Performing Artist
[In the following laudatory review, Stone examines the organizing principles of An Accidental Autobiography.]
Most autobiographies are narratives, getting you from here to there in the author’s life. As such, they are implied explanations of how it all came to pass. An Accidental Autobiography gives no such account of Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s sixty years of being alive. “A linear autobiography would falsify because it would cast things in a mold and present me with the temptation to find formal patterns where none exist,” she writes in the Introduction. If she created a pattern, she might imprison herself in it, she says, robbing her own memory of its diverse versions of her own experience, all of which are true.
How then to organize? “Memories gather around puzzles, passions and possessions,” she says. With these three Ps as hubs, she goes where her thoughts chance to lead her—hence the book’s “accidental” character. As such, this autobiography is not “about” her life; it is a performance of her distinctive style, intelligence and sensibility, a stylized free association—of memories and thoughts—focused on what compels her.
For this venture, six years in the making, Harrison first identified her perpetual itches, then organized them alphabetically, leaving “room to play and freedom to improvise.” Those already familiar with her previous seven books and many articles—she is a contributing editor to Harper’s and has often been published in Ms. and The New York Times Magazine—will find that most of her customary itches remain.
She continues to write of her Brooklyn childhood experience as a Jehovah’s Witness, first documented in Visions of Glory. Her concern with spiritual matters remains, though her explicit focus on the Roman Catholic church, with which she has had an intense and sometimes argumentative relationship (she long ago announced herself as a pro-choice Catholic) seems less prominent. Traveling, the subject of Italian Days and The Islands of Italy, still fascinates her, and food does, too. (I’ve never forgotten her New York Times Magazine profile of Jean Nideitch, the founder of Weight Watchers: over lunch, Harrison eyed Nideitch’s rabbity salad, comparing it with her own choice, which was something like a double bacon cheeseburger.) As to vision and style, as always, Harrison is idiosyncratic, excessive, intelligent and as impatient as she has always been, suffering fools badly.
Additional memory hubs in An Accidental Autobiography include “Food, Flesh and Fashion”; “Loot and Lists and Lust (and Things)”; “Scars and Distinguishing Marks,” each chapter incorporating lengthy quotations from authors who tickle her fancy, give her something to react to and send her off in a fresh direction, so she doesn’t wind up moebius-stripping herself. The longest chapter—“Men and God(s)”—is an exploration of five beloved men in Harrison’s life: Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy Sayers’ urbane English detective hero; Red Barber, a radio announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers, the “voice of goodness” in her childhood who “brought the gold of summer into an attic apartment in the bowels of Brooklyn”; Arnold Horowitz, her English teacher at New Utrecht High School and her first great passion (“He chose me. He marked me.”); Jazzman, a black musician who was her first lover as a young woman, and with whom she recently reconnected, only to part again; and thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the Second—“hideously flawed as he was magnificent”—whom she adores and whose character as she describes it (intellectually curious, passionate, God-loving, iconoclastic) seems to have some overlap with her own.
Look anywhere to see that the organizing principle is psychic hypertext. The thought of Peter Wimsey reminds her of the used bookstore in Bombay where she found her first Sayers novel, and that leads her to catalogue the smells of Bombay, then to the spread of odors in a ground-floor flat outside Bombay where she and her husband lived, which brings to mind the night she triggered his contempt by serving veal to his Indian colleagues, which prompts a mention of how she was a city kid whose knowledge of animals was based on Heidi and the Prospect Park Zoo.
This format has its risks, but it allows Harrison to display her distinctive talents, including the vast and remarkable spread of her interests. With her wide-angled gaze, improbable pairs show up on these pages: Rodeo Drive and Caravaggio, Jeffrey Dahmer and Arnold Bennett, God’s grace and Campbell’s tomato soup.
Her memory, meanwhile, is practically prehensile:
At Swaine & Adeney, Her Majesty’s whip and leather makers, the Queen Mother’s umbrella makers (185 Piccadilly), “Listen, madam, hear it rustle, listen, hear it rustle,” Mr. Johnson says. Sibilant and reverent, Mr. Johnson of Swaine & Adeney opens and closes a black silk taffeta umbrella, hand stitched, with a rosewood handle (£500); he caresses umbrellas with ostrich handles and umbrellas with pig-skin handles, umbrellas with crocodile handles and snakeskin handles, umbrellas of Malacca, birch, and ash …
(p. 156)
And that’s not the half of it.
Occasionally, I wish she had had an editor who could convince her to shave a phrase here, amputate a paragraph there, in the interest of modulation and emphasis. The centrifugal force of her mind flings off so many jewels so far and so fast that they’re gone before they’re seen. On collecting, she writes:
We hunt for things and experiences, for states of grace, satiety, security, self-definition, immortality … out of love and lovingly, and for motives of snobbery … with graceful intuition, perception and integrity, and with an urge to cherish and preserve … out of avarice, greed, lust, hunger, fear, boredom, restlessness, … out of a simple sense of entitlement …
(p. 137)
—and more. One could slow oneself down to savor and consider, but caught up in the thrill of her muchness and pacing, one just doesn’t. Well, as she points out, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
Harrison is a woman of intense appetites, after all, and she writes for herself perhaps even more than she writes for others. “Did you think for a moment one wrote only for other people?” she asks in one of her few direct addresses to the reader. Given her method, there are lacunae (not much about making her way as a writer, or charting the stages between being poor enough to shoplift belts and rich enough to buy gold necklaces), and also frequent returns to her psychic hotspots—especially Arnold Horowitz, India, her children Josh and Anna, Jazzman and (even after twenty-odd years) “Mr. Harrison,” her ex-husband. However, by the end—and this is part of her charm—you feel you know her, precisely the way you feel you know an old friend: preoccupations, repeated ruminations, likely areas of wisdom, hobbyhorses and all.
Harrison’s stylistic extravagance also contributes to the appearance of complete openness. Without any discernible hesitation, she tells you how fat she is, how great she is in bed (“I love my body when I’m having sex, nice body, so obedient, so capable. … I rise, like yeast … so beautifully able to give and to take”), how her father tried to kill her and molest her, how she’s suffered from panic attacks, how her lover didn’t want to go down on her because he was afraid he’d smother. She is willing to reveal the painfully humiliating. When her affair with Jazzman ended (for the second time) she called his wife and then called him every day for six months. Once, after repeatedly hanging up without speaking, she identified herself to him. “‘Do you want to talk to me?’ ‘No,’ he said, his voice clotted with loathing.”
But of course the notion of complete candor is an illusion, and Harrison is candid enough to say so. After alluding twice to her father’s long-ago attempt to kill her—he was drunk, he put a twisted towel around her neck—she says how hard it is to say right.
[My doctor says] it isn’t a joke. And it isn’t an anecdote either, though I’ve done my best to turn it into one, sanitizing it, ordering and neutralizing it, skimming over it lightly in flat, uninflected sentences, denying the present pain, the leaching fear. (Did you ever doubt there was a censoring wily writerly presence behind the words you read?)
(p. 356)
And then: “I don’t know how to tell myself this story honestly.”
Speaking of honesty, it is the reader’s right to know that Harrison, while not a friend of mine, is someone I’ve known professionally for years. Having said that, I also want to say that it raises the question of the relationship between writer and reader in matters of self-disclosure. I’m fascinated (truly) by how much more open she is with me as the reader-stranger than she is with me in what passes for our “real” life. After reading this autobiography I find myself in the odd position of knowing things about Harrison that she chose not to tell me face to face. When I last happened to speak to her, she mentioned she was in the throes of doctor’s appointments. She didn’t say more (and of course I didn’t ask), but she opens the book with a story about her latest treatment for her chronic lung problems, the dates matching those of our last conversation. At the time, in the pulmonary clinic, she says, she hid her anxiety “behind a facade of cheerfulness and careless optimism.” If she succeeded in fooling anyone, it was not what she would prefer, for as she says elsewhere, “all that one [really] wants [is] to be seen; what one does not want is to be invented.”
To reconcile what appears to be a paradox, I would say that one is most willing to be seen when one is to some degree both protected and in control of one’s self-presentation. What better medium for this than print? The most magical part of writing is that it is one of the few performing arts where composite—redo, blend, deletion, rearrangement—is a given, allowing the writer infinite opportunity to display the totality of her fandango. Undoubtedly Barbara Grizzuti Harrison revels in the opulence of her options, and many readers will in turn delight in the dancer and her arresting and brilliant dance.
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