A Circle of Quiet

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  There’s a reason for this, chaps—though, like Alan’s chemistry master, I’m not sure what it is. No senior editor could possibly read all the manuscripts that come across his desk. A manuscript by an unknown writer obviously must be read first by someone with less experience than the senior editor’s, and there seems to be no solution to that problem. Editors are aware that good books are rejected because of this. Even a published writer is often read by the most junior of readers; Wrinkle was my seventh book. In about half the houses to which it was sent it was given the dignity of being read by one of the senior editors; in the other half it was not. And it is, I suppose, an odd book.

  When Hal Vursell was asked why they had accepted it when other publishers were afraid of it, he replied, both privately and publicly in a published article from which I quote briefly: “We have all, from time to time, chosen and published obviously superior books, a book not written to prescription or formula, one which we passionately believed to be far better than nine-tenths of what was currently being offered, only to have that very book still-born. Now editors have emotions, too, and when this happens, believe it or not, they bleed. All of us have a longer or shorter list of such books we still mourn. But if this happens to an editor too often, he loses his ability to judge and dare creatively; he has a strong urge to retreat permanently to the sluggish waters of ‘safe’ publishing. So to have refused A Wrinkle in Time carries no stigma of editorial cowardice; the bravest of us pause from time to time to bind up our wounds. It was our own good fortune that the manuscript reached us at a moment when we were ready to do battle again.”

  It was my good fortune, too.

  But one must not take good fortune too seriously. A librarian told me, with anxiety on my behalf, that she had known authors who, after winning such an award, were unable to write again; it produced such self-consciousness that the result was writer’s block. I was able to assure her that I was deep in the middle of another book, and that when I am writing I think of nothing but the book. Success or failure matters to me—and matters too much—after the book is written. I know what the book wanted to be, for each book has its own ontology; but have I managed, in revision after revision, to catch enough of the essential book that cried out to me to write it? I am never sure.

  Strange: if a review is good, I am delighted, but I don’t take it quite seriously. If a review is bad, I fall right into that old trap of hurt pride: hubris.

  During the writing, however, there is nothing but the book itself.

  During the ten years when practically nothing I wrote was published, I was as much writer qua writer as I am now; it may happen that there will come another time when I can’t find anyone to publish my work. If this happens it will matter. It will hurt. But I did learn, on that fortieth birthday, that success is not my motivation.

  I am grateful for that terrible birthday, which helps me to wear glass slippers lightly, very lightly. My laughing white china Buddha helps, too. He is barefooted.

  4

  One unexpected and joyful result of the Newbery Medal has been friends. I can’t possibly name them all; if I mention A. I can’t leave out B., and then there’s C., and on down through the whole alphabet. They have come to me, these warm and generous people, through talks across the country: a few minutes’ conversation, real talk, with somebody will lead to a correspondence out of which a deep friendship will grow. It just hap pens that several people have spoken lately about how we must learn not to need anybody; I know that I need my friends. All of them, even those I seldom see.

  I enjoy trekking about the country to give talks: I don’t do too many—my job is to write, not lecture, and it is also to stay home with my family and do the cooking. But I do love my occasional jaunts, although my hands still get cold with nervousness before I speak. It is not good to be too nervous, but I think it is essential to be a little nervous; one ought to care that much. My husband tells me that no matter how long a play has been running, he feels the same kind of nervousness every night before he goes on stage. It may be partly pride, but I think that it’s mostly the desire to do a good job, not for one’s own satisfaction, but for the sake of the job itself. It’s part of what Zeke and I talked about this July, and why I always say that psalm verse before starting.

  I also enjoy being on panels, either with grownups or with teenagers. One day Hal Vursell called me, after having made arrangements for me to be on a radio program where six youngsters from schools all over New York talk to a writer about his book. I’d been on this particular program several times before, and always enjoyed it, even if the kids pull no punches. If they don’t like something they say so. I learn, probably, more from what they don’t like than from their unqualified appreciation.

  Hal said, “Now I have something to tell you that I think will please you. Miss X said, ‘We do like to have Miss L’Engle on this program. Lots of people become very prima donna-ish when they’ve had as much success as she has, but it hasn’t affected her at all.’”

  Hasn’t it?

  Of course it has. It’s made me free to go out to meet people without tangling in the pride which is an inevitable part of the sense of failure. W. Somerset Maugham said, “The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people bitter and cruel.”

  I recorded this rather bitterly in my journal during the time of failure. It’s true. My very small success has had a joyfully liberating effect; so has passing the half-century mark and being happily married; I am free to reach out and touch people without being misunderstood.

  5

  When I talk with teachers (“in-depth” talking, I think the current jargon would have it) about teaching and the effect that teachers have on the lives of children I tell about two very different teachers I encountered in my early years in New York.

  I spent three years when I was very young in a school which was, as far as I was concerned, a foretaste of hell. It was a private school with a fine reputation, academically and socially. It was one of the “proper” schools for a New York child to attend. It did not occur to me that I could tell my parents that I was unhappy. I assumed that it was something to be gone through, and that if I was unhappy I had no one but myself to blame.

  In a sense, that is undoubtedly true, but it is not wholly true. At least some of it was the school’s fault, and my home-room teacher’s fault in particular.

  A lot of emphasis was put on athletic prowess in that school. I was a poor runner not just because of innate clumsiness but because an illness when I was three had left one leg shorter than the other, and whenever I was tired I limped. Undoubtedly I was too sensitive to the groans and moans of my classmates at gym; I should have been able to shrug it off and laugh; I couldn’t. So my unpopularity quickly extended beyond the gym to the rest of the school world. Our teacher, whose name I happily do not remember, accepted my classmates’ assessment of me. Not only was Madeleine clumsy; she was dumb. It wasn’t long before I stopped doing my homework: what was the use? The teacher always found fault with it, found something to laugh at, always held it up as an example of what not to do. When I went back to our apartment after school I read books of my own choosing, and I wrote stories and poems, painted pictures, played the piano.

  Out of the varied humiliations of that school there are two which stand out particularly. One must have happened during the first year there, and it caused me to discover the perfidy of adults. My parents might be rather more Olympian than the parents of most American children—I did not see a great deal of them while I was a child; at night, for instance, they dined at eight, and always in dinner clothes, and I had my supper in the nursery—but they were models of integrity. I could not imagine an adult doing anything that was wrong.

  Adults can, and do, and perhaps the earlier we discover it, the better for us. I was about eight, certainly old enough to have forgotten what i
t is like to wet one’s pants. One day in French class I asked to be excused. The French teacher must have been having problems with children wanting to leave the room for other reasons, and using the bathroom as an excuse, because she forbade me to go. I asked her three times, and three times was told, No. When the bell for the end of class rang I bolted from my desk and ran, but I couldn’t quite make it, and spent the rest of the afternoon sodden and shamed.

  When my mother heard what had happened, she demanded to see the principal. I remember with awful clarity the scene in the principal’s office, after the French teacher had been summoned. She said, “But Madeleine never asked to go to the bathroom. If she had only raised her hand, of course I would have excused her.”

  She was believed. I suppose the principal had to believe the teacher, rather than the child with wet clothes. I was reprimanded gently, told to ask the next time, and not to lie about it afterwards, it really wasn’t anything dreadful to make that kind of mistake.

  To have an adult lie, and to have another adult not know that it was a lie; to tell the truth myself and not be believed: the earth shook on its foundations.

  I wrote about this incident in Camilla, and writing about it helped: to take it away from the personal and objectify it made it comprehensible; I found that I had it in me to pity the French teacher and the principal.

  The second of the two incidents happened the spring of my last year there—for it made my mother change schools the following year. A poetry contest was announced for the entire lower school; the judge was to be the head of the upper-school English Department. The entries weren’t screened by the homeroom teachers, otherwise I wouldn’t have had a chance of getting anything in.

  When I won, there was great sound and fury. My teacher said that Madeleine must have copied the poem; she couldn’t possibly have written it; she isn’t very bright, you know.

  It was an issue big enough for my parents to hear about it. My mother produced the poems and stories I had been writing while I should have been doing homework, and it was finally conceded that Madeleine could have written that poem after all.

  I learned a lot about writing in this school—not directly, because I don’t think anybody taught me anything academically—but simply from doing it in order to survive. At O.S.U. this July we asked each other: how much pain and rejection and failure and humiliation can a child take? Pain can be a creative teacher, but there is a point where it is totally destructive. The span of endurance varies from child to child; it is never infinite. What would have happened if my parents had not been able to remove me from that particular school where teacher and student alike had me pegged as different and therefore a failure? I remember quite clearly coming home in the afternoon, putting my school bag down, and thinking, calmly and bitterly, “I am the cripple, the unpopular girl,” leaving my book bag where it lay, and writing a story for myself where the heroine was the kind of girl I would have liked to be.

  Warning, parents, teachers, friends: once a child starts to think of himself this way, it’s almost impossible for the “image”—I think that’s the right word here—to be changed. A few weeks ago the girlfriend of one of my ex-students called me long distance, weeping, because they were having problems. We talked for quite a long time, and I made some reference to my own youthful clumsiness in love, and she said in astonishment, “You were that way, too! I’ve always thought of you as being beautiful and wise and strong.”

  I was considerably more astonished than she. I still tend to think of myself in the mirror set up for me in that one school. I was given a self-image there, and not a self, and a self-image imposed on one in youth is impossible to get rid of entirely, no matter how much love and affirmation one is given later. Even after all these years, my instinctive image of myself is of someone gawky, clumsy, inadequate, stupid, unwanted, unattractive, in the way …

  A good deal of the time I can laugh about it. Two schools later—an English one—the irritated form mistress snapped, “Madeleine, can’t you come into a room without knocking over the furniture?” I couldn’t then, and seldom can now. It doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. I simply accept my multifarious black-and-blue spots. But there are times when I wish I believed in reincarnation. I would like to live a life as a ballerina.

  6

  At the school which followed that unfortunate one, I encountered a teacher whose name and face I do remember. I was there only a year, because the following summer we went to Europe to live; but a great deal can be accomplished in a year. My home-room teacher was one of five or six great teachers whose influence has helped shape my life. A young woman on her first job, she was the first to see any potential in a shy, gauche child. My mother tells of my bursting into our apartment, calling out joyfully, “Mother, Mother, you ought to scold me for the sin of gluttony!”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Miss Clapp liked my story so much that she read it out loud to the whole class, and I was so happy I just gloated and gloated.”

  Miss Clapp was Margaret Clapp, recently retired as president of Wellesley College.

  She didn’t make me over completely; I never became graceful, or good at gym, or the most popular girl in school. But I did make friends. And I wrote at least as much during that year, while doing my homework as well, as I had written before. I wrote a sequel to the Odyssey, with Telemachus as the hero, and painted lurid illustrations, for a class project. I also wrote my first novel. Fortunately it has been lost, but I remember the plot. It had to do with triplets, boys; one was superb at sports; one was superb academically; and the third was superb socially. So they passed themselves off as one young man and, considering their combined talents, they did very well indeed. Then one of them fell in love and wanted to marry, and he had to tell his sweetheart that he was only one-third of himself.

  She walked away from him. All was over. I recall the last line, because I still remember how grownup and sophisticated I felt as I wrote it: “He said nothing. What was there to say?”

  I wrote poems, too. Looking through some old journals, I came across several. There was one, notable for its arrogance, if nothing else:

  We lived on 82nd Street and the Metropolitan Museum was my short cut to Central Park. I wrote:

  I go into the museum

  and look at all the pictures on the walls.

  Instead of feeling my own insignificance

  I want to go straight home and paint.

  A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn’t diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of creation behind the universe. This surge of creativity has nothing to do with competition, or degree of talent. When I hear a superb pianist, I can’t wait to get to my own piano, and I play about as well now as I did when I was ten. A great novel, rather than discouraging me, simply makes me want to write. This response on the part of any artist is the need to make incarnate the new awareness we have been granted through the genius of someone else.

  I used the word “arrogant” about those verses. I take it back. I don’t think it’s arrogance at all. It is beauty crying out for more beauty.

  Surely Miss Clapp must have taught me more than I remember. She encouraged me not only to write but to read, giving me books that would stretch my mind and my vocabulary, push me beyond my capacity. There weren’t any limited-vocabulary books in those days. I learned vocabulary by coming across new words in my reading for fun (I’m not speaking about textbooks; that’s a different matter and I’m not qualified either to criticize or to praise them). I didn’t stop to look up the new words; I was far too interested in what I was reading. By the time I’d come across a word in two or three books, the shades of its meaning would automatically come clear, and the word would be added to my vocabulary.

  I have a profound conviction that it is most dangerous to tamper with the word. I’ve been asked why it’s wrong to provide the author of a pleasure book, a non-textbook, with a controlled-vocabularly list. First
of all, to give an author a list of words and tell him to write a book for children using no word that is not on the list strikes me as blasphemy. What would have happened to Beatrix Potter if she had written in the time of controlled vocabulary? Lettuce has a soporific effect on Peter Rabbit. “Come come, Beatrix, that word is beyond a child’s vocabulary.” “But it’s the right word, it’s the only possible word.” “Nonsense. You can’t use soporific because it’s outside the child’s reading capacity. You can say that lettuce made Peter feel sleepy.”

  I shudder.

  To give a writer a controlled-vocabulary list is manipulating both writer and reader. It keeps the child within his present capacity, on the bland assumption that growth is even and orderly and rational, instead of something that happens in great unexpected leaps and bounds. It ties the author down and takes away his creative freedom, and completely ignores the fact that the good writer will always limit himself. The simplest word is almost always the right word. I am convinced that Beatrix Potter used “soporific” because it was, it really and truly was, the only right word for lettuce at that moment. One of my favorite authors, Anon, wrote, centuries ago:

  The written word

  Should be clean as bone,

  Clear as light,

  Firm as stone.

  Two words are not

  As good as one.

  I should pay more attention to those lines than I do. The writer who listens to them will do his own limiting, but it will come from inside, it will come from a creative response and not from an arbitrary restriction, which is the structure that imprisons instead of the structure that liberates.

  The more limited our language is, the more limited we are; the more limited the literature we give to our children, the more limited their capacity to respond, and therefore, in their turn, to create. The more our vocabulary is controlled, the less we will be able to think for ourselves. We do think in words, and the fewer words we know, the more restricted our thoughts. As our vocabulary expands, so does our power to think. Try to comprehend an abstract idea without words: we may be able to imagine a turkey dinner. But try something more complicated; try to ask questions, to look for meaning: without words we don’t get very far. If we limit and distort language, we limit and distort personality.