When Madeleine L’Engle died last week at 88, she was living in a nursing home in Connecticut. While I’m sure it was a very nice nursing home — in one of her obituaries, her family thanks the staff for “their extraordinarily kind and loving care of their mother during her illness” — it was nonetheless likely much like every other nursing home in the world. In other words, I suspect L’Engle had a lot of time to think about her death before she died.
I have no evidence, beyond her body of work, to support the following theory, but here it is: I suspect that L’Engle was not afraid of death. She may have even welcomed it. This, after all, was a woman of deeply rooted religious faith and a writer of awesome imaginative power who not only entertained the unproven, the speculative and the flat-out weird — she embraced them. So I like to believe that as death circled closer, L’Engle saw her fate not as a punishment, or a cause for grief, but as a kind of thrilling introduction to some unmapped state of consciousness.
I clearly remember my first encounter with “A Wrinkle in Time,” L’Engle’s now-classic 1962 novel, which was, incidentally, rejected by 26 publishers before finding a home at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and winning the 1963 Newbery Medal. It was the mid-’80s and I was probably 10 or 11, and my grandparents had arrived with a suitcaseful of gifts — which generally meant books. “A Wrinkle in Time” was packaged as a trilogy with “A Wind in the Door” and “A Swiftly Tilting Planet”: hardbound, encased in glossy covers illustrated with swirling, colorful and slightly creepy winged creatures — sort of a psychedelic take on Marc Chagall. I opened the first volume, flipped to the first chapter heading, and plunged headfirst into L’Engle’s world.
Like so many other children before and after me, I thrilled to this new kind of storytelling. Meg Murry, a cranky, brilliant, unpopular preteen, was unlike any literary heroine I’d ever encountered. She was real to me, and she and her brother Charles Wallace Murry were brave beyond measure, making a treacherous journey across time and space in search of their lost father. I sped through that book greedily, stopping only to eat and, grudgingly, sleep. When I was finished I attacked the second, and then the third. When I finished the last page of “A Swiftly Tilting Planet,” I closed the book carefully, smoothed the cover and placed it back in its box. Two days later, I picked up “A Wrinkle in Time” and started again at the beginning.
The “Time” books, as they’re known, walk a line between science-fiction adventures and liturgical treatise. They are viewed by some as modern masterpieces, and by others as dangerous challenges to traditional concepts of God. The latter belief means “A Wrinkle in Time” remains one of America’s most-banned books. In 2001, The New York Times asked L’Engle, a frequent writer on faith and spirituality, to recall her reaction to accusations that the books promoted witchcraft or fantasy. “First I felt horror,” she said, “then anger, and finally I said, ‘Ah, the hell with it.’ It’s great publicity, really.”
Eight million copies later, the books remain a staple in libraries, bookstores and family bookshelves. Their appeal, while hardly commercial, is profound. The action is gaspingly exciting, even terrifying, but the stories are also steeped in what can only be called a kind of fierce goodness — a belief that people are not only capable of great kindness, but that only great evil keeps us from realizing our innate state of grace.
Being good, of course, should not be confused with being a goody-two-shoes, and L’Engle seemed to know this. Her primary protagonists, including Meg Murry and Vicky Austin, behaved in utterly believable ways: They were prickly and then soft, they railed at their parents, and they stood guard over their younger siblings. They were whip-smart, loved their families and struggled with messy, real-life issues: violence, divorce, death, love. I read the books at an age when my ideas of romance and sexuality were as dim as my grasp of physics, time travel and molecular biology. While Meg Murry’s adventures forced me think about the universe, and for that matter, science, in a totally different way, the Austin books, with their awkward first kisses and fumbled affections, provided something of a social road map for an awkward bookworm. These were girls with guts and nerve — I wanted to be like them. I longed to care less what other people thought, like Meg. I envied Vicky’s rollicking, loud, comfortable family life.
Looking back, I can see that I didn’t want to inhabit those fictional worlds — I just wanted mine to be more expansive, less anxious. More patient, less claustrophobic. L’Engle’s books granted me the opportunity to dream — not about anything particularly grandiose, or glamorous, but rather of a reality very much within my grasp, in which girls could be angry and catty and loving and protective and loyal and outspoken. And while I considered it highly unlikely I would discover a fifth dimension, or stumble upon a mode of time travel, falling in love remained a possibility. A distant possibility, true. But, as Meg and Vicky and L’Engle herself teach us, there’s nothing more useless than giving up hope.
———-
jreaves@tribune.com
– – –
Literary legacy
Madeleine L’Engle’s best-known young-adult and children’s books (from www.madeleinelengle.com):
The Time Quintet
A Wrinkle in Time, 1962
A Wind in the Door, 1973
A Swiftly Tilting Planet, 1978
Many Waters, 1986
An Acceptable Time, 1989
The other Murry books
The Arm of the Starfish, 1965
Dragons in the Waters, 1976
A House Like a Lotus, 1984
The Austin Family books
Meet the Austins, 1960
The Moon by Night, 1963
The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas, 1964
The Young Unicorns, 1968
A Ring of Endless Light, 1980
The Anti-Muffins, 1980
Troubling a Star, 1994
Miracle on 10th Street, 1998
A Full House, 1999
