Germaine Greer's 30,000-word love letter to Martin Amis revealed

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Germaine Greer wrote the 30,000 word love letter for Martin Amis in 1976
She couldn't bring herself to send it and objects its impending publication
When she wrote it she was in a relationship with James Hughes-Onslow
Had hoped to have a baby with old Etonian but it never happened
Does Greer not want the letter published because it shows her softer and more vulnerable side, asks the Daily Mail's Geoffrey Levy

Published: 19:00 EST, 20 November 2015 | Updated: 21:04 EST, 20 November 2015

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As her front doorbell rang, Germaine Greer got out of bed, pulled on a dressing gown and slipped downstairs to answer it. Smiling on the doorstep was her friend Ossie Clark, the fashion designer, and Jean Shrimpton, the most famous model of the day.

Clark had brought her, unexpectedly, to take a look at the house in Notting Hill, which the author of the ground-breaking feminist book The Female Eunuch had talked of selling.

But when they stepped inside, they got an eyeful of rather more than they had anticipated. Reaching the bedroom, they found, full-length on the bed, Germaine’s startled lover, Old Etonian James Hughes-Onslow — completely naked.

Germaine Greer penned a 30,000 word letter to author Martin Amis in 1976, which she never sent

The letter to Amis (pictured in 1975) is now held in the University of Melbourne archives, and it was hoping to publish it as a book - but Greer has objected. Could it be because it shows off a vulnerable side?

‘There’s Germaine’s “Great White Hope”!’ quipped Clark as Germaine grinned, the Shrimp’s jaw dropped and Hughes-Onslow sheepishly muttered ‘Hello’ and dived for cover.

The year was 1976 and Ms Greer, then 37 and already world-famous from her seminal 1970 best-seller, had been enjoying a near two-year affair with quietly-spoken Hughes-Onslow, a journalist six years her junior. In fact, she had been trying to have a baby with him.

Some weeks later, as the man eater embarked on a fortnight’s lecture tour of America and Canada, she jotted down in a notebook an episodic, deeply passionate ‘love-letter’ 30,000 words long in which she described herself as ‘helpless with desire’.

However, this was not intended for Hughes-Onslow. Instead, it was for a new lover, the cerebral author Martin Amis, ten years her junior, who had just published his second novel.

It is this letter, much of it a travelogue and beautifully written, while containing some startling but not untypically fruity language, that is now causing Greer, at 76, considerable angst.

It was unearthed among personal papers that she sold as an archive two years ago to her alma mater the University of Melbourne (all the money went to her Queensland charity, the Friends of the Gondwana Rainforest).

The letter was so extensive and powerfully written that the university wanted to publish it as a short book.

When Greer, left, wrote the letter, Amis, right, was in a relationship Julie Kavanagh, while she was hoping to have a baby with James Hughes-Onslow. Greer didn't send the letter almost certainly because she didn't have the confidence, suggests Geoffrey Levy

But Greer is understood to have objected, arguing that it was never intended for public consumption and that some of those mentioned in it could be embarrassed. In truth, the greatest embarrassment may be her own.

It certainly wouldn’t trouble Amis, now 66, one of whose abiding pleasures, according to friends, is his reputation as a serial philanderer, despite being only 5ft 4in tall.

Greer, almost a head taller at 6ft — more with her favoured knee-length boots with four-inch heels — mischievously called it ‘The Long Letter To A Short Love, or . . .’.

She wrote tenderly about his ‘tobacco hair and tangled black eye-lashes’, and how his eyes were ‘cool-coloured, sort of air force blue-grey, and strangely unreflecting. You slide them away from most things and look at people through your thick eyelids, under your hair, your eyebrows and your lashes.

‘You look at mouths more than eyes. Is it because you hate to look up? It is very shy and graceful and tantalising, as well you know.’

Undoubtedly some pretty passionate prose. But are Greer’s objections to it being published really just based on her anxieties for others’ feelings?

For the truth is that her unrequited yearning for Amis shines an uncomfortably penetrating light on the most intimate thoughts of a strong, indeed strident, woman who has always shielded any vulnerability and weakness from view while boldly presenting a public persona as the irrepressible mouthpiece for womankind.

While with Kavanagh, Amis had not only bedded Greer but had also begun affairs with Claire Tomalin, at that time literary editor of the Left-leaning magazine the New Statesman, as well as with Winston Churchill’s granddaughter Emma Soames

In fact, Greer didn’t send the letter to Amis — almost certainly because she didn’t have the confidence to do so. After all, she knew he was in a two-year relationship with Julie Kavanagh, biographer of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev.

To have sent it would have revealed that, for once, she was not in control of a relationship. Apart from this, there was her other lover, Hughes-Onslow, to consider. For his part, he says he knew nothing about either her fling with Amis or the love-letter.

Her dalliance with Amis, it must be said, was just one spin of a high-speed merry-go-round of passion, in which sexual betrayal was commonplace and on which now, decades later, the participants tend to look back with some nostalgia.

The behaviour of Amis (who inherited the womanising ways of his author father Kingsley) was not surprising. While with Kavanagh, Amis had not only bedded Greer but had also begun affairs with Claire Tomalin, at that time literary editor of the Left-leaning magazine the New Statesman, as well as with Winston Churchill’s granddaughter Emma Soames, who would years later become the editor of Saga magazine.

‘Martin could, and did, behave very badly,’ Emma Soames has told me.

Neither was Greer a romantic innocent. As a student, she regularly carried a supply of variously coloured condoms in a tiny velvet bag slung from her wrist. She’d talk loudly about sexual acts and what she would like to do to certain admirers.

Old university friends recall her as totally uninhibited, and a woman who, more than anything, set out to shock. For example, the former convent girl appeared in a university revue wearing a nun’s habit and, to the music of the Stripper, slowly wiggled out of the garment to reveal a swimsuit underneath.

On another occasion while a student, she sat in an armchair without wearing any underwear — rather like Sharon Stone in the film Basic Instinct 30 years later — and shocked a young priest who happened to look her way.

Having arrived in Cambridge from Australia in 1964 to do a PhD, Greer then moved to London and edited an adult magazine called Suck. In one edition, she published a naked picture of herself stretched out on a floor, displaying a breast and looking seductively at the camera.

But as her Amis love-letter reveals, this handsome and impressive woman wasn’t always in control.

In Amis — whose narcissism, according to Kavanagh, extended to him ‘chuckling away’ as he re-read his own prose — she had met her match.

Typically, though, Greer was not faithful to the youthful writer (‘Like all women of taste, I am a pederast,’ she announced). She also engaged in a brief relationship with the debonair Jonathan Aitken, a future Tory minister, but as she insisted to friends: ‘I only slept with Jonathan to annoy Martin [Amis].’

Greer, now 76, has spent a lifetime courting controversy with her provocative stances on feminism and women's rights, showing off her strong side

What’s more, the Amis ‘love-letter’ also mentions an American man she met. Indeed, Greer’s list of lovers is extensive and impressive. Over the years it has included Hollywood’s famed Lothario Warren Beatty (she told friends ‘his performance was very disappointing’), Italian film director Federico Fellini, Dan Topolski (the late Oxford University oarsman and coach), William Shawcross (three-times-married son of Nuremberg prosecutor Hartley Shawcross and now chairman of the Charity Commission) and author Geoffrey Wheatcroft.

Despite this roll-call, a friend insists: ‘Some people have the wrong impression of her. She always wanted proper relationships — but as every woman knows, these don’t always happen.

‘What she really wanted, more than anything in the world, was a baby. But it never happened.’

One other name that must be mentioned is that of the late DJ John Peel. He long dined out on claims of a one-night stand with Greer in 1971. The story of their affair reached a much wider audience when he told interviewer Joan Bakewell that Greer had more or less forced him to have sex with her.

He said: ‘She was a friend, somebody I liked and admired, and then she decided to presume on friendship and push it a step too far. I actually found myself saying: “Look, I like you too much. I don’t want to do this.” And she made me.’

Greer, it must be said, would talk to close friends about men, but had never — and has still never — gone public about her relationships. She was incandescent about the unchivalrous allegations of Peel.

Amis, pictured, inherited the womanising ways of his father, the author Kingsley

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, she drew elegantly on her literary skills to pen an understandably vitriolic and highly emotional response to his decision to reveal how — in her own words — ‘I ravished him a quarter of a century ago’.

Her most crushing comment was her recollection of his post-coital admission that he was suffering from a venereal disease.

As she said: ‘The ravishing of Peel must have been extremely low voltage, for I have no memory of it at all — except for an extremely distressing circumstance that Peel would rather I kept to myself . .

‘Whatever unmemorable passages at arms had occurred between Peel and me . . . I would have to run the gauntlet of the clap clinic in the morning.’

After that, perhaps it is not surprising that it was on the mild-mannered Hughes-Onslow that Germaine’s gaze fell when she was choosing a man to be the father of the child she dreamed of having. The pair had often bumped into each other around London.

And he went along with it, contentedly enough, occasionally even talking of marriage. (Greer had married years earlier to a builder she met in London’s Portobello Road. The union lasted no more than weeks.)

But no baby came, despite medical treatment she received at the London Clinic and Hughes-Onslow being sent by her to a doctor in Harley Street for tests.

She eventually blamed her failure to conceive, she told one close friend, on an abortion she had undergone while at her second university, Sydney, which had ‘messed me up’.

Greer 'had a maternal tendency which was sadly under-used,' revealed Hughes-Onslow later

For his part, Hughes-Onslow has never worked out for sure why she chose him to father her child, and never asked her, but he was perfectly happy to oblige.

While they were a highly visible item, she made bar-room jests about his potency and size of his manhood, but the accepted view is that she was incredibly fond of him and he was, as one friend puts it, ‘unchallenging’.

In turn, he found Greer (who looked after him well, cooking him beautiful meals) ‘had a maternal tendency which was sadly under-used’.

Today, happily married and with four charming children, Hughes-Onslow recalls Greer as ‘a very caring woman that the world doesn’t really see. In company, she always dominated conversation, but in private she was a wonderfully good listener, sometimes even changing her views to mine.

‘But a baby never came along and eventually we went our different ways. Not having children is a tragedy for her. She would have been a wonderful mother.’

Poignantly, when he married and had young children, he and his wife took them to meet Greer. ‘It was a beautiful afternoon,’ he recalls. ‘She loved the children. I shall always have great fondness for her.’

As for Martin Amis, Greer never reopened their affair — which her friends came to realise was probably for the best.

'Not having children is a tragedy for her,' he continued. 'She would have been a wonderful mother'

He duly married New England socialite Antonia Phillips in 1984, but a decade later left her and their two young sons for American writer and heiress Isabel Fonseca. They now live in New York with their two children.

These days, Greer is an academic and globally famous author who gives lectures and appears on TV to discuss feminism and high culture. Indeed, she remains a formidable woman in British public life, and is as contentious as ever.

On Wednesday night, she defied a campaign to stop her delivering a university lecture. Oblivious to the irony that they were trying to ban a woman whose feminist battles had opened so many doors for them, the students had taken offence at Greer’s view about transgender people.

She had said she ‘didn’t believe a woman is a man without a c**k,’ adding: ‘You can beat me over the head with a baseball bat. It still won’t make me change my mind.’

Almost 40 years on from writing that sulphurously sexual letter about being ‘helpless with desire’, she still wears her heart on her sleeve — but it no longer pines for the self-regarding Mr Amis.