April 1992
When the West was new:
Annie Dillard's "The Living"
Interview by Peggy Langstaff
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard has been called a latter-day Thoreau, a mystic, a naturalist and a superior stylist of a difficult form of non-fiction, the familiar essay. Lauded for her debut work, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," which appeared in the mid '70s and which is still considered her masterpiece, Dillard has tried her skills at a variety of forms -- verse, criticism, and memoir among them -- receiving rave reviews nearly every time out.
This month Dillard's first effort at yet another genre, the novel, is being published. The Living (HarperCollins, $22.50) is really quite a departure from her previous work. The publisher has ordered a major first printing, unusual for a work by an author who refuses to promote her works on TV and in other media.
Dillard admits that at this point in her life she had grown exceedingly tired of "the sound of my own voice," and wanted to try something entirely new. I spoke with Annie Dillard recently by phone at her home in Middletown, Conn., to hear what she had to say about this new chapter in her writing life.
PL: Tell us a little about the novel in general. What's it about? How would you describe it?
AD: The Living is a novel about the pioneer generation in Puget Sound in the 19th century. It takes place from 1855 to 1893 and concerns three men, the opening up of the Pacific Northwest, the settlement of that enormous forest, the distinctiveness of the region, the splendid landscape and the brave people who went out there.
PL: How accurate a portrayal is it of the times? Did you do a lot of research?
AD: I lived out there for five years. I spent part of that time on an island that had no amenities whatsoever. Not only did it have no electricity, but no telephone link with the mainland, no stores, no paved roads, no anything. It was very much a 19th-century life. We drew our water and heated it and so forth. And I also lived in town on Bellingham Bay in a restored old house that was built in the 1890s, and I became very interested in the history of the region which is sort of American history writ small.
The book tells the whole history of the region accurately. I did an enormous amount of research, all terrifically fun. It took three years altogether to write and I spent 16 months in just pure research. I decided early on to write it as if it were a 19th-century novel, as if Thomas Hardy wrote it. So it's a completely old-fashioned novel, and the language is old-fashioned.
I used a contemporary Webster's, an Oxford English Dictionary which gives the dates of first usage, and an enormous dictionary of American slang in two volumes. At the beginning I would read only 19th-century books so that I would be sure not to use any anachronistic language. After a while I got a feel for it.
PL: What are some of the themes you cover? Tell us a bit about the characters, too.
AD: There are many, many characters in the book, and their lives all change in different ways. A lot of it is quite dark. The region itself is full of contrasts, the dark forest and the light water, and there is quite a bit of violence and murder in the book.
Economics figure prominently. Essentially the book addresses our problems today, basically what to do if America is not number one. The Pacific Northwest pioneers had huge optimism: "Here, we're going to be the great new coast, we're going to be rich with the Asia trade." Then everything would collapse and the people were back again drinking their cow's milk and having no income at all. One of the main things the region had to deal with was intermittent economic collapse. But my main concern is with the settlers as they go in one generation from the absolute wild forest to the modern merchant city.
PL: Was it easy making the transition from non-fiction to fiction? How did you go about it?
AD: I haven't written a novel before, and about halfway through I figured out how to do it. It's just an enormous pleasure. Suddenly it seemed as though everything was possible. It was like an enormous mural or big orchestra. Because it's such a large-scale book, there were so many people in it and so many things happened to them and they do so much, I felt that I could cram almost all of human experience into it. I've never had more fun writing . . .
I found as I was writing the novel that you discover an order for the work and the meanings obtain within the work. I had a kind of vision of the world, of the generations of us people being so alive and so vivid to ourselves -- "here we are alive, here we are, these are our exciting times, this is our thrilling new, fast, modern world."
Well, they had the same sense, too. So you read about these people so vivid to themselves who are right on the cutting edge of the present looking at the clouds changing overhead, and we read this now in 1992 instead of 1882 when most of the action takes place, knowing that all these people are dead. And knowing therefore that we will be just as dead.
PL: Is this a kind of book, would you say, that will make the reader long for simpler times when good and evil were more clearly discernible and pioneer lives were filled with action and adventure? In other words, is this a variant of "escapist" fare?
AD: On, no! This book is no agricultural idyll. I'm nowhere saying that the 19th century is a better time. Everything that characterizes the United States, its optimism and its greed, its sort of transcendental impulse and its piety, along with its deception and racism, it's all there.
Peggy Langstaff lives and writes on a farm in Tennessee.
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