A Circle of Quiet

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  The primary needs can be filled without language. We can eat, sleep, make love, build a house, bear children, without language. But we cannot ask questions. We cannot ask, “Who am I? Who are you? Why?”

  One of our best writers of teenage books, someone whose work I deeply admire, wrote an article saying that he is not going to write for teenagers any more because his sons have now grown up, and teenagers have changed so that he no longer understands them.

  I am horrified. He is implying that he no longer has a language in which to communicate with teenagers, because teenagers have changed; but it is not change that makes language invalid, it is refusal to change. Teenagers, like the rest of us, are always changing. Every generation is different. Teenagers during the time when the Black Plague was decimating the world were unlike young people who lived in less violent centuries. To say that you won’t write for teenagers any more because they have changed makes no more sense than to say that you won’t write for adults any more, because today’s world is so different from the pre-bomb world. It also implies that you write differently when you write for teenagers than when you write for adults.

  If you are a responsible writer, you don’t. The same rules that apply to The Brothers Karamazov (my archetypical adult novel) apply to Peter Rabbit (my archetypical picture book). The same rules that apply to Dante’s Divine Comedy apply to The Wind in the Willows. Mankind is always in the human predicament, and this is what people write about. A good children’s book is not easier to write than a good adults’ book, and it poses to the writer the identical problem of trying to communicate his vision in a language that is not obsolete. This doesn’t mean using current slang, but finding a language that will still be understood when this year’s catch phrases have been replaced.

  One of the most helpful tools a writer has is his journals. Whenever someone asks how to become an author, I suggest keeping a journal. A journal is not a diary, where you record the weather and the engagements of the day. A journal is a notebook in which one can, hopefully, be ontological.

  A little more pragmatically, a journal, at least one that is not written for publication, and mine most certainly are not, is a place where you can unload, dump, let go. It is, among other practical things, a safety valve. If I am in the slough of despond, if I am in a rage, if I am, as so often, out of proportion and perspective, then, once I have dumped it all in the journal, I am able to move from subjectivity to at least an approach to objectivity, and my family has been spared one of Madeleine’s excessive moods. A journal is also a place in which joy gets recorded, because joy is too bright a flame in me not to burn if it doesn’t get expressed in words. And it’s where I jot down ideas for stories, descriptions of a face seen on a subway, a sunset seen over the Hudson, or our Litchfield Hills. If I need, when writing a story, to recapture a mood, there it is, ready to live again for me. On the empirical level, if we have a family argument about when or where something happened, and the others don’t agree with me, if I say, “But I know I’m right this time, I’ll go get my journal,” they usually give up. If I’ve remembered not only the event but the journal it’s in, I’m almost always right—at least about that. In most other arguments I’m wrong.

  Sometimes, on the children’s birthdays, they enjoy having me go back to an old journal and read to them about their birth, and about their early years. The journals are full of family snapshots—not taken by me, however. My husband says that he never even properly sees a batch of snapshots before I’ve pasted them in my journal. And of course a journal is inviolate; I may read sections aloud from mine, but nobody, not even Hugh, is allowed to touch them.

  A journal is useful in precisely the same way for a children’s book as for an adult one. At O.S.U. I kept remarking hopefully each day that possibly, before I left, I might have some kind of definition of the difference between an adult novel and a true children’s book. I never did—at least nothing that satisfied me any more than my instinctive reaction on the panel: that I’m not bright enough to know the difference.

  “Why do you write for children?” My immediate response to this question is, “I don’t.” Of course I don’t. I don’t suppose most children’s writers do. But the kids won’t let me off this easily.

  If you want to raise my blood pressure, suggest that writers turn to writing children’s books because it’s easier than writing for grownups; so they write children’s books because they can’t make it in the adult field.

  If it’s not good enough for adults, it’s not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.

  Sometimes I answer that if I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children. This is usually good for a slightly startled laugh, but it’s perfectly true. Children still haven’t closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth. It was adults who thought that children would be afraid of the Dark Thing in Wrinkle, not children, who understand the need to see thingness, non-ness, and to fight it.

  When I am feeling unsure about my writing, it is not because I am worried about the difference between adult and juvenile fiction, but because I am worrying that I am neglecting other responsibilities, and so misusing my freedom; I’ve gone through periods of confusion and downright stupidity. It was our eldest child, with her remarkable ability to see and accept what is, who said to me a good many years ago, “Mother, you’ve been getting cross and edgy with us, and you haven’t been doing much writing. We wish you’d get back to the typewriter.”

  So I write whichever book is clamoring to be written, for children or adults. But which or what is the difference is still a mystery to me.

  Sometimes I play around with the words “childish” and “childlike,” but the difference between them has been pointed out to us so often that it has become part of that obvious to which I am prone. But don’t let that stop me.

  I am part of every place I have been: the path to the brook; the New York streets and my “short cut” through the Metropolitan Museum. All the places I have ever walked, talked, slept, have changed and formed me.

  I am part of all the people I have known. There was a black morning when the friend who cashed the Emily Brontë check and I, both walking through separate hells, acknowledged that we would not survive were it not for our friends who, simply by being our friends, harrowed hell for us.

  I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be. Because I was once a rebellious student, there is and always will be in me the student crying out for reform.

  This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages, the perpetual student, the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide; my past is part of what makes the present Madeleine and must not be denied or rejected or forgotten.

  Far too many people misunderstand what putting away childish things means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I’m with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grownup, then I don’t ever want to be one.

  Instead of which, if I can retain a child’s awareness and joy, and be fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup. I still have a long way to go.

  So with books. A childish book, like a childish person, is limited, unspontaneous, closed in, certainly doesn’t appeal to a true grownup. But the childlike book, like the childlike person, breaks out of all boundaries. Here again joy is the key. A decade a
go we took the children through Monticello, and I remember the feeling we all had of the fun Jefferson must have had with his experiments, his preposterous perpetual clock, for instance: what sheer, childlike delight it must have given him. I fancy that Lewis Carroll was truly happy when he was with children, and especially when he was writing for them. Joy sparks the pages of Alice, and how much more profound it is than most of his ponderous writing for grownups. Mozart, in pain, unhappy, wrote sheer childlike joy: The Magic Flute is a gloriously absurd fairy tale. His piano sonatas sound deceptively childlike; they are as difficult to play as any music ever written.

  Lewis Carroll may have thought that he was writing a book for a specific little girl; he was also writing for himself; mostly for himself. The children’s writer clarifies things for himself, not by wrapping them up in tight and tidy packages, but in opening himself up to them. One of the greatest delights of writing is in seeing words we never expected appear on the page. But first of all we have to go through the fear that accompanies all beginnings—no, not fear, but awe: I am awed at my temerity when I sit down at the piano to play a Mozart sonata; I am awed when I sit down at the typewriter to start a new book and so step out into that wild land where the forgotten language is the native tongue. Then, and then only, when I have got my feet wet in a distant brook, as real as the one at Crosswicks, am I free to communicate to others what I have seen.

  There is a lovely Talmudic story that when the Children of Israel reached the Red Sea, and Moses struck his staff on the shore, the waters of the sea did not part to let them through. The Israelites stood there at the edge of the water and nothing happened until one of the men plunged in. Then the waters rolled back.

  5

  Juvenile or adult, War and Peace or Treasure Island, Pride and Prejudice or Beauty and the Beast, a great work of the imagination is one of the highest forms of communication of truth that mankind has reached. But a great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or to agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is.

  It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to confuse the two. A vivid example of this confusion was evident in a faculty workshop I attended. The school which was the host for the day runs from nursery through twelfth grade, and there was a good deal of searching by the teachers of the little ones as to what it is safe to tell them. We all agreed that one must never lie to them, but there was considerable disagreement as to just what constitutes this “safe” truth.

  I found myself, as always, trying to remind everybody that truth is not just provable fact, and that the children themselves don’t have the trouble in recognizing this that we do.

  A specialist, a Ph.D. who teaches college students how to teach little children, was brought in to give us a morning of lecture and discussion. She told us a great deal about helping the child to be at home in the material and sensory world, to know what is sold in supermarkets, to know how raisins feel, or a daisy petal. Everything she told us was of the utmost importance, because she was deeply concerned with the tangible world in which the children have to live and function. But she never went beyond it, and the world of the imagination was never mentioned. When I asked her if children were to be denied the world of fantasy and myth and fairy tale, she had no answer. Of course they need fairy tales: she was willing to concede this at the same time that it was apparent that these stories had, for her, no place whatsover in the so-called real world for which she was trying to prepare teachers to prepare children.

  This delightful professor (and she was delightful, though I have a suspicion she might not be amused at being called a Phid) is not an unusual children’s specialist. I have met her—as it were—all across the country. There are thousands of her ilk, all full of degrees and facts and computered information, much of which is, indeed, vitally important. In schools all over the country there is a tremendous emphasis on preparing the child for the physical, material world, in giving him sensory experience, in taking him on field trips, in putting at his disposal all the latest discoveries in the world of fact, of preparing him for the world in which Euclidean geometry is true, where a table must have a solid top and be able to stand on its four feet, and where a square, even a human one, must be square.

  But what is frightening is that far too many of these authorities on child guidance go on to tell us that anything beyond this pragmatic knowledge is not necessary, that anything else is dishonest, as a result of which many children today are growing up losing great areas of truth. The tragically comic thing is that these specialists are unwittingly contradicting themselves: they know that according to contemporary science Euclidean geometry is not “true”; a table is neither flat nor solid; and they emphasize the truth of Einstein’s geometry and the new physics and biology as well as the new math.

  Nevertheless, they are preparing the children to live in the functional Euclidean world exclusively, and keeping from them the vast open reaches of the imagination that led Einstein to soar out among the galaxies and bring back to us ever widening circles of truth. Just as we are taught that our universe is constantly expanding out into space at enormous speeds, so too our imagination must expand as we search for the knowledge that will in its turn expand into wisdom, and from wisdom into truth.

  But this is violent, and therefore frightening.

  Children are less easily frightened than we are. They have no problem in understanding how Alice could walk through the mirror into the country on the other side; some of them have done it themselves. And they all understand princesses, of course. Haven’t they all been badly bruised by peas? And then there’s the princess who spat forth toads and snakes whenever she opened her mouth to speak, and her sister whose lips issued pieces of pure gold. I still have many days when everything I say seems to turn into toads. The days of gold, alas, don’t come nearly as often. Children understand this immediately; why is it a toad day? There isn’t any logical, provable reason. The gold days are just as irrational; they are pure grace; a gift.

  6

  In one of his books, Edward Nason West tells of a time in his youth when he got so furious at another young man that he hit him. The other young man’s response was a calm, “I see that words fail you.”

  What do we do when words fail us? They frequently fail me, and often when I’m using them in the vastest quantity, struggling to push through them to what I’m trying to express. Often they fail me entirely, as when young people ask me ultimate and unanswerable questions. It has been very helpful to remember that quite a few reputable scholars, including one Socrates, made a point, when asked such a question, of saying, “I don’t know.”

  But children want to know, and perhaps it is our desire not to let them down that has led us into the mistake of teaching them only the answerables. This is a mistake, and we mustn’t refuse to allow them to ask the unanswerables just because we can’t provide tidy little answers. In our fear of the unprovable we mustn’t forget that they can learn from The Tempest as well as social studies; that they can learn from Aesop as well as the new math; that The Ugly Duckling need not be discarded in favor of driver education. There is a violent kind of truth in the most primitive myths, a truth we need today, because probably the most important thing those first storytellers did for their listeners back in the dim past in their tales of gods and giants and fabulous beasts was to affirm that the gods are not irrational, that there is structure and meaning in the universe, that God is responsible to his creation.

  Truth happens in these myths. That is why they have lasted. If they weren’t expressions of truth they would long have been forgotten. One of the great historical pieces of evidence is the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. Many books which were once in the Bible have dropped out of sight through the centuries. Those that have stayed with us are those that contain truth that speaks to us in our daily living, right where we are now.

  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.… The extraordinary, the marvelous thing ab
out Genesis is not how unscientific it is but how amazingly accurate it is. How could the ancient Israelites have known the exact order of a theory of evolution that wasn’t to be formulated by scientists for thousands of years? Here is a truth that cuts across barriers of time and space.

  So myth, fantasy, fairy tale contain an iconic truth, and in turning to their language we are not going backwards but forwards to that language which is not obsolete. We must not take from our children—or ourselves—the truth that is in the world of the imagination.

  I look at the babies; we make daisy chains and play ring-around-a-rosy and put two candles on a birthday cake, and I wonder: what can we give a child that will stay with him when there is nothing left?

  All we have, I think, is the truth, the truth that will set him free, not a limited, provable truth, but the open, growing, evolving truth that is not afraid.

  7

  During a panel discussion on drugs, homosexuality, pornography—“problems” in children’s books—I suggested to the young teenagers on the panel that if they wanted facts about these subjects, they turn to non-fiction, to scientific articles. One of them asked, “But can’t we find truth in fiction, too?”

  “Who said anything about truth? I told you to check facts in non-fiction articles. If you are looking for truth, the place to look for it is exactly in stories, in paintings, in music.”

  We may find the facts about intercourse in an article; but we learn about love in that very contemporary play, Romeo and Juliet. We learn about insemination and childbirth in film strips and lectures; but we learn about creation in