|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
A Creativity in Time
| Article
# : |
10780 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
2,406 Words |
| Author
: |
Alexandra Johnson
Alexandra Johnson teaches writing at Harvard University and
has written for the New Yorker, the Nation, the New York
Times Book Review, Ms., and numerous national publications.
She received a 1990 PEN Special Citation for The Novel Self,
a portrait of women writers and their diaries. |
In 1958, on the cusp of her fortieth birthday, Madeleine L'Engle sat down to reflect on the dry season in her writing life. "During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict," she recalls. "The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump."
But write she did. After moving from New York to Crosswicks, the family's home in rural Connecticut, L'Engle managed to complete several novels. The most current, The Lost Innocent, was then circulating among New York publishers. One publisher in particular had expressed strong interest in it. L'Engle had published her first novel, Small Rain, in 1945, and her second, Camilla Dickinson (1951), had garnered critical acclaim, but she had published little since then. A steady stream of rejection letters poured through the mail slot.
On November 29, the morning of her fortieth birthday, the mail brought cards and a slim letter saying, regretfully, that The Lost Innocent had been turned down. L'Engle draped her typewriter "in a great gesture of renunciation." She would give up writing altogether. But while walking around her study in tears, she realized, "my subconscious mind was busy working out a novel about failure." In the clarity of that moment she knew.
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 clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing . . . When the decision is made in the abyss, then it is quite clear that it is not one's own decision at all.
Reflecting back on that moment in A Circle of Quiet, the first volume of her autobiographical writing, L'Engle notes,
When I accepted myself as Madeleine on my fortieth birthday, not a computer's punch out, or my social-security number, or the post-office date on the latest rejection slip, it had nothing to do with the degree of my talent . . . It has everything to do with a way of looking at the universe.
Everything indeed. And up till that moment how had she looked at her creative life? How, in short, did she see her own role in the universe? She realized she'd made.
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
