Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? Read online

  I do not believe that any subject is in itself taboo; it is the way it is treated which makes it either taboo or an offering of art and love. On my personal censorship scale, showing violence as admirable is taboo. Showing the sexual act as the only form of love allowed the human being is taboo. Back when the early human being lived in caves or in the trees, we had to breed aggressiveness into ourselves in order to survive. We had to be able to kill wild animals, protect ourselves against hostile tribes. But now we have come to a point in the history of the human being where we are going to have to breed this kind of aggressiveness out of ourselves if we and the planet we live on are to survive.

  Back in those primitive days, we had to breed into ourselves a powerful sex urge if we were to continue to exist as a species. The world was sparsely populated; few children lived to be adults; we had to produce as many as possible. Now, on our overcrowded planet, we must rediscover friendship and love and companionship, as the need to propagate the species as rapidly as possible becomes not only unnecessary but questionable, in a world where more and more people are starving. Do you realize that the word relationship came into the vocabulary only a decade or so ago? Before that we had love and friendship; now we talk of relationships. And a relationship is not fulfilled unless it ends in bed. If two men or two women share an apartment together it is, therefore, immediately assumed that it is for erotic reasons, rather than companionship or financial necessity in this day of exorbitant rents. One can have a relationship without commitment. To love, or to be a friend, demands commitment. Friendship and love need to be redeemed, and if saying that is disturbing the universe, it is disturbing it in a creative way.

  A friend of mine who is teaching a high school class in marriage counseling told me that when she has asked her students what constitutes a marriage, none of them has yet come up with anything beyond the notion of romantic, erotic love. What happens when that first, marvelous surge of romance is gone? Is there nothing more enduring to take its place? Perhaps it is in story that we can give our young people glimpses of a wider kind of life.

  I also want to practice self-censorship in my use of vocabulary. People who are constantly using four-letter words usually do so because of the paucity of their vocabulary. If you want to swear really elegantly, go to Shakespeare and the other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers; they know how to use words. The use of limited vocabulary has always struck me as immoral: how is a child to learn vocabulary if the child is urged to stay within what the educational establishment has decided is a fourth-grade or a seventh-grade level? Certainly, in the late fifties and early sixties, when limited vocabulary was popular, the word tesseract was not to be found on any approved list.

  We think because we have words, not the other way around, and the greater our vocabulary, the greater our ability to think conceptually. The first people a dictator puts in jail after a coup are the writers, the teachers, the librarians—because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.

  I teach a group of eleventh and twelfth graders a class in Techniques of Fiction once a week, and each year one of the assignments I give them is to take one act of any play of Shakespeare’s they choose, read it with a pad in front of them, and jot down the words they really like, but which are no longer current in everyday vocabulary. I ask them to put these words into sentences, and then to try to start using them, bringing them back into their daily conversation. It saddens me that each year the words they choose are words that were in the average teenager’s vocabulary only a few years ago. It was far easier for me to read Shakespeare when I was in high school than it is for the kids I teach today—not because I was any brighter but because there was more vocabulary available to the average student when I was in school than there is now.

  Perhaps one of the cleverest things the communists have done is to make education in this country suspect, so that there is a strong anti-intellectual bias among many people who consider themselves patriotic. I heard someone announce, categorically, that all college professors are communists. That’s a pretty ugly way to think. Perhaps education does open our eyes to injustices which make us uncomfortable; if we don’t know about them, we don’t have to do anything about them. Perhaps people who read and write and have enough vocabulary to think with are universe disturbers. But we need to disturb the universe if, as human beings on planet earth, we are to survive. We need to have the vocabulary to question ourselves, and enough courage to disturb creatively, rather than destructively, even if it is going to make us uncomfortable or even hurt.

  A librarian friend of mine told me of a woman who came to her and urged her to remove The Catcher in the Rye from her library shelves (The Catcher in the Rye has long been a favorite of the vigilante groups). The woman announced that it had 7,432 dirty words in it. “How do you know the exact number?” my friend asked. “I counted them.” “Did you read the book?” “No.”

  How dreary to spend your time counting dirty words, but not reading the book. And how revealing of the person who is counting. We do find what we look for.

  So let us look for beauty and grace, for love and friendship, for that which is creative and birth-giving and soul-stretching. Let us dare to laugh at ourselves, healthy, affirmative laughter. Only when we take ourselves lightly can we take ourselves really seriously, so that we are given the courage to say, “Yes! I dare disturb the universe.”

  Lecture presented at the Library of Congress, November 16, 1983.

  Introduction to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition of A Wrinkle in Time

  It’s twenty-five years since the publication of A Wrinkle in Time, and longer than that since I wrote it, and it is hard to believe that more than a quarter of a century has passed.

  When I wrote Wrinkle, I was in a state of transition. We had been living in northwest Connecticut for nearly a decade, and were ready to move back to New York City. When we left the frustrations and stresses of Manhattan and decided to raise our family in the protected environment of a small, dairy-farm village where there were more cows than people, my husband thought he had left the theater forever. But forever (to my joy) was over, and Hugh was going back to the theater, and this move was going to be what is now called “culture shock” for our children. So we bought a tent and five sleeping bags and set off on a cross-continent camping trip.

  As we crossed the vast North American continent, I continued the thinking that had begun a few months earlier when I had stumbled across a book of Einstein’s and discovered that for me higher math is easier than lower math. My background in science was nil, and in any case the new sciences that excited me weren’t being taught when I was in school and college.

  There’s nothing like marriage, children, leaving home (I was born in Manhattan) to start one asking all the old questions: What does life mean? Does it matter? What is the universe like? Is there a pattern and a plan? And am I part of it?

  The old philosophies left me unsatisfied. The religious establishment made the mistake of answering the great questions to which there are no answers, only new questions. I would walk the dogs at night, looking at the incredible sweep of stars above me, and philosophies and theologies centered only on this planet, and usually on only a small segment of the population, seemed totally inadequate. They left me hungry for something more marvelous.

  We left on our cross-country trip in the early spring of 1959 and the first idea for Wrinkle came to me as we were driving across the Painted Desert. The names Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which simply popped into my head. I turned around in the car and said, “Hey, kids, I’ve just thought of three great names, Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which. I’ll have to write a book about them sometime.” And so the names of the three cosmic bag ladies went into the subconscious creative slow cooker. In the evenings, in the tent, I read from the box of books I had brought with me: more Einstein; Planck, and his quantum theory;
books on the macrocosmic world of astrophysics; books on the microcosmic world of particle physics. There I found ideas about the nature of being which stimulated and fascinated me. When we got home, my husband went right into a play, and I sat down at the desk and typed out, “It was a dark and stormy night,” and the book poured out of my fingers. Evenings, I would read to my children what I had written during the day, and they would say, “Oh, Mother, go back to the typewriter!” (They didn’t always say that.)

  When I finished the manuscript, I was drained and excited. I believed it to be not only totally different from my six previously published books but by far the best thing I had ever written. My children loved it; my husband loved it; my agent loved it. I hoped that its publication would end a decade during which I had received countless rejection slips for more traditional books, half a dozen of which are still in typescript on my shelves.

  Well, I was kept hanging for two years, by many different publishers.

  “What is it?” I would be asked. “Is it fantasy or science fiction?”

  “It’s a book.”

  “But who is it for? Is it for children, or adults?”

  “It’s for people. Don’t people read books?”

  Over and over again, I received nothing more than the formal, printed rejection slip. These cold, impersonal rejections hurt. I began to doubt myself. Didn’t any of what I saw in the book get onto the typewritten page?

  I had written Wrinkle beginning in the late summer of 1959 and finished in early 1960. The world was still in chaos. While my husband was reestablishing himself in the theater, the children and I stayed in the country. War with Russia seemed imminent. At school, the children were taught to crouch under their little wooden desks, their hands over their heads, in case an atom bomb fell on the school. What insanity! Some of my feelings about this insanity are expressed in Wrinkle. In it, I was trying to write about my own questions, my own affirmation of meaning despite seeming chaos. (After Wrinkle was published, I was frequently asked if Camazotz didn’t represent Soviet Russia. Interesting: nobody asks that anymore.)

  We moved back to New York, which no longer seemed more insane than the rest of the world. Air-raid sirens going off every day at noon, signs for air-raid shelters, for closed highways “in case of enemy attack,” seemed no more realistic than crouching under a desk.

  And the rejection slips continued. How could they seem important against a background of a planet gone mad? They did. My book was a candle in the dark for me, and a hope.

  A form rejection slip came on the Monday before Christmas 1961. I was sitting on the bed, wrapping Christmas presents and trying to feel brave, and thinking I was succeeding. After Christmas, I discovered that I had sent a necktie to a three-year-old girl and a bottle of perfume to a bachelor uncle. I called my agent. “Send it back. It’s too different. Nobody’s going to publish it. It’s too hard on my family. Every time it’s rejected, I bleed all over the living-room rug.”

  He sent it back, and that ought to have been the end of it. But my mother was with us for Christmas, and I gave a party for some of her old New York friends, and one of them happened to belong to a small writing group led by John Farrar, co-founder of Farrar, Straus and Company. She insisted that I meet him. I was, at that moment, not particularly interested in meeting any publisher. But she set up an appointment, and I took the subway down to Union Square, bearing my very battered manuscript.

  John had read my first novel, The Small Rain, and had admired it. I told him that Wrinkle was very different, but he was eager to read it. In two weeks I heard from my agent that he had read it, and really liked it, but was afraid of it. My heart sank. I had been so hopeful, after leaving John’s office, that the long wait might be at an end.

  John and Hal Vursell (who was to be my editor from then on until his death) sent the worn manuscript to a librarian for assessment. She wrote back, “I think this is the worst book I have ever read. It reminds me of The Wizard of Oz.”

  I’m not sure how many more weeks it was before John called me to tell me that he was going to publish the book. I went back downtown to have lunch with him and Hal, and they warned me, “Now, dear, we don’t want you to be disappointed, but this book is not going to sell. It’s much too difficult for children. We’re publishing it as a self-indulgence because we love it, and we don’t want you to be hurt.”

  And then, in the spring of 1962, A Wrinkle in Time was published, and it took off like a skyrocket.

  The problem wasn’t that it was too difficult for children. It was too difficult for adults.

  Madeleine L’Engle

  Crosswicks, 1987

  A Chapter from the Original Manuscript of A Wrinkle in Time

  ISBN: 978-1-4668-0270-4

  Cover photograph copyright © 1992 by Sigrid Estrada

  Speech text copyright © 1984 by Madeleine L’Engle

  Speech, 25th anniversary edition introduction, and chapter from the original manuscript included with the permission of Crosswicks, Ltd. in cooperation with McIntosh& Otis, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  eBook edition, May 2012

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