JOURNAL
(Photo to the right, taken by Aimee Zaring in Santorini)

LITERARY HEROINES HAVE I LOST
January 15, 2008

As I settle into the new year, I am still mourning the deaths of two of my favorite female writers in 2007: Madeleine L’Engle and Elizabeth Hardwick. On the surface, the two women’s works seem to have little in common--L’Engle is perhaps best known for her fantasy children’s classics and Hardwick for her astute literary criticism--but to me, both women were preoccupied with similar themes in their writing: compassion, redemption, and love.

Madeleine L’Engle
Nov. 29, 1918 - Sept. 6, 2007

“For the things that are seen are temporal, but things that are unseen are eternal.”
A Wrinkle in Time

“I have often been asked if my Christianity affects my stories, and surely it is the other way around; my stories affect my Christianity, restore me, shake me by the scruff of the neck, and pull this straying sinner into an awed faith.”
Walking on Water

Madeleine L’Engle was born in Manhattan. An only child, she grew up in a loving home in which she had the privilege, as she describes in The Rock That is Higher, of reading the Bible as story--not as a wholly factual story, capable of only one interpretation, but “that story which is the revelation of truth.”

A Wrinkle in Time (1962), which according to the New York Times sold eight million copies, was one of the first books I fell in love with as a child. I think it was partly because, as L’Engle once explained, “It’s a smart girl’s book, but it’s about a girl who isn’t yet smart.” I, like Meg Murry, struggled--and still struggle--for meaning in the midst of chaos, to find my unique voice and place in a world where I so often feel like a misfit. I believe, as L’Engle did, that fantasy and myth can open our minds to greater truths. And if I didn’t learn the lesson as a small child from attending Catholic Mass every Sunday or from the assurances of my family, I certainly learned it from reading books like Wrinkle--that the power of love can overcome the darkness.

L’Engle was a prolific writer, publishing over sixty books, but she did not always have an easy time of it. As I try to find an agent for my first novel, I find solace in the fact that L’Engle also went through a lonely, dispiriting period in her writing career. Even after she had already had six books published, she ran into a roadblock with Wrinkle.

In A Circle of Quiet, L’Engle recounts the story of how, on her fortieth birthday, after receiving yet another rejection letter, she covered the typewriter, “in a great gesture of renunciation.” Then, after crying her eyes out, she suddenly uncovered the typewriter, because while she had been crying, she realized her subconscious had been working on yet another novel, one about failure. “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. It didn’t matter how small or inadequate my talent. If I never had another book published, and it was very clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing.” Wrinkle went on to win the Newbery Medal award in 1963. (A scene from Pretty Woman comes to mind in which Julia Roberts’ character, her hands full of shopping bags, says to the snooty store assistant, “Big mistake. Big. Huge.”)

But Wrinkle has had its share of detractors. In fact, the American Library Association lists it as one of the most commonly challenged books in the United States, some religious conservatives accusing it of misrepresenting God, promoting witchcraft, and undermining certain religious beliefs. L’Engle, at first, was dumbfounded by the attacks. She had written Wrinkle “as a hymn of praise to God.” She later came to accept attacks on her work, but in 1990 when she gave a talk at Wheaton College in Illinois, a college at which she’d always felt at home, her own faith came under attack by an audience member. The encounter left her hurt and upset, but she later told the dean of the college, “I’m afraid Mrs. X would not want me to pray for her, but that is all I know to do.”

Only in recent years have I discovered L’Engle’s spiritual works and meditations. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art is one of my favorites. The idea for the book was prompted when L’Engle was invited to lecture on the subject of the Christian artist. “I am beginning to see,” she concludes at the end of the book, “that almost every definition I find of being a Christian is also a definition of being an artist.” She compares the creative process to prayer, to Christian contemplation. To truly serve a work of art, she declares, the artist must die to self, just as a Christian, to be fully aligned with Christ, must die to self. “[E]ven when one denies God, to serve music, or painting, or words is a religious activity, whether or not the conscious mind is ready to accept that fact. Basically there can be no categories such as ‘religious’ art and ‘secular’ art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore ‘religious.’”

When she was in a serious automobile accident in 1991, L’Engle, feeling lonely, abandoned, and in considerable pain, wondered why God had kept her alive. Why was there so much suffering in the world? “The closest we get to understanding is a kind of subdued gratitude that God created us human beings with a modicum of free will,” she writes in The Rock that is Higher. “We are not puppets being manipulated by a master puppeteer. We do have some say in our own story, and often we tell the story in uncomprehending and sometimes evil ways, and innocent people suffer because of the wrongdoing of others. But whatever our experience is, God is there, in it with us. . . . That isn’t really an answer, but it’s all we’re going to get, and it’s enough.”

To me, L’Engle was, and will continue to be, a bridge between believers and non-believers, a pragmatic voice of reason and Truth, of mercy and hope and love, in an ever-increasing polarized “globalized” world.

Elizabeth Hardwick
July 27, 1916 - Dec. 2, 2007

“At times I am not certain who is imagining the working people living in their clashing homes, lying in their landscape, as if beneath a layer of underclothes. Or those gathering rubbish, dear indeed to them as relics. Or those threading through love, missing the eye of the needle.”
Sleepless Nights

“The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.”
Interview with Elizabeth Hardwick, The Paris Review

Hardwick was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky but after college, she pursued her lifelong dream of living in the Big Apple and quickly made a name for herself among the New York City literati, eventually even helping found the New York Review of Books.

Much (maybe too much) has been written about Hardwick’s tumultuous two-decade marriage to the confessional poet Robert Lowell--his manic-depressive episodes and betrayals and her heroic loyalty and capacity for forgiveness. And much attention, too, has been paid to her literary criticism, including her most well-known collection of essays, Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974), which helped revolutionize the landscape of feminist criticism. Novelist and essayist Jim Lewis, in a recent tribute to Hardwick in Slate, wrote “she was the best literary essayist of the last century. Better--yes--than Edmund Wilson, better than Trilling or Steiner or Sontag. She was not as broad as they were, but she was deeper, and line for line a better stylist.”

But perhaps Hardwick’s least-known work, sadly, is her fiction. She wrote many exemplary short stories (several volumes of The Best American Short Stories series feature her work) and three novels: The Ghostly Lover (1945), The Simple Truth (1955), and the semi-autobiographical Sleepless Nights (1979), which earned a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination.

“I am very grateful for your kind letter,” Hardwick wrote me in 2004, after I had written to gush over her work, particularly Sleepless Nights. “I don’t think I have many Kentucky readers,” she went on to write. “Well, it’s not Gone With the Wind.”

Maybe not, but my copy of Gone With the Wind looks brand new compared to my dog-eared Sleepless Nights in which not a single page has been unmarked. I did not read Sleepless Nights. I communed with it. (I think the saying is true, that the characters we meet in novels can seem more real to us than the people we know.)

Hardwick had that rare and unique gift of forcing us to see the people the world routinely ignores. She wrote about sad, pathetic, tragic figures. In an interview for The New York Times with Richard Locke in 1979, Hardwick explained that the narrator of Sleepless Nights (also named Elizabeth) is drawn to “identification with damaged, desperate women on the streets, cleaning women, rotters in midtown hotels, failed persons of all kinds. C’est moi, in some sense. . . .”

From where does this pity come? Elizabeth of Sleepless Nights remembers the evangelical tent meetings she attended in her youth, where the lowly and dispirited sought redemption. “Perhaps here,” she writes, “began a prying sympathy for the victims of sloth and recurrent mistakes, sympathy for the tendency of lives to obey the laws of gravity and to sink downward, falling as gently and slowly as a kite, or violently breaking, smashing.” Suffering is the great equalizer in Sleepless Nights, and it is through suffering, Hardwick continually points out, that the possibility of transformation and redemption can occur.

Though Harkwick was raised a Presbyterian, she later claimed to be a nonbeliever. L’Engle wrote in Walking on Water that she believed the two essential ingredients for a book to be considered “Christian” are these: it must convey a message of love and an overall affirmation of life. Other than the Bible, I am hard pressed to name a single book that concerns itself more intently or exhaustively with the destitute and downtrodden, the fakes and failures, the weak and weary, the unloved and unlovable than Sleepless Nights. Critic Diane Johnson suggests that Hardwick “. . . does not love these characters because she knows them so much as she knows them because she loves them.”

Perhaps Hardwick was not a believer, but when Elizabeth cries out for the long-suffering bag ladies on the streets of New York City, “Have mercy on them, someone,” I can’t help but hear the compassion of Christ, just as I can’t help but hear the persistent ring of hope, of life affirmed, when she writes, “Perhaps it is true that being from where I am I was born a gambler. And as the gambler in Dostoevsky’s great story says: It is true that only one out of a hundred wins, but what is that to me?”

I should also mention that the world lost another literary grand dame in 2007: Grace Paley. If L’Engle is correct, and Heaven is wherever God’s will is being done, then it isn’t hard to imagine these three extraordinary women gathered together somewhere now, discussing great literature.