NATURE GIRL | PAGE 1, 2
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Dillard didn't let the Pulitzer go to her head, speculating to a New York Times reporter that maybe her success was due to her long yellow hair and "beautiful legs." Dillard left her husband that year but kept his last name. She took her beautiful legs to Puget Sound in Washington to teach at a university "so there'd be someone who'd notice if I died in my sleep." If "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" was influenced by vampire films, Dillard's next book, the slim, 76-page "Holy the Firm" (1978), was influenced by the French horror cult flick "Eyes Without a Face," directed by Georges Franju. In exquisite, but horrifyingly blunt prose, Dillard's "Holy the Firm" meditated on the plight of a small girl whose face had been burned off by a gob of fiery airplane fuel. "Little Julie with her eyes naked and spherical baffled. Can you scream without lips? Yes. But do children in long pain scream?"

This horror story was dedicated to Gary Clevidence, Dillard's anthropology professor/lover. In 1980, the two married and moved east, where Dillard began teaching at Wesleyan University. They lived on Cape Cod from May through October, working in little writing huts out behind their house, named "Old Plum." During the next 12 years, the hut-bound Dillard produced a memoir, a novel and several books about writing. In 1982, a collection of miscellaneous nature/horror essays, "Teaching a Stone to Talk," was published. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wondered in the New York Times if Dillard dwelled on the horror in nature because she wanted to "spook" us.

That same year, Dillard trained her cold eye to Borges/Nabokov-style prose in "Living by Fiction." Most critics figured the book was pro-modernist, yet Dillard referred to it as a "horrible dull book that I never should have published" that said "good-bye to new-fashioned fiction." Six years later, Dillard's "love me, love my exploding typewriter" account of her profession, "The Writing Life," was published. The Nation suggested that Dillard was reduced to "navel-gazing" because the "epiphanies" no longer came.

Between those two unfortunate books, Dillard gave birth to her first daughter, Cody Rose, in 1984, which compelled the author to complete her splendid memoir, "An American Childhood," in 1987. Unlike the 1990s "I fucked my daddy" memoirists, Dillard deliberately did not "kiss and tell" about the boys she drag-raced with. "It's not ladylike. It's not proper," she told the Washington Post's deliciously named Charles Trueheart. Even though Dillard gave her family the right to edit the manuscript, her mother complained to People, "There's a bit of vomit in [the book]." Adding, "Annie loves us very dearly, but she doesn't particularly like us."

The year the book came out, a curious report came from Connecticut that Dillard's yellow Plymouth had turned 20 and that she held a "small ceremony" to note the occasion. Sometime after the ceremony, she separated from her husband, marrying writer Robert Richardson Jr. on Dec. 11, 1988. She met the fellow after sending him a mash note about his biography of Thoreau. Dillard insisted to writer Mary Cantwell that she and her husband did not sleep together before marriage -- instead they had "two lunches and three handshakes." Dillard never reported at what point during the lunches they shook.

By 1989, Harper and Row gracefully reprinted the dust jacket of "The Writing Life" to the alleged tune of $10,000 because Dillard objected to being described as a mere writer of "essays." She also brooded about authoring a "big book," writing in the New York Times Book Review "It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in 'Moby Dick.' So you might as well write 'Moby Dick.'"

In 1992, her "Moby Dick," "The Living," came out. "The most obvious thing to say about [this] splendid solid novel ... is that it could have more easily been called 'The Dead,'" started one review. In it, Dillard described humans burning, drowning and dying of disease with as much splendid minutiae-ridden prose as she had previously unleashed on murdered frogs in "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," writing, "Human bodies were thin-skinned parcels out of which the force of life leaks at a prick."

For the rest of the 1990s, Dillard treaded water artistically, publishing a volume of found poetry and editing her best book into a reader. Now, as the millennium looms, Dillard has returned to her favorite subjects: God, antiquity and the endless terror of nature. "For the Time Being" is a disjointed but brilliant book that reveals the Protestant-born Dillard's Hasidic nature. "I grew up certain I was Jewish," she once told Women's Wear Daily. She told People that she was a Hasidic Christian. In this new work, Dillard uses Jewish holy books to sum up God more succinctly than she ever has before. The Talmud reports that God, himself, prays. Yes. The omnipotent one, responsible both for perfect snowflakes and lobbing gobs of gasoline in children's faces, apparently prays: "May it be my will that my mercy overcome my anger."

Finally, for all Dillard's words about shrews and muskrats, at heart her work is an accounting of a Pittsburgh girl's search for God. In 1992, Dillard made an amazing admission to Mary Cantwell in the New York Times Magazine, saying that she spent the night "crying uncontrollably" over Cantwell's questions about the writer's faith. "Just because I'm religious doesn't mean I'm insane," Dillard insisted.

In America, if a woman has to publicly claim, "I'm not insane," it pretty much means the opposite. The great question in Dillard's case is whether it is the quest for God that made her so intense. Or whether in her arrogance she mistook her hereditarian drag-racing craziness as evidence of holy omnipotence. Neither answer diminishes the power of Dillard's many important books and, yes, essays.
SALON | March 9, 1999

David Bowman is a frequent contributor to Salon.

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