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Remembering Madeleine L'Engle
By Sue Careless
The Anglican Planet
http://www.anglicanplanet.net/TAPIntern0709a.html
September 2007
Prolific Anglican author, Madeleine L'Engle, whose young adult classic A Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery Award in 1963, has died. She was 88. L'Engle wrote more than sixty books, including science fantasies, poetry and memoirs, often drawing on her deep Christian faith.
In an interview she granted me in 1997 she said she was finding it easier to believe the impossible. "It was a crazy thing to do to be incarnate." Her book The Glorious Impossible reflects this paradox.
For many years she was the librarian and writer-in-residence at the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City. On Sundays she would attend services at All Angels Church in the upper west side which had a service for street people, many of whom were on crack.
"I pass prostitutes, drug pushers and street people every day," she said. "I am part of who they are and they are part of who I am."
Judy Sarick, long-time owner of the now defunct Children's Book Store in Toronto, said L'Engle's books are popular because "they speak the truth. They ring true to human nature. There are writers who sell even more, but they tend to be formula stuff which is heavily marketed," Sarick confessed. "They are not in her league."
Twenty-six publishers rejected Wrinkle as too hard for children, yet teachers later reported that the time trilogy motivated non-reading boys to read.
"I didn't know when I wrote A Wrinkle in Time that you don't use female protagonists in science fantasy. If it has a young protagonist it's marketed as young adult fiction [12 to16-year-olds]. I don't write any differently for adults or young adults."
L'Engle wanted her writing to affirm that "Life is worth living; the adventure is worth taking." She also believed, "If you write about the deepest issues of the heart, they're there in every generation."
By 2004, Wrinkle had sold more than 6 million copies. Some viewed A Wrinkle in Time as a precursor of the Harry Potter series. L'Engle told Newsweek in 2006 that she had read one Potter book but was not impressed. "It's a nice story but there's nothing underneath it. I don't want to be bothered with stuff where there's nothing underneath."
L'Engle read particle physics as well as the 16th and 17th-century writers George Herbert and Henry Vaughn to savour their use of language and metaphor. "I think we owe the world good language." She also made up words "that are not encrusted with other meanings."
In her classic Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art she wrote, "If our lives are truly 'hid with Christ in God' the astounding thing is that this hiddeness is revealed in all we do and say and write."
L'Engle said "Christ pulled me into his life. ...Even though for me there was no Damascus road, even though it all has been gradual....there are moments when God comes in new and fresh ways."
Wrinkle tells the story of a young teen, Meg Murry (drawn on L'Engle herself), her brilliant little brother Charles Wallace, and their battle against evil as they search across the universe for their missing father, a scientist. Aided by their neighbour, Calvin, and some down-to-earth supernatural spirits, they must pass through a time travel corridor (the "wrinkle in time") and overcome the totalitarian regime which is holding the father on another planet.
L'Engle followed it up with further adventures of the Murry children, including A Wind in the Door, 1973; A Swiftly Tilting Planet, 1978, which won an American Book Award; and Many Waters, 1986.
Almost simultaneously L'Engle wrote a second series about the Austin family. A Ring of Endless Light, 1980, was perhaps the best received. In all, there were nine Austin books from 1960 to 1999, and eight Murry books from 1962 to 1989.
She said that by the 1960's "the evangelical world began to understand that story is not wicked, that story is not a lie." Evangelical colleges invited her to discuss art and religion. "There was such a deprivation of art and symbolism there. Thank God that was one thing we never lost [in Anglicanism]."
Among L'Engle's memoirs is The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, 1974, about her own mother's death at age 90. In it she reflects on inspiration: "...if any artist of any kind sits around waiting for inspiration, he'll have a very small body of work. Inspiration usually comes during the work, rather than before it."
She compared such artistic work to prayer. . "If I don't struggle to pray regularly, both privately and corporately, if I insist on waiting for inspiration on the dry days, or making sure I have the time, then prayer will be as impossible to me as the C Minor Fugue without work."
She met her future husband, actor Hugh Franklin, when they both appeared in a New York production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. L'Engle died Sept. 6 in Connecticut of natural causes. Her husband and son predeceased her. She is survived by her two daughters, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
---Sue Careless interviewed Madeline L'Engle for the Anglican Journal and ChristianWeek when L'Engle was the keynote speaker at a conference sponsored by the Anglican Diocese of Huron in London, Ontario in June, 1997.
