March 12, 2020 15
kind of funding to nineteenth-century
support by financial institutions of slav-
ery—it’s not the same crime, of course,
but “the same instinct to abuse and
extract, deplete, discard, and disavow
holds.” It’s no sur pr ise that the same de -
mand for reparations—compensation
for all those whose lives and communi-
ties are being wrecked—is being raised.
There’s no question that taking on
one of the biggest parts of the planet’s
economy is a daunting task. It’s possible
that the Chases of the world can go on
lending money to their friends in the
oil industry without suffering any con-
sequences. On the other hand, in the
same way that the electoral map favors
Republicans, the money map favors
those who care about the climate. Chase
branches, for instance, are concentrated
in those small pockets of blue around
our big cities (I was arrested in a protestin one of them, in Washington, D.C.,
in early January). And perhaps these
institutions are beginning to bend: in
mid-January the world’s largest finan-
cial firm, BlackRock, announced that it
was taking broad, if still tentative, steps
to include climate change in its analyses
of potential investments. “Awareness is
rapidly changing, and I believe we are
on the edge of a fundamental reshaping
of finance,” its CEO, Larry Fink, wrotein a letter to CEOs of the world’s largest
corporations. That’s perhaps the most
encouraging news about climate change
since the signing of the Paris climate ac-
cords, because if these pillars of global
capital could somehow be persuaded
to act, that action could conceivably be
both swift and global.
Anything is worth a try at this
point, because we’re very nearly out of
time. QThe Kairos Novels :
The Wrinkle in Time
and Polly O’Keefe Quartets
by Madeleine L’Engle,
edited by Leonard S. Marcus.
Library of America, 2 volumes,
1,899 pp., $80.
Penguins and Golden Calves :
Icons and Idols in Antarctica
and Other Unexpected Places
by Madeleine L’Engle, with a foreword
by Charlotte Jones Voiklis.
Convergent, 252 pp., $15.00 (paper)
The Rock That Is Higher:
Story as Truth
by Madeleine L’Engle,
with a foreword by Sarah Bessey.
Convergent, 311 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Madeleine L’Engle, a fixture in the
lives of generations of American chil-
dren and teenagers as the author of
the classic novel A Wrinkle in Time,
looked back on the 1950s as her “de-
cade of failure.” After finding criti-
cal success in the 1940s with fiction
for both young readers and adults,
she had a run of persistent bad luck.
One novel went unpublished; the next
found a home only after years of ef-
fort. She and her husband had moved
from New York City to run a general
store in rural Connecticut, where many
knew her simply as “the grocer’s wife.”
After she received a rejection letter for
another book on her fortieth birthday,
in 1958, she wondered if she ought to
give up writing and focus on being a
housewife and mother to her three chil-
dren: “Stop this foolishness and learn
to make cherry pie,” she told herself.
A practicing Christian who was active
in the local Congregational church,
she also had begun to struggle with her
faith.
During the summer of 1959, L’Engle
and her family embarked on a cross-
country road trip. At night, after the
children had gone to bed, she read
books of higher math and physics by
flashlight. As she recalled in “How
Long Is a Book?,” a lecture from the
early 1970s that is included in the sec-
ond volume of the Library of Ameri-
ca’s recent collection of her writings,
she was seeking a light in the dark:
“Not just to learn the various theo-
ries of the creation of the universe,
the theories of relativity, of quantum
[mechanics], but because in the writ-
ing of Sir James Jeans, of Einstein,
Planck, I got a vision of a universe in
which I could believe in God.” In the
work of scientists and mathematicians,
she continued, she found “a reverence
for the beauty and pattern of the uni-
verse, for the mystery of the heavenly
laws which argued much more con-
vincingly to me of a loving creator
than did the German theologians.”
Driving through the Painted Desert in
Arizona—an environment “as much
out of this world as any of the planets”
she later imagined in her fiction—she
turned to the children and announced
that she was going to write a new novel
about three characters whose names
had just come to her: Mrs Whatsit, Mrs
Who, and Mrs Which. (L’Engle de-
liberately left off the period after the“Mrs” in their names, to emphasize
that they were “extra- special as well as
extra- terrestrial.”)
The book that L’Engle wrote after
returning home was, of course, A
Wrinkle in Time, which was published
in 1962 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
after being rejected by at least two
dozen publishers. It won the 1963 New-
bery Medal and has become one of
the best- loved, as well as best- selling,
children’s books of the last fifty- plus
years. Its heroine is Meg Murry, a
gawky, socially awkward adolescent
whose father, a physicist on a mysteri-
ous assignment for the government,
has suddenly disappeared. Together
with Charles Wallace, her preternatu-rally brilliant younger brother, and her
schoolmate Calvin O’Keefe—a popu-
lar jock with whom she develops an
unlikely romance—she embarks on an
interplanetary adventure to save him.
The trio are guided by the three Mrs
Ws, who have the ability to “tesser,”
or travel through space nearly instan-
taneously by creating a “wrinkle” in
time. As Charles Wallace explains, “A
straight line is not the shortest distance
between two points.”
Studded with quotes not only from
the Bible but also from Dante, Shake-
speare, Descartes, and many other
great humanists, Wrinkle is playful
and intellectual, realistic and other-
worldly. Absolute evil is embodied by
the “ONE mind” of the planet Cam-
azotz, where free will has been taken
away and all the inhabitants are con-
trolled by a central brain to which they
must conform. On streets of identical
houses, children bounce balls in per-
fect unison, and anyone who refuses
to submit is brutally punished. “I am
freedom from all responsibility,” the
evil power croons to Charles Wallace,
trying to take over his mind. But Meg
recognizes that the consolation it of-
fers is false. Freedom from respon-
sibility, after all, is the fantasy of a
world- wearied adult, not of a teen-
ager, who longs for nothing more than
to be trusted to make decisions for
herself.
Wrinkle taught generations of read-
ers—myself happily included—that
there is reward, and even power, in
being a misfit. “A heroine with glasses?
Finally!” writes Sarah Bessey in her
foreword to The Rock That Is Higher,
one of L’Engle’s spiritual memoirs. At
school, Meg suffers for being stubborn
and independent- minded, but the qual-
ities that make her a misfit are precisely
the ones that serve her in facing down
the evil on Camazotz.
Wrinkle and its sequels—A Wind in
the Door (1973) and A Swiftly Tilting
Planet (1978), together with Many Wa-
ters (1986), which was published later
and is stylistically quite different, but
involves some of the same characters
and takes place chronologically in be-
tween its two predecessors—constitute
what L’Engle came to think of as the
“First Kairos Quartet.” (The “Second
Kairos Quartet,” centered on the ad-
ventures of Polyhymnia O’Keefe, Meg
and Calvin’s oldest daughter, includes
The Arm of the Starfish (1965), Drag-
ons in the Waters (1976), A House Like
a Lotus (1984), and An AcceptableL’Engle’s Cosmic Catechism
Ruth Franklin
Madeleine L’Engle