The Astonishing World

by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Ticknor and Fields

$22.95

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison understands that the most important character in any journalistic account is usually the journalist herself.

"To rejoice in objectivity is to rejoice in divesting one's self of self; to lay claim to objectivity is to lie," she writes in the introduction to her excellent collection of essays, The Astonishing World. "Disinterestedness is an excellent thing in a Supreme Court justice...but a disinterested writer? I couldn't be one--why would one choose to spend a lifetime writing about a subject that didn't excite one's passions?--I'd be bored."

Harrison is forcefully present on every page. Although she treats subjects as diverse a Francis Ford Coppola, Nadia Comeneci, a Vermont religious cult, racial tensions in New York and ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia, her book retains a logic and cohesion through Harrison's distinctive voice and sensibility.

Fittingly, the opening pieces serve as an introduction to Harrison--her past, beliefs and prejudices. She writes eloquently and wittily about her difficult past. In one essay, she recounts her experiences as a seven year old" precocious little mouthpiece for the apocalypse" who preached door-to-door on behalf of her mother, a Jehovah's Witness. We read about her early alienation from the Italian American suburb of Bensonhurst in which she grew up; her defection from its provincialism to feminism and bohemianism; her marriage and divorce.

Through all of this she seems to have retained a sense of humor, a fierce pleasure in observing the world and a moral strength (she has a biting contempt for people who complain). She writes beautifully, savoring the details that pass most people by in the blur of daily life.

Harrison brings this strong personality and keen eye to all the essays in this book. The profile pieces are less standard interviews than dialogues; Harrison's opinions on the celebrities she writes about are always crystal clear. Some of the best essays result from encounters with people she clearly dislikes.

"Pure Gore," which recounts an afternoon spent with Gore Vidal in his house in Rome, is a fascinating display of two clashing sensibilities. Gore's dry pessimism in the face of his own worldly and literary success strikes Harrison as pouty and ungenerous. Rejecting the usual fawning interviwer's pose, Harrison challenges and argues with Vidal. In their tense but often funny exchange, they hone their opposing philosphies:

"'At my age," [Vidal] says, 'Nobody is afraid of death...I think I might take a short cut.'

I protest. Suicide sets a bad example, I say, and it is contagious, "There are plenty more where we came from,' he says.

Harrison, of course, eventually gets the last word, finding Gore guilty of a rather ungrateful attitude toward the world. But the piece presents an absorbing and fair fight.

The essay on Nadia Comeneci is more devastating. In a series of depressing interviews, the Rumanian gymnast bosses waiters at restaurants, lies to Harrison about her collaboration with the murderous dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and periodically leaves the table to vomit up the large quantities of food she stuffs into her mouth.

Harrison depicts the former Olympic pixie as an unhappy, selfish and dishonest woman: "Her voice is flat and uninflected; it lacks the ardency of truth...Reading what she has said over the years is like walking through halls of mirrors; she issues denials and counterdenials, she writes and rewrites the script, editing all the time, contradicting her contradictions."

Harrison travels to Rumania a few days after the 1989 revolution to seek out Comenici's family and past. She stunningly juxtaposes the vitality of the awakening nation with hardened gymnast's artificiality.

Yet this complex piece is not simply judgemental; it is mournful. Harrison never loses sight of the twisted nature of the government under which Comeneci grew up and the unnatural strains placed on the teenage girl who was also a world-class athlete. The essay is a terrifying portrait of a weak person in bad circumstances, a "casualty."

Harrison displays the same complexity and sensitivity when she likes her subject. She wears her enchantment on her sleeve in her engaging profile of Mario Cuomo, "the most formidable and glamorous man I have ever met."

She strikingly evokes the governor as a regular person who is also larger than life. "His gestures are large and his deepest large dark baggy eyes are dramatically hooded, and the defining lines of his fleshy fifty-nine-year-old face are so deeply etched one feels one could read him like Braille...He thinks he looks like a frog." Harrison makes her admiration palpable.

She is equally captivating in her more blatantly personal essays. "Women and Blacks and Bensonhurst" meditates on Harrison's hometown, the New York suburb where Yusuf Hawkins, a Black sixteen-year-old, was shot to death in 1989 by a group of Italian-Americans who thought he was dating a local girl. Resisting what she calls the "mandolin and macaroni" depiction of Italian-American uraban life, she recalls grimly the casual racism and violence of life in Bensonhurst, and the stifling nature of community life there. "What you don't want known in Bensonhurst you don't do," she writes.

She speaks honestly and movingly of a hometown that was alternately embracing and terrifying. It has the tone of a leave-taking; with this critical essay Harrison realizes she is publicly, officially severing herself from the community she grew up in. It is a brave and difficult fight against the powerful "will to silence."

Perhaps Harrison's most valuable gift is her conviction that spending time in the world is a supremely exciting experience. All of these essays are dense with a kaleidescopic abundance of sensual detail that records and conveys that excitement.

Describing the intense, uncertain optimism of Bucharest a few days after the revolution, for example, she writes that "it is like being present at a birth--one is full of trepidation and of joy, pity, terror: life."

More mundane experiences are conveyed just as pierceingly. The ocean at sunset "shines silvery like a bolt of shot silk." A swimming pool on a hot day is "polar cold. After a while cold feels like a different kind of warmth, hypothermal hypnosis, a fugue state, sweet."

Passages like these, which raise the sensual to a spiritual level, make The Astonishing World a consistently exhilarating book. Harrison makes a religion out of the notion that the world is here to be noticed, and in most of these essays she renders that notion utterly convincing.