Conversations with Madeleine L’Engle by Jackie C. Horne (review)

The New York-born American writer Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007) is still best known today for her science fiction fantasy family novel A Wrinkle in Time, inspired in part by the theories of quantum physics and astrophysics. Published in 1962, it won the coveted Newbery Medal for children’s and young adult literature in 1963.

The success was not a given, as L’Engle had had to put up with numerous rejections from publishers. In her extremely diverse oeuvre of over sixty books, she ventured into a variety of genres and themes, including poetry, short stories, science fiction, mystery, adventure, and both young adult and adult literature, as well as prayer and theological essays. In her later years, Christian motifs and content became increasingly important.

Just as variable as her work was L’Engle’s biography and her private and professional occupations, for example as an actress, sales-woman, librarian, or lecturer with numerous lectures on literary and religious topics.

Both are reflected in this volume, which reprints interviews of Madeleine L’Engle with various interlocutors, such as Roy Newquist, Linda Chisholm, Cheryl Forbes, Studs Terkel, and Betsy Hearne, in chronological order from 1967 to 2006.

Editor Jackie C. Horne contextualizes these interviews in her illuminating introduction, in which she outlines the major themes of each interview and points out the contradictions and repetitions, half-truths, and wishful thinking in L’Engle’s statements about herself. She suggests that the interviews reveal a high degree of self-stylization on the part of the author to the point of fictionalizing her own biography.

The introduction is preceded by a list of “Novels, Plays, and Nonfiction by Madeleine L’Engle”; it is followed by a helpful chronology of the major biographical events in the author‘s life and work.

Because the interviews mark different stages in her life, and the interviewers provide different perspectives, they touch on a wide range of topics. The first interview, from 1967, follows the success of A Wrinkle in Time and L’Engle’s development as a writer, but also takes up the linguistic-philosophical discourses from France. Later interviews discuss topics such as cosmic questions, L’Engle’s religious views based on an agnostic worldview, and a discussion of a censorship of some of her works for religious reasons. She talks about her preference for truth in favor of facts; presents herself as a woman who knows how to best balance family life and work as a writer; and talks about her literary role models, the continuation of her literary characters in several works, her fascination with science, her school and college experiences, and, above all, her literary writing and works, including, in addition to A Wrinkle in Time, The Arm of the Starfish, An Acceptable Time, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, A Wind in the Door, The Small Rain, and A Severed Wasp.

This volume offers a fascinating portrait of an author and mother with her extraordinary circumstances and working conditions as a representative of the educated middle class in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows how L’Engle, inspired by the intellectual currents of her time, at the same time thought and wrote in opposition to the movements of the zeitgeist.

In the interviews, L’Engle uses imagery and anecdotes; she polarizes, provokes, speaks concretely about her use of language, about her writing process, and about memories that have impressed themselves on her. Both her way of speaking and the interview genre make for a vivid read that revives and pays tribute to this dazzling author, rendering something of her energy, her humor, the unconditionality of her passion for literature, and her multilayered religious sense of mission.