Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L'Engle in Many Voices
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Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L'Engle in Many Voices
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Overview
Writer. Matriarch. Mentor. Friend. Icon.
Madeleine L'Engle is perhaps best recognized as the author of A Wrinkle in Time, the enduring milestone work of fantasy fiction that won the 1963 John Newbery Medal for excellence in children's literature and has enthralled millions of readers for the past fifty years. But to those who knew her well, L'Engle was much more besides: a larger-than-life persona, an inspiring mentor, a strong-willed matriarch, a spiritual guide, and a rare friend. In Listening for Madeleine, the renowned literary historian and biographer Leonard S. Marcus reveals Madeleine L'Engle in all her complexity, through a series of incisive interviews with the people who knew her most intimately. Vivid reminiscences of family members, colleagues, and friends create a kaleidoscope of keen insights and snapshop moments that help readers to understand the many sides of this singularly fascinating woman.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466827776 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 11/13/2012 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 323,427 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Leonard S. Marcus is one of the world’s leading writers about children’s books and the people who create them. His own award-winning books include Randolph Caldecott: The Man Who Could Not Stop Drawing; Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L'Engle in Many Voices; Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom; Minders of Make Believe; The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth; Mr. Lincoln Sits for His Portrait: The Story of a Photograph That Became an American Icon; and Earthrise: The Story of the Photograph That Changed the Way We See Our Planet. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Read an Excerpt
Listening for Madeleine
A Portrait of Madeleine L'Engle in Many Voices
By Leonard S. Marcus
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2012 Leonard S. MarcusAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-2777-6
CHAPTER 1
MADELEINE IN THE MAKING
MARY "SISTER" L'ENGLE AVENT
Mary "Sister" L'Engle Avent was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. She and Madeleine L'Engle were cousins.
Q: How did you meet Madeleine L'Engle?
A: Her grandmother Caroline Hallowes L'Engle Barnett was my aunt — the sister of my father, Camillus Saunders L'Engle. Madeleine was two years older than me and about six years old when I first knew her. She and her parents would occasionally come down to Jacksonville, Florida, from New York by train. They would come to visit her grandfather and her grandmother, who by then had separated. It was a very ugly kind of situation.
What happened was that Mr. Bion Hall Barnett, having sired four children, told my aunt — Madeleine's grandmother, whom I called Aunt Lina — that he wanted a divorce. Her answer to him was "We don't get a divorce in this family." She flat out refused to divorce him. "You will be my husband," she told him, "until I die." Mr. Barnett had fallen in love with a young Frenchwoman. When Aunt Lina said no to a divorce, he took the new love of his life and her two daughters and went with them to live in France. After a while, the future Mrs. Barnett, who was a devout Catholic, got tired of living with Mr. Barnett as a companion, and so he adopted her as his daughter! Then, when Aunt Lina finally died, he did marry her, but not before opening a very large account with the pope in order to "unclaim" her as an adopted daughter. Eventually, Mr. Barnett and his new wife moved back to Jacksonville. She died before he did. This was a great scandal in the 1920s in a small city like Jacksonville. Everyone in Jacksonville knew the story, and it hung like a cloud over Madeleine's head, because people felt very sorry for her grandmother. It was a very embarrassing situation.
My earliest impressions of Madeleine were not very favorable. She didn't know how to play like the rest of us girls. For example, she didn't know how to ride a bicycle, which was a favorite thing for us girls to do. Her grandfather lived at the Park Lane Apartments, which was located in a beautiful setting along the banks of the St. Johns River, by a park that was a good place for bicycling. Both her parents would say to Madeleine, "You've got to play with Sister" — Sister was my nickname — "this afternoon." Well, that wasn't what she wanted to do. My mother would say, "Cousin Madeleine [Madeleine's mother] wants you to come down and be with Madeleine." And I would say, "Oh, yuck, Mom. I don't want to do that!" She was such a loner, always writing or reading. Her father was a New York theater critic, and when they were up north, her parents were often out at night, leaving her alone or with her nanny. As I later realized, her behavior was due in part to her having spent so much time by herself during her early life while her mother and father were out seeing plays.
Jacksonville was a small, quiet, beginning-to-come-up town. Florida had not been found yet, really. Henry Flagler had built the Florida East Coast Railway through Jacksonville on its way to Miami. The banks in town were very strong, as was the practice of law. Lumber was big and the port was good. Jacksonville sits on the St. Johns River, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean about eighteen miles away. It's a huge river, and so shipping was good. About forty miles away, St. Augustine was quite a place of note as a vacation resort. In the summer, the men in Jacksonville all wore white linen suits. When seersucker suits became fashionable, my father would call them his "downtown pajamas."
Jacksonville had a garden club and two country clubs — one group had gotten mad at the other and built a little farther out of town. There was the side of the river that you lived on and the other side, which had not yet been developed. In 1933, when Madeleine's parents returned from living in Europe, they bought a house in Jacksonville. It was a nice house but not very grand, and it was on the wrong side of the river. It was not in Riverside or Avondale, which were considered the two good neighborhoods, but closer to town, and it was not far from her grandmother's beach house.
Madeleine was very close to her grandmother, who had her own apartment in the Park Lane Apartments as well as a great house down at what is now called Jacksonville Beach. We called it Pablo at the time. Madeleine loved to go there, in part because it was a good place to be alone. The house, which was named Red Gables and which I think is gone now, was one of our favorite, favorite places. It was right on the ocean, along a part of the beach that had not yet been "found." It was a comfortable, rambling old wooden house with big porches and long windows because you counted on the breeze to cool it. It was furnished informally with wicker furniture, that kind of thing. Very few people lived at the beach all year round and Red Gables was Aunt Lina's summer house, but she would stay there a great deal of the time, and Madeleine would go down there a great deal, too.
Madeleine's mother was the oldest daughter of four in her family, very nice-looking but a little on the shy side, very pleasant but not really warm. She spoke in a quiet voice with a southern accent. She had been raised in Jacksonville but long before my time. Then she married this gentleman from the North who had been badly hurt during World War I, and they had lived together in New York in circumstances completely unlike anything here in Jacksonville. So Madeleine's mother knew two different worlds, and I think she may have felt about New York the same way that Madeleine felt about Jacksonville.
As a New Yorker, Madeleine was completely oblivious to the southern customs of the time. She was always polite, but she was also shy. Between one thing and another, she had a very hard time with us and we with her. When we girls were in our late teens and were all making our debuts and being introduced into the hierarchy of society, Madeleine remained very much the outsider. She would be invited to many of the parties, and she would always say that she couldn't stand the food. We had lots of luncheons, at which chicken salad was always served. Madeleine said she didn't like chicken salad. She was just completely out of place at that time and in that part of the world.
Her one close friend in Jacksonville was Pat Collins [later Cowdery], and they were very close. Pat was a delightful, lovely person, very cordial, very open, and she was exactly Madeleine's age. When Madeleine's family moved to Jacksonville, Madeleine was sent to boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina. But prior to going off to Smith College, in order to prepare for some entrance or placement exams she was going to take, Madeleine enrolled in summer courses at the Bartram School for Girls, which was a small local private school, and I think that that is where she and Pat became good friends. She and Madeleine remained close even late in life.
As a grown-up, Madeleine would sometimes come down to Jacksonville by herself and head straight for Orange Park, where Pat's family had a house. Orange Park is a small community out on the St. Johns River, ten miles out of town, where the houses are spread far enough apart that you have no near neighbors. We say it is "in town but out of town." When you are in Orange Park, you feel completely away from everything. Out there, Madeleine had no social obligations. She didn't have to be anyplace that she didn't want to be or listen to other people discuss among themselves what they had had that day for lunch. She could just be herself and be with Pat and relax. Madeleine might be there for ten days or two weeks without anybody knowing it.
My grandparents John Claudius L'Engle and Susan Philippa Fatio had eleven children, all of whom were born and lived in the Jacksonville area. So the woods were full of L'Engles. If your name was L'Engle, it was generally something to be very proud of. But then you could have killed some of the others who were also named L'Engle. We would say, "He might be my cousin, but I don't know him!" So you would pick and choose.
My father's younger sister, my aunt Tracy L'Engle, was very much intrigued by the theater. She had vague fantasies about being an actress and thought she should have been accepted immediately. She wrote poetry as well, but I would say that all in all she was far better known for her temper. Tracy lived in New York for quite some time, although I don't think she pursued her dream of the theater too seriously while there.
Tracy was a character, and Madeleine knew her well. They probably met when Madeleine was in her teens, which would have been in the late 1930s. Madeleine was very comfortable with my aunt, who had graduated from Wellesley and had a mind of her own. She was haughty. Her two brothers were older than she, and come World War I, they were married with children. When neither of the brothers offered their services to their country, Tracy said, "By damn, if you all are such weaklings, I'm going to go!" And so she did, running military canteens, giving the soldiers their mail, that kind of thing. She had a uniform and was proud of it. And she was very ashamed that her two brothers hadn't enlisted in the service. She was very strong and adventurous; in fact, "strong" is a very weak word for Tracy! At one time when she was still quite young, she became so upset with her father after he had reprimanded her that she moved out and never spoke to him again. After that incident, she lived with us instead. Madeleine looked up to her. She and Tracy were very much alike. They were very determined to do things their way, and to hell with what anybody else said.
There is a saying in the L'Engle family that refers to the fact that we're all stubborn and that we have all got our own ways. You might say to one of your relatives: "You have certainly inherited a lot of the L'Engle-arities!" Madeleine had all of the L'Engle-arities. The Barnetts were pretty strong themselves, so you can imagine what that added up to. Mrs. Barnett — Madeleine's grandmother — was a L'Engle too, so she got it on both sides.
Madeleine's name was a combination of her mother's name and her grandmother's name. She named her own son after her grandfather Bion Barnett. Madeleine also had an uncle named Bion, who was her mother's youngest brother. That Bion Barnett was a writer and an artist, although I don't think he made a living by either. His oil paintings — landscapes and beach scenes, scenes from around the river — were lovely, and he did sell them on occasion. But people liked his paintings because the scenes were familiar, and his banker father paid his bills. He too married a French girl. I'm sure that he and Madeleine knew of each other. Bion's oldest daughter wanted to be a writer as well.
I had not seen Madeleine for a long time when she and I got together for a very brief visit, in New York, probably in 1941. This was the one and only time I saw her in New York. She spoke about wanting to be on the stage. We chatted and asked each other what we were doing, and then we said goodbye. It was a very brief visit. She was not the friendly type, and I still couldn't understand her aloofness. She couldn't understand how I could be so flighty and gregarious. Her life and mine were just so different. By then we had at least become mature enough to acknowledge each other's differences. As far as she was concerned, I was a cousin from Jacksonville. As far as I was concerned, she was a cousin from New York.
In later life — I would say during the 1970s — I saw Madeleine twice in Jacksonville. Once she gave a graduation talk at Bartram, the school where she had done her summer studies. She gave another talk at Bolles, which started out as a military school for boys and which later merged with Bartram. Madeleine had become very friendly with Bartram's two headmistresses. I went to hear her speak on both occasions and was completely mesmerized. She was very cool and calm, with a little bit of a sophisticated humor. The audience all loved her. They saw her as a good writer who had once lived here and had come back to town.
I have most of Madeleine's books. I bought them myself. You'll get a lot of Madeleine's history from The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, which I thought was an accurate description. There are still several Barnetts here. But I guess I am the last of the L'Engles of Jacksonville.
NANCY BRUCE
Nancy Bruce's older sister was the late Dr. Patricia Collins Cowdery, Madeleine L'Engle's closest friend from her Jacksonville, Florida, years.
Q: How did you meet Madeleine L'Engle?
A: I knew Madeleine, but mainly it was my sister, Pat, who knew her well. They were best friends, starting back in the late 1930s, when Madeleine and Pat were at a small girls' school together in Jacksonville, Florida, called Glynlea and later renamed Bartram. My sister was enrolled as a student at Glynlea, and Madeleine spent a short time there to be tutored for her college entrance exams. It all worked out well because Madeleine went on to Smith and my sister went to Vassar. The story was that four years later, at her college graduation, Madeleine was so unenthusiastic about the ceremony that she marched in at the very back of the line, dressed in a raincoat rather than an academic gown.
After college, Pat went to medical school in Philadelphia, married, and returned to Jacksonville. Madeleine moved to New York to work in Eva Le Gallienne's acting company. I saw Madeleine there when she had an apartment on West Tenth Street. I was a student at Vassar, and Pat was teaching at Barnard for a year. Madeleine had a roommate from Jacksonville named Frances Burnett, who was a talented pianist. Unfortunately for Frances, she suffered from stage fright and for that reason was never able to have a career.
I had followed Pat to Bartram, where — to give you an idea of my small group — my best friend was Selden Kirby-Smith, who married Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Her grandfather was Edmund Kirby-Smith, the last Confederate general to surrender! I saw Selden and Lawrence a lot. But Pat wouldn't have been interested in them. My sister and I were not all that close until much later in our lives. Another of my classmates, Palmer Daniels, was a cousin of Madeleine's. Madeleine had lots of cousins in Jacksonville.
I would say that Jacksonville was very ... warm. It was not a place I would have returned to, as my sister, Pat, did. It was a very class-conscious place, and of course it was segregated. As young people, we were all so used to segregation that I don't think we gave it any thought at the time.
My mother taught Sunday school and gave piano lessons. My father was a lawyer who worked in real estate. He and the other men all went hunting. Hunting is what the men of Jacksonville did. We children used to get little animals and skin them and make dolls' clothes out of the hides. Not Madeleine, however.
My father was one of eight boys, and one of my uncles was a man named Charles Wallace Collins. I don't think that Madeleine ever met Charles Wallace, but Pat may have told her about him. He was a well-known lawyer during the Franklin Roosevelt era, a prominent southern Democrat and states' rights advocate, and the author of a book called Whither Solid South? He lived outside of Washington, D.C., in a historic house known as Harmony Hall, which he was responsible for restoring. It was an impressive house but not all that harmonious from what I heard! There were one or two other Charles Wallaces in the family down through the generations. It was a family name, and I think that Madeleine liked the sound of it. My father's twin brother was Littlebury Calhoun Collins. I'm surprised Madeleine didn't use that name!
Pat and Madeleine were like sisters, I guess. It's hard to know just why. Pat was not religious. As a doctor, she was, of course, interested in science. The main thing about them was that they were both sort of odd! They were both loners. Madeleine didn't like Jacksonville society, and maybe that's why she and my sister got along. They did not fit in within the social group.
Later, Madeleine would visit Pat in Jacksonville. My sister's house there was beyond help. Madeleine would tell Pat, "Your house is getting to be more than ratty." She would have notes to herself pinned all over. Her boys shared a room with a dresser that was propped up with paperback books. There was a bed for the dog. Madeleine wanted her to spruce it up and gave her a quilt as a present for the bed that guests slept on. It was such a contrast to the "good life" that Madeleine's mother knew in her later years in Jacksonville, with her live-in maid named Dinah. I do recall Mrs. Camp as a lovely woman without a trace of snobbishness. Eventually, she bought Dinah a house of her own. And that was when Mrs. Camp moved up to Goshen to live with Hugh and Madeleine at Crosswicks.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Listening for Madeleine by Leonard S. Marcus. Copyright © 2012 Leonard S. Marcus. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Frontispiece,Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Introduction,
MADELEINE IN THE MAKING,
Mary "Sister" L'Engle Avent,
Nancy Bruce,
Lee Kingman,
Gay Jordan,
Katharine Weber,
WRITER,
James Cross Giblin,
Carmen Gomezplata,
George M. Nicholson,
Sidney Offit,
Patricia Lee Gauch,
Bridget Marmion,
Marcie Imberman,
Sandra Jordan,
Beverly Horowitz,
Neal Porter,
Stephen Roxburgh,
Catherine Hand,
Judy Blume,
Helen Stephenson,
Mary Pope Osborne,
Thomas Banchoff,
MATRIARCH,
Gretchen Gubelman,
Frederica Brenneman,
Josephine Jones,
Alan Jones,
Léna Roy,
Charlotte Jones Voiklis,
MENTOR,
William Alexander Johnson,
James Parks Morton,
Peter Glassman,
T. A. Barron,
Trish Marx,
Don Lundquist,
Elsa Okon Rael,
FRIEND,
Dana Catharine,
Luci Shaw,
Barbara Braver,
Mira Rothenberg,
Thomas Cahill,
Susan Buckley,
James VanOosting,
ICON,
Wendy Lamb,
Colby Rodowsky,
Christine A. Jenkins,
Gardner McFall,
Jane Yolen,
Paul Moravec,
Amy Kellman,
Betsy Hearne,
Henry Rinehart,
Cynthia Zarin,
Illustrations,
Notes,
A Note on Sources,
Acknowledgments,
Also by Leonard S. Marcus,
Copyright,