Backlisted - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

Authors Jay Griffiths and Geoff Dyer are our guests for a discussion of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Annie Dillard was only twenty-nine when her first prose book was published in 1974; it went onto win the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction the following year. To discuss this classic of observational nature writing and spiritual enquiry, we are joined by two writers making their Backlisted debuts: Jay Griffiths, the author of Wild: An Elemental Journey and Geoff Dyer, whose most recent book The Last Days of Roger Federer, featured on the Gormenghast episode. By coincidence, Andy has been reading Pages from the Goncourt Journals (NYRB Classics), a spicy, gossip-rich glimpse into 19th century French literary life which has a foreword by Geoff, while John immerses himself in the inner world of John Donne, through regular Backlisted guest Katherine Rundell’s widely acclaimed biography: Super Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Faber). Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 08:12 - Pages from the Goncourt Journals by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. 16:45 - Super Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell. 22:29 - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today you find us near the town of Roanoke in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It's a sunny day in January 1971 and we're heading north following a stream. Ahead of us, in the middle of the water, there is a tear-shaped island sitting on the dry grass at the far end a young woman is staring intently at the slow moving current as water striders skate across the surface and a frog sits half in and half out of the water. I'm John Mitchinson the publisher of Unbound the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read and I'm Andy Miller author of The Year of Reading Dangerously and today we're joined by two guests making their backlisted debuts. Please welcome Jay Griffiths and Geoff Dyer. Hello to you both. Welcome, welcome. Hi. Thanks for

coming. Jay Griffiths is the author of many books, including Wild, An Elemental Journey, Kith, The Riddle of the Childscape, Tristomania, Pip-Pip, A Sideways Look at Time, and Why Rebel? She won the Discover Award for the best first-time author in the USA, the inaugural Orion Award, and has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. She has held the Hay International Fellowship and has broadcast and written widely,

including for Radiohead and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her work has received widespread accolades, including from Gary Snyder, Barry Lopez, John Berger and KT Tunstall. She wrote the script for Almost Invisible Angels, a short film about insects scored by Sam Lee and voiced by Mark Rylance. And her most recent book is titled Nemesis, My Friend, Journeys Through the Turning Times, published by our friends at Little Tola. She claims to be, and perhaps is, a wild skater. Yes!

Please tell me what that is. I don't claim. I am! Skating, whenever the lakes freeze near me in Wales which used to be at some point in most winters and then it didn't freeze between

2011 was it and last year so there was 10 years with no skating but it is beyond question the single and last year, so there was 10 years with no skating. But it is beyond question the single most wonderful thing I have ever done. And obviously, you have to be pretty safe with it. You have to check the depth of the ice, which you can do with a really hot poker, if you like, a fire,

or you can do it with a hand drill. But anyway, and then friends of mine mine i've got my own skates friends of mine have got a huge bag full of secondhand and some antique skates and so generally as many of us as we can muster go down so i've skated in sunshine and sunrise and i've skated in moonlight and I've skated in starlight and it's the best. Have you ever been to or would you like to go to a frost fair? They sound completely brilliant. Yeah. But do I have to go to the 16th century to do that?

We can negotiate. Because the one's on the 10th. It's fine. We can talk. It's fine. Okay, well, I will substantiate your claim of being a wild skater. That's fine. So thank you.

I can teach you. I don't do wild anything. We don't know one another well, but that's not really in my... Andy is domesticated, I think it would be fair to say correct I can't even domestic skate so let's be absolutely clear about that let alone do it wildly my goodness you take a broom you take a broom that's the best advice I've ever been given for for beginner skaters okay because if you lean on another person then you fall over and they do but if you take a broom it's like it's

enough pressure so that you it supports you but it doesn't slip all right and you sweep it's great we're getting wild skating tips regular listeners regular listeners to this podcast will know i will never do that but thank you nonetheless uh I'm noting it down. Jeff Dyer. Thanks for coming, Jeff. Jeff Dyer's many books include the novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, But Beautiful, about jazz, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, and most recently, The Last Days of Roger Federer,

which John enthused about on our recent episode on Gormenghast. Geoff is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books have won numerous prizes and have been translated into 24 languages. He is a writer in residence at the University

of Southern California. Geoff, I had the great pleasure last year of watching the film Stalker for the first time. Oh, what took you so long? Fear. Fear of boredom. Fear of not understanding what was going on.

But I thought it was incredible. And I read your book the same day. I watched the film in the morning and then I read Zona in the afternoon. So the film was totally alive in my mind when I went straight into the book. And that was a really intense and valuable and incredibly enjoyable experience.

So thank you for helping me do that. Well, that was a well-spent day. And as a reward, you could have the follow-up. You could watch again a film, which I'm sure you saw when you were a boy, Where Eagles Dare. And then you can read my book about that film as well, called, of course,sword calling danny boy i still

regularly shout broadsword calling danny boy and will very much look forward to it's a common thing for men of a certain age isn't it it appears so yes did you did you was that one of those moments where you thought to yourself i'm the only person who ever says broadsword calling Danny Boy, and then you met more and more people saying it? Oh, no, whatever, whenever I do anything that I think is unique to me, whenever I have that feeling, that's when I feel very sure that I'm part of some sort of universal experience. Yes, good, good instinct, I think. The book we're here to discuss is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, first published by Harper Magazine Press in 1974.

It's a classic of nature writing that has exerted a huge influence over the genre. It tells the story of an unnamed narrator's year spent living by Tinker Creek in rural Virginia. Precise and unsentimental observation of the natural world is matched by a constant attempt to draw moral metaphysical and spiritual meaning from what's observed organized into 15 chapters spending four seasons pilgrim at tinker creek's commitment to awareness has often been compared to thoreau's walden annie dillard was only 28 when the book came out and it went on to win the pulitzer prize for non-fiction in 1975, selling over 37,000 copies in its first three months. And it's remained in print ever since. As well as being admired for its prose and appreciation of nature, it's also established

itself as a kind of religious text. The American sci-fi writer Ted Chiang said recently that the book gave him maybe the closest I'm likely to get to an understanding of a kind of religious ecstasy. But before we strap on our boots and light out for the bridge, Andy, what have you been reading this week? Thanks, John. I've been reading Robert Baldick's edit of Pages from the Goncourt Journals by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, currently published in this edition by NYRB. And this is a total coincidence

with an introduction from Jeff Dyer. And the reason I've been reading those is I'm working on a thing at the moment, a piece at the moment, which involves reading the six novels co-authored by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt between 1851 and 1869, including Sir Philomen Germany Lacerto,

which I've just finished reading, and Manette Salomon, which I read a couple of months ago. And I'll be saying more about that on future episodes of Backlisted. But having been reading the novels, I thought, well, it would be very interesting to read the journals because the journals that the two brothers kept, initially Jules de Goncourt, the younger brother, and then after he died, his older brother Edmund,

are a sort of repository of 19th century French literature, celebrity, illness, history. And just, Geoff, as well as I think you say in your foreword, a kind of the indication that when writers get together or talk about one another behind one another's backs, nothing has much changed. Yeah, it remains a very contemporary book, doesn't it? Basically, Edmund and Jules de Goncourt were fairly of the opinion

that they had invented most important things in 19th century literature. I found it hilarious, I must say. I did laugh a lot. Yeah, part of the fun of it is the amazing sort of eavesdropping on these giants of 19th century French literature. But there's a huge cast of characters, many of them famous in their day but now forgotten, and one of them significantly, i can't even remember his name

he's a great friend of theirs but he gets this great being his bonnet he becomes obsessed with dueling all he wants to do is just all he wants to do is do duels and there's just endless incidental things like that from these minor characters yes if you're a fan of the E-Day fix, this is the book for you. I'll just read three successive entries. Because, Geoff, what this book could have been called is Pages from the Goncal Journals Complaining About Zola. That's a big thing for these boys, isn't it? Oh, yeah.

Well, they so feel that they haven't had the acclaim that they uh they haven't had the um the uh the acclaim that they merit i think at one point they they claim that they were they were the ones to discover the importance of the nerves in uh in in in they were the first people to pay attention to that in literature that's disputed but yeah they feel very they feel consistently hard done by and that's that's kind of fun but then things take a very uh a very significantly darker turn when the brother dies and after his son but they've really you know although they're doing lots of bitching and moaning they're very seriously committed to an idea of literature and after the brother brother dies and the other brother takes over, there's a really moving bit where he says,

after his brother has died, he said, I now hate and despise literature because the idea is the brother was in some way consumed by his literary ambition. I must say, I've found reading their novels absolutely fascinating because they're much better than their British reputation might lead you to think, or rather their English-speaking

world reputation, where half of them have still never been translated. And also they are paint strippingly offensive in terms of the misogyny and anti-Semitism. artistic innovation and integrity while also giving health warnings about uh attitudes that are it i mean attitudes which were pretty outrageous even at the time i imagined anyway and let me just read you three successive entries from pages from the goncourt journals i felt these gave a very nice flavor of what you can what you'll read if you read them. From late 1876, Friday the 1st of September, 1876.

Flaubert told me that during the two months he had spent confined to his room, the heat had given him a kind of intoxicated urge to work and he had worked for 15 hours every day. He went to bed at four o'clock in the morning and was sometimes surprised to find himself back at his writing table at nine a grind interrupted only by a swim in the sen in the evening and the result of those 900 hours of work is a story 30 30 pages long. So there you go. The idiot Flaubert writing Un Coeur Sampler.

This sounds great. I've got to get Oh God, it's fantastic. I mean, if you've listened to these episodes over the years, listeners, I've chosen very deliberate, because we haven't done Flaubert, but we have done the next two authors. Friday the 3rd of October 1876.

Yesterday, I received a novel by Monsieur Huysman, L'Histoire d'une Fille, with a letter saying that the book had been seized by the censors. That was Huysman's author of Against Nature, of course, who had just published his first novel, Mat, in Belgium. In the evening, at the far end of the princess's drawing room, I talked for a good hour with the Barrister du Merc about my dispute with my honest solicitor. This persecution of a book similar to the one I am writing,

end note, similar to the one I am writing, and this conversation with a clean-shaven lawyer dressed all in black resulted in my dreaming last night that I was in prison. A prison with stone walls looking like a stage set of the Bastille. And the peculiar thing was this. I had been imprisoned simply for writing La Fille Elisa, which had not been published and which was no further advanced than it is now.

So I'm laughing. It's a terrible, writerly anxiety dream of the ages. My fury at this action on the part of the government may be imagined and it was exacerbated in my dream by the fact that i found myself in a big room in the company of colleagues with their heads shaven as if for the guillotine colleagues with bloodless hands who talked pretentiously monocle in one eye about aesthetics colleagues dressed in correct and sinister fashion like a baudelaire or my barrister dumerck it's never so it's never far from the surface i think the torment and finally speaking of which sunday 17th of de, 1876. It really is unwise to read what one is writing to one's literary friends.

I read out to Zola the passage describing the walk of my prostitute Elisa doing her beat. And now I find the same walk in his novel, if not entirely cribbed, most certainly inspired by my reading, that's in La Sonnoir. Oh, God. In another setting, he uses exactly the same effects. The darkness, the pitiful shadow she trails behind her. He even uses the phrase,

but listen to me, monsieur, a phrase used in the Saint-Honoré district, but not on the Chaussée-Clinicorps. Glorious, glorious stuff. As relevant today as it ever has been. It's available from the New York Review of Books, Classics, pages from the Goncourt Journals, Emmerdon, Jules de Gontour,

forward by Geoff Dyer. John Mitchinson, what have you been reading? forward by Jeff Dyer. John Mitchinson, what have you been reading? I've been reading a marvellous biography of John Donne, the metaphysical poet and turned, obviously, Anglican priest, Dean of St Paul's, by Catherine Rundell katherine rundell former

guest on the show um it's called super infinite the transformations of john dunn it's published by favor uh i think a couple of months ago and it's it's just marvelous it does everything you want i mean done it is interesting it's interesting because he wrote some of the greatest most complex surprising memorable uh metaphysical poetry but he also he also his other great late masterpiece his collected sermons so he's he's he's interesting and i realized i knew practically nothing about his life and it turns out his life is pretty interesting. And she tells that story with such energy and verve. It's obviously a huge amount of research. You get a strong sense of late Elizabethan,

early Jacobean London. He's in London at the same time, possibly met. We don't know whether he met Shakespeare, but certainly attended first performances of Shakespeare plays. He meets Johann Kepler, the great astronomer, on a visit to Denmark. He fights with the Earl of Essex in the Siege of Cadiz. He's on the fringes of the Essex, the famously failed Essex Rebellion. He gets imprisoned for marrying his wife when she's two years when she's young and her father

hasn't given her permission his brother dies it's it's it's she tells a story a tremendous clip but she's also very very good at illuminating the work through the life which is a kind of thing what you want for a literary biography um if you're interested in Dunn he repays through I think the lens of her really really I think it's beautifully written well researched but it isn't bogged down with the usual kind of

superstructure of footnotes it feels like in the nicest possible way like a romp I'll just read you a little bit give you a flavour of it. He wrote also, he wrote a book about suicide. He was slightly obsessed with self-slaughter.

So called Biathanatos. How then did he stay alive, this man whose pain urged his thoughts towards self-slaughter? His letters show the way. On the one hand, they are a laundry list of his agonies. He demanded of his friends a high tolerance of vomit talk. He complains of a stomach colic has kept me in a continual vomiting so that what I should have been able to do to dispatch this wind, but that an honest fever came and was my physic. Another time sick alongside his wife and it hath pleased God to add thus much to my affliction that my wife hath now confessed herself to be extremely sick. She hath held out thus long to assist me, but is now

overturned, and here we be in two beds or graves, so that God hath marked out a great many of us, but not taken none yet. Still, though, he attempts to joke, I have passed ten days without taking, i.e. eating, anything, so that I think no man can live more thriftily. Elsewhere, his uvula swells in his throat and he's rendered dumb, his eyes falter, he shudders with coughs, his teeth plague him. The latter was a common enough affliction, made worse by the most popular recipes to remove tooth stains, which included the powder from a burned rabbit's head

or an abrasion made from ground brick eggshells and myrrh the rich suffered it most having eaten the most sugar so much so that there was a brief fashion among the poor for coloring one's own teeth black in order to look glamorously prosperous anyway wow this is a letter of close friend i'm not alive because i've not had enough upon me to kill me but because it pleases god to pass me through many infirmities before he'd take me either by those particular remembrances to bring me to particular repentances or with them to give me hope of his particular mercies in heaven. All this mellows me for heaven and so ferments me in this world as I shall need no long concoction in the grave, but hasten to the resurrection. Ferment. To be alive is to stew in readiness.

Illness is a clarifying marinade through which he might forestall the pores of the grave and leap into eternity. They were heavy metal, Dunn's letters. There is little romance in them and a great deal of twisting and hammering at his pain to force it to take on the shape of some meaning. It is one more kind of making. It is a furious kind of focus, an instance of feverish, counterintuitive seeking for good, an insistence that it must show you the truth of mortality and allow you to see more clearly, to see the hopeless, transitory, pained soul

suffused in glories. It says a great deal about him, that he was the kind of man who demanded of pain that it shunt you closer to infinity. Beautiful. Yeah, it's great. It's like the Goncourt's as well. They loved being sickly.

That's one of the things that they felt gave them their competitive edge artistically. They had 10 children. A lot of the children died. The kind of lives... You do get that very strong sense of how similar and dissimilar the life of somebody in the late 16th century was to ours. It's a really, really good book. Really, really enjoyed it. And who's it published by?

It's published by Faber and Faber. And it's called Super Infinite, The Transformations of John Donne by Catherine Rondell. We'll be back in just a sec. Jay, it was your excellent idea that we read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which is now nearly 50 years old. It was published in 1974. Can you remember when you first read it? Yes, I can. I can absolutely remember.

And one of the reasons why I'm laughing is because it was so recently and I'm absolutely gutted. I am gutted that I didn't have this book in my life longer. Because you know the thing with books is like, you know, you read books and you curate your own soul. You layer up yourself in terms of the books that you've read. And so the earlier in your life that you've read certain books, the longer you have for their influence to be with you. And for that reason, I am absolutely gutted that I read this so recently. What happened was I'm part of a writers-only reading group

and it's based in Mid Wales, in Talgath near Hay. And so it's a whole bunch of writers who live broadly in Mid Wales and it's very specifically writer-only as a book group. So when we choose a book we really we don't just like have a glass of wine and say yeah really liked it or I don't know why you did that at the end what what we do is we absolutely take it apart we undo it we look at it we kind of like examine it and the thing about it is that when we have consensus we have occasionally had consensus that a book is absolutely like bow down untouchably brilliant and it makes me so happy because that

because this writers group i i have so much respect for all the people who are part of it and we all take our own craft really seriously. And so that feeling of like, you know, the world just got bigger. The kind of, you know, the spirit just rose. You know, everything is more important when there's that sense that it's not just that she's taken the world and sort of put it through this extraordinary mind. mind, but also that she's then found the words, the humour, the glee, the glory, the philosophy, the theodicy, if you want that as well, it's like how to justify the sense of divine even with a sense of evil. And then she's just made the whole thing sing and sing and sing so yeah that's how i came across it that's how that's how it's top i am that it was so recently that's how much i love it if this book were an lp uh it would be a joni mitchell wouldn't it? It's like written by... Very good.

It's like a young woman in her mid to late 20s is channeling all this late 60s, 70s energy into this non-generic form. I was totally... I'm really pleased. I'm really pleased that you liked it, Andy. It being... I mean, we talk about whether it's nature writing or not um whatever nature writing well like the hissing of summer lawns it it it takes a while for its spell to work but once you're once you're into

the side too it had me yeah jeff annie dillard when did you first encounter her work? Yeah, well, there was a bit of a delay. I first, she first entered my consciousness in that great period, I think, you know, in the late 70s, early 80s, that great sort of the first Picador era. So I associate her absolutely with those Picador books, such as Speedboat by Renata Adler, the Richard Brautigan books. You know, back then, Penguin Modern Classics were a guarantee of sort of quality. But Picador was a bit more sort of hippie-ish and sort of, yeah. And, you know, what else? There was also Gurdjieff, or or or just been rereading Rabbit is Rich Kerchief as Rabbit

Armstrong's son Nelson calls Gurdjieff. So that's what I encountered her as part of that kind of cosmology of kind of high quality, vaguely sort of hippie ish writing, but never, never bought the books. And then sometime later, I went after, this was about 10, 12 years ago, I think I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And then I really liked that and then embarked on this, you know, reading of pretty much everything by her

and experienced this full conversion to Annie Dillard. And I think it was about the time that in one of those Michael Ondaatje books, one of the characters quotes a line of Annie Dillard's. He says, that marvel Annie Dillard. So I thought that was nice. But then I read a review of that Ondaatje book by Brian Dillon, where he seized on that line and he says well what is she a cleaner which was uh I thought rather fantastic not of course there's anything wrong

with being a cleaner but uh I actually thought there was something really appropriate uh to Annie Dillard about on the one hand that Andache's uh exaltation of her and then brian dylan's undermining of that it's a it seems to me that's a very dillard like uh strategy that we get over and over again in in her writing i love the comparison there to broughtigan yeah i feel like it's coming from a similar slightly smoke drifting backwards late psychedelic place on one level john had you read dillard before yeah i i read her because when i was at harville we had on submission her book for the time being i remember two of the things in manuscript at Harville that made a huge impact on me.

One was reading The Emigrants by Sebald, and the other was reading this book by Annie Dillard, who at that point I'd never heard of. In the end, I think we didn't get to publish the book because it was knopf, and they got paid a lot more money by somebody else to do it. But that started me on a bit like Jeff. I wanted to read more by her.

And it was probably a year later that I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And, you know, in your sort of it's all one song theory, Andy, it was really good. Neil Young's theory. Yeah, it was Neil Young's theory. It was good to go back to remind myself because I think I have a sort of Dillard space in my brain

so many extraordinary anecdotes and stories and I can't remember which book they've come from. Going back to Tinker Creek this time yeah, it's an astonishing book it's an astonishing book We should say for listeners who aren't familiar with it,

does anyone want to say, like, you can have three sentences. I'm going to ask each of you. You've got three sentences, and I'll talk for a bit so you can be thinking. And because our guests are guests, to John Mitchinson, I will turn first to say in three lines, what is this book about? It's a year in the life of what we assume is a woman, possibly a woman called Annie Dillard. It's a series of, I suppose, a series of stories of observations of nature and reflections on those

observations of the natural world but keyed up i think to a sort of blakey and intensity at times and also kind of this is can i've got one? Also, strangely lighthearted and funny at the same time. I don't know. I think a couple of pages I'd be able to tell an Annie Dillard chunk of prose. That's my go. You had three sentences in a gazebo there. Well done. That was very good.

Jay, would you like to tell people what this book is in three lines? Of course I can't do that. No. It's like Fontaine saying, kind of, you know, what does it mean to dance as you do? And she said, if I could say it in words, why would I bother to go to the trouble of dancing it? You can't describe this in three lines we have to read it but i will also say in addition to what john said is that the the thing about this book for me it's an extraordinary exploration yes it could be the way that you know that that she sees

the light in one particular um a saga orange tree yes it could be the way that she watches kind of you know a giant water bug destroy a frog from the inside it's the details of this but it's also that she goes out to the moon she goes you know in because her curiosity is sacred and she will tell you that you know that kepler could was a it was sufficiently sensitive to feel the warmth of the moon. So she goes out to the enormities of outer space and also to a sense of spirit and the divine. So it's as tiny as an amoeba. There's one beautiful time where she's really stopping with a microscope and she gets down to kind of amoeba level and she says i think i will give myself over to its idea of evening and she can do that and then she can write about the kind of you know

the infinities of of of the the universe and however many billions of suns exploding at however many per hour and the thing about it is, you know, that unlike almost every book I know, what she doesn't do is stick to the now rather, in a sense, rather tedious only human scale. Her scales are amoeba to the universe, to God and the impossible. and also she tells us the the facts of some of it and the facts of scale like she says the average size of all living animals including humans the average size is almost that of a house fly brilliant it's completely brilliant well you've uh failed to meet my challenge but you have but you have given a brilliant account brilliant brilliant account of the book jeff would you like is there anything you would like to add well i i completely agree with what jay was saying and uh this will go for more than three sentences

but i think part of the wonder of this book and and it's a book about wonder, is the way that I think there's a tendency, and it was Nicholson Baker who first articulated this for me, that for successful nonfiction books to be synopsizable, that is to say they can be reduced to their thesis, or in the case of certain highly successful books you don't have to read them at all they can be reduced to their title so for example the shock doctrine or the most perfect example of all blink and of course malcolm gladwell is not the master of this the key thing it seems to me if you had to summarize if you had to provide a synopsis of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek it would be exactly the length of the book itself so it has to be experienced in the same way as a novel does yeah but because you've asked me then um uh I'll say what it is it's um I mean she I think Annie Dillard's own description of it as a Thoreau she says she's offering a meteorological journal of the mind but that mention of Thoreau is so important because when she was a graduate

student and when this book was sort of germinating I think in that vast consciousness of hers she spent a great deal of time asking herself what was Walden about and she really anguished over this for a long time of course she she thinks deeply about things and then she decided that ultimately it was uh that Walden was a book about a pond um so uh I following on from that from that I think we can say it's a book about Tinker Creek. Your job in the marketing department is assured. Assured in the sense that my p45 is in the post. So Annie Dillard was as we've said relatively young when this book was published when she wrote it when it was published and I imagine much to relatively young when this book was published, when she wrote it, when it was published.

And I imagine, much to several people's surprise, it was a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize. And here's a clip of the author discussing the effect that all this had on her at the time. You have to understand, I was just a housewife in Virginia who wrote poetry. And then I was a housewife who wrote a book of prose. I thought I was addressing the book to maybe nine monks.

And in fact, a great many monks did read it. But that's because a great many other people read it, a great many monks did read it. But that's because a great many other people read it, and that was in turn because on the Pulitzer Prize Committee that year, there was a South African named John Barkham with an H. And he, as a boy in South Africa,

had read Lawrence Vanderpost, who is just a beautiful writer. I've read him too. And he liked the book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek because it reminded him of Lawrence Vanderpost. That's because all nature writers are pretty much alike. So he lobbied to give it the Pulitzer Prize. It was just a fluke.

It could have been anybody, anybody at all. Oh, I love her. I love her. Oh, she's great. She's really sassy, isn't she? I mean, it's not what I was expecting when I heard her interview. She's kind of really, she's very, really amazing sense of humour, I think. She raises a thing there which is really interesting.

She talks about, she describes herself as a housewife. There's that essay by Diana Saverin in The Atlantic from a few years ago where she reframes

the room at Tinker Creek. Is it really a suburban tale? Is it not a wild tale? Is it a wish fulfilment from someone who's looking out the backyard at night, which I thought was fascinating. Jay, have you got an extract you could share with us? I surely have. It's a passage fairly early on in the book. and she is writing in one of her first total breakout pieces into the bigness

and the meaning of it all. She says, our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or if it comes to that, choir the proper praise. At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant gun down to the water. It was an extravagant gesture, but we can't do less if the landscape reveals one certainty. It is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal

exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down eons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacy with ever fresh vigour. Jay, I love the rhythm you bring to that. And you really bring out the rhythm of the prose, you know, her status as a poet and her status as a prose writer, though they are different disciplines. You can feel them both flowing together, can't you? She just completely unashamedly loves language. She's just, you know, it's like she's drinking it, every word, you know, every word. She's tasting it.

She's using it. She's loving it. She's rubbing words up against each other to see what happens. And she is also, in her prose, mirroring that sense of the extravagance, the profligacy, the abundance, the richness of it all. The rhythm there is beautiful, but the book is really interesting, isn't it? As well as being this sort of broad seasonal structure, she kind of mines these ideas, the things being fixed, the idea of things being present. You feel like she's inventing a genre here. A lot of nature writing aspires to the condition of Annie Dillard,

but very, very, very few books, in my view, get anywhere close. Because I think you're right, there's something in her, the fact that she's unafraid. She just will push an idea as far as she can take it. It's also because, you know, because one of the problems with a lot of so-called nature writing is that it's done very one dimensionally. It's observed. It might be oral as well. It might be tactile as well. sense of actually daring to and having the capacity to make meaning to find meaning to make meaning and to give it to the reader in a way that doesn't sound like um a sort of you know a kind of slightly childish prayer or something like that. But because she uses every part of herself and every part of the human mind,

from the absurd to the erudite to the witty to the song of praise. It felt to me not like an ur-text of nature writing but a piece of nature writing that had yet to be written. That's interesting. That nature writing aspires, will eventually evolve to be as good as this book

that was written in the first place. That's how I felt about it. That the relative pedestrianism of the genre at the moment could dream of being as opening its third eye in the way that this particular book does. That's just one guy's opinion. Geoff, is this nature writing? Geoff, is this nature writing? Well, yeah, and to go back to, yeah, it's nature writing, but to go back to what Jay was saying, I think it's right.

The actual experiences that she's putting on the page are often really quite trivial things. They're not like, for example, her most famous essay when she's describing a solar eclipse, which, of course, is a remarkable thing. These are often really quite sort of minor events. They're not and it's not a work of great exploration, such as you get in Thesiger or whatever. So, yeah, it's nature writing as long as we put the emphasis on writing. And we're having a real literary experience here. I didn't feel after reading it the way I felt after reading sort of Jean Baudrillard's book America, where I felt I've got to go to Death Valley because of the way he writes about it. I had no urge to go to, you know, this place she was writing about.

I just had a great urge to read much more Annie know dilardian theme of quick in the sense of the quick and the dead this is a book about being fully alive and living each day i think it's something she gets from emerson living each day as as a. But the gift to us, crucially, is in the writing, I think, more than in the experiences themselves. I guess I would also want to slightly, okay, so I said it's nature writing, but then I think in terms of the tradition that it's part of, I thought it was really great, John, that you, you know, she seems such an American writer in some ways, and that other book of hers is called An American Childhood, but you rather beat me to the punch when you invoke good old Albion in the

shape of William Blake, because it seems to me that, yeah, she's part of that kind of Because it seems to me that, yeah, she's part of that kind of a visionary tradition. And in the same way that with Blake, you know, he insisted that his visions were real, that he could see angels and all this kind of stuff. There's that famous essay, another famous essay of hers in Teaching a Stone to Talk, when she says, you know, I'm not talking about meta, I'm not using metaphors here or anything. I'm giving a reliable account like a witness in a court of law. She says, I'll insist till my dying day that I saw an angel in the field. So it's this idea of the kind of the visionary made literal is so important as well. And the same thing, I think you can't help but be reminded ofake and the angels sitting in the tree in peckham rye that she has sort of visions out of very mundane ordinary

experiences she's looking at a cedar tree and she sees the chloroplasts flowing at the same time she said well i actually did see them flowing when i used my microscope. It's sort of a suburban scene. It's not a kind of it's not a sort of Ansel Adams kind of the majesty of nature. She's just having she's just having an extraordinary experience. And as you say, the most extraordinary thing is that she's able to recreate that in the mind of the reader with the precision and beauty of the language that she uses. Yeah, and she talks about the way that it only won the Pulitzer thanks to that one guy. But I think, I mean, obviously, the Pulitzer is almost a guarantee of a book having a great success. But I think it's worth saying something about the larger structure of feeling that it tapped into. This was, you know, the early 70s. So I think there are two things going on. On the one hand, in the 60s, and it continued into the 70s, there was this sort of back to the earth movement and lots of this kind of thing of getting away

from the city and people were setting up these ideal communities. It seems to me that she's not a communitarian at all, as Eudora Welty famously said in her review in the New York Times, she's the only person in this book, you know, she'll maybe, she'll set eyes. So it's not, it's not a social book at all. But I think she, the book appealed to that sort of return to the earth thing. The other thing that it appealed to and tapped into, which is very compatible with her as a sort of solitary explorer, is, of course, that kind of thing of the psychedelic movement, that there was this kind of sense of LSD could open up this world. Now, Dilla does claim that she was sort of so crazy,

she never, such a sort of instinctive visionary. She never needed to to take drugs. But I think it's quite interesting at one moment that she says that she sees the world as Adam saw it before things were named. And at that moment, she's actually consciously or unconsciously repeating exactly what Huxley famously said LSD said which is that you know under the influence of LSD or mescaline we see the world as it was on the first day of creation before we had to have all these filters in in order for us to function effectively as opposed to being overwhelmed by just the wonder of creation. And what this book does is knock out all those every day filters and give us in our armchairs, this kind of sense of the splendor of newly created nature or alternatively,

the splendor of people that she talks about in the book of having their cataracts removed and able being able to to see and barely make sense of those wonders for the first time i was very surprised um jeff in keeping with what you you were just saying about the kind of psychedelic nature of it and we mentioned blake as well i don't know what i thought this book was going to be, but I was quite surprised with about 50 pages. I was thinking, wow, I wouldn't have bought this book in foils. I would have bought this in compendium in Camden High Street. It's far more countercultural than I was anticipating. Jay, is that an element that is resonant for you or did it feel much more current or timeless rather than being tied to a historical moment?

Oh, that's a good question because it literally didn't occur to me to tie it or to see it as tied to a historical moment. What she's talking about are three kind of perennial things, the green stuff, the beauty, the hideousness, the fecundity, because she doesn't shy at all of things that are gruesome, disgusting, kind of like really, really, really icky. She does things that a lot of writers

wouldn't want to admit to of kind of like you know chucking things that animals trying to scare things you know trying to get a rise out of out of out of stuff it's not just that you know that she's not um she's not good in the sense of she's not well behaved and I love that it's almost like that that sort of Adamic gaze is actually kind of somebody saying oh my god I have just fully come alive to what it feels like to be in possession of the human brain and to be in possession of the human brain in a landscape of infinite curiosity and extraordinariness and wonder, and in a world which is also full of books and ideas that will take you further every which way you want to go. If you want to go into etymology, it'll take you there. If you want to go into entomology, it'll take you there.

If you want to go into philosophy, it'll take you there if you want to go into entomology it'll take you there if you want to go into philosophy it'll take you there so she's she's drunk with the possession of not Tinker Creek but of the of Tinker brain Tinker mind it's that wonderful combination of seeing every everything afresh but then you know she brings this vast uh sort of library that she's internalized into play so can offer you all the latest scientific explanations about this and that the book was written she wrote it on cards to begin with the 1300 kind of note cards and she you know she's she has a huge library of books i mean that's one of the things i i think i love about it is that she she's a she's a scientist and a poet you know she wants

to know i think this is a famous story she wants to know what what makes fireflies glow she's she's she's telling off another writer for not actually going and finding out what what are the two chemicals that that fused it that make it glow and you feel yes that's it you feel that with her all the time that she's it's it's it's somehow she's she's able to bring a sort of poet sensibility to scientific inquiry it's it's amazing yeah that's yeah it's interesting i enjoyed, Johnny, the sort of almost Herzogian relish in the cruelty of nature and the brutality of nature. It's a horror book, isn't it? Yeah.

This is a horror text. Some physical stuff in here is Cronenberg-like in its body horror. No, it's not. It's not. I absolutely reject that. What it is, is reality. And the thing about it is that, is that because unlike most people who would write about these things, is that she doesn't smear Vaseline all over her own eyes and say, oh, look, beautiful sunset.

Oh, beautiful. What she does is she says, this eats that. Yeah, she goes, this eats that. And worse than that, this parasitises that. This explodes that from the inside. This happens. And it's not that it's horror. It's that it's true. And it's as true as the beauty is true. And it's as true as the sublime is true.

It's certainly not as horrible as J.A. Baker's The Peregrine which is uh you know that's a real god I mean that's uh that's just slaughter all all around but I think what I mean once again I'm I mean agreeing with uh with J.A. that there's none of this uh it's devoid of all the things that I dislike about nature writing there's it seems to me i mean she's a very religious writer that's something i think we'll discuss i mean when she talks about the i think she's part of that tradition of the literature of illumination that she that she mentions so a religious writer but it seems to me, you know, pretty much without reverence. She's also devoid of that awful quality that I can't bear, earnestness, which in brackets, Nietzsche correctly said, was always the sign of a slow mind. part of this is and it's something that we've all agreed on, she's very very funny isn't she, always

and it seems to me what we get here, it's the kind of quite often it's the intoxicated comedy of rapture and I love the way that she's so ready to sort of undermine some of her own most revelatory experiences.

I'll just read this brief paragraph, I think, Jeff, which is exactly, demonstrates what you were talking about there. She writes about halfway through Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I have often noticed that these things which obsess me neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild glittering eye and say, Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth

there are 228 separate muscles. The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter. I mean to change his life. I seem to possess an organ that others lack, a sort of trivia machine. I mean, that's so playful, but yet earnest at the same time, but not in the Nietzschean slow way, as you say, quick and nimble. Yes, I mean, I guess we don't want to get into a thing where we all tell our favourite Annie Dillard jokes, but I think there's just one little section that, well, it's not even a section, it's just a sentence that i'll read

and this the funny thing about this book i find is that i've read it multiple times but i don't think i've ever read it all the way through um i'm always sort of skipping bits and as a result of that i'm always coming back to it afresh so here is just a I think she's talking about her goldfish at this point and then she mentions Saint-Exupéry and then we get this Eskimo sled dogs feed all summer on famished salmon flung to them from creeks I've often wondered if those dogs feel a wistful downhill drift in the fall or an upstream yank, an urge to leap ladders in the spring. What a great, great idea. The idea that these dogs have eaten so much salmon that somehow they absorb the instincts of the salmon. And that's something that we get a lot. She has her own sort of crazy logic. And in Teaching a Stone to Talk, there's this essay about the polar explorers. And she's struck by the kind of rather grim, unromantic style of the great polar explorers.

explorers and she sees this as a kind of almost kind of it's thing they've all got in common and it's I guess it's it's embodied mostly mostly by Shackleton and Amundsen anyway so she says this is the sort of thing that unites all the polar explorers and then she writes this one wonders after reading a great many such first-hand accounts, if polar explorers were not somehow chosen for the empty and solemn splendour of their prose styles, or even if some eminent Victorians, examining their own prose styles, realised, perhaps dismayed, that from the look of it,

they would have to go in for polar exploration. that from the look of it, they would have to go in for polar exploration. What a great asker of questions she is. She's always raising these questions, and then she'll offer some kind of explanation. But typically, that explanation will in turn give way to a vaster or more trivial question. When you encountered Pilgrim at Tinker Creek were there other writers that you felt wow this is like this but but so different or so similar do you know I see a great affinity between her and D.H. Lawrence. There is that kind of similar responsiveness to the natural world

and that instinctive movement to go from sensation to idea, or if you like, to go from the physical to the metaphysical. There's a Laurentian uninhibitedness and also that sort of religious sense. And so it came as a great delight to me when I was rereading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek today. And there's this wonderful, such an echo of Lawrence where she goes for a walk one day and she bumps into a snake. And there it is that, you know, she's by bumping into the snake, of course, she's also bumping into Lawrence, who in his white pyjamas goes down to the, you know, and he's living in Sicily and sees a snake at the water trough. So Lawrence is the person I feel is closest in many ways to her and had a similar indifference after a certain point to exactly what form he was writing in. Geoff, I completely do agree with you about D.H. Lawrence. I think that's excellent because I wouldn't have put that together.

Not just a willingness, but a welcoming of one's body as well as one's mind. I mean, and this is where she's very different from Lawrence, is that Lawrence just kind of went, ooh, that means sex. And she kind of like basically means oh no this is elbows this is elbows and eyelids and you know and probably everything except the bits um but i think that that you know that that in a way that is mollo ponti said i think that with a great piece of art you don't so much see the piece of art and see according to that work of art and i think that's what she's done here is that she's she's given us the absolute brilliance of seeing according to annie dillard and not not

as an opinion but as a mindscape as an entire galaxy in her mind. And she's doing us all a massive favor by kind of saying, you know, you two have got a brain and books. In the world's religions, there is always room for people who have experiences. And one of them is that the veils of illusion are whipped away and you see a different world. I have seen, actually, the chloroplasts streaming in leaves that are on a tree. I've seen it under the microscope, but actually to look at a tree and see something strange about the leaves.

That's the kind of the religious point as well, the religious visions which we touched on earlier. She's quite disparaging about Tinker Creek. I think even in that interview she says, oh, I kind of threw a lot of stuff up into the air and didn't really, didn't get anywhere with it. And she said the book that all my friends all my writer friends really like is for the time being i think i really nailed it in

that book what i what i really what being uh this idea of wanting to understand about being in the world what we're here for she said it's a young person's book. I mean, you've mentioned, I think, Jay, the youthful energy. But does it work, I suppose, ultimately? Obviously, we all love the book, but does it achieve what it sets out to do? Oh, God, yeah. I think so. I absolutely think so. And also because when she's exploring things, I mean, she's exploring things for which there is no final word and there shouldn't be.

But it's that, you know, it's the journey, not the destination. And so, you know, one of the things that we haven't mentioned that she's talking about in this is where she's talking about time and the sense of being in the present and um and how at one point she completely loses self-consciousness when she's stroking a puppy and that actually took her into the present moment and then she says in a way it was like i drank the kool-aid she says i stroked the puppy i don't know why she would be disparaging about this book and it might be a you know feigned modesty perhaps. I mean writers tend to like their last book don't they I mean as a rule. Yeah I think as we've been saying it's a young person's book but in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek I mean she is just on fire throughout isn't she and um I guess I mean uh one thing you could say that you yeah you'd have to say that you don't I mean

Eudora Welty says there are no other people in in this book she also says in that review there are times when I've got no idea what she's going on about. And I guess we could add a third thing, even though it's sort of irrelevant. But there really is a lack of narrative. And I know that as a reader, I'm aware of how much I have a hunger for narrative and how quite often in nature books that hunger for narrative is satisfied by the way that there's a journey, a physical journey. And almost by definition, this book is the opposite of that. She's not setting off to Canterbury on her pilgrimage. She's just describing where she is. What did you spend? Spend it all.

That's what writing is about. Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor. Don't try to keep anything for yourself because it'll turn to ashes. If you spend it, it will fill up from behind, as it were, like a well. from behind as it were like a well empty it you'll be okay it's just such great advice isn't it such brilliant writing i find that incredibly moving i have to say you'll be okay what a what a beautiful message is it incredibly moving partly because um uh annie dillard followed her own advice and has been actually pretty silent as a writer for quite a long time. I wonder if we might even say that that's a sort of contractual condition of this visionary writer.

You're probably going to burn out more quickly than if you're writing trollop-like sagas. Jay? She writes about that spend it spend it kind of thing in the writing life and i think it's an it's an incredibly acute piece of writer psychology which is that when you get to a bit where you kind of go oh oh no this is precious and i'm keeping it for there this is where that goes is it's an attitude which feels like care but it can perhaps end up being meanness

and what she's talking about is um not carelessness but generosity generosity. Oh, yeah. And so I think that kind of sense that it's a generosity with her students, with her books, with her readers. What she's talking about is generosity, but it's also trust. It's like, you know, trust yourself that if you let it flow from you, it will also flow into you. And in that sense, I think that she's exhibiting something that i think is incredibly important about the writer's role in general which is to be translucent in so far as possible to the world so that you're not saying to your reader come here come here come here look at me what you're doing is you're saying to the reader

come here you use everything about yourself you say come here come here come here really honestly come here come here look at that and the writer is translucent and that's the flow of the water that comes through i would like to offer a call back to regular listeners of this podcast to the start of this year i'm not even going to tell uh p other you can all go back and find it for yourselves but but I'm going to say these lines again. Anything you do, let it come from you, then it will be new. A very similar message. And as the song of the mockingbird leads us out of the woods, it's time for us to leave Tinker Creek.

Huge thanks to Jay and Jeff for guiding us through the undergrowth, to Tess Davidson for making our field recording sound so polished, and to Unbound for letting us through the undergrowth, to Tess Davidson for making our field recordings sound so polished, and to Unbound for letting us pat the puppy. You can download all 168 previous episodes, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, backlisted.fm, and we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter or Facebook, and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too. You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon if you contact us on Twitter or Facebook, and now in sound and pictures on Instagram too.

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This has been absolutely magical as far as I'm concerned. Thank you. Brilliant discussion. Totally fascinating. That book is in print, everybody, around the world. It's easy to get hold of. If this isn't going to turn you on to Annie Dillard, I don't think anything will.

But, I mean, you've got such a treating story, you've never read her. It's a truly magical book, I think. We can't do more, and we'll see you in a fortnight. Thanks very much, everyone. Bye. Thank you all. Bye, bye, bye. Bye.

Bye. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.