The Moment of Tenderness - Madeleine L 'Engle Page 0,1

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.

In another way, though, all of these stories are indeed “vintage L’Engle” in that they resist fitting easily into “young adult” or “adult” categories. She always insisted that she was simply a writer, with no qualifications or labels. When A Wrinkle in Time was making the rounds of publishers she would be asked by skeptical editors, “Who is it for? Adults or children?” and she would respond in frustration, “It’s for people! Don’t people read books?” These stories, too, are for people, and while some feature younger protagonists, they also span a range of genres and styles. Additionally, most of these stories resist a resolution and