Becoming Madeleine L'Engle
Page 3
Being on the student council also conferred privileges, like extended library access, that appealed to Madeleine. The council kept everyone on her toes by having a couple of leadership positions that were rotated and voted on monthly. The highest level of leadership, though, was board member, reserved for upperclasswomen, and the tenure was for a longer term. These positions became a source of anxiety for Madeleine once she was on the student council: the elections for leadership and board were often a popularity contest, and there was a great deal of lobbying and retribution paid, but she did aspire to rise through the ranks.
Madeleine also spent a lot of time writing her own stories and poems.
Poem, circa 1935
She was very serious about improving her writing and someday being an accomplished author, as shown in a journal entry from the summer after her first year at Ashley Hall.
* * *
I am rewriting an old story that I wrote last year called Pippa and hope to make something fairly decent out of it—also, a collection of poems called “Peter Thinks,” and when I’ve finished, I’m going to send it to the publishers. I know that many people get a stage when they want to write, but it is no stage for me. I was born with the itch for writing in me, and o, I couldn’t stop it if I tried. I have always written. Why, if I look back to earlier journals I see pages on my desire to write. When I was a tiny child I was never so happy as when scribbling rhymes. O, I have to write, there is no doubt about that, and in this journal as in my first real one, I am going to copy that last wonderful verse from “The Fringed Gentian”:
Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep
How I may upward climb
The alpine path, so hard, so steep,
That leads to heights sublime.
How may I reach that far off goal
Of true and honored fame
And write upon its shining scroll
A woman’s humble name.
And now I do swear a vow. I, Madeleine L’Engle Camp, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the alpine path and write my name on the scroll of fame.
* * *
The poem she quotes in this journal entry was reprinted in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Emily series, which remained a favorite of hers. She began writing in her journal in earnest, using it not only to record events but also to sketch characters and practice dialogue.
That summer she went to Huckleberry Camp, in Connecticut, where on one occasion she went too far in playing a practical joke, exercising her storytelling skills but scaring herself in the process.
* * *
I wish I did not have a way of doing things that I instantly regret. Tonight I had a devilish—yes, I must use that word—desire to see how gullible Gertie Pike was. So I told her that my name was not really Madeleine Camp, but Carol Grave. Well, it would have been all right if I had let it go at that, but I didn’t. I carried it further and said that I was adopted by some Camps, and that before, I had lived in Switzerland with my parents. Well I had to go on then. So I said there was a fire, and I can’t write what I said next because it makes me feel too awful, and of course, though Gertie had taken it in I instantly confessed that I had been fooling because it makes me feel awful to think of anything happening to mother and father, and o, I wish I hadn’t said it. Supposing it really—O, I can’t even think that. O, why did I say it—O, why am I always doing things I feel terribly over after? But I have such an awful way of being and feeling impersonal about myself, and O, I must stop even writing about this or I will worry over it for days.
* * *
After camp, she returned home to Red Gables and her parents and Dearma, who was still ill. Days were lazy and hot, and Madeleine worked on a book of poems, wandered the boardwalk, and swam in the ocean. She also thought deeply and continued to be concerned about the state of the world.
* * *
I am afraid of ideas tonight. Mother and father talked politics for a couple of minutes tonight, and politics always get me jumpy when the world is in a mess like it is now, and so tonight I am afraid of ideas—not actualities.
An idea has more power over human mind than anything else—actuality you can touch, but ideas are elusive—ununderstandable. But these thoughts have the power to make you understand beauty, fear, rejoice—almost more than actualities.
* * *
Madeleine’s bedroom was right across from Dearma’s. She often had to turn out her light before she was quite ready for sleep in order to not disturb her grandmother, but she didn’t mind. She loved the sound of Dearma’s gentle snoring. But then, just before Madeleine was scheduled to go back to school, Dearma died.
* * *
Dearma died yesterday morning a while before five o’clock. She didn’t feel well when she went to bed, and Mother fanned her for a long time. Her pulse was slow, but not as slow as it had been often before. I woke up in the night and heard her go to the bathroom and get back into bed and turn out the light. Later I woke up again and heard her breathing queerly. I ran and told Mother and we called the Doctor but it was too late.
I am not going to remember all that. I am going to remember her the way she really was … The funeral was this afternoon, and O, I can’t write anymore. I feel as though my feelings were all bottled up inside me, and I can’t take the cork out. I wish I could. It would be such a relief if I could just write everything out … I read in Emily Thinks about the milestones that you pass. I think that this has been my passing from childhood into girlhood, because as mother says, though I am fifteen, I have really been a child all these years.
And I read in another book that a person is never dead until you have forgotten them, so Dearma can never be dead to me, because I will never forget her.
* * *
When Madeleine returned to Ashley Hall for her second year of high school, she threw herself into student activities, still excited to be on the student council. She was also elected assistant editor of the school’s literary magazine, Cerberus.
Cerberus staff photo, with Madeleine standing fourth from left, circa 1936
But her poor grades at Châtelard meant that it was unclear when she would graduate. She had hoped that she would only have another two years of high school, but she was doing poorly in Latin. She found it difficult to put an effort into something she didn’t understand or enjoy.
* * *
I have just been speaking to Miss McBee about whether I am to graduate next year or the year after. If I pass all five subjects this year, I will be able to graduate next year, but I am so mixed-up in my Latin because of not studying at Chatelard the first year, and being sick a lot of the next year and not studying very hard the rest of it that I am afraid I will fail. Besides, I know so little about it that I am not interested enough to study very hard this year, but Father and Mother want me to learn it because they think it will help me in my writing.
* * *
If not obedient, Madeleine was ever creative in her assignments for school. In American history, she wrote a paper on the early American colonies as a series of letters. She imagined a band of dispersed friends writing back to the one who stayed behind in England. She wrote letters from Virginia, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and more. Her teacher, unimpressed, gave her a C+ with this comment: “This is interesting and well done although not what I had expected. History if viewed correctly provides its own thrill and human touch without additional fiction.” In English, however, Madeleine’s work was so good that she was exempt from taking final exams.
Like most teenagers, Madeleine was caught up in any drama that happened between other girls and herself. She wanted to surround herself with girls who were both effervescent and intellectual, and when she was stuck with someone who wasn’t like that, she could be grumpy.
* * *
I’d be happier with another roommate. But I don’t want to worry Mother and Father. But I don’t like Mary. She just gets on my nerves. She has no enthusiasm, no pep or vitality, she hardly ever speaks above a whisper, and she isn’t in
the least conversational or original or human and she hasn’t any backbone. And these are qualities I like in a girl.
* * *
Mary and Madeleine never did manage to become friends.
Shortly before her sixteenth birthday Madeleine wrote:
* * *
But O, I don’t want to grow up! I remember how unhappy I was when I was thirteen. I didn’t want to be in my teens. I wanted to stay a little girl and I still do.
* * *
And once again her father had strong opinions about her education—he thought she needed another year at Ashley Hall.
* * *
I am, to put it mildly, discouraged, I have tons of work to make up in Latin and algebra, and so I have to drop one of them. And so just as I am getting interested in old Caesar, I have to put him behind me. Miss McBee says that I can take the Calvert system this summer and make it up, and so graduate next year. So far, well and good, but Father doesn’t want me to graduate next year. He thinks 17 is too young. And isn’t! O, it isn’t! I think eighteen is too old. But I suppose it would help to get a more extensive education, but then I won’t graduate from college till I’m twenty-two, and then I want to go to the art students league, and then study abroad, and I’ll be middle aged before I finish my education!
* * *
Madeleine wrote lots of poetry and sent it to the magazine Good Housekeeping under the pseudonym Elizabeth Applegate Martin, her father’s grandmother’s name, which she thought beautiful. She even wrote a pretend letter to that great-grandmother about it.
When her poems were rejected, she accepted it with good grace and more than a little bit of bravado.
She shared her poetry with her parents. Her father would send her back letters of both encouragement and serious feedback.
April 21, 1935
Dear Daughter,
… On our way back we stopped at the post-office, and found your letter with the poems, “Night Cry” and “Night.” I like them both. In the first: “The moon shivers behind a thin cloud” seems a very suggestive and rememberable line, but of course all appreciations and criticisms are personal. Mother thinks that “Night” has too much use of the word, light, but my feeling is that your intention was to make your effect with just that repetition, and I believe with a little smoothing it will be very successful. Of course “The night with its thousands of eyes—” is in itself very lovely, and you are perfectly free to phrase it so; but that old war-horse, “The night has a thousand eyes, the day but one,” I think detracts from the dignity of your line, because in the public mind it has much the same appeal as a crooner’s song; but you must decide for yourself. With a little smoothing you have a lovely thing there.
More Journal Entries from Madeleine’s First Two Years at Ashley Hall
* * *
Tomorrow is Leonora’s birthday. She will be seventeen! Heavens! Aren’t we aged! Well, I have to wait for two years before I get to be there, anyhow. I wish we didn’t have to grow up—at least not so quickly. It is such fun to be a little girl.
* * *
* * *
We also had forum tonight, and Miss McBee told us of her experiences in the war. It was awfully interesting, but O, I hope that nothing like that ever happens again.
* * *
* * *
I am much too shy. It is mother’s despair! And mine too, incidentally—I hate my shy awkwardness in being introduced to people. Once I get to know them it isn’t so bad, and Leonora has often told me that I am a very interesting conversationalist. But I can’t be sure of that. It seems to be that I either talk too little or too much.
* * *
* * *
I must stop losing things, I say things occasionally that I shouldn’t say … Another thing I do occasionally that I hadn’t thought of before but that is very serious, and that I must never do again is that when I haven’t studied a lesson well enough I exaggerate on the amount I have studied. A lot of people do, but that makes no difference. I haven’t been doing it lately because I have been studying, and I didn’t realize that I was exaggerating when I did, but it is a form of lying, and I have always prided myself on being strictly honest.
* * *
* * *
Today I received an autographed copy of Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. Saturday I received a letter from Mr. Brett at Macmillan saying that he had spent a delightful evening with father, and that it was agreed that I would probably enjoy receiving an autographed copy. And it was coming under separate cover and here it is. Everyone says that it is simply wonderful, but I am afraid that it will depress me awfully, because anything about the war always does. O, there mustn’t be another war.
* * *
* * *
O, if only I can succeed and be a poet and author and an artist. I must. O, God, give me the determination. And the will to work, and the talent. I wish I dared say genius. I will say it. Please give me genius.
I know italics are midvictorian, and everything else, but when you are as tremendously in earnest as I am, you have to have them.
* * *
* * *
Louisa May Alcott had an awful temper, and we both have the same birthday. Maybe that has something to do with it! Louisa succeeded, and I must too!
* * *
Madeleine, circa 1936
The Eustace Affair
In 1935, at the end of the school year, Madeleine went home for a visit before she went back to Huckleberry Camp. She was pleased to learn that Grandfather Bion and Gaga had moved back to the States and taken up residence in a brand-new skyscraper in Jacksonville. Uncle Bion and his family had stayed in Europe and wouldn’t return to Jacksonville until the end of 1940.
After camp that summer, she returned to Ashley Hall in September. Her grades and her father had won the argument: she would be a junior and not a senior that year.
When she found that her friend Bee was going to be her roommate, and that they would have a coveted balcony room, Madeleine was ecstatic. She was elected a board member of the student council, as well as the junior class representative. She was also hoping to be chosen as an honor girl, yet another distinction granted by the Ashley Hall faculty and the student council.
* * *
Sometimes I’m going to [be] writing this diary in the third person singular, calling myself what Bee calls me, Scatter. I’m just going to do it whenever I feel like it.
Sunday Scatter’s cold was still a cold, and she stayed in bed, propped up on her camp blankets and pillows. She finished Stalky and Co. and started another book she had borrowed from one of the new girls called Swallows and Amazons. Occasionally, with a little excited shiver she thought about that night, after supper, when the girls who were to be honor girls for the following year would be announced. If only she could be one—but no, she tried not to think about it.
“If I think about it,” she thought, “I may get hopeful, and then it will be such a disappointment.”
She got up at night for supper and to hear Miss McBee’s traditional talk at the first Sunday night of school. When she came, lastly, to the announcements of the honor girls, how they were the ones that were the nearest to what an Ashley Hall Girl should be, she sat calmly. Looking at her lap, hiding the faint hope that might escape from her eyes.
“Here are the honor girls for this year, alphabetically,” said Miss McBee’s beautiful, calm voice. “Madeleine Camp, Ann McCormick, Judy Penniman, Polly Read.”
When Scatter’s name was called her face flooded with a happy crimson. She, Scatter, short for Scatterbrains, an honor girl, and all her best friends, Judy, Ann, and Polly honor girls too. And Bee, her best of best friends, would be sure to be one as soon as she had been a boarder long enough.
* * *
Her birthday that fall brought up conflicted feelings about growing older.
* * *
Well, here I am seventeen!… I don’t feel a bit older or wiser, but I shall try to act older and wiser.
* * *
&n
bsp; The student council once again occupied a great deal of Madeleine’s time, and she was very involved in the monthly elections and disciplinary hearings of other girls. Much of her journal writing reflects a growing willingness to use the council as a means to judge and punish other students. Lots of girls seemed to have been “called up” before the council for discipline, including Madeleine’s friend Cavada Humphrey.
* * *
We called Cavada up before the board this afternoon, because she is disregardish of the rules. She may get suspended from Student Council if she isn’t very careful. Also several other people. We are going to do rather drastic things about suspending people from Student Council who have proved themselves undesirable, but it’s the only thing to do … Cavada won’t speak to me, and although that fact is very minor, I wonder what under the sun I’ve done to make her mad. She’ll make a great actress probably, but she’ll be even more egotistical than most of ’em.
* * *