Becoming Madeleine L'Engle

by Charlotte Jones Voiklis

  * * *

  After a second rejection, she wrote in her journal:

  * * *

  In a book I’m reading about Fitzgerald, there is a sentence about “second-rate writers who pass themselves off as geniuses.” But how does anybody know? A writer is far too tied up in his work, if he is really a writer, to know whether it is second rate or a work of genius. And how many writers who have been considered second rate, and yet who have persisted in believing in themselves, have been discovered and hailed as geniuses years after their deaths; or writers who have been highly acclaimed during their lives have been forgotten forever shortly after? Or writers who are perhaps true geniuses who have never been discovered at all?

  Perhaps all this is true if someone just decides at the age of twenty or thirty or fourty, oh, I think I’ll try to write. But what about those of us who are stuck with it? Does it really matter if we are geniuses or if we are second rate? It is something that is as much a part of us as the colour of our hair.

  * * *

  After a third, this:

  * * *

  I hate to have to tell mother because it will just make her unhappy. She went through it with father and now with me. But father had had a lot more success, he’d been a lot more important.

  * * *

  In the fall of 1960, while she was in limbo with Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which and Meet the Austins still hadn’t come out, Madeleine decided to go back to school and take classes at Columbia University, not far from where the family lived.

  * * *

  I’m going back to school. Taking a course at Columbia with three credits towards an M.A. I’m really very pleased and excited. It doesn’t start for a couple of weeks—a course on advanced novel writing by Caroline Gordon. I know her work and respect it, and hope that the course will give me the stimulation and excitement and more of a legitimate reason for keeping at the typewriter. The children will understand it a little more if I say, “I have to do my homework, too.”

  * * *

  She enjoyed some friendships, playing piano duets with one new friend and reconnecting with old theater friends for dinners. She volunteered at the children’s school, directing the annual Christmas pageant; kept working on Rachel; and, at the suggestion of her old friend Herbert Berghof, started a play adaptation of the book The Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun, which had scandalized Europe in the late seventeenth century.

  But the Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which rejections kept coming.

  * * *

  Each rejection, no matter how philosophically expected, is a wound. Perhaps the thing about it that bothers me the most is that the editor, in returning it to Theron, said that he felt that it should be cut at least in half, and that he thought Theron should do this before sending it to another publisher. And Theron was all for talking to him on Monday and seeing if he’d be interested in it, if I cut it in half. I’m willing to rewrite, to rewrite extensively, to cut as much as necessary; but I am not willing to mutilate, to destroy the essence of the book. I told Theron to go ahead and talk to him if he was determined to, but that this was how I felt. And I added that one has to keep some integrity. I won’t destroy my book for money for some editor who completely misses the point, which this one obviously did.

  * * *

  One of the reasons she felt so strongly about not making those changes to the manuscript, changes she thought violated the book’s heart, was that she had gone against her similar instincts with Meet the Austins, and it bothered her. When she heard in October that the Austins jacket was finalized and the book would be released in November, she was anxious instead of being excited. Then came the first review, calling it “a convincing and attractive picture of a family faced with real and important issues.”

  * * *

  This clipping [of the review] came on Thursday, and was a relief rather than a joy. Things have gone badly with my writing for so long that I can hardly believe that it is possible that something may go right: and it is the basic inner faith that eventually it will that keeps me going.

  * * *

  Then, just before Christmas, Madeleine received word from Theron that another publisher who had had Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which for a long time had also decided to pass. Once more, she was devastated. Hugh, too, was having some professional disappointments. While the run of The Best Man was continuing, he had only a minor part and wanted to try something else, something with more challenge and visibility, but he was not getting callbacks.

  * * *

  I have told Theron to bring me back Mrs Whatsit, to bring me back Rachel. The entire last third of Rachel is wrong, and I want to look at Mrs Whatsit again before he sends it anywhere else. I want to make Meg’s return to Camazotz for Charles Wallace more motivated.

  * * *

  “A convincing and attractive picture of a family faced with real and important issues.” —V. Kirkus Bulletin

  It’s not clear, however, that she had a chance to make any changes to Mrs Whatsit before she had a call from John Farrar, of the publishing company Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  * * *

  I had a talk with John Farrar this afternoon which was also hopeful. He is not only a good friend of Hester Stover’s, he’s a good publisher, and Hester talked to him about me, and he knew and remembered The Small Rain and looked through three other of my books and I’m to come talk to him. And as Hugh says, this is much more the way things get done than when a manuscript is sent in cold by an agent. He knows and likes Theron, too. And then I told him that Mrs Whatsit was difficult to classify, but that if I had to compare it to anything it would be one of C. S. Lewis’ parables, he said that C. S. Lewis was right up his alley. So he is to make an appointment (he called me from home) and I’m to come in and talk to him and someone else in the office about it. Oh, I can’t help hoping, I can’t help hoping.

  * * *

  Madeleine brought Farrar the manuscript on January 16. The following day, she was already anxious that she hadn’t heard from him, even though she must have known that was an unrealistic expectation. But, on January 18, she heard from Theron.

  * * *

  Mr. Farrar likes Mrs Whatsit, [and] the juvenile man there likes it, but they’re a little afraid of it and are going to give it to an outside reader to report on. So. My first reaction, I’m afraid, was frustrated rage. I’d so hoped that they’d like it, say so, and buy it. But at least I still have hope. And I will just have to wait and see. If there is karma, mine is certainly patience.

  * * *

  Almost two more weeks passed before Madeleine’s patience had its reward.

  * * *

  Happiness is as numbing as unhappiness. Bion came into our room this morning (there’s a teacher’s conference so no school) and said, “Mommie, Theron says I’m to wake you up. He wants to speak to you. It must be very important.” Farrar is taking Mrs Whatsit.

  * * *

  Madeleine, Charlotte, and Léna, circa 1970

  Epilogue

  It was supposed to be a quiet book. John Farrar loved it and was willing to publish it, but he thought that the audience would be very narrow—it was a risk. If science fiction in the late 1950s and early 1960s was published primarily with male readers in mind, how would people respond to a fault-ridden female protagonist who has to become her own hero? And weren’t the book’s concepts about space and time, and good and evil, over children’s heads? But he was willing to gamble on it because he believed in Madeleine as a writer, and he wagered that if A Wrinkle in Time didn’t do well, her next book would.

  The response, however, ended up being overwhelming, as both children and adults were able to see themselves in the main character, Meg Murry, and were swept up in the great adventure. Teachers and librarians championed A Wrinkle in Time, and because of its success, Madeleine was able to spend her time from then on lecturing, teaching, and writing, without the guilt she’d felt during the years in Connecticut because she was neither successful in the ways she wante
d to be as a writer nor accomplished in the domestic virtues that were so lauded in the 1950s.

  Madeleine and Newbery committee chair Ruth Gagliardo

  During the 1960s, she wrote books and traveled and saw her three children safely out of the nest. Eventually, she became a grandmother.

  We knew her as GrandMadeleine, or Gran, and were very close: summers and Christmases loom large in our own memories, and after our grandfather Hugh (we called him “Gum,” short for Grumpy Old Grandpa, which he tried to teach us to say) died, we lived with her when we were both in college in New York. Charlotte stayed on with her in the apartment through graduate school.

  She always felt like “one of us” and always seemed to be whatever age we were, a comrade and fellow traveler who also nurtured and supported us. She was the woman who sang at the top of her lungs, who played Ping-Pong with gusto, and who had us all read Shakespeare aloud, cuddled up in her four-poster bed. She was the lonely girl who craved connection and who, as an adult, recognized and responded to that need in others. She was the woman who shared her spontaneity and grace by showing us the stars, whether outside at a special star-watching rock near Crosswicks or at the planetarium, or even by pointing out our own inner light.

  As young children, we were invited into the heart of her writing life. At Crosswicks, the family called her writing room above the garage “the Tower,” short for “Madeleine’s Ivory Tower,” a wry reference to scholarly seclusion and privilege. It was off-limits to everyone else except by special invitation, though we, her granddaughters, were always welcome, much to the shock of the rest of the family, who had been trained to give it a wide berth. The Tower was lined with bookcases filled with fiction, nonfiction, large art books, mass-market paperbacks, and standard as well as more esoteric reference books. Various editions of her own books were there, too, and best of all to us: shelves and shelves of manuscript boxes with handwritten titles we didn’t recognize, three-ring binders with the mysterious word mélanges on the spine, and books of different sizes and shapes and bindings, which we knew were her journals. Her whole history as a writer was laid before our eyes.

  She had a big desk that had belonged to her father nestled next to a huge window overlooking Mohawk Mountain. The desk was always a mess of papers, pens, small boxes, and figurines, including a Buddha, a giraffe, and various religious icons. Her typewriter was on a special smaller table to the side. A dog would always be by her feet.

  We would sprawl on the daybed opposite the desk, and she let us read whatever we wanted. We understood that the journals were private, so we never ventured into those sacred texts. Mélanges, we eventually learned, is French for “mixture,” and those notebooks were filled with lectures and old college papers. Some of her manuscripts held no fascination for us once we read the first few pages: they were about adults, and we were not interested in those stories. But there was Brigitta, set in a Swiss boarding school with a fearless protagonist who led the other girls in various acts of independence, and The Joys of Love, about a young actor’s first job at a summer theater by the sea.

  There was also an electronic piano in the Tower, and Gran would occasionally get up from her typewriter and do finger exercises—scales and arpeggios—or attempt a complicated composition like Bach’s Toccata in C Minor. She said it helped “clear the cobwebs out.” She said she never minded practicing the piano when she was younger (that made us skeptical: we hated practicing!), and that in fact, that, too, had helped her become a writer.

  “How?” we asked.

  “Discipline. I saw how if my mother didn’t practice every day, her playing suffered. It’s the same for a writer. You have to practice every day. I also saw how she could go to the piano in a bad mood and usually come away an hour later in a much better frame of mind. I was terribly disorganized and undisciplined in every other way, but I developed enormous discipline for writing, because it was the only thing that ever made me happy when I was younger.”

  As we grew older, our conversations grew deeper, particularly on summer nights as teenagers when we hiked out to the star-watching rock to wonder at the sky. One night, when one of us was feeling particularly wretched about a falling-out with friends, we went to the rock. She told us a story about a time during her theater days when she had been feeling particularly wretched, too, and confided that her mentor, the great actress Eva Le Gallienne, had told her a secret.

  “What was that?” we asked.

  “Miss LeG wore a locket around her neck. The secret was that in the locket, instead of a picture, was a note that said: Everyone is lonely.”

  “That’s so sad!”

  She smiled warmly. “Sometimes it is. But this story is more of a reminder that it can also help to put your own hurts and miseries in perspective, knowing that everyone has those feelings sometimes. But just look at the stars, girls: let them help you put things in perspective. I can’t possibly feel lonely when looking at the stars.”

  * * *

  As we read more and more of her books, and heard more and more of her own personal stories, we began to see how connected they were. Many of her own experiences were given to Camilla in Camilla Dickinson, Katherine in A Small Rain, and Flip in And Both Were Young. Many of her own characteristics were given to Meg in A Wrinkle in Time and Vicky in Meet the Austins.

  May 1, 1959

  Reading Gran’s early journals has brought her to us in a new and different way. Her voice, even as an eleven- and twelve-year-old, is recognizable, and watching her grow and struggle and change and commit through the pages has deepened our relationship with her. As both a teenager and an adult, she turned to her journal for multiple things: when she needed to just get something out of her head and onto paper, as a way of creating distance; when she needed a laboratory for investigating a character or narrative device; as a record of the books she was reading. From the time she was eighteen to the end of her life, she also used her journal as a way to reminisce and reimagine the past. She frequently reread her journals to cull information and incidents for her other writing, both fiction and nonfiction. Sometimes she edited her early journals with notes and thorough redactions, making certain passages impossible to read.

  Her mother, Mado, kept most of the letters her daughter wrote to her, and in those days before email, when long-distance phone calls were expensive, Madeleine wrote almost every day, at least when she was in college and first on her own in New York. When she was a younger adolescent, her parents had had to threaten and cajole her for news from their only child. As a thirty-year old, Madeleine was still being encouraged and scolded by her mother.

  Mado’s visits to the Northeast were frequent, though. She finally moved into the guest room in Crosswicks in the summer of 1971 to spend her last few months on earth with her daughter and grandchildren. Madeleine’s love for her mother is reflected in her memoir The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, published in 1974.

  Madeleine was in her fifties in the 1970s when Hugh was cast as Dr. Charles Tyler in the daytime soap opera All My Children, and now when they traveled, he was recognized. Together they went to South America, China, Europe, and all over the United States.

  When Hugh died in 1986, after forty years of marriage, Madeleine was devastated, but she responded in the way she always did when she was feeling something strongly: she wrote. She traveled even more after Hugh was gone, though New York was always home base, and we, her granddaughters, lived with her there until 1994. She still spent time at Crosswicks, where her son, Bion, lived. When Bion died in 1999, the same year she became a great-grandmother, she lost much of the wind in her sails, but continued to write and travel as long as she was able to. She died in 2007, just shy of her eighty-ninth birthday.

  She always said that her stories knew more than she did, that she wrote to find out what she thought about things, that truth and fact were not the same. She also said she recognized that her books had lives of their own, far apart from her. She was deeply moved when another artist adapted her work, se
tting a poem to music, drawing a picture of a character, or taking one of her stories to stage or screen. She knew what a rarity and honor it is to have a book spark such a response in readers, and she felt it to be both a privilege and a responsibility.

  Madeleine and Hugh, circa 1977

  Just as she never stopped growing and becoming more Madeleine, she challenged us and all of her readers to become more themselves, too, by finding the courage to be both creative and vulnerable. Children, she believed, were much better at this than grown-ups, and part of her true gift was not forgetting those parts of herself as she grew older. In A Circle of Quiet (1972) she reflects:

  I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be. Because I was once a rebellious student, there is and always will be in me the student crying out for reform.