On Madeleine L'Engle
Sep. 25th, 2020 10:49 pmWhen I posted on rereading Severed Wasp recently, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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. ( Read more... )
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. ( Read more... )
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.
