Outside of a Dog (19 page)

‘What are you doing?’ she asked incredulously, turning on her bedside light to reveal me, shoulder to bureau, huffing across the room.

‘Shh!’ I said, in my loudest whisper. ‘They’ll hear you!’

Barbara looked round, alarmed.

‘Who?’

‘Be quiet! They’re right outside!’

‘Who is? For God’s sake, is it burglars?’

‘Worse. Shh! From outer space!’ I said. ‘Help me barricade the door. Quick!’

‘C’mon now,’ she said kindly and softly, as if talking to an hysterical toddler, ‘come back to bed, it’s just a nightmare.’

Bureau finally in place, I did. I sat up in bed all night, rigid with anxiety lest the aliens get in. How it was that they could make their way across the universe to get me, only to be thwarted
by a blockaded door was unclear, but I watched the bureau intently for any signs of the inward movement that would signal our doom.

In the morning, alien attack successfully averted (they only get you in the dark), I set off for university, fuelled by caffeine, utterly exhausted. As I entered my office Germaine (whose room
was just across the hall) looked in, concerned. Propinquity had led us to an easier relationship, and we occasionally popped into each other’s offices for a quick natter or a gossip.

‘You look like shit,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘What’s the matter?’

I told her everything, even about the aliens. She raised her eyebrows, said nothing, and suggested we had a coffee.

‘You need to move,’ she said, ‘it makes no sense living in such an isolated place. It isn’t fair to Barbara.’ She was right.

‘Come to dinner next Thursday night,’ she suggested. ‘Can you make it?’

We had absolutely no social life, and had hardly been out save for a stiff evening at Professor Hunter’s obligatory greet-the-new-members-of-staff dinner party, so I could accept –
sad old me – without looking at my diary.

By this time we’d both read
The Female Eunuch
, Barbara with an excited sense of new possibility, though with some serious reservations. As one with a commitment to psychotherapy,
some of Germaine’s views seemed misplaced: ‘The revolutionary woman must know her enemies, the doctors, psychiatrists, health visitors, priests, marriage counsellors . . . all the
authoritarians and dogmatists who flock about her with warning and advice.’

Nevertheless, there was a smell of freedom in the air. Women who had previously described themselves ruefully as ‘having problems making relationships with men’, freed themselves
from this condescending category, and replaced it with the larger and more satisfying notion that such problems were those of women in a dominant and uncongenial male culture. This culture, of
course, included me. Barbara joined a woman’s group, and was delighted to find that her sisters felt similarly (though not always about me).

I resisted this as best I could. Though numbers of my male friends and colleagues created a
mea culpa
culture in sympathy with the women’s movement, I was inclined to regard a
men’s group as something that met on the first tee, or over a poker table. Happy to avow myself as a sympathetic first-generation feminist (equal rights, equal pay, equal most anything), I
regarded the aggression of the new women’s libbers, who often presented themselves, shockingly, as victims in the way that blacks had been victims, as morally wrong-headed. My reserves of
sympathy for the world’s victims, I was often heard (pompously) to claim, had their priority with the people of the third world, with children dying of starvation, with the genuine
dispossessed. You can get compassion fatigue, and I wanted to apportion mine where it best belonged, and not with a bunch of privileged middle-class women who had come to regard the term
‘man’ as one of amusement, exasperation and abuse. I said so, as frequently as I was allowed. ‘Just like a man to say that,’ I was told. I had learned, by then, not to say
‘just like a woman to argue so badly,’ but I think my face showed me thinking it.

Germaine was aware of this problem, though it took her some time to acknowledge it. In the Foreword to the twenty-first anniversary edition of
The Female Eunuch
, she observes
that:‘
The Female Eunuch
does not deal with poor women (for when I wrote it I did not know them) but with the women of the rich world, whose oppression is seen by poor women as
freedom.’ The apparent solipsism of this – can you only consider the wretched of the world if you ‘know’ them? – is, I assume, caused by sloppy writing, not mere
self-reference.

Germaine lived in a Regency house in Leamington, her flat exuberantly decorated with Moroccan scarves and artefacts, colourful and welcoming, with exotic smells of good food, incense and
marijuana. She’d cooked a lamb tagine, and was thoroughly engaged, amusing, and intently related. It was just the three of us, and Barbara, warmed by the atmosphere, attention, and a few
glasses of wine, overcame her usual aversion to academic people, and opened up considerably. By the end of the evening she and Germaine were chatting away merrily, while I sat back in an absurdly
comfy bucket chair, stoned and happy, a million miles away from my inward aliens, or they from me.

The next day Germaine popped into my office between classes.

‘Thanks so much,’ I said. ‘That was so generous of you.’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘and I wonder if you’d like to move in with me for a while, until you find a flat in Leamington?’

It was an extraordinary, totally unexpected offer. Germaine was given to impulsive acts of high generosity, which were sometimes beyond the boundaries of what she could really manage –
and, in this case, well beyond the scope of what her flat could contain. Her second bedroom was small, and the proffered living arrangement would have been quite impossible, even for a short time.
I said so to Barbara, a little wistfully, as we sat over a glass of wine that evening. It was tempting, if improbable; it would have been fun, at least for a while.

‘Do you think Germaine fancies me?’ she asked.

‘You seemed to get on pretty well,’ I said, rather turned on by the thought. ‘Do you fancy her?’

She shook her head. ‘I’d be terrified,’ she said. ‘I think I’d end up as a pile of bones at the bottom of the bed.’

It was a pretty enticing thought, this menstrual-blood-quaffing Valkyrie seducing my Barbara. I could see the headline already
: ‘Lecturer Watches As Aussie Vampire Eats Wife!’
A few weeks later we found an adequate flat in Leamington, and invited Germaine back to supper. I don’t think we ever found a date that suited all of us – her calendar, unlike ours, was
always full. Anyway, she’d helped us through a crisis, and after that rather kept her distance. I didn’t mind: it had been exceedingly kind of her to intervene, and she had plenty to be
getting on with. Within a year she had resigned from Warwick, gone abroad, and moved into a more exciting world. No more English Department, no more white tiles, no more unhappy colleagues. It must
have been a considerable relief. It was to take me thirteen more years before I had the nerve to do the same.

Barbara had ironically ended up in a maximally uncomfortable milieu: marooned amongst self-satisfied academics, only five miles from her old home in Kenilworth. She had none of Germaine’s
swagger, yet
The Female Eunuch
had an effect on her, on both of us, which neither of us would have fully registered at the time. There are books that produce epiphanies – as Hume had
done for me, at eighteen – but
The Female Eunuch
worked on us imperceptibly, in combination with a number of cognate influences. The mature woman that Barbara came to be was, indeed,
tougher, sassier, more socially confident, more inclined to seek responsibility on her own terms. She became a good painter, trained as a homeopath and, echoing in her soul somewhere, I expect she
would acknowledge the voice of Germaine Greer.

It didn’t work that way for me, of course, it couldn’t have. But from the time of the publication of
The Female Eunuch
it became a more complex, more embattled, and certainly
a more interesting thing to be not a mere male, a penis-toting animal, but a man.
The Female Eunuch
set an unprecedented problem for men of the time: if you disagreed with and opposed it,
you found yourself in the company of stodgy, generally right-wing, anti-feminists; if you were generally well disposed, you acceded to a description of yourself which was unbearable.

Germaine knew this was a likely response, of course, and it was part of her rhetorical strategy, as the sentences with which the book ends make clear: ‘Privileged women will pluck at your
sleeve and seek to enlist you in the “fight” for reforms, but reforms are retrogressive. The old process must be broken, not made new. Bitter women will call you to rebellion, but you
have too much to do. What
will
you do?’

The sentence may have been directed primarily towards women readers, but it felt as if it was aimed directly and threateningly at me. Considered thus,
The Female Eunuch
was like a
terrorist attack: it was designed to distress, to cause outrage and to provoke just that response which would heighten the tension that it described and bring it to boiling point. I could see this
of course – you couldn’t miss it – but the book left you with no room to negotiate. I admired the spirit and voice without sharing the analysis or conclusions. I carped, I argued,
I quoted selected passages with disdain. It made me defensive, sulky, slightly desperate. I suspect that Germaine would have said that, under the pressure she had imposed, I revealed myself for
what I was. It wasn’t a comfortable process, and even now I am not sure I would thank her for it.

11

If you want to understand the difference between sense and sensibility, the following instance, abstracted from one of my Oxford DPhil tutorials, may be instructive. John
Bayley and I were talking about Lawrence’s
Women in Love
. I don’t remember why: might it have had something to do with endings? Or perhaps with the nature of love (his
The
Characters of Love
is a remarkable book). I’d inherited John for a year while my thesis supervisor J.I.M. Stewart was on leave, presumably to write another of his Inspector Appleby books.
(‘
Not
thrillers, dear boy, I think of them as parodies of thrillers.’)

Bayley was more fun than Stewart, who had confined our very occasional tutorials to correcting the spelling of my latest chapter, and describing to me the Regius Professor of Greek’s
erotica collection.

‘Can you take me to see it?’

‘Certainly not.’

Bayley, though, actually engaged with the words on the page, and I learned a lot from him, if only obliquely. Everything about John was oblique, and one could never predict what he might say
next. He was illuminatingly insightful, whimsical and puckish, his premises opaque, his procedures impenetrable. There was a cultivated femininity in his sensitivities. He had a face and demeanour
right out of the benign children’s books of Edwardian literature, a Bunterish affability which concealed a mind like a velvet trap. It is inconceivable that he might have had followers, as
Leavis did. You couldn’t become a Bayleian.

His stuttering was not the usual Oxford affectation – they don’t do it in Cambridge – but a desperate groping for the next syllable, leaving his listener praying that he would
either make it – soon! – or give up trying. You had to be patient, for after a time, as you settled in to the tutorial, he would calm a little, and his performance improve. I remember
listening to him lecture at the University of Warwick, some years later, while sitting next to his wife, Iris Murdoch, who was clenched with apprehension as John began, stutteringly.

‘He’s always much better after the first few minutes,’ she said to me, anxiously clutching my hand, and he was, but those moments seemed interminable. In tutorials he had
learned to let his students start the talking, and I think it was I who had broached the topic of
Women in Love
.

‘I love the ending,’ I said. ‘You know, when they are talking about love and relations between the sexes? And it ends with a disagreement, when Birkin says he needs two kinds
of love, and Ursula disagrees, and he just says “I don’t believe that . . .” And that’s it, that’s the final line. It’s a wonderful ending, so shadowy and
inconclusive.’

John considered this for a moment.

‘I’ve always th-th-thought it r-rather h-h-highly orch-orchorchestrated.’

The insight gains from having been stuttered, as if the perception were hard won. But it had the ring of some delicately perceived truth that had been unavailable to me. My reading of the ending
was not wrong, it was sensible enough, but it was unremarkable. It took what was
given
, without grasping the tonality, the latent content, the authorial control.

To think like that, it seemed, you had to have real sensibility, and to be English. I was American: apparently we were bright enough, but earnest, too new world – almost as bad as
Australians really – lacking in subtlety of mind, our feelings deep, perhaps, but all in a flow, without rivulets, eddies, or tributaries.

In those days people still took Lawrence seriously, and he had a central place in the canon and syllabus of twentieth-century fiction in a way that, I gather, he no longer does. I suspect he is
now seen as dated and more than faintly ridiculous, embarrassing almost. But in the sixties and seventies, he was celebrated as one of the key figures of what Leavis had called
The Great
Tradition
.

Lawrence is usually taught alongside Joyce in courses on modernism –
Women in Love
was published only a year before
Ulysses
– but if you were a serious reader of serious
literature, Leavis required that you
chose
between Lawrence and Joyce. Joyce may have been technically precocious, but was reprehensibly self-referring, unhealthy, and ultimately
solipsistic: