Annie Dillard’s Subject Was the Whole World
Literary lives, like the lives of plants, follow many trajectories. Some bloom early. Some blossom late. Some grow in view of everyone, sending out shoots where all and sundry can watch them experiment. Others bide their time underground, husbanding resources and awaiting their season until they are good, ready, and ripe.
Annie Dillard, who died last week, at eighty-one, did not literally emerge from nowhere. The eldest daughter of a wealthy Pittsburgh family, she attended Hollins College, in Roanoke, Virginia, and married her writing teacher, Richard Dillard, at the end of her sophomore year. After a serious case of pneumonia in her twenties, she borrowed a notion from Henry David Thoreau and set out to write a “meteorological journal of the mind.” She was, at the time, a poet with a rich inner life, a shelf’s worth of notebooks, and the grating sense that her husband’s male graduate students took her ambitions something less than seriously.
All of that changed when “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” was published, in 1974. To Dillard, “Pilgrim” was the fruit of many years of reading, walking, looking, and thinking. But to most of the world it might as well have been an eruption ex nihilo—as sudden, as startling, as a fully grown sycamore sprung from your yard overnight.
The story of “Pilgrim” ’s publication, as Dillard told it, went like this: A chapter of the book, an essay on praying mantises, ended up in the slush pile at Harper’s. A schoolteacher who sifted submissions was so struck by what she read that she threatened to quit her post if it wasn’t accepted immediately. Lewis Lapham, the magazine’s editor, made the essay a cover story. A year later, Harper’s Magazine Press published the book, and, a year after that, it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Half a century on, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”—“Patsy,” as she called it—remains the work for which Dillard is best known, even though she was quite sure it was not the best she ever wrote. (That honor, in her opinion, belonged to “For the Time Being,” which she published in 1999—the book, she once said, “on which I stake all.” A reasonable choice. But, if you ask me, the honor in fact belongs to her 1977 prose poem, “Holy the Firm.”)
“Pilgrim” can be described, accurately enough, as a collection of essays about nature, so long as you’re willing to grant that “Moby-Dick” can also be described, accurately enough, as a novel about a whale. Better, perhaps, to call it a book about nature that reads nature as a book: essays about stalking muskrats, the appalling fecundity of the wild world, and a twenty-five-cent goldfish that lived in her kitchen fishbowl search for some hint, some clue, about the meaning and purpose of existence. Better still to say of the book what she said once of a long poem by Evan S. Connell, a favorite writer of hers: “It blows, in short, your mind.”
Thoreau was one obvious inspiration for “Pilgrim,” as were the medieval mystics who saw in nature a Book of Creation meant to be read and interpreted alongside the Bible. Like Thoreau, Dillard wanted to cut a broad swath and shave close, to see if she could learn what life had to teach. Like the mystics, she believed that understanding our peculiar situation required grappling with immanence and transcendence, the difficult ancient paths of the via positiva and via negativa. Like both Thoreau and the mystics, she chose for her investigations a site that was outwardly undistinguished. In later books, Dillard would write about Antarctica, the Galápagos, Jerusalem, Xi’an, and the Amazon, but Tinker Creek was a quiet waterway of the sort every third town in America can claim. It meandered along just down the hill from her house in suburban Roanoke.
“Pilgrim” made Dillard an instant literary celebrity, at a time when that phrase still signified something other than a winking oxymoron. All of this happened before I was born, so I can’t pretend to explain why a book about a latter-day transcendentalist trying to untangle the deepest mysteries of nature and God caught the Zeitgeist in post-Watergate America. But, as anyone who’s read even a chapter of the book can tell you, what it’s about is only half the appeal. Possibly the lesser half. Much as it bugs me when books are praised for their prose or (ugh) their sentences—as though a book were anything other than the sum and substance of its words—when I open “Pilgrim” today, I find myself helpless to resist the clichés. Just look at that prose, I want to tell you. Look at those sentences.
“Pilgrim” ’s success changed Dillard’s life in a flash, and not uniformly for the better. Though she knew very well that no one wanted to hear about the perils of early success, it was obvious even decades later that her triumph had exacted a heavy toll. “Life was better before anyone envied me or begrudged or competed with me,” she told me once. She left Richard in the aftermath of the book’s publication, in what she always described as an amicable divorce, and moved to Puget Sound, as far from Tinker Creek as it was possible to get without leaving the contiguous United States.
A hint of her post-“Pilgrim” strife can be detected in “Holy the Firm,” her most concentrated examination of the problem of suffering. There she talks about camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the midst of her newfound fame: “I had hauled myself and gear up there to read, among other things, James Ramsey Ullman’s The Day on Fire, a novel about Rimbaud that had made me want to be a writer when I was sixteen; I was hoping it would do it again.” Much later, she joked that someone should write a crime novel in which a strategically deployed MacArthur “genius” grant was the murder weapon of choice.
When I met Annie, in 2000, all of this was decades in the past. She had by then written most of the books that she would publish, including a memoir (“An American Childhood”), a novel (“The Living”), a book of criticism (“Living by Fiction”), a book about writing (“The Writing Life”), and “For the Time Being,” which completed the informal trilogy on theodicy which she’d started with “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” and “Holy the Firm.” She’d taught for many years, first at Western Washington University and then at Wesleyan, and had since retired from teaching. She’d got married twice more, most recently to Robert D. Richardson, Jr., a wonderful man and a brilliant biographer of Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James. She’d raised a daughter and helped raise several stepdaughters, and split her time between Key West, Cape Cod, and North Carolina. Only “The Maytrees,” her second novel, which she undertook “with the lousy but funny aim of getting my work off school curricula,” was yet unpublished.
At the time, I was a college senior in the midst of an intense but idiosyncratic flareup of my childhood Catholicism. After reading “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” a book of essays which Dillard published in 1982, and finding in its pages an account of an experience I found unnervingly familiar, I sent her a fan letter. The letter was overearnest, overwrought, and self-serious in a way that only a person on the cusp of proper adulthood could produce.
A few weeks later, she responded kindly and at length. (For a long time, she made it a point of pride to respond to every letter she received, if only with a postcard.) We struck up a correspondence—letters, initially, and then, to our mutual regret, e-mail—that fast became a friendship. I met her in person for the first time at a Benedictine monastery in New Mexico, and soon enough she absorbed me into the circle of former students with whom she kept in close contact. Eventually, I spent six months working for her and Bob as a kind of secretary. Later still, I ended up co-owning property with the two of them, deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
It is simple enough, and true enough, to say that Annie was unlike anyone I’d ever met, then or since. Still less was she like the condescending portrait that Eudora Welty painted in her 1974 Times review of “Pilgrim,” which described Annie as a “high‐strung and high‐minded” Girl Scout, “an appealing young woman standing alert in a meadow, dressed in shirt and pants, holding her field glasses and provided with a sandwich.”
The Annie I knew over the last quarter century of her life was very funny, very frank, and very determined to live life on her own terms. Though she never entirely escaped the influence of her affluent Pittsburgh upbringing, she also never stopped bucking against the constraints of bourgeois convention. Some of this was principle—she hated the usual pieties, thought them actively harmful to the best things in life—and some of it was just who she was. (A little cruelly, her first husband nicknamed her Little Miss Blurt.) She delighted in her ability to shock people, delighted particularly in subverting what they expected to hear from Annie Dillard, but it was also clear that the habit left her feeling perpetually misunderstood. In a chunk of journal she sent me at one point, she wrote, “Only in Key West am I free of the fear in people’s faces . . . because they judge me insane (and therefore possibly dangerous) for violating any one of a million meaningless customs.”
Is it obvious that she could be exasperating? Could you guess that she sometimes spoke her mind rather too freely, in ways that were not merely indecorous? Good, then let me just say that she was the only person I’ve known who had a special set of stationery printed to carry her apologies. (The cards featured a photo of her with two Band-Aids covering her mouth.)
But let me also note that she was proud of never printing a word that she suspected would hurt someone she knew. When she gave her father an advance copy of “An American Childhood,” her memoir, he asked her not to describe the Allegheny, one of Pittsburgh’s three rivers, as dirty. Say again? “I have to live in this town,” he told her. “You don’t.” She cut the adjective.
Critics sometimes complained about the lack of overt politics in Annie’s books, as though the questions that obsessed her—how to value human lives, and whose, and on what terms—were politically nugatory. In electoral terms, she was a fairly standard progressive Democrat, and was delighted to receive the National Humanities Medal from Barack Obama in 2014. But she was radical at least in her conviction that everyone, collectively and individually, owed an obligation to the poor.
Though Annie knew what money could do for people, and was honest about what it had done for her, she could not bear the American obsession with the almighty dollar. She felt the same way about fame. As part of her thing about money, she was generous to a stupefying degree, to strangers and friends alike. (After reading, in this magazine, Tracy Kidder’s Profile of Paul Farmer, one of the founders of Partners in Health, she took on the organization as a favorite cause, and eventually donated more than a million dollars to support it.) “It’s like too many apples in the yard,” she once explained to me when I half-heartedly objected to one or another of her gifts: “Anyone would help me by taking some from these bushels.”
Jokes were, to her, the world’s only honest currency: tell her a good one, prove you could handle yourself with a punch line, and she’d enlist herself in your debt forever. It’s not quite accurate to say she lived only for laughs—literature was a more durable commitment—but she was firm in her conviction that having fun with friends was a core existential imperative.
Probably it helped that she was, indisputably, a ham. She loved dancing, Ping-Pong, and parties. I have an enduring memory of a party thrown in her honor by Wendy Doniger, a friend of Annie’s and a professor of mine, in Chicago. In the midst of the festivities, among a crowd of bookish faculty and graduate students, Annie and Wendy convinced an overheated newspaper photographer who’d been sent to cover the event to abandon his turtleneck. He spent the rest of the night shirtless and sweating on the dance floor.
Annie especially loved anagrams, not to be confused with Bananagrams, a nearly forgotten game played with Scrabble-like tiles which became for me, as it was for her, “my word game of choice/obsession.” A circle of male authors that included, at various points, John Ciardi, Richard Wilbur, John Hersey, and Harry Mathews had a regular game in Key West from which women were rigorously excluded. I don’t think Annie ever forgave them. Anyway, poor souls, they played it wrong. Annie preferred the “sheer adrenaline” of the so-called Hofstra variation: “I told them how I play and they said, ‘Nyaaa, that’s the way LENNY played! The guy was CRAZY!’ They loved him, though; it was Leonard Bernstein.”
At the same time, the social whirl clearly exhausted her. She liked to describe herself as a gregarious hermit—and, sure enough, she often quivered in a state of quantum indeterminacy about whether she wanted to be surrounded by everyone or no one. In “Pilgrim,” she writes, “I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained.” Chicago aside, during the quarter century I knew her she avoided cities the way her books avoided adverbs. Instead she preferred to hole up at one extreme of the continent or another, with no one for company except books, bugs, and stars. (Wherever she lived, she insisted on rigging up complicated bedding arrangements so that she could sleep comfortably outside. She did this not as an occasional adventure but sometimes for months at a time.)
No one familiar with her work will be surprised to hear that she read on an industrial scale. Her books are filled with other books, so much so that she once joked that the proper genre of “For the Time Being” was “creative quotation.” (In 1974, a Harper’s editor, preparing her for an upcoming assignment, warned, “We are not sending you to the Galapagos . . . to quote William James.”) I was in graduate school in the humanities for most of the early years of our friendship, but it wasn’t until I lived with her and Bob that I appreciated how much reading an adult life could sustain. Powered by coffee, cigarettes, and gummy fruit slices, accompanied always by the cheap spiral notebooks and yellow legal pads she used to keep notes, she read twelve, fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day. I’m still working through the book lists she assigned me in my early twenties.
In her review of “Pilgrim,” Eudora Welty complained, of Annie, that “there remains something about her wishes which is not quite related to the human world.” You still hear this kind of thing sometimes, especially from people who have not read much of her work, or who have not read it well, or who are secure in their faith that worrying about the meaning of life is a mug’s game, fit only for naïfs, scolds, and charlatans.
It’s true that she wrote often about subjects that embarrassed that latter conviction—God, theology, eternity. And certainly those subjects could be, in other hands, a vehicle for fleeing the urgencies of the here and now. It’s also true, as the outpouring of tributes this past week has attested, that she won plenty of admiration and even devotion from people allergic to metaphysics.
For me, however, it would be dishonest to leave the matter there, as though my judgment on “Pilgrim”—that prose! those sentences!—were any kind of suggestion that her legacy hangs on the genius of her craft. Of course I loved her writing: the pacing, the diction, the dazzle, the humor, the range. But the reason I wrote her a letter in the first place, the reason Annie had legions of “deep fans” who approached her after lectures with a kind of stunned reverence, was not her coruscating style.
I wrote her because she was obsessed, as I was, as they are, with the quintessentially human question that recurs explicitly throughout “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” and implicitly throughout all the work that followed: “What’s going on here?” Why do any of us have this ridiculous, wonderful chance to be alive? What does it mean that we can appreciate that chance, that we are aware enough to be baffled by it? Why is there pain? Why is there beauty? Does any of it have a point? If so—if not—how should we live?
Annie wrote about transcendence not because she was trying to avoid these questions but precisely because she was trying to face them square on. She embraced the scientific endeavor unreservedly, and was forever sending me clippings about this or that new discovery that appropriately boggled her mind. But she knew enough about science to know that it couldn’t answer, or even properly ask, the questions that concerned her most.
“What I have been after all along is not an explanation but a picture,” she wrote in “Pilgrim,” when “all along” still meant a few hundred pages and not yet a dozen astonishing, inimitable books. “This is the way the world is, altar and cup, lit by the fire from a star that has only begun to die. My rage and shock at the pain and death of individuals of my kind is the old, old mystery, as old as man, but forever fresh, and completely unanswerable.” Twenty-five years later, in “For the Time Being,” she was still after it: “How can an individual count? Do individuals count only to us other suckers, who love and grieve like elephants, bless their hearts?”
Not quite related to the human world? I’m sorry, no. The human world was exactly her subject. Its confounding cruelty and sublime wonder were her perennial themes. She knew that you weren’t supposed to talk about this stuff, in these terms, in polite or sophisticated company. Bless her heart, she couldn’t possibly care less. ♦