48
Madeleine L’Engle
Writing toward the Why
Madeleine L’Engle quit writing on her fortieth birthday. When a publishing house rejected her book, she declared it “an obvious sign from heaven.” In a dramatic gesture, she covered her typewriter in her study and then paced the room, sobbing. “The rejection on my fortieth birthday seemed an unmistakable command: Stop this foolishness and learn to make cherry pie,” she wrote. The trouble was, while she walked in circles around the study weeping, she was also already busily working out a novel in her head about failure. Realizing that she was still “writing,” Madeleine made a decision in that moment that would change the course of her life: “I uncovered the typewriter. In my journal I recorded this moment of decision, for that’s what it was. I had to write. It was not up to me to say I would stop, because I could not. . . . If I never had another book published, and it was very clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing.”1
Four years later, after it was rejected more than two dozen times, A Wrinkle in Time was finally published. The novel won the prestigious Newbery Medal in 1963, and as a result, Madeleine never had difficulty publishing again. She wrote more than sixty books over her lifetime, including works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Writing Responsibly
Madeleine’s parents were married almost twenty years before their daughter was born in 1918. Her father, a drama and music critic for a New York City paper, and her mother, an accomplished pianist, were accustomed to enjoying an active social life, which they continued after the birth of their daughter, leaving Madeleine with a great deal of time on her hands to read and write alone in her bedroom.
School was torturous for young Madeleine. Neither the teachers nor her peers at her private girls’ boarding school liked her. Ridiculed for her clumsiness in sports and deemed unintelligent by her teachers, Madeleine retreated into her own imagination. “As difficult as these experiences were at the time, their value lay in the effect they had in shaping L’Engle as a writer,” biographer Donald Hettinga observes. “They forced her to develop a rich interior world, and they provided the material for a significant portion of her fiction.”2
By the time Madeleine graduated from Smith College in 1941, she had written dozens of short stories and knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life. “I headed like a homing pigeon for New York,” she wrote. “It was the place of my birth. It was where I would find music and art, theatre and publishing; it was where I belonged.”3 In New York City Madeleine also met her husband, Hugh Franklin, a successful stage actor who later became known for his role as Dr. Tyler on the soap opera All My Children. And it was in New York that Madeleine decided to drop her last name, Camp, in favor of her middle name, L’Engle, because she wanted to make it on her own without the influence of her father’s name in publishing circles. It was a difficult decision for her. Her father had died in 1935, while Madeleine was in boarding school in South Carolina, and her mother suggested that in dropping the name Camp she was rejecting her father.
Death would become a frequent theme in Madeleine’s work—so much, in fact, that some of her novels were initially rejected by publishers who claimed death played too prominent a role. “Publisher after publisher turned down Meet the Austins because it begins with a death,” Madeleine acknowledged. “Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time because it deals too overtly with the problem of evil.”4 She insisted that her responsibility as a writer was to present reality accurately, and for her, reality included both the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. “A writer who writes a story which has no response to what is going on in the world is not only copping out himself but helping others to be irresponsible, too,” she wrote.5 Even fantasy, she argued, serves as “a search for a deeper reality, for the truth that will make us more free.”6 For Madeleine, writing fantasy was a way for her to apprehend the mysteries of God. She claimed the young adult fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time was a theological book because it was a metaphor for God’s love.
Madeleine didn’t always consider herself a person of faith. In fact, having abandoned religion in college, she admitted that she and her husband rarely darkened a church door during the early years of their marriage. But something changed with the birth of her two biological children and the adoption of a third. “We discovered that we did not want our children to grow up in a world which was centered on man to the exclusion of God,” she wrote.7 Realizing that bedtime prayers wouldn’t suffice, and guiltily acknowledging that she couldn’t very well send her children to Sunday school without participating in worship herself, she and Hugh began to attend a small church in the center of Goshen, the Connecticut village where they’d moved from New York City in 1951. “As long as I don’t need to say any more than that I try to live as though I believe in God, I would very much like to come to your church—if you’ll let me,” she told the minister.8 Not only did the minister agree to let the conflicted skeptic through the church doors, he also made Madeleine the choir director.
Writing and faith quickly became inextricably entwined for Madeleine, and over time she came to view writing as a form of prayer. “As I understand the gift of the spirit in art, so I understand prayer, and there is very little difference for me between praying and writing,” she wrote in The Irrational Season. “At their best, both become completely unselfconscious activities.”9 She attempted to answer many of her questions related to the existence of suffering, grief, and evil through her fiction. “It’s not easy for me to be a Christian, to believe twenty-four hours a day all that I want to believe,” she admitted in Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. “I stray, and then my stories pull me back if I listen to them carefully.”10 As she quipped in The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, “If I ‘believe’ for two minutes once every month or so, I’m doing well.”11
Madeleine resisted the label of “Christian writer,” despite the fact that she wrote dozens of nonfiction books about spirituality and faith. She preferred instead to be considered a writer who is Christian. “I have often been asked if my Christianity affects my stories, and surely it is the other way around,” she admitted. “My stories affect my Christianity, restore me, shake me by the scruff of the neck, and pull this straying sinner into an awed faith.”12
Madeleine’s fiction is not overtly Christian. She doesn’t mention Jesus or God by name, and, in fact, some Christians have interpreted characters like Mrs. What, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which in A Wrinkle in Time as witches and accused her of blasphemy and heresy. She has also been criticized for referring to the Bible as story and has been labeled a New Age spiritualist for her assertion that God is present in all parts of creation. Madeleine herself claimed, “There can be no categories such as ‘religious’ art and ‘secular’ art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore ‘religious.’”13 She believed her job as a writer was to draw people to the light of Christ, not by blatantly evangelizing or hitting them over the head with theology, or by “loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they will want with all their hearts to know the source of it.” She had confidence that her art—her words—would do exactly that without any overt mention of God: “What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.”14
Madeleine L’Engle has been most criticized for her broad and encompassing view of Christianity. She’s been accused of universalism, a charge she denied in Walking on Water: “I don’t mean to water down my Christianity into a vague kind of universalism, with Buddha and Mohammed all being more or less equal to Jesus—not at all! But neither do I want to tell God (or my friends) where he can and cannot be seen!”15 She was the first to admit that she didn’t have any of it figured out, but she also insisted that God is a God of love and a God who loves all.
In the end, she refused to limit God, preferring instead to celebrate the fact that so much of him cannot be defined or known. She chastised those who, because of fear and a need for control, attempt to define him in a particular way. Madeleine found not fear or unease but comfort and consolation in this unknowable, mysterious God. “The only God worth believing in is neither my pal in the house next door nor an old gentleman shut up cozily in a coffin where he can’t hurt me,” she asserted. “He is the mysterium tremendens et fascinans”16—literally, “the terrible mystery.” A paradox, yes, but one that made sense to Madeleine.
As Donald Hettinga notes, Madeleine L’Engle’s science fiction stories are her response to this God of mystery. “I’m never surprised when I discover that one of my favourite science fiction writers is Christian,” L’Engle wrote in Walking on Water, “because to think about worlds in other galaxies, other modes of being, is a theological enterprise.”17 At their center, her books ask deeply profound questions: What is this universe like? Why is there so much suffering? What does it mean? And the most simple and complex of all questions: Why? Not only did she work through these questions in her published works, she also grappled with them privately, filling dozens of journals, which she called her “free psychiatrist’s couch,” over her lifetime.
Madeleine L’Engle believed in the power of questioning and the power of story. Over time and with persistent asking, she learned that it’s more important to ask the right questions than it is to get watertight answers.18 And story taught her that it is indeed possible to live through fear and thrive in spite of it. When she was a young child, her father’s coughing and wheezing, the result of his mustard gas–burned lungs, was a constant reminder of war and its terror. Initially she wrote as a way to escape that fear, and then ultimately as a way to understand it. “Story was in no way an evasion of life, but a way of living life creatively instead of fearfully,” she said. While she was the first to admit that she wrestled with doubt, she also acknowledged that story often transformed her from a place of fearful disbelief to a place of faith. “In trying to share what I believe, I am helped to discover what I do, in fact, believe, which is often more than I realize. I am given hope that I will remember how to walk across the water.”19 And in receiving the gift of Madeleine L’Engle’s stories, we too are given that hope, the hope of remembering how to walk across water.