The Irrational Season

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Tulsa was a “one-night stand” for touring theatrical companies, and one evening Hugh was taken to see the legendary Walter Hampden in Cyrano de Bergerac. From that evening on, acting was not just an extracurricular high school activity; it was his life.

  My own high school and college years were a mixture of joy and pain. I loved Ashley Hall, where for the first time I was happy in school. In the lower grades I was a non-achiever. At Ashley Hall I found my stride and was appreciated and a leader—except at the school dances. Most of the Southern boys who went to those dances were considerably shorter than I. There is nothing more mortifying than having your partner’s head below your neck. But these school dances came only once or twice a year. Far worse were the debut parties I had to attend during the holidays when I took the train down to Florida. I was the outsider in a closely knit group of young people who had grown up together in Jacksonville, gone to school together, would marry one another. Because my mother had been born and reared in this Southern city, I was invited to the dances and coming-out parties and dates were arranged for me. “Arranged” is right. I don’t think I ever had a young man call me on his own in Jacksonville until I was ready to graduate from college. There may be something to be said for arranged marriages; there is little to say for arranged dates.

  Seafood was frequently served at the dinner parties, and I assumed that the reason I often had to excuse myself and hurry to the bathroom to throw up was my inadequacy as a social butterfly. I did not know how to make small talk, and large talk was discouraged. Despite lessons, I was clumsy on the dance floor. I stepped on my partner’s toes or tripped over my own feet. I hated every minute of these debutante parties and threw up a good many dinners. Years later I discovered that I am allergic to bivalves, to the very oysters, clams, and scallops that were so popular. The combination of the double allergy was abysmal. I couldn’t wait to go back to school.

  When I graduated from college and started to work in the theatre, I was able to manage my visits South at times other than the debutante season. I am grateful that Hugh and I didn’t meet until we had both learned at least a little more about other people and about ourselves than we knew during those early years of painful growth.

  Two

  After college I headed like a homing pigeon for New York. It was the place of my birth. It was where I would find music and art, theatre and publishing; it was where I belonged.

  When I came to New York in the early autumn of 1941, the glamorous world my parents had known during the twenties had long been gone. We were heading toward the destruction of Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States into World War II. The rest of my known world was already at war. For me that war had started when I was still at Ashley Hall and heard that Mussolini had marched his troops into Ethiopia. I still remember my stark feeling of terror as I realized that yet another ghastly war could not be averted.

  But ordinary life kept on. My college roommate and I found an apartment on Ninth Street in Greenwich Village. In order to cut expenses, we shared it with several other aspiring young artists. A few blocks away, Hugh was living in an equally crowded apartment, and was beginning to get roles on Broadway. But we were not to meet for several years more.

  I provided the furniture for the Ninth Street apartment, cherishing the few pieces my parents had not given away but had put into storage. There was only one bed, a lovely French mahogany bed with the wood curved into swans’ necks. We bought a double-decker bed, and a sofa bed for the living room. My mother loved the apartment; it was for her a reminder of the old happy days, and she helped us decorate it. The little room with the French mahogany bed was hers, and though we sometimes let a temporary roommate use it, it was vacated and cleaned whenever Mother came.

  My greatest treasure in the apartment was my mother’s piano, the parlor grand on which I had practiced as a child and around which so many of my parents’ parties were held. One of our roommates came because of the piano. She was a budding musician and filled the apartment with Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach, though after she came I played only when she wasn’t around. She grew as she played, not only in technique but in maturity. The great masters pushed her as she tried faithfully to go where they led. We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.

  Barrels of china and glass came to me from the storage house, and I unpacked them with reverence, pulling each piece out of the sawdust and feeling a marvelous sense of continuity. My mother was not with us for this; it would probably have been too painful for her, a poignant reminder of a life gone forever.

  When we distributed the household jobs I announced that I would do the cooking. And that is how I learned to cook—by doing it, and discovering that I was good at it. During my early childhood there had been trips to Europe before our move from New York when I was twelve. So I was a little more experimental about food than many of my contemporaries. I remembered one summer in Brittany when I would be sent off for the day to explore, carrying my lunch of sour bread, sweet butter, and bitter chocolate. This taught me to mix taste and texture. I felt that one does not cook with water, so I learned to keep stocks and juices in the fridge. Cooking was definitely a creative act.

  As we settled into the apartment I had visions of work in the theatre, of books published, of romantic love, which had little to do with real love. I wrote stories, which I sent out to little magazines and university quarterlies. And of course I was working on my first novel.

  But I needed to earn money, and such small literary magazines pay only in prestige. The theatre beckoned. What wonderful hours for a writer! And Equity minimum was sixty-five dollars a week. In the decade of the forties, Broadway was the Great White Way; stars were brilliant with talent. American musicals came into their own with the production of Oklahoma! Serious plays could run without loss for several months, slowly building an audience.

  But how could I fit into such a world? True, I had been a success as an actress in school and college. One of my best roles in high school was Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night. In a girls’ school those of us who were tallest played the male roles. In college I was finally able to play women. But the professional theatre? Broadway?

  It so happened that the year of my return to New York was also the year that Eva Le Gallienne, Margaret Webster, and Joseph Schildkraut were offering free auditions to any young theatrical aspirant who wanted to apply. Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut were starring in a Broadway play, Uncle Harry. Margaret Webster had brilliantly staged an innovative production of Othello, with singer Paul Robeson in the title role. There were giants in the theatre in those days. Eva Le Gallienne was the founder of the Civic Repertory Theatre. She was a star when she was only fourteen years old and played opposite Joseph Schildkraut in Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom. Schildkraut—Pepé, as he was known to his friends—was a dashing young Austrian actor, son of the famous Rudolph Schildkraut. In the still occasionally rerun Cecil De Mille film The King of Kings, Rudolph played Caiaphas, and Pepé played Judas. His last role on Broadway was the father in The Diary of Anne Frank. This was also the first role my husband played on his return to the theatre, after nearly a decade of living year-round at Crosswicks while we raised our children and nurtured our marriage.

  Margaret Webster, like Joseph Schildkraut, came of a theatrical family. Her father was the actor Ben Franklin; her mother, Dame May Whitty, whom I had loved in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. Peggy Webster was a fine actress, playing Emilia in Othello, but she was best known as a director, particularly of Shakespeare’s plays, though she was also called on to stage some of the operas at the Metropolitan.

  Those three, Le Gallienne, Schildkraut, Webster, were part of a galaxy of stars including Katharine Hepburn, Judith Anderson, John Gielgud, Maurice Evans, Helen Hayes, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, with all of whom Hugh was ultimately to play. Many of these “greats” had a soft spot for the young and starstruck and saw to it that the seats
in the back row of the top balcony of the theatre often sold for one dollar.

  Another opportunity for theatregoing was given us by the American Theatre Wing, which organized the sale of war bonds in theatre lobbies. When the curtain came up and the lobby emptied, we were allowed to go into the theatre and stand in the back and watch the play, or slip into an unoccupied seat. Those who were lazy and did not sell many bonds were sent night after night to Angel Street, a popular and long-running Victorian thriller which was fun the first few nights one saw it but did not wear well.

  Amazingly, I was successful in selling the bonds, so I was sent from theatre to theatre and ultimately saw everything on Broadway. My method was to approach middle-aged men, smile shyly, and hopefully ask them to buy. What I had going for me was youth and earnestness. I was no great beauty, being overtall (though my long legs were probably more help than I realized) and awkward; my shyness was not feigned. But something worked, and I had an excellent record of sales and a wonderful opportunity to see plays, musicals, whatever was going on in the theatres around the Great White Way. And I learned, subconsciously probably more than consciously, about acting and writing.

  And I sent in my application for an audition to Miss Le Gallienne, Mr. Schildkraut, and Miss Webster, and waited for my turn. They were, of course, deluged with applications, but my appointment was scheduled for early in the winter.

  Somehow or other I had the sense to choose material that was very different from what most of the other girls were doing. Scenes from Shakespeare and Chekhov abounded. I made up a short monologue from Katherine Mansfield’s letters, chose a dramatic scene from an almost unknown play of Molnár’s. My two roles were just right for a tall, gawky, myopic young woman. When I got up onstage and started speaking, suddenly these three generous stars heard something completely different from the traditional Juliets and Ninas and Lady Macbeths with which they’d been inundated. They listened. At the end of my allotted time I left the stage. I had brought with me the manuscript of a play I had just written, and with both timidity and audacity handed it to Miss Webster and fled.

  A few days later my phone rang. The understudy was leaving Uncle Harry and I was offered her job.

  And so I was on Broadway. As well as understudying the women’s roles, I had a small part as matron of a prison in the last scene, and two lines: “But it might be important, sir.” “But it can’t do any harm.” I wore a long, dark Victorian dress, powdered my hair, and added two greying braids to make me look old, though I suspect I looked very young and clumsy anyhow.

  Miss Le Gallienne was deluged with mail, and suggested that I supplement my Equity minimum salary by helping her. So most evenings I spent sitting in her dressing room answering letters. I didn’t learn anything unusual from this job, since she kept the more interesting letters for herself and I was given the run-of-the-mill fan ones. But I did learn a great deal about the theatre and about acting and about artistic intuition, not only from the stories she told me about her life and her development as an actress, but even more from her response to each evening’s performance.

  Perhaps the most important thing I learned is that the artist is not separate from the work and therefore cannot judge it. Some nights Miss Le Gallienne would come drooping back to the dressing room. “I gave a terrible performance this evening. I couldn’t get the audience to respond to a thing.” Almost invariably when people came backstage after such a declaration, an old friend would cry out enthusiastically, “Eva, that was the best performance I’ve ever seen you give. You were superb.”

  On other evenings she would come bounding in. “Oh, it went well tonight! I had them eating out of the palm of my hand!” Almost invariably Thelma, the stage manager, who was also an old friend from the Civic Repertory days, would knock on the door, poke her head in, and ask anxiously, “LeG, are you all right?”

  We do not know and cannot tell when the spirit is with us. Great talent or small, it makes no difference. We are caught within our own skins, our own sensibilities; we never know if our technique has been adequate to the vision. Without doubt this is true of my own work, too. I never know, when I have finished a book, how much of what has been in my mind and heart has come through my fingers and onto the page. This inability truly to assess one’s own accomplishment is what makes rejections so bitter. When I was receiving rejections from publisher after publisher, I wondered sadly if the book I had conceived in my mind had failed utterly in getting onto the page. This lack of knowing makes the artist terribly vulnerable. When I hand in a manuscript to agent or editor I am filled with anxiety until I hear: Yes, the book is there. It needs work, but it is there.

  When Uncle Harry closed for the summer—we were going on tour in the autumn—I was ready to move from the Ninth Street apartment, much as I had loved it, and much as I had learned from communal living. But cooking for our gang, usually eight or more people, was time-consuming. There were too many distractions, and I needed time alone. I needed my piano back. I needed uninterrupted time to write.

  When I left Ninth Street I was still as naïve and ignorant as a young woman coming to the big city could possibly be. It wasn’t that I was a country cousin; the city was mine; it was my home town. But I knew nothing of its lures or its dangers, and it was to some extent my innocence that protected me.

  I found my own small walk-up on Twelfth Street. I began to move outside the circle of friends from the Ninth Street apartment. One of my few friends from Florida, Pat, was in New York at the other end of the city, up at Columbia, where she was an instructor and was taking essential pre-med courses she had missed in college. Pat was, is, as tall as I am, excited by the same beauties, equally inept with small talk. Our idea of joy when we were in Florida was to borrow her school canoe and spend the day paddling the dark backwaters, or to walk for hours in silence on the beach. It was good to have a friend in New York who was as motivated as I was but who was not involved in the strange world of the theatre.

  We were (and still are) able to talk about absolutely anything, intimate problems and thoughts one shares with almost nobody. Pat was preparing to enter medical school. I wrote. Got out of bed in the morning and wrote, forgetting breakfast.

  Of the Ninth Street group I continued to see Cavada, who did the pots and pans (and still, when she comes to visit, takes over that job despite her elegant clothes and beautifully manicured nails). On occasion I continued to do letters or errands for Miss Le Gallienne, but I spent a lot of time on my own, and began to learn how woefully ignorant I was. My first twelve years in New York I was a nursery child, though my nursery was no more than my own small back bedroom. But I never stopped to wonder how beds got made or tubs got cleaned.

  In boarding school I learned to make my bed, but everything else continued to be magically accomplished. During college the making of beds and the moderate tidying of the room was the extent of my housekeeping. Even in the Ninth Street apartment where I became an instant cook, all the rest of the jobs were taken care of by others. It was not until I was living on my own in the walk-up on Twelfth Street that I discovered that sinks and tubs do not stay clean without regular scrubbing. Floors have to be swept and vacuumed, furniture dusted and polished. If I was naïve about housekeeping, I was equally naïve about life.

  But at last I was free to experiment, and surely experiment and experience come from the same root.

  For ten years, in boarding school and in college, I had been bounded by rules. Times to rise, times to go to bed. Colleges were less free before the Second World War than they are now. We had a curfew: we had to be back in the house by ten o’clock. In New York my friends and I quickly put ourselves on theatre hours. We could go anyplace we wanted at any time we wanted, see whom we wanted where we wanted. Heaven knows it was time for me to be on my own, to live my own life, but my lack of experience caused me to do some incredibly stupid things.

  One day shortly before the cast of Uncle Harry gathered together for rehearsals to prepare for the tour, Miss Le G
allienne sent me to one of the casting offices. In those days young (and not so young) actors and actresses “made the rounds,” going from one casting office to another, hoping to get past the receptionist’s desk and into a producer’s office. The anterooms were often grungy and in need of paint, although the walls were hung with photographs of the producer’s plays and autographed portraits of players. In the winter, radiators clanked against the cold; in the summer, the rooms were hotboxes. For the very young, all this still had glamour. After “making the rounds,” players often gathered in the Astor Drugstore on Times Square to drink sodas and trade tips about who was casting what, and where there might be an opening.

  That day I did whatever it was Miss Le Gallienne had asked me to do, and as I was leaving the casting office a young man fell into step beside me. He was shorter than I, but otherwise personable. It was noon and he asked me what I was doing for lunch. My salary wasn’t to start till the following week, so I said I was going to the Automat on Fifty-seventh Street, where I could get a sandwich and soup for a quarter. (Subways and buses were a nickel; only the Fifth Avenue double-decker buses were a dime. A hot dog was a nickel; a hamburger was a dime; tea and coffee were a nickel; cocoa, which I preferred, or a glass of milk, was a dime.) The young man told me his name was Paul and invited me to have lunch with him and took me to Fifty-seventh Street, not to the Automat but to the Russian Tea Room, which was a famous haunt of musicians and ballet dancers and was definitely out of my pocketbook range. It represented opera and concerts and ballet and the glamour of composers and singers and dancers. I had played in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters in college; I was suitably impressed with Paul’s choice.