Walking on Water

by Madeleine L'engle

  So the use of the name of Jesus is no criterion. And the fact that “Christian” stories are still story further complicates things, for story touches on the realm of art, and art itself is looked on as something unfit for the real world. There’s another New Yorker cartoon that shows a woman opening the door of her house to a friend. We look through the door, and in the back of the house a man is writing at a typewriter, with a large manuscript piled on the desk beside him. The friend asks, “Has your husband found a job yet? Or is he still writing?”

  A successful businesswoman had the temerity to ask me about my royalties, just at the time when my books were at last making reasonable earnings. When told, she was duly impressed and remarked, “And to think, most people would have had to work so hard for that.” I choked over my tea, not wanting to laugh in her face.

  A young friend of mine was asked what she did, and when she replied that she was a poet, the inquirer responded, amused, “Oh, I didn’t mean your hobby.”

  So it is not only the church that fobs off art as untrue or unreal, and art for children is the most looked-down-on of all.

  —

  Whether a story is to be marketed for grownups or for children, the writer writes for himself, out of his own need, otherwise the story will lack reality. There is no topic which is of itself taboo; if it springs from the writer’s need to understand life and all its vagaries and vicissitudes, if it is totally honest and unself-pitying, then it will have the valid ring of truth. If it is written because it is what is at the moment fashionable, and not out of the writer’s need, then it is apt to be unbelievable, and what is unbelievable can often be shocking and even pornographic—and this includes some recent children’s books.

  The world wants to shove us into what it considers the appropriate pigeonhole. I do not like to be labelled as a “Christian children’s writer” because I fear that this will shove me even further into the pigeonhole which began to be prepared for me when A Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery medal. If I am so labelled, then the implication is that I am to be read only by children, and Christian children at that. Though the chief reason that Wrinkle was rejected for over two years and by thirty-odd publishers was because it is a difficult book for many adults, the decision was made to market it as a children’s book; it won a medal for children’s books. Therefore, I am a children’s writer, and that is all I’m allowed to be.

  But I’m a writer. That’s enough of a definition. (I infinitely prefer to say that I am a Christian than to mention any denomination, for such pigeonholing is fragmenting, in religion as in art.) So. I am a Christian. I am a writer. When I am grappling with ideas which are radical enough to upset grownups, then I am likely to put these ideas into a story which will be marketed for children because children understand what their parents have rejected and forgotten. Because I am a struggling human being; trying to make sense out of the meaninglessness of much of life in this century and daily searching for revelatory truth in Scripture, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever want to write novels of pessimism or porno, no matter how realistic my work. But I don’t want to be shut in, labelled, the key turned, so that I am not able to grow and develop, as a Christian, as a writer. I want that freedom which is a large part of the Christian promise, and I don’t want any kind of label to diminish that freedom. It is sad and ironic to have to admit that it does.

  —

  To write a story is an act of Naming; in reading about a protagonist I can grow along with, I myself am more named. And we live in a world which would reduce us to our social-security numbers. Area codes, zip codes, credit-card codes, all take precedence over our names. Our signatures already mean so little that it wouldn’t be a surprise if, sometime in the near future, we, like prisoners, are known only by our numbers.

  But that is not how it was meant to be. Coleridge writes,

  The Jews would not willingly tread upon the smallest piece of paper in their way, but took it up; for possibly, said they, the name of God may be upon it. Though there was a little superstition in this, yet truly there is nothing but good religion in it, if we apply it to man. Trample not on any; there may be some work of grace there, that thou knowest not of. The name of God may be written upon that soul thou treadest on; it may be a soul that Christ thought so much of as to give his precious blood for it; therefore, despise it not.

  The name of God is so awe-full, so unpronounceable, that it has never been used by any of his creatures. Indeed, it is said that if, inadvertently, the great and terrible name of God should be spoken, the universe would explode. The letters YHWH are a jumble of Hebrew consonants, and a better translation than “Jehovah” is “The Lord.”

  But we, the creatures, are named, and our names are part of our wholeness. It used to be a moment of great importance when someone said, “Oh, don’t call me Mrs. X. Call me Anne—or Katherine. Alex or John. My name is a gift which I offer to you.”

  Now the name is taken automatically—grabbed away. On television programs, the interviewer immediately calls whoever he is interviewing—head of state, composer, scientist—by the first name.

  I love the rare moments when I am permitted to offer my name to someone. And I love the letters which begin “Dear Madeleine,” because the writers feel that I have already given the gift of the name through the books. And I remember times when I have been given a name—and to be given a name is an act of intimacy as powerful as any act of love.

  —

  A French priest, conducting a retreat, said,

  To love anyone is to hope in him always. From the moment at which we begin to judge anyone, to limit our confidence in him, from the moment at which we identify [pigeonhole] him, and so reduce him to that, we cease to love him, and he ceases to be able to become better. We must dare to love in a world that does not know how to love.

  We are to be children of the light, and we are meant to walk in the light, and we have been groping along in the darkness. The creative act helps us to emerge into the light, that awful light which the disciples saw on the Mount of Transfiguration, and which the Hebrew children saw on the face of Moses when he had been talking with God on Mount Sinai.

  If we are blind and foolish, so were the disciples. They simply failed to understand what the light was about—these three disciples who were closest to him. They wanted to trap Jesus, Elijah, and Moses in tabernacles, tame them, pigeonhole and label them, as all of us human beings have continued to do ever since.

  It seems that more than ever the compulsion today is to identify, to reduce someone to what is on the label. To identify is to control, to limit. To love is to call by name and so open the wide gates of creativity. But we forget names and turn to labels; there are many familiar ones today, such as:

  • Fairy tales are not real and should be outgrown.

  • Christians are people who are not strong enough to do it alone.

  • Bach is mathematical; therefore he does not write with emotion.

  • Chopin is only a romantic.

  • El Greco must have had astigmatism to account for his elongated people.

  • All Victorian poets had TB.

  • Roman Catholics are not Christians.

  • Protestants cannot understand Holy Communion.

  • People who write for children are second-class and cannot write for adults.

  And the list could go on and on and on…

  If we are pigeonholed and labeled we are unnamed.

  —

  Last spring I was briefly in Jerusalem as the guest of the publishers who were bringing out a book of illustrations of the Old Testament by children all over the world, wonderful people who asked me to write the text to go with the pictures, and who knew me by name. During my stay, in which I was driven about the countryside to see as many Old Testament sites and sights as possible, I was entirely within the Jewish community. To my surprise, several times I heard, in times of stress or irritation, “Oh, Christ!”

  So, I repeat, the number of times the n
ame of Jesus is invoked has little or nothing to do with whether or not a book is Christian. But before I struggle further with what is or is not a Christian children’s book, I think it’s important to ask: What is a children’s book?

  Added to the assumption that if you don’t have enough talent to write for adults, you might try writing a book for children, is the further insult that if you really work hard and discover that you have more talent than you thought you had, you might advance enough to write a book for adults.

  If you are not good enough to write a book for adults, you are certainly not good enough to write a book for children. I had written and published several “regular” novels before I dared try my hand at a children’s novel. (I say “regular” novel because I was gently told by a friend that today the word adult in front of novel means porno.)

  And that’s just another example of pigeonholing.

  Nancy Berkowitz, long a great friend of children’s books and their writers, told me last year that I’d given her the best definition of a children’s book that she’d heard. Having completely forgotten ever giving such a definition, I asked eagerly, “What was it?”

  “A children’s book is any book a child will read.”

  First my children and now my grandchildren are proof of this, moving from children’s books marketed for their own age range—the girls are ten and eleven years old—to any grown-up novel I think would appeal to them. All they require is a protagonist with whom they can identify (and they prefer the protagonist to be older than they are), an adventure to make them turn the pages, and the making of a decision on the part of the protagonist. We name ourselves by the choices we make, and we can help in our own naming by living through the choices, right and wrong, of the heroes and heroines whose stories we read.

  To name is to love. To be Named is to be loved. So in a very true sense the great works which help us to be more named also love us and help us to love.

  —

  One summer I taught a class in techniques of fiction at a midwestern university. About halfway through the course, one of the students came up to me after class and said, “I do hope you’re going to teach us something about writing for children. That’s really why I’m taking this course.”

  “What have I been teaching you?”

  “Well—writing.”

  “Don’t you write when you write for children?”

  “Well—but isn’t it different?”

  No, it is not different. The techniques of fiction are the techniques of fiction. They hold as true for Beatrix Potter as they do for Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Characterization, style, theme, are as important in a children’s book as in a novel for grownups. Taste, as always, will differ (spinach vs. beets again). A child is not likely to identify with the characters in Faulkner’s Sanctuary. Books like A Wrinkle in Time may seem too difficult to some parents. But if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.

  So what, then, are the differences?

  Most of them are minor, and apparent. A child wants to read about another child, a child living in and having adventures in a world which can be recognized and accepted. As long as what the protagonist does is true, this world can be unlimited, for a child can identify with a hero in ancient Britain, darkest Africa, or the year two thousand and ninety-three.

  When I was a child I browsed through my parents’ books when I had finished my own. What was not part of my own circumference of comprehension I simply skipped; sex scenes when I was eight or nine had little relevance for me, so I skipped over them. They didn’t hurt me because they had no meaning for me. In a book which is going to be marketed for children it is usually better to write within the child’s frame of reference, but there is no subject which should, in itself, be taboo. If it is essential for the development of the child protagonist, there is nothing which may not be included. It is how it is included which makes its presence permissible or impermissible. Some books about—for instance—child abuse are important and deeply moving; others may be little more than a form of infant porno.

  Children don’t like antiheroes. Neither do I. I don’t think many people do, despite the proliferation of novels in the past few decades with antiheroes for protagonists. I think we all want to be able to identify with the major character in a book—to live, suffer, dream, and grow through vicarious experience. I need to be able to admire the protagonist despite his faults and so be given a glimpse of my own potential. There have been a few young-adult novels written recently with antiheroes; from all reports they are not the books which are read and reread. We don’t want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don’t want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination.

  —

  One summer at a writer’s conference I felt that something was wrong with most of the juvenile manuscripts I received—not all of them, but enough so that it worried me, especially because I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong.

  On the last day of the conference all the workshops were open, and almost everybody attended them all. Most of the students had been in two or three workshops, so I had the opportunity to listen to poems, stories, sections of novels, written by the men and women from my workshop. In almost every case, the work in the other workshops was better than the work they had turned in to me, and I discovered to my horror that they had been writing down, not so much down to children as down to themselves, writing below their own capacity. I listened to an excellent story written by a young man who had turned in some indifferent material to me, and after class I figuratively shook him as I said, “That is the way you write for children: the way you wrote that story, not the—junk you wrote for me.”

  A child is not afraid of new ideas, does not have to worry about the status quo or rocking the boat, is willing to sail into uncharted waters. Those tired old editors who had a hard time understanding A Wrinkle in Time assumed that children couldn’t understand it either. Even when Farrar, Straus and Giroux, to which house I am devoted, decided to risk taking it, they warned me that they did not expect it to sell well, and they did not think it could possibly be read by anyone under high school age. This is the typical underestimation of the adult as to the capacity of children to understand philosophical, scientific, and theological concepts. But there is no idea that is too difficult for children as long as it underlies a good story and quality writing.

  As to Wrinkle, it reflects my discovery that higher math is easier than lower math, that higher math deals with ideas, asks questions which may not have single answers. My reading of Einstein, Planck, Dessauer, Eddington, Jeans, Heisenberg, etc., was for me an adventure in theology. I had been reading too many theologians, particularly German theologians. I was at a point in my life where my faith in God and the loving purposes of Creation was very insecure, and I wanted desperately to have my faith strengthened. If I could not believe in a God who truly cared about every atom and subatom of his creation, then life seemed hardly worth living. I asked questions, cosmic questions, and the German theologians answered them all—and they were questions which should not have been answered in such a finite, laboratory-proof manner. I read their rigid answers, and I thought sadly, If I have to believe all this limiting of God, then I cannot be a Christian. And I wanted to be one.

  I had yet to learn the faithfulness of doubt. This is often assumed by the judgmental to be faithlessness, but it is not; it is a prerequisite for a living faith.

  Francis Bacon writes in De Augmentis, “If we begin with certainties, we will end in doubt. But if we begin with doubts and bear them patiently, we may end in certainty.”

  The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing writes, “By love God may be gotten and holden, but by thought or understanding, never.”

  Love, not answers.

  Love, which trusts God so implicitly despite the cl
oud (and is not the cloud a sign of God?), that it is brave enough to ask questions, no matter how fearful.

  It was the scientists, with their questions, their awed rapture at the glory of the created universe, who helped to convert me. In a sense, A Wrinkle in Time was my rebuttal to the German theologians. It was also my affirmation of a universe in which I could take note of all the evil and unfairness and horror and yet believe in a loving Creator. I thought of it, at that time, as probably a very heretical book, theologically speaking, which is a delightful little joke at my expense, because it is, I have been told, theologically a completely orthodox book. The Holy Spirit has a definite sense of humour.

  —

  I’ve finally discovered a way to make the point that writing is writing, whether the story is for the chronologically young or old. I give whatever group I am teaching two assignments. The first is to write an incident from their childhood or adolescence which was important to them. “Write in the first person. Nothing cosmic, just an incident. And do not write this for children. Repeat: Do not write this for children. Write it for yourselves. Write it for each other.”

  When I am giving this assignment as part of a juvenile’s workshop at a writer’s conference, I will already have read the stories and chapters of books which the conferees have submitted. Thus far, in every case, the work they hand in for this assignment is better than the stories they wrote “for children.”

  I repeat, “But you don’t write ‘for children.’ You write for yourselves. Do you understand how much better this work is than the story you submitted when you were writing ‘for children’?”

  The second assignment follows: “Rewrite this story, this time in the third person and from the point of view of someone else in it.”