The Books: “And Both Were Young” (Madeleine L’Engle)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA fiction/Children’s books:

Next book on the shelf is And Both Were Young by Madeleine L’Engle.

When Madeleine L’Engle was 12 or 13, it became apparent that her father was dying. Her parents were consumed with their own tragedy and basically just could not deal with their daughter. Not in a bad way – they still loved her – they just didn’t have the space to deal with her and raise her. So they sent her to a Swiss boarding school. L’Engle has written eloquently of those years – how lonely she was at first in the school, how she ached, how awful it was to be away from her parents, how she was never a real “joiner” – and boarding school was all about being a “joiner”. She was a loner. She wanted to read. She wasn’t a jock. Etc. She had a real tough time at first – but gradually, all of that changed – and she began to flourish. It’s amazing what young people can not only get used to – but accept fully. L’Engle looks back on that time as one of the most formative of her life, in terms of becoming an artist.

Anyway – And Both Were Young (which was written when L’Engle was young, in her 20s – this was the 1940s) – and then, in the early 80s, L’Engle decided to update the book and reissue it. That’s the version of it I have. L’Engle writes a little foreword, explaining that back then there were certain topics that were deemed unacceptable for a young audience – the main one being death. Death hangs over this book. It takes place directly in the wake of WWII – and in Europe – so it’s a haunted place. Paul (the kid in the book) has lost his memory – because of withstanding a bombing raid on his town – he has no idea who he is – Also, the romance between Philippa and Paul (an innocent romance – they’re 14 years old) had to be toned down. So later in her life – 40 years later – L’Engle put back in all the stuff she had been forced to take out and republished the book to great success. It’s still in print. You can find it at any Barnes and Noble.

Any girl who has ever had a boarding school fantasy – this book will be like CANDY.

Philippa Hunter (nickname Flip) is dumped off at the Swiss boarding school – mainly because her father has a new young wife, and the wife SO does not want to have an awkward adolescent daughter. Philippa has led a sheltered American life – and all of the girls in this boarding school are breezily international, they all speak a gazillion languages, have boyfriends, and are fully ensconced. Philippa just doesn’t fit in. She’s a loner. She likes to read by herself – which is just seen as WEIRD. All of the other girls want to go skiing and flirt with men – or play ping-pong – or field hockey – and they don’t get why Philippa wants to just be by herself!! They’re mean to her at first. Not brutally mean – but mean in the way a pack of teenage girls can be mean to someone they sniff out as different. Eventually, though, Philippa proves herself to them – and she’s accepted. L’Engle never takes the easy way out which I really like. She doesn’t paint Philippa out to be an innocent victim – and all the other girls as bitches. No. She lets us know that Philippa has a lot of growing up to do. That sometimes it’s better to not be so rigid with who you think you are – and maybe freakin’ play some ping pong – because maybe you’ll like it, and maybe you’ll come out of your awkward shell a little bit.

Philippa, during one of her solitary walks, meets a boy named Paul. A beautiful boy. They click. In a very soulmate teenage kind of way. Philippa begins sneaking off the boarding school grounds to go hang out with him. This is strictly against the rules. But she doesn’t care. Paul and Philippa just hang out in an abandoned barn (if I recall) and talk, and – become friends. Paul eventually reveals his secret – that he has no idea who he is. He was found in a bombed-out cellar, half-dead – and now he has no memory of the time before. He is tormented by this. Frankly, I can’t remember how it all plays out.

But it does. Of course.

Lovely book. Perfect for teenage girls. I ate this shit UP when I was a young girl.

Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter – when Philippa is having a HELLUVA time adjusting.

And the writing. I just want to mention one image – which is so good and yet – it’s subtle – L’Engle doesn’t LINGER on her good writing, she’s not a showoff – but some of her images, and how she paints word pictures are startlingly fantastic. For example: //only a branch of elm appearing with shy abruptness as the mist was torn apart.// That whole section. Gorgeous. Well done.

Excerpt from And Both Were Young by Madeleine L’Engle.

Almost the most difficult thing, Flip found, was never being alone. From the moment she woke up in the morning until she fell asleep at night, she was surrounded by girls. She was constantly with them, but she never felt that she was of them. She tried to talk and laugh, to be like them, to join in their endless conversations about boys and holidays, and clothes and boys, and growing up and again boys, but always it seemed that she grew clumsier than ever and the wrong words tumbled out of her mouth. She felt like the ugly sister in the fairy tale she had loved when she was younger, the sister whose words turned into hideous toads, and all the other girls were like the beautiful sister whose words became pieces of gold. And she would stand on the hockey field when they chose teams, looking down at her toe scrounging in the grass, and pretend that she didn’t care when the team that had the bad luck to get her let out a groan, or the gym teacher, Fraulein Hauser, snapped, “Philippa Hunter! How can you be so clumsy?” And Miss Tulip glossed over Jackie’s untidy drawers and chided Flip because her comb and brush were out of line. And Miss Armstrong, the science teacher, cried, “Really, Philippa, can’t you enter the classroom without knocking over a chair?” And when she fell and skinned her knees Miss Tulip was angry with her for tearing her stockings and even seemed to begrudge the iodine that she put on Flip’s gory wounds.

If only I knew a lot of boys and could talk about them, she thought, or if I was good at sports.

But she had never really known any boys, and sports were a nightmare to her.

So in the common room she stood awkwardly about and tried to pretend she liked the loud jazz records Esmee played constantly on the phonograph. Usually she ended up out on the balcony, where she could at least see the mountains and the lake, but soon it became too cold out on the balcony in the dark, windy night air and she was forced to look for another refuge. If she went to the empty classroom, someone always came in to get something from a desk or the cupboard. They were not allowed to be in their rooms except at bedtime or when they were changing for dinner or during the Sunday afternoon quiet period. She was lonely, but never alone, and she felt that in order to preserve any sense of her own identity, to continue to believe in the importance of Philippa Hunter, human being, she must find, for at least a few minutes a day, the peace of solitude. At last, when she knew ultimately and forever how the caged animals constantly stared at in the zoo must feel, she discovered the chapel.

The chapel was in the basement of the school, with the ski room, the coat rooms, and the trunk rooms. It was a bare place with rough white walls and rows of folding chairs, a harmonium, and a small altar on a raised platform at one end. Every evening after dinner the girls marched from the dining room down the stairs to the basement and into the chapel, where one of the teacher read the evening service. Usually Flip simply sat with the others, not listening, not hearing anything but the subdued rustlings and whisperings about her. But one evening Madame Perceval took the service, reading in hre sensitive contralto voice, and Flip found herself listening for the first time to the beauty of the words: “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise. Sing unto the Lord with th eharp, and the voice of the psalm … let the hills be joyful together.” And Flip could feel all about her in the night the mountains reaching gladly toward the sky, and the sound of the wind on the white peaks must be their song of praise. The others, too, as always when Madame Perceval was in charge, were quieter, not more subdued but suddenly more real; when Flip looked at them they seemed more like fellow creatures and less like alien beings to fear and hate.

After chapel that evening, when they were back in the common room, Flip pretended that she had left her handkerchief and slipped downstairs again to the cold basement. She was afraid of the dark, but she walked slowly down the cold corridor, lit only by a dim bulb at the far end, blundering into the trunk room, filled with the huge and terrifying shapes of trunks and suitcases, before she opened the door to the chapel.

Down one wall of the chapel were windows, and through these moonlight fell, somehow changing and distorting the rows of chairs, the altar, the reading stand. Flip drew in her breath in alarm as she looked at the organ and saw someone seated at it, crouched over the keys. But it was neither a murderer lying in wait for her nor a ghost, but a shadow cast by the moon. She slipped in and sat down on one of the chairs and she was trembling, but after a while her heart began beating normally and the room looked familiar again.

She remembered when she was a small girl, before her mother died, she had had an Irish nurse who often took her into the church just around the corner from their apartment. It was a small church, full of reds and blues and golds and the smell of incense. Once her nurse had taken her to a service and Flip had been wildly elated by it, by the singing of the choirboys, the chanting of the priest, the ringing of the bells; all had conspired to give her a sense of soaring happiness. It was the same kind of happiness that she felt when she saw the moonlight on the mountain peaks or the whole Rhone valley below her covered with clouds, and she could lean out over the balcony and be surrounded by cloud, lost in cloud, with only a branch of elm appearing with shy abruptness as the mist was torn apart.

Here in the nondenominational chapel at school she felt no sense of joy; there was no overwhelming beauty here between these stark walls, but gradually she began to relax. There was no sound but the wind in the trees; she could almost forget the life of the school going on above her. She did not try to pray, but she let the quiet sink into her, and when at last she rose she felt more complete; she felt that she could go upstairs and remain Philippa Hunter who was going to be an artist, and she would not be ashamed to be Philippa Hunter, no matter what the girls in her class thought of her.