On Madeleine L'Engle
Sep. 25th, 2020 10:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnWhen I posted on rereading Severed Wasp recently, rymenhild had some perceptive comments that led to a rabbit hole of finding some more about L'Engle's life, which was... illuminating. (Note that the following makes for some hard reading, especially if one has read her memoirs -- which I have only lightly skimmed parts of, but enough that I had an idea of how they ran.)
I think these should be considered as a set:
The Storyteller [The New Yorker] (Cynthia Zarin)
Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L'Engle in Many Voices (Leonard Marcus)
(Here is the review of the above book that got me to buy/read it)
That is to say, Listening for Madeleine (a collection of interviews with people who knew/were touched by Madeleine L'Engle) is, as the review says, in conversation with and is a response and companion piece to Zarin's "Storyteller" article.
In Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a sort of half-autobiographical work of fiction not totally unlike Severed Wasp or Meet the Austins, the authorial character, Francie, talks about how one of her teachers told her, " In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story." And the author says, if it weren't for that teacher, Francie might well have grown up to be a terrible liar.
Zarin's article is about how L'Engle got those things mixed up, the way things happened, the way they should have happened, and the way we construct things making sense in our minds, which are often three different things. I once said tonolly, when we were both much younger, "I wish I could be in the Austin family!" nolly replied, "Have you read her memoirs? I wish I could be in Madeleine L'Engle's family!" But Zarin's article shows that L'Engle's memoirs were perhaps more fictitious than her books. Her family was a lot messier than they looked in either the Austin books or her memoirs, a lot less idealized. Her son Bion never left home and died at age 47 of effects of long-term alcoholism, which L'Engle never admitted. Her marriage wasn't the ideal one portrayed in her memoirs or in the Austin books; husband Hugh drank heavily and had at least two affairs (one of them, according to their daughter, lasted until his death); in the article, this is followed by Zarin quoting L'Engle herself saying, "Hugh was lucky...he didn't drink."
There are things about her books that become really disturbing when seen through the lens of her life, too. L'Engle talked about how Bion was the inspiration for Charles Wallace and Rob Austin, who are both highly gifted, empathic, special children -- who are never seen as grownups; and her most autobiographical character, Katherine Forrester Vigneras, has a son who dies as a boy full of promise, who never makes it to adulthood to succeed or fail. L'Engle and her husband adopted a daughter whose parents had been close friends and had suddenly died, and it appears they thought she was kind of spoiled; this makes the Maggie through-plot of Meet the Austins, where the adopted Maggie disappears from the family at the end through another convenient re-adoption, horrifying rather than sweet (as i thought it was before knowing she actually had adopted a child under these circumstances).)
I don't think Zarin intended this exactly (see below), but it's easy to read her article and come away as very disillusioned about L'Engle in particular and perhaps even people in general -- L'Engle was such a touchstone for me as well as others, not just from her books but as sort of an ideal of how one could be a person of faith in the world, how one could be giving and loving and also articulate about what one believed, and the article sort of makes it hard to believe in any of that.
This is where Marcus' book comes in; it's not a rebuttal to Zarin's work, but it was clearly written as a response to it. What Marcus has done, I think, is to show a lot of the facets of what L'Engle meant to other people in her life, so that she could be seen as a multifaceted person, not just as the ideal she showed in her memoirs, but also not just as the destruction of that ideal shown in Zarin's article.
And the portrait these interviews paint is indeed one of a very generous and loving person of faith, one who could be an amazing friend, a perceptive mentor, an inspiring acquaintance -- and who seems to have just not been very good at the minutiae of family, at all. (This is perhaps not surprising, given that she had no good role models herself.) There are several interviews where the interviewee will be discussing how L'Engle was such a wonderful person and great friend, and then the interviewee will throw out an aside of, "oh, her family, yeah, she was hard on those kids," or "That New Yorker article was right about everything."
People are complicated, is the meta-message of Marcus' book. She could be both. She could be the person who was there and was wonderful for all these people; and she could also be the person who wasn't there for her own family in a lot of ways, and who hurt her family in a lot of ways.
I suppose I can see how this could be, mind you. It's always easier to deal with other people's children than one's own, because one can always give the other children back. And also... it took me two weeks to write this post (and only finished writing it once the kids went back to school, lol), during which I have read aloud a lot of Minecraft books, been shown a lot of Lego creations and pretended to be wildly interested in them, drew pictures with a Crayon Eraser kit assembled by small child with great enthusiasm, tried to strike a balance between encouraging the kids to practice and nagging them to practice (probably mostly falling on the latter side), tried (and sometimes failed) to pay full attention while playing simple board games with kiddo (who has recently discovered the concept of board games and is quite excited about this)... What I'm saying is, it's a skill set that doesn't necessarily have as much overlap with being a good writer, friend, mentor, or teacher-of-adults as one might think. In fact, the being a good writer part might be diametrically opposed to it in some ways, because they're competing demands on one's attention. (Hilariously, any storytelling skills I do have, which one might have thought would be useful in childrearing, have not been super useful. A. asks me to tell stories but I usually get about one sentence in before he takes over and wants to tell me what the hero is doing, and E. was only briefly interested in stories that involved a lot of fighting and please no boring character development.) Not to say that one can't be a good writer, or otherwise have a career, and be a good stay-at-home parent! But it's not easy. I used to think L'Engle was the exception, but it looks like she was the rule.
It also reminds me of my mom a little, actually, although without the faith part. (Though my mom attends church, she has an extremely pragmatic attitude towards religion where I'm not sure any sort of belief is even actually much of a component.) My mom is also multifaceted. One of her facets is that -- and this is the part I was particularly thinking about, reading Marcus' book -- she has always been very good at doing things like organizing and hosting meetups for my high school friends after graduation, in a way that no other parent seems to have done (or at least I don't remember it). I used to joke -- only it wasn't really a joke, this actually happened a bunch -- that when people I knew saw me and my mom, they'd be all "Hi, Mrs. Cahn! -- oh, hi, cahn," because she was so dynamic, so good at talking to my friends and asking them about their lives, and often found out things about their lives that I didn't know. I'm not good at these kinds of things and I wish I were, I wish I could do these things for my kids that I very much remember my mom doing for us. But at the same time, that sense of control that made her very good at hosting these get-togethers, as well as the pushiness that meant she was able to ask my friends questions and get to know all kinds of things about them, and which (as far as I know) my friends thought was great, was a little too much in a parent-child relationship, with the result that I stopped telling her anything important about my own life around college or so... So I can see quite well how L'Engle's personality could very well have been great for the one and not so great for the other.
(I suppose my feelings about all of this are also affected by knowing that thirty years from now my kids will be writing blog posts about the things I did right and the things I did wrong. Hopefully it'll tip more on the former side than the latter. But knowing I fail my own kids -- hopefully not too badly, hopefully with more successes than failures -- affects how I feel both about L'Engle and my own mom.)
(That being said. There's a bit in Severed Wasp which I will bet you money was taken from real life, where Katherine and Justin go to visit their grown daughter and her family for Katherine and Justin's anniversary. They are informed by the daughter that they will be staying in a hotel and the husband's parents will be staying with daughter+husband's family and the grandkids. Katherine and Justin (mostly Justin) are ENRAGED by this. I read this at the time as a perceptive depiction of how people can and will get worked up over things that are kind of dumb. (Presumably there was some reason! maybe the husband's parents needed extra help? maybe the husband's parents could be trusted not to make snide comments in front of the kids? and even if there was no reason, they, get to decide, it's their house?? I can imagine being hurt by it, sure, but enraged?? But yeah, this is exactly the kind of thing my parents would get enraged by as well.) I also thought it was a perceptive and accurate depiction of how relationships can be fraught; Katherine has this memory because she's wondering why she and her daughter aren't close, and... yup, I can see why. Though from Katherine's POV she thinks this was a result of the semi-estrangement rather than a cause.
...Well, now I still think it's an example of all of that, but less perceptive than it is... documentation, let's say.)
(All of this also makes a lot more sense of the weird emphasis in Wasp on how nobody is owed private information about someone else, especially famous other people, and it's totally OK to keep secrets!! Which... the unfortunate pedophile execution aside, I would feel a lot more sympathy towards L'Engle if she hadn't written actual memoirs. Though I guess one could think of it, as one of L'Engle's editors says in the book, as "a memoir ethos drawn from another time" (if my time in the Frederician fandom has taught me anything, it's that it can be veeeeeery iffy to trust blindly in memoirs). But still.)
Of course, who can say whether Marcus' book is balanced? By the nature of things, it's probably not, one way or another. But I loved that in the "icon" section, along with the interviews I expected of people who talked about how L'Engle's work had touched them in wonderfully positive ways, Marcus also included an interview with one person who thought L'Engle, in their one interaction, was a "bully," and moreover talked about how L'Engle had not written in ways that she was happy with (particularly with respect to her queer characters; you know, in the 80's I was eating up that she was writing about two lesbians in a happy relationship (in A House Like a Lotus), but in 2020, yeah, I have to say there's a lot of weirdness to her queer characters). And there's another interview with Jane Yolen who was like "...I read a lot of SF, and I didn't really like Wrinkle, which didn't really seem like SF to me," which I thought was hilarious. (It is hilarious because is true! I loved it because it was my gateway to SF, which Yolen also talks about.)
Marcus also lets Cynthia Zarin have the last word, which I was not expecting and which I loved. Zarin talks about writing her article, how she didn't mean it to be the expose it became but as more and more came out she realized it had to be, and how conflicted she was about it. It was a good way to end the book.
But anyway. L'Engle was a complicated person. She did a lot of good and helped a lot of people. She hurt the people closest to her. She wrote memoirs that didn't have enough truth in them, and novels that had too much. She wrote books that I still remember fondly, and books that I now approach with some (or a lot of) trepidation. And some of those are the same books.
I guess I don't really have a good conclusion here, except that I wish peace to L'Engle's family, and to L'Engle herself, wherever she may or may not be.
rymenhild had some perceptive comments that led to a rabbit hole of finding some more about L'Engle's life, which was... illuminating. (Note that the following makes for some hard reading, especially if one has read her memoirs -- which I have only lightly skimmed parts of, but enough that I had an idea of how they ran.)I think these should be considered as a set:
The Storyteller [The New Yorker] (Cynthia Zarin)
Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L'Engle in Many Voices (Leonard Marcus)
(Here is the review of the above book that got me to buy/read it)
That is to say, Listening for Madeleine (a collection of interviews with people who knew/were touched by Madeleine L'Engle) is, as the review says, in conversation with and is a response and companion piece to Zarin's "Storyteller" article.
In Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a sort of half-autobiographical work of fiction not totally unlike Severed Wasp or Meet the Austins, the authorial character, Francie, talks about how one of her teachers told her, " In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story." And the author says, if it weren't for that teacher, Francie might well have grown up to be a terrible liar.
Zarin's article is about how L'Engle got those things mixed up, the way things happened, the way they should have happened, and the way we construct things making sense in our minds, which are often three different things. I once said to
nolly, when we were both much younger, "I wish I could be in the Austin family!" nolly replied, "Have you read her memoirs? I wish I could be in Madeleine L'Engle's family!" But Zarin's article shows that L'Engle's memoirs were perhaps more fictitious than her books. Her family was a lot messier than they looked in either the Austin books or her memoirs, a lot less idealized. Her son Bion never left home and died at age 47 of effects of long-term alcoholism, which L'Engle never admitted. Her marriage wasn't the ideal one portrayed in her memoirs or in the Austin books; husband Hugh drank heavily and had at least two affairs (one of them, according to their daughter, lasted until his death); in the article, this is followed by Zarin quoting L'Engle herself saying, "Hugh was lucky...he didn't drink."There are things about her books that become really disturbing when seen through the lens of her life, too. L'Engle talked about how Bion was the inspiration for Charles Wallace and Rob Austin, who are both highly gifted, empathic, special children -- who are never seen as grownups; and her most autobiographical character, Katherine Forrester Vigneras, has a son who dies as a boy full of promise, who never makes it to adulthood to succeed or fail. L'Engle and her husband adopted a daughter whose parents had been close friends and had suddenly died, and it appears they thought she was kind of spoiled; this makes the Maggie through-plot of Meet the Austins, where the adopted Maggie disappears from the family at the end through another convenient re-adoption, horrifying rather than sweet (as i thought it was before knowing she actually had adopted a child under these circumstances).)
I don't think Zarin intended this exactly (see below), but it's easy to read her article and come away as very disillusioned about L'Engle in particular and perhaps even people in general -- L'Engle was such a touchstone for me as well as others, not just from her books but as sort of an ideal of how one could be a person of faith in the world, how one could be giving and loving and also articulate about what one believed, and the article sort of makes it hard to believe in any of that.
This is where Marcus' book comes in; it's not a rebuttal to Zarin's work, but it was clearly written as a response to it. What Marcus has done, I think, is to show a lot of the facets of what L'Engle meant to other people in her life, so that she could be seen as a multifaceted person, not just as the ideal she showed in her memoirs, but also not just as the destruction of that ideal shown in Zarin's article.
And the portrait these interviews paint is indeed one of a very generous and loving person of faith, one who could be an amazing friend, a perceptive mentor, an inspiring acquaintance -- and who seems to have just not been very good at the minutiae of family, at all. (This is perhaps not surprising, given that she had no good role models herself.) There are several interviews where the interviewee will be discussing how L'Engle was such a wonderful person and great friend, and then the interviewee will throw out an aside of, "oh, her family, yeah, she was hard on those kids," or "That New Yorker article was right about everything."
People are complicated, is the meta-message of Marcus' book. She could be both. She could be the person who was there and was wonderful for all these people; and she could also be the person who wasn't there for her own family in a lot of ways, and who hurt her family in a lot of ways.
I suppose I can see how this could be, mind you. It's always easier to deal with other people's children than one's own, because one can always give the other children back. And also... it took me two weeks to write this post (and only finished writing it once the kids went back to school, lol), during which I have read aloud a lot of Minecraft books, been shown a lot of Lego creations and pretended to be wildly interested in them, drew pictures with a Crayon Eraser kit assembled by small child with great enthusiasm, tried to strike a balance between encouraging the kids to practice and nagging them to practice (probably mostly falling on the latter side), tried (and sometimes failed) to pay full attention while playing simple board games with kiddo (who has recently discovered the concept of board games and is quite excited about this)... What I'm saying is, it's a skill set that doesn't necessarily have as much overlap with being a good writer, friend, mentor, or teacher-of-adults as one might think. In fact, the being a good writer part might be diametrically opposed to it in some ways, because they're competing demands on one's attention. (Hilariously, any storytelling skills I do have, which one might have thought would be useful in childrearing, have not been super useful. A. asks me to tell stories but I usually get about one sentence in before he takes over and wants to tell me what the hero is doing, and E. was only briefly interested in stories that involved a lot of fighting and please no boring character development.) Not to say that one can't be a good writer, or otherwise have a career, and be a good stay-at-home parent! But it's not easy. I used to think L'Engle was the exception, but it looks like she was the rule.
It also reminds me of my mom a little, actually, although without the faith part. (Though my mom attends church, she has an extremely pragmatic attitude towards religion where I'm not sure any sort of belief is even actually much of a component.) My mom is also multifaceted. One of her facets is that -- and this is the part I was particularly thinking about, reading Marcus' book -- she has always been very good at doing things like organizing and hosting meetups for my high school friends after graduation, in a way that no other parent seems to have done (or at least I don't remember it). I used to joke -- only it wasn't really a joke, this actually happened a bunch -- that when people I knew saw me and my mom, they'd be all "Hi, Mrs. Cahn! -- oh, hi, cahn," because she was so dynamic, so good at talking to my friends and asking them about their lives, and often found out things about their lives that I didn't know. I'm not good at these kinds of things and I wish I were, I wish I could do these things for my kids that I very much remember my mom doing for us. But at the same time, that sense of control that made her very good at hosting these get-togethers, as well as the pushiness that meant she was able to ask my friends questions and get to know all kinds of things about them, and which (as far as I know) my friends thought was great, was a little too much in a parent-child relationship, with the result that I stopped telling her anything important about my own life around college or so... So I can see quite well how L'Engle's personality could very well have been great for the one and not so great for the other.
(I suppose my feelings about all of this are also affected by knowing that thirty years from now my kids will be writing blog posts about the things I did right and the things I did wrong. Hopefully it'll tip more on the former side than the latter. But knowing I fail my own kids -- hopefully not too badly, hopefully with more successes than failures -- affects how I feel both about L'Engle and my own mom.)
(That being said. There's a bit in Severed Wasp which I will bet you money was taken from real life, where Katherine and Justin go to visit their grown daughter and her family for Katherine and Justin's anniversary. They are informed by the daughter that they will be staying in a hotel and the husband's parents will be staying with daughter+husband's family and the grandkids. Katherine and Justin (mostly Justin) are ENRAGED by this. I read this at the time as a perceptive depiction of how people can and will get worked up over things that are kind of dumb. (Presumably there was some reason! maybe the husband's parents needed extra help? maybe the husband's parents could be trusted not to make snide comments in front of the kids? and even if there was no reason, they, get to decide, it's their house?? I can imagine being hurt by it, sure, but enraged?? But yeah, this is exactly the kind of thing my parents would get enraged by as well.) I also thought it was a perceptive and accurate depiction of how relationships can be fraught; Katherine has this memory because she's wondering why she and her daughter aren't close, and... yup, I can see why. Though from Katherine's POV she thinks this was a result of the semi-estrangement rather than a cause.
...Well, now I still think it's an example of all of that, but less perceptive than it is... documentation, let's say.)
(All of this also makes a lot more sense of the weird emphasis in Wasp on how nobody is owed private information about someone else, especially famous other people, and it's totally OK to keep secrets!! Which... the unfortunate pedophile execution aside, I would feel a lot more sympathy towards L'Engle if she hadn't written actual memoirs. Though I guess one could think of it, as one of L'Engle's editors says in the book, as "a memoir ethos drawn from another time" (if my time in the Frederician fandom has taught me anything, it's that it can be veeeeeery iffy to trust blindly in memoirs). But still.)
Of course, who can say whether Marcus' book is balanced? By the nature of things, it's probably not, one way or another. But I loved that in the "icon" section, along with the interviews I expected of people who talked about how L'Engle's work had touched them in wonderfully positive ways, Marcus also included an interview with one person who thought L'Engle, in their one interaction, was a "bully," and moreover talked about how L'Engle had not written in ways that she was happy with (particularly with respect to her queer characters; you know, in the 80's I was eating up that she was writing about two lesbians in a happy relationship (in A House Like a Lotus), but in 2020, yeah, I have to say there's a lot of weirdness to her queer characters). And there's another interview with Jane Yolen who was like "...I read a lot of SF, and I didn't really like Wrinkle, which didn't really seem like SF to me," which I thought was hilarious. (It is hilarious because is true! I loved it because it was my gateway to SF, which Yolen also talks about.)
Marcus also lets Cynthia Zarin have the last word, which I was not expecting and which I loved. Zarin talks about writing her article, how she didn't mean it to be the expose it became but as more and more came out she realized it had to be, and how conflicted she was about it. It was a good way to end the book.
But anyway. L'Engle was a complicated person. She did a lot of good and helped a lot of people. She hurt the people closest to her. She wrote memoirs that didn't have enough truth in them, and novels that had too much. She wrote books that I still remember fondly, and books that I now approach with some (or a lot of) trepidation. And some of those are the same books.
I guess I don't really have a good conclusion here, except that I wish peace to L'Engle's family, and to L'Engle herself, wherever she may or may not be.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-27 11:33 pm (UTC)*nods* Not everything is timebound, obviously, but because she was born a few years before the uncle I grew up near (nearest cousin's father, a bona fide American, lol), I lump her with Iconic Author (the one whose archive I worked in/with) and not the Boomers, though she's nearer the latter in absolute terms. Even for that uncle, the feel of social norms was nearer where Iconic Author left off; IA died only a few years before L'Engle's birth, for that matter. Cultural stuff is weird and not evenly paced.
one of those life-changers for me
In that case, everything else aside, I think it's nifty that you're able to revisit the context intermittently as your understanding of things changes....
no subject
Date: 2020-09-28 04:28 am (UTC)