The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by Madeleine L'engle

  The substance of my days was as subterranean as the deepest of the cellars where the vegetables and eggs and milk were stored. This dream world ended abruptly on the day my parents took me away from the château and to boarding school. In my naïveté I hoped that the school would be a continuation of the dream. My first inkling that school was not going to be like a story came during the very first hour, when the matron, in crisp white uniform and even crisper accent, said, “If you have read boarding-school stories, Madaleen, forget them. School is not like that.”

  It was not. It was, at first, sheer hell. The term had started three days earlier, and I understand now that the decision to send me had been sudden and arbitrary, and had come after bitter quarreling. Mother wanted to take me with them higher into the Alps—for, even in Publier, Father found breathing difficult—and send me to the village school. Father felt that I would not get a proper education there, and that the French I would learn would be a questionable patois. I think also that he thought he was going to die sooner than he eventually did, and did not want me around, for both our sakes.

  4

  So I went away to school. Those first three days missed were disastrous. The other new girls had already found friends. I was completely alone, and the only American, to boot. The only other foreigners were Teri and Danusch Zogu, nieces of King Zog of Albania, and I have often wondered if they survived the terrors which came to their country. We bitterly resented the fact that they had a suite with a fireplace; the only other active fireplaces in the unheated building were in the infirmary and the headmistress’s apartment.

  But most terrible of all was that my imaginary world was ruthlessly wrested from me. Nothing was ever said about daydreams or the weaving of stories; daily life in school was set up so that there was no time and no place for the world of imagination. Our life was completely regimented from the moment we were roused to a bell, to the moment our lights were turned off to another bell. We had fifteen-minute bath “hours” twice a week, and anybody who dared stay in a lukewarm tub sixteen minutes was routed out by Matron. Bathrooms were constantly monitored, and a locked door was knocked on after two or three minutes. “Who is in there? What are you doing?”

  Most of us had chilblains during the winter months. We used to sit in bed at night with tears running down our cheeks, rubbing Mentholatum into hands which were chapped raw and bleeding. Our diet would have provoked a riot in a present-day prison. I remember mostly watery potatoes, and suet pudding with one seed of raspberry jam as filling, so heavy we could feel it clonk into a cold lump in the pits of our stomachs as we swallowed.

  It did not occur to me that there was any way out of this torture until another new girl wrote home asking her parents to take her away, and suggested to me that this was a perfectly possible way out for me, too. When her parents drove up and she left, I wrote to my mother and father in Chamonix, telling them of my misery, and asking them to come for me.

  When Mother wrote saying that she and Father had talked my letter over, long and seriously, and that they were asking me to stay and to learn from my experiences, I did not realize how difficult it was for her to say no to me, or how right she was to do so. After a few weeks I did considerable adjusting. I was not happy, but neither was I unhappy. I learned to put on protective coloring in order to survive in an atmosphere which was alien; and I learned to concentrate. Because I was never alone, because (except after the lights-out bell) I was always surrounded by noise, I learned to shut out the sound of the school and listen to the story or poem I was writing when I should have been doing schoolwork. The result of this early lesson in concentration is that I can write anywhere, and I wrote my first novel on tour with a play, writing on trains, in dressing rooms, and in hotel bedrooms shared with three other girls.

  Sending me away to school may have been an, arbitrary decision on my parents’ part, an end to their dispute about me and an answer to “What are we to do with her?” But I was irrevocably changed and shaped by the school and by my reaction to it. In the spring, when our chapped hands finally healed and we moved from heavy woolen underwear and scratchy serge gym tunics to Liberty cottons, we were given small garden plots to cultivate. We were assigned partners; I was Number 97 in the school (even then, the process of un-Naming had begun); 97 on my clothes, my desk, my napkin cubbyhole, my shelf in the classroom, my locker in the common room; and my partner was 96. We were allowed to bring the produce of our gardens in for tea, so almost everybody planted tomatoes and lettuce and radishes and cress. 96 and I planted poppies. Nothing but poppies.

  It was possible when I was twelve to be considerably more naïve and innocent about drugs than it is today. All we knew was that opium comes from poppies, and we knew this because our illicit reading included Bulldog Drummond and Fu Manchu. From these paperback books, which we kept hidden in our blazer pockets to read when we got sent from the classroom, we learned that opium produces beautiful dreams. So 96 and I ate poppy-seed sandwiches, poppy-flower sandwiches, poppy-leaf sandwiches, and went to bed every night with our dream books and flashlights under our pillows. My dream book has been lost somewhere, but I am still grateful for it. I soon learned that poppy sandwiches weren’t needed to induce dreams, but they did serve to give me an awareness that the waking world isn’t all there is.

  If we had been allowed more time for daytime dreaming, for excursions into the world of the imagination, if we had been allowed time for what George MacDonald calls holy idleness, we would not have had to depend on our nighttime dreams. But holy idleness would not have been tolerated in that school, and any attempt to search for it was considered wicked and immoral. “What! Daydreaming again, Madaleen? You’ll never get anywhere that way.”

  Where did Matron want me to go? Our civilization was rushing toward the devastation of the Second World War; the clouds were visible on the horizon, and my parents saw them, even if Matron didn’t; and yet in school we were being taught to live in a climate where it was assumed that man is in control of the universe, and that he is capable of understanding and solving all problems by his own effort and virtue.

  What 96 and I were doing with our dream books was instinctively rejecting this false illusion, refusing to think that our whole self is limited to that very small fragment of self which we can know, control, and manipulate; that very small fragment of self over which we have power.

  At that time the two worlds lay side by side for me; the imaginary world in which I had been moving was just behind me; I was still fending off the limited, finite world of school with stolen moments of dreaming and writing. I had yet to learn that the two worlds should not be separated. Growing up is a journey into integration. Separation is disaster.

  Look at my mother this summer. She is lost somewhere in the subterranean self; she cannot come up into the light of the day. She is no longer the integrated person I have loved and admired, but a dark shard broken and splintered.

  Bedtime has always been a time for me when the above-water world of the mind and the undersea world of the imagination, the world of the intellect and the world of intuition, have come close. In boarding-school days I treasured bedtime not only because it was my only time of privacy but because it was daydreaming time, and I was angry if I became sleepy too soon. In my Swiss school the dormitory windows opened out toward Lake Geneva, facing the always snow-crested mountains of France on the other side. When I was fortunate enough to have my bed by the window I could lie and look at one of the most spectacular views in the world; the view itself was a consciousness expander, and disciplined my daydreams.

  Long before the language of Freud and Jung became part of our everyday vocabulary, Emerson wrote, “I catch myself philosophising more abstractly in the night or morning. I make the truest observations and distinctions then, when the will is yet wholly asleep and the mind works like a machine without friction. I am conscious of having, in my sleep, transcended the limits of the individual, and made observations and carried on conversations which in my wak
ing hours I can neither recall nor appreciate. As if in sleep our individual fell into the infinite mind, and at the moment of awakening we found ourselves on the confines of the latter.”

  Our dream books were not so foolish.

  I still treasure the time before sleep comes, when I move into the shallows before plunging down into deep waters; and the minutes before I surface into daylight and the routine of the day, when I swim slowly up from sleep and dreams, still partly in that strange, underwater world where I know things which my conscious mind is not able to comprehend.

  5

  This is a story with a double helix. I am trying to write about a particular summer, the summer that will always be for me the great-grandmother’s. I am trying to take a new look at my mother’s life and world, and I find that I can do this only subjectively. I can look objectively at Mother’s life only during the years before I was born, before my own remembering begins, when I did not know her; and even then my objectivity is slanted by selectivity, my own, hers, and that of friends and relatives who told me stories which for some reason Mother had omitted from her repertoire. I learned a good deal of family scandal one Crosswicks summer when I overheard Mother talking to my mother-in-law.

  But there attempts at objectivity fall apart, and biology makes me subjective, and this is the other strand of the intertwined helix, my very subjective response to this woman who is, for me, always and irrevocably, first, Mother; and second, her own Madeleine.

  Change is a basic law of life, and when change stops, death comes. But change is not automatically good; it can be for the worse as well as for the better. If I need any proof that all change is not good, all it takes is five minutes with Mother. She tries to break things, throw things, fights moving anywhere, cries, “No, no, no, no,” over and over; often does not know where she is, or who we are; or, if she does know who, then whether we are. “Are you real? You aren’t made up?” There’s something to learn from this strange, senile madness about the nature of reality.

  Am I making Mother up as I remember her? Am I overcompensating, as the jargon would have it? No matter. What I remember is a woman who was fully alive, who enjoyed new tastes, sounds, adventures.

  That year when I was twelve and she and Father spent the winter in Chamonix, Mother was not happy. The rented villa was as inconvenient as the château, and cold. At night she had to cover the washbasins with quilts so that the pipes would not crack. The ink froze, and had to be thawed in the morning. She told me, when I was grown, that the mountains closed in on her. The winter was snowy and cloudy, the village enclosed in grey. Only rarely would she wake up in the morning to clear skies and Mont Blanc on fire from sunlight.

  But what I remember, from the Christmas holidays I spent with my parents, was the coziness of the villa, which she had somehow made into a home, despite hideous wallpaper with designs that looked like spiders, chairs of brilliant green plush and sagging springs.

  I remember, too, the new glimpse of my parents which followed our separation. Nothing would ever be the same again; they would never be the same. I went up to their bedroom one afternoon looking for Mother, and saw her flung out on the bed in an abandoned position of grief, and I backed out in horror. I do not think she knew that I had seen her. And I began to notice that Father was drinking more than was good for him, but I did not understand the reason why.

  During this summer of the great-grandmother, I am aware again of my father. His portrait is over the mantelpiece, a charming, impressionist piece done long before I was born, painted in an apple orchard in Brittany. The occasion for the portrait was a swashbuckling felt hat and a red tie he’d bought in Cairo. Mother hates the portrait, which I love. The man who looks at us is vital, full of joie de vivre; and he belongs to another, more gracious but equally brutal world; this portrait could not have been painted after that world ended, with World War I. I never knew the man in the portrait; I knew only the man whose world had been demolished in that war, and who took eighteen years to die.

  Mother would say, “Your father and Gilbert White used to take a pitcher of martinis and go out to the apple orchard while Gilbert painted; you can see the martinis in your father’s eyes.” I can’t. This is hindsight on Mother’s part. I see only the handsome, blond young man full of pleasure, not because of martinis but because he’d just completed an exciting assignment; because the apple orchard was beautiful; because he was full of élan vital and amour-propre. (Odd: when I try to express joy I turn to the French words, and to German for pain: Angst; Sturm und Drang; Weltschmerz. It was my parents’ wanderings which gave me these words; I gained many valuable things because of their troubles.)

  I began to know Father after his death. During his life I never heard him complain, so I did not understand about his pain until later. Nor did I understand that alcohol, which had been a pleasure in an apple orchard in Brittany, became a painkiller, and occasionally an abused painkiller. As I look back now, I am amazed that it was so seldom abused. My own struggles with pain, with defeat, help me to know my father and to love him, not as I had loved him before that winter in Chamonix, as a small child looking up to an impossible god, but with a love which begins to struggle toward ousia.

  That month in Chamonix was an ambiguous one for me. When I could, I reacted as a child, but I was being forced into growing up. I wanted to balance the pain of school with comfort, safety, changelessness, but I found pain, discovery, change. I listened to Mother playing Bach on a barely playable upright piano, and I watched her play solitaire. Because she could not understand Father, neither could I, and I was drawn into her unhappiness.

  And yet that Christmas was one of our loveliest. All the decorations on the small tree were homemade. We still hang on our Christmas tree each year a small silver chain made of little beads of tinfoil, rolled from the paper in Father’s packages of Sphinx cigarettes. We cut pictures out of the English illustrated magazines to replace the horrors on the wall which came with the rented villa. My presents were the very books I had asked for, plus colored pencils and a fresh box of water colors and a new notebook with a marbleized cover. What we ate for Christmas dinner I don’t remember; all we ate that winter, it seemed, was rabbit, which was plentiful and cheap; and Berthe, the eighteen-year-old girl Mother had brought with her from Publier (for, even that austere winter, she managed to have help), cooked rabbit every conceivable way. And a few inconceivable, Father would add. We also ate hearts of palm; for some reason the village grocer had an overabundance of this delicacy, and needed to unload it. Berthe bargained with him and came home triumphantly with string bags bulging with cans.

  On New Year’s Eve I was allowed, for the first time, to stay up with my parents until midnight. I remember only one thing about that milestone: while the village clock was striking twelve, Father opened his small new engagement diary for the year, and we all signed our names in it. It was Father’s way of saying yes to Mother and to me and to the new year, no matter what it might bring. It would have been much easier for him to withdraw from it, as he occasionally withdrew from the pain with whiskey, but he refused to withdraw, and I knew this without understanding it in the least, and was grateful as I added my signature to Mother’s and his.

  My father’s name: Charles Wadsworth Camp. When I wrote my first published stories and had to decide on a writing name, it was with a wrench that I decided to use my baptismal name, Madeleine L’Engle.

  Mother said, “It’s as though you’re rejecting your father.”

  “I’m not!” And I reminded her that it had taken her a year to decide whether or not she could go through life as Mrs. Camp. Add to this the fact that many publishers at that time were friends and contemporaries of my father, and I wanted to be a writer on my own. And I’m sure that Father would have been the first to agree that Madeleine L’Engle is a more felicitous name for a writer than Madeleine Camp.

  When I married Hugh I was all set to switch to Madeleine Franklin, but my publishers said that I had already made a good s
tart under L’Engle, and Hugh agreed.

  My first novel was a success, and it was not until we were living in Crosswicks and I began to receive what seemed an interminable stream of rejection slips (for nearly a decade I could sell nothing I wrote) that I began to understand what the failure of his last years must have been like for Father.

  Long after his death Mother told me that one day she went into his room to call him in for lunch. It was at the very end of his life, when they were living in my great-grandmother’s cottage at the beach. Father’s bedroom and office was a corner room overlooking ocean and dunes, with the sound of the surf and the wind in the palms ever present. He was sitting at his desk, and when she came up to him he stopped typing and handed her several pages.

  Mother did not know how to be dishonest, and she sometimes infuriated Father by falling asleep in the evening while he read his day’s work to her. Now, slowly and carefully, she read what he gave her, and then she said, “Charles, this is good.”

  His eyes filled. “I can still write, can’t I?”

  I cannot set this down without tears coming to my own eyes.

  My father’s name was his, and I will always honor it. A name is an important thing, and I did not decide on mine lightly. Perhaps it was Father’s affirming signature on that cold New Year’s Eve in France which underlined forever the importance of a name.

  During those weeks in Chamonix we went everywhere on skis, the simplest method of moving on the snow-packed streets, and I learned more complex skiing on the slopes above the villa. We spent a memorable day on the Mer de Glace, and those hours of walking over a sea of ice were a revelation of a cold and unearthly beauty I had never before seen. My own vision was deepened because I saw the beauty through the eyes of my parents; their wholehearted response took us all beyond the pain and confusion which were ever present in the villa. One night we rode for an hour in a horse-drawn sleigh, snow beneath us, moonlight and starlight above us, the horse’s mane streaming coldly in the wind, while we were kept warm under fur robes. Father hardly coughed at all; Mother relaxed and enjoyed the beauty and the speed. I moved back into my dream world during that ride, not as an escape, but as a respite; I did not try to take the fairy tale with me back into the villa.