Madeleine, circa 1936
In 1935, at the end of the school year, Madeleine went home for a visit before she went back to Huckleberry Camp. She was pleased to learn that Grandfather Bion and Gaga had moved back to the States and taken up residence in a brand-new skyscraper in Jacksonville. Uncle Bion and his family had stayed in Europe and wouldn’t return to Jacksonville until the end of 1940.
After camp that summer, she returned to Ashley Hall in September. Her grades and her father had won the argument: she would be a junior and not a senior that year.
When she found that her friend Bee was going to be her roommate, and that they would have a coveted balcony room, Madeleine was ecstatic. She was elected a board member of the student council, as well as the junior class representative. She was also hoping to be chosen as an honor girl, yet another distinction granted by the Ashley Hall faculty and the student council.
Sometimes I’m going to [be] writing this diary in the third person singular, calling myself what Bee calls me, Scatter. I’m just going to do it whenever I feel like it.
Sunday Scatter’s cold was still a cold, and she stayed in bed, propped up on her camp blankets and pillows. She finished Stalky and Co. and started another book she had borrowed from one of the new girls called Swallows and Amazons. Occasionally, with a little excited shiver she thought about that night, after supper, when the girls who were to be honor girls for the following year would be announced. If only she could be one—but no, she tried not to think about it.
“If I think about it,” she thought, “I may get hopeful, and then it will be such a disappointment.”
She got up at night for supper and to hear Miss McBee’s traditional talk at the first Sunday night of school. When she came, lastly, to the announcements of the honor girls, how they were the ones that were the nearest to what an Ashley Hall Girl should be, she sat calmly. Looking at her lap, hiding the faint hope that might escape from her eyes.
“Here are the honor girls for this year, alphabetically,” said Miss McBee’s beautiful, calm voice. “Madeleine Camp, Ann McCormick, Judy Penniman, Polly Read.”
When Scatter’s name was called her face flooded with a happy crimson. She, Scatter, short for Scatterbrains, an honor girl, and all her best friends, Judy, Ann, and Polly honor girls too. And Bee, her best of best friends, would be sure to be one as soon as she had been a boarder long enough.
Her birthday that fall brought up conflicted feelings about growing older.
Well, here I am seventeen!… I don’t feel a bit older or wiser, but I shall try to act older and wiser.
The student council once again occupied a great deal of Madeleine’s time, and she was very involved in the monthly elections and disciplinary hearings of other girls. Much of her journal writing reflects a growing willingness to use the council as a means to judge and punish other students. Lots of girls seemed to have been “called up” before the council for discipline, including Madeleine’s friend Cavada Humphrey.
We called Cavada up before the board this afternoon, because she is disregardish of the rules. She may get suspended from Student Council if she isn’t very careful. Also several other people. We are going to do rather drastic things about suspending people from Student Council who have proved themselves undesirable, but it’s the only thing to do … Cavada won’t speak to me, and although that fact is very minor, I wonder what under the sun I’ve done to make her mad. She’ll make a great actress probably, but she’ll be even more egotistical than most of ’em.
For all Madeleine’s concern about the student council, honor girls, and other girls’ behavior, she and a group of friends took part in an incident that crossed the line of acceptable behavior: they wrote pretend love letters to another girl at school from a pretend suitor, going as far as to painstakingly doctor postmarks and return addresses.
A very, very beastly thing has happened. Quite a while ago Nancy and I dropped [off] the letters we had written to Edie Bryant by Mr. Eustace Cabot Blake. We had only written two letters. Well, tonight, all on the spur of the moment, we decided to tell her. So we did. So she immediately tells the whole school and poses as an afflicted heroine, and all the unimportant people in school are down on us, and say it was a mean trick, etcetera. I honestly don’t think it was mean. The whole thing was done in the spirit of fun, and I think she should have taken it that way and not have been such a lousy sport.
Madeleine eventually lost her defensiveness and came to regret her part in the “Eustace affair.” She worried that it would impact the next student council vote. As it turned out, she didn’t lose her place on the council, but she did lose the honor of being on the board. Someone else was also elected for junior class representative, and that was a blow.
I helped count the votes, and it was awfully hard to just act funny when I saw her getting more votes than I. I think I was too sure about the affair of the letters; maybe it wasn’t that, but if it wasn’t, what was it. I thought I had improved, and I thought I was better than Ruthie. If I know, and I do, that my character hasn’t deteriorated, I shouldn’t let it hurt me, but it does. I still have a chance to get on again from the elections by the whole school, and oh, I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t, for I couldn’t bear to go home next week end and tell Mother and Father. About the hardest thing of all was congratulating Ruth; I beamed and said, “Oh, Ruthie, I’m so glad; I’m so glad,” and had an awful time not showing that I wanted to cry. It was a lie, of course, to say that, because how could I be glad when I have evidently lost the respect of Student Council, but at least it made me feel more self respecting than if I hadn’t said anything about it, and had rushed off somewhere to cry. And I can’t talk to anybody about it, not even to Beetles, because I won’t show how it hurt.
Madeleine worked hard to put the Eustace affair behind her, but it shadowed the rest of her junior year and caused her a great deal of pain.
Journal entries from before and after the Eustace affair show that Madeleine was very serious about her work, and had started to examine her own self and who she was. She felt that she had different kinds of moods and that those moods needed to have different names, because to her they felt like distinct personalities. She could be “Diana Masterson,” who was a bit reckless and enthusiastic; “Daphne Parish,” who liked to spend her time painting and writing poetry; or, again, “Elizabeth Applegate Martin,” who observed and empathized, and took the sorrows of the world on her shoulders. She was also “Madeleine L’Engle.”
She is the dramatic part of me—the part of me that longs to act—the one that acts even when there is no audience. The me that often comes just anytime, and almost always after hearing a wonderful piece of music, reading a good book, or seeing a grand play or movie.
I can’t explain all these things. These aren’t the only me’s. There is a me that is none of these things that I am in between lives that, perhaps, even more inexplicable than they. And there are other roads besides, but these, I think, are the ones that occur oftenist.
Madeleine’s exploration of personalities combined with her desire to be a writer, and she began work on a novel.
I wrote quite a bit on my book about Anne and Diana and Daphne and the rest yesterday. I think it’s fairly good. It isn’t an ordinary boarding school story with violently exciting plot and impossible characters. It is real people and real events. To people who are at boarding school, it is really the most important part of their life. They have to learn to live with other people and adjust themselves in a complete little world.
As her literary ambition grew, Madeleine started to seek advice from established writers and critics. She sent some poems to Archibald Rutledge, the poet laureate of South Carolina.
He doesn’t like my subjects or free verse, he says my subjects aren’t poetic, and he thinks free verse is fast being outmoded. I think subjects are a matter of taste, and I disagree about free verse, but he did say something awfully nice at the end. He said that I saw things with a poet’s eye, and that there was no doubting my ability, and that one needs to suffer to write really great poetry, and that if I suffer I may really get somewhere. I am not willing to suffer to write mediocre poetry, but I am to write really great poetry, and I will be great!—although magazines still continue to send me discouraging rejection slips.
More Journal Entries from Madeleine’s Third Year at Ashley Hall
When Scatter went out for anything she always went thoroughly, and now in much of her spare time she went over and practised her Bach Prelude. It was really worth hours of practising, and getting violently excited over; it always left her with a feeling of exhilaration, and a vast amount of energy.
We discussed the girls who sent in applications today. Quite a few were passed that I didn’t think should be, but I don’t expect the faculty will pass them.
Hope this year 1936 brings peace and not war. Oh, if only it can. War would be too horrible. I do hope that this year can be a good year, as good to me as 1935. 1935 was awfully good to me. Representative at Board, Board member, Sir Andrew in Shakespearean play, those 2 weeks with Bee and Maggie, camp, cup at end of camp, school, rooming with Bee on balcony, Honor Girl.
Am at Woodford’s table again this week. It’s really awfully luck. Last week although I was at her table no one talked much, and this week I’m afraid Faith and I carry it to the other extreme discussing politics, diplomacy, etcetera. Woodford really got rather annoyed at lunch, but I do so love to argue and Faith is an excellent opponent. It wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t raise our voices when we got excited.