The Books: “A Circle of Quiet” (Madeleine L’Engle)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:

I keep all of L’Engle’s books together … but the next book is no longer strictly a religious book … It’s the beginning of her “memoir” series – The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle.

Madeleine L’Engle has four books out in a series that she calls The Crosswicks Journal, and Circle of Quiet is Part 1 of that series. Crosswicks is her house in Connecticut. The book is kind of a jumble of her thoughts, reminiscinces, memories … It’s also a bit biographical, of course – but she writes movingly about her journey towards being the writer she is today. I am always moved when I read about the 10 year period of rejection slips. She wrote and wrote and wrote for 10 years – 10 YEARS – with no success. It was not easy. She speaks of wanting to give up many many times. Finally, she had written this old book called Wrinkle in Time – but publisher after publisher rejected it. It was too odd, too unclassifiable … could this be a children’s book? No. No. No. No. Finally – a brave publisher (Farrar, Straus Giroux) accepted it. They took a chance. The book, obviously became a runaway success, winning every medal in sight, and launched Madeleine’s career as a well-known and beloved author. She had written and published books before Wrinkle, but they didn’t really have an impact. They’re good books, I’ve read them all … but Wrinkle is extraordinary.

Anyway, enough preamble. The following excerpt talks about her struggles with the copyeditors working on Wrinkle, who kept trying to iron out her punctuation, “correcting” certain things that were very deliberate on Madeleine’s part.

(I guess I didn’t realize that “grey” was the English spelling. I have always spelled the word that way, and for exactly the same reasons. As a person who loves rainy days, and loves foggy days on the beach … “grey” calls up those images. “Gray” calls up concrete, cement. So I always use “grey”.)

EXCERPT FROM A Circle of Quiet , by Madeleine L’Engle.

Copy editors, except the present one at FS&G, who is an artist herself, are apt to monkey around with punctuation. You have to watch them like a hawk.

When A Wrinkle in Time went into galleys, the copy editor — I’m glad I haven’t the faintest idea who it was — had him/herself a ball. First of all, I do spell the English way; I was in an English boarding school when I was twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, and these are the years when spelling gets set. After I had been made to write h-o-n-o-u-r, for instance, a hundred times on a blackboard several hundred times, it was almost impossible for me to spell it h-o-n-o-r. The English use t-o-w-a-r-d-s and we use t-o-w-a-r-d. I like to use them both, depending on the rhythm of the sentence and the letter which begins the following word; sometimes the s is needed; sometimes not: this is, I realize, rather erratic, and I can’t blame the copy editor who tries to talk me out of it. Then there’s grey, which is English, and one very definite, bird-wing, ocean-wave color to me; and gray, which is American, and a flatter, more metallic color. Then there are the c and s words, such as practice or practise. Abour words like these I’m simply in a state of confusion, rather than aesthetic persuasion, as with grey or towards, and the copy editor can have his way. On the whole I tell the copy editor to go ahead and make the spelling American, but don’t muck around with the punctuation.

The worst thing the copy editor did with A Wrinkle in Time was with the three strange Mrs Ws. Now, Mr and Mrs are usually spelled Mr and Mrs in England, and Mr. and Mrs. in America. Usually I spell them the American way, or try to remember to. But the Mrs W were extra-special as well as extra-terrestrial, and I very deliberately did not put the period after their Mrs’s. With Mr. and Mrs. Murry, who, scientists or no, were solid earth folk, I did put in the period. It was important to me. It was, I should have thought, obvious that it was done with forethought, but the copy editor went through the manuscript and put a period after every Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which.

When I got the galleys I was appalled. I called my editor and told him what had happened. He was sorry, though certainly it was not a matter of vital import to him, as it was to me. He said, “If you insist, we’ll take the periods out, but it will cost a fortune.” If I insisted I would be acting like an impossible and temperamental author (I am convinced that I am the most gentle, pliable, easily managed author-wife-mother who ever walked the earth), and my editors would not be pleased. And they were taking a risk on a book that almost every other publisher in the business had turned down, and I was more than grateful. So I didn’t insist. But it bothered me (and it still does).

When the book was done in England, at last I was able to get the punctuation the way I wanted it: joy! though (temperamental author again?) I wasn’t wholly satisfied on two counts: the publishers thought the book was too long for English children, and a few cuts were made; they weren’t disastrous, but I think they shouldn’t have been made; everything that could be cut had already been cut out before the original publication. Then, I was asked if I would mind if the setting of the story were identified as being in America. I replied that I didn’t think it was very important, but if they felt it to be essential, go ahead.

The first sentence of the book is very carefully and deliberately that old war-horse:

It was a dark and stormy night.

Period. End of sentence. End of paragraph.

The English edition begins, “It was a dark and stormy night in a small village in the United States.”

I was naturally delighted when Penguin Publications decided to make a Puffin book out of it. But lo, the Puffin copy editor took the periods out after Mr. and Mrs. Murry, too.

Ah, well.