Madeleine, circa 1961
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, and 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.
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.