A meaty article in the New Yorker is a treat: often contrarian, in-depth, unexpected. I’m still a bit mystified by this one from the early aughts that amounts to character assassination, as far as I can see. Why the systematic deconstruction of a legacy? Why bring such gossip and hearsay to the light of day? Cynthia Zarin’s “The Storyteller: Fact, fiction, and the books of Madeleine L’Engle” is mean-spirited and unworthy of the New Yorker.
Granted, she had plenty of material to work with. The women who long to be “compleat” often go comically astray. To pursue great, passionate married love, to welcome life abundantly, and to contribute substantially to the world through the work of one’s hands or minds: that is a ludicrous level of ambition.
One such woman was Madeleine L’Engle, a woman who came of age in intense loneliness, wrote novels that arose from her life of books as companions and her attempts to understand the world, loved her husband until his death and beyond, and raised children with a zest for the joys of family living, the healthful influence of country living and the culture and theater of the big city. Did she succeed in all things? Like all mortals, assuredly not. Based on Zarin’s scathing account that has set the lore of Madeleine L’Engle for a generation, you’d think she was worthy of scorn for ever aspiring to any of it.
Among other allegations delivered by family members to the investigative reporter are that L’Engle misunderstood her father’s illness from which he died when she was still young, her marriage and family life were unpleasant for all involved, and it was widely known that her husband, whom she repeatedly proclaims in print was faithful to her for life, carried on decades long affairs. Oh, and it is heavily implied that L’Engle is responsible for her son’s alcoholism and subsequent early demise. Ouch!
After reading the article, I wanted to see her side for myself and I read “Two-Part Invention,” L’Engle’s memoir about her marriage and family life, the name taken from Bach’s inventions, which she loved. Especially after this from the New Yorker article, quoting L’Engle: “‘There in the chapel of the church, Hugh and I made promises, promises which for forty years we have, by some grace, been able to keep.’ The memoir testifies to the idea that two vibrant, curious people can, over the decades, maintain a marriage that is imaginative, deeply sustaining, and alive.” This is precisely what interests me about marriage. Zarin would have us believe it all sham.
Of what does L’Engle write in “Two-Part Invention”? In reminiscing about coming of age and finding her way in writing novels and working in the theater, L’Engle is lyrical and sensual in ways that reveal the skill and ingenuity of her writing. In commemorating her later years, watching her husband die from cancer and her entrance into widowhood, her writing is disjointed, saccharine, and often devoid of her gifted abilities of observation. Where was the editor for this project? I did not, however, find in “Two-Part Invention” the crimes which her nearest and dearest gossiped about to the New Yorker and I was disquieted by the account the article gives, unjustly critical of a flawed but seemingly likeable and talented woman.
When is L’Engle at her best? Take this passage about divvying up housework with roommates in a shared New York City apartment:
When we distributed the household jobs I announced that I would do the cooking. And that is how I learned to cook—by doing it, and discovering that I was good at it. During my early childhood there had been trips to Europe before our move from New York when I was twelve. So I was a little more experimental about food than many of my contemporaries. I remembered one summer in Brittany when I would be sent off for the day to explore, carrying my lunch of sour bread, sweet butter, and bitter chocolate. This taught me to mis taste and texture. I felt that one does not cook with water, so I learned to keep stocks and juices in the fridge. Cooking was definitely a creative act.
Her reminiscences of wandering the city late at night (back when it was much safer, apparently), getting harassed on set (and people claim the MeToo movement came out of nowhere? Thespians have been that way for a long time it seems), spending hours a day on the piano, and soaking in the full-sized bathtub are all delicious.
There are moments of this embodied beauty in her later life, such as the solace she gains from reciting a repertoire of scripture and poetry while swimming laps each morning, the reprieve of lingering over a homecooked meal on the patio at sunset while her husband is ill in the hospital. However, these become increasingly overshadowed by stream of consciousness interludes and a weak theology that tries to make God into math or something (which explains the theological weaknesses in several of her novels).
Was it wise to share her personal life so publicly? No. What was so offensive? The disturbing part for me is that I can’t think of a single time L’Engle admits that she was wrong about anything and, of course, she controls the narrative. But it would be a stretch to say she comes across as a saintly and enlightened woman in her written account of the major movements of her life: coming of age and entering widowhood.
Zarin writes, “L’Engle’s children and grandchildren—who love her deeply, but with a kind of desperate frustration spliced with resentment—revile ‘Two-Part Invention.’ Indeed, L’Engle’s family habitually refer to all her memoirs as ‘pure fiction,’ and, conversely, consider her novels to be the most autobiographical—though to them equally invasive—of her books.” This statement implies that her life seems pleasant and enviable in her memoirs. Far from it! From the awkward and gangly debutante unaware of her allergy to shellfish who spent many a fancy-dress ball vomiting in the powder room, to the newlywed who almost hemorrhaged to death with a retained placenta, little of L’Engle’s life seems fun.
There is searing realism in her writing: developing a friendship with a suicidal young man in her youth, wallowing in tumbledown country house far from her friends in the city, her close friend blown up in a farmhouse accident, the poignant loss of not being able to have more children and being separated for long periods of time from her husband while he travelled with various shows. When she and her husband took on the Herculean effort of reviving a country store in a small town, she describes Hugh coming home distant and incapable of affection or conversation…for years. How she can be accused of sugarcoating things is a mystery to me! Was it really worse than that in real life?
Zarin writes:
When Josephine Jones read “Two-Part Invention,” she thought, Who the hell is she talking about? Alan Jones, the dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, who was married to Josephine for many years, told me, “The matriarch of the family is the guardian of the family narrative, and if that person is a writer . . . One of the things Madeleine used to say to me is ‘It’s true, it’s in my journals,’ which was a hilarious statement. Some of her books were good bullshit, if you don’t know the family. Spaghetti on the stove, Bach on the phonograph, that’s all true. But there was this tremendous fissure.”
The fact that Alan Jones, a clergyman, stoops to gossiping about his ex-wife’s family in print should discredit much of the reporting. What a bold new world of incivility is the 21st century!
I found this quote from Zarin’s conversation with L’Engle more revealing:
She admits, though, that the portraits in her memoirs are idealized: “I can’t put disturbing things about people into print.” In fiction, she is freer. “If I’m working on a piece of fiction,” she told me, “I do not write from life. I think that my characters came to me because I didn’t have any family, and I wanted to have a family, and it was the only way I could get it.”
“But you had your own family,” I said.
“Even so, writing the stories came out of my childhood experiences.”
Could it be that Madeleine L’Engle was a lonely person who managed to see moments of great beauty which she idealized in the written word? Could it be that she aspired to close bonds of deep meaning with her husband, her children, and her friends that never fully materialized and which she unwittingly undermined by harvesting words for sale from her life as it passed by? Could it be considered cruel to look at such a woman and feel the need to publicly humiliate her? Whatever her husband did or didn’t do, it seems that L’Engle kept her marriage vows and lived a varied and interesting life while she was at it.
As an aside, it seems her family life would have been made simpler by ditching Crosswicks, the house in the country she and Hugh held onto for their lifetime together and which figures as a character in its own right in her writing. In the impracticality and romance of an old, New England country house L’Engle reminded me of Shirley Jackson, another talented writer, wife and mother. The contrast between the two would seem to be that Jackson’s legacy is defined by humor and frankness. Her husband sat her down before they got married and explained to her that he would serially have affairs. You’ll find no earnest proclamations of fidelity to be ridiculed by friends and family. While L’Engle’s big country house is so obviously important to her, Jackson can treat hers with humor and keep her real feelings better hidden in the armor of comedic writing.
Whatever an old article in the New Yorker has to say about it, I still find both L’Engle and Jackson to be good writers who have worthwhile insights into family life, both in fiction and in memoir.
