The Books: “Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage” (Madeleine L’Engle)

Next in my Daily Book Excerpt:

TwoPartInvention.jpgNext book in my Madeleine L’Engle nonfiction section is:

Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, by Madeleine L’Engle.

This is the last of the Crosswicks Journal series. It is the story of Madeleine’s long marriage to Hugh Franklin. It’s the story of her childhood, his childhood, the years of their lives before they met, and finally … the story of the meeting, the proposal, and the marriage. All of this is told with the backdrop of Franklin’s current-day diagnosis of cancer. Madeleine wrote this book – the biography of her marriage – during the long months of his final illness. She’s a real writer, man – The writing impulse in her never stops. The book is kind of a wrenching read – so so sad – and yet also joyous, an acknowledgement of their marriage, of the man she married.

Hugh Franklin and Madeleine L’Engle met in the early 1940s, when they were both were in a touring production of The Cherry Orchard. Madeleine was an actress as well as a writer. Success for her, as a writer, came late – although her first novel was sold when she was quite young. But there were a couple decades to go before Wrinkle in Time crashed onto the scene.

In the following excerpt, Madeleine writes about being a single girl, an actress and a writer, living in New York City … before meeting Hugh Franklin. How did she sustain herself, keep things going? What were her sources of inspiration?

The title of the book is in reference to Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, but of course it ends up being a larger metaphor for marriage. Marriage as a “two-part invention”.


EXCERPT FROM Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, by Madeleine L’Engle.

Summer came, and New York heat. On particularly hot and humid days I would open the door to my apartment, then prop open the door to the building. New York was a reasonably safe city in those days, but I am not sure it was that safe. I continued to work at St. Vincent’s Hospital and to sell war bonds in theatre lobbies. Sometimes on my way home after a show I would be accosted by a drunken soldier or sailor, but I would just move out of the way and I never had any real problem. If someone started to be ugly, there was always somebody else around to say, “Is he bothering you?”

And I would take the subway home to my apartment, make some supper, turn to the piano, and play my way back to perspective. I was working on the Bach C-minor Toccata and Fugue (I’m still working on it), Handel’s Harmonious Blacksmith Variations (still a marvelous finger exercise), and the Bach Two-Part Inventions. One is never through with the Two-Part Inventions; they are the essential practice needed for the Well-Tempered Clavier.

On unbearably hot nights I would ride the subway downtown to the bottom of the city with a friend, take the Staten Island ferry and cool off in the breeze from the water, then walk home along the docks, too ignorant to know that this is never a safe place at midnight. Again, it may have been our ignorance that protected us…

Despite a widening circle of friends, my solitude often turned to loneliness. I decided ruefully that what I had hoped for in the kind of love that is the foundation for marriage was nothing but an idealistic figment of my imagination.

Through my secretarial work for Miss Le Gallienne [Ed: Yes. THAT Miss La Gallienne. Eva La Galienne was a good friend and acting mentor to Madeleine.] I met a Hungarian refugee, a cultivated man who took me to the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall, introduced me to the music of Bruckner, which I found rather heavy, and to Hungarian fruit soups, which I found rather sweet. One evening he invited me to an elegant and expensive restaurant for dinner, and it was evident that this was to be a special evening. As we ate, he told me that he was married and that he and his wife loved each other. She was a winter-sports instructor and some kind of childhood trauma had made her incapable of normal sexual intercourse. In fact, whenever he attempted to consummate their marriage she had responded by throwing up. They had been to the finest therapists. It had nothing to do with him. It was her specific problem, no matter whom she was with. She fully understood his need for sexual fulfillment, but he had not found a suitable mistress since their flight to America. He assured me that he could put me up in a much nicer apartment than my beloved place on Tenth Street. He could get me an apartment on Park Avenue, give me a mink coat …

I told him gently that I enjoyed his company but I did not think I was mistress material. After dinner he took me home, and I never saw him again.

Had I, once more, been incredibly naive to be totally taken aback by his proposal? I was badly shaken. As was my late-evening habit, I put Touche on her leash and walked over to Fifth Avenue, past Mark Twain’s house, past the Marshall Chess Club, where the windows were still lit and I could see the silhouettes of men bent over chessboards. On the corner of Tenth and Fifth is Ascension Episcopal Church. It had been endowed with a fund to keep it open twenty-four hours a day. So I tied Touche in the vestibule and slipped into the back of the church to sit and think. Not so much to pray as to take time to be. It was a while, that evening, before I coudl stop my mind from its chaotic whirling.

Almost every night around midnight (for I kept theatre hours — bed at 1 a.m., up at 10 a.m.), I slipped into the church. I would not have dreamed of going in during a church service. My parents’ church had not done well by me. In my Anglican boarding school I was taught Anglican virtues, all self-protective: do not show emotion; do not grieve; do not ask for help; do it yourself. My father died when I was seventeen and no one told me that it was all right to cry. True to my tradition, I carried on, did all the brave things, and repressed my grief.

It was a long time before I learned that Anglican virtues and Anglican theology are barely compatible. But Ascension Church was a special place for me, part of my deepening, along with the piano, the books, and the typewriter, which had once been my father’s.

Journal entries for those days were earnest. I was reading as many letters of the great writers as I could get hold of, and copying out the things that touched me closely. Knowing that I would soon be traveling with the Cherry Orchard company during the upcoming tour, I read deeply from Chekhov and learned much.

“You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite quietly, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, for failures…

“Something in me protests: reason and justice tell me that in the electricity and heat of love for man there is something greater than chastity and abstinence from meat …

“The thought that I must, that I ought to write, never leave me for an instant.”

And I added: Nor me.

The next day I wrote: “Today I sold ‘Vicky’ to Mademoisell magazine for $200.” That was big money.

And I wrote down these words of Thoreau: “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky whose bottom is pebbly with stars.”

On a hot summer evening I went with an actress friend from Uncle Harry to spend the night on her tugboat, anchored off the tip of Manhattan. We went into a dock-front bar, were the only ones there, and were treated to a long soliloquy by the owner, who delighted me by saying of one of his patrons, “He was so stingy he wouldn’t pay a nickle to see the Statue of Liberty piss — ‘scuse my language.”

As I recorded such small events in my journal I was, in effect, writing my own story. What we write down we tend not to forget, and that unique evening is as vivid to me now as it was then.

I quoted again (was it Chekhov?): “If you never commit yourself, you never express yourself, and yourself becomes less and less significant and decisive. Calculating selfishness is the annhilation of self.”

And from Plato: “He who having no touch of the Muses’ madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple with the help of art — he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted …

“And there is the madness, too, of love, the greatest of Heaven’s blessings.”

Slowly I was learning who I was and who I wanted to be with the help of the great ones who had gone before me. Composers, too. After sitting at the piano I wrote: “The thing I love about Bach is the strength and simplicity and shape he gives to beauty. For most of us everything in the world seems to swirl around in an amorphous mass of confusion — even the lovely parts of it. Bach takes its beauty — which is somehow blurred in its looseness — and subdues it to his own great and simple spirit.

“It seems to me that most of us don’t know anything about life but its bare facts, and they’re all pointless unless they’re interpreted. I like the way Bach does it.”

After an hour with the C-minor Toccata and Fugue I wrote about “Bach’s immense and vital freedom within the tight boundaries of strict form. Perhaps that’s why life doesn’t drive one mad; it’s interesting to see how alive and free one can remain within the limits that are always imposed on one and from which there can be no escape.”

Life was not entirely “art”. I was very aware of the precariousness of the world. I had lost several friends overseas in the war in Europe. What was even worse was seeing a man I had once known as an insouciant stagehand come home trembling, shaking inwardly and outwardly from the horrors he had witnessed on Okinawa.

I saw more of the unspeakably traumatic results of this war when I was asked to be in a Theatre Wing production of The Warrior’s Husband. I played one of a dozen long-legged Amazons. Our theatres were Army and Navy hospitals, and then mental hospitals for men who had been shellshocked. These soulsick patients acted as stagehands for us, and we had been warned that they were apt to walk out if we didn’t please them. But they liked The Warrior’s Husband with its ebullience and humor — and probably the almost entirely female and scantily attired cast.

After I had declined to be my Hungariant friend’s mistress, I was more than ever convinced that marriage was not going to be part of my pattern. I would write, see friends, write, go to the theatre, write, but ultimately I was going to walk alone.

Nevertheless, I went out with several people. One was a handsome blond man with a great golden mustache, whose wife had abandoned him for a Spaniard, ironically enough named Julio, leaving him with the care of their preschool children. He was nicknamed Cap and he definitely purused me, and it is a human reaction to enjoy being pursued.

Cap was brought up in various capitals of Europe, a delicate, sensitive little boy. In many ways he never grew up, but he had charm and he kept calling me and taking me out. I was pretty forlorn at that time, and Cap was good for my amour-propre. I knew that he liked me; I thought he was handsome; we had a good deal in our backgrounds in common, and he was fun to go out with — but I was completely taken aback when he asked me to marry him.

It was New Year’s Eve. I had flu, and I was in bed, wearing a white flannel nightgown, with a piece of red flannel a doctor friend had ordered me to keep tied about my throat. I was lying in the dark, the lights out, in a cold room which a small fire in the fireplace did little to help. Shortly before midnight Cap arrived with a bottle of champagne and some food and then he told me that he was in love with me and wanted me to marry him.

I was fond of him. I wondered whether my ideal of what being in love was like might not be a mirage, and I finally agreed not to say no at once, but to wait six months before giving my answer. I knew long before the six months were over that I couldn’t marry him. For one thing, he talked constantly, and it seemed to me that anyone who could love so vocally, who found it so necessary to reiterate out loud the depth of his passion, might not, in reality, be very deep.

But Cap would not take no for an answer. He refused to admit that I had ever mentioned the word “no”. Or he would make scenes. Or send the children to climb in my lap, twine their arms about my neck, and tell me they wanted me for a mother — and they were darling children. But the answer was no.

I remember Cap with affection and gratitude. He helped me regain my self-confidence at a period when it was at one of its lowest ebbs, and for this I owe him an eternal debt of gratitude.

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2 Responses to The Books: “Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage” (Madeleine L’Engle)

  1. David says:

    Funny, when I wondered about a man sacrificing to follow his wife’s calling I remembered this book. Didn’t he give up acting and become a general store proprietor to follow his wife’s calling and needs? I need to reread this book. I need her back in my life. What a woman!

  2. red says:

    The two of them were so extraordinary and – from what I’ve read – had my ideal of a partnership. It was something they created.

    They wanted to raise children, and he decided to give up acting so they could move to the country. He actually just wanted to prove to himself that he COULD make a living without being an actor – it was his own challenge – he could be self-sufficient no matter what life threw him … So they bought the general store and had a couple kids, and she kept writing (nothing got published though) … until finally, after 10 years of this – they were sitting on the couch in their farmhouse in front of the fire, and out of nowhere she turned to him and said, “You miss acting, don’t you?” He didn’t say anything, just nodded. And she said, “Then we need to move back into Manhattan and you need to start up your career again.” So they did. They sold the general store – they kept the farmhouse as a weekend getaway – but moved the whole family back into the city, and he started up the crazy life as an actor again. And you know what? The guy was never out of a job until the day he died. He just needed to know that he didn’t HAVE to be an actor, and he could make a small run-down general store successful.

    I love the book.

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