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While packing my bags for a summer vacation not long ago, I decided to bring along Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business. Friends had recommended the novelist to me, saying that he was a Canadian, a master storyteller on the spellbinding order of Iris Murdoch, and sufficiently engaged with religion to make the likes of me less guilty about reading him. It seemed a good time to give this unknown writer a chance and Canada its due.

I didn’t have to read far before I was caught. In the opening pages of the novel, a peevish ten-year-old boy conceals a stone inside a snowball and throws it in anger at another, who ducks, so that the snowball goes on to hit an unintended victim, a pregnant woman who is thereby brought prematurely into labor. It is a moment that joins hatred and innocence, intention and accident; it also occasions a "fall" whose effects ripple outward for 60 years and almost 300 pages. Nor is Fifth Business (1970) the end of it. In two successive novels, The Manticore (1972) and World of Wonders (1975) , Davies continues to explore the implications of this single moment, which forces a variety of characters to confront their own compound of good and evil. Together the three novels form the "Deptford trilogy," named for the Ontario village where the snowball first was thrown and which remains, despite the European settings of much of the action, the chief point of reference in all three books.

Although I had come prepared to read only one of these interlocking stories, a well-stocked bookseller supplied the other Deptford volumes, as well as some very welcome information: there were seven Davies novels already in print, and another volume was due out shortly. I resolved to make up for lost time when I got home.

What I found, in addition to more wonderful reading, was a writer who had lived in many of the worlds evoked by his fiction. Born in 1913, in a small Ontario town where his father was editor of the local newspaper, Davies went on to university both in Canada and at Balliol College, Oxford. After an initial career in theater, at the Old Vic, he returned to Canada where he became editor (and later publisher) of the Peterborough Examiner. During the ‘50s he wrote a number of plays and published a few novels, including A Mixture of Frailties (1958) , later made into a film. In 1961 Davies became master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, a position from which he has only recently retired. It was in that university setting that he produced the Deptford trilogy, and a more recent pair of interconnected novels, Rebel Angels (1982) and What’s Bred in the Bone (1985) ; Viking Press informs us that a third related volume is on the way. One hopes that a fourth may follow -- with luck, something on the order of a Toronto quartet may be in store.

What’s Bred in the Bone, as the most recent working-out of preoccupations that have been with Davies for 15 years, provides us with a good vantage point for surveying his work. Opening shortly after the protagonist’s death, the novel tells the life story of Francis Cornish from a variety of posthumous perspectives. The biography begins, however, two generations before Cornish’s actual birth, thus demonstrating the truth of the proverb that what is bred in the bone (or inherited from the past) will be borne out in the flesh. The product of a family that is a characteristic Canadian melange of Catholic and Protestant, French and English, Cornish makes his way out of the narrow confines of small-town Ontario to discover not only the wider world of England and the Continent but also the complex vocation of his own life as a keeper of secrets and a maker of myth. Rather than simply emphasizing his rejection of straitened provincialism, however, the novel shows how what was "bred in the bone" provides the material of a lifetime. As in the Deptford trilogy, it is Davies’s genius to show us the degree to which the shape of a childhood provides a haunting pattern of apparently unending richness, at least for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

This project is what an earlier age would have called the coincidentia oppositorum, the reconciliation of opposites. And it is precisely to this end that Davies’s Canadian Everyman works out his salvation with fear and trembling, revealing in his quite singular struggle a quest of far wider implications. Indeed, his story might be ours as well. For what Davies seems to be doing in this book, and in all his fiction since Fifth Business, is catching the reader’s attention through marvels of storytelling to bring him or her to the point of undertaking a similar journey toward individuation. He invites each of us, in other words, to our own "wedding."

What’s Bred in the Bone makes it clear, however, that this reconciliation of opposites is not easily achieved. Religion and myth should be its handmaids, opening the individual to the mysterious depths of human existence, as well as providing our culture with a shared vision of those things unseen which Davies believes are what largely govern us. But as Cornish’s experience demonstrates, Christianity no longer seems up to this task. To be sure, there is the "hot, sweet Catholicism" of his aunt, the "stern and unyielding Calvinism" of the Presbyterian cook, the lukewarm Anglicanism of his boarding school ("a religion that ‘Never Went Too Far") -- all part of the warmed-over stew of a divided Christendom long past its prime, of which only the "warm gravy of Catholicism retains a little flavor.

Aside from the exhaustion of a Christian faith that no longer seems able to provide institutional nourishment for personal growth, there is the fact that the old theology has been replaced by something new, a "theology of our time" that knows nothing of mystery or the imagination of the fullness of life. Identified as "science," it stands over against (rather than fostering) the integration that Davies sees as the chief end of humanity. As Simon Harcourt, Cornish’s would-be biographer, says at the beginning of the novel, in words that seem very much Davies’s own despite their placement in the mouth of an Anglican theologian:

There ends the diatribe against scientism, and in particular against the impoverishing arrogance of its reductio ad absurdum. However, the aspect of modernity that this novel really takes to task is not science but rather modern art itself, together with the psychological bias that seems to inform it. Having rejected the "old map of religion" and the world it described, art since the Renaissance has retreated into a private universe of self-reference, a universe in which there is no other God but the reductive and vainglorious Freud. "[Modern painters] are sick of what they suppose to be God," Cornish is told by his artistic mentor, Tancred Saraceni, "and they find something in their inner vision that is so personal that to most people it looks like chaos. But it isn’t simply chaos. It’s raw gobbets of the psyche displayed on the canvas (p. 227).

Cornish’s journey as a religious artist in the modern age takes him to an extraordinary act of personal creation: a visionary wedding of his whole psychic life, unachieved in the actual living of it, but nonetheless capable of being imagined. Choosing as his subject the biblical account of the marriage at Cana, he takes the Scripture’s "sustaining myth" and transforms it (in the style of the 15th-century Old Masters) into a mythic self-portrait. The painting, as Saraceni notes, "solicits the Unconscious"; it tells a profoundly intimate story, but does so in the iconographic terms of past theology, in a shared and traditional language. Cornish puts new wine into old skins in an attempt, to make a resonantly contemporary statement of self.

Although haunted by the fear of fakery, of artistic fancy dress, he simply cannot express his "here and now" in the terms of his own era; he knows himself to be one untimely born. And so he reanimates the religious vocabulary of the past in order to live with something like wholeness in the present. Surely it is one of the sharpest ironies of this particular divine comedy that by telling the truth in such a way, he will come in later years to be thought of as a forger of old paintings -- a counterfeiter of truth.

Urged by his godfather to follow his nose -- what another character speaks of as obeying his instincts -- Cornish learns that to do so is to find himself moving in some "very unmodern and unfashionable directions." One might make the same observation about Robertson Davies himself, whose nose has lead him up the unlikely paths of sainthood and miracles (Fifth Business) , Jungian analysis (The Manticore) , magic and mystery (World of Wonders) , gypsy lore, alchemy and demonism (Rebel Angels). In every case, he is satirizing the peculiar obscurantism of the 20th century, pushing past its assumptions about what matters (or does not) in an effort to open us to our own depths. His novels reveal the essential human value of what has been discarded as useless or outmoded -- that is, the value of almost two millennia of Christian civilization, especially its darker nooks and crannies. What he shows us through the medium of his fiction, in other words, are forgotten things about ourselves: the "muddle of eras" that even the most up-to-date modern incarnates; the richness of human meaning which, lacking myth, we no longer have full access to; the reality of God as a transcendent authority both within and above us.

The reality of God. From a variety of statements scattered throughout his nonfictional writing -- One Half of Robertson Davies (1977) and The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1979) -- we know that the author has confessed himself a Christian believer without nailing down the nature of that belief. Although he was confirmed as an Anglican while studying at Oxford, his religion seems to have been most nurtured by the thought of Carl Jung, whose insistence on God as a psychological fact of human nature -- a fact avoided at enormous peril to ourselves -- is echoed throughout Davies’s fiction. And yet Davies’s religion is no mere Christianity. Indeed, he might well claim the realization of Francis Cornish as his personal testimony: "Somehow I’ve drifted into a world where religion, but not orthodoxy, is the fountain of everything that makes sense" (p. 378).

What that religion is, and how it branches out from Christian orthodoxy, is perhaps most fully explored in Rebel Angels, through the reflections of a winsome Anglican divine, Simon Darcourt, whose scholarly pursuit is, significantly enough, New Testament apocrypha. Darcourt says at the end of the novel that while he considers the essentials of Christianity, when rightly understood, to form the best possible foundation for life, he holds that this orthodox basis is in genuine need of "farcing out." He goes on to explain the striking choice of vocabulary: "I use the word as cooks do, to mean the extending and amplifying of a dish with other, complementary elements. . . One cannot live on essences" (p. 314).

Along with humor and a lightness of touch that both Darcourt and Blazon identify as among the missing elements in Christianity, a frank allowance for the body is needed -- an allowance, that is, for "the unknown factor, the depths from which arise the unforeseen and uncontrollable in the human spirit" (Rebel Angels, p. 111) Everywhere in Davies’s fiction we are made to see that it is a serious mistake to subdue our physicality or to strive (as the ascetic ideal would have it) for an exclusively spiritual purity at the body’s expense. To do so is to sever the self from its roots and thus to dwarf it. More ominously still, it is to court the revenge of what has been repressed -- a revenge that is disastrous for both the individual and society.

Instead of purity, Darcourt (and certainly Davies behind him) proposes another ideal altogether: a wholeness that joins root to crown, the light and glory of the spirit to the dark earth, Christ to Satan. This latter inclusion is Davies’s most radical departure from Christian orthodoxy and reveals most strikingly his debt to Jung, who argued that vice and virtue are mutually interdependent -- always in contention, but never entirely to be factored out one from the other. Time after time in his novels Davies recommends nothing less than shaking hands with the devil, acknowledging him as Christ’s "brother" and, as the shadow of light, the necessary "other side" of what Christianity has celebrated as God. As a wonderfully demonic character in Fifth Business says, "The Devil knows corners of us all of which Christ Himself is ignorant. Indeed, I am sure Christ learned a great deal that was salutary about Himself when He met the Devil in the wilderness" (p. 249). What Satan knows is not only the inexplicable and irrational; it is also knowledge itself, together with whatever mysterious forces enable us to make art. "It is he," says Cornish’s mentor in What’s Bred in the Bone, "who understands and ministers to man’s carnal and intellectual self, and art is carnal and intellectual" (p. 328).

Davies cannot be accused of diabolism in any common sense of the term, any more than he can be said (even in his own Jungian terms) to be of the devil’s party. To be of any one part would be to stop short of the wholeness that is the clear goal of his entire work, that merging of apparent opposites in human experience to produce what he has spoken of in four lectures titled "Masks of Satan" as the new element still waiting to be born in us: "a wider sensibility, a greater wisdom, and an enlarged charity" (One Half of Robertson Davies, p. 263). Orthodox Christianity would seem to Davies ample enough to support this new life, but, whether through understandable caution or unthinking fear, it has always been indisposed to accept any notion of fullness that asks us not to cut off or pluck out what we identify as evil, but rather to know it wholly -- as part of life, as part of holiness, as part even of God.

For purposes of classification, therefore, it would perhaps be most accurate to think of Davies as a writer of Christian apocrypha: a novelist who finds himself uncomfortably restrained by the canon of Christian thought, but who is not, on the other hand, a heretic; a self-proclaimed moralist who holds that while we reap what we sow, it is often difficult to know the nature of the seed or the outcome of the harvest. Like his character Simon Darcourt, he believes the Creed; but he also believes a good many things that are not in it. "It’s shorthand, you know. Just what’s necessary. But I don’t live merely by what is necessary" (Rebel Angels, p. 120).

When Francis Cornish is being initiated into the mystery of art -- an initiation that will bear fruit in his religious self-portrait, "The Marriage at Cana" -- he is told by his mentor that the purpose of a picture is to give pleasure, and not only pleasure but "awe, or religious intimations, or simply a fine sense of the past, and of the boundless depth and variety of life" (p. 293). There can be no doubt that the author of these words also had in mind the purpose of a novel, perhaps one that would help break the spell of current assumptions in order to surprise us with the complicated truth about ourselves -- with more dreams than we have dared to dream in what passes for our philosophy. In any case, these words about painting are a fitting description of Davies’s own narrative art, provocative in its "farcing out" of Christian tradition and powerful in its evocation of our human depth and variety.

Book Review:

The Life of Graham Greene (Vol. One) : 1904-1932, by Norman Sherry. Viking, 783 pp., $29.95.

If there is a virtue implicit in the vocation of the biographer, it is surely the willingness to pay serious attention to another person’s life. Throughout the often lengthy years of research and writing, the pressing demands of what Iris Murdoch has called the "fat relentless ego" are perforce suspended, and the intimate details of someone else’s personal history -- the family albums, dreams, first drafts, travel itineraries -- in effect become as significant and vivid as one’s own affairs. For most of us this transcendence of self-centeredness is either a matter of hard work or the happy result of falling in love. But for the biographer such attention is nothing less than a career: the "other" is one’s life work.

Norman Sherry has earned his rest after much labor. Having paid attention to the lives of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and Joseph Conrad (the latter scrutiny a "ten-year stint") , he has spent more than a decade on Graham Greene. The result is over 700 pages of text and roughly 1,700 footnotes, all devoted to the first 35 years of an author who is still going strong. It is possible that a second volume will not be Sherry’s last word but only the mid-point of a continuing (not to say daunting) project.

Sherry’s competition in his chosen field is, alas for the biographer, the subject himself. Greene has written fairly extensively about his own experience, including a memoir of his first 30 years, A Sort of Life (1971) . The subject’s personal look backward is invariably more interesting than Sherry’s; it is also written in prose that has a power and glory beyond the command of most academic writers. Greene’s self-recall is remarkable for its choice of significant detail, its deftness of touch, a gift for self-dramatization, while the professional examination tends to accumulate a dizzying amount of information and interpret its data with a heavy hand.

The latter trait is especially noticeable in Sherry’s treatment of Greene’s first memory: the author’s recollection of a dead dog placed at the foot of his baby carriage by a nurse who (to quote A Sort of Life) "thought it convenient to bring the cadaver home this way." Green’s account is brief, funny, sardonic ("the cadaver") and understated. Sherry’s version, on the other hand, takes up where the subject leaves off: "However young he was he must have had an instinctive awareness of death from the carcass, the smell, perhaps blood, perhaps the mouth pulled back over the teeth in the snarl of death. Wouldn’t there be a growing sense of panic, even nausea on finding himself shut in, irrevocably committed to sharing the limited confines of a pram with a dead dog?" The biographer concludes, "Knowledge of death came early to Graham Greene." Perhaps. In his autobiography Greene may indeed have been hiding his primal horror behind a screen of cool; after all, his first spoken words, a few months after this event, were supposedly "poor dog." Nonetheless, Sherry has a tendency to connect too many dots, to overread Greene’s life in an attempt to get it straight.

Not that one should blame the biographer for trying to rise to the task he has set himself. He intends to provide not only a study of a major writer’s early development but an attempt "to penetrate the mystery of his character and personality." This entails a closer look at major events already presented by Greene and now fleshed out with the accounts of other people: his life in and around the Berkhamstead School, where his father was headmaster; the more or less serious attempts at teenage suicide; the startling decision of the family to respond to this crisis by sending the boy to board with a psychoanalyst in London; later games of Russian roulette played all alone in an effort to beat boredom and make existence seem precious; and his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

New doors are also opened. Whereas A Sort of Life is content to report, "I married and I was happy," the biographer tells the extraordinary story of courtship, wedding and early marriage, as well as suggesting what would undo that union in the end. There is also a brief but hilarious study of Greene’s career as an acerbic film critic, whose characterizations of Mae West’s walk ("the seductive and reeling motions reminiscent of an overfed python") and Jean Harlow’s charm ("she toted a breast like a man totes a gun") read like compliments compared to the witty venom spilled on Shirley Temple ("In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry") . It is small wonder Greene’s attack on Temple’s "dimpled depravity" cost him a libel suit from Twentieth Century -- Fox.

Sherry has not only read extensively in the scattered Greene archives, talked with everyone available (including, perhaps most interestingly, Greene’s former wife, Vivien) , and thought long and hard about the connections between the life and the work; he also traveled all over the world retracing his subject’s footsteps in order to share his experiences -- including the dysentery Greene contracted in a certain Mexican boarding house 40 years earlier. "Risking disease and death as he had done, I went to those places and in most cases found people Greene had met and put into his novels." The biographer is at his best on location, whether in reconstructing the fantastic and precipitous trip to Liberia that Greene shared with his cousin Barbara (and later described in Journey Without Maps) or providing clues to the persons behind the characters in The Power and the Glory.

Besides collecting (and often correcting) the facts of Greenes history, Sherry functions as a mythographer: he constructs the mystery of a character and personality. In some cases this means continuing the author’s lead in A Sort of Life, which, for instance, presents the horrors of boarding school (on the other side of the "green baize door" from his family quarters) as a season in hell, replete with demonic adversaries among the student body. Sherry not only reveals the names and identities of Greene’s youthful tormentors, but argues that the suffering he experienced at their hands -- and that in part led him to attempt suicide -- yielded artistic material throughout his career, and perhaps most richly so in The Power and the Glory: "Into the lieutenant, the priest and the Judas went some of the insight into human nature gained from his experience with Carter and Wheeler, which had involved him in persecution, self-doubt, feelings of cowardice and the fear of betraying."

Sherry also enriches our sense of the Greene family myth. the extended (and extensive) clan’s own sense of itself. In A Sort of Life Greene attempted to see where he came from by looking past the "loving folly" of his parents’ apparently very happy marriage to the legacy of the two "manic- depressive" grandfathers he never knew except within himself: "the guilt-ridden clergyman and the melancholic sugar planter dead of yellow fever in St. Kitts." Sherry, however, is far more interested in the parents: an abstracted, eccentric father obsessed with the evils of masturbation in his school and the treachery of politicians in Europe; a beautiful but remote mother who was seen almost exclusively during her "state visits" to the nursery. And yet, as the biographer’s documentation bears witness, both father and mother showed themselves surprisingly accepting and indeed generous parents, people aware of their son’s gifts and (as seen in their decision to send him into psychoanalysis) able to go outside their world to offer him help. They seemed invariably willing to protect him as best they could, to send money when it was needed, to bow before his choices, including that momentous decision not only to marry a Roman Catholic but, after years of ardent atheism, to become one himself.

As is often the case in conversion, the church entered his life, in 1925, through a person. A throwaway line in an Oxford Outlook article about the worship of the Virgin Mary provoked a response from Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a 19-year-old secretary at Blackwell’s. She reproved him for confusing worship with veneration ("hyperdulia") and in so doing unwittingly opened a door he would not allow her to close. A meeting led to letters -- hundreds of them, sometimes three a day -- and thereby to an obsessive, monomaniacal love that pursue its end like an army with banners. "You glorious, marvelous, most beautiful, most adorable person in the world. You are simply the symbol of the Absolute."

Because the "symbol" was a Roman Catholic (and herself a convert) , Greene set about to investigate her demanding church at least in part to get her to take him more seriously. Sherry recapitulates Greene’s own accounts of what came of that investigation in Journey Without Maps and A Sort of Life, with important supplementary material from correspondence with Vivien. Instruction was provided by a Father Trollope, a former actor whose "careful avoidance of the slightest emotion or sentiment" appealed to Greene, as did the thorough and businesslike quality of the church’s formidable rules. Doctrines and sacraments were discussed week by week -- even hell at the time seemed "hard, non-sentimental and exciting"-- but the major stumbling block was, quite simply, God. "If I were ever to be convinced in even the remote possibility of a supreme, omnipotent and omniscient power," he wrote in A Sort of Life, "I realized that nothing afterwards could seem impossible."

Arguments for the existence of God did not seem to move him toward that impossibility. There was only Vivien -- his purchase on the Absolute -- and then, in January 1926, a decision to say Yes: "I became convinced of the probable existence of something we call God." The general confession he had to make before his conditional baptism turned out to be a humiliating ordeal ("It was like a life photographed as it came to mind, without any order, full of gaps, giving at best a general impression," he recalls in Journey Without Maps) . The baptism itself was a somewhat anticlimactic affair which Greene chose not to share with Vivien or anyone else, the only witness being a woman who had been dusting the chairs. (Here Sherry corrects Greene’s memory, as is often his wont, with the needless truth of the matter: "The witness of his baptism was not a woman dusting the chairs but Stewart Wallis, an unofficial verger who helped around the cathedral.")

In the biographer’s judgment Greene turned to Catholicism for the "wrong reason," that is, for Vivien. Certainly it seems that the church would not have occurred to him without her, although it has to be said that the euphoria and hyperbole that characterize his premarital letters to her – "Dear love, dear only love forever, dear heart’s desire"-- are notably lacking in his restrained statements of faith. When he talks about the church itself (as opposed to the guardian angel that brought him forward) it is with respect for its rules, a grudging acceptance of its "unnatural" impositions on human life, in short the "unyielding façade" of the Rock of Peter that (as in the case of Evelyn Waugh) attracted many another English convert disgusted with modernity. Greene may well have fallen in love with a woman fantasized beyond human recognition, and then gotten God in the bargain -- for the "wrong reason." But the point is, as Sherry acknowledges, that both Vivien and her religion offered Greene an anchor, a way to channel energy and excitement, an excuse for hope in the face of a congenital predisposition to despair.

Neither anchor turns out to have held; or, rather, it seems to be in the nature of Greene to have to move on, out of safe harbor and into dangerous waters. The need to escape may be the heart of his matter. This was not at first the case in his marriage. Greene’s literary agent observed of the newlyweds at home that there was "a bit too much effusive affection in that flat." The sense of cuddly claustrophobia is suggested by the notes the couple sent to one another via their pet Pekinese ("Lovely and adored Pussina Love-Cat . . .") and the elaborate code they developed for public communication of private feelings. They made a thatched (if rat-infested) cottage in Chipping Camden their retreat from the world and, despite Catholic convictions, felt that the gift of children would be an absolute intrusion into their privacy. (Before the birth of their first child they actually considered giving up the baby for adoption and referred to the unborn as "the amoeba." Sherry says nothing about the two children born within the purview of this volume, giving the impression, however unjustly, that neither daughter nor son meant very much to "the life of Graham Greene," except as dependents to be provided for.)

If part of Greene needed this domestication, another force of greater magnitude wanted out. There were trips abroad, such as the wild jungle trek through Liberia in 1935 (roughly a year after the birth of his first child) , that while ostensibly undertaken as field work for publication were also ways of running away from home. Apparently there were also sexual infidelities: the chaste suitor willing to enter a monastic marriage of brother and sister -- one of Sherry’s revelations -- could not sustain the daily reality of the marriage bed. The inability to maintain his vows may indeed have led Greene to become skeptical about himself and finally unable to remain in the church. This seems in fact to be the gist of his confession in A Sort of Life, where Greene contrasts his state of resolve at the time of his conversion with his condition more than 20 years later, at a point (which Sherry suggests remains characteristic of the present) when "continual failure or the circumstances of our private life finally make it impossible to make any promises at all and many of us abandon Confession and Communion to join the Foreign Legion of the Church and fight for a city of which we are no longer full citizens."

To join the Foreign Legion of the Church, no longer able to be full citizens at home within it: this seems to define what has come to be called, more on the basis of the fiction than on knowledge of the author himself, a "Graham Greene Catholic." One thinks of the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, at once faithless to his vows and utterly faithful to his vocation. But there is also Pinkie in Brighton Rock, who (in Sherry’s characterization) "seeks with religious passion his own damnation," cursed by a religious sensibility and able only to choose the demonic. And then there is the atheist Bendrix, who, at the conclusion of The End of the Affair, allows that he would not take it amiss if the Hound of Heaven were at his heels: "I hope so. I hope so. I hope He is still dogging my footsteps."

Sherry begins his study with the recollection of an interview in 1983, when he visited Greene at his home in Antibes and spoke with him about religion. He opened the interview with questions about an event of which we will no doubt read in volume two: a 1949 trip to Rome in order to visit the reputed stigmatic, Padre Pio. Greene described with awe his memories of Pio at mass, the intensity of his celebration, and the clear signs of the stigmata on his hands. Although Greene had been granted a meeting with the priest, he decided against it: "I said, ‘No, I don’t want to. I don’t want to change my life by meeting a saint.’ And I felt that there was a good chance that he was one. He had a great peace about him."

So much of Greene’s predicament is expressed in that refusal: his obvious awe in the presence of holiness, his fear that exposure to it would transform his own life, his sense that "great peace" is at once the mark of the true saint and a condition not to be borne by himself. Confrontation and escape are the two impulses that drive him: the desire to see for himself and the need to avoid being "placed" by that vision. Guilt comes from the knowledge that one has betrayed what is worth dying for, but that -- short of the firing squad’s enforced moment of truth -- one cannot live for very long, or perhaps even at all, in the bright light of vision. It is better to hear the shots in the dark and hope (against so much experience) for the best.

In 1971 Greene wrote, "With the approach of death I care less and less about religious truth. One hasn’t long to wait for revelation or darkness." Almost two decades later, and now with his early life so extensively anatomized, the waiting time for insight or blindness must seem very short indeed. Norman Sherry’s Life tells us something about the man who has given us one notion of what it may mean to be a citizen fighting for a city that is no longer home. If Sherry does not penetrate the mystery of Greene’s character and personality, it may be because (no matter how diligently studied, no matter how much attention lavished) the life of anyone remains an enigma, a secret that cannot be disclosed.

Flannery O’Connor once said that any novelist who could survive her childhood had enough to write about for a lifetime. Had she herself lived longer she might have added a corollary: the writer who survives middle age will invariably want to tell the story of that childhood directly, in autobiography. It’s not that the events of one’s first ten or even 20 years are themselves particularly remarkable. Rather, it is the retrospective discovery (or creation) of significance that matters; the discovery that one has survived with a sense of purpose, or at least with a past. Looking backward from midstream reveals something unnoticed in the living: a pattern to events, the strange alternation between predictability and surprise, and most important of all, the private moment that turns out to seem of general interest.

This impulse to tell one’s story comes at a time when the end of life is suddenly all too imaginable. All of the past (but especially the years of childhood) becomes an endangered species worthy of memory’s protection. The urge to hold on tight takes over with the realizations usually reserved for Forty Something: parents can die, relationships meant to last forever come to an end, and the once invulnerable flesh proves astonishingly frail. At a point one hopes to be no less than halfway through – "midway in the journey of our life," according to Dante -- it is time at last to come to oneself.

Shoring up the fragments of the past against the future’s ruin (and savoring all the riches that in fact remain) , the autobiographer comforts us with the record of a continuous self and a coherent history. Self-indulgence is transcended as one person’s memoir becomes an open invitation to remember. It can also be an act of love. For just as we alone among the creatures are given the difficult gift of imagining our own death, we are also uniquely endowed with the ability to tell our stories to one another, to give ourselves away in narrative.

St. Augustine is usually credited as the one who invented the giveaway. Writing the Confessions in his early 40s, he remembered schoolboy fears, a pear tree plundered, books that shaped his life, the death of his mother -- all recalled as threads in a tapestry woven according to the inscrutable design of another. C. S. Lewis and Frederick Buechner have carried on Augustine’s memoir of conversion, less confident about the clarity of the design perhaps, but clear about the hand behind it. Annie Dillard is yet another case in point. Readers who know Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) , Holy the Firm (1977) and Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982) are not only familiar with the autobiographical turn of her writing, but also with the power of a religious imagination that, while recognizably Christian; roams free. We have watched her haul congregational communion wine in her knapsack and endure the longueurs of guitar masses. But it is outside the church that she is most at home. Like a worldly Julian of Norwich set loose on Thoreau’s pond, she has looked through to nature’s bottom and managed, without sentimentality, to find all manner of things to be well. If well, however, things are always cloaked in mystery and contradiction; the glory often hurts.

Or at least it used to. In An American Childhood (1987) , Dillard explores primarily her own life, and the social and historical world she recollects is largely free of nature’s tooth and claw; fewer creatures sputter into flame. It is a loving recollection with surprisingly few shadows: a happy middle age remembers this enviably happy childhood. Written midstream in her own life and career, the book stretches from her birth in 1945 ("on the day that Hitler died") to her departure for college in 1963. But the dots of significance with which Dillard constructs her tale do not conform to a discernible plan. They are all connected by faith alone; the hand that made us, here at least, is not divined. Dillard is indeed what her headmistress once despaired of: "a child of the twentieth century." The lament, however, should be taken as a compliment. This is an autobiography that rings true to contemporary readers.

As she grows, so does the history of the town. Beginning with its origins in the forest primeval – so dense, people said, that a squirrel could run the length of Pennsylvania without ever touching ground -- she leads us through its evolution: frontier fortification of the 18th century, industrial giant of Carnegie, Frick and Mellon, and "clean city" of the 1950s, dominated from the beginning by Scotch-Irish and Germans, political conservatives, and staunch Presbyterians, all driven by that "powerful Calvinist mix of piety and acquisitiveness." . Dillard comes from this elite. And until in adolescence Pittsburgh proved to be golden cage, it offered her childhood demiparadise, a perfect place to grow up.

Yet from the very beginning it seem to have been a paradise meant to be lost or at least left behind. Dillard’s story properly begins with her father’s cutting loose when she is ten. After years of reading Life on the Mississippi, he decides to quit his job in the family firm and sail his boat downriver to a New Orleans where Dixieland reigns supreme and music is always loud. The adventure soon palls and he returns to the wife and three young children he left behind. But Dillard is marked for good by the recklessness of his setting out, by the power of a book to go to one’s head, and by her father’s having confused leaving Pittsburgh with living.

What An American Childhood recounts as Dillard’s own waking up is her gradual discovery of this recklessness for herself. As a little girl she remembers standing at the window of her family’s big, warm house. Outside a snowstorm has transformed the neighborhood, and Jo Ann Sheehy defies the fates by skating in the open street, turning this way and that within the streetlamp’s yellow cone of light. "Was everything beautiful so bold?" The answer invariably is Yes. And so we watch as risks become revelations. A little girl roams free in an off-limits park; she pelts a car with snowballs and then runs breathlessly as the motorist pursues; she is mesmerized by the sight of a downed powerline -- a live wire -- as it melts the asphalt beneath it, "all but thrashing like a cobra and shooting a torrent of sparks"; she remembers being old enough to know better and yet running down Penn Avenue with arms flapping, risking pride and dignity in a zany attempt to fly.

For Dillard these small adventures are as exemplary of freedom as Augustine’s robbing the pear tree is of sin; indeed, they are Emersonian exhortations to "cobble up an original relation with the universe." For some it may be easy to explain this predilection for daring as the result of high-spirited, indulgent parents and the cushion of inherited wealth. Little girls may grow bold with impunity when there is a big warm house to return to, and when it looks down on Pittsburgh from the rarefied heights of Glen Arden Drive ("The next step was a seat at the right hand of God"). Yet it is precisely the privilege of Dillard’s background that she knew would clip her wings and force another life upon her: the country club and its obsessive cultivation of a suntan; years of dancing school and white cotton gloves; the fate of young ladies to take custody of unquestioned codes, to be "vigilantes of the trivial," to accept their destiny ("to marry Holden Caulfield’s roommate, and buy a house in Point Breeze, and send our children to dancing school")

Long before she takes off her cotton gloves there is an event, a "searing sight," that serves as a premonition of what is in the works. A Polyphemous moth hatching from its cocoon is maimed before Dillard’s eyes simply because the mason jar enclosing it is too small for its wingspread. Intending all along to set the moth free, her science teacher lets the crippled thing make its way along the school driveway, past "fine houses, expensive apartments, and fashionable shops," heading for certain death. The child felt pity and terror; the autobiographer breathes a sigh of relief. She got out in time.

Before adolescent rebellion made the getaway, however, Dillard learned to live in Pittsburgh with unalloyed joy, fully awake and close in touch with "this speckled mineral sphere, our present world." She stalks the backyards of her neighborhood, digs the earth for buried treasure, and learns honor and accuracy from baseball. But most of all, she reads. When her father is swept away by Life on the Mississippi, she is held fast in the arms of Kidnapped. Many other novels follow and later poetry. But it will come as no surprise to those who have watched Dillard scout Tinker Creek and Puget Sound that it was the natural history section of the Homewood Library that captivated her.

The Field Book of Ponds and Streams was her first discovery, "a small blue-bound book printed in fine type on thin paper, like The Book of Common Prayer." Another field guide to mineralogy guides her rock collection; there are books on butterflies, moths and insects to embolden her to "touch the rim of nightmare"; then a microscope to match her reading of Microbe Hunters. During this time of reading and looking, The Natural Way to Draw is also teaching her to record what she sees. It seems an exhilarating education, but also a solitary one. For while school bells ring throughout An American Childhood, neither classes nor teachers are memorable -- except, that is, for the informal instruction in joke-telling offered at home by both parents. What matters is what she read and what she saw by herself: "The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world."

Acquired in this reeling back and forth is information, what the boys learned while the girls got tan. But Dillard pursues not a research scientist’s compilation of interesting facts but the transfiguration of data into vision -- the exploration of invisible worlds that are revealed within the visible. Given the theological cast of her writing, one might expect to find in her memoir a portrait of the artist as a young Jonathan Edwards -- someone who (shortly before he went off to college) observed the curiosities of the flying spider, analyzed the optics of the rainbow, and then celebrated the glory of the creator as revealed in the natural creation. This, after all, is what the pilgrim in Dillard has been up to ever since Tinker Creek (even if under her watchful eye the sparrow seems to fall as often as not, and the rainbow stretches over many that are drowned). But the book does not show us a mystic in the making, or suggest that the girl bent over her microscope was looking beyond the hydra and rotifers into mystery. It does something better. It shows how a religious upbringing as attenuated and perfunctory as Dillard’s own -- she describes her stock as lapsed Presbyterian and believing Republican -- could yield an adult sensibility so extraordinarily rich and strange. To be sure, that story is only hinted at here. We have memories of Sunday school and Bible camp; an early suspicion of adult Christianity as hypocrisy; a sense of complicity between church and dancing school -- both drawing on a common list of acceptable folk and equally mad about white cotton gloves. Mild, mainline stuff. But there are also indications of a great deal more going on.

Later on Dillard catches that case of opposition, but it turns out that church is part of what she feels called to reject. The morning after her first "subscription dance," she finds herself sitting in the balcony of the Shadeyside Presbyterian Church, looking down her teenage nose at the Pittsburgh she presumes to know all too well. Imprisoned in a robber baron’s stone temple, she surveys the carpeted marble aisles, the women in mink and sable, the men accumulating dignity -- everybody "occupying their slots." She knew enough Bible to damn the whole lot of them to hell; she had also spent enough time in the whited sepulchre to do the next best thing and "plain quit." But insult is added to injury when she realizes that she would have to sit through an eternity of Communion. In a state of outrage against "the grape juice, the tailcoats, British vowels, sable stoles," she looks at the boys from dancing class in the expectation of fellow suffering and a shared smirk. "Was all this not absurd?" Apparently not.

To her astonishment she realizes that her friends are actually praying. Their eyes are tightly shut, their jaws work mysteriously -- in fact, they, are as inscrutable as the adults gathered beneath her, bowed and silent in a room where no one seemed to be breathing. "I was alert enough to feel, despite myself, some faint, thin stream of spirit braiding forward from the pews . . . There was no speech nor language. The people had been praying, praying to God, just as they seemed to be praying. That was the fact. I didn’t know what to make of it." For the first time in her life she doubts her own omniscience; she realizes, almost with the force of conversion, that there is more than she knows.

Such realizations are not enough to keep her in church, however. And so she decides to "plain quit," submitting her resignation to a minister who tells her, "I suppose you’ll be back soon." Dillard does not give us that return here; instead she leaves us at the point where her childhood left off, in an American dream of open roads and music loud enough for freedom. More than 20 years later, she finds herself no longer in Pittsburgh or with her parents, but "here now," at an unspecified latitude -- a seasoned pilgrim. "And I still break through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive." We can only hope that when it’s time she will once more dive down into the past and bring her progress up to date.