by Sarah Arthur
“How do I happen to believe in God?” wrote Frederick Buechner in The Alphabet of Grace; “Writing novels, I got into the habit of looking for plots. After a while, I began to suspect that my own life had a plot. And after a while more, I began to suspect that life itself has a plot.” It’s human nature to descry patterns and meaning in our daily experience, to attempt to narrate events such that they fit our preferred way of scripting the world. Yet, if our lives veer off script while we’re living them—if crises strike, if people say and do things that don’t fit the storyline—we tend toward one of two responses: denial, which takes many forms, or existential despair, which also takes many forms.
Sometimes denial and despair are bound up together in one person (there’s both/and again), or even in one emotional outburst. There’s no guarantee we’ll be honest, clever, or heroic in the critical moment. But for the inveterate storytellers among us, myself included, the impulse toward denial often manifests as a creative manhandling of the facts in order to tell the story we want our lives to be.
My tale of the fire is true. It’s a story of what happens in our human experience: crises, fear, heroism, loss, change. It’s also factual: not only was I there to witness these events as they happened, but I also ran the beginning of this chapter past my parents to confirm that what I remembered was, in fact, accurate. (It was my father who pointed out the revivalist history of that region, including Charles Finney’s description of it as the “burned-out district.”) Accountability has been my practice throughout my writing career: “Does this sound right to you?” I ask family and friends, handing them a couple of pages from a manuscript. “Is this how you remember it?” It’s my way of not merely relying on my own sketchy memories, which have been known to fail spectacularly (“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” my husband often says of a memory I assume we share). Instead I try to acknowledge that my version of events doesn’t hold more authority just because I wrote it down.
While I desire to tell stories of what happens, I’m also obligated—by the sheer material reality of being a fallible mortal among other fallible mortals, bound to others for daily survival—to keep myself accountable to what happened. Because if God can work through fiction, as Madeleine insisted, we must also assert that God can, and does, work through facts.
• • • •
If God created this material world, then God created facts. I may not like them: I will crash if I attempt to defy gravity by jumping off my roof; I will burn my hand if I touch a flame. Indeed, my material body proves the facts of physics all day long, for better or worse. This may not be the sum total of my existence, but I can’t ignore that matter matters. After all, as Madeleine herself would be the first to remind us, God made matter and called it good.
Meanwhile, there are certain historical claims I cling to as a Christian, without which my faith would be meaningless. Jesus was a real, live person. His disciples actually touched his resurrected body. He didn’t dismiss his disciple Thomas for refusing to believe without proof (see John 20:24–29). Rather, Jesus gave Thomas the means for proving it (“Touch my scars . . . here and here . . .”) and then later cooked and ate fish in the disciples’ presence, for good measure.
“I stand with Paul here,” Madeleine wrote of the apostle’s claims about the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:12–19. “When we deny the Resurrection, we are denying Christianity. We are no longer the Church; no wonder the secular world is horrified by us.” Paul himself wrote, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:17–19). The gospel isn’t just a “good spell,” an enchanting story; it’s also good news.
Facts matter. Yet Madeleine’s insistence on truth taking primacy over facts is one of those rare instances when a woman who otherwise excelled at being both/and tended toward either/or. At times she wandered into a false binary—you can have truth or facts but not both—as if facts themselves can’t carry truth. She never comes out and says so: but in positioning stories as the primary vehicles for truth, the assumption is that facts are only secondary, and suspect.
She rightly challenged our tendency to assume that correlation means causation: just because something is told in the form of a narrative doesn’t mean it never happened, nor even that it lies. The biblical book of Job may have been written as a kind of ancient Near Eastern opera, but its literary form doesn’t automatically mean that a character like Job never existed—no more than the artistic form of a musical somehow suggests that composer Lin-Manuel Miranda invented politician Alexander Hamilton. Yet Madeleine never really reckoned with the converse: just because you tell something in the form of narrative does not mean it automatically delivers truth.
The story may be true for you, the author; but what if it contradicts someone else’s truth? What if, in contradicting someone else’s truth, you end up hurting or even silencing them?
• • • •
My first hint that I was sailing into difficult waters, as a biographer, was in coming across the 2004 New Yorker profile, “The Storyteller: Fact, Fiction, and the Books of Madeleine L’Engle” by Cynthia Zarin. I’ve already mentioned Zarin’s interviews with the family, whose responses to Madeleine’s work were, in Madeleine’s own words, “ambivalent.”5 I immediately wondered what the family thought of the article: Was it fair reporting? How much could be chalked up to editorial manhandling? (A lot, apparently.)
Then, reading Leonard Marcus’s interviews with Madeleine’s contemporaries in Listening for Madeleine only complexified an already complex picture. In one example, author and family friend Katharine Weber told Marcus, “Two-Part Invention is a beautiful portrait of the marriage she wished she had.”6 Madeleine’s former son-in-law, Alan Jones, likewise said, “While I don’t think her marriage was at all disastrous, it was complicated, and Two-Part Invention was a tremendously idealized picture of the marriage. I always thought the title was suitably ironical.”7
Madeleine’s eldest daughter, Josephine, recalled instances in which Madeleine’s fans would approach the family, exclaiming how they felt like they knew the family so well. Josephine told Marcus, “I would always reply, ‘You have to remember that my mother is a fiction writer.’ ‘No, no,’ they would say as if I had somehow misunderstood them. ‘I’m talking about her nonfiction.’” And so Josephine would repeat, with as much patience as she could muster, “You have to remember that she is a fiction writer.”8 I’m struck by how much hurt and love and bewilderment and courage is bound up in such an exchange.
Pause. This is one of those moments when the ground you thought was stable starts tremoring—particularly when you’re a biographer attempting to paint a faithful portrait of a life. If it weren’t for the gracious input of Madeleine’s granddaughter Charlotte, who is Josephine and Alan’s youngest daughter and literary executor of the L’Engle estate, I might still be sitting amidst a heap of books, wailing, “Help!”
Charlotte’s take on her grandmother’s storytelling is powerfully charitable. She explains that it’s not that Madeleine was lying. Rather, Madeleine was, like every good storyteller, embellishing. The point of a given story might be true—such as, manuscripts get rejected a lot—and along the way Madeleine supplied the concrete details every good writing teacher asks for: so, for instance, A Wrinkle in Time was rejected twenty-seven times. Or thirty. Or thirty-seven. (By the 2003 anthology Winning Authors: Profiles of the Newbery Medalists, compiled by Kathleen Long Bostrom from author interviews, the number had risen to “over forty.”9) I can picture Madeleine shrugging. Details, details. The point is, authors can plan on their manuscripts getting rejected. A lot. That’s true.
Despite her resistance to provable facts, however, Madeleine would nevertheless insist, to the exasperation of her family, that her own recall of particular events was accurate. Charlotte told me that for all her
grandmother’s emphasis on embracing uncertainty, Madeleine did want answers; and once she found or created ones that satisfied her, she would insist on them as the only possible interpretation of events her family may have remembered very differently. “On the empirical level,” Madeleine wrote in A Circle of Quiet, “if we have a family argument about when or where something happened, and the others don’t agree with me, if I say, ‘But I know I’m right this time, I’ll go get my journal,’ they usually give up”10—as if a personal journal presents incontrovertible evidence rather than a potentially fallible interpretation.
For those closest to Madeleine, despite their deep love for her and vice versa, this sort of episode was not an isolated incident; it felt like a regular erasure of their experience. Alan Jones reflected with Leonard Marcus, “I think it was very hard on her children when they’d say something about a personal experience and she’d say, ‘No. It didn’t happen that way. I have it in my journal.’ That was a way of somehow denying other people’s experience.”11 It didn’t seem to matter that her loved ones had a different version of events. “Madeleine was such a good writer,” Jones said, “and she would work things out in her journal and idealize reality, and I think she sometimes thought of it as objective truth. We all do that to some extent, inventing our lives as we go along. Madeleine was a storyteller looking for a story.”
Madeleine’s fiction, meanwhile, often hit far too close to home. In Meet the Austins, for example, the family welcomes a troubled orphan, Maggy, into their midst, which sets off a chain of events that threaten to tear the otherwise mostly perfect family apart. The book came out in 1960, a mere four years after the Franklins too had adopted an orphan, Maria. “How could she have done that?” Maria’s friends would ask her, according to Zarin’s article. Maria asserted, not surprisingly, “I hated the Austin books.”12
Madeleine, for her part, claimed that Maggy bore no resemblance to Maria—that her characters rose unbidden from some other place entirely. “Reality,” Madeleine wrote in A Circle of Quiet: “I can only affirm that the people in my stories have as complete and free a life of their own as do my family and friends.”13 The only exceptions to not knowing where her characters sprang from, she claimed, were Canon Tallis, who was based on her friend Canon West, and “Rob Austin, who simply is our youngest child [Bion], and there’s nothing I can do about it.”14
Rob Austin is protagonist Vicky’s little brother, memorable for his delightful sayings. In Meet the Austins Rob prays, “Oh, and God bless Santa Claus, and bless you, too, God”15—taken, most likely, from things Bion Franklin actually said. Eerily, as Cynthia Zarin points out in her New Yorker article, Rob never seems to grow up from book to book: he’s always the baby of the family, acting and speaking like a five-year-old, even as his older siblings age into early adulthood. If Rob wasn’t granted the freedom to grow and change, what of Bion himself? What happens to a child who finds himself—his real, not fictionalized self—written into novels by his own mother as the eternal preschooler?
According to Madeleine in Walking on Water, at ten years old Bion became upset with her for (spoiler alert) killing off the character Joshua in drafts she read aloud from The Arm of the Starfish.16 Bion demanded that she change it. She insisted that she couldn’t—because, in her words, “that’s what happened.” The two went back and forth, but Madeleine held her ground. Joshua’s death remained. And according to Madeleine, Bion wouldn’t read anything else of hers for years. However, her various editors described the massive revisions she would undergo—sometimes at their suggestions, other times just because she could—down to major plot changes that the editors didn’t even feel were necessary. So, on some levels, yes, she could change it.
When who you are is so heavily scripted by someone else, the lines between fiction and fact must seem very blurred indeed. Who is the person acting and speaking here, me or the person my parent invented? Can I change the narrative of my own story if I want to? As Charlotte says in Listening for Madeleine, “How do you live up to that legacy? How do you make yourself real to your own mother?”17 When Bion died of liver failure from alcoholism at age forty-seven, the rest of the family spoke openly about it—which, as Charlotte told me, was a way to break the cultural silence around alcoholism and make room for others who might be going through a similar experience. Yet Madeleine refused to acknowledge it.
We are, none of us, discrete authorial units. We live and write in community; our account of events is put in conversation with other accounts, and this is what we call accountability. When it comes to the impact of Madeleine’s storytelling on her family, hers might be a cautionary tale. To what extent are we leveraging our own preferred plotlines at the expense of giving our loved ones as “complete and free a life of their own” as we hope to give our invented characters, even our invented selves?
• • • •
When I asked Madeleine’s housemate, Barbara Braver, about Madeleine’s spin on real events, she reflected, “When you look at the fact of the situation, it may not speak to the deeper reality. That’s what storytelling is all about. In the telling of the story it’s not that you’re making things up; it’s that you’re touching on the ineffable, you’re touching on the things that are too complicated to name in rational terms. That’s what storytellers do. They tell stories in ways that you understand the deeper truth beyond the fact. That’s one thing Madeleine had a huge gift for.” Elsewhere, in Listening for Madeleine, Barbara told Marcus, “Something might be factually correct but still lead you to the wrong conclusion.”18 “Indeed it might,” countered Cara Parks in a New Republic review of Marcus’s book, “but our current age has no patience for useful fictions presenting themselves as fact.”19
We now live—in a phrase that would astound and possibly confound L’Engle—in a “post-truth” and “alternative facts” culture. Sifting the real from fake news is a skillset some of us have only recently recognized as urgent. Facts are not only hotly contested in favor of various ideological fictions, but the fictions can be alarmingly persuasive and even harmful to real people on the ground. As a result, we’ve learned to approach everything with what my theology professor, J. Kameron Carter, called a “hermeneutics of suspicion”—something that communities of color have employed for centuries. Whom does this interpretation of events benefit? Why? What other voices also need amplifying?
If Madeleine tended to script individuals, she also had a tendency to script demographic groups. According to Madeleine, children are always open to mystery. (Really? My eldest son takes comfort in predictability, actually.) Teens, meanwhile, “love the combination of order and delight in a Bach fugue.”20 (Do they? Let’s test that theory at my church’s teen ministry on Sunday nights.) Adults are always doing something boneheaded and unimaginative—are we? Native Americans were peaceful and earth loving before the European invasion—were they? Questions turn to discomfort when I read about the supposedly salvific role of indigenous characters with fair hair or blue eyes, descendants of European ancestors, in books like Dragons in the Waters and A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
To some extent, like many of her fellow mainline liberals, Madeleine succumbed to what C. S. Lewis called the “myth of progress.” She wrote in Walking on Water in 1980, “It is hard for us to believe now that there were anti-vaccinationists, when vaccinations have succeeded in wiping smallpox from the planet”21—as if that was ancient history never to be repeated.
Her tendency toward obliviousness about the recurring history of racism and classism also crops up in various places, although she was at least culturally aware enough to notice the problems in a story like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Little Princess. In her introduction to the 1987 Bantam Books edition of that classic, she admits that
when I [as a child] was reading and rereading Sara’s adventures, England was still an empire, and it had not occurred to many of us that empires are made by taking other peoples’ lands, by imposing our culture on ones quite different from ours, wit
h a bland assumption that of course our culture is the best one and that these “primitive” peoples are savages and are really lucky to have their land and their gods and their uncouth customs taken away.22
And yet, she says that later, as a young woman, when she began to notice those problems with Burnett’s story, “I was inchoately grateful that in my country we believe that all men and women are created equal.” She never offers a corrective to this starry-eyed view of American ideals, although she acknowledges, “In our own country, which I think is as free from caste as any country on this planet, [the problem of inherent privilege] still exists, and calling a garbage collector a sanitation engineer simply emphasizes it.”23
Madeleine’s occasional tone deafness to the complex layers of race and class, to what black feminists now refer to as “intersectionality,” we’re tempted to look back on as generational. A longtime friend of the Franklins’ children, Gretchen Gubelman—who stayed with the family in Manhattan as a young woman in 1964—told Marcus in Listening for Madeleine, “I was also deeply involved in the civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and SDS, and Hugh and Madeleine were more conservative politically than I was.” She then described a cross-generational scene that still unfolds in our own era, every evening, in homes all across America: “When we argued and debated at dinnertime, it would feel as if we were starting from two completely different sets of facts.”24
Lack of involvement in things like the civil rights movement, Madeleine herself insisted, were reasoned and intentional. She recalled praying to God about marching, and he told her she could reach more people with the pen. I’m not sure I’m satisfied with that answer, to be honest. In the mid-1960s she was a rising literary star. She still had teenagers in the house. One can understand if she didn’t want to sabotage her career or disrupt her family. But who am I to question what God told her? Who are any of us? And that’s the problem. How much do we script even God himself by fitting him into our personal narratives—or claim he has endorsed our version—of who we claim to be, rather than let God disrupt our stories with, for lack of a better word, facts?