{"id":134322,"date":"2019-03-11T09:00:52","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T13:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=134322"},"modified":"2023-09-19T11:52:15","modified_gmt":"2023-09-19T15:52:15","slug":"the-creepy-authoritarianism-of-madeleine-lengle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/11\/the-creepy-authoritarianism-of-madeleine-lengle\/","title":{"rendered":"The Creepy Authoritarianism of Madeleine L\u2019Engle"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her monthly column,\u00a0YA of Yore<\/a>, Frankie Thomas takes a second look at the books that defined a generation.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Madeleine L\u2019Engle (Photo: Sigrid Estrada \/ FSG)<\/p><\/div>\n

The date December 16 is seared into my brain. Every time I see it on a calendar I snap to attention, thinking, just for a second,\u00a0That\u2019s the big day! This is a complete neurological accident. There is nothing significant about December 16, except that in 1996 I saw it on a flier in the lobby of my elementary school. The flier announced that Madeleine L\u2019Engle, the Newbery-winning author of A Wrinkle in Time<\/em>, would be visiting my school for a book-signing event.<\/p>\n

Madeleine L\u2019Engle. I was going to meet<\/em> her.<\/p>\n

I was nine years old, too young to keep a calendar or manage my own schedule or do much of anything except read. I stood in the crowded lobby and read the date over and over and over, burning it into myself so I\u2019d never forget: December 16. December 16. Madeleine L\u2019Engle is coming on December 16.<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

To me, she was so much more than the author of A Wrinkle in Time<\/em>. In fact, I felt about A Wrinkle in Time<\/em> the way Beach Boys superfans feel about \u201cSurfin\u2019 USA\u201d: it was beginner stuff. I was a L\u2019Engle completist, or as much of a completist as was possible for a nine year old in the pre-internet era. If a book of hers was still in print, I owned it and had read it multiple times. If it was out of print, like the underrated Prelude<\/em>, I had borrowed it from the library. I had also borrowed an authorized children\u2019s biography of L\u2019Engle herself, so I knew she\u2019d been a writer even as a child. That excited me. We were the same.<\/p>\n

My family bought its first home computer for Christmas in 1995, and I quickly commandeered it for afternoon use, spending hours on end writing novels on ClarisWorks. Having managed, against all odds, to hang on to those files, I can report confidently that they are almost entirely plagiarized from Madeleine L\u2019Engle. Often I am able to identify verbatim L\u2019Engle phrasing: my heroine is always \u201cpushing at her glasses in a characteristic gesture<\/a>,\u201d \u201clavishly buttering her roll<\/a>,\u201d disparaging her little sister as \u201ctwelve going on forty-two<\/a>.\u201d But beyond the wording, beyond the spelling of gray<\/em> as grey<\/em>, beyond the use of dashes to punctuate thoughts (\u2014is that a quirk unique to L’Engle?) the real giveaway is my heroines. They are all, in one way or another, Vicky Austin.<\/p>\n

The Vicky Austin books are not L\u2019Engle\u2019s best-known work. Unlike A Wrinkle in Time<\/em> and its sci-fi sequels, the Vicky Austin books are domestic realism, though I use the term \u201crealism\u201d loosely. The Austins are a perfect family living in a rambling farmhouse in rural Connecticut. Their hobbies include saying grace, having family sing-alongs, reading aloud from Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets, and discussing the theological implications of an Einsteinian universe. Daddy is a country doctor; Mother is a gorgeous housewife who\u2019s always cooking elaborate meals while playing Brahms on the phonograph. The four Austin children are all gifted in various ways, but Vicky, an aspiring poet who narrates the novels, is the most gifted of all. Adults love her to pieces. Here is a nonexhaustive list of things adults say to Vicky:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have an artistic temperament, Vicky \u2026 That\u2019s empathy, and it\u2019s something all artists are afflicted with.\u201d \u2014Vicky\u2019s beloved Uncle Douglas, Meet the Austins<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI think the trouble is that you have too many<\/em> talents \u2026 You\u2019re on your way to being a real beauty, child, but it\u2019s all in what\u2019s behind <\/em>your face. Right now everything\u2019s promise.\u201d \u2014Uncle Douglas again, painting her portrait in The Moon by Night<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cYou are to be a light-bearer. You are to choose the light \u2026 You already have. I know that from your poems.\u201d \u2014Vicky\u2019s minister grandfather, A Ring of Endless Light<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018Maybe our intimacies are more precious if we know they may be taken away.\u2019 Daddy looked at me and smiled and nodded slightly. Aunt Serena said, \u2018You are wise, my child.\u2019\u2009\u201d \u2014Troubling a Star<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI swore I\u2019d never love or marry again. Your poem helped, Vicky.\u201d \u2014Some woman named Siri who learns to love again thanks to Vicky, Troubling a Star<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rereading the Austin books now, I\u2019m struck by how often Vicky\u2019s praise comes at the expense of another child, a lesser child. It\u2019s not enough that, in Troubling a Star<\/em>, Vicky\u2019s poem wins second prize in a school contest; Aunt Serena must also point out that Vicky\u2019s poem \u201cwas much better than the one that won first prize.\u201d Vicky\u2019s younger sister, Suzy, who is \u201cthirteen, going on thirty,\u201d is allegedly beautiful and smart and popular with boys, but she mostly functions as a straw man for the older characters to compare unfavorably to Vicky. \u201cSuzy\u2019s got plenty going for her, you\u2019re right,\u201d a sophisticated college boy concedes in A Ring of Endless Light <\/em>(in which, to reiterate, Suzy is thirteen), \u201cbut it\u2019s all out there, on the surface. I prefer to dig for gold.\u201d Throughout the series, as far as I can tell, Vicky has no friends her own age.<\/p>\n

How I longed to be adored like Vicky Austin! More than anything, I wanted Madeleine L\u2019Engle to love me the way she loved Vicky\u2014that is to say, the most.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

And then it was December 16, and I was going to meet<\/em> her. What would I wear? Not pants, that was for sure: in The Moon by Night<\/em>, Vicky narrates cheerfully that \u201cDaddy doesn\u2019t like women in pants,\u201d and neither did L\u2019Engle, if her outfit descriptions were anything to go by. I squeezed myself into a pleated skirt, sweater, and tights. It was uncomfortable. But I wouldn\u2019t let it show. In A Ring of Endless Light<\/em>, as Vicky grieves for her dying grandfather, her mother reprimands her: \u201cDon\u2019t scowl. You\u2019re getting lines in your forehead.\u201d<\/p>\n

To distract myself, I raided my leftover Halloween candy. Only the bad candy was left, so I ate an entire box of green Nerds. Then I looked in the mirror and saw, to my absolute horror, that my tongue was stained green.<\/p>\n

My mother tried to reassure me. \u201cShe won\u2019t notice,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to stick your tongue out at her, are you?\u201d<\/p>\n

But that wasn\u2019t the point. To meet Madeleine L\u2019Engle, I needed to be perfect<\/em>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

As an adult I find it hard to ignore the sinister authoritarianism of the Austin books. There is a violent undercurrent to the adoration of Vicky. In Meet the Austins<\/em>, the Austins take in a recently orphaned ten year old named Maggy, and I don\u2019t believe there exists in all of children\u2019s literature a less sympathetic portrait of a child who has just lost her parents. Maggy is rude, disruptive, \u201cspoiled rotten\u201d; she is scolded for \u201cbragging\u201d about her parents\u2019 deaths and for waking the household with her screaming night terrors. (L\u2019Engle\u2019s real-life adopted daughter, Maria, who came to live with L\u2019Engle\u2019s family after the sudden death of her own parents, was not a fan<\/a> of Meet the Austins<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Finally Maggy misbehaves one time too many and gets spanked. The spanking occurs offstage. This is how Vicky narrates it:<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a family story about me when I was Rob\u2019s age or younger. I\u2019d done something I shouldn\u2019t have done, and I\u2019d been spanked, and I climbed up onto Daddy\u2019s lap that evening and twined my arms around his neck and said, \u201cDaddy, why is it I\u2019m so much nicer after <\/em>I\u2019ve been spanked?\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, Maggy was ever so much nicer for a long time after that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 1996, however, I did not find this chilling. The Austins seemed exquisitely literary, and I so wanted to be literary. That December, I was writing a novel about a fourteen-year-old aspiring poet who is precociously accepted into a writing class for adults, where she is immediately hailed by her teacher, the famous Virginia Percher, as the best writer of them all. \u201cAs I went home,\u201d my heroine narrates, \u201cI was flying. Virginia loved my work. Even the adults weren\u2019t as good as me.\u201d<\/p>\n

This plotline is plagiarized from A House Like a Lotus<\/em>, which is only an honorary Vicky Austin novel: L\u2019Engle rewrote it, according to that biography I read, after deciding that it \u201cdidn\u2019t fit Vicky\u2019s personality.\u201d The rewrite doesn\u2019t appear to have been extensive. Vicky has become Polly; Dr. and Mrs. Austin are now Dr. and Mrs. O\u2019Keefe; beloved Uncle Douglas is beloved Uncle Sandy; pretty younger sister Suzy is pretty younger cousin Kate, and so forth.<\/p>\n

All the adults adore Polly, but A House Like a Lotus<\/em> is specifically about the adoration of Polly by an aging heiress and artist named Max. In the first half of the novel, Max takes the sixteen-year-old Polly under her wing, painting her portrait and serving as an all-purpose mentor. Here are some of the things Max says to Polly:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll take you over Kate, any day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have elegant bones \u2026 Beautiful slender wrists and ankles, like princesses in fairy tales. Bet Cousin Kate envies them \u2026 What splendid eyes you have, like bits of fallen sky, and wide apart, always suggesting that you see things invisible to lesser mortals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI love you, Polly, love you like my daughter. And you love me, too, in all your amazing innocence.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Max is a lesbian. (This novel was where I learned the word lesbian<\/em>.) Polly is uncomfortable with this, but her parents urge her not to think about it; the novel, which was published in 1984, initially looks like a rather clumsy call for tolerance. But then, at the halfway point, Max gets too drunk and reaches toward Polly and \u2026 does something to her:<\/p>\n

She bent toward me, whispering, \u201cOh my little Polly, it\u2019s all so short\u2014no more than the blink of an eye. Why are you afraid of Max? Why?\u201d<\/p>\n

Her breath was heavy with whiskey. Her words were thick. I was afraid. I didn\u2019t know what to do, how to stop her. How to make her be Max again.<\/p>\n

In the next flash of lightning she stood up, and in the long satin gown she seemed seven feet tall, and she was swaying, so drunk she couldn\u2019t walk. And then she fell\u2026<\/p>\n

I rolled out of the way. She reached for me, and she was sobbing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The scene is written so vaguely that there\u2019s no critical consensus on what exactly it is, how far it goes, whether it\u2019s merely attempted or actually carried out. Whatever it is, Polly is so traumatized by it that she flees Max\u2019s house, barefoot and sobbing, in the middle of the night, in a thunderstorm. She has nightmares and flashbacks for months afterward. She doesn\u2019t want to see or speak to Max ever again.<\/p>\n

Here are some things adults say to Polly in the second half of the novel:<\/p>\n

\u201cMax is a dying woman. You can\u2019t just drop her like a hot coal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to allow even the people you most admire to be complex and contradictory like everybody else. The more interesting somebody is, the more complex.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem is, Polly, you made Max into a god. Can\u2019t you let her be a little human?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eventually, Polly is worn down. She reminds herself that Max taught her everything she knows, that Max \u201csaw potential in me that I hardly dared dream of.\u201d She decides that Max must be \u201cbrilliant but flawed. Perhaps the greater the brilliance, the darker the flaw.\u201d The novel ends with Polly calling Max on the phone to apologize for avoiding her. \u201cForgive me,\u201d says Polly tearfully. \u201cI love you, Max, I love you.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a child, I was disturbed by A House Like a Lotus<\/em>, especially that ending, but I wasn\u2019t sure why. I figured I would understand it when I was older. I pretended to love it.<\/p>\n

In a 1963 New York Times<\/em> article<\/a>, explaining why she wrote for children, L\u2019Engle remarked, \u201cIt\u2019s often possible to make demands of a child that couldn\u2019t be made of an adult.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

It was strange to go to school at night, and in a taxi with my father instead of on the bus. The book-signing took place in the elementary school gymnasium, noisier and more crowded than I\u2019d ever seen it during the day; the event was open to the public and full of strangers. I carried two books for L\u2019Engle to sign. One was my mother\u2019s childhood copy of A Wrinkle in Time<\/em>, which embarrassed me\u2014surely everybody would bring that one!\u2014but my mother had insisted. To correct for this, I also brought Troubling a Star<\/em>, my favorite L\u2019Engle novel and no one else\u2019s. I hoped it would communicate to L\u2019Engle that I was a different caliber of reader.<\/p>\n

The line to meet L\u2019Engle was so long, and I was so short. I couldn\u2019t see her until it was my turn\u2014then I was face to face with her. She was older than I\u2019d expected. Her gray hair was cropped shorter than in her author photo. In my memory she looms quite tall even while seated at the book-signing table; I\u2019ve always assumed this was the exaggerated perception of a very small nine year old, but apparently she was indeed very tall<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She smiled an impersonal smile at me, the same smile she must have smiled at thousands of other kids. She wrote her name, nothing more, inside my books. She did not say, \u201cWow, Troubling a Star<\/em>? That\u2019s an unusual choice!\u201d She did not say \u201cYou are to be a light-bearer\u201d or \u201cYou see things invisible to lesser mortals\u201d or \u201cI love you, Frankie, love you like my daughter.\u201d If she said anything at all, I don\u2019t remember what it was. The whole thing was over so quickly.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

According to the literary critic Dale Peck, great writers \u201cwrite stories which become part of our dreams, but cult writers are themselves dreamed about.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a long time since I\u2019ve dreamt about Madeleine L\u2019Engle. In the summer of 1997, I discovered Jean Craighead George\u2019s Julie of the Wolves<\/em>, and that was it for me and L\u2019Engle: I became a George completist and never looked back. Until I began to write this essay, I\u2019d never revisited the Vicky Austin books.<\/p>\n

It turns out that when I\u2019m not studying them as if cramming for a test on how to be the most lovable child in the world, I can barely get through them. On top of everything else, they\u2019re boring.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

One more thing I remember about the night of December 16, 1996: After the signing, there was a Q&A in the school auditorium. This was my last chance to impress Madeleine L\u2019Engle. I raised my hand and raised my hand and got ignored so many times that when she actually called on me, I was caught off guard.<\/p>\n

My mind raced for a question that would convey that I, too, was a serious writer. I blurted out, \u201cHow long does it take to write a book?\u201d<\/p>\n

She replied, \u201cA long book like A Wrinkle in Time<\/em> takes about a year.\u201d That was all she said. Then she called on the next kid.<\/p>\n

I shrank in my seat, abashed. Hadn\u2019t she given a longer, more thoughtful answer to everyone else? Why had she been so curt with me? Why didn\u2019t she like me best?<\/p>\n

But even more than that, I was dismayed by her answer. A year? <\/em>I could hardly believe anything took so long. Maybe I didn\u2019t want to be a writer after all. Who had that kind of time?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

After I slogged through the Vicky Austin books, I reread A Wrinkle in Time<\/em>. And if the Vicky Austin books put me to sleep, A Wrinkle in Time<\/em> jolted me wide awake. I\u2019d forgotten how much I loved Meg Murry, not because she\u2019s better than everyone else\u2014she isn\u2019t; she\u2019s ugly and argumentative and weak\u2014but because she\u2019s so real, so human, so fully herself. She\u2019s lovable in a way that suggests that everyone else must be equally lovable in their own way, if you only got to know them.<\/p>\n

A Wrinkle in Time<\/em> is astonishing, irreducible. The plot remains indescribably bonkers, perhaps even more so for an adult reader, but it rockets along so swiftly on the force of its own dream logic that I read the whole thing in one breathless sitting. When it was over, tears were streaming down my face; I was crying the way you sometimes wake up crying from a dream. I wasn\u2019t thinking about Madeleine L\u2019Engle at all. I was thinking only of her book.<\/p>\n

I wish I\u2019d understood sooner that I didn\u2019t need anything from L\u2019Engle that she hadn\u2019t already given me. I wish I\u2019d just let myself love the book, instead of trying to make the book love me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of\u00a0<\/em>YA of Yore\u00a0here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

James Frankie Thomas is the author of \u201cThe Showrunner,\u201d which received special mention in the <\/em>2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in <\/em>The Toast,<\/em> The Hairpin, and\u00a0<\/em>Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He is currently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Frankie Thomas on the lesser-known L\u2019Engle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2410,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42956],"tags":[50619],"class_list":["post-134322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ya-of-yore","tag-madeleine-lengle"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Creepy Authoritarianism of Madeleine L\u2019Engle by James Frankie Thomas<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 11, 2019 \u2013 James Frankie Thomas on the lesser-known L\u2019Engle.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/11\/the-creepy-authoritarianism-of-madeleine-lengle\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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