Joy Is Sitting In A Sun-Drenched Piazza With A Bottle of San Benedetto and Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

To know Italy, to love Italy, you must read this book.

To read the work of Barbara Grizzuti Harrison is to feel yourself utterly besotted, not just by her subject matter, but by her interpretation of the subject matter. That’s because Barbara’s sensitivity to beauty and talent for observation were so painfully acute, she existed inside a perpetual cloud of cigarette smoke just to protect herself.

It eventually killed her, the smoke. She died of Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder on April 24, 2002, in a Manhattan hospice at the age of eighty-seven. Had I read her essays, articles, travel books and novels before she died, I would have sent her impassioned letters telling her how greatly I admired her talent. There is a fierceness to it, a forward momentum and lack of apology that encourages me to do the same in my own writing. She is the strongest version of her own unique flavor. More than that no Creative can aspire to.

At some point during my Internet spelunking, I came across her name, read excerpts from her travel book Italian Days, bought the book, read the book, read it five more times, and then started dog-earring my favorite pages, so that the entire volume now looks like a tattered diary.

No one—not Stendhal, not Lord Byron, not my adored Mary Shelley—can turn base metal into gold more poetically than Barbara. No one understood Italy the way she did, which may have had something to do with the fact that both her grandparents were from Calabria. She had a pretty remarkable aptitude for turning wounds into gifts: her mother, who suffered from mental illness, became a Jehovah’s Witness, insisting that a nine-year-old Barbara do likewise; her father sexually abused her. And yet, there is the glorious legacy of her work to prove how strong people can overcome all things.

With her stratospheric IQ, Barbara skipped several grades in school before graduating. She then worked at the Watchtower Society, world headquarters for Jehovah’s Witnesses, having been forbidden to attend university. At first, this might seem like a horrible injustice until you realize that Barbara never needed university. Here was a woman who continued to evolve artistically on her own, gradually sliding away from her faith. The psychological tension this created led to a nervous breakdown at the age of twenty-two. Barbara left the Watchtower and religion, immersing herself in the proto-hipster lifestyle of fifties and sixties’ Greenwich Village.

Barbara Gruzzuti Harrison

During this period, when interracial relationships were practically forbidden even in Bohemia, Barbara embarked on an affair with an African-American jazz trumpeter, who she never publicly named. In her autobiography, she refers to him as “Jazzman,” and forty years after their first breakup, they went for Round 2, with the kind of gusto for fighting and lovemaking that often makes for great stories but unhappy lives. This, too, eventually ended.

In 1960, Barbara married W. Dale Harrison, whose work took him all over the globe. Barbara went with him, discovering a passion for travel that never left her. They had a son and daughter, but divorced in 1968. Barbara returned to New York with the kids.

Twenty years later, already the author of Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses, which recalled with far less bitterness than I would have expected her days in that organization, Unlearning the Lie: Sexism in School, Off Center (a collection of essays), and Foreign Bodies (a thinly disguised autobiography about a woman’s obsessive desire for a homosexual man), Barbara wrote what I consider to be her magnum opus: Italian Days.

Just to give you an idea of her descriptive power, here are two excerpts:

In an anonymous wall on a long lonely street in southern Trastevere is a small door set in a larger door, and beyond it—beyond the metallic clamor of the world—is an enclosed garden world, completely beautiful enigmatic, in which everything seems symbolic, though sadly one does not know of what. We are enveloped in the fragrance of orange blossoms and jasmine. Red, yellow, and white birds fly, like birds in a child’s picture book, through arches of red roses. An elderly woman is sprinkling the roses with a hose (the fat drops of water catch the liquid light) … what a lovely, useful occupation. Nuns in black robes embrace a little girl who is eating chocolate cookies. A strolling priest wears, on his white robes, a felt cross, one that a child might have made, the red and blue stitches untidy and irregular. On the loggias there are pots and pots of homely marigolds; vines twine around octagonal columns. We are in a cloister of a building that presents a blind face to a blind street; its windows open to the cloister; in one of them we see a domestic tableau: two women at a table; one is shelling peas. “Do you take guests?” Lala asks the custodian; he doesn’t answer. No one will tell us. We greedily imagine having apartments in this building. A young man and woman holding hands swing down the steps and into the crystalline light. Do they live here? Mystery in this clear light makes Lala restless. In the center of the cloister is a well—a tabby cat sits on it—framed by two marble columns.

I have seen the glorious facades, and I have had the slightly perverse thrill of seeing the slimy back and belly of Venice, the backwaters; I would not have this kingdom—this city of masks and mirrors—for a gondolier’s song, a feeling known to Oscar Wilde, who said, after a ride in a gondola, that he had been through a sewer in a coffin. “I never mind being lost in Venice,” says a character in Nicolas Roeg’s film Don’t Look Now, in which Venice is palpably sinister. “I never mind being lost in Venice”—and then she sees the water rats, and her pensione seems to vanish from its street, and as she tries vainly to retrace her steps, echoes bounce off the water; there are too many shadows; Venice seems then to her like a city in aspic, left over from a dinner party—and all the guests are dead. And then she notices the unique “twinning” in Venice that Mary McCarthy has commented on: Nothing exists that does not have its counterpart; the city itself exists twice over—in its solid weight and in its reflections … like the tremulously shining light on my bedroom celling that sometimes gives me the odd sensation of swimming in air. But it isn’t only material objects that are reflected in Venice, it is emotions and experience. In Roeg’s film a child dies and its father finds a rubber doll in the canal, water pouring from its blank eye sockets; a blind twin has second sight.

Leone Battista Alberti, the great fifteenth-century Florentine Humanist, regarded Narcissus as the first painter; his image, reflected in water, was an exact likeness of himself on a flat surface. Leonardo da Vinci called the reflection in the mirror “the true painting.” In this case all of Venice is a painting—which is how it exists in memory. Memory turns the wheel again. In memory, Venice is always magic.

Please forgive the fan-girling, but nobody writes like that anymore. Barbara tasted language the way a world-class chef tastes soup. Gone are the spare, robotic sentences that populate early 21st-century prose. Instead, we are given a treat for the senses as rich and evocative as the scenes it describes. Even in the construction of her long and precariously cantilevered sentences, sentences hinged together with a terrifying welter of semi-colons and em dashes, Barbara betrays her fearlessness.

No one else can paint using that many colors.

For those of us who love Italy and who hunger for the words to describe her, we need more writers like Barbara Grizzuti Harrison. Italian Days and the book she wrote right after, The Islands of Italy: Sicily, Sardinia, and the Aeolian Islands, should be on every English-reader’s shelf.

With that, I shall leave you with one additional Barbara Gruzzuti Harrison quote:

Anna and I go to Capri by aliscafo, hydrofoil. Island of fantastic rocks, of fragrant myrtle, juniper, and heather, of blue butterfly and blue lizard, of lemon sun and radiant waters, audacious hills and embracing green gardens, it can never—let no one tell you otherwise—be spoiled. “This is the most beautiful place on earth,” Anna says, looking at me in frank and delighted amazement, for since she has come to Italy, life has offered her everywhere cornucopia and paradise.

Straight from the aliscafo and the Marina Grande to the Blue Grotto (I want to give my daughter a sapphire present): from a motor launch to a small boat, and all the boats, too many boats, hustling and jockeying for position, the boatmen in bad humor.

It is a good thing Italy is not devoted to Freud, all this slithering in and out of cave-wombs, laden with freight.

In we go, to magic: vibrant blue so blue the liquid concentration of blue essence, and iridescent; it is as if the source of light were not the sky but the molten center of the earth .. and God moves among the mirrored waters. And then out we go, to a communal intake of breath. Too short a time in silvered sapphire waters.

Tacitus says it was not so much the perfection of climate that charmed rotten Tiberius, who spent the last ten years of his life in debauchery on Capri, as the seclusion and inaccessibility of the island. And one still feels it, feels cut off from the rest of the world—though cars careen on roller-coaster roads, on one side the rock, on the other the precipice. In the coolness of the arched streets, in those streets where sobriety and intoxication fight for equal time, one feels it. Among the confused shining of hot cliffs one feels it. One feels it mostly as a blessing, but occasionally as a haunting. From a promontory in Capri Tiberius threw his victims to the sea, and there a band of Roman men received them and broke their bones with clubs and oars.

This is Italy.

Who are your favorite writers in Italian or in English about Italy? I want to know. Leave your comments below.

Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin