the ages

Germaine Greer in 1992

[Image source: https://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/book-show-germaine-greer/clip1/]

Regular readers may notice signs, just to the right, of the final disappearance of my old website. That means a lot of old poetry now awaits republishing, and also the final bits and bobs from the "Brief History of Western Culture". This particular note was written in 2004, and probably doesn't merit re-publishing, but today is a busy day and I'm rushing to get something out, so here it is.  It reads a bit differently now that I'm approaching 60 and Germaine Greer is 79.

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Germaine Greer has become an important author for me, though I have so far read only three of her books; but all three have changed what I think. They were Slipshod Sybils (1995), Sex and Destiny (1984) and most recently The Change (1991).

 

The Change is subtitled Women, Ageing and The Menopause. It’s a book about being forty-five-something, which happens to be what I am, though naturally the book is emphatic about the difference between what this means for a man and for a woman. When Germaine Greer wrote it she was in her early fifties.

 

Books about age are rare. Even older readers usually find themselves reading about men and women in what we now think of as the prime of life, starting around sixteen. This concept has managed to stretch upwards to the early forties. Coincidentally or not, it happens now to be the period when a woman can have children and has a sexual power. HRT (one of Greer’s chief objects of attack) seems to be sold on the basis of encouraging women to elongate the period when they too can be heroes and therefore willing participants in the fantasies of consumerism.

 

Young people do not wish to know anything about old people. Perhaps this is not wrong. Older people talk and think less about themselves, anyway. Perhaps literature, which has an intrinsically educational or at least informative component, is and ought to be about the young. We live with and grow with Prince Andrey, Natasha and Pierre: not with Prince Vassily, Count Ilya Rostov... Older people have nothing to learn, nothing tangible to strive for. Their decisions matter less to themselves. Love is the staple of the novel, Love and Death. This Death means, nearly always, the death of a young person. Old people die a lot more often than young people, but that’s not news.

 

In The Change a concerted attempt is made to identify with the interests of older people, such as gardening and going to church. This does not mean that they are “taken seriously” – the connotations of that phrase illustrate exactly why literature (which depends on taking things seriously) has a great problem grappling with age. Its deepest interests are in fact not deep, but infuriatingly unambitious. Older people, if they are self-absorbed at all, simply don’t accept the axioms on which a younger world revolves. That’s principally why advertisers can’t think of a way to sell to them. (In fact there are many TV programmes for an older audience but to everyone’s relief they are disguised. These include talent contests such as Stars in Their Eyes,gardening programmes, and programmes about buying property abroad as well as Breakfast with Frost, A Touch of Frost and in fact nearly everything now that the young have decamped to Sky.) It seems that older people do not wish to be reminded of how far they have left the rest of the world behind them. They appear merely to look on, mildly and uncomprehendingly, contributing to a grey and beige backcloth against which glamour can pose. At 46 I’ve begun to make attempts to write about this phase of life, but I’ve done it very badly. Age is much more fleeting than youth. It changes rapidly and insignificantly in a fluid way, leaving no concrete iconic images behind it.

 

OK, I know it’s about the menopause and therefore about a specific, rather young, agedness, but it seems to me that The Change is a little bit ageist in its own right. The author does not seem inspired at all about the thought of people in their eighties. She seems to see them as partially (or mostly) shut down. With the predisposition towards traditional patterns of society that was apparent in Sex and Destiny, she perhaps had a tendency to feel that anyone who survives to these greater ages is a bit of an anomaly. The idea that emerges from the book is that a seventy-five year old is much the same as a fifty-five year old, but minus – to a variable extent. More forgetful, less mobile, less able-bodied. I hope she will write a follow-up when she is in her mid-seventies; I hope so, actually, with some confidence.* Greer’s appearance on Celebrity Big Brother suggests that, as usual, her own experience might not be too typical. She has tried on so many costumes, wearing mourning in Tuscany for example, and it may be that her phase of menopausal gardening had a gestural element. Why should she be more immune than others to the desire to prolong what made them feel excited and constructive?  

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*Confidence not yet justified (2018). Unless her Australian rainforest book White Beech (2013) constitutes it.... I really want to read that.


Yvonne Roberts' Guardian review of White Beech:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/02/white-beech-rainforest-years-germaine-greer-review