A Rough Sort of Hope
A posthumously discovered collection of Madeleine L’Engle’s stories offers a new perspective on the author as a Southern expatriate—and a visionary of hope amidst the darkness.
Review by T. Wyatt Reynolds
After her grandmother’s death in 2007, Charlotte Jones Voiklis dug through her grandmother’s belongings and, where most of us might have found knitting needles or loose antiques, she found stories—40 in all. To be fair, her grandmother was also Madeleine L’Engle, which is not true for me despite my desperate wishes as a child. My fondness for L’Engle and her work was reinforced by a photograph my mother hung outside my childhood room. It was an image of a white, clapboard, country church surrounded by live oaks laced with Spanish moss. I remember asking her where it was, and she told me how my great-great-grandfather had helped build the small church in rural North Florida. Over time, the photograph became passé, blending into the walls as my family moved houses and towns and I left for college. Until one day, when I was talking to my mom on the phone about her latest read—a memoir by Madeleine L’Engle—and the photograph came up again. It turned out that Ms. L’Engle’s grandfather had helped build and attended that church with my own ancestors. From then on, she felt like family in a way that all authors from the constricted South feel to me.
Much like L’Engle, I left the South for Northern cities. I haven’t spent more than two weeks in the South in nearly a decade, but it is a place that draws me back in as soon as I see Spanish Moss and feel my hair curling from the humidity. This seems to be the experience of Southern writers; we can leave the South, but the South refuses to leave us. We experience the rest of the country as a peculiar people. It seems to be from this communally Southern expat experience that L’Engle writes the stories of The Moment of Tenderness.
L’Engle has an ability to touch on the innate homesickness of the human condition.
One of the stories, “The Foreigners,” ends with one of L’Engle’s most poignant questions: “But where, after we have made the great decision to leave the security of childhood and move on into the vastness of maturity, does anybody ever feel completely at home?” L’Engle has an ability to touch on the innate homesickness of the human condition. She knew all too well that we have no lasting city here. L’Engle herself spent much of her early life moving between disparate locations; originally from North Florida, she was raised in Manhattan before being packed off to boarding schools first in France and then South Carolina. Similarly, the protagonists of these stories are uncanny—exilic figures beyond strange—who help us recognize our own pilgrim way.
“Poor Little Saturday” tells the story of an adolescent boy in South Georgia riddled with malaria who explores an abandoned, haunted plantation house. The house is now inhabited by a “witch woman.” The witch is able to cure his malaria and proves quite friendly, if distant. She is surrounded in her home by cats of various breeds, a girl she pulled out of a painting, and a camel named Sunday, drawn across the ocean from Egypt, the witch’s home. L’Engle describes the witch as having fingers that “had the strength of the ocean and the coolness of jade.” The witch could as easily be Madeleine L’Engle remembering her visits back to the South as she could be Selina from “White Under the Moon the Long Road Lies” as she could be a foreshadowing of one of the three angelic female figures from Wrinkle in Time. The boy returns often to the abandoned plantation and each time finds friendship and healing. Eventually, when he cannot provide an acceptable explanation for a ring the witch has given him, the townspeople discover where he has been sneaking off to play. Naturally they try to kill the witch. They fail, and she rides off into the swamps on the back of her camel. The story then ends, as it began, with the boy alone. This sense of absurdity and exile in the South permeates several of the stories in this collection. Indeed, one contribution of the collection itself is that it seems to suggest we should consider L’Engle more in the context of Southern gothic writers like Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy than children’s authors like Lewis and Rowling.
The Word, preached in that little clapboard white church in North Florida and by Mrs. Whatsit in A Wrinkle in Time, reminds us we are in exile and in need of moments of tenderness like those in this volume.
Voiklis writes in the introduction that the tie that binds the 18 stories of The Moment of Tenderness together is a “yearning towards hope.” Perhaps that it is why I found these stories particularly impactful amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. They are drawn towards hope in different forms, but all of them have an almost Cormac McCarthy-esque roughness to them. This is not the L’Engle so many of us grew up with from A Wrinkle in Time or A Circle of Quiet. These stories end with addiction, almost affairs, knives in bellies, broken glass and hearts, homelessness, and human sacrifice.
Appropriately for an author who enjoyed twisting the laws of physics in her writing, the collection ends with a preface. The final paragraph of the volume is a translation from an alien text, which reads: “In the beginning was the Word… And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” These words comfort the character who translates them, much like the stories of this book may comfort the reader even as they are discomfited by their rough edges. They draw us to see how Madeleine L’Engle evolved from a homesick child, to a struggling actress, to the author of a “psalm of praise to life” in her later work. The Word, preached in that little clapboard white church in North Florida and by Mrs. Whatsit in A Wrinkle in Time, reminds us we are in exile and in need of moments of tenderness like those in this volume. After and even amidst all the darkness and repeated sighs of frustrated protagonists, we are left with a flash of light. While Madeleine L’Engle may have gone to sleep, her stories play on.
T. Wyatt Reynolds is a Southern expat who studied history and psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently pursuing an MAR concentrated in the History of Christianity at Yale Divinity School, where he is also affiliated with the Institute of Sacred Music.
The Moment of Tenderness was published on April 21, 2020, by Grand Central Publishing. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own on their website here.
