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September 27, 1987

Her Inexhaustable Mind

By NOEL PERRIN

AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD By Annie Dillard.

ome mystics see an aura around things. Such a talent greatly increases the power, majesty, drama and interest of this humdrum world.

One of William Blake's more famous passages describes his reaction to sunrise, as opposed to the response of ordinary Englishmen. '' 'What,' it will be questioned, 'when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?' 'O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying, ''Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.'' ' ''

Annie Dillard is one of Blake's company. She may or may not see auras - but she invariably sees something beyond what is just there. In the meditative book ''Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,'' she saw the coming of God in the attempt of three Canada geese to land on her frozen duck pond. She continues to see beyond the visible in her autobiography, ''An American Childhood.'' This woman is either unusually sensitive or prone to exaggeration, the reader thinks. Both things are true.

People who know Ms. Dillard only from ''Pilgrim'' are going to get some surprises. The very name Annie suggests a homespun background, and the rural Virginia location of Tinker Creek affirms that the author must be a countrywoman. No such thing. ''An American Childhood'' takes place almost entirely in Pittsburgh, where Ms. Dillard grew up in the small Presbyterian elite that runs (or used to run) the city.

The book is Ms. Dillard's equivalent of Wordsworth's ''Prelude.'' The full title of that work is ''The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind: An Autobiographical Poem.'' Ms. Dillard has written an autobiography in semimystical prose about the growth of her own mind, and it's an exceptionally interesting account. She 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. (Thoreau once said he had never met a man who was fully awake - but he was forgetting about women, and he hadn't met Ms. Dillard.) She is a stunning observer. There is a passage in this book, a rather long one, in which she talks about adult skin as perceived by a child. She begins with an event: herself as a little girl, pinching up the skin over one of her mother's knuckles, and watching in fascination as it stays ridged up instead of instantly returning to smooth shapeliness as a child's hand does. The passage grows into a meditation on how parents (in her case, very young and very good-looking ones, though she didn't know it then) physically appear to a child. It seemed to me, reading it, that skin had never been adequately described before.

She thinks about time, about death, about Pittsburgh streetcars doomed to their tracks, about herself probably doomed to a future in the Junior League and a good Pittsburgh marriage. The year she was 13, she notes, ''I was reading books on drawing, painting, rocks, criminology, birds, moths, beetles, stamps, ponds and streams, medicine.'' She's also looking through a microscope at her own urine, having complicated fantasies and night fears, being reckless in cars, idolizing aristocratic youths, telling jokes in the expert way her parents taught her. It makes lively reading, all these things with their auras.

And yet, ''An American Childhood'' is not quite as good as it at first promised to be. By choosing to make the book an account of the growth of her mind, an inner rather than an outer narrative, Ms. Dillard almost necessarily forfeited plot. Except at the end, the book does not build; there is no continuous narrative. And though scores of people appear, only two of them are real characters: Annie Dillard herself and, for one wonderful chapter, her mother.

Also, the mystic's heightened prose can become mere mannerism, and from time to time in this book it does. I believed easily, reading ''Pilgrim,'' that Ms. Dillard felt the presence of God in the flight of those three geese; she made me feel it too. Or at least she made me feel a great power and intensity in the occasion. But when in ''An American Childhood'' she describes her first encounter with formal philosophy at age 16, and refers to ''Platonism as it had come bumping and skidding down the centuries and across the ocean to Concord, Massachusetts'' (it was on its way to meet Emerson), skepticism comes unbidden to the reader's mind. Plato's thought? Bumping and skidding? Fine, vivid language, certainly - but would it be either more or less true to say that his ideas tiptoed daintily down the centuries, or walked in galoshes through the Dark Ages, carrying an umbrella?

In short, isn't Ms. Dillard overwriting here? I think the answer is yes. It's the romantic's temptation, and she is an extreme romantic. Still, overwriting and all, ''An American Childhood'' remains a remarkable work. Blake overwrote too.

Noel Perrin is the author of ''First Person Rural'' and other books.

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