A Light So Lovely

by Sarah Arthur

  Keep in mind, that’s just her fiction for children and teens. Novels for adults, like Certain Women (1992) and A Live Coal in the Sea (1996), were fewer after her success as a children’s author, yet still significant.

  Meanwhile, Madeleine began publishing creative nonfiction with A Circle of Quiet, the first of her memoir-esque Crosswicks Journals, in 1972—and suddenly she found another niche. Now her audience included not just the young adults she originally wrote for, but also their grown-up selves as they attempted to make sense of their religious beliefs and vocations on the ground, in their everyday lives. The Summer of the Great-Grandmother followed in 1974 (about the decline and death of her mother) and The Irrational Season (1977), about the liturgical year; all of which culminated with Two-Part Invention in 1988, the story of her forty-year marriage to Hugh and his death of cancer in 1986.

  Sprinkled throughout these releases were books like Walking on Water, The Rock That Is Higher, and her midrashstyle commentaries on Genesis (And It Was Good, A Stone for a Pillow, and Sold into Egypt). To be honest, I have no idea how her publishers kept up.

  All told, Madeleine’s corpus has sold in the tens of millions—and continues selling.

  • • • •

  We must not forget: this is the same woman who claimed to have been “an unsuccessful, nonachieving child at school, unappreciated and unloved by teachers and peers alike.”11 What she missed out on in a lonely childhood she more than made up for in her middle and later years as a successful author who traveled the world.

  After Hugh’s death, she continued to teach dozens of writing workshops, creating a fellowship of ardent student-disciples. To many of them she opened her home and, in some cases, her life, hosting various reunion dinners and other gatherings at her Manhattan apartment, surrounded by a menagerie of cats and dogs.

  Madeleine in person was, by all accounts, larger than life. Tall, with an astounding self-confidence and stage presence, despite her claims to be physically clumsy, she had a straightforward, almost oracle-like way of speaking. Publisher’s Weekly writer Jana Riess (Flunking Sainthood), in her interview for this book, described having dinner with Madeleine when the author gave the 1991 commencement address at Wellesley College: “She was outspoken, and I think that kind of took a person by surprise. She had a lot of opinions about everything from Jesus Christ Superstar to movies that were currently playing.” Philip Yancey laughed when I asked him to describe his initial impressions: “When she wasn’t around, some of us in the Chrysostom Society sometimes called her Dame Madeleine, because she had that imposing presence. She fulfilled that stereotype. She had strong opinions, she tended to make pronouncements. She was intimidating at first meeting and then gradually over the years as I got to know her I realized there’s a soft person and a very welcoming person underneath.”

  Her students described her as “fierce in her faith,” a woman who physically projected a “sense of wonder.”12 Poet Luci Shaw, L’Engle’s lifelong friend, wrote:

  What the world saw was a powerful woman, largehearted, fearless, quixotic, profoundly imaginative, unwilling to settle for mediocrity. Tall and queenly, she physically embodied her mental and spiritual attributes. Some of us remember occasions when, in church during Advent, at her home church, All Angels’ in Manhattan, she rose to full height, spread her arms wide like the Angel at the Annunciation, and declared, “Fear not!” in a tone that allowed no gainsaying.13

  Meanwhile, “Madeleine got more done in one day than most people accomplish in four,” writes one of her goddaughters, filmmaker Cornelia Duryée Moore; “I watched her write the entire first draft of [Certain Women] in two weeks.”14 One of her writing students says, “Her five-foot ten-inch frame possessed twice my energy, endurance and creative stamina”—adding, “One day I found her in bed, somewhat tired; she had been a little ill, but still managed to dictate some seventy letters that day.”15 A day or evening spent with Madeleine at Crosswicks or her New York apartment ended with Compline, that simple ritual of communal Scriptures and prayer from the Book of Common Prayer.

  Who on earth has nineteen godchildren? Madeleine did—among them many adults that she sponsored in their Episcopalian catechism. Hearing their stories, one gets the impression that half the aspiring artists on the Upper West Side, most Protestant poets, and a good portion of evangelical college students around the country converted to Anglicanism or some form of liturgical something before she was done with them. She also attended more weddings—couples that she, herself, introduced to each other—than seems humanly possible.

  Madeleine also cultivated an ability to travel just about anywhere. As a young girl, when she wasn’t off to boarding school or traveling in Europe with her parents, she spent a great deal of time near Jacksonville, Florida, surrounded by her mother’s extended family and history. In adulthood she seemed at ease (or at least at a truce) with country life at Crosswicks, though she preferred the city. Travels to Europe, South America, China, and elsewhere marked her later years, before health issues slowed her down. She found something to talk about with most everyone, able to converse equally well in art, theater, and music as well as science, theology, and philosophy. She could hold her own as a commencement speaker at her “secular” alma mater, Smith College; but she was also at home in a place like Wheaton—despite the fact that conservative fundamentalists, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter, became some of the most acidly vocal proponents of banning her books.

  On her best days, she was openhearted and generous to people of all ages. Paul Willis of Westmont College remembers hosting Madeleine at his home during one of her college visits: “Before dinner she held a Q&A session with all of the neighborhood children, in which she sat in a big stuffed chair and they all sat on the floor.” L’Engle scholar Carole Chase describes Madeleine keynoting a family retreat in the mountains of North Carolina, where the children flocked to her on the way to dinner: Madeleine carefully addressed each child individually before moving on. Jana Riess, recalling the Wellesley College visit, depicts a celebrity who turned down dinner with the college president because she had already agreed to dine with Jana and her friends.

  Remembrances of Madeleine by friends, colleagues, and students approach hagiography. She was a “transformational light,” a “bright shining star,” a grandmother, mentor, minister, spiritual director, trusted advisor, Wise Woman, and guide, “maybe more than a little like the angelic presences in A Wrinkle in Time, Mrs Who, Mrs Whatsit, and Mrs Which, who had ways of bringing out the best in their earthly students by magnifying the students’ inherently good qualities.”16

  If she’s beginning to sound like an idol, that’s because, for many, she was.

  • • • •

  But this was not the sum total of Madeleine. One of my favorite questions for those who knew her is “What were her quirks, her blind spots?” Paul Willis, speaking to me of her Westmont College visit, describes how “she passionately spoke twice in chapel on the text ‘Judge not,’ but when I had lunch with her she went on and on, just as passionately, about how she couldn’t stand the current president of [another evangelical college] and was not going to give another dime to that school.”

  Paul also showed her Westmont’s C. S. Lewis wardrobe, which had been owned by the great author of the Chronicles of Narnia himself. Incidentally, another Lewis wardrobe stands on prominent display at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College—although, purportedly, Lewis’s personal secretary, Walter Hooper, claimed that Westmont’s was the real inspiration behind the wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.17 “She got a real kick out of that,” Paul recalled, “being fully acquainted with Wheaton College’s pride in their own wardrobe. I can still see her standing in front of the wardrobe and chuckling and chuckling. I think it appealed to a delightfully wicked part of her.”

  Her temperament was certainly a force to be reckoned with. In a rare instance of honest critique, one writing student admits, parenthetically, “She could be dismis
sive and scathing when appalled or hurt.”18 Madeleine herself admitted to being moody. She could also be blunt. Her decisiveness was not always leveraged graciously. Luci Shaw describes sharing a newly written poem with her one afternoon—a moment of vulnerability for any writer. After a brief pause, Madeleine said, without preamble, “Take off the last three lines.”19

  Then there’s the infamous New Yorker profile by Cynthia Zarin in 2004, three years before Madeleine’s death. It was less than flattering, in which Madeleine’s children reportedly hated Two-Part Invention for being unrecognizable. In which they likewise claimed to detest the Austin Family Chronicles for hitting too close to home while painting an overly idealized portrait of their otherwise tumultuous domestic life, in which her son Bion is said to have died from the effects of an alcoholism that Madeleine never acknowledged. Later, children’s books biographer Leonard Marcus’s 2012 collection of interviews, Listening for Madeleine, only served to bolster Zarin’s earlier assessment, with reflections from Madeleine’s children and grandchildren in particular that paint a much more complex portrait of the beloved author.

  It’s a hard pill to swallow, as we’ll discuss further in chapter six. Needless to say, her students and ardent fans, and even many of her colleagues, with whom she worked closely, found those interviews distressing. The New Yorker profile was not, they insisted, the Madeleine they knew. And yet one could argue that the people with the real chops to speak are the ones who were closest to her, her family, who loved her in spite of their painful history. Who was the real Madeleine? Or could she be, like paradox itself, both/and?

  I’ve come to realize that in all of these different incarnations, Madeleine was not merely code switching. All of these things were who she was. As her granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis says, “She had such a fluid mind that she didn’t have to prioritize by saying, I’m this first and these other things are secondary. She was always a ‘both/and’ thinker, not an ‘either/or’ thinker.”20 Madeleine was both icon and iconoclast; which is another way of saying she was, like the rest of us, utterly human.

  If I learned anything in divinity school, it’s that the uncomfortable places, the troubling questions about faith and Scripture and life and humanity, are exactly where we need to drill down. Focus there, where it bothers you. Dig where it disturbs you, and see what God is doing. Because if God isn’t at work in the hard places—in spite of God’s own people, not just because of them—then why bother with any of it?

  For Madeleine, if God speaks anywhere, God speaks everywhere, even through things, places, and people we least expect—including those with whom we vehemently disagree, including the idols and icons that at times disappoint us by being just as imperfectly human as we are.

  • • • •

  If we need icons, we also, Madeleine insisted, “need an iconoclast close by”21—someone who takes our precious little idols—those ideas we think we understand, those cherished convictions—and smashes them. It was her own husband, Hugh, she claimed, who played this role for her, often critiquing her first drafts so incisively that she stormed off in a rage. But there were others, friends and colleagues, whose way of seeing the world were not like hers. For Madeleine, one of those friends was Luci Shaw.

  I’ve known Luci myself for well over a decade, ever since I first picked up her poetry collection Polishing the Petoskey Stone when I lived in Petoskey, Michigan, and then all but stalked her at the 2004 Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College. In the picture I took of us that year, she’s smiling sheepishly while I suppress whoops of excitement: “I’m a rabid fan! I can’t believe I get to meet you in person!” Then later, as I was curating the literary guides to prayer for Paraclete Press, we corresponded regularly: “Can I reprint this poem? How about that one? And that one?” When it came to my Christmas collection, Light Upon Light, I dubbed her the Patron Saint of Advent. She, meanwhile, endured all this graciously, the epitome of poetic generosity.

  When I was approached about writing this book, there was absolutely no question: I had to set up an interview with Luci. She responded to my query immediately: “I’d love to talk to you about Madeleine, in all her complexity!” Finding the time was another thing: not only was there a three-hour time difference between Michigan and the state of Washington, but at almost eighty-nine, Luci is impressively busy, maintaining a rigorous publishing and speaking schedule that reminds me of, well, Madeleine. But finally we connected.

  As Luci tells it, she and Madeleine met in the ’70s at Wheaton College, where Madeleine was invited by the English faculty to speak at a conference on the arts. Luci was also a presenter. “Wheaton invited her to come,” Luci explained, “and it was a bit of a risk. Because at that point it was—and Wheaton still is—very conservative; and some of her ideas sort of wandered beyond the usual boundaries of faith and belief. She had a wildly imaginative mind and sometimes that took her into territory that Wheaton might have considered dangerous.”

  Meanwhile, the only Wheaton College Madeleine had ever heard of was in Massachusetts. When the letter detailing her visit arrived, she discovered that this particular Wheaton was in the Midwest—and a premier Christian college, no less. “Someone explained to me that Wheaton was Evangelical. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.”22 (Pause while the rest of us attempt to comprehend a time when someone in the United States could reach their fifties without ever hearing the word evangelical.) In typical Madeleine fashion, she went anyway—rather like a tourist on safari, or so I picture her—and to her own surprise, she found a new spiritual home. As Madeleine later told the Wheaton class of 1977 in her commencement address (she had just spoken at Smith College the day before), “Although Smith is my alma mater and I love it, I was not as at home there as I am with you. Nor could I say the same words there that I can say to you today. Because here at Wheaton, I’m able to be openly a Christian among Christians.”23

  It was at Wheaton, she claimed, that she learned a more spontaneous way of praying beyond merely reciting the prescripted language of the Book of Common Prayer. And it was at Wheaton that she met Luci. They hit it off immediately. “We both loved the color green,” Luci told me, chuckling. “We both loved baroque music, we both loved Bach, we both would play the Bach fugues.” These may sound like trifles, but to Madeleine—raised among New York’s musicians and literati—it must have signaled someone with a shared culture. And, needless to say, they were both writers. Luci and her husband Harold had just started a new literary publishing company, Harold Shaw Publishers.

  “We were hoping to focus on literary biographies, poetry, literary criticism, that sort of thing,” Luci explained to me about those early years, “‘literature for thoughtful Christians.’ Madeleine told me that she’d written two books of poetry, and they both went out of print (I don’t know why). I said, we would love to publish those books, and if you’ve got more recent poems that aren’t in those books, we’d love to add those to the number of poems that have gone out of print. She was delighted. So we did that. It was our first project with her. It was called The Weather of the Heart.” Luci would go on to work with Madeleine, as her editor and sometimes coauthor, on at least eleven books, including one about their decades-long friendship called Friends for the Journey.

  But it was during one July visit to Wheaton, in 1977, that the two authors became very close. “Her granddaughter Léna was involved in a bad car accident,” Luci told me, “and her life was in danger. Madeleine and I went for a long walk in a park and sat down and prayed together for Léna. She recovered. When we were able to pray together over something so pressing and so life-and-death, that cemented us.” Roughly a decade later, both of their husbands died of cancer in the same year. “We did a lot of talking over the phone and catching up and understanding what we were going through,” Luci recalled. “That brought us very close together.”

  This didn’t stop them from disagreements, however, particularly over theology. Luci had been raised in an extremely conservative Christian home
and church; needless to say, Madeleine had not. “One of the great things about my relationship with Madeleine,” Luci said, “was that we sparred a lot around ideas and truths. We never quarreled, but we had long discussions in which she would take one position and I would take the other; and we nearly always ended up in the middle.” Luci tells of editing sessions in which she would exclaim, “Madeleine, you can’t say that to evangelicals!” But then, after Madeleine had explained and defended herself, Luci would conclude, “You must say that, exactly that way.”

  “Sometimes when we were involved in editing something and we had a strong disagreement, we’d come to the point when we understood each other, and then we’d stand up and sing the Doxology, almost spontaneously,” Luci told me. I picture them seated at a paper-strewn dining table in Madeleine’s New York apartment, late afternoon sun flooding the room, surrounded by cats and empty tea cups. And then suddenly these two literary giants—well, one an almost-giant in a flowing dress and the other a petite Brit with twinkling eyes—rise and belt out a hymn.

  Luci captured it well when she wrote to Madeleine, in Friends for the Journey, “And you, on your part, can make radical theological statements with which I may disagree, but again, because of our bond of love we accept each other for who we are, flawed and failing, but always truth-seeking.”24