Time & Space: L'engles, Barnetts, and Charles Wadsworth Camp

[Bill Ectric]

After enjoying the fine research of STJR, Wacca Pilatka, and Stephen Dare in the August 18, 2009 thread The L'Engles, Jacksonville's Belle Lettrists, Muckraking, Artistic Family, I thought I would add my research to the mix.

This article originally appeared on my literary blog, Bill Ectric's Place, under the title Is Charles Wadsworth Camp’s minimal internet presence due to lack of interest in his work, or is the lack of interest due to his minimal internet presence?

Why is there almost no biographical information about Charles Wadsworth Camp on the internet? Almost all references to Mr. Camp appear in the numerous biographies of his famous daughter, Madeleine L’Engle (most famous for her children's book A Wrinkle In Time). But Camp was also a writer. There are movies based on his work. His books are available for purchase in both used and new editions. The ebook versions range from free to 96¢, and some of his novels are freely accessable online.

Camp’s The Abandoned Room (Public Domain) is a little gem of a murder mystery with supernatural overtones. The story is briskly paced, for the most part, with a sustained  atmosphere of spookiness.  The denouement is no less satisfying than many of the Sherlock Holmes adventures. The story is certainly more linear than the webwork novels of Harry Stephen Keeler.

Charles Wadsworth Camp, also known as simply Wadsworth Camp, was born on October 18, 1878 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and died on October 30, 1936 in Jacksonville, Florida. This intrigues me because I live in Jacksonville, and it is my intention to find out exactly where Mr. Camp lived and if he wrote any of his novels or articles while residing here.

I sent an email to the Madeleine L’Engle website. After all, L’Engle’s parents were Wadsworth Camp and Madeleine Hall Barnett, and, although L’Engle passed away in 2007, maybe the mangers of her web site can fill me in.

The reply from L’Engle’s web site came back the next day, “Bill, we are not aware of any resources online about Mr. Camp. Sorry. Thanks for your interest.”

Continuing my web search, I found some vital information in a New Yorker profile of Madeleine L’Engle, written by Cynthia Zarin, which gives us, among other things, the spectacle of an alligator climbing up the steps of L’Engle’s Florida home before she and her parents moved to New York and lived in an apartment below Leonard Bernstein. Zarin says, "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.”

Zarin goes on to say:“Madeleine…found Florida stultifying and surreal” (don’t we all; she should have been here during the hanging chad debacle - Bill). “One afternoon, she watched an alligator pick its way up the porch steps.” (Again I say, she should have been here during the hanging chad debacle - Bill).



Above is a cropped section of an image I found in an excellent ebook called World’s Finest Beach by Donald J. Mabry. At this time, I can’t say for sure that “C.W” stands for “Charles Wadsworth” but . . . how could it not?

I hold in my hand the official death certificate of Charles Wadsworth Camp, which I recently obtained from the Department of Vital Statistics. The trade/profession section contains the one word I can only hope will appear someday on mine: Writer.

According to this document, a Dr. E. C. Swift attended the ailing author from Octber 29th until his death at 1:40 PM on October 31st, 1936. This differs from what I found online at sites like IMDb, which always list his last day as October 30. Could it be that he or a member of his family wanted to avoid any mention of Halloween?
The cause of death is blocked out because I’m not a member of the family, but we know that Camp died from pneumonia at age 57. The most common story is that Camp’s lungs were already weakened by mustard gas during WWI, leaving him especially vulnerable to respiratory disease. But the April 14, 2004 issue of the New Yorker features a profile of Camp’s daughter, author Madeleine L’Engle, in which a member of Camp’s family tells Cynthia Zarin, “(Camp) used to smoke Rameses cigarettes… he used to drink a lot…Uncle Charles was not ailing in his life. He was a big, handsome man in a white linen suit smoking cigarettes on the porch and drinking whiskey. He was a favorite of my mother’s, and she was a talker, and she never mentioned anything about him being gassed in the war.”

Camp’s residence is listed as “Red Gables” at Jacksonville Beach, Florida. It says that he had lived in this area for three years before his death, which means he probably did not write any of his mystery books here, but he was also a critic and an editor, so it’s possible that he did some work in Jacksonville.

I found the following photographs of Red Gables, also known as Illyria. I'm hoping someone who reads this can tell me exactly what part of the beach this is. I would like to know what is there now.



Above: "Illyria" or Red Gables beach cottage built by Mrs. William Johnson L'Engle on ocean front (a section of 1st Street). The photo is property of the Beaches Area Historical Society.




Above:Dr. Camellus S. L’Engle and sister Louise L’Engle on the porch of the Red Gables beach cottage at Pablo Beach, which is now called Jacksonville Beach. Photo courtesy of Beaches Area Historical Society.



Above: Unidentified group of people in water at the beach in front of the Red Gable beach cottage owned by Mrs. William Johnson L’Engle. Photo courtesy of the Beaches Area Historical Society.

I’ve considered myself a Madeleine L’Engle fan since I first read A Wrinkle In Time as a 10 year old in the 1960s, but only within the past two days have I come to appreciate L’Engle’s formidable abiltity to address serious issues like life and death in prose that is both simple and profound.
 
Thanks to a comment by W. Orth (on my blog Bill Ectric's Place) I have discovered the wonderful world of The Crosswicks Journals, which consists of the following four autobiographical books by Madeleine L’Engle:

•   A Circle of Quiet (1972)
•   The Summer of the Great-grandmother (1974)
•   The Irrational Season (1977)
•   Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (1988)
 
I’m reading the 2nd book in the list. The “great-grandmother” in the title is Madeleine L’Engle’s 90 year old mother, the great-grandmother of L’Engle’s grandchildren. The “summer” refers to a time when all four generations were gatherd together in the large Connecticut farmhouse known as Crosswicks, the home of Madeleine and her actor husband, Hugh Franklin. It’s a moving and honestly human account by L’Engle about caring for her mother, a once-brilliant and adventerous woman in the throes of advancing senility.

One thing I have always admired about L’Engle is that she rocked the boat of conservative Christians. According to Donald Hettinga in Christianity Today, “(L’Engle) has been perceived as too worldly by some conservative Christian audiences and too dogmatically Christian by some secular audiences . . . Ministers preach sermons against her; books and articles denounce her and any Christians who evaluate her work favorably or even evenly; librarians in Christian schools and churches handle her books as though they carried dangerous heresies, sometimes relegating them to back shelves where patrons must ask specifically for them, and sometimes banning them altogether.”
 
I can’t recall reading anything by L’Engle that seemed remotely dogmatic. In the book I’m reading, for example, she says, “The artist’s response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, not to impose restrictive rules but to rejoice in pattern and meaning, for there is something in all artists which rejects coincidence and accident.” That almost sounds like a William S. Burroughs sentiment.

L’Engle is not afraid to express doubt, nor does she downplay the importance of common sense and and mental health science to get through a hard time. But this blog entry is supposed to be about Wadsworth Camp, so let me move on to Mister C.
 
In The Summer of the Great-grandmother, Madeleine L’Engle tells us that her mother, Madeleine Hall Barnett and her father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, were married in Jacksonville, Florida and went to nearby Saint Augustine for a brief honeymoon, where they stayed at the Ponce de Leon hotel. They then moved to New York, where Camp worked as a newspaper reporter, writing reviews of plays, operas, and concerts. Camp dressed elegantly every evening, whether he was eating dinner at home or taking the horse-drawn trolley a theater or concert hall. Many of their friends were msuicians.
L’Engle tells this story:
 
“One hot summer evening, long before I was born, (my mother) walked through the hall and glanced at the etching of Castle Conway and said, ‘Oh, Charles (Camp), it’s so hot. I wish we could go to Castle Conway,’ ‘Come on!’ he cried, and swept her out of the house without toothbrush or change of clothes, and into a taxi, and by midnight they were on a ship sailing across the Atlantic. In those days a trip could be as spontaneous as that. My parents were not poor, but neither were they, by today’s standards, affluent. Father was a playwright and journalist, and their pocketbook waned and swelled like the moon; this must have been one of the full-moon cycles.”

I have yet to find a single photograph of Charles Wadsworth Camp.