The Irrational Season
Page 28
Suddenly Julio’s voice was raised so that I could hear clearly. “But you cannot say you are an anti-fascist and then say you are a Francoist. That is a—contraception.”
People around him began to laugh and Julio looked confused.
“Contradiction,” the cool American said to Julio. He was dressed in a pin-striped business suit and stood out in a room full of people in bohemian clothes.
“That’s what I said.”
Someone asked me a question, and the next thing I heard was the man in the business suit saying, pleasantly, as though talking about his liking for artichokes, “I am a very strong, a very firm Catholic.”
A man wearing a Russian peasant outfit murmured to me, “He’s a fascist, that Louis. I don’t know why he’s here.”
“Being a Catholic doesn’t make him a fascist!” said a woman who had been introduced to me as a French war bride.
“Of course not. His politics, not his religion.”
Louis’s voice was quiet but carrying. “It is because you are blind, because you are an idealist. It would have been better if you had died in Spain, because you are living in a dream.” His tone was still friendly, a trifle condescending.
Julio cried out, waving his hands excitedly, “If I am living in a dream, then you are trying to make it a nightmare.”
“Perhaps not all of us are asleep. Perhaps some of us are awake.”
I felt uncomfortable, and nearly as confused as Julio.
Our hostess moved into the group and cocked her finger at Louis. “Louis, I shoot you. You’re dead. Bang-bang. Go home, you louse. This is Julio’s party. You’re not to bait him.”
Louis laughed and went to the card table which had been set up as a bar.
Julio said, “This is the first time this has happened to me. This man is my enemy. In Spain I would shoot him if he did not shoot me first. But because I am in America, because I am a guest here tonight in your house, I have to sit and talk to him.”
“I’m sorry, Julio,” our hostess said, kissing the top of his dark head, “but I shot him for you, so it’s all right.” She seemed relaxed and certain that she was taking care of the situation. I wasn’t feeling that sure.
Louis came back from the bar with two glasses of wine, one of which he handed to Julio. The Spaniard looked up at him with blazing eyes. I went into the bedroom and got my coat, said goodbye, and left, feeling that if Louis pushed Julio any further, there was going to be violence.
I walked home through the crisp winter air. Walked home alone. Yes. That was one of the splendid things about working in the theatre in the early forties. When I was invited to a party, I was invited. There was no need for anybody to think about an escort. If I said I wanted to bring a young man, that was fine. Mostly I preferred to be on my own. Such solitary walks through the streets of New York, usually well after midnight, are no longer advisable. But one thing has carried over: when Hugh and I give a dinner party we don’t worry about balancing men and women. We ask people we think would enjoy each other, and if there are more men than women, or vice versa, it presents no problems. I have met single women in other communities whose lives have been narrowed by their singleness. New York gets a very bad press, but in the world of the arts, at least, the single woman is not left out because there is no man available to her.
So I walked home to Tenth Street alone, the words of the quarrel still burning in my ears. In the morning I almost expected that there would be a news item that Julio had killed Louis. There was certainly murder in his eyes. But if anything happened after I left, I never knew about it.
I took care of my feeling of frustration and incompleteness by writing a short story about the evening. So I learned something about writing and something about living, though there was still a vast amount for me to learn about both.
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Acknowledgments
None of this would have been written had not Reid Isaac, then with The Seabury Press, come to me and asked, “Don’t you want to write a book for us?” My immediate and vocal response was, “No.” But then this book tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Here I am. Write me,” and when this happens I have little choice.
Several names have been changed and a few incidents “translated” in order to protect privacy. Nevertheless this book is as “true” as I can make it.
The last third was completed while I was a Visiting Fellow at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. My debt to my friends there is incalculable. Not only was I given time to write, and an opportunity to share in the life and worship of the seminary, but I was also fed, chauffered, and consistently ministered to.
A Biography of Madeleine L’Engle
Madeleine L’Engle was the award-winning author of more than sixty books encompassing children’s and adult fiction, poetry, plays, memoirs, and books on prayer. Her best-known work is the classic children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time, which won the Newbery Medal for distinguished children’s literature and has sold fourteen million copies worldwide. The Washington Post called the science fantasy tale of an adolescent girl and her telepathic brother’s journey through space and time “one of the most enigmatic works of fiction ever created.”
L’Engle was born on November 29, 1918, in New York City, where both of her parents were artists—her mother a pianist and her father a novelist, journalist, and music and drama critic for the New York Sun. Although she wrote her first story at the age of five and devoted her time to her journals, short stories, and poetry, L’Engle struggled in school and often felt disliked by her teachers and peers. She recalled one of her elementary school teachers calling her stupid and another accusing her of plagiarism when she won a writing contest.
At twelve, L’Engle and her family moved to France for her father’s health (he had been a soldier during World War I and suffered lung damage), and she was sent to boarding school in the Swiss Alps. Two of her novels, A Winter’s Love and The Small Rain, drew on her experiences in Europe. She returned to the United States three years later to attend another boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina. L’Engle flourished during these years and went on to graduate from Smith College with honors in English.
After college, she moved back to New York City and started work as a stage actress while devoting her free time to writing. During this time, she published her first two novels, The Small Rain and Ilsa, and wrote many plays that were produced in regional theaters. While touring in a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard as an understudy, she met actor Hugh Franklin, and they married in 1946. After the birth of their daughter Josephine the following year, they bought an old farmhouse, which they called Crosswicks, in Goshen, a small town in rural Connecticut, planning on weekends in the country. When she became pregnant with their second child, Bion, they moved to Crosswicks permanently and ran the local general store. Their family grew with an adopted daughter, Maria. After nearly a decade in Connecticut, they moved back to New York so her husband, who would go on to star in All My Children, could focus on his acting career. She was happy to return and hoped that she would find success as an author again. Indeed, A Wrinkle in Time was published in 1962.
The family often returned to Crosswicks over the years and these visits inspired L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journals, including Two-Part Invention, which tells the story of her marriage, and A Circle of Quiet, in which she explores her role as a woman, mother, wife, and writer.
Back in Manhattan, L’Engle worked as a librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, a position she held for more than three decades. Her lifelong fascination with theology and philosophy, and her personal faith, largely influenced her work. A Wrinkle in Time hints at many Christian themes, yet religious conservative groups have spoken out against the book, accusing L’Engle of misrepresenting God in a dangerous world of witchcraft, myth, and fantasy. It has been one of the most banned books in the United States. Apart from her religious influences, she s
aid that Einstein’s theory of relativity and other theories in physics also served as inspiration. The novel’s combined use of both science fiction and philosophy established it as a sophisticated work of fiction, proving L’Engle’s belief that children’s literature deserves a place in the literary canon.
However, L’Engle initially struggled to achieve success and recognition for her work, and she almost quit writing at forty. She finally broke out onto the literary scene in 1960 with Meet the Austins, the first in her popular young adult series about the Austin family, which includes Newbery Honor Book A Ring of Endless Light. Even A Wrinkle in Time was rejected by twenty-six publishers before being accepted by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Although it was an instant commercial and critical sensation and has never gone out of print, the book’s strong female protagonist and intellectual themes were unusual in children’s fiction at the time.
L’Engle’s long literary career expanded far beyond the publication of A Wrinkle in Time. Among her many books are adult novels dealing with relationships, faith, and identity, including Certain Women, A Live Coal in the Sea, and A Severed Wasp; several books of poetry; and more overtly religious works like her Genesis Trilogy of biblical reflections. She won countless accolades, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, the National Religious Book Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. In 2004, President Bush awarded her a National Humanities Medal. L’Engle lived out her final years in Litchfield, Connecticut, and passed away at the age of eighty-eight on September 6, 2007.
A portrait of L’Engle in her first years of life.*
L’Engle ice-skating in Brittany, France, circa 1926.*
L’Engle with her dog, Sputzi, circa 1934.*
From July to September 1943, the Repertory Players at Straight Wharf Theatre produced two of L’Engle’s plays, The Christmas Tree and Phelia. She acted in both plays, among others.
L’Engle with her husband, actor Hugh Franklin, in 1946.*
L’Engle and her husband renovated and ran a general store in the late 1940s.
L’Engle always illustrated her family’s Christmas cards, including this one from 1952.
L’Engle with her granddaughters Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Lena Roy at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Cathedral Library, circa 1975.
L’Engle in the library of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, circa 1977.
L’Engle at a Manhattanville College commencement ceremony, where she received an honorary degree in 1989.*
L’Engle with her granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis the night before the young woman’s wedding on August 30, 1996.
L’Engle speaking at a church in 1997.
L’Engle at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, circa 1997.*
*Photograph courtesy of the Madeleine L’Engle Papers (SC-3), Special Collections, Buswell Library, Wheaton, Illinois.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This work is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of her experiences over a period of years. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed in order to protect the identity of certain individuals. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
Copyright © 1977 by Crosswicks, Ltd.
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4127-0
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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