A Circle of Quiet

by Madeleine L'engle

  Tiger! Tiger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

  It is an extraordinary and beautiful thing that God, in creation, uses precisely the same tools and rules as the artist; he works with the beauty of matter; the reality of things; the discoveries of the senses, all five of them; so that we, in turn, may hear the grass growing; see a face springing to life in love and laughter; feel another human hand or the velvet of a puppy’s ear; taste food prepared and offered in love; smell—oh, so many things: food, sewers, each other, flowers, books, new-mown grass, dirt …

  Here, in the offerings of creation, the oblations of story and song, are our glimpses of truth.

  8

  One summer Hugh and I went, more or less by accident, to a burlesque show. We’d gone down to the Village to see an off-Broadway play in which a friend was appearing, found, that he was out that night because he’d strained his back. We thought we’d rather wait to see the show when he returned to it, and directly across the street was a marquee proclaiming Ann Corio in This Is Burlesque.

  “How about it?”

  “Fine.”

  It was great fun. A series of pretty young girls came out on stage and danced while removing their clothing. I was filled with envy not so much for their lovely bodies as for the way they could twirl the tassels on their breasts: clockwise, counterclockwise (widdershins!): it was superb.

  Towards the end of the performance one stripper came out who was a little older than the others, possibly a little beyond her prime. But she had a diaphanous scarf in her hands, and she twirled and swirled this about her as she removed her clothes, and Hugh remarked, “She’s beautiful.” It was only she, of all the strippers, who gave the audience a feeling of mystery.

  If we accept the mysterious as the “fairest thing in life,” we must also accept the fact that there are rules to it. A rule is not necessarily rigid and unbending; it can even have a question mark at the end of it. I wish that we worried more about asking the right questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers. I don’t need to know the difference between a children’s book and an adult one; it’s the questions that have come from thinking about it that are important. I wish we’d stop finding answers for everything. One of the reasons my generation has mucked up the world to such an extent is our loss of the sense of the mysterious.

  One night after dinner a group of us were talking about the supernatural, and one of our dinner guests said that when the electric light was invented, people began to lose the dimension of the supernatural. In the days before we could touch a switch and flood every section of the room with light, there were always shadows in the corner, shadows which moved with candlelight, with firelight; and these shadows were an outward and visible sign that things are not always what they seem; there are things which are not visible to the mortal human being; there are things beyond our ken.

  One of my favorite theologians is Albert Einstein. He writes, “The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not, who can no longer wonder, can no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.”

  Our younger daughter is engaged to a theoretical chemist who delights me in many ways, not the least of which is that he looks like Einstein, and, it seems to me, thinks like Einstein, too. He’s finishing a post-Ph.D. grant at the University of Pennsylvania and showed me his most recent publication: “Look, Madeleine, nothing but equations! I’m getting rid of words entirely.” When the world around him gets too much in his Einsteinian hair he murmurs, “All I want is to be left alone with my numbers.”

  He will learn, I am confident, that his numbers themselves will not allow him to stay alone with them, that they will shove him around, as words shove me (he may think he’s getting rid of words, but his formulas are full of Greek letters). He is also learning the strange rules of the mysterious. Einstein writes, “What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know the answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy, but hardly fit for life.” He also says, “The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from self.”

  Science, literature, art, theology: it is all the same ridiculous, glorious, mysterious language.

  It was while I was steeping myself in Einstein, Planck, and various other physicists and cosmologists during the writing of Wrinkle that I came across and was fascinated by the first law of thermodynamics, which is one of the rules of the mysterious. It tells us that energy and heat are mutually convertible, but if you get energy you lose heat, and if you get heat you lose energy. Or, to put it in non-scientific layman’s language, you don’t get something for nothing.

  A science-fiction story tells of a machine that was invented that could produce everything needed for man’s comfort on earth: food and furniture; refrigerators and radios; clothes and cars. There were a few wise men who warned people that one cannot continually take without putting back, or the supply will be depleted, but they were laughed at. After several centuries of the machine giving freedom from all material want, schools were teaching that the old myth that the earth was once larger than the moon was rank superstition. And at the end of the story there is one toothless old man clinging to a tiny and depleted fragment of earth.

  How does the first law of thermodynamics apply to the making of books? Most of us realize that if we buy our groceries or gasoline from a place that gives trading stamps, we are paying for the trading stamps in higher prices. It may be fun, but it’s not something for nothing. I trust that most of us are not like the woman who left her neighborhood market, paid thirty cents to ride a bus, went to another market, bought five pounds of sugar for which she paid one cent less than she would have in the first market, paid thirty cents to ride home, and was triumphantly convinced that she had saved money.

  I’m not referring to the rising cost of books—that’s another story—but to books which are afraid of the mysterious, leave nothing to our imagination, and try to break the first law of thermodynamics.

  There are the four-letter-word books which have ruined our four-letter words. I was horrified recently to see the word “shit” irresponsibly used in a book for the ten to twelves, not because these children have never heard the word, but because these words, sex scenes, normal and perverse, have become big business and children’s writers are joining adult (?) writers in cashing in on it. Something for nothing: there is no word, no action, which is of itself out of place if it springs from artistic necessity, if it is paid for by the fact that it is essential to the life of a story.

  I am bored with the sex books which are demolishing sex—or trying to, because the intent is ultimately murder. Orville Prescott mentioned in a review, with a deep, figurative sigh, the sex scene that seems to have become de rigueur in the modern novel. This is a peculiar kind of perversion, this voyeurism. I’m totally against any kind of legal censorship, but I’m fed up with play-by-play descriptions of the act of intercourse. If we’ve made love, we don’t need to be told about it; if we haven’t, a description of its physiological progress isn’t going to tell us anything. When the writer leaves something to the readers’ imagination he is like the beautiful burlesque stripper who, with her diaphanous veil, added a sense of mystery to the human body.

  The sexiest books I know, are those like Anna Karenina and Phaedre; or, if we want realism, what about that arch-realist, Flaubert? Madame Bovary, for instance: for sheer power in giving us the sense of uncontrollable physical passion no one can beat the scene in which Emma and her lover, Léon, get into a carriage, “a carriage with drawn shades,” that is seen driving on an
d on through the streets, “sealed tighter than a tomb and tossing like a ship.” The picture of this carriage with the drawn shades is far more sexually potent than any diagram of what was going on within it. In this climate of mystery, passion can flourish far more strongly than in the clinical glare of the laboratory.

  Hemingway is not known for his reticence, and yet one of his most poignant love scenes is in For Whom the Bell Tolls, where Robert and Maria are together in the sleeping bag, and all Hemingway says is, “The earth shook beneath them.”

  Now some readers, both adolescent and supposedly mature, are looking for pornography. They come into bookstores and libraries hunting for substitute life, for vicarious sex. When they ask for books that pander to their desire for four-letter words, for descriptions of intercourse, for something for nothing, they’re not unlike addicts looking for substitute pleasure.

  Censorship is not the answer. I have intense respect for all the librarians and teachers who guide but do not manipulate. I know of at least one librarian who starts her readers on what they ask for, on what they think they want; then, when she gets to know them, when she has made friends, she offers something with a little more substance, and then, when that is accepted and swallowed, something with even a little more. And without exception, she says, when the real thing is accepted, the desire for the cheap substitute goes. Something for something is far more satisfying than something for nothing. “Take what you want, said God,” runs an old Spanish saying. “Take it, and pay for it.”

  The taboos about death and sin which delayed some of my books’ being published in the children’s field have now been broken; it would seem that everything goes. But this is not quite true. When we break one taboo, we replace it with another. Alan remarked to me that just as we suffered from the sexual repression of Victorianism, so we are beginning to suffer from the spiritual repression of this century. Even in the church, the transcendent, the mysterious, the irrational in God is taboo; God is the Great Sociologist.

  But: warning: there is, in art, no subject which is in itself taboo, either for children or adults. The way in which the subject is handled is what matters. The same subject can be obscene and repellent, or alive and loving, depending on the artist. And the reader. I had a troubled letter from a librarian in California who had received a number of phone calls from the parents of the high-school children who were passing A Wrinkle in Time around because of the sex passages. She gave me page numbers, and I rushed to the bookcase, eager to read my sex scenes. They were the descriptions of tessering. I wrote back that if one wants to, one can find sex symbols in anything, and I thought those in A Wrinkle in Time were probably healthier than those in some of the other books I knew high-school students were reading that year, and suggested that she relax about it.

  I read lots of adult novels when I was a child; the parts about sex were mostly outside my vocabulary and definitely outside my experience; I didn’t understand them and slid over them. Unless a grownup, looking horrified, tells us that we shouldn’t read a book because it is “dirty,” we, as children, won’t even see the dirt because it is outside our field of vision; we have not yet been corrupted by repressive taboos. And children are a great deal less naïve and fragile than many adults give them credit for being.

  Whatever the contemporary taboos may be, all great books are imbued with Einstein’s quality of the mysterious, and keep its rules. Is this, then, going to enable us to tell, out of the large quantity of books published each year, which ones are going to join the ranks of the great and which will be forgotten? I doubt it. And I don’t think this matters.

  A truly great work of art breaks beyond the bounds of the period and culture in which it is created, so final judgment on a current book has to be deferred until it can be seen outside this present moment.

  How, then, do publishers judge? A publisher has to use his sense of smell, and he has to be a hardheaded businessman, or he won’t be a publisher for long. Not many make the mistake of the men in the television industry who wait with bated breath for the Nielsen reports, for Trendex, to tell them what the viewer wants, and then proceed to give the viewer more of what the calculating machine has ordained that the viewer wants. I don’t think most people in the book business fall into the error of thinking that the machines, the public-opinion polls, the bestseller lists, know what the public wants. Then who does?

  I do. You, my dears, do. Because we are the public. We do have to have faith in our own convictions. We are not machines, but living human beings who sign our own checks with our own names; and I have a lot more faith in us than I do in Trendex. It is human beings who have the wisdom to spot a book that perhaps a publisher is not pushing, that gets ignored by reviewers, but that will still be selling long after the immediate success: examples: Lord of the Flies. The Lord of the Rings. Narcissus and Goldmund. Students, once they discovered these books, went wild over them, students who still had not lost sight of the particular in the forest of generalities.

  Josephine’s godfather is now an important man in the world of the English theatre. When he first started work in a London producer’s office, hadn’t been there very long, and didn’t know many people, he was invited to a large and fashionable supper party. He was having a lovely time, because Toby always has a lovely time; he has complete and passionate interest in people. And he doesn’t have to wait for anybody to tell him who’s important at a party, whom he “ought” to be speaking to. In the midst of his pleasure he noticed a slender man sitting off by himself with nobody paying much attention to him. So Toby immediately went over to pay him some attention, to make sure that he wasn’t unhappy. They got along famously, and after a while the quiet man identified himself as General Sir Frederick Browning, Comptroller and Treasurer for Their Royal Highnesses Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. He was also the husband of Daphne du Maurier, and one of the most “important” people at the party. He asked Toby if he’d like to go to Buckingham Palace the next day to see the Royal Art Collection and to have a guided tour of the whole palace. A few minutes later Gertrude Lawrence came up and said, “Toby, do you appreciate what an honor this is? I’ve known Boy for years, and he’s never invited me to see the king’s pictures.” Of course Toby asked if he might bring Gertie too, but that’s another story.

  Toby isn’t afraid to stick his neck out; he doesn’t try to play it safe. He doesn’t depend on Trendex rather than his own opinion. Because he is, thank God, human, he sometimes makes mistakes; but he wouldn’t be where he is now if his opinion hadn’t far more often been right than wrong. Or if he hadn’t been willing to take risks for what he believes in.

  One decade in the nineteenth century produced Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables, Emerson’s English Traits and Representative Men, Melville’s Moby Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and—reminds The New York Times, my source for this information—“none of these achieved more than a modest sale.” In 1853 Thoreau was informed by his publishers that A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers had sold 219 copies since its publication four years before, so they sent him the remainder. He wrote, “I now have a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.” That same year, seventy thousand copies were sold of a book called Fern Leaves from Fannie’s Portfolio.

  We never know when a book is going to be like the quiet man Toby found in a corner of the fashionable supper party, when it is going to turn out to be a Sir Frederick Browning. It’s far more exciting to be enthusiastic about the real book that deals with life in all its particularity than to allow ourselves to be dazzled by the cheap substitute that tickles the palate for the moment but leaves us with a hangover. And all we have to rely on to tell the difference is ourselves, not a computer.

  I’m all for realism in the book business, but I’m afraid of cynicism, and the two are often too close for comfort. Books must be sold, or there will be no more publishers, or booksellers, or librarians—or writer
s, majah, minah, or mediocah. We remember the reputable publisher who published a recent flaming best seller knowing that it stank—but that it would sell. We all know writers who write solely to make money, and this is a perfectly legitimate business. It is quite proper to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s. But there is something in us that knows that this is not enough, which reaches out for something more, which longs for Einstein’s realm.

  9

  In Smith I majored in English literature, and one of the required courses was Chaucer. I loved him. It fills me with joy to know that Chaucer, with his explosive, bawdy, colorful imagination, changed the course of the English language. If it had not been for Chaucer breaking with tradition and writing in the language of the common people, instead of the more elegant Latin or French, we might be speaking a kind of bastard Norman today.

  I wonder: if Chaucer hadn’t come along, what would have happened to Shakespeare when he picked up his pen two hundred or so years later? There’s an idea for a story, one day …

  In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn’t the way people write.”

  I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn’t done deliberately.

  Am I implying that an author should sit around like a pseudomystic in his pad, drinking endless cups of espresso and smoking pot and waiting for enlightenment?

  Hardly. That isn’t how things happen, either.

  Hugh and I heard Rudolf Serkin play Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata in Symphony Hall in Boston many years ago. It was one of those great, unpredictable moments. When the last notes had been lost in the silence, the crowd not only applauded, cheered, stamped, we stood on our chairs: this doesn’t happen often in Boston.