Remembering two literary greats – Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard

Writer Wendell Berry died on Aug. 31. A smidge over two weeks later, writer Annie Dillard died at the age of 81. Compared to Berry, who was 92, she was a pup. They both wrote fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. They both taught university students.

I held both writers in high regard, but I knew Dillard’s work more intimately and comprehensively. I own every book she wrote, and for years I compulsively hunted down her published articles. There are others like me — crazy Dillard fans — besotted with her tough, beautiful prose. Sam Anderson wrote a piece in the “New York Times Magazine” (Sept. 20) that rendered my Dillard worship ghostly by comparison.

By her own admission, she was a bluestocking, which Merriam-Webster tells me is “a woman having intellectual or literary interests.” That definition barely does justice to a woman whose ravenous mind never seemed sated.

In 1975, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her narrative non-fiction, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” She was 28 and the youngest woman to win in the General Non-Fiction category. The unwanted attention drove her from the East Coast where she taught at Western Washington University for three years.

I had gone to a small, private college in the middle of the country, and there was a small but fervent Annie Dillard cult there, starting with the English faculty and spreading to some of us students. I read and re-read “Pilgrim” because, in the beginning, it was too much to absorb. Her dense, brilliant, and muscular prose is still a marvel 50-some years on.

In 1980, I ended up at Western Washington University, but Dillard had already moved on. Perhaps it was just as well. I met a young woman there who had taken a Dillard class, and she said, “Because of her, I don’t write anymore.” Yikes.

When Wendell Berry died, a former student recalled how she received a failing grade on her first writing assignment. The lesson here seems to be that exemplary writers can be rough taskmasters. They know how hard it is to develop clean, clear prose, and they aren’t about to be buffaloed by sloppy, earnest emotion.

Dillard and Berry both wrote about the natural world, but Dillard probed a world shot through with mystery and horror by equal turns. Berry saw the natural world as beneficent and endangered by hubris and greed. He believed that we weren’t listening to what the earth had to teach us. He embodied humility at nature’s feet. He used draft horses to plow his ground. He was anachronistic, joyous, and a curmudgeon.

Dillard could be curmudgeonly, too, in her own way. She refused to make TV appearances after she won the Pulitzer, and she sparingly attended literary conferences and festivals. In 2014, she withdrew from public life and declared that she had stopped writing.

Berry also strove for a contemplative existence, but he was still writing in the last year of his life. He famously never owned a computer, and in 1987 wrote an essay, “Why I Am Not Going To Buy a Computer,” which drew ire from all corners of readership.

Anyone who believed in technological progress found Berry’s arguments naïve or hypocritical. They called him a Luddite. Feminists derided him when he wrote that his wife took his handwriting and typed it up. They thought he was exploiting her, although both Berry and his wife, Tanya, enjoyed this working arrangement.

Turns out that writing by hand has distinct benefits. One scientific paper says that “[t]he slower pace of handwriting fosters deeper thought and creativity, as the brain has more time to process and synthesize ideas.”

Berry didn’t need a scientific study to tell him that. He knew the value of taking time to form his thoughts, and he continued hewing to a method which needed no improvement.

He was steady and constant. He immersed himself in understanding the soil he farmed in Henry County, Kentucky, in relating to his neighbors, to the people in his local church, and to the creatures around him.

He tried to call us back to ourselves, but the call to resist progress for progress’s sake is one few of us master. We still seem far away from what he believed to be good and true.

Too few of us know the work of these thinkers and writers who looked at the world and saw beyond the things themselves. Dillard saw the world aflame with wonder. Berry saw the world as blessed but in peril.

In five years’ time too few of us will have heard their names. Too few of us read work like Dillard’s and Berry’s even now. It requires time and effort to absorb what they’re getting at, and we’re too distracted on Instagram, or TikTok, or YouTube.

Those who love their work can take comfort knowing their words live on. There is at least that.

Joan Zwagerman writes from Storm Lake.