Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? (3 page)

Well, I was kept hanging for two years, by many different publishers.

“What is it?” I would be asked. “Is it fantasy or science fiction?”

“It's a book.”

“But who is it for? Is it for children, or adults?”

“It's for people. Don't people read books?”

Over and over again, I received nothing more than the formal, printed rejection slip. These cold, impersonal rejections hurt. I began to doubt myself. Didn't any of what I saw in the book get onto the typewritten page?

I had written
Wrinkle
beginning in the late summer of 1959 and finished in early 1960. The world was still in chaos. While my husband was reestablishing himself in the theater, the children and I stayed in the country. War with Russia seemed imminent. At school, the children were taught to crouch under their little wooden desks, their hands over their heads, in case an atom bomb fell on the school. What insanity! Some of my feelings about this insanity are expressed in
Wrinkle
. In it, I was trying to write about my own questions, my own affirmation of meaning despite seeming chaos. (After
Wrinkle
was published, I was frequently asked if Camazotz didn't represent Soviet Russia. Interesting: nobody asks that anymore.)

We moved back to New York, which no longer seemed more insane than the rest of the world. Air-raid sirens going off every day at noon, signs for air-raid shelters, for closed highways “in case of enemy attack,” seemed no more realistic than crouching under a desk.

And the rejection slips continued. How could they seem important against a background of a planet gone mad? They did. My book was a candle in the dark for me, and a hope.

A form rejection slip came on the Monday before Christmas 1961. I was sitting on the bed, wrapping Christmas presents and trying to feel brave, and thinking I was succeeding. After Christmas, I discovered that I had sent a necktie to a three-year-old girl and a bottle of perfume to a bachelor uncle. I called my agent. “Send it back. It's too different. Nobody's going to publish it. It's too hard on my family. Every time it's rejected, I bleed all over the living-room rug.”

He sent it back, and that ought to have been the end of it. But my mother was with us for Christmas, and I gave a party for some of her old New York friends, and one of them happened to belong to a small writing group led by John Farrar, co-founder of Farrar, Straus and Company. She insisted that I meet him. I was, at that moment, not particularly interested in meeting any publisher. But she set up an appointment, and I took the subway down to Union Square, bearing my very battered manuscript.

John had read my first novel,
The Small Rain
, and had admired it. I told him that
Wrinkle
was very different, but he was eager to read it. In two weeks I heard from my agent that he had read it, and really liked it, but was afraid of it. My heart sank. I had been so hopeful, after leaving John's office, that the long wait might be at an end.

John and Hal Vursell (who was to be my editor from then on until his death) sent the worn manuscript to a librarian for assessment. She wrote back, “I think this is the worst book I have ever read. It reminds me of
The Wizard of Oz.
”

I'm not sure how many more weeks it was before John called me to tell me that he was going to publish the book. I went back downtown to have lunch with him and Hal, and they warned me, “Now, dear, we don't want you to be disappointed, but this book is not going to sell. It's much too difficult for children. We're publishing it as a self-indulgence because we love it, and we don't want you to be hurt.”

And then, in the spring of 1962,
A Wrinkle in Time
was published, and it took off like a skyrocket.

The problem wasn't that it was too difficult for children. It was too difficult for adults.

Madeleine L'Engle
Crosswicks, 1987

A Chapter from the Original Manuscript of
A Wrinkle in Time