Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (28 page)

Annie Dillard has carved a unique niche for herself in the world
of American letters. Over the course of her career, Dillard has written essays, poetry, memoirs, literary criticism—even a western novel. In whatever genre she works, Dillard distinguishes herself with her carefully wrought language, keen observations, and original metaphysical insights. Her first significant publication,
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
, drew numerous comparisons to Thoreau’s
Walden
; in the years since
Pilgrim
appeared, Dillard’s name has come to stand for excellence in writing.

Tickets for a Prayer Wheel
was Dillard’s first publication. This slim volume of poetry—which expressed the author’s yearning to sense a hidden God—was praised by reviewers. Within months of
Tickets’
s appearance, however, the book was completely over-shadowed by the release of
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
. Dillard lived quietly on Tinker Creek in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley, observing the natural world, taking notes, and reading voluminously in a wide variety of disciplines, including theology, philosophy, natural science, and physics. Following the progression of seasons,
Pilgrim
probes the cosmic significance of the beauty and violence coexisting in the natural world.

The book met with immediate popular and critical success. “One of the most pleasing traits of the book is the graceful harmony between scrutiny of real phenomena and the reflections to which that gives rise,” noted a
Commentary
reviewer. “Anecdotes of animal behavior become so effortlessly enlarged into symbols by the deepened insight of meditation. Like a true transcendentalist, Miss Dillard understands her task to be that of full alertness.” Other critics found fault with Dillard’s work, however, calling it self-absorbed or overwritten. Charles Deemer of the
New Leader
, for example, claimed that “if Annie Dillard had not spelled out what she was up to in this book, I don’t think I would have guessed…. Her observations are typically described in overstatement reaching toward hysteria.” A more charitable assessment came from Muriel Haynes of
Ms
. While finding Dillard to be “susceptible to fits of rapture,” Haynes asserted that the author’s “imaginative flights have the special beauty of surprise.”

The author’s next book delved into the metaphysical aspects of pain.
Holy the Firm
was inspired by the plight of one of Dillard’s neighbors, a seven-year-old child badly burned in a plane crash. As Dillard reflects on the maimed child and on a moth consumed by flame, she struggles with the problem of reconciling faith in a loving god with the reality of a violent world. Only seventy-six pages long, the book overflows with “great richness,
beauty and power,” according to Frederick Buechner in the
New York Times Book Review. Atlantic
reviewer C. Michael Curtis concurred, adding that “Dillard writes about the ferocity and beauty of natural order with…grace.”

Elegant writing also distinguishes
Living by Fiction
, Dillard’s fourth book, in which the author analyzes the differences between modernist and traditional fiction. “Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically—even fraudulently—essays to live ‘the life of the mind’ should read this book,” advised Carolyn See in the
Los Angeles Times
. See went on to describe
Living by Fiction
as “somewhere between scholarship, metaphysics, an acid trip and a wonderful conversation with a most smart person.” “Whether the field of investigation is nature or fiction, Annie Dillard digs for ultimate meanings as instinctively and as determinedly as hogs for truffles,” remarked
Washington Post Book World
contributor John Breslin. “The resulting upheaval can be disconcerting…still, uncovered morsels are rich and tasty.”

Dillard returned to reflections on nature and religion in a book of essays entitled
Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
. In minutely detailed descriptions of a solar eclipse, visits to South America and the Galapagos Islands, and other, more commonplace events and locations, Dillard continues “the pilgrimage begun at Tinker Creek with an acuity of eye and ear that is matched by an ability to communicate a sense of wonder,” stated Beaufort Cranford in the
Detroit News. Washington Post Book World
contributor Douglas Bauer was similarly pleased with the collection, judging the essays to be “almost uniformly splendid.” In his estimation, Dillard’s “art as an essayist is to move with the scrutinous eye through events and receptions that are random on their surfaces and to find, with grace and always-redeeming wit, the connections.”

Dillard later chronicled her experiences as a member of a Chinese-American cultural exchange in a short, straightforward volume entitled
Encounters with Chinese Writers
; she then looked deeply into her past to produce another best-seller,
An American Childhood
. On one level,
An American Childhood
details Dillard’s upbringing in an idiosyncratic, wealthy family; in another sense, the memoir tells the story of a young person’s awakening to the world. In the words of
Washington Post
writer Charles Trueheart, Dillard’s “memories of childhood are like her observations of nature: they feed her acrobatic thinking, and drive the free verse of her prose.” Critics also applauded Dillard’s keen insight into the unique perceptions of youth, as well as her exuberant spirit. “Loving and lyrical, nostalgic without being wistful, this is a book about the capacity for joy,” said
Los Angeles Times Book Review
contributor Cyra McFadden, while Noel Perrin of the
New York Times Book Review
observed that “Ms. Dillard has written an autobiography in semimystical prose about the growth of her own mind, and it’s an exceptionally interesting account.”

The activity that had occupied most of Dillard’s adulthood was the subject of her next book,
The Writing Life
. With regard to content,
The Writing Life
is not a manual on craft nor a guide to getting published; rather, it is a study of a writer at work and the processes involved in that work. Among critics, the book drew mixed reaction. “Annie Dillard is one of my favorite contemporary authors,” Sara Maitland acknowledged in the
New York Times Book Review
. “Dillard is a wonderful writer and
The Writing Life
is full of joys. These are clearest to me when she comes at her subject tangentially, talking not of herself at her desk but of other parallel cases—the last chapter, a story about a stunt pilot who was an artist of air, is, quite simply, breathtaking. There are so many bits like this…. Unfortunately, the bits do not add
up to a book.”
Washington Post Book World
contributor Wendy Law-Yone voiced similar sentiments, finding the book “intriguing but not entirely satisfying” and “a sketch rather than a finished portrait.” Nevertheless, she wondered, “Can anyone who has ever read Annie Dillard resist hearing what she has to say about writing? Her authority has been clear since
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
—a mystic’s wonder at the physical world expressed in beautiful, near-biblical prose.”

Dillard ventured into new territory with her 1992 publication,
The Living
, a sprawling historical novel set in the Pacific Northwest. Reviewers hailed the author’s first novel as masterful. “Her triumph is that this panoramic evocation of a very specific landscape and people might as well have been settled upon any other time and place—for this is, above all, a novel about the reiterant, precarious, wondrous, solitary, terrifying, utterly common condition of human life,” wrote Molly Gloss in the
Washington Post Book World
. Dillard’s celebrated skill with words was also much in evidence here, according to Gloss, who noted that Dillard “uses language gracefully, releasing at times a vivid, startling imagery.” Carol Anshaw concurred in the
Los Angeles Times Book Review
: “The many readers who have been drawn in the past to Dillard’s work for its elegant and muscular language won’t be disappointed in these pages.”

Following the 1994 publication of
The Annie Dillard Reader
, a collection of poems, stories, and essays that prompted a
Publishers Weekly
reviewer to term Dillard “a writer of acute and singular observation,” Dillard produced two works that were published in 1995.
Modern American Memoirs
, which Dillard edited with Cort Conley, is a collection of thirty-five pieces excerpted from various writers’ memoirs. Authors whose work appears here include Ralph Ellison, Margaret Mead, Reynolds Price, Kate Simon, and Russell Baker. “Many of these memoirs
are striking and memorable despite their brevity,” commented Madeline Marget in a
Commonweal
review of the collection.

Mornings Like This: Found Poems
, Dillard’s other 1995 publication, is an experimental volume of poetry. To create these poems, Dillard culled lines from other writers’ prose works—Vincent Van Gogh’s letters and a Boy Scout Handbook, for example—and “arranged [the lines] in such a way as to simulate a poem originating with a single author,” noted John Haines in
The Hudson Review
. While commenting that Dillard’s technique in this book works better with humorous and joyful pieces than with serious ones, a
Publishers Weekly
critic remarked that “these co-op verses are never less than intriguing.” Haines expressed serious concern with the implications of Dillard’s experiment: “What does work like this say about the legitimacy of authorship?” He concluded, however, that “on the whole the collection has in places considerable interest.”