The Books: A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA books:

Next book on the shelf is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.

Now I’m all nervous and excited – because I’m starting in on my Madeleine collection. We’re gonna be here for a while. I’m scared! I love her SO much. Hard to talk about. It’s just that her work means so much to me. I’d read a grocery list penned by L’Engle and have a profound experience.

Wrinkle in Time is not just one of my favorite books from my childhood but one of my favorite books ever. It’s the kind of thing where if I hear someone hasn’t read it, someone who I know will love it – I will literally BEG them to read it. Wrinkle in Time has reduced me to begging.

I actually wrote Madeleine L’Engle a letter once – I was in my mid-20s. This was before the Internet. I sent the letter to her publisher, Farrar, Straus Giroux … and a couple months later – she wrote me back. The most beautiful personal letter … I mean, how many letters must she get a month?? She had obviously read my letter, and thought about her response. Unbelievable. She’s one of my personal idols – for so so many reasons.

The story of Wrinkle in Time getting published is almost (ALMOST) as good as the book itself. She and her husband, Hugh Franklin, an actor – had given up on the city – bought a general store in a little town in Connecticut – and moved there to raise their family. They had kids. She wrote. She published nothing. She had published a novel in her early 20s – and then a couple other books – quite a bit of early success, actually. Then – for 10 years – 10 long long years – nothing. Not even a story published. Not even a poem published. The rejections piled up. Madeleine has written eloquently about those years. Full rich years of childbearing and mothering and house-wife-ing – but on another level, there was an abyss of despair. Who was she really – if not a writer? She wrestled with the angels. The devils. It is that classic battle: between art and commerce. I’ve written about this before – in terms of being in a relationship with an artist. I expressed some of my feelings about this in my post about Annie, the wife in ‘Field of Dreams’. If you fall in love with an artist, and choose to spend your life with that person – then you cannot fall in love with the end result. You have to love the journey itself. Madeleine L’Engle was a writer whether or not she got published … but during those hard years of rejection and oblivion, she truly wondered if she could justify the time spent away from her family, writing in her study – if she wasn’t making any money at it … This is the struggle – this is what that struggle personifies. Of course you want to make money. But that is NOT why people get into this whole art game. Not people like L’Engle anyway. She writes because she MUST. She describes a black moment, when yet another rejection slip came in for a novel she had written – and she was pacing back and forth in her study, sobbing – panicky – like: what am I doing?? WHAT AM I DOING??? And suddenly, a sort of unearthly calm came over her – after a couple of hours of crying – and she sat down at her typewriter, and started writing again. That was the moment she knew. There was no monetary value she could place on this writing thing. Whether or not she sold anything ever again, she had to write. But it was NOT easy. She was lucky her husband was an artist as well, and had had the presence of mind to walk away from his career (when it was at its height!!) – and try something new. But then – when that “something new” (running a general store, living in the country, not being an actor) got old … after 15 years … he was brave enough to say to his wife, “I think we need to sell the store and I think we need to move back to Manhattan. I need to be an actor again.” So that’s what they did. And he was hugely successful until the day he died – with a long-running huge part on a soap opera. Anyway – there are many ways to have a marriage, many ways to work out these issues – and I admire Madeleine and Hugh for figuring out what worked for THEM, not trying to fit into some round hole that wasn’t right …. I’d need a marriage like that.

Madeleine’s breakthrough was with Wrinkle in Time. All her other books had been thoughtful novels about thoughtful people – nothing supernatural, nothing too out there – and they were successful, but – you know, they disappeared. They did not make her famous. After a gazillion publishers rejected Wrinkle in Time (“Is it a children’s book?” “It’s too dark – could you lighten it up?” “I don’t get it …” etc.) – Farrar Straus Giroux said Yes – and they gave her so much freedom – they just let Madeleine be Madeleine – that she STILL is with them. After 40 years. If she writes a religious book, they publish it. If she writes a book of poetry, they publish it. Children’s books, adult books, memoirs – they publish it all. Kind of extraordinary. But Wrinkle in Time was such a huge success that it is still a best-seller – to this day. It’s rare. She tapped into something. She “hit it”, so to speak.

But the great thing – the inspirational thing – is that she wrote the book in isolation, in the middle of those bleak 10 years of rejection slips – She wrote it because it was a story she NEEDED to tell. She had had such bad luck getting published that she had no expectation that anyone would want the book – but she HAD to write it. And look what happened. It made her name.

Sigh. It’s just so inspiring.

Here’s an excerpt from the awesome first chapter that starts with the words: “It was a dark and stormy night.”

If you haven’t read it – I won’t give you a plot synopsis. All I can do is beg. PLEASE. Read this damn book.

Excerpt from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.

In the kitchen a light was already on, and Charles Walace was sitting at the table driking milk and eating bread and jam. He looked very small and vulnerable sitting there alone in the big old-fashioned kitchen, a blond little boy in faded blue Dr. Dentons, his feet swinging a good six inches above the floor.

“Hi,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

From under the table where he was lying at Charles Wallace’s feet, hoping for a crumb or two, Fortinbras raised his slender dark head in greeting to Meg and his tail thumped against the floor. Fortinbras had arrived on their doorstep, a half-grown puppy, scrawny and abandoned, one winter night. He was, Meg’s father had decided, part Llewellyn setter and part greyhound, and he had a slender, dark beauty that was all his own.

“Why didn’t you come up to the attic?” Meg asked her brother, speaking as though he were at least her own age. “I’ve been scared stiff.”

“Too windy up in that attic of yours,” the little boy said. “I knew you’d be down. I put some milk on the stove for you. It ought to be hot by now.”

How did Charles Wallace always know about her? How could he always tell? He never knew – or seemed to care – what Dennys or Sandy were thinking. It was his mother’s mind, and Meg’s, that he probed with a frightening accuracy.

Was it because people were a little afraid of him that they whispered about the Murry’s youngest child, who was rumored to be not quite bright? “I’ve heard that clever people often have subnormal children,” Meg had once overheard. “The two boys seem to be nice, regular children, but that unattractive girl and the baby boy certainly aren’t all there.”

It was true that Charles Wallace seldom spoke when anybody was around, so that many people thought he’d never learned to talk. And it was true that he hadn’t talked at all until he was almost four. Meg would turn white with fury when people looked at him and clucked, shaking their heads sadly.

“Don’t worry about Charles Wallace, Meg,” her father had once told her. Meg remembered it very clearly because it was shortly before he went away. “There’s nothing the matter with his mind. He just does things in his own way and in his own time.”

“I don’t want him to grow up to be dumb like me,” Meg had said.

“Oh, my darling, you’re not dumb,” her father answered. “You’re like Charles Wallace. Your development has to go at its own pace. It just doesn’t happen to be the usual pace.”

“How do you know?” Meg had demanded. “How do you know I’m not dumb? Isn’t it just because you love me?”

“I love you, but that’s not what tells me. Mother and I’ve given you a number of tests, you know.”

Yes, that was true. Meg had realized that some of the “games” her parents played with her were tests of some kind, and that there had been more for her and Charles Wallace than for the twins. “IQ tests, you mean?”

“Yes, some of them.”

“Is my IQ okay?”

“More than okay.”

“What is it?”

“That I’m not going to tell you. But it assures me that both you and Charles Wallace will be able to do pretty much whatever you like when you grow up to yourselves. You just wait till Charles Wallace starts to talk. You’ll see.”

How right he had been about that, though he himself had left before Charles Wallace began to speak, suddenly, with none of the usual baby preliminaries, using entire sentences. How proud he would have been!

“You’d better check the milk,” Charles Wallace said to Meg now, his diction clearer and cleaner than that of most five-year-olds. “You know you don’t like it when it gets skin on top.”

“You put in more than twice enough milk.” Meg peered into the saucepan.

Charles Wallace nodded serenely. “I thought Mother might like some.”

“I might like what?” a voice said, and there was their mother standing in the doorway.

“Cocoa,” Charles Wallace said. “Would you like a liverwurst-and-cream-cheese sandwich? I’ll be happy to make you one.”

“That would be lovely,” Mrs. Murry said, “but I can make it myself if you’re busy.”

“No trouble at all.” Charles Wallace slid down from his chair and trotted over to the refrigerator, his pajamaed feet padding softly as a kitten’s. “How about you, Meg?” he asked. “Sandwich?”

“Yes, please,” she said. “But not liverwurst. Do we have any tomatoes?”

Charles Wallace peered into the crisper. “One. All right if I use it on Meg, Mother?”

“To what better use could it be put?” Mrs. Murry smiled. “But not so loud, please, Charles. That is, unless you want the twins downstairs, too.”

“Let’s be exclusive,” Charles Wallace said. “That’s my new word for the day. Impressive, isn’t it?”

“Prodigious,” Mrs. Murry said. “Meg, come let me look at that bruise.”

Meg knelt at her mother’s feet. The warmth and light of the kitchen had relaxed her so that her attic fears were gone. The cocoa steamed fragrantly in the saucepan; geraniums bloomed on the window sills and there was a bouquet of tiny yellow chrysanthemums in the center of the table. The curtains, red, with a blue and green geometrical pattern, were drawn, and seemed to reflect their cheerfulness throughout the room. The furnace purred like a great, sleepy animal; the lights glowed with steady radiance; outside, alone in the dark, the wind still battered against the house, but the angry power that had frightened Meg while she was alone in the attic was subdued by the familiar comfort of the kitchen. Underneath Mrs. Murry’s chair Fortinbras let out a contented sigh.

Mrs. Murry gently touched Meg’s bruised cheek. Meg looked up at her mother, half in loving admiration, half in sullen resentment. It was not an advantage to have a mother who was a scientist and a beauty as well. Mrs. Murry’s flaming red hair, creamy skin, and violet eyes with long dark lashes, seemed even more spectacular in comparison with Meg’s outrageous plainness. Meg’s hair had been passable as long as she wore it tidily in braids. When she went into high school it was cut, and now she and her mother struggled with putting it up, but one side would come out curly and the other straight, so that she looked even plainer than before.

“You don’t know the meaning of moderation, do you, my darling?” Mrs. Murry asked. “A happy medium is something I wonder if you’ll ever learn. That’s a nasty bruise the Henderson boy gave you. By the way, shortly after you’d gone to bed his mother called up to complain about how badly you’d hurt him. I told her that since he’s a year older and at least twenty-five pounds heavier than you are, I thought I was the one who ought to be doing the complaining. But she seemed to think it was all your fault.”

“I suppose that depends on how you look at it,” Meg said. “Usually no matter what happens people think it’s my fault, even if I have nothing to do with it at all. But I’m sorry I tried to fight him. It’s just been an awful week. And I’m full of bad feeling.”

Mrs. Murry stroked Meg’s shaggy head. “Do you know why?”

“I hate being an oddball,” Meg said. “It’s hard on Sandy and Dennys, too. I don’t know if they’re really like everybody else, or if they’re just able to pretend they are. I try to pretend, but it isn’t any help.”

“You’re much too straightforward to be able to pretend to be what you aren’t,” Mrs. Murry said. “I’m sorry, Meglet. Maybe if Father were here he could help you, but I don’t think I can do anything till you’ve managed to plow through some more time. Then things will be easier for you. But that isn’t much help right now, is it?”

“Maybe if I weren’t so repulsive-looking – maybe if I were pretty like you -”

“Mother’s not a bit pretty; she’s beautiful,” Charles Wallace announced, slicing liverwurst. “Therefore I bet she was awful at your age.”

“How right you are,” Mrs. Murry said. “Just give yourself time, Meg.”

“Lettuce on your sandwich, Mother?” Charles Wallace asked.

“No, thanks.”

He cut the sandwich into sections, put it on a plate, and set it in front of his mother. “Yours’ll be along in just a minute, Meg. I think I’ll talk to Mrs Whatsit about you.”

“Who’s Mrs Whatsit?” Meg asked.

“I think I want to be exclusive about her for a while,” Charles Wallace said. “Onion salt?”