Madeleine L’Engle Dies

I’m not particularly spiritual. The big questions can work themselves out: it matters less why we’re here than that we are, and we’re hungry, and there are six delis on this block but five of them don’t have bagels.  My grandmother used to say she was related to the Vilna Gaon (a claim made significantly more dubious by the fact that she said the same thing about Moshe Dayan) and perhaps that has something to do with it: faced with the growing Hassidic movement, my supposed-ancestor started excommunicating overly exuberant worshippers.  I think I understand where he was coming from—ecstatic prayer freaks me out, too.  

Only one person has ever really gotten to me on a spiritual level, and she died yesterday, in Connecticut, at the age of 88, after a lifetime of writing extremely weird children’s books that somehow instructed all sorts of non-mystical people like myself in the ways of the big life questions.  Madeleine L’Engle is best known for A Wrinkle in Time, but she published several series of novels about teenagers, mostly girls, sometimes marooned on other planets but often just marooned in adolescence.  She made almost no distinction between science fiction and realist drama, as if to say that there is no difference—that saving your father from a giant evil alien brain is no more or less difficult than surviving an awkward youth. 

Nor did L’Engle worry much about tiptoeing around what the MPAA might term “adult themes.”  I’ve still never found a scene in a book more horrifying than the chapter of A Swiftly Tilting Planet about the boy who’s been so violently abused by his father (step-father?) that he’s brain-damaged for life.  One of the books in her Austin series surprised the hell out of my twelve-year-old self when it turned out to be all about lesbians.  And I was equally taken aback—though also kind of thrilled—when, after three Meg Murray novels containing nothing more sexual than a chaste kiss, L’Engle’s book about Meg’s brothers, Many Waters, re-imagined life in Noah’s family just before the flood, sin, raunch, and all.  Young adult novels tend to broadcast it when they get serious, as if to prep their tender readers before upsetting (or titillating) them.  That kind of warning is profoundly unnatural, though, and L’Engle’s refusal to use it (to say, in effect, “hey kids, get ready for some lesbians!”) was a measure of her respect for her readers.  

This refusal to coddle her young readers makes L’Engle’s most famous book, A Wrinkle in Time, one of the few novels for children that works equally well for adults.  I’ve never been able to slog through The Dark is Rising or Lloyd Alexander’s Black Cauldron series since I hit puberty, despite adoring them as a kid, but I’ve reread A Wrinkle in Time multiple times in my twenties.  As an adult, I’m much more aware of the dangers of a good-versus-evil worldview, and much more likely to be skeptical of the real-life resonances of stories about cosmic battles (declaring war on Sauron, or the Nothing, is a lot simpler than declaring war on, oh I don’t know, terror) but I trust L’Engle’s moral sense completely.  It’s too original not to.

In the same way, certain of her religious touches would make adult-me really uncomfortable if rendered by a writer with a less idiosyncratic and deeply-rooted sense of right and wrong: the ecstatic scene in which Meg and her friends are flown into the sky by a psalm-quoting centaur, for example.  But while L’Engle did spend years working at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, her spiritual sense isn’t guided by any specific religion.  The New York Times obituary ends with a lovely quote:

“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

People say stuff like this a lot, and usually I don’t really listen.  It’s possible that L’Engle hooked me because she got me so young, or that I loved her books for reasons that are much more personal or political than spiritual (Meg Murray may be literally the only realistic, non-Mary-Sue-ish teenage girl pop culture has offered in the past sixty years).  But it doesn’t matter.  The point is, when L’Engle talked about the cosmos, even cynics like me listened.  She’ll be greatly missed.