Becoming Madeleine L'Engle

by Charlotte Jones Voiklis

  Madeleine, circa 1924

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  Table of Contents

  About the Authors

  Copyright Page

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  For Greatie, Dannie, Dearma, Grachie, GrandMadeleine, Jamma, and all grandmothers

  A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

  —Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

  Charlotte, Madeleine, and Léna, circa 1973

  Prologue

  We were young when our grandmother, Madeleine L’Engle, started sharing with us the patchwork of events, relationships, and emotions that shaped her into the person she was always becoming. She described her childhood as solitary, and we thought it must have been lonely—after all, even we, who had each other, had periods of loneliness. But her stories about growing up and becoming the writer and grandmother we knew gave us the assurance that, just like her, we could survive the hurts and joys of childhood and adolescence.

  She encouraged us to read whatever we wanted, and eventually what we wanted was to read her books. By the time we were nine and ten, we had read A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and various excerpts of A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which was about to be published. The stories felt like Gran because they were infused with her spirit and took place at her home in Connecticut. However, it wasn’t until we read And Both Were Young, a novel she had written about a girl at a Swiss boarding school, that we recognized a direct parallel to her life. We knew that she had also gone to a boarding school in Switzerland, and we wondered if everything that happened to Flip, the protagonist, had happened to her, too. So we asked.

  “Were the other girls mean to you?”

  “Did you plant poppies hoping for wonderful dreams?”

  “Were you really called by a number and not your name?”

  She patiently answered our questions and went on to tell us how she came to go to the school in the first place. She was only eleven, shy, awkward, and bookish. She and her parents had moved to rural France, and on a beautiful day in late September they had packed a picnic lunch and started driving. Madeleine had assumed they were going to spend the afternoon on the shores of Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, but instead they passed a sign for the village of Montreux and pulled up to Châtelard, a boarding school for girls. It was grand on the outside, cold and spare on the inside. Her parents introduced her to the school’s matron and left her there, with hardly a word of goodbye.

  “Really, Gran?” Our regal but sensitive grandmother abandoned at a foreign boarding school, her parents too cowardly to tell her what they were doing? We were outraged.

  “It wasn’t so bad after a while,” she assured us. “And I learned a lot. It helped me become a writer.” She then went on to explain, “I had always written stories, ever since I could hold a pencil. As a small child in New York City, I spent a good deal of time alone, and my stories kept me company. But at boarding school, I was never alone. They didn’t think that privacy was good for girls. So I learned to shut out the din of a crowded dormitory, and now I can concentrate and write anywhere.”

  We were still incredulous. “But weren’t you angry with your parents? How did you ever forgive them?”

  “Of course I was angry. And hurt, too. But I came to realize my parents had their own hurts and angers that had nothing to do with me. Before the war, before I was born, they lived a very adventurous and happy life. But then after the war came along and I was born, everything changed for them. Trying to make sense of all of this helped me become a writer. A writer must be able to understand different points of view.”

  Still, the story was grim. After the first couple of months at Châtelard, Madeleine was able to go home for Christmas vacation, but instead of a joyous reunion, with parents delighted to see their only child, she found her parents withdrawn and unhappy. Her father was ill and his typewriter sat unused. Her mother played Bach on the piano with fury. They were too wrapped up in their own worries and sadness to give her much attention.

  “How did you get over that?”

  “I tried to understand them. I wrote stories, trying to imagine what it was like for them. I learned to inhabit other selves, other ages. It helped put things into perspective. And now that I am older, I still do that. I’ve never had to lose my younger selves—so that’s why I am every age I have ever been.”

  We’ve been wondering and marveling at her timelessness ever since.

  We are now able to step back and look at how our grandmother became Madeleine L’Engle, starting from the beginning: What were her parents like when they had been happy, before World War I, before she was born? How did her hurts and joys manifest themselves in her writing? Here, with the aid of her fiction and nonfiction books—along with her journals, letters, and our own family stories and memories—we begin to answer the questions.

  Charles Wadsworth Camp and Madeleine “Mado” Hall Barnett, circa 1908

  Before Madeleine

  Madeleine’s mother, Madeleine “Mado” Hall Barnett, grew up in Jacksonville, a city in northern Florida on the Atlantic Ocean. She was a classically trained concert pianist who had studied in Berlin.

  Madeleine’s father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, was a novelist and journalist. He was born near and educated at Princeton University, “up North” in New Jersey.

  In many ways they were opposites. Charles at twenty-eight was gregarious, confident, and handsome—over six feet tall, with thick fair hair. Mado was much more reserved. She had always felt herself to be an ugly duckling, and at twenty-six she was considered an old maid.

  They met when Charles came to Jacksonville for his sister’s wedding. Mado was standoffish at first, unsure that his attentions were sincere. But they quickly fell in love and married in 1906, and Charles whisked her off to New York City.

  Mado and Charles settled in a two-bedroom apartment on East Eighty-Second Street. Charles reviewed plays, wrote novels, and later was a foreign correspondent for magazines such as Collier’s and The Century. He traveled abroad frequently for his work, taking steamships across the ocean to places like London and Paris as well as Cairo and Shanghai, and was often accompanied by Mado. Charles’s work also meant that he and Mado rubbed elbows with both high society and a world of artists. Although they loved to entertain, they couldn’t afford to throw lavish dinner parties, so they instituted a tradition of simple Sunday-night suppers. Their friends would pile into their tiny apartment, a few of them would cook a meal, and Mado would play the piano while they all sang. Everyone had a glorious time. (Mado enjoyed playing for friends and at small gatherings, but she was terrified about playing in public.)

  Mado, circa 1904

  Then came the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Charles went to Europe twice for magazines—first to cover the war in France in 1914, and then to report on the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916. He also wrote a nonfiction book about that
experience called War’s Dark Frame, published in 1917, just before the United States entered the war.

  Charles enlisted in the army as a second lieutenant and was sent to fight in France in 1918.

  His war experience, as both a journalist and a soldier, had a deep impact on him that reverberated throughout his and his family’s life. When describing her father, Madeleine recalled that he was horrified and repelled by the destruction and devastation he had witnessed. Later, Madeleine said that the war had killed him; it just took him seventeen years to die. She, too, had a lifelong terror of war.

  Charles, circa 1900

  Charles, 1917

  Mado and Charles both desperately wanted children, and had been trying for more than ten years. Charles, the youngest child and only boy in his family of six girls, was eager to have a boy to carry on the family name. When Charles was deployed in early 1918, Mado was two months pregnant. Even though Armistice was declared later that year, on November 11, Charles was still on active duty when, early in the morning on November 29, the day after Thanksgiving, Mado went into labor.

  It must have been a difficult delivery, because Mado wasn’t able to write to Charles until two weeks later.

  December 13, 1918

  My dearest husband—

  If you could see your little flower of a daughter, I am sure you would forgive her for not being a boy. Oh my dear, I am so thankful that she is here and healthy and perfect and I wouldn’t exchange her now for all the sons in the world.

  She is considered a perfect miracle in the hospital and every one is interested in us, and so if you were only here to share my happiness. It is worth all the long months of waiting and the hours of agony at the end. Dear one, I have been pretty sick and am hoisted up in bed for the first time this afternoon. Baby is two weeks old today. [A cousin] phoned yesterday that your mother had sent you a cable yesterday afternoon. I wonder if you have had mine sent November 30 and if you know what a proud father you should be? It seems so strange not to have heard from you yet. I got your letter of Nov 21 a day or two ago. There was nothing between that and the one of Nov 13 I received Thanksgiving Day, so I must have lost one at least.

  I do hope you have had a nice time on your leave and that your cold is gone. I have worried over your ears, dear. Never mind about the promotion dear. It is hard luck but lots of others have been treated the same way and I am so happy that you are safe and whole. Nothing else matters. Have you any idea yet when you are coming home? It can’t be so long, yet every week will seem an eternity now.

  I have two good nurses dear. My day nurse is the very best in the whole world I am sure. I just love her dearly and she is good to me and the baby. I hope you approve of baby’s name—Madeleine L’Engle. I think it just suits her and thought you would want her named Madeleine. I must stop now dear. I’m pretty wobbly but very very happy.

  Will try to write again in a day or so.

  Your loving wife, Madeleine

  Mado with Madeleine, 1919

  Madeleine, circa 1920

  A New York City Childhood

  When Charles finally returned to New York in May 1919, he and Mado were thrilled that the war was over, that they were back together, and that they had their much-longed-for child. Charles resumed his work as a journalist, reviewing plays and writing his own plays, novels, and short stories.

  Madeleine’s parents loved her, but the pattern of their married life had already been well established over the twelve years they had been together before she was born: dinner at eight, adult conversation, evenings out, and sleeping in. Even as a young child, Madeleine was content eating alone in her room—with her feet on her desk and her plate on her chest—and going to bed before her parents sat down to their more elegant grown-up dinners.

  They often went to plays, operas, and symphonies, and they would come and kiss her good night before they left, her father in top hat and tails, smelling comfortingly of Egyptian tobacco, whiskey, and starched linen, and her mother also elegantly dressed and smelling deliciously of expensive perfume.

  Her parents still had those casual Sunday-night suppers, and Madeleine would sometimes sneak out of bed and listen from the hallway to the music and the conversation. While some children might have observed and fantasized about being a grown-up someday, Madeleine saw it as fascinating and curious, but not something she wanted for herself. She sensed that childhood was only very short in the scheme of things, and she wanted it to last.

  Charles and Madeleine, circa 1919

  Her parents, however, disagreed about how to raise her. Mado hadn’t had much formal education, spending her childhood in Florida with lots of cousins and play. She thought childhood should be carefree. Charles had had a much more traditional school experience and therefore wanted a more structured upbringing for his daughter. Charles usually won their disagreements, and he was insistent about sending his daughter to the best schools, whether his daughter liked it or not, and whether he and his wife could afford it or not. (His pocketbook, Mado was fond of saying, “waxed and waned like the moon.”)

  Charles, Madeleine, and Mado, circa 1922

  Charles was prone to depression and sometimes withdrew from his wife and child. When he emerged from his darkness and turned his attention once more toward his daughter, it was as if the sun were shining on her again. His moodiness did not stop Madeleine from adoring her father, and being a little bit in awe of him. He was a force in the world: charismatic, confident, and charming. She watched him writing, absorbed in his creation of stories—real and fictional—and saw that it gave him both pleasure and frustration. He wrote a first draft in longhand and then typed it out on a typewriter. As a war correspondent, he typed his dispatches directly.When Madeleine was ten, he gave her his old typewriter, which she used into the 1950s.

  Charles’s typewriter, given to Madeleine at age ten

  Madeleine and Caroline “Dearma” Barnett, circa 1922

  One of the ways her father shared his love of stories with his daughter was through opera. The first time he took her was when she was around eight. It was a production of Madame Butterfly. Madeleine had no idea what to expect, but she was immediately drawn into the story and the music. It started like a beautiful fairy tale, a love story between a naval officer and a young Japanese woman. But when tragedy befell Cio-Cio-San at the end, Madeleine was deeply shocked and upset. She didn’t want to disappoint her father, so when he asked if she had enjoyed the opera, she said that she had, and he had no idea that she was traumatized by the sad ending. The next time he took her to see an opera—Pagliacci—she asked him as they sat down if this story had an unhappy ending, too. When he told her it did, she began to cry and did not stop until her father took her home, before the curtain even rose.

  Mado and Madeleine, circa 1924

  Madeleine spent more time with her mother, who was often home practicing the piano for hours at a time or writing daily letters to the family and friends she had left behind in Jacksonville. The two would visit Jacksonville several times a year, traveling on the overnight train. They stayed with Madeleine’s grandmother Caroline Barnett, whom Madeleine called “Dearma.” There were lots of cousins there, too.

  Like Charles, Mado was a wonderful storyteller. Many of the stories she told Madeleine were about Mado’s grandmother, the first Madeleine L’Engle, who had had not only a glamorous adolescence in Spain in the 1840s as the daughter of the U.S. ambassador, but also adventurous early days of marriage to an army doctor traveling throughout America’s western territories and across the Isthmus of Panama before there was a canal. Then, widowed early during the Civil War, Mado’s grandmother had worked as a nurse at an army hospital and eventually settled in Jacksonville. Mado would also recount stories that her father, Bion Barnett, had told her about his wild childhood in Kansas. He would tell his children the stories after dinner, while he smoked a cigar, and Mado always kept an eye on his lengthening ash, knowing that when it fell, the stories were over for the evening.

&n
bsp; Madeleine with unknown boys, circa 1923

  Madeleine and her parents traveled by ship to Europe several times when she was young, visiting Grandfather Bion, that cigar-smoking storyteller, and his common-law wife, Louise, whom Madeleine and her cousins called “Gaga.” Grandfather Bion was a wealthy banker who lived in various places in France and Monte Carlo. Later Madeleine would recall idyllic wanderings around the French countryside, provisioned with bitter chocolate, sweet butter, and sour bread, which she said taught her how to mix flavors and textures in both her cooking and her writing.

  Aside from her parents, the adult who meant the most to her was Mrs. O’Connell. Mary O’Connell—whom Madeleine called Mrs. O—came several times a week to the Camps’ New York apartment to help Mado with the cooking and cleaning, and she took a special shine to the young Madeleine. And Madeleine adored her. Next to her strict and formal parents, Mrs. O was a breath of freedom and a glimpse into a wider world. Mrs. O, who thought Madeleine was overprotected, would often bend the rules.

  For example, Madeleine was confined to her Upper East Side neighborhood, but Mrs. O took her on the subway to other parts of the city—on adventures to Greenwich Village and even to the Bronx, where Mrs. O lived. A devout Roman Catholic, Mrs. O would sometimes take Madeleine to church to attend Mass or to light a candle for someone in pain or trouble. But Madeleine and Mrs. O agreed to keep these outings a secret because they knew her parents would not have approved.

  Madeleine also loved exploring her Upper East Side neighborhood with her parents or Mrs. O—the tree-lined streets; the tall, elegant buildings; and especially the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She visited its galleries whenever she could, enthralled by the creativity and history on display. Her girlhood memories of New York City remained strong throughout her life, and she always thought of it as her home.