A Circle of Quiet

by Madeleine L'engle

  But even among those who admit that talent, genius, the creative impulse (or whatever one calls it) can neither be taught nor defined, there seem to be two diametrically opposed theories as to what it is. One is expressed most clearly by a group of psychiatrists, many of whom studied with Freud, who have been successful in helping well-known writers to recover from writer’s block, so we cannot afford to take them lightly.

  A few years ago I came across a definition of the writer in The New York Times: “The writer, like the alcoholic and the homosexual, is an orally regressed psychic masochist, and artistic creation is an alibi.” I looked across the Sunday paper to my husband: “Darling, did you know that I am an orally regressed psychic masochist and I write only as an alibi?”

  It’s perfectly possible that this is true, but it still strikes me as hilarious. (Does orally regressed mean being unable to talk? If so, I was orally regressed as a solitary, overshy only child. But ever since I learned that I could talk, it has been practically impossible to shut me up.)

  I have been accused by several friends and acquaintances of being anti-intellectual (I can’t win), and also of being “against psychiatrists.” I don’t really think I am. That would be as silly as being “against dentists” or “against barbers.” I do think that psychiatry is still a very young science, not unlike surgery when the surgeons were barbers. If you absolutely had to have a leg amputated in the seventeenth century, you went to a barber; you didn’t rush to him for a scratch. I’ve seen psychiatry save and redeem. I’ve also seen people going year after year to psychiatrists or therapists and growing steadily more self-centered. Most of us like being the center of the universe; no wonder these people don’t want to give up their bi-weekly sessions. I’ve also seen them regress in their work and deteriorate in personal relationships. But, my friends tell me, that means it’s a bad psychiatrist. True, perhaps.

  I’m still less than happy about the school of psychiatry which says that all writers—and all is meant, not just an occasional crackpot—all writers are Peeping Toms, in the clinical sense; this is not meant as a poetic image. No writer is capable of love. The impulse to write is only a neurotic symptom of disease. Any time a writer mentions a mountain it is a breast image. These doctors see phallic symbols, anal symbols, oral symbols, in everything. Once Hugh and I were invited to a large cocktail party—I’m not sure why, because all the other guests were psychiatrists. I dressed up and put on high-heeled shoes, because my 6′ 3″ husband likes me in them when we go out. When we arrived everybody was standing around, as one does at a cocktail party, and almost every man there was shorter than I am. And my feet hurt. So I took off my uncomfortable elegant shoes and put them under a chair. During the party almost every doctor there came to me and asked me confidentially, “Why did you take off your shoes?” And did not believe me when I told them. Perhaps I did have some devious sexual motive: fascinating thought.

  I’m quite willing to admit that all images in all forms of art have multiple meanings, and one of the meanings is usually a sex meaning. Let’s just think about mountains: one of the most beautiful mountain ranges in our country is the Grand Tetons, which means the Great Breasts. Why not? The idea of nature as mother is hardly new, and I think I’ve made it clear that I’m all for the pleasures of the body. When, as a very young girl, I read that Freud said that the baby at its mother’s breast experiences sexual pleasure, and so does the mother, I was naïvely shocked. When I nursed my own babies I knew what he meant; it was pure sensual delight. It was also an unmitigated act of love, an affirmation of creation.

  But I think we tend to confuse the word sex, in the sense of rutting, with the enjoyment of our senses. Breasts are to be enjoyed, and to name the Grand Tetons thus is wholly appropriate. Then, when we read, “And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills,” or, “Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish; / A Vapour sometime like a bear or lion, / A tower’d citadel, a pendant rock, / A forked mountain, or blue promontory / With trees upon’t, that nod unto the world / And mock our eyes with air: thou hast seen these signs; / They are black vesper’s pageants,” the imagery expands. An image, this kind of image, like the reality it stands for, always touches on mystery.

  I’m always a little doubtful about people who complain about the vast sums spent on such things as moon exploration, saying that none of this is necessary for our military defenses. Whether or no, the practical reasons aren’t why we want to explore space. We must push out to the moon, the solar system, our galaxy, the galaxies beyond, because they are there, because they are mysterious. We must explore them in the same way that our great-grandparents pushed across the prairies in covered wagons, not knowing what lay beyond the mountains; in much the same way that Abraham left the comfort of home and went out into the wilderness.

  As our heads reel with the enormity of the macrocosm without us, we turn and become dizzy with the microcosm within us; the world of the physicist who pursues the infinitely small things in the physical world; and the psychologists who are exploring the depths of our personalities: I am all for this as long as we remember mystery; as long as we don’t ignore joy. The people who would limit art to a neurosis totally forget about joy.

  I have a friend, a beautiful and talented young woman, who is afraid to have a child and who is afraid to use her talent to write. She does not yet understand the joy that follows the pain of birth. I’ve experienced the pain and joy of the birth of babies and the birth of books and there’s nothing like it: when a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or composing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationship with those he loves, with the whole world.

  All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects. I’ve had some glorious times visiting the Sisters and lecturing to the novices at Mundelein College. On my first visit, the Sisters, knowing that I was not Roman Catholic but Anglican, were terribly curious about me; never have I had so many questions asked, questions about ultimate things, questions that put me on my toes: I felt like a strange life-form from another planet being questioned by the natives. Early in the day, when we were all still a little tentative with each other, several of the professed nuns were taking me on a tour of the dormitories. In one of the rooms was what I thought to be an appalling picture of Jesus, wishy-washy, powerless, plain bad art. The senior nun fixed me with a stern eye and demanded, “Madeleine, what do you think of that?” I swallowed and answered, “I think it’s ghastly.” To which the Sisters chorused, “Oh, thank God.”

  That so-called sacred picture was totally secular. Conversely, much great religious art has been written or painted or composed by people who thought they were atheists. Picasso, for instance, makes me think of Dorothy Sayers’s story of the Japanese gentleman who, in discussing the mysterious concept of the Trinity in Christianity, said, “Honorable Father, very good. Honorable Son, very good. Honorable Bird I do not understand at all.”

  Very few of us understand Honorable Bird, except to acknowledge that without his power and grace nothing would be written, painted, or composed at all. To say anything beyond this about the creative process is like pulling all the petals off a flower in order to analyze it, and ending up having destroyed the flower.

  Now I don’t suppose I’d react quite so sharply to those petal-pullers, the writers of psychiatric books who call writers of fiction Peeping Toms, if there weren’t a grain of truth in what they say. A writer does need to have a tremendous curiosity about everything and everyone, to have a trained and insatiable awareness. But this must go along with an honest commitment to and involvement in human nature, as against the ghoulish curiosity wh
ich makes some people gorge themselves on the newspapers that concentrate on bloody accidents, murders, and sex crimes. This kind of curiosity is selfish, and is in the wrong sense detached from the scenes which it is lasciviously compelled to observe.

  Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion. It has taken me over fifty years to begin to get a glimmer of what this means.

  Several years ago two of my friends in far-flung places, one in Europe, one in the Northwest, both made the mistake of writing to me—the letters arrived within a week of each other—that I was a harp string, constantly vibrating. I don’t remember their exact phrasing, but the general idea was that I was sensitive, vulnerable, quivering with pain, my own and everybody else’s, and that this came out in my writing, particularly in my poems, some of which I was sharing with them.

  The trouble with this lovely metaphorical comparison was that it made me take myself—not my verses, but myself—far too seriously. My vulnerable vanity was definitely tickled by the comparison to the sensitive artist, delicately tuned, suffering more than duller folk …

  I’m not sure what laughed me out of this, but something did, promptly; it might have been simply walking into the apartment and having my kids call out, “Hey, Mother, what’s for dinner?” or, “Don’t burn the peas again tonight.”

  Compassion means to suffer with, but it doesn’t mean to get lost in the suffering, so that it becomes exclusively one’s own. I tend to do this, to replace the person for whom I am feeling compassion with myself.

  I learned this—though it’s still a bit of a problem—shortly after Hugh and I were married, and I was pregnant with our first child. I answered the telephone to learn that a friend of ours had lost a child, a twelve-year-old girl who was thrown from a horse and killed. And I was lost, not in compassion but in passion. The child’s mother was an old friend of Hugh’s; I didn’t know her very well; if I had, certainly my own suffering over the death of her child (the death of all children; the death, potentially, of my child) would have made me completely useless to her. I did realize this, dimly, even while thinking that Hugh was being far too objective about it; that he wasn’t feeling a thing.

  I am just learning to realize what Cynthia and I talked about. It is not that in compassion one cuts oneself off from feeling, only from one’s own selfishness, self-centeredness.

  It’s an odd thing, another paradox, this balance of involvement and detachment, and perhaps one should not think about it too self-consciously. But I get asked about it, and so I try to fumble for a partial answer. We cannot afford, either as writers or as human beings, to be detached from the human predicament, because this is what we write about, and it is the predicament we ourselves are in. We are always on stage, actors in the human drama. But we are also and simultaneously members of the audience: it takes both performer and audience to “create” a drama.

  This awareness came to my creative unconscious long before I understood it with my mind. One of the first assignments given by Leonard Ehrlich, who came to Smith for a year to teach writing, and who is one of the many teachers to whom I owe an eternal debt of gratitude, was to write a story in the present tense, using the first person. I wrote an oddly detached story, one that I was at that time really incapable of writing. But it wrenched itself out of me, leaving me physically drained and emotionally exhilarated. It was the story of a painter watching his wife die; he loved her; he was in an agony of grief; he hated his friends who did or who did not come to help. But all the time his wife was dying he could not stop one part of his mind from considering exactly how to paint her, how to mix the colors to show the shadow of death moving across her face.

  Of course I didn’t realize then that the story was teaching me the ambivalence of involvement/detachment, subjectivity/objectivity that happens to all artists. I say “happens” advisedly; we cannot make ourselves detached; this would be slightly demonic. But we can try, when we write, to be objective. Shortly after writing this story I read Chekhov’s letters and copied in my journal: “When you depict sad or unhappy people, and want to touch people’s hearts, try to be colder—it gives their grief a background against which it stands out in sharper relief.” And he went on to say that the writer does—and must—suffer with his characters, but he “must do this so that the reader does not notice it. The more objective, the stronger will be the effect.”

  An English poet—I copied his uncredited words in my journal over twenty years ago—said that poetry is like ice cream; tremendous heat is needed in generating it, but during the actual “making” there must be ice, otherwise the ice cream will melt. All the scenes that move me deeply while I am writing them end up in the wastepaper basket.

  Kierkegaard says, “A poet is an unhappy creature whose heart is tortured by deepest suffering but whose lips are so formed that when his sighs and cries stream out over them, their sound becomes like the sound of beautiful music.… And men flock about the poet saying, ‘Sing for us soon again; that is to say, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before.’”

  All right, but I’d better not take it too seriously; at any rate, I’d better not feel it. If I become subjective about pain, no matter what causes it, then it becomes destructive, not creative. Colette said to a young poet who complained to her that he was unhappy, “Mais personne ne t’a demandé d’être heureux. Travaille!”

  17

  Is the impulse to write, to work out one’s unhappiness in work, neurotic? I couldn’t care less. In one of her books, Dr. Karen Horney describes the neurotic personality, detailing the symptoms, and remarks: At this point probably every one of you is going to think, I have all these symptoms. The difference is that the neurotic personality is controlled by the symptoms, and the healthy personality is in control of them.

  A young priest friend said to me one day at lunch that he is disturbed by his brethren giving so much importance to the “mental health” of themselves and their flocks. “It is a very bad thing,” he said, “when we confuse mental health and sanctity.”

  That night during a wakeful period I thought about all the people in history, literature, art, whom I most admire: Mozart, Shakespeare, Homer, El Greco, St. John, Chekhov, Gregory of Nyssa, Dostoevsky, Emily Brontë: not one of them would qualify for a mental-health certificate. It’s been a small game with me this summer to ask, “Do you know anybody you really admire, who has really been important to the world in a creative way, who would qualify for a mental-health certificate?” So far nobody has come up with one.

  What is mental health, anyhow? If we were all what is generally thought of as mentally healthy, I have a terrible fear that we’d all be alike. Even as we’re rushing towards the end of another thousand years, we are still terrified by nonconformity; our nonconforming hippies are at least as conformist as the conformists against whom they are rebelling. I can’t think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as educational experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group. We discussed this at Ohio State, and it worried the young teachers. If a child in their classrooms does not succeed with his peer group, then it would seem to many that both child and teacher have failed.

  Have they? If we ever, God forbid, manage to make each child succeed with his peer group, we will produce a race of bland and faceless nonentities, and all poetry and mystery will vanish from the face of the earth. Somehow I am not too worried. Surely every teacher must want each child to succeed, with Yetta must hope to help him find a self, but this self may be a nonconforming self: And surely there will always be the occasional prickly child who rejects all efforts, who kicks the other children, bites teacher’s hand, is unloving and unlovable, and yet who will, one day, produce—perhaps out of this very unloveliness—a work of art which sings of love.

  I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their “different drum”: Einstein was hopeless at school math and com
mented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn’t manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about Jesus, if we need an ultimate example of failure with one’s peers?

  Or an ultimate example of love?

  18

  I’ve known for a long time that we know nothing about love, that we do not have love, until we give it away. Grandma showed me this very clearly during my choir-directing days.

  In a sense Grandma was the organ, and the organ was Grandma; it was, as McLuhan might say, an extension of Grandma. She lived alone with Grandpa in a tiny little house, and if Grandpa was her love, the organ was her vocation, and one cannot have a vocation without love. Grandpa was old, even older than Grandma, and not well; often she would be up with him all night. It wasn’t a surprise to anybody when one morning Grandpa simply did not wake up.

  Two days earlier one of Grandma’s cousins and close friends had died, and she was to be buried the afternoon of the day that Grandpa died. People asked, “But who will play the organ for the funeral?”

  Her daughter called me. “Madeleine, Grandma wants to play for Grandpa’s funeral. What shall we do?”

  My response was, “You can’t take the organ away from Grandma, today of all days. Let her do whatever she wants to do.”

  Grandma played, of course. To keep everybody happy (she loved us all that much), she got a friend in to play an anthem. But she herself sat at the organ for the rest of the service.