I nearly posted before heading off to dinner, but I’ve come back to discover that Madeleine L’Engle died in Connecticut yesterday at the age of 88. This woman deserves more than a blogpost from me, but she’ll get at least that much tonight, in tribute to her long and productive life.
I packed my bags and left Gambier this week to spend a year in the UK (which is why I’ve already had my Friday dinner). It was nothing short of grueling to choose the books I would mail or carry on this trip, and now I find myself wondering why I didn’t pack the Time Trilogy: A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Wind in the Door (1973), and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978). Of course, what I stubbornly persist in knowing as the Time Trilogy is actually only 3/5 of the Time Quintet, which also includes Many Waters (1986) and An Acceptable Time (1989), but somehow I’ve never been able to allow those later two novels into the series. Perhaps it’s because, of all the many of L’Engle’s sixty-some books that I’ve read (and of all the many, many young adult novels I read in my youth), the Time Trilogy remain dearest to my heart.
Until a few years ago, I read A Wind in the Door at least once a year. I could tell you exactly where and when I acquired each of my volumes; I could even tell you where I wanted to acquire the old yellow Dell Yearling edition of Wrinkle–the one with Meg Murry, Charles Wallace Murry, and Calvin O’Keefe perched atop the back of Mrs. Whatsit-as-centaur–but didn’t. (It was a Waldenbooks in East Amherst, NY, and I was 6. I finally bought a copy of that edition at Autumn Leaves, a used bookstore in Ithaca, NY, when I was 26.) My copies are marked with a succession of my developing signatures, dating all the way back to 1983, and they’re among my most beloved books.
I have read these books again and again, and Madeleine L’Engle has achieved a place among my literary heroes, because they are so deeply humane and wise, and because they gave a bookish and awkward feeling little girl growing up in southern Indiana a sense that she might grow into her own self–that those aspects of her being that seemed simply gawky or weird might someday become great assets. The Time Trilogy books are dark and frightening, offering up spectres of suburban conformity gone horribly wrong, of the wasting powers of hatred and evil (working at every level from the mitochondrian to the celestial), of nuclear war and the end of history itself. I suppose that A Swiftly Tilting Planet was the novel that taught me, in the early 1980s, what the threat of nuclear war actually meant. But they’re also ultimately hopeful, without ever becoming saccharine. As a group, they helped reinforce for me that women could be brilliant intellectuals (the Murry children’s mother is a Nobel winner) and that being a researcher and a mother was, though difficult, possible (she cooked stews for them on her bunsen burner). While I was still very small, they gave me all manner of ways to think about some Big Questions: what is justice? how does time work? what is love like, and what can it do? And, in many ways, they taught me how (and why) to read well–and how (and why) to reread passionately.
L’Engle shaped my life with her works, and for that I am grateful indeed. Tonight, from my bright room in the middle of a dark Cambridge night, I’m hoping that she’s been shepherded into whatever afterlife may await us by figures not unlike the wise, gentle guides who never failed to protect her works’ young characters–usually by teaching them to embrace the powers they carried within themselves.