_________N a t u r e .g i r l

For all her words about shrews and muskrats, at heart Annie Dillard's work is a record of her search for God

BY DAVID BOWMAN
Annie Dillard is nature girl. A bookworm. A Hasidic Christian. An erudite eccentric. One of the most coldblooded horror writers of the 20th century. She may also be out of her mind.

Most readers think of Annie "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" Dillard as a nature writer à la Thoreau, although historian Don Scheese points out that Tinker Creek has never been on the "American roster of sacred places to visit" like Walden Pond. Dillard's body of water is too Gothic and psychedelic. "You cannot have mountains and creeks without space," she wrote. "And space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death." Dillard's personifications baffled poor Eudora Welty, who wrote in the New York Times, "I honestly do not know what she is talking about at such times."

Ah, but the crazy are always misunderstood. Dillard, born Annie Doak in 1945 in Pittsburgh, was merely a result of the eccentric bloodlines she was born from. Her father, who was financially comfortable from American Standard family money, once quit his job to float down the Mississippi like Mark Twain, while Dillard's mother was a "card" who would accost strange men in zoos and claim to be their ex-girlfriend, implying Annie was their illegitimate daughter. Dillard herself had a Salingeresque childhood studying her own pee under a microscope and reading Augustine's "Confessions." As a teen, her vices were cigarettes (she got kicked out of school for smoking) and drag racing (a practice that led to a date in juvenile court). In the early 1960s, Dillard was shipped down South like other "troubled" girls to Hollins College in Virginia. She married her writing teacher, R.H.W. Dillard -- 10 years her senior -- when she was just a sophomore. She credits R.H.W. with influencing her sense of aesthetics. He was also a connoisseur of horror films and likely responsible for Dillard's monster-movie view of nature, such as "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek's" bloodcurdlingly poetic descriptions of a frog being sucked dry by a water bug, as well as her meditations on the fatal sex life of the male praying mantis.

The book itself may or may not have been started in the early 1970s because she was bored with her marriage. Or because she had stopped smoking. In one interview she says an almost fatal bout of pneumonia is responsible -- she became "scared of everything, I couldn't sleep nights."

"Pilgrim" started as a third-person novel about a male metaphysician in Maine. Then Dillard switched to the first-person masculine voice and reset the story in Virginia. Finally, she abandoned the fictional format and used four years of journals to fashion "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." It was published in 1974, several months after her first book of poems, "Tickets for a Prayer Wheel."

Her poetry was ignored. "Pilgrim" wasn't. Eudora Welty may have had misgivings about Dillard's "Death dog," but "A reader's heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled," the older woman wrote. The Washington Post called Dillard a "Southern Sibyl" and speculated that "West Coast hipsters" felt she was a "female Castaneda ... smoking mandrake roots." Later the next year, Dillard was washing lettuce in her kitchen when an unidentified man phoned to tell her that she'd won the Pulitzer Prize. "Don't you realize you'll never have to wash lettuce again?" the stupid fellow asked.

N E X T_P A G E .|.Two unfortunate books, and one splendid memoir

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