, is all the better for it: full of passion, eloquence, and sharp observation. Contrary to Jeffrey's advice, she spares neither her dead father nor herself. The book becomes as much an autobiography as a biography.
Her industry and energy are prodigious. Every Greer is hunted down, every record searched, every old newspaper read. She collected the names of every Greer born in England between 1900 and 1910. The history of the Greers of Scotland — a grand and important family — is thorough- ly research. She battles with dopy and ob- structive archivists in Tasmania and Mel- bourne. She unearths records in India, and tries to pin down exactly what sort of intelligence work her father was doing in Cairo and in an underground cave in Malta under siege. Reaching a dead-end, she goes on the Wogan show and appeals for help, in vain.
Was she driven by love, or hate? Part of the book's fascination is its near-heroic 'It's not the sort of scrap I joined up for!' honesty. We can see exactly why at times she hates her father; his former secretary tells his daughter certain things about his philandering that no daughter, least of all the author of The Female Eunuch, would wish to hear. She, a noted truth-teller, detests his lies. But we are led to understand, too, why at times she feels a profound sympathy for him, though father and daughter were so different. Universal themes touching on father-daughter relationships are pervasive in the book, but never directly stated.
Sometimes Ms Greer wheels away into huge irrelevancies — or what at first seem like irrelevancies. Her trip to India and her experiences there are worlds away from anything her father could have known in a military barracks. Yet the digression is pertinent. For one thing, the warm and loving Indian family life that Ms Greer enters is the exact opposite of her own bleak Melbourne upbringing, with only her books for comfort. For another, Ms Greer sees Reg, at times, as a victim. She feels very Australian still, despite her savage sideswipes at her fellow-citizens, and her years overseas. Indians, Maltese, Austra- lians — they all are, or have been, victims of the British.
My advice to readers is to try to avoid learning the denouement of the book. But it will not spoil the tension to reveal that she did finally run down her quarry. On the way, she discovers a heroine — almost, but not quite, her grandmother — who 'had in abundance all the human characteristics I most prize, tenderness, energy, intelli- gence, resource, constancy, honesty, cour- age, imagination, endurance, compassion'. Reg Greer had few, if any, of these characteristics. His daughter, however, proves to have many of them. Does she have compassion? She gives her mother a ruthless going over: 'a woman who has done nothing but lie on beaches for the best part of 70 years'. The book nears its end with Ms Greer, in a marvel- lously funny scene, trying to tell her mother who her husband really was. The daughter's excuse must be that her mother, if she runs true to form, will never read the book.
Germaine's brother and sister, however, react to the revelations with admirable sanity. As her brother, a primary school- teacher, says, Dad didn't do too badly. 'He made a stable family.' Mum, too, should presumably get some credit. Should Ms Greer have taken Jeffrey's advice and not have faced up to the facts so boldly? The answer is left up in the air. She explains why she thinks she was a 'pain in the neck' to her father. 'It was not the war that destroyed his love for me, but his charade and my censorious, scrutinising nature.' She ends: 'I found him, but I lost him. Sleepless nights are long.' Her brother and sister have forgiven her for the revelations, and she has forgiven her father for being a liar and a fraud. It is less clear that she has forgiven herself.
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