Madeleine and Hugh, circa 1946
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 Huckleberry 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 definite 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.
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 appropriate 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?