Becoming Madeleine L'Engle

by Charlotte Jones Voiklis

  Sensing that Madeleine had no idea what life was like in places outside her own experience, Hugh teased her with stories about how the streets of Tulsa had only recently been paved, and how his mother only wore shoes when she went to church on Sundays. Madeleine’s willingness to believe such things became a standing joke between them.

  However, they had both chosen lives other than the ones expected of them (for Hugh’s Baptist family, acting was quite scandalous), and both had grown up in families whose fortunes had changed drastically during the Great Depression following the stock market crash in 1929.

  The theater company was watching their romance closely, perhaps too closely. Hugh, a very private person, was embarrassed by his fellow actors’ scrutiny. He distanced himself from Madeleine and stopped sitting next to her on the train. Madeleine was hurt, but she didn’t say anything. When Hugh gave her a pair of socks at Christmas, when the tour was over, instead of something more romantic, her hurt expanded into wounded pride, and she believed the relationship was over. As she had done with other disappointments, she tried to hide her pain from the world, channeling it instead into her writing and taking a break from Miss LeG and the theater company.

  “A warm, lovely story.” —Ruth Blodgett, Book-of-the-Month Club News

  The Small Rain was published in January 1945. Reviews were good; most of the reviewers gave lots of encouragement to her as a young writer who had published her first novel.

  When Madeleine visited her mother in Jacksonville that winter, she was finally able to look at her relatives with pride, confident in the choices she had made.

  Back in New York, Madeleine moved into a smaller apartment by herself on West Tenth Street, living alone for the first time.

  In April 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died. Madeleine knew that Hugh was a great admirer of the president, and impulsively she called him. They spoke, but the conversation didn’t lead anywhere, and she was again disappointed.

  She threw herself back into her work, taking the play she had worked so hard on for Miss LeG, Ilse, and turning it into a novel with the same title (though now spelled as Ilsa). Set in Jacksonville, the story was a very uncomplimentary portrait of the South in the first half of the twentieth century, some of it based on Madeleine’s own experiences with her extended family there. She submitted it to Vanguard, and it was accepted for publication.

  That fall, shortly after the end of World War II, Hugh called. He was in town between shows—would she like to have dinner? Yes, she would. They saw a great deal of each other over the next few months, but they kept it private. Not even Mado, who visited for Madeleine’s twenty-seventh birthday in November, was aware of how serious the two were.

  Hugh proposed to Madeleine, with Swan Lake playing in the background, a few days after her birthday.

  * * *

  Very softly last night Hugh said the first two lines of that lovely poem of Conrad Aiken’s.

  [Music I heard with you was more than music,

  And bread I broke with you was more than bread.]

  We are going to be married.

  I would like to be able to write about this but somehow there aren’t any words.

  * * *

  When her mother called to say she had arrived back home safely, Madeleine casually broke the news of her engagement. Hugh also telephoned his parents and then sent them a letter.

  December 4, 1945

  Dear Mother and Dad,

  I should have written all this before telephoning you so it wouldn’t have been such a great shock, but I must say it sounded like less of a shock to you than I thought it would. But I wanted you to know as soon as possible and I also wanted you to mail the ring right away so Madeleine could have it by Sunday. Funny about the ring—when I told her that you had a ring, Mother, that you had always said would be mine when I found the right girl, she said “Well, I want an old-fashioned one with a diamond held up on prongs” and I told her that was exactly what this one was as I remembered it.

  I can assure you you’ll love Madeleine as much as I do. She’s not a Miss America by any means but she has more personality than any Miss America ever had. If you have found a copy of The Small Rain you’ll see a picture of her on the cover. She’s quite tall—I think almost 5'9'' and has always been self conscious of it—she needn’t be now. She’s always worn flat heels but is now wearing high ones! She’s not so much blond as light haired, has a high forehead which she camouflages with bangs. Her eyesight is not good but she hates to wear her glasses, consequently can’t see very well. I think that’s why she picked me.

  Hugh was about to go on tour with A Joyous Season, and Madeleine auditioned for an understudy part. “Don’t give it to her on my account,” Hugh told the producer. Madeleine, capable of getting the job on her own merits, was hired.

  Hugh and Madeleine, January 26, 1946, at Saint Chrysostom’s Church in Chicago

  Their engagement was brief, only eight weeks, and they married on January 26, 1946, in Chicago.

  No family were able to come on such short notice, but a friend from the company stood up for them in church. When the theater tour was over, Hugh moved in with Madeleine in the apartment on West Tenth Street.

  Madeleine and Hugh, circa 1946

  Marriage and Children

  It was a happy time for the newlyweds. The war was over, and Ilsa was published in March to solid reviews. Since she was already published and known professionally as Madeleine L’Engle, Madeleine continued to use that name, though she was also known by her married name, Madeleine Franklin, in her personal life.

  Hugh’s star, too, seemed to be on the rise, with work plentiful and rewarding.

  “Miss L’Engle has the happy gift of never being obvious. She writes with subtlety and in realizing her characters, she suggests rather than explains. She has created in Ilsa a memorable figure and a challenge to the imagination.” —Polly Goodwin, The Chicago Tribune

  Yet the couple had a sense of dissatisfaction and restlessness. What had thrilled Madeleine when she was fresh out of college was different from what she wanted as a married woman whose career as a novelist—instead of a playwright—was taking off. She was working on several novels, including And Both Were Young, with a teenage protagonist, Flip, inspired by her days at boarding school. And although she still had jobs in the theater, she did not feel as attached to it as she once had—she hadn’t been involved with Miss LeG and Margaret Webster’s theater company for some months. Things that had brought Madeleine and Hugh together—feelings of being out of place in the social life of the theater—remained, and they began to think about making a change.

  * * *

  More and more we want to get out of the city, away from artificiality. The longer we work in the theatre the more we realize it is the place we want to work and the more we realize that it is essential for us to make many friends out of the theatre. We have got to the point where this company bores us to hysteria. Although alone they are all interesting, nice people, when they are together they seem to set up a reaction, to represent everything superficial and artificial. And after an evening of being clever, always with a little edge of smirk to the cleverness, of brilliant surface conversation, we come out feeling wasted and soiled. People ought to stay apart if that is what happens when they get together.

  * * *

  Madeleine loved New York City, with its vibrancy, its color. She could be anonymous and solitary when she wanted to be, yet there were plenty of opportunities for connection and culture when she needed them. Hugh was less happy with the city—its noise, its dirt, and their small quarters—but it was where the work was. They dreamed of having six children, of creating a family life quite different from Madeleine’s solitary upbringing. She wanted dogs and cats, too—she’d always loved them but had never had any of her own, not counting Touché.

  Madeleine and Hugh had friends who had given up on the theater and moved to northwestern Connecticut, and Madeleine had fond memories of spending summers at Camp Huckle
berry in that same area. When Madeleine became pregnant in late 1946, they bought an old, rambling farmhouse in Goshen, Connecticut, near their friends, so they could spend weekends and summers in the country. They called it Crosswicks, the same name as Madeleine’s father’s childhood hometown in New Jersey.

  Crosswicks, circa 1954

  Soon enough, the baby came due. Madeleine had a difficult labor and delivery, and then she had to be rushed back to the hospital after a month because of complications. It was only after that scare was over that she was able to enjoy her newborn daughter, Josephine, and get used to the rhythms of motherhood, which didn’t include much writing.

  Madeleine and Josephine, circa 1948

  Hugh traveled a great deal—he was on tour with another play—so Madeleine and Josephine were without him for much of the time that first year, but Mrs. O, Madeleine’s staunch supporter, was a frequent visitor at their apartment. Madeleine and Josephine also visited Mado and other relatives in Jacksonville.

  Those visits to Jacksonville were tense because Madeleine’s extended family thought her marriage had been hasty and a little scandalous. They also felt Madeleine had aired some family “dirty laundry” in Ilsa. Her cousins snubbed her, and her mother was distraught and embarrassed. Madeleine was deeply wounded and hurt by this: she didn’t understand how or why her family couldn’t simply be proud of her success, and not offended by the family descriptions that hit too close to home.

  When one tour ended and another began for Hugh in the summer of 1947, they decided that Madeleine and the baby should spend an extended period at Crosswicks. She was writing, but her new novel wasn’t going well. She put it aside when Beatrice Creighton, an editor at the publisher Lothrop, Lee & Shepard who had been considering And Both Were Young, asked for some changes to the manuscript so it could be published as a “juvenile book.” This was something Madeleine had never thought of or tried before.

  * * *

  It has been a full summer and, on the whole, a good one. If Creighton is pleased with my book I shall be happy and if she is not I shall be miserable. The entire summer is going to be colored in my mind by her reaction to it. I know that is foolish and perhaps it is wrong, but it is the truth of the matter and there is nothing I can do about it. As I look back on this summer it will be the fate of Flip that will determine color.

  * * *

  The colors were glorious for Madeleine, as And Both Were Young was accepted for publication. It came out in 1949.

  “A boarding school story for girls is sure of popularity. Madeleine L’Engle has chosen Geneva for the scene of her unusually good tale of a lovely American girl in an international school … The author, former secretary to Eva Le Gallienne, has had personal experience in boarding schools.” —Horn Book

  Madeleine then started work on Camilla Dickinson, a coming-of-age novel set in her beloved New York City. She returned to her favorite themes of adolescence and those moments when you realize that your parents aren’t perfect, that they have separate lives, and that you are the one responsible for your own happiness. This imaginative return to the New York of her childhood made her ponder her process.

  * * *

  At 31 I am still beset with all the passions, depressions, exultations of adolescence. Some of adolescence I don’t want to lose—the sudden awareness of discovery—discovery of all kinds of things, books, pictures, music, sunsets, stars, common trees, night, food, drink, people … But the other part, the unreasonable moods, glooms, tortures, self-doubts, the unwillingness to grow up: those I wish I could lose. It’s a difficult balance to strike. To be [a] writer, the kind of writer I want to be, I must keep certain qualities of adolescence, but it must be passion that is productive; out of the gloom must come light. And above all I must not use it as an excuse to remain childish. I myself must mature if I can hope to have my writing become mature.

  I have asked myself frequently of late why writing is so desperately important to me. Or, more simply: why do I write?

  And the only really honest answer I can give is: “I have to.”

  But why I have to I can’t truly say. It is just a necessary function to me like breathing and eating and eliminating. And is one of my greatest joys. And one of my greatest agonies.

  And what do I want to do with my writing? Again that’s a question I find difficult to answer to myself. I can feel what I want to do, but I can’t put it in words that satisfy myself. I don’t believe in propaganda writing as a form of art but I would like my books to make their readers want to be more than they are, to reach higher. I want to make them—the readers—aware of the wonderfully exciting and unlimited possibilities of man. Perhaps I am a romantic because I don’t want to make them disappointed in their surroundings but with themselves. And not too much of that, really. What I want them to feel is: look! How wonderful I can be if I only will and I will! How wonderful everyone can be!

  And as I look back on my finished books I know I have not done this. Perhaps because it is something I need to feel more often myself.

  But I must write. I must “be a writer” in the fullest sense of the word. I must someday begin to approach more nearly what I’m striving for.

  And now I sound 16 again. Perhaps talking about being mature always sounds immature.

  * * *

  In the fall of 1951, Madeleine and Hugh decided to live full-time at Crosswicks. Madeleine was pregnant again. They were still hoping for lots more children and thought it would be easier to raise them in the country. Hugh would use Crosswicks as a home base while he pursued acting jobs, and Madeleine, of course, could write anywhere.

  Camilla Dickinson had been accepted for publication. Madeleine’s publisher also wrote to her about some praise she’d received of a different sort—Pageant magazine had named her one of the ten most beautiful female authors of 1951.

  Hugh’s career as an actor hadn’t become more predictable or stable. He would work for a few grueling months on tour and then just wait, wait, wait for a call for the next job.

  * * *

  The theatre is the goddamnest lousiest most heartbreaking profession. Sometimes I think I can’t stand it for Hugh, the gaps in between jobs, the appointments and then the waiting. And the telephone. The telephone has become a horrible personality dominating the room. Waiting for it to ring for a job or even an appointment. And then waiting to see if you get the job. Sometimes it seems to me that Jo and I are millstones around his neck as far as the theater is concerned. With the amount of television he’s done this year he could have done very well and even saved something. As it is we just barely managed. Having a child invariably raises your standard of living—and we have the house, too—and all that can’t help but weigh heavily on his mind.

  * * *

  “Ms. L’Engle’s Camilla has more innate strength and stability than Salinger’s Holden Caulfield.” —Harrison Smith, Saturday Review

  With the publication of Camilla Dickinson shortly after their move, though, Madeleine herself was feeling secure in her identity as a writer.

  She was also confident that village life would suit her and her writing. She and Hugh joined the local Congregational Church, where Madeleine was the choir director and occasional Sunday school teacher. She was determined to be part of the community, and was very happy that both the children she taught and the parents at the church enjoyed her.

  * * *

  Perhaps one reason this makes me so happy, is so important to me, is that it has taken me so long to get on with people, to become outgoing instead of in going. And since, until I was about 14, I wasn’t able to get on with other children, it pleases me to have children like me now.

  * * *

  She was solidifying her writing philosophy, too, and understanding the anguish she had experienced as a child at the opera. For her as a writer, stories were meant to transform both the reader and the main character—she did not want them to end in tragedy.

  * * *

  I’ve felt for some time now (a defi
nite development from my collegiate point of view) that the end of a work of fiction should be positive, that no matter how tragic or sordid the events the reader should be left at the end with a feeling of elevation.

  * * *

  Madeleine also admitted that moving to rural Connecticut was an escape of sorts. Having been a child in Europe as the shadow of World War II was lengthening, Madeleine had long feared war. Now, as a mother, she worried about a new type of war dominating the news of the day: a cold war between two superpowers armed with nuclear weapons.

  * * *

  Each morning while Jo and I are eating breakfast there is a half hour news broadcast from eight to eight thirty. I try to listen to it and yet to keep chattering to Jo so that she won’t have to hear most of it, because even if she can’t understand the words she can sense the fear and tension behind it. And I think rather ashamedly that one reason I am glad we are here this winter instead of in New York (though it is not the reason) is a kind of escapism. I listen to the news but it does not seem as close here as it does in New York, even when it’s on the same programs we listened to most there, WNYC or WQXR. And in this lulled sense of false security I no longer have the nightmares about atom bombs or the panic for the safety of my children. I know this is being like an ostrich with its head in the sand. Goshen, given the right circumstances, could easily become a little hell of its own … And though I might feel that I was on the side of the angels that wouldn’t change the terror of the powers of darkness.