An Annie Dillard Reader (19 page)

W
E HAD MOVED WHEN
I was eight. We moved from Edgerton Avenue to Richland Lane, a hushed dead-end street on the far side of Frick Park. We expanded into a brick house on two lots. There was a bright sunporch under buckeye trees; there was a golden sandstone wall with fireplace and bench that Mother designed, which ran the length of the living room.

It was into this comfortable house that the last of us sisters, Molly, was born, two years later. It was from this house that Father would leave to go down the river to New Orleans, and to this house that he would return early, from the river at Louisville. Here Mother told the contractor where she wanted kitchen walls knocked out. Here on the sunporch Amy tended her many potentially well-dressed dolls, all of whom were, unfortunately, always sick in bed. Here I began a life of reading books, and drawing, and playing at the sciences. Here also I began to wake in earnest, and shed superstition, and plan my days.

 

Every August when Amy and I returned from our summer at Lake Erie with our grandmother, we saw that workmen had altered the house in our absence—the dining room seemed bigger, the kitchen was lighter—but we couldn't recall how it had been. I thought Mother was a genius for thinking up these improvements, for the house always seemed fine to me, yet it got better and better.

This August, the summer I was ten, we returned from the Lake and found our shared room uncannily tidy and stilled, dark, while summer, the summer in which we had been immersed, played outside the closed windows like a movie. So it always was, those first few minutes in an emptied room. They made you self-conscious; you felt yourself living your life. As
soon as you unzipped your suitcase and opened the window, you broke the spell; you plunged again into the rush and weather.

While we were gone, Molly had learned to crawl. She pulled herself up and stood singing in her playpen on the flat part of the front lawn; the buckeye boughs stirred far overhead, and waved over her round arms their speckled lights.

 

Usually when it was hot the family swam at the distant country-club pool. Now that we were back from the Lake, all that resumed—a nasty comedown after the Lake, to whose neighborhood beach I had gone alone, and where we were all kids among kids who owned the beach and our days. There, at the Lake, if you wanted to leave, you simply kicked the bike's kickstand and sprang into the seat and away, in one skilled gesture like cowboys' mounting horses, rode away on the innocent Ohio roads under old, still trees. At the country club, you often wanted to leave as soon as you had come, but there was no leaving to be had. The country-club pool drew a society as complex and constraining, if not so entertaining, as any European capital's drawing room did. You forgot an old woman's name at some peril to your entire family. What if you actually, physically, ran into her? Knocked her off her pins? It was no place for children.

One country-club morning this August, I saw a red blotch moving in a dense hedge by the club's baby pool. I crept up on the red blotch in my cold bathing suit and discovered that it was a rose-breasted grosbeak. I had never seen one. This living, wild bird, which could fetch up anyplace it pleased, had inexplicably touched down at our country club. It scratched around in a hedge between the baby pool and the sixth hole. The dumb cluck, why a country club?

Mother said Father was going down the river in his boat pretty soon. It sounded like a swell idea.

 

One windy Saturday morning, after the Lake and before the new private school started, I hung around the house. It was too early for action in the neighborhood. To wake up, I read on the sunporch.

The sunporch would wake anybody up; Father had now put
on the record: Sharkey Bonano, “Li'l Liza Jane.” He was bopping around, snapping his fingers; now he had wandered outside and stood under the big buckeye trees. I could see him through the sunporch's glass walls. He peered up at a patch of sky as if it could tell him, old salt that he was, right there on Richland Lane, how the weather would be next week on the Ohio River.

I was starting
Kidnapped
. It began in Scotland; David Balfour's father asked that a letter be delivered “when the house is redd up.” Some people in Pittsburgh redd up houses, too. The hardworking parents of my earliest neighborhood friends said it: You kids redd up this room. It meant clean up, or ready up. I never expected to find “redd up” in so grand a thing as a book. Apparently it was Scots. I hadn't heard the phrase since we moved.

I rode back to Edgerton Avenue from time to time after we moved—to look around, and to fix in my mind the route back: past the lawn bowlers in Frick Park, past the football field, and beyond the old elementary school yard, where a big older boy had said to me, “Why, you're a regular Ralph Kiner.” Touring that old neighborhood, I saw the Saint Bede's nuns. I sped past them, careless, on my bike.

“Redd up,” David Balfour's father said in
Kidnapped
. I was reading on the sunporch, on the bright couch. “Oh, Li'l Liza!” said the music on the record. “Li'l Liza Jane.” Next week Father was going down the river to New Orleans. Maybe they'd let him sit in a set on the drums; maybe Zutty Singleton would be there and holler out to him—“Hey, Frank!”

The wind rattled the windowed sunporch walls beside me. I could see, without getting up, some green leaves blowing down from the buckeye branches overhead. Everything in the room was bright, even the bookshelves, even Amy's melancholy dolls. The blue shadows of fast clouds ran over the far walls and floor. Father snapped his fingers and wandered, tall and loose-limbed, over the house.

I was ten years old now, up into the double numbers, where I would likely remain till I died. I am awake now forever, I thought suddenly; I have converged with myself in the present. My hands were icy from holding
Kidnapped
up; I always read lying down. I felt time in full stream, and I felt consciousness in full stream joining it, like the rivers.

W
HILE FATHER WAS MOTORING DOWN
the river, my reading was giving me a turn.

At a neighbor boy's house, I ran into Kimon Nicolaides'
The Natural Way to Draw
. This was a manual for students who couldn't get to Nicolaides' own classes at New York's Art Students League. I was amazed that there were books about things one actually did. I had been drawing in earnest, but at random, for two years. Like all children, when I drew I tried to reproduce schema. The idea of drawing from life had astounded me two years previously, but I had gradually let it slip, and my drawing, such as it was, had sunk back into facile sloth. Now this book would ignite my fervor for conscious drawing, and bind my attention to both the vigor and the detail of the actual world.

For the rest of August, and all fall, this urgent, hortatory book ran my life. I tried to follow its schedules: every day, sixty-five gesture drawings, fifteen memory drawings, an hour-long contour drawing, and “The Sustained Study in Crayon, Clothed” or “The Sustained Study in Crayon, Nude.”

While Father was gone, I outfitted an attic bedroom as a studio, and moved in. Every summer or weekend morning at eight o'clock I taped that day's drawing schedule to a wall. Since there was no model, nude or clothed, I drew my baseball mitt.

I drew my baseball mitt's gesture—its tense repose, its expectancy, which ran up its hollows like a hand. I drew its contours—its flat fingertips strung on square rawhide thongs. I drew its billion grades of light and dark in detail, so the glove weighed vivid and complex on the page, and the trapezoids small as dust motes in the leather fingers cast shadows, and the pale palm leather was smooth as a belly and thick. “Draw anything,” said the book. “Learning to draw is really a matter of
learning to see,” said the book. “Imagine that your pencil point is touching the model instead of the paper.” “All the student need concern himself with is reality.”

With my pencil point I crawled over the mitt's topology. I slithered over each dip and rise; I checked my bearings, admired the enormous view, and recorded it like Meriwether Lewis mapping the Rockies.

One thing struck me as odd and interesting. A gesture drawing took forty-five seconds; a Sustained Study took all morning. From any still-life arrangement or model's pose, the artist could produce either a short study or a long one. Evidently, a given object took no particular amount of time to draw; instead the artist took the time, or didn't take it, at pleasure. Similarly, things themselves possessed no fixed and intrinsic amount of interest; instead things were interesting as long as you had attention to give them. How long does it take to draw a baseball mitt? As much time as you care to give it. Not an infinite amount of time, but more time than you first imagined. For many days, so long as you want to keep drawing that mitt, and studying that mitt, there will always be a new and finer layer of distinctions to draw out and lay in. Your attention discovers—seems thereby to produce—an array of interesting features in any object, like a lamp.

By noon, all this drawing would have gone to my head. I slipped into the mitt, quit the attic, quit the house, and headed up the street, looking for a ball game.

 

My friend had sought permission from his father for me to borrow
The Natural Way to Draw
; it was his book. Grown men and growing children rarely mingled then. I had lived two doors away from this family for several years, and had never clapped eyes on my good friend's father; still, I now regarded him as a man after my own heart. Had he another book about drawing? He had; he owned a book about pencil drawing. This book began well enough, with the drawing of trees. Then it devoted a chapter to the schematic representation of shrubbery. At last it dwindled into its true subject, the drawing of buildings.

My friend's father was an architect. All his other books were
about buildings. He had been a boy who liked to draw, according to my friend, so he became an architect. Children who drew, I learned, became architects; I had thought they became painters. My friend explained that it was not proper to become a painter; it couldn't be done. I resigned myself to architecture school and a long life of drawing buildings. It was a pity, for I disliked buildings, considering them only a stiffer and more ample form of clothing, and no more important.

 

I began reading books, reading books to delirium. I began by vanishing from the known world into the passive abyss of reading, but soon found myself engaged with surprising vigor because the things in the books, or even the things surrounding the books, roused me from my stupor. From the nearest library I learned every sort of surprising thing—some of it, though not much of it, from the books themselves.

The Homewood branch of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library system was in a Negro section of town—Homewood. This branch was our nearest library; Mother drove me to it every two weeks for many years, until I could drive myself. I only very rarely saw other white people there.

I understood that our maid, Margaret Butler, had friends in Homewood. I never saw her there, but I did see Henry Watson, who drove for my grandmother.

I was getting out of Mother's car in front of the library, when Henry appeared on the sidewalk; he was walking with some other old men. I had never before seen him at large; it must have been his day off. He had gold-rimmed glasses, a gold front tooth, and a frank, open expression. It would embarrass him, I thought, if I said hello to him in front of his friends. I was wrong. He spied me, picked me up—books and all—swung me as he always did, and introduced Mother and me to his friends. Later, as we were climbing the long stone steps to the library's door, Mother said, “That's what I mean by good manners.”

 

The Homewood Library had graven across its enormous stone facade:
FREE TO THE PEOPLE
. In the evenings, neighborhood people—the men and women of Homewood—browsed in
the library, and brought their children. By day, the two vaulted rooms, the adults' and children's sections, were almost empty. The kind Homewood librarians, after a trial period, had given me a card to the adult section. This was an enormous silent room with marble floors. Nonfiction was on the left.

Beside the farthest wall, and under leaded windows set ten feet from the floor, so that no human being could ever see anything from them—next to the wall, and at the farthest remove from the idle librarians at their curved wooden counter, and from the oak bench where my mother waited in her camel's-hair coat, chatting with the librarians or reading—stood the last and darkest and most obscure of the tall nonfiction stacks:
NEGRO HISTORY
and
NATURAL HISTORY
. It was in Natural History, in the cool darkness of a bottom shelf, that I found
The Field Book of Ponds and Streams
.

The Field Book of Ponds and Streams
was a small, blue-bound book printed in fine type on thin paper, like
The Book of Common Prayer
. Its third chapter explained how to make sweep nets, plankton nets, glass-bottomed buckets, and killing jars. It specified how to mount slides, how to label insects on their pins, and how to set up a freshwater aquarium.

One was to go into “the field” wearing hip boots and perhaps a head net for mosquitoes. One carried in a “rucksack” half a dozen corked test tubes, a smattering of screw-top baby-food jars, a white enamel tray, assorted pipettes and eyedroppers, an artillery of cheesecloth nets, a notebook, a hand lens, perhaps a map, and
The Field Book of Ponds and Streams
. This field—unlike the fields I had seen, such as the field where Walter Milligan played football—was evidently very well watered, for there one could find, and distinguish among, daphniae, planaria, water pennies, stonefly larvae, dragonfly nymphs, salamander larvae, tadpoles, snakes, and turtles, all of which one could carry home.

That anyone had lived the fine life described in Chapter 3 astonished me. Although the title page indicated quite plainly that one Ann Haven Morgan had written
The Field Book of Ponds and Streams
, I nevertheless imagined, perhaps from the authority and freedom of it, that its author was a man. It would be good to write him and assure him that someone had found his
book, in the dark near the marble floor at the Homewood Library. I would, in the same letter or in a subsequent one, ask him a question outside the scope of his book, which was where I personally might find a pond, or a stream. But I did not know how to address such a letter, of course, or how to learn if he was still alive.

I was afraid, too, that my letter would disappoint him by betraying my ignorance, which was just beginning to attract my own notice. What, for example, was this noisome-sounding substance called cheesecloth, and what do scientists do with it? What, when you really got down to it, was enamel? If candy could, notoriously, “eat through enamel,” why would anyone make trays out of it? Where—short of robbing a museum—might a fifth-grade student at the Ellis School on Fifth Avenue obtain such a legendary item as a wooden bucket?

The Field Book of Ponds and Streams
was a shocker from beginning to end. The greatest shock came at the end.

When you checked out a book from the Homewood Library, the librarian wrote your number on the book's card and stamped the due date on a sheet glued to the book's last page. When I checked out
The Field Book of Ponds and Streams
for the second time, I noticed the book's card. It was almost full. There were numbers on both sides. My hearty author and I were not alone in the world, after all. With us, and sharing our enthusiasm for dragonfly larvae and single-celled plants, were, apparently, many Negro adults.

Who were these people? Had they, in Pittsburgh's Homewood section, found ponds? Had they found streams? At home, I read the book again; I studied the drawings; I reread Chapter 3; then I settled in to study the due-date slip. People read this book in every season. Seven or eight people were reading this book every year, even during the war.

Every year, I read again
The Field Book of Ponds and Streams
. Often, when I was in the library, I simply visited it. I sat on the marble floor and studied the book's card. There we all were. There was my number. There was the number of someone else who had checked it out more than once. Might I contact this
person and cheer him up? For I assumed that, like me, he had found pickings pretty slim in Pittsburgh.

The people of Homewood, some of whom lived in visible poverty, on crowded streets among burned-out houses—they dreamed of ponds and streams. They were saving to buy microscopes. In their bedrooms they fashioned plankton nets. But their hopes were even more vain than mine, for I was a child, and anything might happen; they were adults, living in Homewood. There was neither pond nor stream on the streetcar routes. The Homewood residents whom I knew had little money and little free time. The marble floor was beginning to chill me. It was not fair.

 

I had been driven into nonfiction against my wishes. I wanted to read fiction, but I had learned to be cautious about it.

“When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone's way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.

The suggestions of adults were uncertain and incoherent. They gave you Nancy Drew with one hand and
Little Women
with the other. They mixed good and bad books together because they could not distinguish between them. Any book that contained children, or short adults, or animals, was felt to be a children's book. So also was any book about the sea—as though danger or even fresh air were a child's prerogative—or any book by Charles Dickens or Mark Twain. Virtually all British books, actually, were children's books; no one understood children like the British. Suited to female children were love stories set in any century but this one. Consequently one had read, exasperated often to fury,
Pickwick Papers, Désirée, Wuthering Heights, Lad, a Dog, Gulliver's Travels, Gone with the Wind, Robinson Crusoe
, Nordhoff and Hall's
Bounty
trilogy,
Moby
Dick, The Five Little Peppers, Innocents Abroad, Lord Jim, Old Yeller
.

The fiction stacks at the Homewood Library, their volumes alphabetized by author, baffled me. How could I learn to choose a novel? That I could not easily reach the top two shelves helped limit choices a little. Still, on the lower shelves I saw too many books: Mary Johnson,
Sweet Rocket;
Samuel Johnson,
Rasselas
; James Jones,
From Here to Eternity
. I checked out the last because I had heard of it; it was good. I decided to check out books I had heard of. I had heard of
The Mill on the Floss
. I read it, and it was good. On its binding was printed a figure, a man dancing or running; I had noticed this figure before. Like so many children before and after me, I learned to seek out this logo, the Modern Library colophon.

The going was always rocky. I couldn't count on Modern Library the way I could count on, say,
Mad
magazine, which never failed to slay me.
Native Son
was good,
Walden
was pretty good,
The Interpretation of Dreams
was okay, and
The Education of Henry Adams
was awful.
Ulysses
, a very famous book, was also awful.
Confessions
by Augustine, whose title promised so much, was a bust.
Confessions
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau was much better, though it fell apart halfway through.