Becoming Madeleine L'Engle

by Charlotte Jones Voiklis

  * * *

  Madeleine and Hugh’s second child, Bion, named after Madeleine’s grandfather, was born in March 1952.

  Madeleine and Bion, 1952

  Madeleine again had problems giving birth, and she and Hugh received the news that they couldn’t have any more children. It was a devastating blow to them both.

  It was around this time that Hugh also made the decision to leave the theater and try something else. What that something else would be, he didn’t know; he only knew that if he wasn’t going to be a successful actor, he was running out of time to start a new career, and his young family needed a more stable income.

  Hugh took jobs at a factory and a radio station before buying the local general store in Goshen. He ran the store, and Madeleine worked there part-time.

  She was also a housewife and mother, but she wasn’t like the other mothers in her community. She was the only one in town who was trying to do something else in addition to the hard and necessary work of keeping house and home and, in some cases, farm.

  Goshen general store

  Madeleine at the store, circa 1958

  It was lonely being different. She began to understand how her father’s isolation as an artist had affected him. She also began to realize that her mother had never been able to understand that about her father, and she worried that perhaps Hugh might not be able to understand that about her either.

  After a couple of years, village life began to wear. Madeleine and Hugh had their artist, actor, and writer friends visit from New York on the weekends, and some of their friends in Goshen had started a community theater company called the Goshen Players, which Madeleine joined. Hugh was more reluctant to keep a toe in the theater. It was painful and frustrating to do as a hobby what he had planned on doing as a career.

  Madeleine carved out time to write, but it was always at the kitchen table and often interrupted. She did maintain her discipline of practicing the piano for half an hour every day, which sometimes was the only thing in her routine keeping her tied to her creative life. She continued to use her journal to record ideas for future work.

  * * *

  October 4, 1953

  A Tesseract is a concept, arrived at by the following reasoning: here we have a one dimensional line a. Four such lines form a two-dimensional square a2, which is bounded by four lines and has four vertices (corners). Four such squares form the three dimensional cube, a3, which is bounded by six squares, has twelve edges and four vertices. The four dimensional cube, called Hypercube or Tesseract, would be mathematically described as a4 and we can state that it should be bounded by 8 cubes, have 16 vertices, 24 faces, and 32 edges. But since it is supposed to be 4 dimensional we obviously can’t make one.

  * * *

  * * *

  Perhaps one can reconcile the contradiction between predestination and free will by thinking of the sonnet: within the strict boundaries of the form there is great freedom.

  * * *

  During this time she had managed to complete two new novels, Rachel and A Winter’s Love, but they were rejected in quick succession.

  * * *

  Let us face a few facts.

  I worked hard on “Rachel” but I never saw either the book or my major characters clearly. I was bitterly disappointed [by] its failure. I was still struggling with rebellion against living in the country. I wanted New York and the life of New York so abominably that it was like a sickness. My own personal individual life was utterly confused and filled with conflicts. I expected for some reason that this new book—the Emily book—would fall into my lap without any real effort on my part. This never happens …

  Let me realize that I cannot accomplish a full day’s work in a couple of tired hours a night.

  Let me realize that I cannot write a valid book without at least as much labour as it takes to produce a child.

  * * *

  It was the 1950s, well into the Cold War, and anticommunism was captivating the nation. The arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union had created a great deal of fear. Senator Joseph McCarthy was in charge of investigating “un-American activities” in the United States, and his tactics stirred up such fear that some people began thinking of each other as “spies.” McCarthy held a series of investigations and hearings, some secret, some televised, accusing individual scientists and artists of having ties to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. There was even a Hollywood blacklist containing the names of anyone even suspected of sympathizing with communism. Those on the list were no longer hired for work.

  Madeleine opposed ideological fervor in any of its forms; she saw in McCarthyism a danger as grave as many saw in communism.

  * * *

  During McCarthy’s investigation of [J. Robert] Oppenheimer one of the charges against the scientist was that he had delayed in the production of the H Bomb. Both McCarthy and the News stated that the only possible reason Oppenheimer could have had for holding back on the H Bomb was the subversive one of withholding aid from the United States and giving it to Russia. Not one mention of Oppenheimer’s conscience made. Not once was it suggested that perhaps morally he hesitated to make possible a weapon that could destroy our world entirely, that could cause the ghastly murders of billions of people … If anybody is blinding us to the fact that there are communists; and that they are a menace, it is McCarthy. Let us try, in opposing him, not to fall into the pattern he has set. It is more than a pattern; it is a trap.

  * * *

  The McCarthy hearings consumed and terrified her even more than the threat of war did. The false promises of security through purity of thought and ideology and McCarthy’s methods of investigation, intimidation, and guilt by association weighed on her mind, and she began to explore a creative response.

  She got a new agent, Theron Raines, to represent her work to publishers. Theron was optimistic and encouraging, and agreed to take on Rachel and A Winter’s Love. Even if she knew she would never stop writing, that it was as essential to her as breathing, Madeleine also cared desperately about being successful and acknowledged.

  * * *

  Each day I feel a little more desperate. Another part of it is that my faith in myself as a writer is what makes life in Goshen bearable. It’s nothing to do with or against Goshen. But basically I’m a big city person, and though I know we’re better off here than in New York I’ll never, no matter how wildly I succeed on the outside, be anything but a misfit on the inside. But all right—I don’t mind the lack of people I can talk to in my own language, the hours spent at the store, having to snatch my writing hours at night when I am tired, as long as I have faith in myself as a writer. Without that everything dissolves into resentment and hate, hate for the store, the lack of culture, of intellectual stimulation, even of simple appreciation for music or pictures or books—hate and resentment and a feeling of waste. If Theron doesn’t like this book there is no need for me to lose faith in myself and my work, but it’s been too long since anything I’ve written has been considered acceptable; I’m in desperate need now of encouragement, not discouragement.

  And the only reason I’m writing all this, or anything I write in these journals at all, is that it may be useful to me in a book someday. When I first started writing journals it was with the usual idea for publication; now I know that outside of fiction what I write is inhibited and dull, but the gem of life is there to remind me of some only barely indicated emotion so that I will have it when I need it.

  * * *

  When she developed severe stomach pain, Madeleine and her doctor both wondered if it was psychosomatic, due to her worry over her writing. But the pain worsened; in addition, she had a flare-up of iritis, for which she spent nearly three weeks in the hospital in the fall of 1955. The best medical advice was “rest,” which she tried. She also tried to not worry so much about her writing.

  Finally, in 1957, A Winter’s Love was accepted and published.

  “A village in the French Alps serves as an approp
riate setting for this novel of a marriage that nearly fails.” —The Tribune, South Bend, Indiana

  Sadly, Madeleine’s happiness at succeeding with a new book was cut short. She and Hugh had two friends, Liz Dewing and Arthur Richmond, who had spent several summer vacations with them in Connecticut. Liz and Arthur died suddenly, just a few months apart, leaving behind their daughter, Maria. At seven years old, a devastated Maria came to live at Crosswicks, joining nine-year-old Josephine and four-year-old Bion.

  Bion, Mado, Maria, and Josephine, with dogs Gardie and Oliver, circa 1959

  Now that her household numbered five, Madeleine, more than ever, needed to find space and time to write. She and Hugh built an office for her over the garage in 1958.

  Madeleine in “The Tower,” her Crosswicks office, circa 1959

  A Winter’s Love didn’t sell as well as Madeleine had hoped, and Rachel, which she had revised as many as six times over the years, was making the rounds without much interest. Madeleine turned back to where she’d had success: writing about younger protagonists, as she’d done in And Both Were Young. She started to work on Meet the Austins, which began as a series of vignettes about a family living in a New England village.

  The book about the Austins found a publisher who wanted significant changes: more plot, something with a recognizable crisis and resolution. The novel had been inspired by Madeleine’s own family life, and since her family was in the process of integrating Maria into the household, the central drama became the arrival of a newly orphaned girl named Maggy. This fictionalization proved to be hurtful to Madeleine’s own children while they were growing up, something Madeleine never fully understood.

  Madeleine was happy to be writing well again, and around this time Hugh realized he would never be happy if he wasn’t acting. Running the general store was no longer a challenge for him, and he was restless. But the thought of returning to acting was daunting—he had been out of the game so long. Also, how would it be possible to raise a family on such an unstable income? Although Meet the Austins had found a publisher, the couple was under no illusions that Madeleine’s income as a writer could support the family if Hugh’s return to the theater failed. Yet Madeleine had come to understand that failure might be making her more of a writer than success had done—because if you fail, and then keep going no matter what, that is what makes you a writer. It almost doesn’t have anything to do with publishing. So Madeleine supported Hugh wholeheartedly in his decision—she knew she wasn’t fully alive unless she was doing the work she loved, and she wanted the same for her husband. Still, it was not an easy decision.

  * * *

  Now that the decision is made, I’m scared.

  There is a seductive safety in the store … I’m scared stiff about a return to the theater! All the things that made Hugh miserable before are still there. What do we do about the children and their education? We can’t afford private schools in New York. How long can we keep them in school here and manage on a commuting basis? What do we do between jobs? When will the first job come? What about the long periods when we will have to be separated? They were bad before; they will be harder now. Will we be able to manage financially?

  * * *

  Madeleine, circa 1961

  Making the Leap

  Madeleine and Hugh sold the store, and Hugh started spending more time in New York City looking for acting jobs. He was away from the family and Goshen for long stretches of time, but he wasn’t able to find work. By the end of the spring of 1959, the couple decided to take a two-month cross-country camping trip before Hugh started to look for work again. They piled into the family station wagon and set off for California, visiting Hugh’s relatives in Oklahoma and stopping at some of the country’s most beautiful national parks along the way. They slept in a tent, did their cooking over a fire, and rose and slept with the sun.

  Preparing for the family camping trip, 1959

  It was while driving across the country, through varied and new landscapes, without much thought of what lay ahead, that Madeleine’s imagination began connecting the dots between sonnets and tesseracts, security and risk, love and action.

  * * *

  Day by day living on this trip, never planning ahead, has been good for me in that it has made it more possible to face complete uncertainty and insecurity of the future. Newspapers and radio have kept world tensions with us, but even they have seemed further away than they do at home.

  * * *

  * * *

  As we neared the New Mexico Border we went into a Ute Indian reservation, and suddenly the country changed entirely. It changed so completely that we might have been in another planet. Everyplace else we’ve been so far has been a little familiar to me, at least a little like someplace else I’ve seen; but this was like [artist] Chesley Bonestell’s pictures of alien worlds. Dry brown land with sparse, dull green vegetation. High mountainous cliffs with flat tops and eroded sides. And strange fairy tale rock formations appearing out of nowhere.

  * * *

  * * *

  Painted Desert, Arizona. The first real beauty so far in Arizona. Red, lava-like cones and pyramids stretching out to the horizon on yellow desert. Purple and blue shadows. Again like the surface of another planet.

  * * *

  Madeleine later recalled that the characters of Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which popped into her head while driving through the Painted Desert in Arizona.

  When they got back from their trip, Madeleine and the children got ready for the beginning of the school year in Connecticut, and Hugh at last found a theater job: he would play the father, Otto, in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank at a summer theater in Massachusetts.

  Madeleine and the children joined him in New York in February of 1960. By that time, Madeleine had written the first draft for what would eventually be called A Wrinkle in Time. Her working title was Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which. Although Madeleine hadn’t studied hard at Le Châtelard, she did retain the school’s use of British grammar, punctuation, and spelling rules. She thought the absence of the period after Mrs, a Britishism, added to her characters’ otherworldliness.

  Madeleine, circa 1965

  After Anne Frank, Hugh was cast in a production of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, which was doing a test run in a theater close to Lincoln Center before heading to Broadway, so the family was living in a hotel near there. Friends had encouraged them to look for a house in the suburbs outside the city, but they knew that Madeleine would feel as isolated as she had in Connecticut and that Hugh would have a long commute. They decided to find an apartment in Manhattan.

  While Hugh was in rehearsals, Madeleine and the children concentrated their efforts on those parts of the city she knew best: Greenwich Village and the Upper East Side, but everything they saw was either too expensive or too small. Then Josephine saw an ad in the newspaper for a six-room apartment on the Upper West Side. At first Madeleine didn’t want to go look—she didn’t know much about the neighborhood, and she was sure that something that size would be beyond their budget. But Josephine insisted on trudging all the way up to 105th Street and Broadway, and they found that the apartment was indeed affordable and the neighborhood was a jumble of different kinds of people, something that Madeleine had loved about Greenwich Village.

  Soon the children were settled in a school not far from the apartment, and Madeleine worked on revising Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which. She was frustrated that the publisher who had taken Meet the Austins still hadn’t given her any editorial notes or a publication date.

  * * *

  Monday I finished typing Mrs Whatsit and gave it into Theron. So there is that awful feeling of being through with one book and not started on another. And the feeling of terror.

  * * *

  Hugh’s play was a success, which meant they could be a little less anxious about money. It also meant a new routine for the two of them. Madeleine stayed up late in order to have some time with him after he got home from work, an
d they didn’t go to bed before two in the morning. She was also up early with the children, getting them ready for school. That, and the worry over Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which making the rounds with publishers brought a flare-up of her stomach trouble. Mrs. O came to help, and on her suggestion the household made an adjustment: the children, led by Josephine, who was now thirteen, got themselves breakfasted and off to school in the mornings by themselves. Madeleine and Hugh still had time together, and Madeleine got the sleep she needed. If the children missed their parents in the morning, they had their company and attention in the evenings, when eating dinner around the family table before Hugh went to the theater was a hard-and-fast rule.

  But the rejections for Mrs Whatsit started to come, including from Madeleine’s editor at Vanguard Press, Evelyn Shrifte.

  * * *

  Evelyn turned down Mrs Whatsit while I was there, turned it down with one hand while saying that she loved it, but didn’t quite dare do it, as it isn’t really classifiable. I know it isn’t really classifiable, and am wondering if I’ll have to go through the usual hell with this that I seem to go through with everything I write. But this book I’m sure of, as I wasn’t of A Winter’s Love, or even of the Austins. I know Mrs Whatsit is a good book, and if I’ve ever written a book that says what I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is my psalm of praise to life, my stand for life against death.