A Wrinkle in Time: 50th Anniversary Edition Read online

  For Charles Wadsworth Camp and Wallace Collin Franklin

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  INTRODUCTION

  1 - MRS WHATSIT

  2 - MRS WHO

  3 - MRS WHICH

  4 - THE BLACK THING

  5 - THE TESSERACT

  6 - THE HAPPY MEDIUM

  7 - THE MAN WITH RED EYES

  8 - THE TRANSPARENT COLUMN

  9 - IT

  10 - ABSOLUTE ZERO

  11 - AUNT BEAST

  12 - THE FOOLISH AND THE WEAK

  ALSO BY MADELEINE L’ENGLE

  AFTERWORD

  QUESTIONS FOR THE AUTHOR

  NEWBERY MEDAL ACCEPTANCE SPEECH - THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE

  Copyright Page

  INTRODUCTION

  IN JULY OF 1983, there was a symposium at Simmons College entitled “Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?” Madeleine L’Engle spoke the first night. I spoke the last night. Her immediate answer to Prufrock’s question was: “We’d better dare.” My immediate answer was: “Certainly not. I hardly dare disturb my springer spaniel.” I was on a number of programs with the incomparable Madeleine. We joked once that we were bookends to conferences. If she began one, I’d end it, and vice versa. So although I saw her and chatted with her on a number of occasions through the years, I am sorry to say that I was a bit too much in awe of her intellect and daring spirit to really become a friend.

  I first met her, as most people have, while reading A Wrinkle in Time. During the sixties and early seventies I was struggling to become a writer and gathering my own small mountain of rejections. I wasn’t a child who, like Madeleine L’Engle, knew from an early age that she’d be a writer. I had decided to become a writer after I was already a wife and mother, so I was reading the acclaimed children’s books of the period to educate myself. How did they do it—these writers who not only found the yellow brick road to publication but a gold medal at the end of it? Which is how I came to read the 1963 Newbery Award winner.

  “It was a dark and stormy night.” My gracious, what was she doing starting her book with Bulwer-Lytton’s infamous first line? Was this to be a send-up of Victorian fiction? And then, just as she’s stirring up a dark and stormy plot with a miserable misfit of a heroine, a mysteriously missing father, and a strange younger brother, in blows a comical little personage named, of all things, Mrs Whatsit. Mrs Who? No, that’s one of her friends. The third one is a Mrs Which. I was reminded of the Abbott and Costello piece Who’s on First? Before we’ve digested this combination of suspense and comedy, we find ourselves flung into an exhilarating ride through multiple dimensions and strange new worlds and are asked to puzzle over words of wisdom from sages and saints from every age. In one book we confront quantum physics, Christian theology, and a cosmic struggle between good and evil. It is not difficult to understand why so many publishers were afraid to touch it. Is it science fiction? Is it fantasy? Is it religious allegory? Whatever it is, could a child understand it, much less like it?

  But the book that was too hard and strange for adult editors has been, for the last fifty years, joyfully claimed by young readers—millions of them from all over the world. Last March I went to see the documentary Chekhov for Children. And there on the screen was a sixth-grader named Rebecca Stead. For me it was a sort of wrinkle in time, for I was seeing the author at just about the time that Madeleine L’Engle made a magical visit to Rebecca’s New York City public school. I’m guessing it was about then that young Rebecca fell in love with A Wrinkle in Time. Her own Newbery Award book, When You Reach Me, is a stunning homage to the book she cherished as a child.

  I asked my son John what he remembered about reading the book thirty-five years or so ago. He remembers, he says, that “A Wrinkle in Time was one of my first imaginary trips through the space-time continuum, and that Meg was one of my first imaginary girlfriends whom I would have been willing to travel through time with.”

  I caught myself smiling at that. Wouldn’t Meg, who considered herself so unattractive, be pleased and surprised to hear my handsome son say that? And, of course, that’s one reason we readers love the book. We know Meg and Charles Wallace and Calvin. They’re not simply characters in a story, they are friends we care about, think about, and remember long after we’ve closed the book.

  In many ways Meg is a strange character for a boy to choose as an imaginary girlfriend. Like the young Madeleine L’Engle, she is the weird outsider longing to fit in. Still, is there a child alive who has never had this experience? Most of us think we are alone in this—that everyone else belongs. We are the different one. We are the odd child out, and we yearn to be a part of the crowd. A wonderful aspect of A Wrinkle in Time is its celebration of the different. In fact, hell, as it is embodied on Camazotz, is being exactly like everyone else. A child who does not bounce his ball just as every other child does is taken into custody to be reeducated until he conforms. It is Meg’s very “difference,” her terrible temper, that saves her from being taken over by the malignant IT.

  In our world, there are the scientifically minded that scoff at the stories told by the religious and the religiously inclined who refuse to accept the theories of modern science. The first group will wonder how a woman of Madeleine L’Engle’s intellect could possibly be a Christian, and the second will wonder how a real Christian could set such store by the words of Godless scientists. But Madeleine was, first of all, a searcher for truth, and so A Wrinkle in Time draws us into a new kind of thinking. Things are truly not simply what they seem in science or in religion. And if we graduate, as she did, from Newton to Einstein, we might discover that those two worlds are not as far apart as we imagined.

  A Wrinkle in Time, however, is not loved for either its scientific or its religious insights. It is loved for its story. Barry Lopez says that stories should be important to us “insofar as they sustain us with illumination and heal us.” This book does both. My daughter Mary has probably read every piece of fiction Madeleine ever wrote and is still a bit envious that her mother actually knew Ms. L’Engle. I was well aware of how many times Mary had reread A Ring of Endless Light, so I wondered how well she remembered A Wrinkle in Time thirty-odd years later. “What I remember,” she said, “is love. The hint of young romantic love between Meg and Calvin (and, of course, they get married later), love between husband and wife, between parent and child, between brother and sister (that’s how Meg saves Charles Wallace, you know), and the love between Meg and Aunt Beast.”

  Fifty years later, I think Madeleine would love for her book to be remembered that way.

  —Katherine Paterson

  1

  MRS WHATSIT

  IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT.

  In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraithlike shadows that raced along the ground.

  The house shook.

  Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.

  She wasn’t usually afraid of weather.—It’s not just the weather, she thought.—It’s the weather on top of everything else. On top of me. On top of Meg Murry doing everything wrong.

  School. School was all wrong. She’d been dropped down to the lowest section in her grade. That morning one of her teachers had said crossly, “Really, Meg, I don’t understand how a child with parents as brilliant as yours are supposed to be can be such a poor student. If you don’t manage to do a little better you’ll have to stay back next year.”

  During lun
ch she’d roughhoused a little to try to make herself feel better, and one of the girls said scornfully, “After all, Meg, we aren’t grade-school kids anymore. Why do you always act like such a baby?”

  And on the way home from school, as she walked up the road with her arms full of books, one of the boys had said something about her “dumb baby brother.” At this she’d thrown the books on the side of the road and tackled him with every ounce of strength she had, and arrived home with her blouse torn and a big bruise under one eye.

  Sandy and Dennys, her ten-year-old twin brothers, who got home from school an hour earlier than she did, were disgusted. “Let us do the fighting when it’s necessary,” they told her.

  —A delinquent, that’s what I am, she thought grimly. —That’s what they’ll be saying next. Not Mother. But Them. Everybody Else. I wish Father—

  But it was still not possible to think about her father without the danger of tears. Only her mother could talk about him in a natural way, saying, “When your father gets back—”

  Gets back from where? And when? Surely her mother must know what people were saying, must be aware of the smugly vicious gossip. Surely it must hurt her as it did Meg. But if it did she gave no outward sign. Nothing ruffled the serenity of her expression.

  —Why can’t I hide it, too? Meg thought. Why do I always have to show everything?

  The window rattled madly in the wind, and she pulled the quilt close about her. Curled up on one of her pillows, a gray fluff of kitten yawned, showing its pink tongue, tucked its head under again, and went back to sleep.

  Everybody was asleep. Everybody except Meg. Even Charles Wallace, the “dumb baby brother,” who had an uncanny way of knowing when she was awake and unhappy, and who would come, so many nights, tiptoeing up the attic stairs to her—even Charles Wallace was asleep.

  How could they sleep? All day on the radio there had been hurricane warnings. How could they leave her up in the attic in the rickety brass bed, knowing that the roof might be blown right off the house and she tossed out into the wild night sky to land who knows where?

  Her shivering grew uncontrollable.

  —You asked to have the attic bedroom, she told herself savagely.—Mother let you have it because you’re the oldest. It’s a privilege, not a punishment.

  “Not during a hurricane, it isn’t a privilege,” she said aloud. She tossed the quilt down on the foot of the bed, and stood up. The kitten stretched luxuriously, and looked up at her with huge, innocent eyes.

  “Go back to sleep,” Meg said. “Just be glad you’re a kitten and not a monster like me.” She looked at herself in the wardrobe mirror and made a horrible face, baring a mouthful of teeth covered with braces. Automatically she pushed her glasses into position, ran her fingers through her mouse-brown hair, so that it stood wildly on end, and let out a sigh almost as noisy as the wind.

  The wide wooden floorboards were cold against her feet. Wind blew in the crevices about the window frame, in spite of the protection the storm sash was supposed to offer. She could hear wind howling in the chimneys. From all the way downstairs she could hear Fortinbras, the big black dog, starting to bark. He must be frightened, too. What was he barking at? Fortinbras never barked without reason.

  Suddenly she remembered that when she had gone to the post office to pick up the mail she’d heard about a tramp who was supposed to have stolen twelve sheets from Mrs. Buncombe, the constable’s wife. They hadn’t caught him, and maybe he was heading for the Murrys’ house right now, isolated on a back road as it was; and this time maybe he’d be after more than sheets. Meg hadn’t paid much attention to the talk about the tramp at the time, because the postmistress, with a sugary smile, had asked if she’d heard from her father lately.

  She left her little room and made her way through the shadows of the main attic, bumping against the ping-pong table. —Now I’ll have a bruise on my hip on top of everything else, she thought.

  Next she walked into her old dolls’ house, Charles Wallace’s rocking horse, the twins’ electric trains. “Why must everything happen to me?” she demanded of a large teddy bear.

  At the foot of the attic stairs she stood still and listened. Not a sound from Charles Wallace’s room on the right. On the left, in her parents’ room, not a rustle from her mother sleeping alone in the great double bed. She tiptoed down the hall and into the twins’ room, pushing again at her glasses as though they could help her to see better in the dark. Dennys was snoring. Sandy murmured something about baseball and subsided. The twins didn’t have any problems. They weren’t great students, but they weren’t bad ones, either. They were perfectly content with a succession of B’s and an occasional A or C. They were strong and fast runners and good at games, and when cracks were made about anybody in the Murry family, they weren’t made about Sandy and Dennys.

  She left the twins’ room and went on downstairs, avoiding the creaking seventh step. Fortinbras had stopped barking. It wasn’t the tramp this time, then. Fort would go on barking if anybody was around.

  —But suppose the tramp does come? Suppose he has a knife? Nobody lives near enough to hear if we screamed and screamed and screamed. Nobody’d care, anyhow.

  —I’ll make myself some cocoa, she decided.—That’ll cheer me up, and if the roof blows off, at least I won’t go off with it.

  In the kitchen a light was already on, and Charles Wallace was sitting at the table drinking milk and eating bread and jam. He looked very small and vulnerable sitting there alone in the big old-fashioned kitchen, a blond little boy in faded blue Dr. Dentons, his feet swinging a good six inches above the floor.

  “Hi,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  From under the table where he was lying at Charles Wallace’s feet, hoping for a crumb or two, Fortinbras raised his slender dark head in greeting to Meg, and his tail thumped against the floor. Fortinbras had arrived on their doorstep, a half-grown puppy, scrawny and abandoned, one winter night. He was, Meg’s father had decided, part Llewellyn setter and part greyhound, and he had a slender, dark beauty that was all his own.

  “Why didn’t you come up to the attic?” Meg asked her brother, speaking as though he were at least her own age. “I’ve been scared stiff.”

  “Too windy up in that attic of yours,” the little boy said. “I knew you’d be down. I put some milk on the stove for you. It ought to be hot by now.”

  How did Charles Wallace always know about her? How could he always tell? He never knew—or seemed to care—what Dennys or Sandy were thinking. It was his mother’s mind, and Meg’s, that he probed with frightening accuracy.

  Was it because people were a little afraid of him that they whispered about the Murrys’ youngest child, who was rumored to be not quite bright? “I’ve heard that clever people often have subnormal children,” Meg had once overheard. “The two boys seem to be nice, regular children, but that unattractive girl and the baby boy certainly aren’t all there.”

  It was true that Charles Wallace seldom spoke when anybody was around, so that many people thought he’d never learned to talk. And it was true that he hadn’t talked at all until he was almost four. Meg would turn white with fury when people looked at him and clucked, shaking their heads sadly.

  “Don’t worry about Charles Wallace, Meg,” her father had once told her. Meg remembered it very clearly because it was shortly before he went away. “There’s nothing the matter with his mind. He just does things in his own way and in his own time.”

  “I don’t want him to grow up to be dumb like me,” Meg had said.

  “Oh, my darling, you’re not dumb,” her father answered. “You’re like Charles Wallace. Your development has to go at its own pace. It just doesn’t happen to be the usual pace.”

  “How do you know?” Meg had demanded. “How do you know I’m not dumb? Isn’t it just because you love me?”

  “I love you, but that’s not what tells me. Mother and I’ve given you a number of tests, you know.”
>
  Yes, that was true. Meg had realized that some of the “games” her parents played with her were tests of some kind, and that there had been more for her and Charles Wallace than for the twins. “IQ tests, you mean?”

  “Yes, some of them.”

  “Is my IQ okay?”

  “More than okay.”

  “What is it?”

  “That I’m not going to tell you. But it assures me that both you and Charles Wallace will be able to do pretty much whatever you like when you grow up yourselves. You just wait till Charles Wallace starts to talk. You’ll see.”

  How right he had been about that, though he himself had left before Charles Wallace began to speak, suddenly, with none of the usual baby preliminaries, using entire sentences. How proud he would have been!

  “You’d better check the milk,” Charles Wallace said to Meg now, his diction clearer and cleaner than that of most five-year-olds. “You know you don’t like it when it gets a skin on top.”

  “You put in more than twice enough milk.” Meg peered into the saucepan.

  Charles Wallace nodded serenely. “I thought Mother might like some.”

  “I might like what?” a voice said, and there was their mother standing in the doorway.

  “Cocoa,” Charles Wallace said. “Would you like a liverwurst-and-cream-cheese sandwich? I’ll be happy to make you one.”

  “That would be lovely,” Mrs. Murry said, “but I can make it myself if you’re busy.”

  “No trouble at all.” Charles Wallace slid down from his chair and trotted over to the refrigerator, his pajamaed feet padding softly as a kitten’s. “How about you, Meg?” he asked. “Sandwich?”

  “Yes, please,” she said. “But not liverwurst. Do we have any tomatoes?”

  Charles Wallace peered into the crisper. “One. All right if I use it on Meg, Mother?”

  “To what better use could it be put?” Mrs. Murry smiled. “But not so loud, please, Charles. That is, unless you want the twins downstairs, too.”