But if Serkin did not practice eight hours a day, every day, the moment of inspiration, when it came, would have been lost; nothing would have happened; there would have been no instrument through which the revelation could be revealed.
I try to remember this when I dump an entire draft of a novel into the wastepaper basket. It isn’t wasted paper. It’s my five-finger exercises. It’s necessary practicing before the performance.
10
I am often asked how I came to write A Wrinkle in Time. Even with all the hindsight of which I am capable I can’t quite explain it. It was during a time of transition. We had sold the store, were leaving the safe, small world of the village, and going back to the city and the theatre. While we were on our ten-week camping trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again, we drove through a world of deserts and buttes and leafless mountains, wholly new and alien to me. And suddenly into my mind came the names, Mrs Whatsit. Mrs Who. Mrs Which. I turned around to the children and said, “Hey, kids, listen to these three great names that just popped into my mind; I’ll have to write a book about them.”
But why did those names come to me just then, and from where? I haven’t the faintest idea. I suppose that my writing mind, which is always at work no matter what is happening on the surface level, took over from there. I had brought along some Eddington, some Einstein, a few other books on cosmology—I was on a cosmological jag at that time, partly, I suppose, because it satisfied my longing for God better than books of theology; and the influence of these books on Wrinkle is obvious. I was also quite consciously writing my own affirmation of a universe which is created by a power of love.
When the book was rejected by publisher after publisher, I cried but in my journal. I wrote, after an early rejection, “X turned down Wrinkle, turned it down with one hand while saying that he loved it, but didn’t quite dare do it, as it isn’t really classifiable. I know it isn’t really classifiable, and am wondering if I’ll have to go through the usual hell with this that I seem to go through with everything I write. But this book I’m sure of. If I’ve ever written a book that says what I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is my psalm of praise …”
And again, “And yesterday morning before we left, there was a letter from Hugh saying that X has turned down Wrinkle. Perhaps I’m slowly becoming inured. I went through a few hours of the usual primitive despairing rage, but I could show none of it as I was with the children driving down to the city. Am I really getting so that I can stand it better? Perhaps the fury and bitterness builds up. But all there is today is a heaviness that makes all household chores wearily difficult. All work seems a little harder … In a book I’m reading about Fitzgerald, there is a sentence about ‘second-rate writers who pass themselves off as geniuses.’ But how does anybody know? A writer is far too tied up in his work, if he is really a writer, to know whether it is second-rate or a work of genius. And how many writers who have been considered second-rate, and yet have persisted in believing in themselves, have been discovered and hailed as geniuses after their deaths; or writers who have been highly acclaimed during their lives have been forgotten forever shortly after? or writers who are true geniuses have never been discovered at all? Does it really matter if we are geniuses or second-rate? If we are majah, minah, or mediocah? As for Wrinkle, for once I have the arrogance to know in my heart that this is something good. But if it is constantly turned down will I be able to keep the faith that I still have in it? Will I begin to doubt?”
I’m ashamed of all the wailing, but I did it. “Why do I love this Tower so when I have done so much bitter weeping in it? X has turned down Wrinkle, too, and this has really thrown me. I cared terribly about having them take it, and they turned it down so quickly, two days, that I know it hasn’t had a fair reading. Someone lower down who just sent a form-type of rejection. This is one of the times when I think I’m yelling with complete and utter reason.”
Does it sound as though I use my journals for nothing but weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth? I don’t. Much of this book is right out of the pages of my journals, those everything-books, and much from the scribbling of this summer just passing. And I don’t mean to dwell on failure and bitterness and rejection. If I bring it up again here it is for two reasons: it may give a little courage to someone else who is going through a similar stretch. And I know now that the bleakness of that period of my life, bleak in many areas, was an essential part of my growing up, both as a woman and as a writer. And in the midst of the bleakness I could write—a few days after one of the Wrinkle rejections—“I’ve been writing hard on the new book, and am tired and happy.” And, “Here I am in what would certainly be considered my middle years, and yet I feel as young and eager and open to development as I did when I was twenty-one.”
It was a long time after these fairly close-together entries that Wrinkle went to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I worked on what was eventually to become The Love Letters. I recorded a happy evening of singing rounds at the table. I worried about not being a good enough wife. Or mother. I was joyful. In misery. In other words, I suppose I behaved normally for a writer.
This was 1960. In 1963 when I was in Chicago to receive the Newbery Medal for A Wrinkle in Time, a woman who was a fine editor for me with And Both Were Young, but who had rejected both the Austins and Wrinkle, said to me, “I know I should have published these books. But I wonder: if I had accepted A Wrinkle in Time, would it have been the right moment for it? If it had been published then, maybe you wouldn’t be here now.”
She is a very wise woman.
The ancient Israelites, crossing the desert, missing the very imprisonment of the days in Egypt, taking too long to get to the Promised Land, wailed, “We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick.” They complained about the manna which had been sent them, and were angry and demanding. “Lust came upon them in the wilderness; and they importuned God. And he gave them their desire, and sent leanness withal into their soul,” wrote the Psalmist.
Thank you, God, for not giving in to my importunate demands.
11
To balance the precarious triangle of wife-mother-writer: it was, is, a problem. And what did I mean by trying to “be good”? To knock down selfishness, self-will, I suppose. And this is not a do-it-yourself job. We can no more “try” to be virtuous than we can try to be humble, or to act with integrity.
Virtue, that odd, old-fashioned word: we have all known so-called virtuous women, professional do-gooders, busybodies; they have no lives of their own, so they try to interfere with others.
How we have blunted this word which comes from the French: Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae says: “Vertue, strength, puissance, prowesse, valiantnesse, manlinesse, manhoode, power.”
A description, surely, of the man every young girl seeks, the man strong enough to be gentle, powerful enough to be tender.
I am grateful to the virtuous men I have encountered in this world: my father who, in the trenches, would not send his men anywhere he would not go himself; he was known as “Bonnie Prince Charlie.”
My husband, who has had the puissance and valiantnesse to put up with me for a quarter of a century.
The friends of my right hand.
12
They guide me with their virtue, particularly when I bumble into “I can do it myself.” One day the children came home from school, bringing with them a discussion about precisely this: in an emergency one must not depend on law or on structure but on judging the situation as it arises, and then making the “loving” decision. We must meet each particular situation separately, with no general preconceptions. This is very well in theory, and it is paradoxical of me to have reservations, but I do. What sends up those little red flags of warning is the assumption that in a crisis we will possess the calm reason with which to make the loving decision. It presupposes that man is perfectible of his own effort�
��just try a little harder, chaps, and it will be all right.
Collectively and separately my generation has tried pretty hard, and it isn’t all right.
In a moment of crisis we don’t act out of reasoned judgment but on our conditioned reflexes. We may be able to send men to the moon, but we’d better remember we’re still closely related to Pavlov’s dog. Think about driving a car: only the beginning driver thinks as he performs each action; the seasoned driver’s body works kinesthetically; steering wheel, brake, accelerator—if you have to think about using each one of these you won’t dare drive on a major highway. A driver prevents an accident because of his conditioned reflexes; hands and feet respond more quickly than thought.
I’m convinced the same thing is true in all other kinds of crisis, too. We react to our conditioning built up of every single decision we’ve made all our lives; who we have used as our mirrors; as our points of reference. If our slow and reasoned decisions are generally wise, those which have to be made quickly are apt to be wise, too. If our reasoned decisions are foolish, so will be those of the sudden situation.
One of the girls gave this example: a group of men are in the Arctic. One is badly hurt. If the others leave him to get back to safety themselves, he will die. If they stay with him, they will all very likely die before help comes. The reasonable decision, the ethical decision in this situation, she was told, is for the others to leave so that only one man will die.
Everything in me rebels. It was the reasonable decision made once before when Caiaphas said that it is expedient that one man die for the sake of the nation.
What would E. M. Forster think? To leave your friend and save the group is not, after all, the particular. It is the general once again.
We killed one man for the sake of the nation once. Didn’t we learn anything?
13
It leads me back to Pope John daring to make a decision without knowing what was going to happen. I hope that I, like E. M. Forster, would choose to stay with my friend, and perhaps die. But I would not need to be able to predict the outcome to make the choice. If one must predict every outcome, then the logical thing is to save those you can and leave your friend to die.
Something that happened when we lived in the country helps me here. During our General Store, diaper, and snowsuit years, Hugh did a good deal of lay preaching. He did not talk as a minister or priest but simply as a human being, a father, a man, sharing his thoughts with the members of the congregation. One Sunday he was asked to talk in a church in a nearby town. I could not be with him, because I could not leave the choir; we were doing a difficult anthem, and it wasn’t only that I was needed to “conduct.” I was needed for moral support—not only by the choir; the anthem was in three sharps at the time when Grandma would occasionally still tackle sharps.
When Hugh came home he was despondent. He had talked about family, about the relationship of parents and children. He had talked from his heart about things important to him and to every parent, and he had felt from the congregation nothing but a wall of blankness. They had sat there politely; they hadn’t coughed; but he felt that there had been no response whatsoever.
The next day a car drove up to the store, and a man Hugh had never seen before got out and came in. “Mr. Franklin, I just had to come tell you. I heard you at church yesterday. I’m a contractor just starting out for myself. I work hard, and I’m doing all right, but I’ve been all tied up in knots. I haven’t been able to eat and sleep, and when the kids have asked me questions I’ve snapped at them, and a couple of times I’ve had my wife in tears. Yesterday I came home from church and I joked with the kids at the table, and it was the first time we’ve laughed during a meal in I can’t tell you when. Afterwards I helped my girl with her spelling. She’s been having a tough time, and I managed to make it make sense to her. Then I went out and played ball with my son. The knot was gone from my stomach, and I slept all night like a baby. I had to come tell you.”
But if he hadn’t come to tell Hugh, the result would have been the same. If we accept the responsibility of a situation, there is a response, whether we know it or not, and whether it’s the response we expect—or want. Perhaps we may be required to die with our friend?
14
Suppose the strange little iceberg that is the human mind (the largest part submerged, ignored, feared) is also likened to a living radio or television set. With our conscious, surface selves we are able to tune in only a very few wave lengths. But there are others, and sometimes in our dreams we will pick up a scene from a distant, unknown, seemingly non-rational channel—but is it non-rational? Or is it in another language, using metaphors and similes with which we are not yet familiar?
“Consciousness expanding” is part of the current jargon. When I was very young and even more naïve than I am now, living alone in Greenwich Village, something in my non-rational mind rejected suggestions made to me by people older and far cleverer than I, that I should sleep with them because such experience was necessary for my development as a writer. The same kind of instinctive non-rational rejection came to me when a young man offered me LSD; he was taking it, and he thought in it to find all the answers. For a moment I was tempted. But I have watched him becoming more and more confused as he uses the drug to try to move more deeply into himself; as he tries to find himself he succeeds only in losing himself. He was talking about his self-searching one day to Will and me as he prepared to take a “trip.” Will asked, “But what do you really expect from it?” He answered, “Instant meditation.”
We don’t hurt ourselves—except aesthetically, which is not to be taken lightly—by drinking instant coffee or eating powdered eggs, but we do hurt ourselves when we try to take short cuts to find out who we are, and what our place in the universe.
Not that I am against consciousness expanding: I want as much of my little iceberg as possible out in the full light of the sun, and I want to be clearly aware of the beautiful country beneath the waters. All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs. For me, writing is the obvious one. But so is reading the great writers. So is going to a museum, or listening to a Schubert Quartet, or, better still, sitting at the piano and making music, no matter how fumblingly. And so are our dreams. I want to remember them, not so that I can recount them at boring length, but so that I will be less insular, less afraid to travel in foreign lands. We are very foolish if we shrug and patronizingly consider that these voyages are not real.
My husband is automatically suspicious of what is commonly called mysticism, or the supernatural. He is right to be dubious. This is dangerous territory, and to experiment foolishly can lead to death and damnation. I don’t understand mysticism, but I do know that the kind of Be-a-Mystic-in-One-Easy-Lesson-in-Contemplation which is becoming fashionable has nothing whatsoever to do with the real thing. I think that one cannot be a mystic consciously any more than one can have integrity or be humble consciously. But there are, indeed, Horatio, more things in heaven and earth than our philosophies can account for. So I send out two messages from the realm where truth has nothing to do with provable fact.
The first message is not very cosmic in importance, but it is definitely outside the bounds of proof.
When I first started as librarian of the Cathedral, I, with Oliver, our old collie, took a route which led up Broadway, then turned east at 110th Street. We would then proceed up either the south or the north side of the street, depending on whether the light was red or green at that point. One morning we were walking up the north side, and Oliver gave a tremendous leap, as though he had been frightened by something, and almost threw me. I didn’t pay much attention when the same thing happened the next time, but when it happened a third time, when it happened every time we passed one particular building, I began to wonder. Oliver would either fling to the end of his leash or he would make an elaborate, quivering circle around something I could not see.
I to
ld my husband, the calm humanist, the iconoclast, the reasonable intellectual. Naturally he doubted; he laughed. The next time we were going to dinner with one of our friends at the Cathedral, he took Oliver’s leash. Although I hated to see Oliver frightened (I now walked him only up the south side), I found myself wanting something to happen. It did. Oliver nearly threw him.
For over a year Hugh kept testing him; sometimes Oliver would only press, trembling, against Hugh as we walked by. But something always happened; Oliver saw, felt, feared, something that we did not, and whatever this thing was, it was evil.
When I tell this story and friends pooh-pooh, I turn to Hugh for corroboration. “Oh, it happened,” he says. “I can’t explain it, but it very definitely happened.”
15
The second message moves deeper into the ocean.
When I was little we usually visited my maternal grandmother during the summer when she lived at the beach. I called my grandmother Dearma, because I thought that’s what all grandmothers were called. The Saint-Gaudens children called old Madame Saint-Gaudens Dearma, and as I look at the snapshots of very small Madeleine with the formidable mother of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and think of my own grandmother, equally austere and dignified, it seems an oddly familiar name even for a grandchild. Now that I have grandchildren of my own, I understand this total lack of awe rather better.
In any case, I called my magnificent grandmother Dearma, and I loved the house at the beach in a special way. It was there that I was first taken out at night to see stars, and where I first sensed ultimate design in the universe. I’ve always had a feeling of personal communication with stars, not in the sense of astrology but in the sense of feeling a consciousness which encompasses all the tiny human consciousness on earth and enlarges it.
A Circle of Quiet Page 20