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It'd have been a lot easier if I could have gone on hating him
This is a found post. As in, I found it on my desktop; it's at least three years old and I don't know why I never put it up, except that it didn't have a title and it didn't have music and I can't tell if I forgot about it or just decided nobody would care. There are half-finished, half-started livejournal fragments all over this machine. They weren't a good sign. Anyway. This is a form of clean-up. Here.
There are several reasons A Wind in the Door (1973) is my favorite of Madeleine L'Engle's original Murry books, a few being the singular cherubim, the idea of kything, the deep-eddying undersea of Yadah, and the statement that "Love isn't feeling," which I associated then and still with Le Guin's concept of ontá.1 But a significant contributor to its imprint on me as a child, and one which only came into focus for me a few years ago, is the character of Mr. Jenkins. Everyone be surprised.
Unlike Meg, or Calvin, or Charles Wallace, Mr. Jenkins is not at all marked out as a main character. He doesn't even look at first as though he'll be anything more than unpleasant background detail. We know him through Meg, who doesn't like him and doesn't have any reason to: he's the epitome of every small-minded administrator who ever made a gifted child's life hell. Kicked downstairs from his principalship at the high school because he could neither inspire his students nor discipline them, equally incapable of maintaining order at the lower levels, he seems to view any disruption of school routine as a personal attack and reacts accordingly—it is not his business to fix anything, because that would imply he let it get broken in the first place. Charles Wallace's classmates are using the much smaller, much smarter boy as a punching bag on a daily basis and Mr. Jenkins doesn't seem inclined to interfere so long as the Drs. Murry don't personally turn up to make him make them stop. Meg does make an appointment, but he brushes her off. He appears to have no kindness in him and less imagination and when he is duplicated and impersonated by two of the Echthroi ("Sky tearers. Light snuffers. Planet darkeners. The dragons. The worms. Those who hate") it comes as almost no surprise to the reader; he seems the perfect host for their purposes, one of the many human beings who in their small, quiet, banal ways make this world a worse place to live.
So it becomes Meg's test to Name him, to distinguish which of these three repugnant doppelgängers is the real Mr. Jenkins, and she despairs of being able to tell: what about him is real to her? He makes her life miserable. He's frightened of snakes. He's nearsighted enough to wear glasses and he smells like old hair cream and there is always dandruff on the shoulders of his shabby suit. He might as well be wet cardboard to her, and in order to Name him, she must be able to love him: not as she loves Calvin or her family or even the fire-pluming, thousand-eyed, winged cherubim Proginoskes, but simply because he is another person, existing, valid; she has to be able to hold her hand out in the dark. (That's also Le Guin: it's the phrase I remember most from "Nine Lives" (1969). I have found it eternally useful.) And what still interests me about this process of Naming is that while Meg does eventually learn that Mr. Jenkins is responsible for at least one good act in his life—he bought Calvin his first decent pair of shoes, clumsily trying to pass them off as a used pair of his own—that is not what tilts the balance. At the heart of things, she's able to differentiate the real Mr. Jenkins from his two daemonic impostors because the one is too successful and the other too kind: only the Mr. Jenkins who really doesn't like children and can barely handle his humiliating job and forgets himself and swears on the playground when confronted with the immense and sanguine blacksnake Louise the Larger—the one that's badly flawed—human—is the real one.2 And I love that. Even after he's made the surprising decision to follow Meg, Calvin, Proginoskes and their Teacher into the green-dark otherworld of Charles Wallace's mitochondria (saying only, simply, that Meg Named him, so he'll come), he doesn't suddenly become a warmer or more spiritually centered person. He remains a short-sighted, middle-aged, rather rabbity-looking elementary school principal whose first attempts at kything are as dry and vague as old chalk dust and who still isn't quite sure he's not losing his mind. He is himself. I've been able to tag some of my early comedic-still-real models, but Mr. Jenkins might have been the first character about whom I was made to realize: hey, you know, people you don't like are people, too . . .
1. Ursula K. Le Guin, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" (1971): "She knew what she felt, and what therefore he must feel. She was confident of it: there is only one emotion, or state of being, that can thus wholly reverse itself, polarize, within one moment. In Great Hainish indeed there is one word, ontá, for love and for hate. She was not in love with Osden, of course, that was another kettle of fish. What she felt for him was ontá, polarized hate."
2. There is surely some existential horror not just in seeing oneself impossibly doubled, but seeing impossible doubles that seem to be better and better-organized people.
And for a further L'Engle connection: happy birthday,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gaudior! Rabbit, rabbit, my best cousin. More joy.
There are several reasons A Wind in the Door (1973) is my favorite of Madeleine L'Engle's original Murry books, a few being the singular cherubim, the idea of kything, the deep-eddying undersea of Yadah, and the statement that "Love isn't feeling," which I associated then and still with Le Guin's concept of ontá.1 But a significant contributor to its imprint on me as a child, and one which only came into focus for me a few years ago, is the character of Mr. Jenkins. Everyone be surprised.
Unlike Meg, or Calvin, or Charles Wallace, Mr. Jenkins is not at all marked out as a main character. He doesn't even look at first as though he'll be anything more than unpleasant background detail. We know him through Meg, who doesn't like him and doesn't have any reason to: he's the epitome of every small-minded administrator who ever made a gifted child's life hell. Kicked downstairs from his principalship at the high school because he could neither inspire his students nor discipline them, equally incapable of maintaining order at the lower levels, he seems to view any disruption of school routine as a personal attack and reacts accordingly—it is not his business to fix anything, because that would imply he let it get broken in the first place. Charles Wallace's classmates are using the much smaller, much smarter boy as a punching bag on a daily basis and Mr. Jenkins doesn't seem inclined to interfere so long as the Drs. Murry don't personally turn up to make him make them stop. Meg does make an appointment, but he brushes her off. He appears to have no kindness in him and less imagination and when he is duplicated and impersonated by two of the Echthroi ("Sky tearers. Light snuffers. Planet darkeners. The dragons. The worms. Those who hate") it comes as almost no surprise to the reader; he seems the perfect host for their purposes, one of the many human beings who in their small, quiet, banal ways make this world a worse place to live.
So it becomes Meg's test to Name him, to distinguish which of these three repugnant doppelgängers is the real Mr. Jenkins, and she despairs of being able to tell: what about him is real to her? He makes her life miserable. He's frightened of snakes. He's nearsighted enough to wear glasses and he smells like old hair cream and there is always dandruff on the shoulders of his shabby suit. He might as well be wet cardboard to her, and in order to Name him, she must be able to love him: not as she loves Calvin or her family or even the fire-pluming, thousand-eyed, winged cherubim Proginoskes, but simply because he is another person, existing, valid; she has to be able to hold her hand out in the dark. (That's also Le Guin: it's the phrase I remember most from "Nine Lives" (1969). I have found it eternally useful.) And what still interests me about this process of Naming is that while Meg does eventually learn that Mr. Jenkins is responsible for at least one good act in his life—he bought Calvin his first decent pair of shoes, clumsily trying to pass them off as a used pair of his own—that is not what tilts the balance. At the heart of things, she's able to differentiate the real Mr. Jenkins from his two daemonic impostors because the one is too successful and the other too kind: only the Mr. Jenkins who really doesn't like children and can barely handle his humiliating job and forgets himself and swears on the playground when confronted with the immense and sanguine blacksnake Louise the Larger—the one that's badly flawed—human—is the real one.2 And I love that. Even after he's made the surprising decision to follow Meg, Calvin, Proginoskes and their Teacher into the green-dark otherworld of Charles Wallace's mitochondria (saying only, simply, that Meg Named him, so he'll come), he doesn't suddenly become a warmer or more spiritually centered person. He remains a short-sighted, middle-aged, rather rabbity-looking elementary school principal whose first attempts at kything are as dry and vague as old chalk dust and who still isn't quite sure he's not losing his mind. He is himself. I've been able to tag some of my early comedic-still-real models, but Mr. Jenkins might have been the first character about whom I was made to realize: hey, you know, people you don't like are people, too . . .
1. Ursula K. Le Guin, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" (1971): "She knew what she felt, and what therefore he must feel. She was confident of it: there is only one emotion, or state of being, that can thus wholly reverse itself, polarize, within one moment. In Great Hainish indeed there is one word, ontá, for love and for hate. She was not in love with Osden, of course, that was another kettle of fish. What she felt for him was ontá, polarized hate."
2. There is surely some existential horror not just in seeing oneself impossibly doubled, but seeing impossible doubles that seem to be better and better-organized people.
And for a further L'Engle connection: happy birthday,
gaudior! Rabbit, rabbit, my best cousin. More joy.
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(I should mention that I'm not a professional artist myself, and never had any intention of becoming one. :))
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That's a great description, I'm just saying.
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May I ask why so? I've never read it; I haven't read most of her adult novels.
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I don't know if they would all hold up equally; I haven't read A Wrinkle in Time in years and while A Swiftly Tilting Planet is beautifully written and taught me "Saint Patrick's Breastplate" (and its unicorns are not stupid), I have gathered there would be problematic aspects on re-read. She formed a great deal of my inner landscape, in any case. I still love Many Waters, even though it's the most explicitly Biblical of the Murry books. I used to be able to recite the circles of the seraphim and nephilim. And apparently I re-read A Wind in the Door every three years or so.
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The thing about love not being a feeling. Can I tell you how that changed my life? No, I can't, but it did. And I think I probably have a different reason for loving Mr. Jenkins, but YES.
*The one is the song at the end. That changed my life as well.
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I had my own ghost self.
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That was a brilliant exploration of Mr. Jenkins. Reading it, and thinking about reading A Wind in the Door again and again over the years, I think what your essay does for me is make me realize how Mr. Jenkins has represented for me not the humanity of people I disliked but rather the heroism of unremarkable people (obviously the two things can go together quite well). I guess it's the other side of the banality of evil: the profundity of small, dry goodness.
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You should write about that. I find it striking, but I don't know if it altered me. The line from that scene that stayed with me was: "A small white feather which was not a feather floated through the cold."
To be faced with the better yous whom you are not, and have those better yous be agents of hell. Yikes.
That's one of the points that only struck me years later on re-read. It would disturb me.
That was a brilliant exploration of Mr. Jenkins.
Thank you!
I can write nearly endlessly about characters that interest me, but I am never sure whether the rest of my friendlist feels the same way about reading them.
I guess it's the other side of the banality of evil: the profundity of small, dry goodness.
Yes. Which is also something I care about, although I think I learned it from other characters first.
about the song
So here is the abbreved version. The song changed me because it showed me how I, too, could participate in the creation of the universe (the way Meg does by singing the song), and that deadly negating evil could be fought by a call to join in the dance. It's better than turning the other cheek. It's, "Oh, you want to destroy me? How about instead you become sea sand and solar system?"
Also, it deeply *moved* me because it's a portrait in miniature of the universe (through the naming of sample constituent parts). It's a mandala in song. You know how Meg realizes that size doesn't matter and she can hold the baby star in her hand? Reading that song is like holding the universe in my hand.
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I'm sorry Livejournal felt the need to inflict a moral lesson on you, but that's beautifully stated.
Re: about the song
I have a very vivid memory of reading it for the first time when I was thirteen or so, standing on a street corner waiting for a bus and feeling very in tune with the world around me. I'd read and reread Wrinkle when I was much younger and was delighted to be visiting old friends again.
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I can remember reading A Wrinkle in Time for the first time, because my mother began reading it to me. I associate A Swiftly Tilting Planet with the old, dark-green, cat-clawed couch in the apartment on Appleton Street. I can't remember where I read A Wind in the Door.
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And then I went back and re-read it several times as an adolescent, and what struck me then was that Meg was able to love Mr. Jenkins because he'd been kind to someone she loves (Calvin) even though he'd been nasty to her. And then I re-read it again as a teenager and adult and got some of the things out of it that you've discussed above. And the marvelous thing about L'Engle is that all of it's true at once. So brilliant.
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Yes. The books in which there is something different and true every time are the ones that stay. I have found it reassuringly the case with a number of books I loved as a child. (And even some of the ones that haven't held up, at least I can see what I loved in them.)
How do you find the others hold up? See above.
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(I suspect that at the time, I also unconsciously drew parallels between Meg and Jo March, and between Mrs. Murry and Marmee, having totally internalized Little Women (as I understood it) at the age of seven)).
A Swiftly Tilting Planet was harder for me to understand, all the time-travel and "all of this is happening to Charles while Meg is still in her own house, grown-up, with her other brothers". I read it several times as a kid, mostly out of duty, and didn't really understand what was going on until I was about 13.
In hindsight, A Swiftly Tilting Planet has held up pretty well, both because the sf aspects feel less dated than A Wrinkle In Time (more on that below) and because the older I get, the more experience I have with people who are similar to the characters. Calvin's mother is so very accurately and unflinchingly drawn that I'm positive L'Engle was basing her on someone she knew. Overall, this book's characters are both more realistically complex and more violent than the first two, I think.
The thing that strikes me about A Wrinkle In Time is that it's so very much of the 1950s and early 1960s, stylistically. This is not bad, of course, but re-reading it is like a crash course in the themes of Cold War-era science fiction. A Swiftly Tilting Planet is the one that's explicitly about nuclear weapons, but A Wrinkle In Time is the one that captures the sense of how the world changed.
Three of L'Engle's YA novels always felt like youthful versions of James Bond-era spy novels to me: The Young Unicorns, Dragons In The Waters, and (most of all) The Arm Of The Starfish. There's an unmistakable sense of both dread and kneejerk patriotism in both of them that is so, so early-1960s. Where L'Engle's genius lies, in all three novels but especially The Arm Of The Starfish, is in her exploration of how American teenagers are affected by being forced into situations where they have to think about what being American means to them in the face of international events. Just brilliant.
...sorry, this got longer than I think you were asking for. Feel free to delete.
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May I ask?
Part of it was that at seven-ish I already had no trouble identifying with a teenaged Meg, although I was 100% language-based and already starting to struggle with anything that involved numbers, and part of it was that I too had a mother who was big on the "you're weird and don't fit in, and that's exactly what we hoped you would be" thing.
She write a good universe for intelligent people.
Overall, this book's characters are both more realistically complex and more violent than the first two, I think.
This is good to hear. The chapters with Beezie and Chuck Maddox are the ones I remember most vividly. I wasn't sure how the blue-eyed lineage of peace would play out on re-read.
The thing that strikes me about A Wrinkle In Time is that it's so very much of the 1950s and early 1960s, stylistically. This is not bad, of course, but re-reading it is like a crash course in the themes of Cold War-era science fiction.
I remember liking that the nightmare conformity of Camazotz is not Soviet-bloc totalitarian, but suburban ticky-tacky: the houses all the same color, the same number of the same kind of flower along the same walk to the door; the children out front bouncing balls or skipping rope all to the same rhythm until their mothers all come out in their dresses all the same design and clap their hands and you know their fathers will all come home from work at exactly the same hour and hang up their hats on exactly the same peg in the front hall. There is even something eerily mechanical about the paperboy.
Three of L'Engle's YA novels always felt like youthful versions of James Bond-era spy novels to me: The Young Unicorns, Dragons In The Waters, and (most of all) The Arm Of The Starfish.
I tried at least one of those around the same time I read Many Waters—fifth grade—but it didn't take. I think it was Dragons in the Waters. I was disappointed by the lack of actual dragons. You are making a good case for reassessment.
...sorry, this got longer than I think you were asking for. Feel free to delete.
Dude, you keep saying this about your comments; I'm still not going to delete them. Have you noticed I am the sort of person who writes two-part replies?
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*sigh* Not gonna lie, the Blue-Eyed People = Peaceful thing doesn't hold up so well. Even when I was a kid, actually, I was all "so, wait, only people with blue eyes are good?!". The best that can be said for it is that in each generation of the lineage, the non-peaceful characters are suitably fleshed out and have motivations for what they do. Even Beezie's and Chuck's abusive stepdad, who's the last member of the lineage that we see in any detail, isn't just a one-dimensional Bad Guy, he's an actual person.
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Nope. Feel free to discourse.
Even Beezie's and Chuck's abusive stepdad, who's the last member of the lineage that we see in any detail, isn't just a one-dimensional Bad Guy, he's an actual person.
All right; I'll give it a re-read.
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May I ask?
Sorry, I missed this bit. It's here. Not the best thing I've written, but Yuletide success is most accurately measured in whether the recipient liked the gift, and s/he says s/he did, so.
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A Wrinkle in Time (1962) really is the classic. It's a weird science fantasy that I'm going to have trouble describing without making it sound either preachy or incoherent; its protagonist is a socially awkward, mathematically gifted fourteen-year-old who doesn't think she'll ever measure up to her scientist parents or her genius youngest brother (and the fact that her other two brothers are completely normal and fit right in at school isn't helping) and finds herself leaping fifth-dimensionally through the universe to save her father from evil manifesting in the form of loveless conformity. There are also centaurs and witches and secret government work and disembodied brains and misuse of mathematical terms in powerful and resonant ways. I learned the names of a few Aztec gods from A Wrinkle in Time, although one of them is certainly being maligned. I should just re-read this book again.
A Wind in the Door is the second, but my favorite.
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You should write about your re-reads. I would love to hear what they're like for you now.
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See previous comments: A Wind in the Door and Many Waters are the only ones of hers I've re-read in years, and I never got around to some of the Austin or adult novels at all. What does she tap into for you vs. what doesn't work?
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On a related note, am I the only one who immediately recognized the Auditors of Reality from the Discworld books as being Ecthroi?
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Thanks!
On a related note, am I the only one who immediately recognized the Auditors of Reality from the Discworld books as being Echthroi?
I didn't make the connection, but they're certainly a related species.
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And total agreement in all ways about Mr. Jenkins. Man, I should reread that book, it was pretty good...
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Glad to have seen you for dinner!
And total agreement in all ways about Mr. Jenkins. Man, I should reread that book, it was pretty good...
I'd love to hear what you think of it now. And I need to borrow some of her other novels from you.
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I need to re-read some L'Engle.
Mr. Jenkins might have been the first character about whom I was made to realize: hey, you know, people you don't like are people, too . . .
That's one of those profound things that I'm never very good at thinking about in writing. It's good to have a reminder of it, right now, for complicated, or at least complex, reasons--amongst other things, I just discovered that a piece of mine which I'd been promised would run with a byline has been run without my name on it, which is especially galling when I wrote it for free.
Happy birthday to your cousin!
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That sounds intensely annoying. I'm sorry. Get the editor to fix it.
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It is. Thank you.
Get the editor to fix it.
I will try, although I suspect he's not going to do it; I have a bad feeling this was a deliberate act on his part. I don't feel like getting into it here, but there's a post on my LJ with more details.
ETA: It's sorted. Apparently there was some sort of a glitch on the website, and several bylines, including mine, weren't showing. I have a pdf of the page of the paper it ran on, which does have my name.