Ruth Franklin
The Kairos Novels: The Wrinkle in Time and Polly O’Keefe Quartets by Madeleine L’Engle, edited by Leonard S. Marcus Penguins and Golden Calves: Icons and Idols in Antarctica and Other Unexpected Places by Madeleine L’Engle, with a foreword by Charlotte Jones Voiklis The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth by Madeleine L’Engle, with a foreword by Sarah Bessey
The 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., $80.00
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 children and teenagers as the author of the classic novel A Wrinkle in Time, looked back on the 1950s as her “decade of failure.” After finding critical 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 One novel went unpublished; the next found a home only after years of effort. 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 children: “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 crosscountry 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 second volume of the Library of America’s recent collection of her writings, she was seeking a light in the dark: “Not just to learn the various theories of the creation of the universe, the theories of relativity, of quantum [mechanics], but because in the writing 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 universe, for the mystery of the heavenly laws which argued much more convincingly 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 deliberately 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 Newbery 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 mysterious assignment for the government, has suddenly disappeared. Together with Charles Wallace, her preternaturally brilliant younger brother, and her schoolmate Calvin O’Keefe—a popular 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 instantaneously 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, Shakespeare, Descartes, and many other great humanists, Wrinkle is playful and intellectual, realistic and otherworldly. Absolute evil is embodied by the “ONE mind” of the planet Camazotz, where free will has been taken away and all the inhabitants are controlled by a central brain to which they must conform. On streets of identical houses, children bounce balls in perfect 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 offers is false. Freedom from responsibility, after all, is the fantasy of a world-wearied adult, not of a teenager, who longs for nothing more than to be trusted to make decisions for herself.
Wrinkle taught generations of readers—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 qualities 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 Waters (1986), which was published later and is stylistically quite different, but involves some of the same characters and takes place chronologically in between its two predecessors—constitute what L’Engle came to think of as the “First Kairos Quartet.” (The “Second Kairos Quartet,” centered on the adventures of Polyhymnia O’Keefe, Meg and Calvin’s oldest daughter, includes The Arm of the Starfish (1965), Dragons in the Waters (1976), A House Like a Lotus (1984), and An Acceptable