Conversations with Madeleine L'Engle

Jackie C. Horne

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781496819833
• eBook ISBN: 9781496819857
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Conversations with Madeleine L'Engle is the first collection of interviews with the beloved children's book author best known for her 1962 Newbery Award–winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time. However, Madeleine L'Engle's accomplishments as a writer spread far beyond children's literature. Beginning her career as a literary novelist for adults, L'Engle (1918–2007) continued to write fiction for both young and old long after A Wrinkle in Time. In her sixties, she published personal memoirs and devotional texts that explored her relationship with religion. At the time of her death, L'Engle was mourned by fans of her children's books and the larger Christian community.L'Engle's books, as well as her life, were often marked by contradictions. A consummate storyteller, L'Engle carefully crafted and performed a public self-image via her interviews. Weaving through the documentable facts in these interviews are partial lies, misdirections, and wish-fulfillment fantasies. But, when read against her fictions, these "truths" can help us see L'Engle more deeply—what she wanted for herself and for her children, what she believed about good and evil, and what she thought was the right way and the wrong way to be a family—than if she had been able to articulate the truth more directly.The thirteen interviews collected here reveal an amazing feat of authorial self-fashioning, as L'Engle transformed from novelist to children's author to Christian writer and attempted to craft a public persona that would speak to each of these different audiences in meaningful, yet not painfully revealing, ways.

Madeleine L’Engle

Linda Chisholm / 1976

From Oral History Research Office, Columbia University. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

This memoir is the result of a series of tape-recorded interviews conducted for the Oral History Research Office by Linda Chisholm with Madeleine L’Engle in April and June of 1976. The first of these interviews were conducted in conjunction with the Oral History course of 1976. Ms. L’Engle has read the transcript and has made only minor corrections and emendations.

Madeleine L’Engle is the author of books of fantasy and science fiction for children, novels for adults, and books of reflection and meditation. She is the wife of Hugh Franklin, actor, mother, grandmother, librarian of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and lay theologian of the Episcopal Church. Her Newbery Medal winner, A Wrinkle in Time, has, in the fourteen years since its publication, become a children’s classic.

In the following interview Madeleine L’Engle tells of the formative influences on her life as a writer, her parents and early schooling, her years at Smith College, her marriage to Hugh Franklin, and her experiences and philosophy of mothering. She describes the events between her first novels and A Wrinkle in Time, when her children were young, a decade of rejection slips, when she experienced the support of a Christian community in a small Connecticut town. She tells how Wrinkle was born of her interest in science, a trip West, and her search for religious truth. She speaks of her understanding of God and His manifestation in the events of her life, especially in the time of her mother’s dying. She describes Canon Edward Nason West, sub-dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, as her friend, colleague and confessor, and the source of one of her most beloved characters, Canon Tallis. She talks about the lack of sexism in her upbringing and its effect upon her books, of her job as collaborator and servant of the books she writes, of the sources of her rich vocabulary, of the heroes of her childhood, and finally of her plans for future books.

Interview 1: Cathedral Library, St. John the Divine, New York, New York, April 15, 1976

Q: The first thing I need to do, Madeleine, is ask for your permission to use this in the Oral History Collection at Columbia University and to quote parts of the tape for my class.

L’Engle: Of course I give you my permission, and I understand that this does not put the tape into the public domain and that I will retain copyright.

Q: That’s right. We’ll want to talk about your books, Madeleine, but before we do that, I’d like you to give me what I would call an educational biography. Now, by that, I want to hasten to say I don’t mean a listing of your schools. I mean to ask you to identify a few of what you would call themes, important formative influences on your life, and what brought you to the place you are today, both as a writer and as a person.

L’Engle: I think it was very important that I was born in New York City and born an only child of parents who had tried for twenty years to produce a full-term baby. I was stubborn then, and I’m stubborn now. I lasted the full nine months, but this also meant that I was horribly overprotected because my mother lost another baby after me. I was going to be it. So, out of this rather negative thing of overprotection came my first positive experiences in writing because if you’re an only child and you’re not allowed out to libraries, when you’ve finished the books that you have, how do you get more books? You write them.

So I wrote my first story when I was five. It was about a little g-r-u-l because I couldn’t spell. I wrote my first novel when I was ten because my father got a new typewriter and I got his old one. And what do you do if you’re given a typewriter? Obviously, you write a novel.

Another seemingly negative thing which was very positive for me as a writer was that I was in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades in a school here in New York City, where there was a lot of emphasis put on athletics, and any team I was on automatically lost. If they chose up teams, the poor team who got me at the end groaned loudly, and my home room teacher very quickly took up the assessment of the kids and decided I was dumb. I learned quickly there was no point in doing any homework for her because she was going to hold it up for ridicule. I was not going to please her, so I stopped doing homework. And what did I do instead? I wrote. I established then a pattern of discipline in writing, which I never would have done had I been happy in school.

Then another terribly important thing happened. My father had been gassed in the First World War, and mustard gas just goes on eating up a man’s lungs very slowly, and when I was twelve it became apparent he could not live in any city anymore. Cities were not polluted the way they are now, but even so, a city was too much for his lungs. My parents went to the Alps to try to find a place where Father could breathe, and what do you do with a twelve-year-old girl? They put me in an English boarding school. This was an incredible experience, having to sink or swim. I went down three or four times before I learned to swim. But the important [thing] that that school taught me was to concentrate in any kind of noise. We never had a moment of privacy, so I learned to put a force field of concentration around myself and to simply eliminate all outside sound. I can still do that as long as I’m not responsible for the noise. I wrote my first novel while I was on tour with a play, in trains, in dressing rooms that I shared with other people, in hotel rooms I shared with other people.

Q: I suspect not every child learned that at an English boarding school.

L’Engle: Well, I might not have learned it if I already hadn’t established the pattern of writing, of needing the world of story, from which I sorted out what was happening. It wasn’t an escape. It was a way of coming to terms with things. And I love to write on airplanes and in airports, which I do when I’m traveling to lecture. The only time that I can’t do this, I discovered, was when I had children. I could not block out the sounds for which I was responsible, but if I’m not having to take care of the noise, it doesn’t bother me a bit.

Then we came back to this country, and I went to another boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina, which is where many of my forebears on my mother’s side come from. I responded enormously to the beauty. The school was in one of the old beautiful houses in Charleston, and I was very happy there. I was allowed to be a writer. I was allowed to be what in the other schools had been considered eccentric. I then went to Smith, and I was at Smith when the English Department was at its height.

Q: Who were some of your teachers?

L’Engle: I had Mary Ellen Chase, with whom I immediately had a battle. I was taking her—

Q: Would you like to—?

L’Engle: Yes. I was taking her survey of the novel course. It was a very popular course, and she did try to weed out those who were just taking it because they wanted to take Mary Ellen Chase and those who were really interested. The first mid-semester quiz was a hundred questions, and I remember only one of them, which was “What color dress did Jane Eyre have on when she met Mr. Rochester?” I looked at these idiotic questions, and I didn’t know the answer to more than two of them. I was furious. So I grabbed about ten of those sheets and turned them over, and in my naive rage I wrote, “Dear Miss Chase, I don’t know the answer to these questions. I think this is a silly quiz. But I have read the books, and I’ll tell you what I think of them.” Which I proceeded to do and Miss Chase, being a marvelous woman and a marvelous teacher, just simply wrote back, “Take no more quizzes,” and made me do a lot of extra work, which was marvelous.

I also had Esther Cloudman Dunn for Shakespeare and for seventeenth-century literature, and she was so on fire with her work that you couldn’t help catching it. I think the most important, single thing that she taught me was, in discussing Shakespeare’s plays and the rudeness of the Elizabethan audience—particularly the boys in the pit—that if they didn’t like what was going on onstage they threw rotten eggs and rotten fruit, and she said you note that every single one of the plays starts with an attention-getter. Hamlet starts with a ghost, Macbeth with three witches, The Tempest with a tempest, and Twelfth Night with a shipwreck. And only after Shakespeare gets the attention of the audience can he go on into the deepness of the soliloquies. Well, that’s just as true for any kind of fiction as it is for the theater.

Another thing I just loved: There were two of Shakespeare’s plays, which she had not read because she said, “I can’t bear to have read all of Shakespeare.”

Q: Some people feel that way about your books, Madeleine. They hold back.

L’Engle: Then my next hunk of education was when college was over. I had been in female institutions for ten years, and I was terribly, terribly shy. I knew I wanted to write, but you don’t earn your living as a writer immediately. So I decided I would earn my living in the theater. Now, that’s not quite as naive as it sounds. I had no illusions about myself as a great actress, but—I’m much too tall—I’m an adequate actress, and because I didn’t care what jobs I got, I did get work. I was usually an understudy, assistant stage manager, and things like that, and I did this for two reasons: one, because I knew it would help me get over my shyness, particularly with the opposite sex. I was terrified often, but I knew I could work with them. If I met a man in a social situation, I completely froze, but when I was working with somebody, I was free to be me. The other was that I thought it was a good school for a writer. And it was. I learned—I suppose the most important thing that I learned was not every word which drops from a writer’s pen is a precious pearl. I saw playwrights go back and sit up in a hotel room all night, cut one scene entirely, and write something else. I learned the necessity for revision. The play I learned most from, though, was—I was for a year on Broadway and a year on the road in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and that was just a fantastic experience for a writer.

Q: It’s a wonderful play.

L’Engle: It was a new play every night. Then, another odd negative was turned into a positive. When it was being cast for the road, there was an actor I was madly in love with, who was, I knew, up for the role of Petya Trofimov, Chekhov’s mouthpiece, the young student. I was sure he was going to get it, and he didn’t. At the first rehearsal I was introduced to a tall, black-haired, blue-eyed young man named Hugh Franklin, and I was not pleased. Then, at about the third rehearsal, we went out for a bite to eat at three o’clock in the afternoon, and he took me home at three o’clock in the morning. And I was pleased. We’ve been married thirty years this past January.

Q: Do you want to talk more about Hugh? Or would you—?

L’Engle: All right. Yes, marriage is certainly an educational procedure, and we did a lot of things that for our day were rather avant garde, without realizing it. When I was pregnant with our first baby, I had noticed the theater wives who were getting up at six a.m. with their babies and being exhausted when their husbands came home from the theater at night. I thought, “This is nonsense.” I also wanted to nurse my baby, which at that time was not being done. And I had to fight. I mean, my doctor said, “Nobody nurses babies nowadays. It’s really not very scientific.” I said, “I don’t care. I’m nursing my baby. I think it’s natural.” And she was a very robust, healthy specimen, so they told me in the hospital that they would cut the two a.m. feeding. I said, “No, my husband is an actor. We are up at two a.m. We will cut the six a.m. feeding.” That was not hospital procedure. But this time I had all the cards in my hand in fighting the Institution, and I said, “It’s my milk. You bring the baby in at six a.m., and I’m turning my breast to the wall.” And I won.

You see, this worked very well indeed. I would put her to bed when Hugh went to the theater and have my evening writing. Then, he’d come home and I got the baby up, and we had our evening together. He had the fun of his child, and she had the fun of her father. An infant very much responds to touch, so we’d put her to bed when we went to bed, about two or three, and then get her up about noon. We’d take her to the pediatrician for her various shots, and he would call in the other mothers and say, “Now, I want you to look at this baby. Now, isn’t she beautiful? Now, I’m going to tell you the schedule she’s on.”

Of course this is fine until school rears its ugly head, and things have to change. We also, with our last child, before natural childbirth had become a thing, decided that this was what we wanted to do. We had him in the country by a general practitioner, and one of our friends who was a nurse who had just stopped nursing to stay home with her baby simply said she was going to the hospital to special me. I had Hugh with me, and there he was to see his son’s head come out. And it was just—again I learned an awful lot about love, and that it made us much more strong as a couple in that we shared all the time.

When I married Hugh I’d had one book already published and another in galleys, so I didn’t have to fight to say, “I am Madeleine. I am not just an appendage.” The night he asked me to marry him, again in my naiveté, I said, “You know, writing takes time, and I like to cook, but you’ll have to do the dishes.” Now, the division hasn’t been rigid all down the line, but we have always shared. Then, when the kids came along, they had to share, too, in the household chores, in order for me to have time to work.

Q: You do say, however, in—I believe it’s Circle of Quiet or possibly Summer of the Great Grandmother that you’ve had troubled times and if it weren’t for the promises once made—

L’Engle: Oh, yes. If you choose to be a wife and a mother and a writer, you’re choosing a life that has a lot of conflict in it. There’s just no getting around it. It’s full of conflict. And when Hugh left the theater forever, during the nine years of forever—thank God it was only nine years—not only were we having a hard time feeding ourselve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Madeleine L’Engle
• An Interview with Madeleine L’Engle
• Madeleine L’Engle
• Allegorical Fantasy: Mortal Dealings with Cosmic Questions
• Madeleine L’Engle: An Interview
• “Listen to Your Work”: An Interview with Madeleine L’Engle
• Madeleine L’Engle and Studs Terkel in Conversation
• Interview with Author Madeleine L’Engle
• An Interview with Madeleine L’Engle
• Luci Shaw—Madeleine L’Engle Interview
• The Story as Teller: An Interview with Madeleine L’Engle
• A Mind in Motion
• Madeleine L’Engle
• Index