Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction
Next book on the shelf is A Winter’s Love
This is one of L’Engle’s “adult” novels, and it was published before Wrinkle in Time, 1957, I believe – and you can feel her struggling to find her way as a writer. Winter’s Love is a big YAWN of a book. Her first novel was The Small Rain, published when she was 23? Published in 1945. That first novel has much more confidence and interest and good writing than this book, published over 10 years later. L’Engle has written about the dark years before Wrinkle was published – when she struggled to balance her life as a mother of young children, a wife, and a writer … You can feel that struggle in A Winter’s Love. The main theme of the book is giving up on a chance at divine happiness and accepting your duty. Not really uplifting – although, yes, it’s quite an adult theme. Adults know that sometimes we just HAVE to do something. But … dreariness emanates off of this book. Duty has never seemed so dreary.
L’Engle has written extensively about her childhood – and her parents (especially in The Summer of the Great-Grandmother – excerpt here). When L’Engle was a little girl – her parents moved the family to Switzerland. Her father’s lungs had been destroyed by the trench warfare in WWI – and he was a writer – and he had been unable to write – and he was also dying – and it was thought the air in Switzerland would do him good. But it was depressing. L’Engle grew up in a house with depressed parents, taken up with other things. She was left to fend for herself. And one day – L’Engle thought she was in the villa by herself, and she walked by her parents bedroom and she saw her mother – her glamorous capable breezy mother – lying on her bed, arms splayed out, weeping with wrenching sobs. It was a horrifying moment for the young L’Engle … a snapshot of adult misery … It was also a shattering of the image of her mother. She now knew what her mother was hiding at all times. She realized how strong her mother actually was … to hide her grief so well.
That incident makes it into A Winter’s Love and – I think it has some of the best writing in this preachy YAWN of a book … so that will be my excerpt.
The plot is similar to L’Engle’s childhood experiences. The parents – Emily and Courtney – take the family to live in Switzerland. The father is in a depression. He drinks too much. He has withdrawn. He feels he can no longer write. His depression takes up the entire family. They have a 12 year old daughter Virginia (who actually ends up being one of the participants at the conference in House like a Lotus – so we get to see what happened to Virginia) – Virginia is awkward, prickly, needs her mother right now – but her mother is totally unavailable because poor little Emily is so taken up with poor little Courtney’s depression. (I didn’t like the names in this book either. They rang false to me. Emily? Courtney? Then there’s a guy named Abe. Nope. Not a good name either.) Emily ends up running into an old friend from New York – who is there for a ski vacation – his name is Abe. And a sort of love affair develops … but in the end Emily picks up the shackles of her marriage and walks away. The whole thing is depressing because I didn’t really like Abe all that much anyway. I wasn’t DYING for them to commit adultery – I wasn’t ACHING for them to kiss – which I guess I wanted. If you’re gonna write a book about an affair – and one that’s not supposed to be a tawdry coupling of desperate barflies … then shouldn’t you WANT them to commit adultery? Even if they DON’T?? Anyway, I read the whole thing totally indifferently. Whatever, have your affair, or don’t … but please stop whining. I also read it, thinking: Abe??? Ew. I don’t like him. I don’t like Courtney either. So basically Emily, you’re up shit’s creek, babe. Deal with it.
The book is written from multiple perspectives – Emily’s – Virginia’s – but … it’s not handled well. Or – it’s not handled gracefully – you feel that L’Engle doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know how to get “in” to the story – so she needs more than one narrator.
But the book is interesting to read – as a L’Engle fan – in terms of her development as a writer. It’s like another writer altogether emerged with Wrinkle in Time. The books before that (except, strangely, for her very first novel – which has a sure and confident tone) seem to be struggling in the dark, hands outstretched. There’s some awfully excellent writing in all of them … but they just don’t …. “hit it”. They’re off the mark, somehow. If she had never written Wrinkle in Time then these books would NEVER be read – they’re not worthy enough.
But as lead-ups to Wrinkle, I find them fascinating.
Here’s the excerpt – taken directly from L’Engle’s own life. There’s something very poignant about that for me.
Excerpt from A Winter’s Love
After lunch Virginia went up early to dress for the dansant, running up the stairs silently in the old white moccasins she usually slipiped into after she had pulled off her boots.
— Mother’s amber beads, she thought. I bet she’d let me borrow them for this afternoon.
She stood for a moment at the top of the stairs, listening to the sounds of the house. Downstairs she could hear Mimi talking to Connie, could hear the sounds of her father’s typewriter; upstairs, nothing except the sound of her old alarm clock ticking loudly against the silence. She moved, quiet as an Indian in the soft-soled moccasins, to the door of her parents’ room. It was pushed to, but not shut tightly, and as she leaned against it it swung open and there upon the bed she saw Emily, lying face downwards, her arms flung out, her body across the bed in an abandonment of despair, her eyes closed but with traces of tears still clinging to lashes and cheeks. Unseen, unheard, Virginia backed out, trembling, and went to her own room.
She stood at the window in the room already beginning to darken with the approach of evening. The garden lay still and white under the snow, only hummocks and ridges showing where there might be bushes and flowers. Stars were already beginning to flicker, disappear, then shine steadily as darkness seeped into the valley. Up the mountains the great hotel lay sprawled in indistinct shadows, above it the sanitorium, and lights were coming on in their windows; and a stranger would not know which was which, which the hotel where there was dancing and champagne and gaiety, and which the sanatorium where there was illness and pain. She stared at the two buildings, trying to blot out with their image that of her mother flung across the bed, staring until the outlines of the buildings blurred, merged into each other, separated, blurred again.
— I wish I were back at school, she thought.
And then — My stomach hurts (transferring the pain to something physical).
She took out of her bottom bureau drawer the small pile of Christmas presents she had bought or made, and put them on her bed and stood looking down at them for comfort, each one tied up carefully in a different kind of Christmas paper. She picked up the last present that remained unwrapped, a small bottle of “4711” eau de cologne for her mother, and turned it over and over in her hand, reading and rereading the insciprtion. “No. 4711, Ferd. Mullens, Inc., always the first prize. Jedesmal den ersten preis. Toujours le premier prix.” Then she wrapped it up, slowly, and put all the presents away, shutting the drawer as Mimi came in.
While they were dressing, Emily knocked and there she stood with the amber beads, saying, “Vee, I thought these might help with the velvet dress,” and her face was freshly powdered and you could not tell that so short a time ago there had been tears on her cheeks.
“I was going to ask you for them,” Virginia said.
Emily laughed. “Two minds with a single thought. Obviously they were meant for your dress, but mind you, I’m only lending them to you. I’m very fond of them myself.”
“Put on Vee’s lipstick for her, will you, Mrs. Bowen?” Mimi asked. “She never puts on enough.”
