Gotcha!

By Martha Duffy

DADDY, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU

by Germaine Greer

Knopf; 311 pages; $19.95

In the course of this riveting account of the search for her father's roots, Germaine Greer reveals that the ancient motto of her family is Memor esto, or "Be mindful of your ancestors." In her case, obsessed might be a more accurate adjective. Until he died in 1983, a wasted shell of a man after serving in the Australian army during World War II, Reg Greer had rebuffed inquiries about his past. Germaine's mother seemed not to care. But after her father's death, Germaine, best known as the author of the 1970 feminist treatise The Female Eunuch, embarked on an arduous three-year investigation of the man she never did call Daddy in life. Her quest started with the few details he had supplied to the army on enlistment, and it took her from Australia, where she grew up, to Europe, India and Africa, and down several exotic blind alleys.

The search is more interesting than the man. While there is genuine mystery and suspense as to his origins, even a gullible reader may catch on to a colossal hint at the truth that appears roughly a third of the way through the text. No matter. This book is far more than a standard piece of genealogical sleuthing. Half its fascination lies in chapters that describe milieus rather than biographical detail. Frontier living in Tasmania when Reg was a boy, the realities of pickup vaudeville in the outback, the grim privations of war in Malta when he served there, the ins and outs of selling jewelry or newspaper ads or working military codes -- whatever the father encountered, the daughter has made her own.

He was a natty charmer, and Germaine yearned for his affection. But, probably because she was smart and naturally skeptical, she got little from her wary father except put-downs. Germaine educated herself, went on to a successful career as a scholar, teacher and author. But the early slights -- her father's callousness and failure to confide in her -- still rankle, and she is zestfully candid about her resentments. "Yippee!" she exults when a parental lie comes to light, or "Gotcha!" Yet this glee is tempered by a deep sympathy with the narrow possibilities of her father's life and indeed with any form of struggle and suffering that people must endure.

Her skill and resourcefulness as a researcher are formidable. No petty bureaucracy thwarts her search for public records, no archive is too remote to pursue. When she uncovers her unknown step-grandmother, she ferrets into the woman's extraordinary life of generosity to waves of foster charges, child by child. An account of the long siege of Malta during the war is an eloquent memorial to the courage of a population. In India, where Reg Greer visited briefly, she gives a beguiling description of the pastimes of women in a comfortable family. One lady chauffeured her to Devlali to investigate local records sources, though she was innocent of auto gears and seemed to know only how the horn worked.

At the end, Greer mentions a book called Difficult Women (1983) by David Plante, which contains a long section about her. She hates it. But Plante has some points to make about Greer's characteristic state of readiness, her far- ranging competence: "She lived, not in the particular country in which she was bodily, but in the general, problematic world which obsessed her." Daddy, We Hardly Knew You is a vivid dispatch from that world, a problem triumphantly solved.