An American Childhood
By Annie Dillard
Harper & Row, 255 pages, $17.95
Think, for a moment, of writing about your own early years-say from age 5 to 15-and consider the problem of getting, first, a grip on all that material, and then organizing and writing about it coherently and in such a way that readers will hang on every word.
Think of your parents and grandparents; think of how you saw them as a child, how you see them as an adult. Think of the houses you`ve lived in, the topography and biology of the neighborhoods you haunted. Think of the other children and how you spent your summers and your winters; think of school and church and your collections of rocks or whatever. Think of your siblings. Think of your closest friends. Think of your childhood`s passions, obsessions, delusions, phobias. Then try to place yourself, as a child would, somewhere on the face of the Earth, somewhere in the march of time.
”An American Childhood” does all this so consumately with Annie Dillard`s `50s childhood in Pittsburgh that it more than takes the reader`s breath away. It consumes you as you consume it, so that, when you have put down this book, you`re a different person, one who has virtually experienced another childhood. You have been with this child on her summer visits to her grandparents` river house and on the boat trip she took (as an adolescent of the opposite sex did on the Mississippi) down the Ohio River with her dad. You have been inside her head as she watches her younger sister materialize. You have gotten a microscope on Christmas and discovered moving protozoa in a drop of water. You have gone to dancing class to learn, not just the fox trot, but a certain social ease. You also have discarded the ridiculous notion of religion in a fit of adolescent agnosticism.
Autobiography by definition would seem to require a singular subject. In
”An American Childhood,” we get both more and less: Those people who figure large in her early life assume almost mythic proportions, but the author wisely spares her reader the undifferentiated, and what could be trivial, aspects of her childhood. Somehow, we experience the sensation of a summer`s droning tedium without being bored for a second.
Admittedly, the childhood this book decribes is, by any standard, a secure one, to the point of tranquility. There are no enormous tragedies here. It`s a life that moves forward organically, like the protozoan; it`s also a life that is socially and economically safe and relatively untouched by disease and malevolent forces outside the child`s or her parents` control. One could say it`s the ideal childhood, couched in an almost universally sanguine view of events. In its pacing and the characters` development, the work resembles a long and happy allegorical novel. In terms of its linear development-what subject leads to what and how each in turn unfolds-”An American Childhood” operates like a series of interlocking prose poems.
In graceful, evocative prose, Dillard re-creates the child`s way of seeing, remembering and eventually assimilating experience, so that the book often feels effortless, a fortunate coming-together of style and subject. ”An American Childhood” may represent a pleasant publishing coincidence of time, subject and writer, but prose like this isn`t just luck.
Dillard follows a straightforward chronology in ”An American Childhood.” This is not to say the writing is simple or unadorned. Like the river she uses as a unifying metaphor, each mile forward brings with it several more of meandering among serendipitous associations. In one, Dillard does the impossible: explaining the family private jokes without deadening their infectious good humor. There are meditations on the family`s
linguistics, on the portents of the nearby branch library, on the day of a huge snow, on the character of solid Presbyterianism, on an insect collection, on the dancing class`s final exam.
In elaborations and playful, poetic digressions lie high stakes and heavy risks. Only a self-assured writer dare intentionally violate the commandment
”Thou shalt not digress.” Dillard does it, and manages to induce the reader not to get impatient. And to feel sad that it must come to an end.
”An American Childhood” is neither an adult`s paean to romanticized memories nor the opposite sort of retributive memoir most readers would wish the writer never committed to paper. Dillard has not flinched at capturing the private fears alongside the rapturous joy, the humble alongside the grand, the comforting rituals alongside the bedeviling puzzlements, the intellectual alongside the sensual. For an autobiographer to comprehend such a wealth of memory with such balance and understanding shows remarkable maturity, and for a writer to share it is an act of singular generosity.
