A stroke of genius
A road trip to Arizona gave struggling author Madeleine L’Engle her big idea for ‘A Wrinkle in Time’
AS Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling are feted in almost every major magazine as the stars of the upcoming “A Wrinkle in Time” film adaptation, it seems surprising that it took 56 years for the classic book to hit the big screen.
But the real surprise is that the book was published at all.
“A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle took a torturous path up to the point it was finally published in 1962, according to the author’s granddaughters in the new memoir “Becoming Madeleine” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Léna Roy wrote the young-adult biography as a way to honor what would have been L’Engle’s 100th birthday. (The author died in 2007, on the cusp of turning 87.) “She was the woman who sang at the top of her lungs, who played Ping-Pong with gusto and who had us all read Shakespeare aloud, cuddled up in her four-poster bed,” they write.
Even so, L’Engle grew up as a lonely child in Manhattan. Her cultured parents — her father was a foreign correspondent for magazines like Colliers and her mother was a piano player — left her to her own devices, even as a young child, where she often ate her food alone in her room.
She considered herself an outsider in school, the book says, much like Meg Murry, the main character of “A Wrinkle in Time,” who complains of being bullied and excluded because of her bad hair, glasses, braces — and absentee father. Clearly, art imitated life.
But L’Engle filled these absences with her imagination. She wrote her first book at age 5 and started keeping a journal at 8.
In one early journal entry she wrote, “O, if only I can succeed and be a poet and author and an artist. I must. O, God, give me the determination. And the will to work, and the talent. I wish I dared say genius. I will say it. Please give me genius.”
L’ENGLE hopped from NYC private school to Swiss boarding school to an all girls school in Jacksonville, Fla. All the while, the writing bug never left her.
She graduated from Smith College, married struggling actor Hugh Franklin and published her first book “The Small Rain.” The couple moved out of New York City to Goshen, Conn., where L’En- gle had two children and adopted a third — continuing to write on the side. But true success eluded her.
On her 40th birthday in 1958, she received the latest in a series of rejection slips, this time for her book “The Lost Innocent.”
“This was an obvious sign from heaven. I should stop trying to write,” she wrote in her memoir “A Circle of Quiet.” “All during the decade of my 30s, I went through spasms of guilt because I spent so much time writing, because I wasn’t like a good New England housewife and mother. When I scrubbed the kitchen floor, the family cheered. I couldn’t make decent pie crust . . . And with all the hours I spent writing, I was still not pulling my own weight financially.”
Despite these misgivings, she could not tear herself away from her typewriter. “I had to write. I had no choice in the matter. It was not up to me to say I would stop because I could not . . . I still had to go on writing,” she wrote. A year later, on a month-long family road trip to Arizona, three characters — Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which, who would forever change her life — popped into her head. She added the story of siblings Meg and Charles Wallace Murry’s interstellar search (guided by the “Mrs trio” of guardian angels), which became “A Wrinkle in Time.” By 1960, she had a first draft of what she had titled “Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which” (later “A Wrinkle in Time”) to send to her agent. The first response by editor Evelyn Shrifte at Vanguard Press, which had published one of her previous books “Meet the Austins,” did not bode well. “Evelyn turned down Mrs Whatsit while I was there, turned it down with one hand while saying that she loved it, but I didn’t quite dare do it, as it isn’t really classifiable,” L’Engle wrote. “I know Mrs Whatsit is a good book, and if I’ve ever written a book that says what I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is the psalm of praise to life, my stand for life against death.” More rejections followed. One publisher insisted that she cut the manuscript by half to which she wrote in her journal: “I’m willing to rewrite, to rewrite extensively, to cut as much as necessary;
but I am not willing to mutilate, to destroy the essence of the book.”
When editors asked if the book was intended for children or adults — pos- sibly to undermine the book, L’Engle would reply, according to her granddaughters, with, “It’s for people, don’t people read books?”
Each rejection, no matter how philosophically expected, is a wound. Madeleine L’Engle, whose classic “A Wrinkle in Time” was rejected a rumored 26 times