A Wrinkle in Time

by Madeleine L'engle

  "I love you!" she cried. "I love you, Charles! I love you!" Then suddenly he was running, pelting, he was in her arms, he was shrieking with sobs. "Meg! Meg! Meg!"

  "I love you, Charles!" she cried again, her sobs almost as loud as his, her tears mingling with his. "I love you!

  I love you! I love you!"

  A whirl of darkness. An icy cold blast. An angry, resentful howl that seemed to tear through her. Darkness again. Through the darkness to save her came a sense of Mrs Whatsit's presence, so that she knew it could not be IT who now had her in its clutches.

  And then the feel of earth beneath her, of something in her arms, and she was rolling over on the sweet smelling autumnal earth, and Charles Wallace was crying out, "Meg! Oh, Meg!"

  Now she was hugging him close to her, and his little arms were clasped tightly about her neck. "Meg, you saved me! You saved me!" he said over and over.

  "Meg!" came a call, and there were her father and Calvin hurrying through the darkness toward them.

  Still holding Charles she struggled to stand up and look around. "Father! Cal! Where are we?"

  Charles Wallace, holding her hand tightly, was looking around, too, and suddenly he laughed, his own, sweet, contagious laugh. "In the twins' vegetable garden! And we landed in the broccoli!"

  Meg began to laugh, too, at the same time that she was trying to hug her father, to hug Calvin, and not to let go of Charles Wallace for one second.

  "Meg, you did it!" Calvin shouted. "You saved Charles!"

  "I'm very proud of you, my daughter." Mr. Murry kissed her gravely, then turned toward the house. "Now I must go in to Mother." Meg could tell that he was trying to control his anxiety and eagerness.

  "Look!" she pointed to the house, and there were the twins and Mrs. Murry walking toward them through the long, wet grass.

  "First thing tomorrow I must get some new glasses," Mr. Murry said, squinting in the moonlight, and then starting to run toward his wife.

  Dennys's voice came crossly over the lawn. "Hey, Meg, it's bedtime."

  Sandy suddenly yelled, "Father!"

  Mr. Murry was running across the lawn, Mrs. Murry running toward him, and they were in each other's arms, and then there was a tremendous happy jumble of arms and legs and hugging, the older Murrys and Meg and Charles Wallace and the twins, and Calvin grinning by them until Meg reached out and pulled him in and Mrs. Murry gave him a special hug all of his own. They were talking and laughing all at once, when they were startled by a crash, and Fortinbras, who could bear being left out of the happiness not one second longer, catapulted his sleek black body right through the screened door to the kitchen. He dashed across the lawn to join in the joy, and almost knocked them all over with the exuberance of his greeting.

  Meg knew all at once that Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which must be near, because all through her she felt a flooding of joy and of love that was even greater and deeper than the joy and love which were already there.

  She stopped laughing and listened, and Charles listened, too. "Hush."

  Then there was a whirring, and Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which were standing in front of them, and the joy and love were so tangible that Meg felt that if she only knew where to reach she could touch it with her bare hands.

  Mrs Whatsit said breathlessly, "Oh, my darlings, I'm sorry we don't have time to say good-bye to you properly. You see, we have to--"

  But they never learned what it was that Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind, and they were gone.

  What did you want to be when you grew up?

  A writer.

  When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?

  Right away. As soon as I was able to articulate, I knew I wanted to be a writer. And I read. I adored Emily of New Moon and some of the other L. M. Montgomery books and they impelled me because I loved them.

  When did you start to write?

  When I was five, I wrote a story about a little "gurl."

  What was the first writing you had published?

  When I was a child, a poem in CHILD LIFE. It was all about a lonely house and was very sentimental.

  Where do you write your books?

  Anywhere. I write in longhand first, and then type it. My first typewriter was my father's pre-World War One machine. It was the one he took with him to the war. It had certainly been around the world.

  What is the best advice you have ever received about writing?

  To just write.

  What's your first childhood memory?

  One early memory I have is going down to Florida for a couple of weeks in the summertime to visit my grandmother. The house was in the middle of a swamp, surrounded by alligators. I don't like alligators, but there they were, and I was afraid of them.

  What is your favorite childhood memory?

  Being in my room.

  As a young person, whom did you look up to most?

  My mother. She was a storyteller and I loved her stories. And she loved music and records. We played duets together on the piano.

  What was your worst subject in school?

  Math and Latin. I didn't like the Latin teacher.

  What was your best subject in school?

  English.

  What activities did you participate in at school?

  I was president of the student government in boarding school and editor of a literary magazine, and also belonged to the drama club.

  Are you a morning person or a night owl?

  Night owl.

  What was your first job?

  Working for the actress Eva La Gallienne, right after college.

  What is your idea of the best meal ever?

  Cream of Wheat. I eat it with a spoon. I love it with butter and brown sugar.

  Which do you like better: cats or dogs?

  I like them both. I once had a wonderful dog named Touche. She was a silver medium-sized poodle, and quite beautiful. I wasn't allowed to take her on the subway, and I couldn't afford to get a taxi, so I put her around my neck, like a stole. And she pretended she was a stole. She was an actor.

  What do you value most in your friends?

  Love.

  What is your favorite song?

  "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes."

  What time of the year do you like best?

  I suppose autumn. I love the changing of the leaves. I love the autumn goldenrod, the Queen Anne's lace.

  What was the original title of A Wrinkle in Time?

  "Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which."

  How did you get the idea for A Wrinkle in Time?

  We were living in the country with our three kids on this dairy farm. I started reading what Einstein wrote about time. And I used a lot of those principles to make a universe that was creative and yet believable.

  How hard was it to get A A Wrinkle in Time published?

  I was kept hanging for two years. Over and over again I received nothing more than the formal, printed rejection slip. Eventually, after twenty-six rejections, I called my agent and said, "Send it back. It's too different. Nobody's going to publish it." He sent it back, but a few days later a friend of my mother's insisted that I meet John Farrar, the publisher. He liked the manuscript, and eventually decided to publish it. My first editor was Hal Vursell.

  Which of your characters is most like you?

  None of them. They're all wiser than I am.

  NEWBERY MEDAL ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

  The Expanding Universe

  August 1963

  For a writer of fiction to have to sit down and write a speech, especially a speech in which she must try to express her gratitude for one of the greatest honors of her life, is as difficult a task as she can face. She can no longer hide behind the printed page and let her characters speak for her; she must stand up in front of an illustrious group of librarians, editors, publishers, writers, feeling naked, the way one sometimes does in a dream. What then, does she say? Should she merely tell a series of a
necdotes about her life and how she happened to write this book? Or should she try to be profound and write a speech that will go down in the pages of history, comparable only to the Gettysburg Address? Should she stick to platitudes that will offend no one and say nothing? Perhaps she tries all of these several times and then tears them up, knowing that if she doesn't, her husband will do it for her, and decides simply to say some of the things she feels deeply about.

  I can't tell you anything about children's books that you don't already know. I'm not teaching you; you're teaching me. All I can tell you is how Ruth Gagliardo's telephone call about the Newbery Medal has affected me over the past few years.

  One of my greatest treasures is the letter Mr. Melcher wrote me, one of the last letters he wrote, talking about the medal and saying he had just read A Wrinkle in Time and had been excited about it. This was one of the qualities that made him what he was: the ability to be excited. Bertha Mahony Miller, in her article "Frederic G. Melcher--A Twentieth Century John Newbery," says that "The bookstore's stock trade is . . . explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly. . . ." I like here to think of another Fred, the eminent British scientist Fred Hoyle, and his theory of the universe, in which matter is continuously being created, with the universe expanding but not dissipating. As island galaxies rush away from each other into eternity, new clouds of gas are condensing into new galaxies. As old stars die, new stars are being born. Mr. Melcher lived in this universe of continuous creation and expansion. It would be impossible to overestimate his influence on books, particularly children's books; impossible to overestimate his influence on the people who read books, write them, get enthusiastic about them. We are all here tonight because of his vision, and we would be less than fair to his memory if we didn't resolve to keep alive his excitement and his ability to grow, to change, to expand.

  I am of the first generation to profit by Mr. Melcher's excitement, having been born shortly before he established the Newbery Award, and growing up with most of these books on my shelves. I learned about mankind from Hendrik Willem van Loon; I traveled with Dr. Dolittle, created by a man I called Hug Lofting; Will James taught me about the West with Smoky; in boarding school I grabbed Invincible Louisa the moment it came into the library because Louisa May Alcott had the same birthday that I have, and the same ambitions. And now to be a very small link in the long chain of those writers, of the men and women who led me into the expanding universe, is both an honor and a responsibility. It is an honor for which I am deeply grateful to Mr. Melcher and to those of you who decided A Wrinkle in Time was worthy of it.

  The responsibility has caused me to think seriously during these past months on the subject of vocation, the responsibility added to the fact that I'm working now on a movie scenario about a Portuguese nun who lived in the mid-1600s, had no vocation, was seduced and then betrayed by a French soldier of fortune, and, in the end, through suffering, came into a true vocation. I believe that every one of us here tonight has as clear and vital a vocation as anyone in a religious order. We have the vocation of keeping alive Mr. Melcher's excitement in leading young people into an expanding imagination. Because of the very nature of the world as it is today, our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe that we can help our children avoid by providing them with "explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."

  So how do we do it? We can't just sit down at our typewriters and turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I'll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, "I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write."

  I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.

  Do I mean, then, that an author should sit around like a phony Zen Buddhist in his pad, drinking endless cups of espresso coffee and waiting for inspiration to descend upon him? That isn't the way the writer works, either. I heard a famous author say once that the hardest part of writing a book was making yourself sit down at the typewriter. I know what he meant. Unless a writer works constantly to improve and refine the tools of his trade, they will be useless instruments if and when the moment of inspiration, of revelation, does come. This is the moment when a writer is spoken through, the moment that a writer must accept with gratitude and humility, and then attempt, as best he can, to communicate to others.

  A writer of fantasy, fairy tale, or myth must inevitably discover that he is not writing out of his own knowledge or experience, but out of something both deeper and wider. I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him. I know that this is true of A Wrinkle in Time. I can't possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.

  Very few children have any problem with the world of the imagination; it's their own world, the world of their daily life, and it's our loss that so many of us grow out of it. Probably this group here tonight is the least grown-out-of-it group that could be gathered together in one place, simply by the nature of our work. We, too, can understand how Alice could walk through the mirror into the country on the other side; how often have our children almost done this themselves? And we all understand princesses, of course. Haven't we all been badly bruised by peas? And what about the princess who spat forth toads and snakes whenever she opened her mouth to speak, and the other whose lips issued forth pieces of pure gold? We all have had days when everything we've said has seemed to turn to toads. The days of gold, alas, don't come nearly as often.

  What a child doesn't realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairy tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture. Many Newbery books are from this realm, beginning with Dr. Dolittle; books on Hindu myth, Chinese folklore, the life of Buddha, tales of American Indians, books that lead our children beyond all boundaries and into the one language of all mankind.

  In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. . . . The extraordinary, the marvelous thing about Genesis is not how unscientific it is, but how amazingly accurate it is. How could the ancient Israelites have known the exact order of an evolution that wasn't to be formulated for thousands of years? Here is a truth that cuts across barriers of time and space.

  But almost all of the best children's books do this, not only an Alice in Wonderland, a Wind in the Willows, a Princess and the Goblin. Even the most straightforward tales say far more than they seem to mean on the surface. Little Women, The Secret Garden, Huckleberry Finn--how much more there is in them than we realize at a first reading. They partake of the universal language, and this is why we turn to them again and again when we are children, and still again when we have grown up.

  Up on the summit of Mohawk Mountain in northwest Connecticut is a large flat rock that holds the heat of the sun long after the last of the late sunset has left the sky. We take our picnic up there and then lie on the rock and watch the stars, one pulsing slowly into the deepening blue, and then another and another and another, until the sky is full of them.

  A book, too, can be a star, "explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly," a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.
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  THE L'ENGLE CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Books featuring the Murry-O'Keefes:

  A Wrinkle in Time (WT)

  A Wind in the Door (WD)

  A Swiftly Tilting Planet (STP)

  Many Waters (MW)

  The Arm of the Starfish (AS)

  Dragons in the Waters (DW)

  A House Like a Lotus (HL)

  An Acceptable Time (AT)

  Books featuring the Austins:

  Meet the Austins (MA)

  The Moon by Night (MN)

  The Twenty-four Days Before Christmas (TDC)

  The Young Unicorns (YU)

  A Ring of Endless Light (REL)

  Troubling a Star (TS)