Remembering Madeleine L’Engle

 
I was out of Internet contact for most of the weekend, so I missed the initial reports of Madeleine L’Engle’s death.

Like practically everyone else in the U.S., I read A Wrinkle in Time when I was growing up. Read it, appreciated it, promptly forgot it. I could recognize the quality, but it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

When I married, years later, I found that my wife was a long-time L’Engle fan. She had even attended one of L’Engle’s workshops (and would go to another, I alongside her, while we were living in Memphis), and collected a number of her books. She continued to do so over the years, and I read what she bought, and my appreciation grew.

The principal thing that stands out about L’Engle as an author is that she was always herself. She wrote what she wrote. Not as a rebel or an iconoclast — neither were part of her personality — but she wrote what came to her and never tried to shape it to any market. If nobody wanted what she’d written, well, she had been primarily concerned with satisfying herself, so she set it aside and wrote something else. As her name recognition grew, so did her marketability, with the result that eventually she was able to publish things that had been passed over decades before. The full panoply of her works is dizzyingly and unapologetically eclectic.

Typifying L’Engle is ultimately impossible. Science fiction, romance, fantasy, history, autobiography, religion, personal introspection … she not only did them all, but habitually interwove them. In her books, stars and mitochondriae are sentient creatures, angels are both more and less than humans (and align themselves to good or evil by passionless decision, using criteria incomprehensible to mortals), and the past can be changed by present choices. Her characters are concert pianists and schoolgirls, estranged wives and biochemists, combat veterans and priests and abuse survivors. The protagonists are sometimes inconsistent, frequently petty, usually confused. People die for the wrong reasons or for no discernible reason at all, and the survivors aren’t comforted by platitudes; meaning comes to them only with effort, they have to seek it and work for it, forge their own understanding and acceptance.

I thoroughly enjoyed the single workshop by L’Engle that I attended: the speaker, the personality. My best knowledge of her, however, came from her books. This would be the case for practically everyone she affected … and that, I think, is very much as she would have wished.