The Library: Part 2

 A couple months ago I was standing outside the Archives and Special Collections at Wheaton College, staring at a leaflet describing the collection of papers held there for Madeleine L’Engle. 

The description of the collection listed manuscripts. Biographical material. Correspondence.

Correspondence.

‘I wonder if they have any correspondence from children’, I said to the person I was with. ‘I wrote to her when I was a kid. And she wrote back.’

I love libraries. A walk through a library is a walk through time. And in it, or through it, you can explore all manner of places and people, stories and ideas. Libraries gather together the works of human creation and creativity – the works of our hands and minds that have been deemed fit enough, good enough to publish and keep, in whatever form that takes. 

And, if the access to the library is open enough, free enough, a library can offer those artifacts in a way that is egalitarian, democratic. It honours of any who enter, regardless of their means or locale, or of their place or position in society. 

That is libraries. Archives serve us in another way. 

More often than not, libraries collect and organise works of human creativity, intellect and industry. They are repositories of finished works. Books and recordings, films and magazines and many more – all discrete units of human creation. 

Archives, in contract, can provide us with the backdrop to the works, the settings, the background, the working out of ideas, from which a work may have come. 

To use a pretty basic analogy, where libraries offer us the work of a person’s hands, so to speak, the work they have finished, created and sent out into the world, archives invite us into the richness of the world out of which the work sprang. Archives can offer us a greater depth of understanding of the people who create the works we value enough to collect and catalogue in our libraries.

I’m not alone in thinking this. I recently read a review of a biography that was largely positive with one exception. The reviewer found the biography lacking in ‘the kind of archival depth – journals, letters, diaries – that allows access to unfiltered emotion, and makes a subject’s passions and peculiarities jump off the page.’ 

The possibility of an unfiltered look at L’Engle was what intrigued me as I stood outside the Archives and Special Collections, that and the question I had of whether she’d saved any letters from children.

With that question at the front of my mind, I entered the Archives.

I explained to the librarian on duty that I’d like to see the papers of Madeleine L’Engle. He directed me to the online catalogue. 

The Madeleine L’Engle collection is organised in the three main categories: biographical material, correspondence and manuscripts. 

Each of these categories is organised into further sub-categories, and those for correspondence are: Adult, Children’s, and Business. 

Children’s. I wondered if in the selection of children’s letters, I might find mine. I didn’t look much further than that returned to the front desk to request access to the box of children’s correspondence.

He let me know that it could take as long as a day and a half to access them. I was only passing through Wheaton and wouldn’t be there that long. 

If a day and a half was the longest it could take, what would be the quickest? I asked. 

An hour and a half. He said. It was almost lunch time. I wrote down the call number for the box of children’s correspondence handed it to the librarian and went to lunch. 

Without saying anything he seemed to silently communicate ‘don’t get your hopes up.’

 I went to lunch and then returned to the Archives an hour and a half later and found when I entered the box of children’s correspondence I’d requested was there ready for me.  It only took an hour and a half after all. I felt a little smug that it hadn’t taken a day and a half after all. 

I followed the instructions of signing the box out, but there was one problem. 

It was a closed box. I was not allowed to open it. 

Why not? I asked, was it because there a diary stored in the same box? Or a journal that L’Engle had asked to remain private?

No, the librarian explained. It was because of the children. Children had written to her, and it was their privacy, rather than L’Engle’s that was the issue. Most of the children who had written to her would most likely be alive and perhaps they wouldn’t want their private correspondence made public. 

Of course! The children! It made perfect sense that the box would be a closed one, even though I was disappointed not to be able to look inside. I commended the librarian on the Archives’ protection of children and then turned to go. I took a step or two towards the door when I remembered. 

‘But what if you’re one of the children?’

‘Oh, that’s a different story entirely.’ 

The librarian picked up the telephone and spoke a few words into the receiver. A moment late the head archivist arrived. 

She looked at the box on the counter and said it was unlikely to be the correct box anyway, and then began a search through the online catalogue into the collection. 

What year would you have written her? She asked. 

And what letter did your last name begin with? 

She quickly wrote down the details for a different box. I asked if I should come back later, knowing that the retrieval of the box could take anywhere from an hour and a half to a day and a half. 

In less than 5 minutes she returned with a box from the archives. 

She opened the box, flipped through the manila folders inside to the one for my part of the alphabet. Q-S. Lifted one up, laid it on the table, opened it and picked up the letter that lay on the top of a stack of letters inside.

‘Is this you?’ she asked.

I recognised the light blue stationary, and even more, the bubble script I used to favour. 

She flipped to the end of the letter and read out my name. 

There was my letter. There in the papers of Madeleine L’Engle held in the Archives and Special Collections of Wheaton College.

It was nothing like what I had remembered. 

In my memory I had written to Madeleine L’Engle and told her how hard it was to move schools, towns and states, how nervous I was about starting a new school. But that’s not what I had written to her at all. My letter was far more glib. Far more self-righteous than the letter I had placed in my memory. Perhaps you’d like to know what I wrote to her. Please keep in mind that I was 13. Bubbly cursive was very popular. And I’m a little embarrassed. But here goes:

Dear Mrs. L’Engle,

I just wanted to write you and tell you how much I enjoy your books. I read some of your books this last year when the girls in the Christian school weren’t acting very Christian. I am a Christian and have always gone to Christian schools except for one year which I hated. I had never gone to a school where I didn’t have lots of friends and this last year was very upsetting and luckily we’ve moved to Atlanta. I’m not saying I didn’t have friends but most of them were older. In case your wondering my name is Laurel Reames. And if this isn’t Madeleine L’Engle who’s reading this letter please give it to her. If you ever have time to write – but I’ll understand if you can’t my address is: 3680 Boulevard Hills Road, Atlanta, Georgia 30339

I don’t want to take up any more of your time so Goodbye! Sincerely, Laurel 

Smiley face

P.S. When I said I read them when the girls at school weren’t being that nice I also meant I’ve read your books a lot. 

I think it was at that point that I burst into tears. 

It’s a strange thing to go to a library expecting to learn something more of favourite author and to instead find something of yourself there. And find that what you’d kept in your memory wasn’t really how it was.

I spoke of my surprise to find that my letter had been saved in a selection of letters that children had sent to Madeleine L’Engle. 

She didn’t save a selection, the archivist explained. She saved every letter sent to her by a child. 

Every letter? 

Every one.

What would it take to save every letter? What kind of space would that require? What kind of real estate in the archives? 

The archivist very kindly offered to show me. 

The Madeleine L’Engle collection is held in a secure area of the special collections. You can’t just browse these shelves, you can only access them with the permission and presence of an archivist.

The papers are stored in archival boxes in this restricted area of the library. In total, there are 360 archival boxes, which take up140 Linear Feet. Of the 360 boxes of papers that belonged to Madeleine L’Engle, around 43 of them are filled with letters from children. 

She kept every letter.

I think a lot about memory these days. What will my children remember of their childhoods? What do I remember of my own? My mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis predicts the loss of much of hers, and one of my siblings, in her silence, communicates erasure, and a wilful forgetting. When memory is lost, what remains of a relationship or connection? What of the self?

I cannot quite figure out just why I was so moved by the fact that Madeleine L’Engle kept my letter, and those of the many children who wrote to her over the decades. She didn’t keep my letter because of who I was in my own right, she kept it simply because I had written to her and my letter plays a small part in explaining who Madeleine L’Engle was in the world. A novelist, a poet, a speaker, and someone whose work mattered to children so much that they would write to her to tell her so. 

I had lost her letter but found my own in her papers. And to find something that I had written as a child, so long ago, held in the archives and special collections also communicated this to me: human memory is a faulty thing. It can play tricks so easily. It can fade and slip away. But the memory of God? That’s another thing entirely. 

‘You number my wanderings; Put my tears into your bottle; Are they not in your book?’ the psalmist writes.

Like an archive. Like the most special of special collection. The memory of God is the place of greatest depth in which to find oneself.