Annie Dillard’s Subject Was the Whole World

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her second novel, which she undertook “with the lousy but funny aim of getting my work off school curricula,” was yet unpublished.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.”