Back Matter (afterword) Annie Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Afterword

In October, 1972, camping in Acadia National Park on the Maine coast, I read a nature book. I had very much admired this writer’s previous book. The new book was tired. Everything in it was the dear old familiar this and the dear old familiar that. God save us from meditations. What on earth had happened to this man? Decades had happened, that was all. Exhaustedly, he wondered how fireflies made their light. I knew—at least I happened to know—that two enzymes called luciferin and luciferase combined to make the light. It seemed that if the writer did not know, he should have learned. Perhaps, I thought that night reading in the tent, I might write about the world before I got tired of it.

I had recently read Colette’s Break of Day, a book about her daily life that shocked young metaphysical me by its frivolity: lots of pretty meals and roguish conversations. Still, I read it all; its vivid foreignness intrigued me. Maybe my daily life would interest people by its foreignness, too. And was it at that time that I read Edwin Muir’s wonderful Autobiography and noticed how much stronger was the half he wrote when he was young?

A New Yorker essay that fall noted that mathematicians do good work while they are young because as they age they suffer “the failure of the nerve for excellence.” The phrase struck me, and I wrote it down. Nerve had never been a problem; excellence sounded novel.

How boldly committed to ideas we are in our twenties! Why not write some sort of nature book—say, a theodicy? In November, back in Virginia, I fooled around with the idea and started filling out five-by-seven index cards with notes from years of reading.

Running the story through a year’s seasons was conventional, so I resisted it, but since each of the dozen alternative structures I proposed injured, usually fatally, the already frail narrative, I was stuck with it. The book’s other, two-part structure interested me more. Neoplatonic Christianity described two routes to God: the via positiva and the via negativa. Philosophers on the via positiva assert that God is omnipotent, omniscient, etc; that God possesses all positive attributes. I found the via negativa more congenial. Its seasoned travelers (Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century and Pseudo-Dionysius in the sixth) stressed God’s unknowability. Anything we may say of God is untrue, as we can know only creaturely attributes, which do not apply to God. Thinkers on the via negative jettisoned everything that was not God; they hoped that what was left would be only the divine dark.

The book’s first half, the via positiva, accumulates the world’s goodness and God’s. After an introductory chapter, the book begins with “Seeing,” a chapter whose parts gave me so much trouble to put together I nearly abandoned the book and its attendant piles of outlines and cards. The via positiva culminates in “Intricacy.” A shamefully feeble “Flood” chapter washes all that away, and the second half of the book starts down the via negativa with “Fecundity,” the dark side of intricacy. This half culminates in “Northing” (it is, with the last, my favorite chapter), in which the visible world empties, leaf by leaf. “Northing” is the counterpart to “Seeing.” A concluding chapter keeps the bilateral symmetry.

As I finished each chapter, I collected those index cards with bits I liked but had not been able to use and filed them under later chapters. The more I wrote, the thicker the later files grew. When I reached “Northing” I thought, It’s now or never for these best bits, so exultant, starved, delirious on caffeine—I threw them all in.

Later I regretted naming the chapters, nineteenth-century-style, because somebody called the book a collection of essays—which it is not. The misnomer stuck, and adhered to later books, too, only one of which, Teaching a Stone to Talk, was in fact a collection of (narrative) essays. Consequently I have the undeserved title of essayist.

Because a great many otherwise admirable men do not read books American women write, I wanted to use a decidedly male pseudonym. When Harper’s magazine took a chapter, and then Atlantic Monthly, I was so tickled I used my real name, and the jig was pretty much up. Still I intended to publish the book as A. Dillard, hoping—as we all hope, and hope in vain—someone might notice only the text, not considering its jacket, its picture, or the advertising; and not remembering someone else’s impression of the book, or its writer, or its other readers; and not knowing the writer’s gender, or age, or nationality—just read the book, starting cold with the first sentence. Editors and agents talked me out of using “A. Dillard,” and talked me into allowing a dust-jacket picture. I regret both decisions. I acknowledge, however, that living in hiding would be cumbersome, and itself ostentatious.

It never entered my mind that publishing a book could be confusing. The publisher’s publicity director and I wrangled daily on the telephone, at full strength, in mutual mystification, her to urge, me to refuse, an unceasing cannonade of offers. Some were hilarious: Would I model clothes for Vogue? Would I write for Hollywood? The decision to avoid publicity, to duck a promotional tour, and especially not to appear on television—not on the Today show, not on any of innumerable network specials, not on my own (believe it or not) weekly show—saved my neck.

Later a reporter interviewed me over the phone. “You write so much about Eskimos in this book,” she said. “How come there are so many Eskimos?” I said that the spare arctic landscape suggested the soul’s emptying itself in readiness for the incursions of the divine. There was a pause. At last she said, “I don’t think my editor will go for that.”

How does Pilgrim at Tinker Creek seem after twenty-five years? Above all, and salvifically, I hope, it seems bold. That it is overbold, and bold in metaphor, seems a merit. I dashed in without any fear of God; at twenty-seven I had all the license I thought I needed to engage the greatest subjects on earth. I dashed in without any fear of man. I thought that nine or ten monks might read it.

I’m afraid I suffered youth’s drawback, too: a love of grand sentences, and fancied a grand sentence was not quite done until it was overdone. Some parts seem frivolous. Its willingness to say “I” and “me” embarrasses—but at least it used the first person as a point of view only, a hand-held camera directed outwards.

Inexplicably, this difficult book has often strayed into boarding school and high-school curricula as well as required college courses, and so have some of its successors. Consequently, I suspect, many educated adults who would have enjoyed it, or at least understood it, never opened it—why read a book your kid is toting? And consequently a generation of youth has grown up cursing my name—which, you recall, I didn’t want to use in the first place.

—Annie Dillard, 1999

More Years Afterward

I was twenty-seven in 1972 when I began writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It is a young writer’s book in its excited eloquence and its metaphysical boldness. (Fools rush in.) Using the first person, I tried to be—in Emerson’s ever-ludicrous phrase—a transparent eyeball.

The Maytrees shows how a writer’s craft matures into spareness: short sentences, few modifiers. The Maytrees are a woman and a man both simplified and enlarged. Everyone and everything represents itself alone. No need for microcosms or macrocosms. The Maytrees’ human tale needs only the telling. Writers’ styles often end pruned down. (I knew this happened; I did not know I was already that old.)

—2007

Copyright © 1974 by Annie Dillard and HarperCollins