Getting ready to tackle the complete works of Germaine Greer, stacked in a formidable tower on the library desk, I pull my pen and paper hankies out of my bag and a small oblong of stiffish paper flutters to the cork floor. It is a sticker from the album Calciatori 1998-99. Dario Hubner and Francesco Marino stare out at me, dressed in the blue and white strip of Brescia football club (in Italy’s second division, Serie B). Dario, on my left, is grizzled and weather-beaten, with frown lines between his eye-brows like the ones my mother notes sadly that I am developing. Francesco is young and smiling. (Perhaps they are only briefly to be seen side by side, like two passengers in adjacent glass elevators in a hotel, Dario on his way down, Francesco going up.)
Paper relics of my stay in the Ospedale Meyer in Florence, where my son and I recently spent four days, Dario and Francesco don’t seem to want to go away. A couple of days later they turn up on my table at home in a cairn-like agglomeration, including a ragged green teddy, a Casio calculator and a lump of fool’s gold which my daughter insists that I always have there. Desultorily, I peel off the sticker’s backing sheet and press it on to my noticeboard, reflecting that the shabby mound of little objects has necessary metonymic significance. Dario and Francesco help to explain that, although in most respects a metropolitan middle class mother, I have spent almost all of my adult life abroad, most recently in Italy, and my travels have taken the edge off my Englishness and my sense of belonging.
This says much about how I am going to read Greer. I am too young to have read her best book, The female eunuch, other than retrospectively. I have visited Britain often enough to be aware of her presence in British cultural life, but not often enough to have been anything other than an intermittent visitor to the theatre of her celebrity-with its quarrels, contradictions and Situationist-style acts of “producing confusion, to stimulate creative thought,” as she has put it. There is no prior history to our encounter; I have no axes to grind. So, notwithstanding the objects on my desk, I am determined to approach her work from the point of view of what it says and not who says it, the more so because she has denounced biographers as flesh-eaters, and I myself am a biographer.
If you are a subscriber, please log in »
This article is available to subscribers only
Subscribing to Prospect is the most reliable and convenient way to receive the magazine every month, and offers the best value.Subscription Types:
Online
An online subscription offers you complete and unlimited access to the entire website, including our searchable archive of every back issue of Prospect, and a PDF edition of each new issue: all this for just £20 per year. Purchase an online subscription »Renewal
Renew an existing subscription »Institutional access
If you are a library, business organisation or any other large institution that needs a multi-user licence, you can obtain institutional access.
Share
Subscribe to post comments
Print
