Post-Newton

THE AUTHORS of widely popular children's book's are invariably less respected than loved, children's books somehow don't seem as serious as their supposedly more spohisticated adult counterparts. But Madeicine L 'Engles, where A Wrinkle In Time was universally considered to be for children when it was first published in 1960, has gradually seem this gap in perception shrink over the years. Now the author of some 20 additional adult and children's books, she still gets about 60 letters a week from appreciative readers and readers of the same story, which follows 12-years-old Meg and her brother on a quest through time space and mathematics to save their father from evil forces. In this early 1960s, L 'Engle says, the letters were almost all from children. But since then the balances has gradually shifted, and more than half her readers are past adolescence.

"I don't write for children," L 'Engle says now, "I write for people, whatever age they are. That's why so many publisher rejected Wrinkle at first. They said, "Who's this for? Children aren't going to understand this advanced math. I said don't be silly, they'll understand it better than adults will,"

The success of A Wrinkle In Times after the initial skepticism is one of the publishing world's Cinderella fables. Twenty printing houses turned it down, and the author gave up in despair when, after two years of submission and resubmission, she received the last two rejections in the mail the day before Christmas. It wasn't her first novel-The Small Rain and Meet the Austin family stories with protagonists in their teens, had appeared and done moderately well-but it was on L 'Engle had spent almost 18 months writing and she hated to give up on it.

She has told and retold what happened after that. Her family convinced her to talk to a kindly man who sat next to them in chapel and had "something to do with publishing"-John Farrar of Farrar Straus & Giroux. He liked the book and told L 'Engle, "I'm publishing it as an indulgence, but don't be disappointed if it doesn't sell because we don't expect it to."

The tale-or fable, or science fantasy, as it has been variously described-went into its 36th printing this year and in the best tradition of the children's classic, still sells 100 copies a week. That success will move into a new dimension late this spring as a movie version of A Wrinkle in Time finally enters production-an enterprise that has the author trying her hand for the first time at the art of the screenplay.

She is writing the screenplay herself for the same reason she delayed 15 years in selling the movie rights-an absolute deadlock with Hollywood over what the film should be like previous contracts would always fall apart at the same point: when L 'Engle insisted on a clause saying a movie Wrinkle had to retain the original's plot characters, and theme. This time around she secured the contract clause, so she was caught by surprise when the first complete script arrived in the mail.

"Not a page, not a single page of the original remained. The writer obviously though it was a book for little tiny children," she says bristling up as if the film makers had attacked one of her own off spring. "He made Meg 10 years old. 10! what happens to her relationship with Calvin at age 10. I'd like to know?" Almost as an afterthought she add. "In a white heat of outrage I dashed of 25 pages of film treatment." After some political reshuffles, she is now shuttling back and forth to Hollywood to finish the job.

OF L' ENGLE's collection of books of fiction poetry and memories, Wrinkle is not the only one she speaks of in freely parental terms. Her fictional characters from a vast family network, many of them reappearing at different stages in their careers, introducing ever widening and ever crisscrossing circles of acquaintances. L 'Engle talks like the matriarch of a vast clan or more precisely their grandmother: she speculates on their moral and psychological growth and debates when and whom they will marry.

The protagonist of her newest novel A Severed Wasp, the retired pianist Katherine Forrester Vigneras, last appeared as an aspiring teenage artist in L 'Engle's first published novel. The Small Rain. "I always knew I would go on and find out what happened to Katherine later in life," she says, "but I had to grow up enough to find out first." The same half whimsical treatment of her creations carries through to the minor characters, such as one Felix Bodeway who becomes Katherine's closest friend in A Severed Wasp after playing a decidedly tangential role in her youth. "I really didn't think any good would come of Felix," she says. "But when I started to write the second book, there he was."

Felix in Wasp is a retired bishop-specifically, the retired bishop of St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York City, where L 'Engle has an office-and the haziness of his position between fiction and reality typifies the rest of L 'Engle's work. Several earlier novels are set in the same Upper West Side environs of the cathedral, which are described with enough detail and care to give visitor a shock of recognition at the subway stop. L 'Engle regularly sends her characters off to drink hungarian coffee at the same Colombia University coffee shop to which she politely invites an interviewer.

More and more, the characters in each successive novel grappic with the same religious and psychological dilemmas that L 'Engle confronts regularly as the cathedral's writer-in-residence and Laypreacher. The title of A Severed Wasp comes from a George Orwell quotation about the death of society's religious beliefs and the excision of modern man's soul. L 'Engle describes herself as "a striving Christian-striving to be Christian somehow in a world where Christians are doing such terrible things."

Her office alcove in the cathedral's library is stacked floor to ceiling with philosophy and theology texts. While novelizine she also serves as part-time librarian-but she insists she reads none of the voluminous works. Pressed for a personal faith, she says, "Post Newtonian physics," and explains: "theologists all want to define God, t00o put him in their little corner and say, That's what my God is like Scientists are dealing with the real nature of being and they know that they don't know anything."

Her philosophy emerges more clearly in a "Meditation" she is preparing for one of the cathedral's spiritual retreat: just through a first draft. She summarizes it over the phone for another organizer. It is a fable of the perfect computer, finally complicated, which can answer any question put to it: asked by its creators what the meaning of her is it be more repeatedly and finally answers "Sixty-four." The point being, "L 'Engle explains. "That even our questions are framed with absolutely an idea of direction of what kind of answer we could get or are looking for."

Her fiction uses the same device-fable, imaginary creatures, allegorical points in pose the same "dynamic questions." And despite the cathedral and the question of underlying faith the push Newtonian in L 'Engle's work and philosophy is definitely ascendant. "The idea is not to be exclusive. "She says "I anything I write speak only to Christians then I have failed totally.