March 12, 2020 17
the twins Sandy and Dennys, the least
intellectual members of the Murry fam-
ily, think first of “Euclid and Pasteur
and Tycho Brahe” when attempting
to come up with examples of histori-
cal heroes. This takes place in Many
Waters, the weirdest and least suc-
cessful of Wrinkle’s sequels, in which
the twins find themselves accidentally
transported to the world just before the
Flood, where they wrestle with both
their knowledge that the earth is about
to be destroyed and their joint attrac-
tion to a girl they meet there while try-
ing to figure out how to get back home.
(In a nicely turned pun that works even
better now than it did thirty- five years
ago, one of the biblical figures hears
“United States” as “Nighted Place.”)
There’s a quality of snobbery to all
this that L’Engle also would likely have
acknowledged. “Being a snob isn’t
necessarily a bad thing,” Polly’s friend
Max, a wealthy widow who lives on a
southern plantation, tells her in Lotus.
“It can mean being unwilling to walk
blindly through life instead of living
it fully.... Being alive is a marvelous,
precarious mystery, and few people
appreciate it.” L’Engle’s fiction con-
stitutes an education in a culture that
she obviously loved deeply, a culture
in which children can quote Robert
Burns in the original Scots, in which
spontaneously arriving guests already
know their parts in madrigals and Bach
chorales, in which people drink “con-
sommé with a good dollop of sherry.”
The pedagogy comes with its own good
dollop of condescension—L’Engle’s
implicit assumption that her readers
will appreciate, and benefit from, her
instruction. But there’s a moral dimen-
sion as well: good people have good
taste, bad people do not. In The Arm
of the Starfish, a luxury hotel owned by
a villainous capitalist features garish
murals of native people and a giant TV;
the O’Keefe house, by contrast, is filled
with books and shabby- chic furniture.
As a child whose parents didn’t sing
in four- part harmony with weekend
guests or name pets after Shakespeare
characters, I gobbled all this up as if
it were one of the family dinners that
Meg’s mother manages to whip up over
her Bunsen burner while working in
her home laboratory. But looking back
on it as an adult, I find L’Engle’s vision
of the good life less aspirational than
blatantly elitist and exclusionary. Those
who appreciate and conform to Ameri-
can and European Christian culture
are allowed into the inner circle; those
who don’t—because they are working
class, like Calvin’s mother, or because
they are superficially concerned with
money and appearance, like a whole
host of other characters—are cast out.
On some level I must have always been
aware of the overwhelmingly WA S P
tinge to L’Engle’s world, but the more
troubling aspects of it eluded me as a
child. It is painful now to read the scene
in A House Like a Lotus in which Polly,
stranded in Athens, condemns the
“junky gift shops” filled with “phony
icons” and “sleazy clothes” clearly in-
tended to attract tourists: “One souve-
nir shop had a sign reading, ‘Welcome,
Hadassah,’ and was recommended by
some Jewish Association.” In a book
where Greek and Sanskrit words are di-
dactically explained within the text, the
reference, as well as the vagueness of its
phrasing, feels gratuitous.
An equally discomfiting element of
the later books is what happens to Meg.
In Wrinkle she is a force of nature: a
math genius, fierce in her love for her
little brother, stubborn and uncompro-
mising. “Stay angry, little Meg,” Mrs
Whatsit urges her. “You will need all
your anger now.” So it is a shock to dis-
cover, in the Second Kairos Quartet,
that Meg has disappeared, replaced
by Mrs. O’Keefe: a devoted wife who
spends her days raising the couple’s
seven (seven!) children, mending, and
cooking, while Dr. O’Keefe, the man
formerly known as Calvin, runs his own
lab. “Mother’s a whiz at math; Daddy
says she could get a doctorate with both
hands tied behind her back, but she just
laughs and says she can’t be bothered,
it’s only a piece of paper,” Polly says at
one point. “Mrs. O’Keefe knew a great
deal about her husband’s work and had
often assisted him,” one visitor assures
us. L’Engle responded to her readers’
accusations of sexism by asserting thatif women are to be free to choose
to pursue a career as well as mar-
riage, they must also be free to
choose the making of a home and
the nurture of a family as their vo-
cation; that was Meg’s choice, and
a free one, and it was as creative a
choice as if she had gone on to get a
Ph.D. in quantum mechanics.That is, indeed, a choice. But it couldn’t
possibly be the choice of the Meg to
whom we were introduced in Wrinkle,
not unless she had a lobotomy. It’s ut-
terly inconsistent with what we know of
her character.
Did L’Engle have Meg choose fam-
ily over career because of her guilt over
having prioritized her own writing? As
yet there exists no comprehensive biog-
raphy of L’Engle, although a book by
Abigail Santamaria is in the works.*
Still, journalistic portrayals of her, as
well as Listening for Madeleine, a book
of interviews conducted with various
people who knew her that came out
a few years ago, have suggested that
L’Engle’s depictions of motherhood in
her novels were highly idealized, evok-
ing the mother she wished she could
be. And the knowledge that L’Engle’s
husband, Hugh Franklin, was often ru-
mored to have been unfaithful makes
some of Calvin’s and Meg’s dialogue
in Wrinkle more comprehensible. “You
know it isn’t true, I know it isn’t true,”
Calvin says to Meg about gossip that
her father has abandoned her mother.
“How anybody after one look at your
mother could believe any man would
leave her for another woman just shows
how far jealousy will make people go.”
It’s impossible to imagine a teenage
boy talking like this. It seems more
likely that L’Engle is talking to herself.The problems with the books occur
when L’Engle allows her agenda—reli-
gious, social, or personal—to displace
her role as storyteller. One of her edi-
tors once said that her books reflected
“her very deep faith... embedded in
a great story with great characters.”
But the reverse can also be true: the
characters are embedded in the faith,
which is the motor that drives Wrin-
kle’s less successful sequels. L’Engleherself rejected the idea that the two
were separable. “Christian art?” she
asks rhetorically in Walking on Water.
“Art is art; painting is painting; music
is music; a story is a story. If it’s bad art,
it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the
subject.” But Christianity, as L’Engle
readily asserted, is at the heart of the
way she thought of herself as an artist.
These lines from Robert Frost’s poem
“Two Tramps in Mud Time,” which are
quoted frequently in The Arm of the
Starfish, could be her artistic credo:My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation....
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal
stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.L’Engle was writing, always, for
“Heaven and the future’s sakes.” In
her acceptance speech when Wrinkle
won the Newbery medal, she argued
that fantasy and myth are a “universal
language, the one and only language
in the world that cuts across all barri-
ers of time, place, race, and culture.”
But while the battle of good against
evil is indeed a universal trope, the
way L’Engle formulates it is decid-
edly specific. “To be truly Christian,”
she wrote, “means to see Christ ev-
erywhere, to know him as all in all.”
Among other things, it means reading
the Old Testament as a springboard to
the New. “If the Flood had drowned
everybody, if the earth hadn’t been re-
populated, then Jesus would never have
been born,” Dennys realizes in Many
Waters, in which the purpose of thetwins’ adventure seems to be shoring
up their belief in the truth of the Bible.
And it means continuously asserting
that the Christian way is the truest way.
While characters may profess admira-
tion for Buddha or Einstein, there’s no
question of where such figures rank in
the moral hierarchy.
In “How Long Is a Book?,” her lecture
about the genesis of Wrinkle, L’Engle
said that she was “struggling through
a period of agnosticism” when she con-
ceived the novel. The greatest Christian
memoirs, dating back to Augustine’s
Confessions, all acknowledge doubt
and wrestle with it. Strikingly, L’Engle’s
books—fiction or nonfiction—do not.
One would imagine that their author’s
faith had never wavered. In fact, the
only place in all L’Engle’s work that I
found such an acknowledgment was in
that same never- before- published lec-
ture, in which she also expressed a poi-
gnant wish for “the kind of loving God
in which I hoped to believe.”
Perhaps one reason why the later
books are less successful as fiction is
that L’Engle overcame her agnosti-
cism; once her faith was stronger, she
felt freer to indulge it. But I can’t help
wondering if the opposite is in fact
true, and the later books fail precisely
because she didn’t convince herself.
As she works harder and harder to for-
tify her own belief, the novels devolve
into the same preachiness that charac-
terizes her spiritual memoirs. The au-
thor of Wrinkle appears to have been
fighting a battle that was to her just as
dire as the struggle between good and
evil she so obsessively depicts: the strug-
gle for her own soul. It’s a pity she didn’t
put more of that into her books. Q*The Moment of Tenderness, a new
collection of L’Engle’s never-before-
published stories, many of them juve-
nilia, will be issued by Grand Central
in April.A new take on classics by
STANISŁAW LEM
Read new English editions of works by Stanislaw Lem,
internationally renowned author of novels, short stories,
literary criticism, and philosophical essays.Find them all at mitpress.mit.edu/LEM