Introduction
By Charlotte Jones Voiklis
I was about nine years old, curiously but quietly poking about my grandmother Madeleine L’Engle’s manuscripts so as not to disturb her writing and risk losing the privilege of keeping her company in her “Ivory Tower” while she worked. The Tower was just a room over the garage in the eighteenth-century New England farmhouse where she and my grandfather had lived and raised three children during the 1950s and where they still spent weekends, holidays, and long stretches of summer. I’m not sure who christened it “the Tower,” but the name was used ironically by both her and the rest of the family, an acknowledgment of the privilege of solitude and time. The manuscripts I was poking about in were housed in repurposed ream boxes with words like “Eaton” and “Corrasable Bond” on the sides, and in black three-ring binders whose leather casings were beginning to crack. There were dozens of boxes and binders, including ones with A Wrinkle in Time, The Arm of the Starfish, and A Wind in the Door written on them, but I wasn’t interested in the manuscripts of stories that could be read as real books: I was more curious about the scraps and stories and studies in the other boxes. I came across “Gilberte Must Play Bach” in one of those. I’m not sure why I stopped to read this particular one, but I liked the French name in the title, and the imperative. The story was strange to me, and sad, and although the girl in the story was named Claudine, I understood it to be autobiographical. The sadness of the story—and its unresolvedness—shook me and gave me a glimpse at the depth of things we might discover about the people we love.
When my grandmother died in 2007, there were papers and manuscripts distributed among three different houses and an office. It’s taken time to organize and inventory those materials, and it’s also been a considerable emotional journey for me to read, assess, and come to the decision that these stories should be shared publicly.
When I read “Julio at the Party,” an onionskin manuscript held together with a rusty paper clip and folded in half, tossed in a box of artifacts, books, and papers, I thought at first that the story must be by some other writer who had given it to her in a class, or over tea or coffee for comment. However, on a second read I recognized details—the nickname Horrors, the malapropisms of the title character—that convinced me it was indeed hers. I later found that the short story had been taken from an unpublished novel manuscript, written and rewritten several times in the 1950s, called Rachel Benson (or, alternatively, Bedroom with a Skylight).
More exploration over time into the loose-leaf binders and manuscript boxes revealed more than forty short stories, most written in the 1940s and 1950s, when she was first an aspiring playwright, then a promising novelist, and then a despairing writer who struggled to find a publisher. All but one were written before A Wrinkle in Time, the 1962 classic that made her career, and I date that one story post-Wrinkle because of the unique typeface of the typewriter she used—oversized, square, and sans serif. It was an early electric typewriter and I remember the satisfaction and mastery I felt when my fingers were strong enough to prevail over the resistance the keys provided. That story, called “That Which Is Left,” shocked and shook me, too, because of the narrator’s selfishness.
The earliest stories were written for college creative writing classes. The manuscript for “Gilberte Must Play Bach” has teacher’s comments and a grade (A–). Some have more than one version, reworked over time, and there is one bound manuscript of collected short stories called Stories from Greenwich Village, which was compiled in the early 1940s when she was working as an understudy and bit player. She lived with a rotating band of roommates in the Manhattan neighborhood of Greenwich Village, which at the time was an affordable haven for artists and “bohemians.”
The stories collected here are arranged in a loosely chronological order, and you can see her growth as a writer. The first five are the earliest, and in each the protagonist gets progressively older, almost a cumulative coming-of-age narrative. Many of these earliest stories were re-imagined and revised and appeared in other forms in later work. In particular, her novel Camilla has a scene similar to “The Birthday,” The Small Rain incorporates much of “The Mountains Shall Stand Forever,” and “One Day in Spring” is a scene that is later revised in The Joys of Love. Later stories, too, were incorporated into other books: “A Room in Baltimore” and “The Foreigners” were revised as episodes in Two-Part Invention and A Circle of Quiet (which also mentions Julio’s party).
Several of these stories were published in Smith College’s literary magazine. “Summer Camp” was published in New Threshold, a national journal of student opinion, and it was that story that caught the attention of an editor at the publishing house Vanguard, who wrote to Madeleine and asked her if she was working on a novel. She wasn’t, but she quickly got to work on The Small Rain. “Please Wear Your Rubbers” was published in Mademoiselle, and “Madame, Or…” in The Dude: The Magazine Devoted to Pleasure. “Poor Little Saturday,” a story that combines Southern gothic and fantasy, has been anthologized a number of times. Some stories have multiple drafts, and those collected here are from the most complete and finished versions.
A great deal in these stories is autobiographical, especially in those that carefully observe an intense emotional crisis. One doesn’t have to be familiar with Madeleine’s biography to enjoy them, but it does add a layer of interest and understanding to know that her childhood was marked by loneliness, that her adolescence was spent in the South, that she was an actress and a published writer before she married, and that her early years of motherhood were also years that she described as being a decade of intellectual isolation and professional rejection.
The most surprising story to me is “Prelude to the First Night Alone,” which I understood only after learning more about her friendship with Marie Donnet while my sister Léna Roy and I were doing research for our middle-grade biography Becoming Madeleine. Marie was Madeleine’s best friend in college, and together they moved to New York City to pursue theater careers. The friendship frayed as their circle enlarged and they had different opportunities and rewards. Their breakup was devastating to Madeleine, and “Prelude,” written shortly after, is raw and imperfect and fascinating for this reason.
The rest of the stories are in a variety of genres: there’s satire, horror, and science fiction, as well as realism and the careful observation of human interaction and moments of change or renewal. In “Summer Camp,” the protagonist fails a moral test. “That Which Is Left” has an unreliable narrator. In “Madame, Or…” and “Julio at the Party” there are subtle adult sexual themes. “The Foreign Agent” has a protagonist who struggles against a controlling writer mother, and “Poor Little Saturday” and “The Fact of the Matter” have elements of fantasy and horror that highlight Madeleine’s skills at pacing and suspense.
In some ways only a tiny handful are what may be considered “vintage L’Engle,” or the kind of story a knowledgeable reader might expect from her: one in which challenges are overcome and growing pains are real, but so, too, is the promise of joy and laughter. Even the title story in this collection is bittersweet, as the moment of tenderness becomes a memory and something apart from the main character’s daily life. The final story, “A Sign for a Sparrow,” is set in a post-apocalyptic future, with Earth no longer able to sustain life after nuclear war and civil society in disarray. The only hope for human beings is to find other habitable planets. The main character is a cryptologist who must leave his wife and child in order to find a better world for them and the rest of Earth’s inhabitants. His journey and what he finds at the end of it recalls what she said of her most famous book, A Wrinkle in Time: that it was her “psalm of praise to life,” a story about a universe in which she hoped to believe.