On one of these May mornings, the school’s headmistress called me in and read aloud my teachers’ confidential appraisals. Madame Owens wrote an odd thing. Madame Owens was a sturdy, affectionate, and humorous woman who had lived through two world wars in Paris by eating rats. She had curly black hair, rouged cheeks, and long, sharp teeth. She swathed her enormous body in thin black fabrics; she sat at her desk with her tiny ankles crossed. She chatted with us; she reminisced.
Madame Owens’s kind word on my behalf made no sense. The headmistress read it to me in her office. The statement began, unforgettably, “Here, alas, is a child of the twentieth century.” The headmistress, Marion Hamilton, was a brilliant and strong woman whom I liked and respected; the school’s small-minded trustees would soon run her out of town on a rail. Her black hair flared from her high forehead. She looked up at me significantly, raising an eyebrow, and repeated it: “Here, alas, is a child of the twentieth century.”
I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t know what to do about it. You got a lot of individual attention at a private school.
My idea was to stay barely alive, pumping blood and exchanging gases just enough to sustain life—but certainly not enough so that anyone suspected me of sentience, certainly not enough so that I woke up and remembered anything—until the time came when I could go.
C’est elle, la petite morte, derrière les rosiers…
It is she, the little dead girl, behind the rose bushes…
the child left on the jetty washed out to sea,
the little farm child following the lane whose forehead touches the sky.
DURING CLASSES ALL MORNING, I drew. Drawing deliberately, as I had learned to do, yielded complex, fresh drawings: the inevitable backs of my friends’ heads; their ankles limp at rest over their winter brown oxfords; the way their white shirts’ shoulders emerged from their uniform jumpers. I roused myself to these efforts only once or twice a day. I drew Man Walking, too. During the other six or seven hours, when I wasn’t fiddling with poetry, I drew at random.
Drawing at random, paying no attention, infuriated me, yet I never stopped. For years as a child I drew faces on the back of my left hand, on the tops of my knees, in my green assignment book, my blue canvas three-ring binder. Later I drew rigid faces on the Latin textbook’s mazy printed page, down and across the spaces between lines and words. I drew stretchable cartoons on the wiggly and problematic plane of a book’s page edges. Those page edges—pressed slats and slits—could catch and hold your pen the way streetcar tracks caught and held your bike’s wheel; they threw you off your curve. But if you overcame this hazard, you could play at stretching and squeezing the Hogarthy face. I drew inside a textbook’s illustrations, usually on the bare sky or on the side of a building or cheek. When I was very young, I sometimes drew on my fingernails, and hated myself for it.
I drew at home, too. My lines were hesitant. “You make everything out of hair,” Amy complained. It was always faces I drew, faces and bodies, men and women, old and young, mostly women, and many babies. The babies grew as my sister Molly did; they learned to walk.
At Ellis, Molly was in the second grade. The little kids didn’t wear uniforms; she wore pretty dresses. I was a forward on the basketball team. Standing around in front of the school, I used to dribble Molly. She bounced hopping under my hand; we both thought it was mighty funny. During class, I drew her hopping in a smocked dress.
If I didn’t draw I couldn’t bear to listen in class; drawing siphoned off some restlessness. One English teacher, Miss McBride, let me sit in the back of the classroom and paint.
I paid no attention to the drawings. They were manneristic, obsessive, careless grotesques my hand gibbered out like drool. When I did notice them, they repelled me. Mostly these people were monstrous, elongated or compressed. Some were cross-hatched to invisibility, cross-hatched till the paper dissolved into wet lint on the desk. They were swollen of eyelid or lip, megalocephalic, haughty, moribund, manic, and mostly contemplative—lips shut, full-lidded eyes downcast, as serene as I was excited. They wore their ballpoint-pen hair every which way; they wore ill-fitting hats or melting eyeglasses. They wore diapers and ruffled pants, striped ties, brassieres, eye patches, pearls. Some were equipped with hands on which they rested their weary heads or which they waved, shockingly, up at me.
Very often I connected these unwittingly formed people by a pen line leading from the contour of a neck or foot to a drawing of the pen that drew the line and thence to my carefully drawn right hand holding the pen, and my arm and sleeve. I loved bending my thoughts down that pen line and up, that weird trail connecting and separating the conscious and unconscious: the wiggly face half-fashioned, and the sly, full-fashioned, and fashioning hand.
More than once, on family visits far away, or on the streets where I walked to school, or at Forbes Field, I saw a stranger whom I recognized. How well I knew that face, its bee-stung lips, its compressed forehead, its clumsy jaw! And I realized then, with a draining jolt of superstitious dread, that I was seeing in the flesh someone I had once drawn. Someone I had once drawn with a ballpoint pen inside a matchbook, or on an overcrowded page, a scribbled face inside the lines of a photographed woman’s skirt. Now here was that face perfectly molded and fleshed in, as private as the drawing and as sad, walking around on a competent body, apparently experienced here, and at home.
Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil. I could see the oaks turning brown on the edge of the hockey field, and see the scoured silver sky above shining a secret, true light into everything, into the black cars and red brick apartment buildings of Shadyside glimpsed beyond the trees. Pretty soon all twenty of us—our class—would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I’d been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other’s socks. I thought, unfairly, of the Polyphemus moth crawling down the school’s driveway. Now we’d go, too.
Back in my seat, I repeated the poem that began, “We grow to the sound of the wind playing his flutes in our hair.” The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking syllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world.
I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. “For the English department,” she told me. William Golding was then writer in residence; before him was Enid Starkie, who wrote the biography of Rimbaud. But, “To smooth off her rough edges,” she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly.
I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world’s surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?
I was in no position to comment. We had visited the school; it was beautiful. It was at the foot of Virginia’s Great Valley, where the Scotch-Irish had settled in the eighteenth century, following the Alleghenies south.
Epilogue
A DREAM CONSISTS OF LITTLE MORE than its setting, as anyone knows who tells a dream or hears a dream told:
We were squeezing up the stone street of an Old World village.
We were climbing down the gangway of an oceangoing ship, carrying a baby.
We broke through the woods on the crest of a ridge and saw water; we grounded our blunt raft on a charred point of land.
We were lying on boughs of a tree in an alley.
We were dancing in a darkened ballroom, and the curtains were blowing.
The setting of our urgent lives is an intricate maze whose blind
corridors we learn one by one—village street, ocean vessel, forested slope—without remembering how or where they connect in space.
You travel, settle, move on, stay put, go. You point your car down the riverside road to the blurred foot of the mountain. The mountain rolls back from the floodplain and hides its own height in its trees. You get out, stand on gravel, and cool your eyes watching the river move south. You lean on the car’s hot hood and look up at the old mountain, up the slope of its green western flank. It is September; the golden-rod is out, and the asters. The tattered hardwood leaves darken before they die. The mountain occupies most of the sky. You can see where the route ahead through the woods will cross a fire scar, will vanish behind a slide of shale, and perhaps reemerge there on that piny ridge now visible across the hanging valley—that ridge apparently inaccessible, but with a faint track that fingers its greenish spine. You don’t notice starting to walk; the sight of the trail has impelled you along it, as the sight of the earth moves the sun.
Before you the mountain’s body curves away backward like a gymnast; the mountain’s peak is somewhere south, rolled backward, too, and out of sight. Below you lies the pale and widening river; its far bank is forest now, and hills, and more blue hills behind them, hiding the yellow plain. Overhead and on the mountain’s side, clouds collect and part. The clouds soak the ridges; the wayside plants tap water on your legs.
Now: if here while you are walking, or there when you’ve attained the far ridge and can see the yellow plain and the river shining through it—if you notice unbidden that you are afoot on this particular mountain on this particular day in the company of these particular changing fragments of clouds,—if you pause in your daze to connect your own skull-locked and interior mumble with the skin of your senses and sense, and notice you are living,—then will you not conjure up in imagination a map or a globe and locate this low mountain ridge on it, and find on one western slope the dot which represents you walking here astonished?
You may then wonder where they have gone, those other dim dots that were you: you in the flesh swimming in a swift river, swinging a bat on the first pitch, opening a footlocker with a screwdriver, inking and painting clowns on celluloid, stepping out of a revolving door into the swift crowd on a sidewalk, being kissed and kissing till your brain grew smooth, stepping out of the cold woods into a warm field full of crows, or lying awake in bed aware of your legs and suddenly aware of all of it, that the ceiling above you was under the sky—in what country, what town?
You may wonder, that is, as I sometimes wonder privately, but it doesn’t matter. For it is not you or I that is important, neither what sort we might be nor how we came to be each where we are. What is important is anyone’s coming awake and discovering a place, finding in full orbit a spinning globe one can lean over, catch, and jump on. What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch—with an electric hiss and cry—this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
On your mountain slope now you must take on faith that those apparently discrete dots of you were contiguous: that little earnest dot, so easily amused; that alien, angry adolescent; and this woman with loosening skin on bony hands, hands now fifteen years older than your mother’s hands when you pinched their knuckle skin into mountain ridges on an end table. You must take on faith that those severed places cohered, too—the dozens of desks, bedrooms, kitchens, yards, landscapes—if only through the motion and shed molecules of the traveler. You take it on faith that the multiform and variously lighted latitudes and longitudes were part of one world, that you didn’t drop chopped from house to house, coast to coast, life to life, but in some once comprehensible way moved there, a city block at a time, a highway mile at a time, a degree of latitude and longitude at a time, carrying a fielder’s mitt and the Penguin Rimbaud for old time’s sake, and a sealed envelope, like a fetish, of untouchable stock certificates someone one hundred years ago gave your grandmother, and a comb. You take it on faith, for the connections are down now, the trail grown over, the highway moved; you can’t remember despite all your vowing and memorization, and the way back is lost.
Your very cells have been replaced, and so have most of your feelings—except for two, two that connect back as far as you can remember. One is the chilling sensation of lowering one foot into a hot bath. The other, which can and does occur at any time, never fails to occur when you lower one foot into a hot bath, and when you feel the chill spread inside your shoulders, shoot down your arms and rise to your lips, and when you remember having felt this sensation from always, from when your mother lifted you down toward the bath and you curled up your legs: it is the dizzying overreal sensation of noticing that you are here. You feel life wipe your face like a big brush.
You may read this in your summer bed while the stars roll westward over your roof as they always do, while the constellation Crazy Swan nosedives over your steaming roof and into the tilled prairie once again. You may read this in your winter chair while Orion vaults over your snowy roof and over the hard continent to dive behind a California wave. “O’Ryan,” Father called Orion, “that Irishman.” Any two points in time, however distant, meet through the points in between; any two points in our atmosphere touch through the air. So we meet.
I write this at a wide desk in a pine shed as I always do these recent years, in this life I pray will last, while the summer sun closes the sky to Orion and to all the other winter stars over my roof. The young oaks growing just outside my windows wave in the light, so that concentrating, lost in the past, I see the pale leaves wag and think as my blood leaps: Is someone coming?
Is it Mother coming for me, to carry me home? Could it be my own young, my own glorious Mother, coming across the grass for me, the morning light on her skin, to get me and bring me back? Back to where I last knew all I needed, the way to her two strong arms?
And I wake a little more and reason, No, it is the oak leaves in the sun, pale as a face. I am here now, with this my own dear family, up here at this high latitude, out here at the farthest exploratory tip of this my present bewildering age. And still I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANNIE DILLARD is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as well as An American Childhood, The Living, and Mornings Like This. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia. After living for five years in the Pacific Northwest, she returned to the East Coast, where she lives with her family.
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Praise
“Casts a golden glow on family life…Reading [Annie Dillard] can be as exciting as reading a thriller—though the only ‘plot’ lies in her unfolding of a child’s entry into consciousness…. Her book is a celebration of being alive.”
—New Woman
“This sunny memoir…reminds one of an Impressionist painting, her memories shimmer on the page.”
—Cyra McFadden, Los Angeles Times
“[Annie Dillard] is one of those people who seem to be more fully alive than most of us, more nearly wide-awake than human beings generally get to be.”
—Noel Perrin, New York Times
“As I read An American Childhood, I [had] the astonishing experience of seeing my neighborhood, my very childhood, unroll before my eyes in the pages of someone else’s book.”
—USA Today
“Annie Dillard has been twice-blessed—by literate and prosperous parents, who gave her unconditional love and freedom of mind and person, and by her own extraordinary gifts of observation and language. The reader of An American Childhood reaps the fruit of these blessings.”
—Hilma Wolitzer, Newsday
“A catalogue of loves lovingly told…This delighted exploration of the world of books is by far the most enjoyable thing in An American Childhood and, in its modest way, a classic love story.”
—Washington Post
“Marvelous.”
—Kansas City Star
“An American Childhood might be described as a metaphysical memoir—closer in spirit to Rousseau or St. Augustine than to most contemporary memoirists…. Her writing celebrates and revels in its surprising loops and leaps of insight the value of the scrupulously examined life.”
—Providence Journal
“Dillard is a natural stylist with a flair and keen love for words. We’ve seen it in her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Living by Fiction, and now this, her most luminous work…. An American Childhood’s penultimate chapter is literature on high beam. Her memories rush and bubble up, a kind of waterfall of language and feeling, in summation…. Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood is a glorious, exultant book. You must read it.”
—Columbus Dispatch
“A rare treat, an autobiography you’ll want to read more than once…When she…reawaken[s] your own joy, you can’t help but be grateful.”
—San Jose Mercury-News
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Encounters with Chinese Writers
Teaching a Stone to Talk
Living by Fiction
Holy the Firm
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Tickets for a Prayer Wheel
Copyright
AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD. Copyright © 1987 by Annie Dillard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.