Off Center
[In the following favorable assessment of Off Center, Tyler describes Harrison as “funny, intelligent, refreshingly candid, and very nearly impossible to fool—a woman with her eyes open, every minute.”]
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison was once expelled from an est session after 24 hours of training. It's significant that she was expelled for failing to close her eyes—for flatly refusing to lie on the floor with her eyes shut and give herself over to her fantasies. “I can't,” she said, and out she went, stepping over writhing bodies all the way to the door.
In Off Center, a collection of 21 essays (some previously published in this magazine), she directs her level gaze toward such diverse subjects as Roseland, Billy Graham, the Godfather movies, and her own hypochondria. She is funny, intelligent, refreshingly candid, and very nearly impossible to fool—a woman with her eyes open, every minute. On the feminist politics in Adrienne Rich's Lies, Secrets and Silence: “My reading of Ms. Rich's book does not even tell me whether I may assume there are any qualitative differences between my son—poised on the brink of adulthood, scared, brave, kind, uncertain—and Idi Amin.” On Werner Erhard: “a forty-one-year-old Gucci-Pucci-Bally California-style guru who ‘got it’ while driving along the California freeway, and promptly packaged ‘it,’ and is, as a consequence, awfully rich.” And on children: “Even to watch television with a child who is not yet jaded is to convince one that, while pessimism of the intellect may be here to stay, optimism of the spirit is still—gloriously—possible.”
She has a particular gift for recognizing and admitting the ambiguities of normal life—surely not easy, when you're writing essays. How tempting it must be to declare one's subject all black, or all white! But no, here she is on abortion: “Is it really so awful to admit to confusion and unhappiness over the issue of abortion? … The most painful moral struggles are not those between the good and the evil, but between the good and the lesser good.”
In “The Helanders and the Moonies: A Family Story,” she interviews a young girl who joined the Moonies and was twice kidnapped (or “rescued,” depending on your viewpoint) by her family and twice deprogrammed, only to rejoin the Moonies both times. She talks with the daughter at the Unification Church's World Mission Center; then she visits the parents in their cluttered, comfortable house. (“What did she have for lunch?” the mother asks, heartbreakingly. “Did she talk about us?”) There are no slick conclusions in this article; the writer sides neither with the parents nor with the daughter. Or rather, she sides with both, understanding the daughter's outrage as well as the parents' pain. “I am entirely convinced,” she says, “of the passionate sincerity of Carolyn and Elton Helander, and of their devotion to their daughter, and of the selflessness of their attempts to rescue her. But they did not entirely persuade me of the appropriateness of deprogramming … nor did they entirely succeed in convincing me that all of Wendy's charges were inaccurate.”
Here, as in most of the other essays, the reader has a sense of parting the jungle fronds alongside the writer, breaking a new path through the underbrush, hoping to come to some understanding. It's reassuring: we trust her good intentions. Watch her, for instance, interviewing Jane Fonda, alternately experiencing open admiration and edgy dislike. “There is both more and less to her than meets the eye,” she decides—not giving up, really, but sharing with us her honest bewilderment, leading us moment by moment through the hot and cold of a day with Jane Fonda.
There were times in Off Center when I wanted to say “Yes!” out loud—to her thoughts on the value of work, for instance, or to her feelings about her child (in an essay whose title is a little essay all by itself: “‘Write the Truth,’ My Son Said. ‘Write About Me.’”). There were other times when I vehemently disagreed; her step-by-step style of exploration allows us that. I can't, for example, share her pleasure in Dick Cavett's skittery chatter, and I find it hard to believe that J. D. Salinger's plots rely upon adoring, innocent young women as foils. And if Jane Fonda speaks “flatly, and without emotion” of her mother's suicide, why should that necessarily mean that she's “sanitized” her tragedy? More likely, she's just tired of journalists asking her to spill her private sorrows.
My most serious disagreement was with “Joan Didion: Only Disconnect,” which first appeared in the Nation as “The Courage of Her Afflictions.” The problem is not that the piece is negative (although I do admire Joan Didion's non-fiction), but that it's an all-out attack. In a business such as reviewing, where the writer/reviewer teeters eternally on the brink of conflict-of-interest, it might be best to decline comment on a fellow-writer one so passionately disapproves of. What's especially ironic is Barbara Harrison's central criticism: that Joan Didion spotlights her own sensibility in describing any event. It's true, of course, but that's what lends a Didion essay its distinctive color. You may find her sensibility amusing or irritating; either way, it sets her work aside from the average newspaper article—just as (and here's the real irony) Barbara Harrison's sensibility sets her work aside.
Granted, the Harrison sensibility is more … well, sensible; but it's equally a defining element, a unique sort of lens upon the world. Look at the way she catches the hairline shifts of mood that give an interview its tension—the fact, for instance, that the Moonie disciple is working hard to please her, and also perhaps to manipulate her; or that Jane Fonda grows chillier after a Fonda child misbehaves in Barbara Harrison's presence. And what would the following description of her est experience amount to, without her special combination of humor, perception, and kitchen-sink matter-of-factness?
During the process, I play these (unauthorized) games: I imagine a passage of Job written in est-eze (item: despair) and I understand that the reduction of all human emotions to single-word ‘items’ makes art—and emotion itself—impossible. … I think of people I would like to have sitting around me: novelist Muriel Spark, for her iconoclastic intelligence, her irony, her absolute faith in an absolute God; Ralph Nader and a whole bunch of his Raiders; my Marxist friend Sol Yurick (part of what is going on in this room is a denial of cause and effect, which is a denial of history); a Jesuit; Woody Allen; and anybody at all who will make a convincing case for human reciprocity—who will convince people that people do hurt one another, help one another, drive one another crazy, and make one another happy. … I try to imagine what would happen if anyone introduced the following things into this room: somebody with a gun. A Beethoven quartet. Somebody having a coronary. A crying baby. (Reality, I think, would rip their game wide open.)
In a culture where closing your eyes is considered a step toward discovery, where women proudly report their assertiveness in saying “no” to a sick neighbor, and where students endangered by a race riot call Channel 5 TV before they call the police, there's an urgent need for Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's sharp, unblinking vision. We are lucky to have her.
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