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Friday, March 14, 2014

The Search for Charles Wallace

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:19 pm

The search in the previous post for the source of a quotation from Poincaré yielded, as a serendipitous benefit, information on an interesting psychoanalyst named Wilfred Bion (see the Poincaré  quotation at a webpage on Bion). This in turn suggested a search for the source of the name of author Madeleine L'Engle's son Bion, who may have partly inspired L'Engle's fictional character Charles Wallace.  Cynthia Zarin wrote about Bion in The New Yorker  of April 12, 2004 that

"According to the family, he is the person for whom L’Engle’s insistence on blurring fiction and reality had the most disastrous consequences."

Also from that article, material related to the name Bion and to what this journal has called "the Crosswicks Curse"*—

"Madeleine L’Engle Camp was born in 1918 in New York City, the only child of Madeleine Hall Barnett, of Jacksonville, Florida, and Charles Wadsworth Camp, a Princeton man and First World War veteran, whose family had a big country place in New Jersey, called Crosswicks. In Jacksonville society, the Barnett family was legendary: Madeleine’s grandfather, Bion Barnett, the chairman of the board of Jacksonville’s Barnett Bank, had run off with a woman to the South of France, leaving behind a note on the mantel. Her grandmother, Caroline Hallows L’Engle, never recovered from the blow. ….

… The summer after Hugh and Madeleine were married, they bought a dilapidated farmhouse in Goshen, in northwest Connecticut. Josephine, born in 1947, was three years old when they moved permanently to the house, which they called Crosswicks. Bion was born just over a year later."

* "There is  such a thing as a tesseract."

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