A Circle of Quiet

by Madeleine L'engle

  And we get back to: What is real?

  What, Yetta, is a self?

  9

  We talk about identities and lose them; it’s something like looking the Gorgon in the face and turning to stone. In American education today we too often either emphasize the sciences at the expense of the humanities or we have permissive schools where the child is allowed to express himself without restriction. It’s too early to gather statistics (ugh) about how many great artists have come out of permissive schools, but I doubt if either of the educational extremes produces the right weather for art.

  I learned about both art and identity in my structured, unliberal schools, probably a lot more than if I’d been allowed to indulge in unlimited self-expression. When I first went to an English boarding school, writing again provided my salvation. We were never alone. If we wanted solitude it was thought that we must have some perverse reason. We had fifteen-minute bath “hours” three times a week: we were supposed to bathe modestly in our underclothes; I love nothing better than the glorious sensuous feeling of water on my body and would bathe in the normal way, then rush into my underclothes and dip under water, always afraid of being caught and held up as an example of American depravity (If I did anything wrong it was an international incident); while we were bathing, the matron was apt to peer either over or under the partitions.

  We were never allowed in our rooms alone, or in the classrooms. The only way to solitude was through the world of notebook, a story, a play. So we learned to concentrate. I earned my right to be a bit different—a writer of tales—over the incident of the chewing gum. The mistresses assumed that all Americans chew gum. “All Americans”—absurd generality: I was me. And one of my particular oddities is that I was one of the one in ten who is born without the tooth on either side of the two front teeth. Usually when this happens the second teeth are simply allowed to grow together. If the dentist had let this happen with me, it would have given my face a narrow look, so he made a gold upper plate on which were fastened two small teeth; while the mouth is growing, a permanent bridge cannot be used. It was easy for me to take my tongue and loosen the gold bridge, which covered the entire roof of my mouth, and I often did so. One morning at assembly, when the roll was being taken, I was happily sucking my gold bridge, and the mistress taking the roll call saw me, assumed that I was chewing gum, and snapped at me, “Come here.” Obediently I walked up in front of the entire expectant school. She held out her hand. “Spit.” I spat. She looked with horror at the gold bridge with the two small teeth.

  After that moment of glory I was allowed to be good at writing and bad at hockey and net ball. I wrote subversively in the classroom during actual lessons, or during our so-called “free” time in the common room, with all kinds of commotion going on all about me, records, arguments, noisy games. As a result of this early discipline, I can concentrate in any amount of noise. I wrote my first novel while I was on tour with a play, in dressing rooms, waiting in railroad stations, anywhere I had a moment to pull out my notebook and pen.

  I am grateful for having been taught concentration so early. I don’t need to wait for the ideal situation in which to write. Or for inspiration. Inspiration does not always precede the act of writing; it often follows it. I go to my typewriter with reluctance; I check the ribbon; I check my black felt pens; I polish my collection of spectacles; finally I start to put words, almost any words, down on paper.

  Usually, then, the words themselves will start to flow; they push me, rather than vice versa.

  Carl Van Vechten wrote, “While dining recently in a public dining room with Christopher Isherwood, we were approached by an eager youth who proceeded to ask ‘literary’ questions, firing them at us with alarming earnestness. We answered them as well as we could, but when he hit upon that cliché, ‘Why do you write with a pen or on the typewriter? Why don’t you dictate?’ I knew how to answer directly and truthfully. ‘An author doesn’t write with his mind, he writes with his hands.’ Isherwood, immediately struck by the validity of this statement, was also amazed by it. ‘Have you ever said or written that before?’ he demanded. I assured him that the remark was both spontaneous and pristine.”

  And true. I copied it in my journal in January of 1952, and even with all the innovations of simpler tape machines, cassettes, dictaphones, it still holds.

  It is out of this world that poetry comes, and music, and sculpture, the tangible world of hard work, manual labor, of practicing finger exercises every day. As a storyteller my job is to tell a good story; to learn to do this so that I can, indeed, write “with my hands,” I must learn everything I can about structure and technique; I cannot neglect my practicing.

  An artist of any kind is like a violin which has to be tuned regularly; it doesn’t stay in tune by itself. Any musical instrument has to be played, or it dies, quite literally. In Washington, D.C., there’s a magnificent collection of ancient instruments, but they’d be valueless wood and catgut if the finest musicians—the men of the Budapest String Quartet, for instance—weren’t brought in to play them regularly.

  Alan plays the violin about as well as I play the piano, and we have a lovely time making music together; we sound to ourselves as though we were, say, Isaac Stern and Artur Rubinstein. Our family and friends are tolerant—for a while, at any rate; though sometimes at the end of a party, when it’s time for the last guests to go home, Hugh or Josephine will suggest that Alan and I play some Bartók.

  Music is our relaxation, not our work. We turn to music when we “feel” like it. But I cannot write just when I feel like it, or I will have nothing to write with. Like the violin, I must be tuned and practiced on constantly. This can sometimes be hard on family and friends, but it’s essential, and I’m blessed with people who put up with my absent-mindedness when I’m in the middle of a book, and my vocal enthusiasm for the subject matter of my enterprise, which I carry far beyond the dignity of wife and mother—or grownup.

  One spring I was going on delightedly about something while I was cooking dinner, and Josephine startled me by saying, “Oh, Mother, you’re such a child.” I must have looked appalled, because she flung her arms around me and cried, “But we love you this way! We wouldn’t want you to be just any old mother.” So I was comforted. But opening oneself to this kind of remark, true though it be, is one of the many hazards of having writing as profession and vocation. I really don’t see how it can be anything but both, because it’s the last thing any sensible person would choose as a profession, with the possible exception of Hugh’s. We’ve always thought of the precariousness of our livelihood as being rather hard on our children, but I looked at the whole thing with fresh eyes when Alan, the first winter we knew him, stood at my desk in the Cathedral library and remarked, “I think you and Hugh live more existentially than most people.”

  I felt we’d made it: we, like Sartre and Camus and Kierkegaard, were existential; we were really with it. It doesn’t matter that I’m still not quite sure what living existentially means, though I have a suspicion that it’s not far from living ontologically, because it’s one of those words that’s outside the realm of provable fact and touches on mystery. Nothing important is completely explicable. After twenty-five years there is much about my husband which is still mysterious to me, one reason why marriage remains exciting. Friendship goes on as my friends and I make new and often painful discoveries about each other. A great work of art never palls because there are always new insights to be found: has anyone ever learned at what the Mona Lisa is smiling? Or what El Greco’s St. Andrew and St. Francis are talking about across a gap of eleven hundred years? I was in The Cherry Orchard for two seasons, one on Broadway, one on the road. Chekhov had something new to teach me every single performance.

  10

  A word written with the hands: it is tangible: I can be careless with these hand-hewn words but not as careless as I often am with my tongue. I should be more careful how I use the word “thing.” I use it in two totally opposing
ways. For a person or a group or a government to treat people as things is a mortal sin. That’s one meaning.

  The other is equally important. In a sense, to use “thing” in this second way is to take it away as thing, for essentially there is no such thing as a thing. Or, every single thing, every possible thing, is holy. I see proof of incarnation everywhere I turn. Here in Crosswicks I see it in the purple smoke of the mountains; the dark blue of fir trees against the green of maples and dying elms; the strong, sarxy stink of manure freshly spread on the pasture. In New York I find it in the sight of a spindly, naked, dead-looking tree in the barren island on Broadway near our apartment, the bare branches suddenly bursting forth with magnolia blossoms in the spring: what courage! I find it in snow (even deadly snow) falling past the lamps in Riverside Park when we walk the dogs at night.

  And then, both in Crosswicks and in New York, there are my special things, my Lares and Penates, like the white Buddha.

  The Piano:

  When I am stuck in writing a book, when I am stuck in a problem in life, if I go to the piano and play Bach for an hour, the problem is usually either resolved or accepted. I find, as I grow older, that I turn less to the romantics and more to the baroque composers, though they’ve always been my favorites. In college I asked if I could learn something with more feeling in it, and my professor gave me some Chopin. What I had really been wanting, of course, was Bach.

  And I did, years earlier, discover counterpoint for myself. We were visiting my grandmother in the South. What I remember most about her big old house was that there was a small conservatory, always green-smelling and warm, and that there were birds in it; and I remember her white, cluttered bedroom, off which was a screened sleeping porch entirely surrounded by trees covered with Spanish moss and filled with the singing of birds; and I remember the music room, with double doors leading to the living room. I spent a lot of time there, the doors closed, and one evening after dinner I was leafing through some old music and came across a rondeau by Rameau. I hadn’t been taking piano lessons for more than a year or so, and I will never forget the shock of joy with when I heard my left hand repeating what my right hand had been doing, heard both hands together, one starting the melody, the second coming in with it: the feeling of discovery, of sheer bliss, is still vivid.

  Here in Crosswicks we have my mother’s piano. It is older than I am, has become difficult to tune, is not always predictable. Keys stick. Notes do not always sound when struck. When we moved back to New York for the winters it was clear that the piano would not stand another transition. In any case, we did not want to empty the house completely; it still had to be Crosswicks.

  For a while we lived in a lovely but almost empty apartment. My mother came up from the South to visit, and one day she said, “You do miss a piano, don’t you?” Yes, I did. Desperately. We kept our eyes and ears open for a second-hand piano, and eventually found one which Mother bought for me. It was not a great piano, but neither am I a great pianist. For a good many years it was perfectly adequate. Then it got to the point where the bass sounded dead and the treble sounded tinny, and tuning didn’t help it at all.

  One evening we were at Tallis’s for dinner. The friend who had cashed Emily Brontë’s check and I were with him out in the kitchen. Hugh was coming up after rehearsal; had he been there he probably would have shut me up, but I was beefing about the piano, and said, “If one of your ritzy friends is breaking up a big house and wants to dispose of a piano, I’m in the market.”

  The following Sunday after church we were again up in Tallis’s apartment, and he staggered us by announcing, “Madeleine, I’ve decided to give you my piano.”

  Hugh’s response was, “You can’t! Where will you put your pictures?” For the top of the piano was covered with dozens of photographs—friends, godchildren, people from all over the world, famous and infamous, majah, minah …

  The piano is a Steinway grand. It came to Tallis from Austin Strong, the playwright. It has been played by Paderewski and Rachmaninoff. It has also almost undoubtedly been played by my mother, though none of us knew this at the time. Austin Strong was a friend of my father’s; they were of the same generation, and they saw each other weekly at the Players Club. My mother was a splendid pianist, and one of my earliest memories is hearing her run through an opera score while friends from the Met stood around the piano and sang.

  The piano is now in our living room in New York. Tallis quite often remarks that things know where they belong. And The Piano is quite definitely an icon. I am convinced that the fact that Paderewski and Rachmaninoff have played it affects my own playing; the first night it was in our apartment I took my bath while Hugh walked the dogs, but instead of going to bed, I wrapped myself in a huge towel and, unable to resist, went to the piano. When Hugh came in he began to fumble with the dials on the radio-phonograph control, which are out in the hall by the front door. “What are you doing?” I asked him. He answered in surprise, “Are you playing? I thought it was WQXR.” Such was the effect of The Piano.

  A circle is considered the perfect form of art. In a novel or play, the resolution of the story is usually hinted at in the first sentence. One contemporary painter is so convinced that in the circle perfection is to be found that he paints only circles; circles within circles, without circles, imposed on, across, through circles. The Piano, in a sense, has come full circle: from my mother’s fingers to mine, and through our dearest friend.

  If it is a thing it is a holy thing: hallowed by love.

  11

  Simply the fact of The Piano has taught me something about love, love in the ancient sense of charity. Here is another word which needs to be redeemed. Charity has come to mean to many people a human response which is cold, uncaring, grudging, unwilling to share, duty-bound, untouchable. Whereas true charity is reflected in the words of a song popular among young people: “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.” Our kids are once again trying to find out what touching people means. They are aware that it doesn’t mean the empty embrace on greeting by two acquaintances who don’t know each other nearly well enough for something as fiery as touch. I’m not sure that the kids understand equally well that it also has nothing to do with the vast, meaningless orgies which are now commonplace on stage and screen; we’re so used to seeing the nude body, female breasts, masculine torsos, faces distorted in what’s purported to be orgasm, that we are even less aware of them than we are of the destructive smog which we breathe daily in our cities—but these scenes are part of the smog.

  Hugh and I went the other night to one of these films, a wildly imaginative, beautifully photographed, two hours of obscenity; obscene’s root meaning is off-stage; that which should not be seen on stage. Take the obscenity, in this meaning, out of that film, and it wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. As we left the theatre, I said to Hugh, “If only there’d been some simple, healthy—ing or—ing on the screen, it would have been a clean relief.” Later on, when I felt more reasonable, I said, “The extraordinary, awful thing about that movie was that in spite of all the sex shown, all the homosexual and nymphomaniac orgasms, nobody touched anybody else. Not once.”

  We have forgotten how to touch each other, and we try desperately to do it in wrong, impossible ways which push us further and further apart. Sometimes when Hugh and I are in a large group I need to touch him; the only way this touch can be realized is if it is tiny and unobtrusive; if I put my arms around him in the middle of a cocktail party we wouldn’t touch at all. But if I stand by him and let my finger brush momentarily against his, we meet; we are together. Too many of us have forgotten that this tiny gesture, this incredibly potent flame, can be as powerful an act of love as any other. We impoverish our lives when we limit our expressions of love. Alan said once, impatiently, “Why are people so hung up on genitalia?”

  I have a strong suspicion that all the emphasis on the superficialities of sex, on allurement, on catching one’s man, on wowing a girl, ends up destroying what they so sh
rilly advocate. We all know that a marriage based solely on the pursuit of pleasure doesn’t often last long; we cannot spend all our lives in bed.

  What concerns me most in the present prevalent freedom—no, not freedom, license, which is a very different thing—about the act of sex, is blunting the particular. If bedding becomes a series of one-night stands, it becomes a general thing-in-itself, instead of a very particular act between two particular, unique, irreproducible, irreplaceable persons. When it becomes a thing-in-itself, it is reduced to the de-personing realm of the general, which I presume is where Madison Avenue wants it; replace that powerful four-letter word, love, with the weaker three-letter word, sex, and people will buy more of our contemporary aphrodisiacs: faster and more lethal automobiles; more antiperspirants (my mother once met a woman whose husband was one of the biggest deodorant manufacturers in the country; she let slip that he was also an ex-undertaker, and his product was made of embalming fluid), toilet water to replace the real aphrodisiac body odor of the clean and healthy male and female; buy, buy, buy, and you will be more attractive, more seductive, more like everybody else: more general.

  The Greeks in their wisdom had four words for our one, love: there was charity, agapé; sexual love, eros; family love, storgé; friendship, philia.

  But charity, agapé, really covers them all; if the other three don’t also partake of charity, they go sour.

  How do we loosen the noose? How do we recover charity? Please, my friends, do not turn off, do not slam doors when I call it Christian charity. Perhaps this means the opposite of what you think, the opposite of what we are.

  In a brilliant article on a recent Fellini film, Gilbert Highet remarks that we are about to enter the post-Christian world. I am no good with chronology, but it seems to me that we have been in the post-Christian world since 1054 when the Eastern and Western worlds split, or maybe even earlier when Constantine made Christianity mandatory instead of dangerous and forbidden. Many people who have rejected the church today have done so because the establishment which calls itself Christian so often behaves in an unchristian manner; because, in the name of Christ, we have so often been intolerably cruel to other human beings. Too many priests and ministers have been seduced by the post-Christian world. Within it, however, lies the tiny, almost extinguished flame of the Christian world, kept alive by the often ignored remnant. If I do not feel despair at the state of the world today it is because I have an eager hope that the Christian world is going to be born again—not a reversion to the first years, but a breaking forth into something new and living and brilliant.