Walking on Water

by Madeleine L'engle

  For a woman who has chosen family as well as work, there’s never time, and yet somehow time is given to us as time is given to the man who must sail a ship or chart the stars. For most writers it takes many manuscripts before enough royalties are coming in to pay for a roof over the head and bread on the table. Other jobs must often be found to take care of bread and butter. A certain amount of stubbornness—pig-headedness—is essential.

  —

  I’m often asked how my children feel about my work, and I have to reply, “Ambivalent.” Our firstborn observed to me many years ago, when she was a grade-school child, “Nobody else’s mother writes books.” But she also said, around the same time, “Mother, you’ve been very cross and edgy with us lately, and we’ve noticed that you haven’t been writing, and we wish you’d get back to the typewriter.” A wonderfully freeing remark. I had to learn that I was a better mother and wife when I was working than when I was not.

  While our son was in college he was very careful that nobody knew that his father was Dr. Charles Tyler in All My Children, nor that his mother had written A Wrinkle in Time.

  And once when our children ranged in age from eight to thirteen, we said to one of their teachers that we did not understand why they were so concerned about their report cards; we did not pressure them; we wanted them to enjoy learning, and this was much more important to us than grades. The teacher looked at us and said, “Don’t you realize that you, yourselves, are pressure?”

  We didn’t. Or we hadn’t, not until that moment. But if I think on it, I suppose that most parents cause a certain amount of ambivalence and pressure for their children, and ours haven’t yet turned us in.

  —

  I was at the annual meeting of a state library association a few years later, when the children were in the process of leaving the nest, and one of the librarians asked me, “What do you think you and Hugh have done which was best for your children?”

  I answered immediately and without thinking, “We love each other.”

  —

  A life lived in chaos is an impossibility for the artist. No matter how unstructured may seem the painter’s garret in Paris or the poet’s pad in Greenwich Village, the artist must have some kind of order or he will produce a very small body of work. To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

  I learned slowly that, for me, this must be external as well as internal. My last year in boarding school I almost lost my “Honor Pin” every month because I had almost accumulated those fatal ten “disorder marks.” It was when I was in college and my roommate and I chose our own room and it was ours that I learned that I worked better in a tidy nest. I am not the greatest housekeeper in the world, but my house is tidy.

  One problem with the word work is that it has come to be equated with drudgery, and is considered degrading. Now, some work is drudgery though it is not always degrading. Vacuuming the house or scrubbing out the refrigerator is drudgery for me, though I find it in no way degrading. And that it is drudgery is a lack in me. I enjoy the results and so I should enjoy producing the results. I suspect that it is not the work itself which is the problem but that it is taking me from other work, such as whatever manuscript I am currently working on. Drudgery is not what work is meant to be. Our work should be our play. If we watch a child at play for a few minutes, seriously at play, we see that all his energies are concentrated on it. He is working very hard at it. And that is how the artist works, although the artist may be conscious of discipline while the child simply experiences it.

  I watched my small son trying to build a tower from blocks which had already been used by so many children that corners had been chipped off, edges worn. They were not as easy to balance as they had been when they were new.

  The tower would start to rise. Then he would place a block on one which was uneven, and the whole thing would topple. With a shout of outrage he would begin again.

  I watched, unnoticed, while he started the tower three, four, five times, unwilling to give up. Tears of frustration were streaming down his face. From his small lungs came uninhibited roars of fury. But he kept at it until the tower stood, a leaning Pisa kind of tower, but a tower.

  Work? Play?

  —

  In this last stretch of the twentieth century we are losing the ability to equate work with play, and there are many self-evident reasons for this. One publishing house, owned by a conglomerate, was told that it must drop from its list any book which did not sell a mandatory number of copies during a year. And so the works of a poet such as Yeats have been discarded, are no longer available, are out of print.

  Greed is not the only reason for this. Too many books are published which are shabbily and shoddily written. Many are simply rough drafts, and most first drafts need long and hard revision, and that means work, and we have been taught to look down on work. But one reason for this is that much work is not, in fact, work but drudgery.

  Hugh and I are among the world’s lucky ones, reminding ourselves frequently how fortunate we both are to be doing work which we love, work which is, for us, play.

  Perhaps play is the answer to those who condemn what they call the “Puritan work ethic,” which provides us a mental image of drably clad, dour-faced people grimly doing their duty. This has little to do with either those imprisoned in the drudgery of sweatshops or those of us who have been given the joy of work we love, be it work with children, words, paint, the discoveries of vaccines, chipping beauty out of marble, weaving melody out of seemingly random notes.

  —

  Many people in walks of life which do not involve creation are completely unaware of the necessity for discipline. It is not only that few serious artists who live lives of debauchery produce a large body of work but that few serious artists are able to live lives which are without interruption. We do not shed all obligations when the children leave home. I am working on this section of this manuscript while teaching an intensive four-and-a-half-hour credit course, and neither may be skimped. Many writers work in the evenings after a nine-to-five job. And there are letters to be answered, the phone which constantly calls us. I travel a lot in order to give lectures, teach at writer’s conferences (though most of my destinations are not as glamourous as Cyprus). To write consistently, I must seize opportunities. I write in airports. I write on planes. I find airports and planes and hotel rooms excellent places in which to write because while I am in them I am not responsible for anything except my work. Once I have my seat assignment I can write until the flight is called; when I am on the plane, the pilot is responsible for the flight, I am not, and so I can work on my manuscript. In a hotel room I do not have to think about the vacuum cleaner (though sometimes I would like to have one); domestic chores are not my responsibility; I am free to write.

  No matter where I am, at home, abroad, I begin the day with morning prayer, including the psalms for the day, so that at the end of each month I have gone through the book of Psalms. I also read from both the Old and New Testaments. And there is almost always something in the Psalms or the other Scripture which I need to hear for that day, something I may have read hundreds of times before, but which suddenly springs out at me with new meaning.

  I end the day in the same way, with evening prayer, and this gives the day a structure. Between these two joyful disciplines, the day is also moderately structured. I write all morning. Lunch is often shared with a friend. Then, most afternoons, I return to my manuscript, though if I’ve put in a hard and productive morning’s work I don’t feel bound by this. I may need to go to the library for research. When we are at Crosswicks I usually take time to go to the brook, taking heavy clippers with me to try to keep the bittersweet from strangling the trees, to cut new paths to the rocks overlooking the water or leading to a particularly beautiful grove of birch or pine. Sitting or, better, lying on one of my favourite sun-warmed rocks, I try to take time to let go, to listen, in much the same way that I listen when I
am writing. This is praying time, and the act of listening in prayer is the same act as listening in writing. And again, comparisons need not come into it; the prayer of the saint is not necessarily “better” than the prayer of the peasant.

  And then there is time in which to be, simply to be, that time in which God quietly tells us who we are and who he wants us to be. It is then that God can take our emptiness and fill it up with what he wants and drain away the business with which we inevitably get involved in the dailiness of human living.

  It is a joy to be allowed to be the servant of the work. And it is a humbling and exciting thing to know that my work knows more than I do. Throughout the years there have been many proofs of this, but I think I began to understand it more fully as I worked on A Wrinkle in Time, my seventh book to be published, eleventh to be written. As I tried to serve it I began to comprehend something about listening to the work, about going where it shoved me. And so the long two years of rejection slips which followed were especially difficult; it wasn’t just that my work was being rejected, or, if it was, it meant that I had not even begun to serve the work.

  While I was writing I’d given myself a crash course in physics, having managed in my schooling to avoid as much as possible anything even remotely mathematical. I didn’t get interested because I was working on a story based on the theories of contemporary, post-Newtonian physics but because post-Newtonian physics caused me to write a story. About a year before I started work on Wrinkle, I discovered that higher math is easier to understand than lower math, and in reading the works of the great mathematicians and physicists I was discovering theological insights I had not found in my determined efforts to read theology. The discovery of physics preceded the work on the book.

  So it has been a surprise and a delight to me to discover that my friends who are scientists, my son-in-law, Peter, who is a theoretical chemist, my godson, John, who is an immunologist, find the science in my fantasies to be “real” and have passed them around to their friends. This is marvellous proof that my books know more than I know.

  The fact that Wrinkle is deeply embedded in both theology and physics had little to do with me, and this puts me in my proper place as a servant struggling (never completely succeeding) to be faithful to the work, the work which slowly and gently tries to teach me some of what it knows. Sometimes it is years after a book is published that I discover what some of it meant. For instance, when I made the villain in Wrinkle a disembodied brain, It, that was just how the villain happened to look; I wasn’t consciously realizing that the brain, when it is disengaged from the heart, turns vicious. (Conversely, the heart, when it is disengaged from the brain, can become sentimental and untruthful.)

  It is nothing short of miraculous that I am so often given, during the composition of a story, just what I need at the very moment that I need it. Why did I blunder into the discovery of physics just as I was ready to write Wrinkle? Why did the names Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which come as we were driving along in the station wagon with our children?

  When I was roughing out A Wind in the Door, trying to listen, I knew that something wasn’t working. I had the characters, Meg and Charles Wallace and Calvin and their families; I had the cherubim, Progo; the three Mr. Jenkinses; and the snake, Louise the Larger. But the story was not unfolding. I couldn’t hear where it wanted me to go. And at that moment my physician friend, Pat, to whom the book is dedicated, gave me two articles from the New England Medical Journal, by Lewis Thomas, on mitochondria, those strange microcosmic creatures living their own lives within our cells, using us as their host planet but living independently of us, with their own DNA and RNA. And there was where the story wanted me to go, away from the macrocosm and into the microcosm. What made Pat, at that specific time, give me exactly what I needed—or what the book needed? Of course it didn’t come free; it never does. With the help of my elder daughter I gave myself a crash course in cellular biology, which science didn’t even exist when I was in school—and if it had existed, I’d probably have avoided it. Hard work, that crash course, but lots of fun.

  When I was well into A Swiftly Tilting Planet I had set myself all kinds of problems which I feared might be insoluble. I was trying to listen to the story and was thoroughly confused because in the story I’d been given a vengeful South American dictator in a small country called Vespugia (my husband thought up that delightful name) set in the middle of what used to be known as Patagonia, a sizeable area along what are now the boundaries of Chile and Argentina. I also had in the story an ancient Welsh prince, Madoc, son of Owain, King of Gwynedd, who, after his father’s death and the violent quarreling of the brothers over the throne, had left Wales and was supposed to have come to North America, before Leif Erickson, and to have made his life among a tribe of friendly Indians. The legend persists today, and Madoc and his descendants were important to the story, and so was the Vespugian dictator, Mad Dog Branzillo. And what I needed was some kind of a link between Wales and South America, particularly, of course, the Vespugian part of South America, and it seemed to me extremely unlikely that there could be such a connection. I was afraid I had painted myself into a corner.

  And just at that time off I went to Wheaton College to give some lectures. I remember standing in the library and saying that I needed to know more about the legend of Madoc. I didn’t mention Vespugia or Patagonia or my need for a link. Ruth Cording loaned me two little paperback volumes, Welsh on one side of the page, English on the other, about Wales and America, and in one of these books I read that in 1865 an expedition left Wales to go to settle in South America, in exactly that part of Patagonia where I had placed Vespugia.

  How to explain this? I can’t. But it strikes me as more than that I was unknowingly dipping into the collective unconscious. My guardian angel was certainly working overtime, and I accepted the miracle with awe and gratitude, and I owe yet another debt to Wheaton, and to Mrs. Cording, who has since managed to find for me my very own copies of these two books which were so important for the background of A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

  —

  When I first started sending Wrinkle around I called it Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which because that was how the book had first come to me, those three names suddenly appearing out of the blue. When Farrar, Straus and Giroux finally decided to risk publishing it, they felt that this title sounded too juvenile, so they came up with The Worlds of Charles Wallace. I didn’t like this but couldn’t invent anything better.

  This was all happening at a time when my mother was visiting us, and one morning I took her an early morning cup of coffee, and she said, “I didn’t sleep well last night, but I think I’ve got a title for you, right out of the text: A Wrinkle in Time.”

  “You’ve got it, Mother! That’s it!”

  It was. When I called the publishers they, too, were delighted. Not only titles, but sometimes some of the content of a book is from someone else, a gift which only needs to be recognized. This is in no sense plagiarism; I didn’t need Lewis Thomas’s words or chapters for A Wind in the Door; all I needed was to get excited about mitochondria. In a sense, nothing the artist produces is his in any exclusive way. An inventor takes inventory of that which is already there. A discoverer uncovers that which is. T. S. Eliot says: “Poetry takes something that we know already and turns it into something new.” Perhaps art is seeing the obvious in such a new light that the old becomes new.

  —

  It isn’t only in fiction that I am given these amazing gifts. When I was drawing to the close of The Summer of the Great Grandmother, a book about my ninety-year-old mother’s last summer and her death (in her grandson’s arms), my little granddaughters gave me just what I needed for the end of the book. I quote the final pages:

  The children grow in all ways. Their vocabulary advances in leaps and bounds. I am no longer Madden or Gan-mad-den. When they are formal with me, I am Grandmadeleine. Mostly it is Gran….

  One night I put them to bed, and after all
the songs and stories they beg for two last songs. “Long ones.”

  So I start the Ballad of Barbara Allen. I have sung only a couple of verses when Charlotte says, her voice quivering slightly, “Gran, you know that’s a bad one.”

  “What, Charlotte?”

  “You know that’s a bad one.”

  Both Barbara Allen and her young man are dead and buried at the end of the ballad; I ask, “Why, Charlotte? Because it’s sad?”

  “No! Because she didn’t love anybody.”

  Charlotte knows what it is all about. The refusal to love is the only unbearable thing.

  Another time, when Josephine and Alan (the parents) are away, I tell the rest of the family that I’ll put the little girls to bed and go to bed early myself and finish reading a manuscript. We’ve had a very happy evening; the little girls—no longer babies—and I had a long bath hour before dinner; we had a lovely meal, with the menu chosen by the children: chicken salad and peas. I added potato salad and a big green salad. It’s warm this evening, so the mostly cold meal was just right.

  After dinner the children and I sing songs and tell stories while I get them into their nightgowns, and all is comfortable and familiar and safe and loving. We go into the bathroom to brush teeth and wash faces, and suddenly Léna looks at me and asks, “Grandmadeleine, is it all right?”

  Slightly taken aback…I answer, “Yes, Léna, it’s all right.”

  “But, Gran, is everything really all right? really?” It is completely cosmic questioning, coming from a small girl in a white nightgown with a toothbrush in her hand, sensing the unfamiliar surrounding the familiar. It is warm and light in the house, but the greater the radius of light, the wider the perimeter of darkness.