Michael Collins | February 2017

 
Annie Dillard, Robert Richardson

EXCERPT

When she gives readings, Annie Dillard has the timing of a stand-up comedian. One minute, she is tossing off one- and two-liners that have the crowd in stitches. The next minute she opens one of her books and plunges the crowd into the deepest mysteries. On one occasion, after suddenly switching gears to a found poem consisting of the last words of dying people, she had to caution the audience: “don’t laugh!” On another occasion, a friend who came with me to a reading of Dillard’s from her epic novel The Living marveled at the her ability to suddenly assume “the voice of God.” She can also assume the voice of malignity: One character in The Living “liked the idea of kicking the struts away from a man one by one, so the false front fell. The spectacle of his decline would be a kind of moral display for the town.” The range of Dillard’s consciousness is always surprising.

Already in notebooks from her time as a student at Hollins College, one finds copious notes on a lecture about, say, philosopher Martin Buber surrounded by sketches of posing female forms worthy of a sharp-eyed fashion designer.

In For the Time Being, her personal favorite among her books, one encounters an account of birds mating in mid-air, and reads of Dillard’s sadness at the sight of microcephalic, “bird-headed” infants. One finds meticulous calculations of the millions murdered by tyrants. At one point, one even finds the joyous Dillard tempted to cry “Deus otiosus: do-nothing God,” before she reminds herself, “God is not on trial….” Dillard, in short, has a consciousness in which all the lights are on. One sees all sorts of unexpected things by the light of it. Dillard always knows where to look and how to ask the right question.

The following interview was conducted after Dillard was awarded a National Humanities Medal and as her new book The Abundance was going to press. Her husband, scholar and biographer Robert Richardson, joins in the exchange.

Michael Collins: Did the two of you know each other’s work before you met?

Robert Richardson: Yes, I’d read her books and was teaching them in American literature classes. A colleague of Annie’s at Wesleyan recommended my biography of Thoreau to her. She wrote me a nice letter about the book and that was how we met.

Collins: Her new book is called The Abundance. Is the title a reference to the abundance of the world that becomes available to those who are indeed dragged into wakefulness?

Richardson: That’s how I take it.

Annie Dillard: The epigraph is from the Qur’an Sura of “The Cow,” “They will ask you about what they should spend. Answer, The abundance.” (My translation. That is, I rendered the English a little better.)

Collins: When did you first read the Qur’an?

Dillard: In my twenties, fifty years ago.

Collins: How do you research books like For the Time Being?

Dillard: I’ve taken notes on my reading all my life. I read what interests me, write down what interests me, and all this stuff bangs around in my head.

Collins: Bob, you write, in a biographical sketch of Annie, that above all she was a reader from girlhood on. That puts me in mind of something you write about Emerson’s reading in your biography of him: “He read like a hawk sliding on the wind over a marsh, alert for what he could use….” Do you see similarities between Dillard’s reading habits and Emerson’s?

Richardson: Yes, and she’s kept notebooks and reading lists much the way Emerson did.

Collins: Of her prose style, you write, “sentences stay relentlessly in the senses, avoiding abstraction and ‘theory’ as one avoids cholera.” Is this because she, like Emerson, as you write in The Mind on Fire, views “nature as a language” and sees “a correspondence between nature and the human mind”—a correspondence that too much abstraction might break?

Richardson: Right on. Rock on.

Dillard: Heavens no. I spent most of my late teens and twenties thinking about poetry and reading poetry. Whatever everyone read, I avoided. How else have an original voice?

Translated poetry and prose frees your mind of English clichés. A writer might avoid what “everyone” is reading, watching, doing—to keep from blunting whatever it is that makes him or her unique. I’m seventy now, born in 1945. I’ve never read Kurt Vonnegut, Catch-22, Fear of Flying (though I like Erica Jong)—never seen Star Trek in any form, nor Saturday Night Live, nor Annie Hall.

Collins: Bob, you write that Annie repudiates all of The Writing Life except the last chapter. Why does she do that?

Richardson: It has become impossible to make a living as a writer and she doesn’t want to hold out false hopes that might wreck lives.

Collins: What are one or two of the things that have changed to make it harder to make it as a writer?

Dillard: To write and publish now is to work as labor for corporations.….

Collins: Or a university. I remember your saying, in a class I took with you at Wesleyan University, that you took the Wesleyan job because you were in a remote area and realized that if you died no one would know.... But I have always thought that being in a university job can seriously reduce a writer’s productivity. Wouldn’t it be better to find a way to write full time?

Dillard: Again your pro-urban bias—“remote area.” Remote from what? New York? Wesleyan was too close to New York!

Before Wesleyan, I took a teaching job at Western Washington State University, in Bellingham, Washington. I had never been there, met no one, knew no one there or in any nearby state. I had just left my then husband and the only world I’d ever known since I was eighteen—Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia. All my friends were there or had been there. I didn’t need money but I took the teaching job in Washington State—I’d been to Wyoming when I was fifteen—so that someone would notice if I didn’t show up. Otherwise I might as well have died.

As for writing full time: No use asking for the moon! I keep wondering where and when you got such wild ideas. I think it was in New York City.

For me, writing halftime is perfect, or as nearly perfect as life gets. You contribute to the world; you get to spend your affection on students; if the writing fails that day or that week you’re still not a total loss to humanity.

People with the money to write full time are so few and were so few that their numbers are statistically insignificant, smaller than a rounding error. In fact, it may still be true that more Americans have walked on the moon than have written full time. More people have been hit by lightning, and more people have been hit by lightning and lived!

About teaching, having any professorship anywhere is a lucky break that many don’t have. I know writers famous among writers who are teaching three part-time jobs at three different colleges. Writers go back to live with their mothers. The fiction writing professor who replaced me at Wesleyan has to teach twice as much as I did. Twice as much would have meant I wrote nothing, being as I had a baby at that time.

As the years have gone by, I’ve felt my priorities switch. Writing the books had its myriad satisfactions as the sentences came together and built, and teaching had its ten myriad satisfactions. I stayed at Wesleyan twenty-two years! And I got better and better at teaching. Students triggered my parental instincts. I was everybody’s mother.

Men can do it too. When Bob’s daughters went off to college, he was astounded at how young his students were!—and consequently treated them much more kindly. They really are babies. They are going through a whole lot.

Collins: You’ve given me a lot to chew on.

Dillard: Remember that for writers without a good teaching job, it can be a real struggle to both have a roof and eat.

And for writing itself you need faith in your accomplishing this insane task that the world does not in any way need. And you should have imagination sufficient to put yourself in other people’s places.… Actually, that’s impossible, because no one truly feels how many of us there are. That’s one reason I wrote For the Time Being.

Forty years ago when I was less than nobody—a woman? housewife? in the South?…it took a most eccentric agent, an old woman who bounced all day on her trampoline in Tudor City, to take a wild chance on my stuff.

Collins: All this makes me think again about The Writing Life. Does the repudiation of that book include the following very memorable advice: “Write as if you were dying.… At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What would you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”

Dillard: Of course, I don’t repudiate that.

Richardson: We get a little closer to it every day.

Collins: Bob, in Annie’s novel The Living, the character Beal Obenchain threatens to kill the protagonist Clare Fishburn in order, as Annie notes, “to watch how Fishburn lives under the threat of imminent death” and in order to become the god of Fishburn’s life. Is Obenchain the anti-Annie Dillard, the worst kind of assigner of meaning?

Richardson: Obenchain is as bad as they come.

Dillard: Obenchain is the antagonist.

Collins: But he is such a memorable antagonist, like the water bug that dissolves the frogs’ insides and sucks them out in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Now, The Living and The Maytrees are wonderful novels. But, Annie, you are best known as a nonfiction writer. In An American Childhood, you write, “The cultural assumption is that the novel is the proper home of significance and that nonfiction is mere journalism.” Did you, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and other creative nonfiction writers help win recognition of literary nonfiction as an art form that is the equal of the novel?

Dillard: No. The literature of the imagination (fiction and poetry) is supreme. In English, nonfiction has been an art for thousands of years…. And being “known for” something has no absolute importance….

Collins: In your book Living by Fiction, you write that one of fiction’s great strengths is that, “[it] is not entirely the prerogative of specialists. Those who make it their business to understand it are not yet priests. By contrast, the other contemporary arts are marvelously down to essences. They have rid themselves of all impure elements, including the audience.” There seems to be an implied critique of poetry here. Of the poetry of the 1970s and 1980s in particular you write, “often poets limit their take of the actual to wee private moments the significance of which they assert only on personal grounds. It is a shame that poetry has decayed to such sensory self-indulgence.”

Dillard: There’s no implied critique! I merely praised prose! That doesn’t mean criticizing poetry! Certainly always and everywhere literary readers find more dross than greatness. Yet if you read any literature, a tint colors your sensibility. Certainly what we see is by no means necessarily what we’ve got. Constrained by space, or bleary from reading submissions, poetry editors may choose small lyrics by big names. Readers for literature grants weary of applicants’ ambitions. We’re all only human.

But lyric poetry can handle epic narrative, metaphysics… anything. Robert Pinsky’s work takes on high hurdles.

About critique in general, I’m seventy years old! One doesn’t go around calling names, judging…. You judge when you’re young, to make choices for yourself alone.

Hurry up and age! Bitterness is fatal.

Collins: Speaking of bitterness, God is in the headlines a lot these days. People cut off other people’s heads in the name of God. Gays are harassed or, in some places, killed in the name of God. People set up theocracies where women can’t make a move that is not sanctioned by a man in the name of God.

Annie, you are someone who writes about a world that is in some ways saturated with the divine—someone who seems to accept an idea paraphrased in your book For the Time Being—that “‘God’ is the awareness of the infinite in each of us.” What can your work tell us about people who kill in God’s name: are they actually blind to the infinite? Have they allowed the infinite to be eclipsed? Might they learn something from the following remark in For the Time Being: “I have never read any theologian who claims that God is particularly interested in religion anyway”?

Dillard: “What can your work tell us about people who kill in God’s name?” Nothing at all.

Richardson: Tough questions. Good questions. And how come so many people who call themselves Christian can’t give anything, let alone everything, to the poor? It’s a fallen world.

Collins: In a 1983 letter to you that is included in a collection of his correspondence, Edward Abbey writes, “I understand and sympathize with your wish not to be labeled an environmentalist.… I have probably suffered much more much more than you from hasty pigeon-holing by reviewers and other literary crickets.”

Is this dislike of being pigeonholed one of the reasons why, after Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, you wrote two novels, two books of literary theorizing, a book of found poems, a meditation on disaster (Holy the Firm), an autobiography, and what for me is a kind of epic philosophical prose poem that I found in a bookstore in the philosophy section, For the Time Being?

Dillard: Ed Abbey wrote a wonderfully positive review of Teaching a Stone to Talk. He apparently read books, as any writer does. I didn’t know him.

Glad you liked For the Time Being. From the mail I get, writers—like you—favor For the Time Being, The Maytrees, and Teaching a Stone to Talk. Why the fuss about Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? Beats me. For the Time Being is a nonfiction narrative. It takes place mostly in the northern hemisphere.… It’s a decent book. Wish I’d written more books like it. A reasonably-sized book, it paints a big picture in unfamiliar events. These events show aspects of the actual world—a grotesque holy site, a red newborn, the rabbi flayed alive, the rabbi who dug clay, the bird-headed dwarves, “the thousands of wealth,” several great-hearted individuals, many dusty generations, the layer of wings in the highest firmament, a male and female expatriate in China whose eyes lock, and dated waves and clouds.

About pigeonholing question, no one writes to negate something negative.… Why didn’t I stick with that genre? People write what they write; no one knows why. Publishing culture has its own myths, and these affect the books we see and hear about.

We don’t write to escape pigeonholes! Writing is a huge undertaking, immense; it takes more than all you have when you begin. I doubt that any artist could get all that going just to work on his “image”! An idea for a book interests us. To which we add all sorts of things from our current thinking. After the book is over, we see we never dealt with this, or that, as we intended to. So another book may arise. In which also we leave unexamined some threads of our current thinking—and so on till we stop. I have at least one idea for a book going.

Richardson: Other people judge us by what we’ve done. We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing.

Collins: Annie, you told me in an email that your novel The Maytrees is a love story for grown ups. But not all the characters seem equally mature. The wife of the central couple in the book, a woman named Lou, seems more grown up: the model of love, devotion, and forgiveness after her husband, Toby Maytree, betrays his marriage vows. Is that just a dumb reading of the Toby-Lou relationship?

Dillard: Well, Toby totally loves her. He’s a fine man. We’re all only human. He made a nauseating mistake—he realizes almost at once—and honorably feels he has to live with it. What do I mean by honor? Taking responsibility for your own actions, I suppose, without excuses, let alone blaming something or someone outside yourself. Honor would also be releasing grudges. I think he’s as grown up as she is.

The Maytrees WAS going to be much more about Toby Maytree than about Lou. It was wildly out of control, and had grandchild and grandchild’s love life… There was a pet turtle named Yankee (after a friend, Bill Yankee). I had noticed before that while it is hard to start writing fiction, it is much harder to stop.

Collins: You seem to carefully refrain from direct, extended comment on the political events of our time. Yet there is passionate political commentary in your work. However, it tends to be passionate political commentary from the perspective of eternity: In For the Time Being, for instance, you write about smoking and hanging out a little, during a trip to Israel, with a Palestinian man. Later in the book, you write about conversing with a Palestinian merchant. But you do not discuss the ever red-hot political issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At the same time, you include the following commentary on the world in For the Time Being: “Paul writes to the Christians in Rome: ‘In all things God works for the good of those who love him.’ When was that? I missed it. In China, in Israel, in the Yemen, in the Ecuadoran Andes and the Amazon basin, in Greenland, Iceland, and Baffin Island, in Europe, on the shore of the Beaufort Sea inside the Arctic Circle, and in Costa Rica, in the Marquesas Islands and the Tuamotus, and in the United States, I have seen the rich sit secure on their thrones and send the hungry away empty.”

Do you for the most part avoid specific political commentary because you see injustice as eternal and inescapable, something that is woven into human nature? Or do you want to avoid the biases of the moment?

Dillard: I don’t write about politics. Others do…. Everyone has political opinions. Apparently I lost my head in what you quote above. Still, the passage seems a decent one to quote.

I’m a big Democrat. I donate to Democratic candidates and some causes. I do what I do; others do what they do. I donate to other causes.

Richardson: Once you see things under the aspect of eternity, really see without flinching, you don’t give a lot of time to the Trumps of the world.

Collins: Yes… Annie, you were a Catholic for a time. What drew you to Catholicism, and why do you now say you have no religion?

Dillard: Catholicism seemed a place for someone interested in certain ideas. Plus I worked in different soup kitchens for many years, work I loved. Everywhere the Christian churches, and especially the Catholic churches, were in the front lines helping people. There’s nothing to fear, let alone hate, about homeless people. Feeding the hungry is a perfect task for writers, who otherwise easily hate themselves for accomplishing nothing all week, month, season, year…

Ordinary intellectuals conform as other people do, and many seem to have deep misunderstandings and ignorance about religion. We can expect human institutions have human faults. It was fine being a Catholic at universities; college chaplains tend to be liberal. Ours at Wesleyan was. A simple, holy man who liked good food and television, he sure seemed far along in the religious life. Still, I wouldn’t deny I “have” a religion. I couldn’t say what. I understand my job to be writing sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books.

Collins: In Encounters with Chinese Writers, you tell stories that directly concern politics, and you report some political grumbling by Allen Ginsberg about a Disneyland film celebrating what you call “U.S. militarism,” but you emphasize in your introduction that “What interests me here, and elsewhere, is the possibility for a purified nonfiction narration—a kind of Chekhovian storytelling which might illuminate the actual world with a delicate light….” Among the great themes of your breakout book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is seeing. Is seeing more important than politics? Is it the essence of politics?

Dillard: I sure dislike that phrase “breakout book”! If a book happens to do well in sales, it’s sheer luck. I was most certainly not trying to. Seems like people have become greedier these last decades. Cult of money, of celebrity—of youth, of all things! Youth!

Collins: But is seeing more important than politics? Is it the essence of politics?

Richardson: More important than politics, yes: the essence of politic, only in a negative way.

Collins: Annie, what do you make of the way China has changed, and did you keep in touch with any of the writers discussed in Encounters?

Dillard: No.… I keep up with the changes in China only vaguely. There are hundreds of volcanoes I refrain from jumping into.

Collins: In September 2015, you traveled to the White House to accept National Humanities Medal from President Obama. What was that experience like?

Dillard: Among the other “medalists” were old friends, especially Larry McMurtry. I loved seeing him again. It got to 105 degrees that day in Washington. Later we all learned that Michelle Obama is frustrated because for seven years she’s not been allowed to open the windows of her own house. Her beauty and warmth are (from what I could see) always on—and magnificent. They split the writers among the National Endowments for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The judges tend to be celebrities themselves, including even movie stars. Jumpha Lahiri was there, stiff with stage fright; after it was over she loosened and was warm and natural.

Best was Stephen King. At a dull moment he wandered up to Bob in the hall and said, “Come here often?”

I love Obama and have contributed to his campaigns more than I thought possible (and lived). In person he is, if possible, even more warm and natural, quick to laugh. You all know him probably better than I do, because I don’t watch television.

Collins: The foreword to The Abundance is written by Geoff Dyer. How did that come about?

Dillard: Geoff Dyer is a friend of my friend Pico Iyer. They both came to the Key West Literary Seminar together one year. Pico speaks beautifully, and wholly off the cuff. Turned out Geoff had already read and liked my stuff. All three of us play Ping-Pong. Geoff and Pico have been playing at literary gigs!

Collins: Dyer’s introduction seems to have grown out of your involvement in a community of writers in Key West, where you have a home. Do you find that your richest friendships are with other writers?

Dillard: Yes; like members of other groups, we writers enjoy one another.

Collins: Is that because writers share a common language of, and common questions about, the writer’s craft? (Dante says that languages grew out of the different vocabularies of different professions after the fall of the Tower of Babel).

Dillard: I like writers because normal people know it’s insane to sit around ruining pieces of paper.                         

Michael Collins is the author of a book of poems, The Traveling Queen (Sheep Meadow Press 2013); an intellectual biography, Understanding Etheridge Knight (University of South Carolina Press 2012); an in-progress novel; and many essays.

excerpt from The Abundance

This Is the Life

What else is a vision or fact of time and the peoples it bears issuing from the mouth of the cosmos, from the mund mouth of eternity, in a wide and parti-colored utterance. In the complex weave of this utterance like fabric, in its infinite domestic interstices, the centuries and continents and classes dwell. Each people knows only its own squares in the weave, its wars and instruments and arts, and also perhaps the starry sky.

Okay, and then what? Say you manage to scale your own weft and see time’s breadth and the length of space. You see the way the fabric both passes among the stars and encloses them. You see in the weave nearby, and aslant farther off, the peoples variously scandalized or exalted in their squares. They work on their projects—they flake spear points, hoe, plant; they kill aurochs or one another; they prepare sacrifices—as we here and now work on our project. What, seeing this spread multiply infinitely in every direction, would you do differently? Would you change your project? To what? Whatever you do, it has likely brought delight to fewer people than either contract bridge or the Red Sox.

However hypnotized you and your people are, you will be just as dead in their war, our war. However dead you are, more people will come. However many more people come, your time and its passions, you yourself and your passions, weigh but equally in the  balance with those of any dead who pulled waterwheel poles by the Nile or Yellow Rivers, or painted their foreheads black, or starved in the wilderness, or wasted from dis­ ease, then or now. Our lives and our deaths surely count equally, or we must abandon one-man-one-vote, dismantle democracy, and assign seven billion people an importance-of-life ranking from one to seven billion.

From The Abundance Copyright 2016 by Annie Dillard.
Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.