A Circle of Quiet

by Madeleine L'engle

  I’m not sure how long after this it was that a man and his wife started some vicious and absurdly untrue gossip about Hugh and me and three other couples, all with jobs in the church: we were, between us, a trustee, a deacon, Sunday School superintendent, Sunday School teachers, choir members and director, and general scrubbers. The man and his wife were leaving town, and why they wanted to destroy those of us who had tried to be their friends we will never know. They were, I suppose, sick (the wife was what my godmother once called menopoisonous), and their lies were so fantastic that one could only be amazed, not angry. Basically, the accusation was that we were all Communist agents. It would have been funny indeed except for one thing: people were eager to believe the lies. It was during the sad reign of Senator Joseph McCarthy; witch-hunting was in the air; but we were still unprepared.

  We ought not to have been so shocked and hurt. An eagerness to believe ill of others in order to feel virtuous oneself is to some extent in all of us. It is perhaps more visible in small communities. Certainly it is not unique in our village. But we were hurt, desperately hurt. Hugh and I knew nothing about it until Thanksgiving afternoon, when the other three couples asked if they could come over for a conference. At first it seemed so incredible that we tended not to take it seriously, to laugh, and probably that was what we ought to have done. But our laughter stopped. Someone said, “If that’s the way they feel about us, if they want us out of the church, then I think we ought to get out. I think the thing to do is for all of us to resign. I don’t mean that we should stop going to church, but we shouldn’t hold any offices in it.”

  This was the consensus. I was the lone voice saying, “No!” I loved the choir; I loved my high-school Sunday free-for-all discussion group; I might be terribly unsure about God, but I was happy working in his house. I said, “If we resign, it’s admitting that they’re right about us.” But finally I gave in, so that the resignation would be unanimous. We wrote it out—I forget exactly what we said—and sent it to the senior and junior deacons.

  In a village our size, everybody knows everybody: the senior deacon was the father of two of the brightest boys in my discussion group; the junior deacon, who would become senior deacon at the first of the year, is our family doctor; his youngest daughter was—still is—one of our daughter Josephine’s friends. This kind of close relationship existed for all of us.

  So we waited for their response.

  And went to choir rehearsal.

  The story, in various versions, was, of course, all over town. When I walked into the church Grandma was there to meet me; she had to talk to me before we started rehearsal. Now, I was quite certain that Grandma would have heard the whole sorry tale from a great many people who would like to see us put down. I loved Grandma, and I thought that Grandma loved me, but I doubted her.

  Grandma said to me, “Madeleine, I just want you to know that if you go, I go, too.”

  Grandma was offering to give up the organ. Grandma was giving me herself.

  That absolute gesture of love is what remains with me.

  The deacons tore up our resignation. The gossip blew over—though, after all these years, there are still a few people with whom I feel very tentative. But only a few.

  19

  Grandma gave me herself, and so helped to give me myself. Is that what Yetta was getting at? Yetta being Yetta, I think it was. But it’s one thing to talk consciously about giving oneself away and another to do it, for it must be done completely unselfconsciously; it is not a do-it-yourself activity. No computer can teach it; no computer can show a child compassion, or how to allow people to be different, to experiment, to love. Almost all the joyful things of life are outside the measure of I Q tests, are beyond the realm of provable fact. A person is needed. But if any teacher, no matter how qualified, no matter how loving, goes into a classroom thinking, “I am going to give a child a self,” it can’t possibly happen.

  Zeke, one of the Fellows at O.S.U., saw this quickly. Zeke is a Ph.D. candidate, father of four, lay preacher in a Pentecostal church; we couldn’t come from more different traditions, but we found that we had all the essential things in common. The morning after Yetta had started the discussion on giving the child a self, Zeke brought me this quotation from G. A. Young, an Omaha psychiatrist: “The compulsion for me to get my cotton-pickin’ fingers on my fellow man is the natural result of my belief that I have the word. If I do have the word and feel surrounded by unmolded clay, I have no choice but to mold. When I do this, I begin playing God, and as a result usually raise the devil.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, “let’s share this with everybody.” And I had a similar quotation for Zeke, written about a hundred years earlier, by George MacDonald, Congregational parson and writer of superb fantasy for both children and adults. I had taken with me to Ohio a small collection of extracts from MacDonald, compiled by C. S. Lewis, and read the following quotation one morning before breakfast, and wrote in my journal that it was vitally important for me to remember it during the two Writer in Residence weeks: “Am I going to do a good deed? Then, of all times,—Father, into thy hands: lest the enemy should have me now.”

  Just as I had wanted to copy the G. A. Young, Zeke wanted to copy the MacDonald.

  “There’s one sort of important difference,” I said, tentatively, because it was just coming into my conscious mind, and I wasn’t sure I could find the right words for it. “George MacDonald implies that as long as we put ourselves into God’s hands, then maybe something good can happen, not because of us, but because he helps. I have a feeling that if I read only G. A. Young, I’d be terrified ever to enter a classroom again, or start another book.” And then I said, “I’ve just remembered another quotation: this one’s from the Psalms. Whenever I’m going to teach a class or give a speech, I always think of it, and hold onto it: Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy Name give the praise; for thy loving mercy, and for thy truth’s sake.”

  “Yes,” Zeke said, and marked that down, too.

  It was easy to say this to Zeke, because we work from the same premise. It wasn’t easy to say it to the entire group. I’m always afraid of sounding pompous, or pious, in the pejorative sense of piosity. When I was an extremely naughty child in an English boarding school, the worst thing that we could call anybody was “pi.” I still think it’s an abominable characteristic.

  And, I suppose, quoting MacDonald and the Psalms, and then sounding off about them myself, I was afraid of looking as though I were going to deliver a mountain and coming forth with a mouse: of being obvious.

  I wonder if I will ever learn not to apologize for the obvious?

  20

  There has been much to teach me about the ontology of things this summer: the blueberry bush; Thomas, the amber cat, and Tyrrell, the large amber dog, diligently washing each other’s faces in harmony and amity; the younger members of the Crosswicks family climbing up onto our big four-poster bed for hot chocolate at midnight; the babies’ incredibly beautiful bare bodies as I help give them their baths before dinner: all these, and many more awarenesses, are proof of my word for this summer.

  It is this kind of awareness which I demand from my students in the seminar in writing practices I give somewhere or other each year. I like the name writing practices better than Creative Writing. As I have said, nobody can teach creative writing—run like mad from anybody who thinks he can. But one can teach practices, like finger exercises on the piano; one can share the tools of the trade, and what one has gleaned from the great writers: it is the great writers themselves who do the teaching, rather than the leader of a seminar. It doesn’t take long for the gifted student to realize that there are certain things the great writers always do, and certain things they never do; it is from these that we learn.

  Henry James tells us: Render, do not report. The writing of fiction is an entirely different discipline from the writing of journalism, and I have to warn my students that I can teach them nothing about journalism; a journalist
must report; he tells, rather than shows. The two techniques are almost diametrically opposite. The writer of fiction—and I include in this all the works of the imagination, poetry, plays, realistic novels, fantasy—may never tell; he must show, and show through the five senses. “Describe this room in which we’re sitting,” I say, “and make use of all five of your senses. Don’t tell us. Show us.” The beginning writer finds this difficult. I have to repeat and repeat: fiction is built upon the concrete. A news article is essentially transitory and may be built upon sand. The house of fiction must be built upon rock. Feel, smell, taste, hear, see: show it.

  Dante says: “You cannot understand what I write unless you understand it in a fourfold way: on the literal level, the moral level, the allegorical level, and the anagogical level.” What is this anagogical level? It’s not easy to define, because it is out of the realm of provable fact. It is most easily discernible in the great works of fantasy, such as Dante’s own Inferno. The best science fiction is anagogical; the Apocalypse is anagogical. Thinking about icons helps me to understand what Dante meant by the word “anagogical.” I do not believe that it is a level that is ever used consciously even by the greatest writers. It is that level of a book which breaks the bounds of time and space and gives us a glimpse of the truth, that truth which casts the shadows into Plato’s cave, the shadows which are all we mortals are able to see.

  I have had to accept that one cannot talk even in the most technical way about the writing of fiction, without talking about being (the why of the blueberry bush). Even the driest rules of syntax involve, in their explication, a sharing of self. Someone asks, for instance, why we need bother with syntax at all. I reply that Herbert Read says that the only difference between man and beast is syntax; and a hot discussion is on. I would worry more about our digressions if some very fine writing didn’t come out of these seminars.

  All explanations involve particulars; one cannot render without being specific. Try to explain anything in generalities: it just doesn’t work. There are particular rules to the baking of a cake (I can hear my family and friends asking: “How would you know? when did you last bake a cake?” I’ll tell you about my last cake later; it’s important), the cooking of a boeuf bourguignon (I do know how to do that), or the putting together of an automobile engine, or a radio, or a television set. This need for particularity is equally true in storytelling. The great writers start out by giving the reader, immediately, the ontology of the protagonist; or, to put it in the form of a literary rule, a writer should immediately tell the reader four things:

  1: Who the story is about.

  2: What he is doing.

  3: Where he is doing it.

  4: When he is doing it.

  The reader must be placed in action, space, and time. In a good story we find out very quickly about the hero the things we want to know about ourselves.

  One cannot discuss structure in writing without discussing structure in all life; it is impossible to talk about why anybody writes a book or paints a picture or composes a symphony without talking about the nature of the universe. I warn my students that when I get dogmatic about such weighty matters it is usually when I am most unsure of myself. “Any time I make a categorical statement, and I’m going to make lots of them during these sessions, we had all better beware.” I am learning to expect questions I cannot answer—that’s easy; I just say that I can’t answer them. What is far more difficult is questions I would rather not answer.

  A winter ago I had an after-school seminar for high-school students and in one of the early sessions Una, a brilliant fifteen-year-old, a born writer who came to Harlem from Panama five years ago, and only then discovered the conflict between races, asked me out of the blue: “Mrs. Franklin, do you really and truly believe in God with no doubts at all?”

  “Oh, Una, I really and truly believe in God with all kinds of doubts.”

  But I base my life on this belief.

  21

  Una kept pushing me, wanting to know (I think wanting to be reassured) if I really believed in God. One day she brought it up at the beginning of the class, and the others seemed to want to talk too, so I plunged in: “There are three ways you can live life—three again—remember that the great writers almost always do things in threes. You can live life as though it’s all a cosmic accident; we’re nothing but an irritating skin disease on the face of the earth. Maybe you can live your life as though everything’s a bad joke. I can’t.”

  They couldn’t, either, though for some of the kids who sat around the table that day not much had happened to make them think that life is anything else.

  “Or you can go out at night and look at the stars and think, yes, they were created by a prime mover, and so were you, but he’s aloof perfection, impassible, indifferent to his creation. He doesn’t care, or, if he cares, he only cares about the ultimate end of his creation, and so what happens to any part of it on the way is really a matter of indifference. You don’t matter to him, I don’t matter to him, except possibly as a means to an end. I can’t live that way, either.”

  Again there was general agreement.

  “Then there’s a third way: to live as though you believe that the power behind the universe is a power of love, a personal power of love, a love so great that all of us really do matter to him. He loves us so much that every single one of our lives has meaning; he really does know about the fall of every sparrow, and the hairs of our head are really counted. That’s the only way I can live.”

  That seemed to make a certain amount of sense to them, so I thought that it was time to get down to the business of writing practices. Such discussions are inevitable in a writing seminar, and anything that stretches the mind is a help to the potential author. But my main job is to try to share the tools of the trade, so I said, “Now let’s talk about punctuation. Punctuation is one of your chief tools in writing a story. I break the rules of punctuation over and over again, but before you may break a rule you must know what it is, and exactly why you’re breaking it.”

  So we did a small run-down on punctuation, and I told them some of the devices I’ve found useful. When I’m giving conversation in the present I use a double quotation mark: “When I’m giving conversation in the past of a story, I use a single quotation mark: And when I’m using interior conversation, interior monologue, I use the French symbol for conversation:—. This saves a lot of “he thought” and “she thought.”

  I love semicolons and colons. And punctuation serves to indicate rhythm. A semicolon is a longer pause than a comma, and a colon means really sitting back and taking note, but doesn’t indicate a conclusion, like a period mark, or, as the English call it, a full stop.

  Dashes should be used with respect. I seldom use them in a novel, except in conversation. I love them in letters. Exclamations and italics are like four-letter words, best used very sparingly.

  Copy editors, except the present one at F S & G, who is an artist herself, are apt to monkey around with punctuation. You have to watch them like a hawk.

  When A Wrinkle in Time went into galleys, the copy editor—I’m glad I haven’t the faintest idea who it was—had him/herself a ball. First of all, I do spell the English way; I was in an English boarding school when I was twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, and these are the years when spelling gets set. After I had been made to write h-o-n-o-u-r, for instance, a hundred times on a blackboard several hundred times, it was almost impossible for me to spell it h-o-n-o-r. The English use t-o-w-a-r-d-s and we use t-o-w-a-r-d. I like to use them both, depending on the rhythm of the sentence and the letter which begins the following word; sometimes the s is needed; sometimes not: this is, I realize, rather erratic, and I can’t blame the copy editor who tries to talk me out of it. Then there’s grey, which is English, and one very definite, bird-wing, ocean-wave color to me; and gray, which is American, and a flatter, more metallic color. Then there are the c and s words, such as practice or practise. About words like these I’m simply in a state of
confusion, rather than aesthetic persuasion, as with grey or towards, and the copy editor can have his way. On the whole I tell the copy editor to go ahead and make the spelling American, but don’t muck around with the punctuation.

  The worst thing the copy editor did with A Wrinkle in Time was with the three strange Mrs Ws. Now, Mr and Mrs are usually spelled Mr and Mrs in England, and Mr. and Mrs. in America. Usually I spell them the American way, or try to remember to. But the Mrs W were extra-special as well as extra-terrestrial, and I very deliberately did not put the period after their Mrs’s. With Mr. and Mrs. Murry, who, scientists or no, were solid earth folk, I did put in the period. It was important to me. It was, I should have thought, obvious that it was done with forethought, but the copy editor went through the manuscript and put a period after every Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which.

  When I got the galleys I was appalled. I called my editor and told him what had happened. He was sorry, though certainly it was not a matter of vital import to him, as it was to me. He said, “If you insist, we’ll take the periods out, but it will cost a fortune.” If I insisted I would be acting like an impossible and temperamental author (I am convinced that I am the most gentle, pliable, easily managed author-wife-mother who ever walked the earth), and my editors would not be pleased. And they were taking a risk on a book that almost every other publisher in the business had turned down, and I was more than grateful. So I didn’t insist. But it bothered me (it still does).

  When the book was done in England, at last I was able to get the punctuation the way I wanted it: joy! though (temperamental author again?) I wasn’t wholly satisfied on two counts: the publishers thought the book was too long for English children, and a few cuts were made; they weren’t disastrous, but I think they shouldn’t have been made; everything that could be cut had already been cut before the original publication. Then, I was asked if I would mind if the setting of the story were identified as being in America. I replied that I didn’t think it was very important, but if they felt it to be essential, go ahead.