Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  “So far away!” I cried out in dismay, so we were both put together in the Queen’s room.

  We then had tea, brought us by a nice Negro maid who took my dress to press it, and I sewed some brilliant buckles on my new evening shoes (bought in Stamford that morning). I was handed the list of guests to look over and decided there was no use trying to read any more Malraux—I would never get to speak to him!† There were at least a hundred people listed from the art world: museum directors, artists, theater, writers, poets, dance (Agnes de Mille), music (Leonard Bernstein), etc.

  We dressed and were ushered (“Call Usher’s Office”) to a small private upstairs salon where the house guests and French Embassy were having cocktails. M. and Mme Malraux, the French Ambassador and his umpteenth wife (he urbane, intelligent and very smooth; she blond, beautiful and hard as nails), Vice President and Mrs. Johnson, and various members of the French Embassy, the Kennedys, etc.

  The President was very natural, charming, and easy—no mask or pose—quite impressive. The French ladies were all dressed up and made up like mannequins—rather terrifying. M. Malraux, a nervous and interesting white mask. Mme Malraux less mask-like than the others, quite sympathetic. Mrs. Kennedy swept in like a queen, looking extremely beautiful in a long pink stiff gown, hair high and stiff—rather Japanese—with a diamond star set in it! I talked in English to Mrs. Johnson, who was kind and quite natural and American, and in French to the French women (not too well—but they were surprised to have me speak at all).

  Then we went downstairs to the main reception hall—where all the other guests were. I was shown my place at dinner (there were eighteen smallish round tables) between Alexis Léger and Vice President Johnson, and C. was at Kennedy’s table on the other side of the French Ambassador’s wife. We lined up (alphabetically) and passed by President and Mrs. Kennedy and then sifted our way into our separate dining tables.

  It was a little like “heaven” in that you kept seeing people who looked rather familiar and you had never met: Is that Tennessee Williams? Or Arthur Miller? Or Edmund Wilson? (I would like to have met E.W.)

  I was at a table with Thornton Wilder, Robert Lowell and Alexis Léger. I loved talking to Alexis—and Vice President Johnson was sympathetic and very, very tired! (He had just flown in from Seattle where he had opened the Fair!) After supper (there were speeches by Malraux and Kennedy, given and translated over loudspeakers), we went into the ballroom to listen to the concert. I found CAL, who was much disturbed by the numbers of press around and would not sit in the front rows as we were intended. We sat in the back rows and the music was heavenly, but I was concerned about C. and not entirely at ease.

  After the concert, people began to leave and we found ourselves being ushered upstairs to the same private salon, where about the same group were gathered as before supper—chiefly the French set. C. and I talked to the French Ambassador but nothing very real was said. And rather quickly, goodbyes were being said again. We said goodbye tactfully and went to our rooms though apparently Isaac Stern went on playing the violin until late at night. I wish we had stayed up.

  The next morning, after breakfast in our room, Mrs. K. came up with the children and we talked informally in the hall—without a mask and quite real and simple (I must tell you about it). The children were refreshingly children and she was quite real and still beautiful. Caroline skips down the great halls happily and John Jr. crawls and climbs and collapses, overturning cigarette boxes on the carpets. We also saw the President in his office as we left. You have a sense of great integrity and naturalness—no pose. We were both impressed.

  Scott’s Cove, Darien, Conn.

  May 15th, 1962

  Dear Mrs. Kennedy,

  Despite the enormous burden of your mail—even your personal mail—I must write to thank you for the great kindness you and the President showed us in inviting us to dinner in honor of M. Malraux, and especially for your consideration and thoughtfulness in wanting us to stay at the White House.

  It was an extraordinarily beautiful and stimulating occasion, which is not surprising. All parties—even big parties—I believe in some measure reflect the spirit of the people at their center. From this core radiates the beauty, vividness and good feeling which spread to the guests. That such an atmosphere was created, at such a party at the highest point of our government and in a formal and dignified setting, is a great tribute to you both and an inspiration to the people who were privileged to be witnesses.

  On the private side, I must add how much my husband and I both enjoyed the personal glimpse of you and the President and your children. We were very touched that you should have found time for this in the midst of the many pressures that surround you. Aside from our pleasure, it is a heartening thing to find in the First Family of America the personal touch, the simple directness and the sense of clear integrity that one feels to be particularly an American heritage.

  With the warm thanks of both of us

  [From a letter to Alan Valentine]

  Scott’s Cove

  Saturday, October 20th, 1962

  Here I am in my Little House, about the second or third time this fall, on a beautiful fall day, alone. Reeve is out with a school friend; Scott has not yet appeared from college for a weekend. And quiet! The constant whine of buzz-saws and grinding roar of tractors plowing up our house-site* is still because it is Saturday. There is so much to say. How disappointed I was, truly disappointed, not to see Lucia or you on your way through, but there was no choice. It was the most difficult week in a hard month. Everything has now subsided, I hope. Reeve is finally back in school on a half schedule. CAL is off on a world trip of some kind. Land and Susie and Erin back in Portland, and Ansy, at the moment on a leave of absence from Radcliffe, is living with Connie Morrow* in Bucks County, having fled Boston and the beau—catching her breath and seeing Rosen.†

  It has been a stormy fall, but still not as difficult as last year, chiefly because Charles, arriving in the midst of it (the week I hoped to see you and Lucia), although much upset by Anne’s plans (to leave college while considering marriage, etc.), was much more understanding of her state of mind and heart (while not approving), and much more concerned, and therefore much more open to her having some help from Rosen, which she is now getting. And though the present arrangement seems to me not perfect or sure, it is so much better than the alternatives that I breathe a sigh of relief and hope she’ll be back in Radcliffe by next term.

  But I meant not to embark on all that, but to tell you how I blessed you for your letter to Reeve which arrived while she was still in bed and rather down.‡ In fact, I had left her to go and shop for groceries that day and she had said, a little sadly: “Uncle Alan has not answered my letter.” I said firmly that you hadn’t had time even to get to England—no time for a letter. But to my delight, when I came back from the store with bags of groceries in my arms, there was a letter for Reeve from you on top of the pile. (I did not wait to find the letter for me in the middle of the pile!) I tore up to Reeve’s bedroom and gave her your letter. She smiled and said, “Never mind about the rest of the mail,” and settled down in her pillows!

  Then I had the extra reward of finding your letter for me, and went out and sat in the sun and read it, and did not realize until that moment how much I needed that. Someone at last speaking quietly and perceptively to the inner me. I felt very restored and quite caught up with you and your life too, and this was a great alleviation of the pressured and somehow impersonal life I had been leading. Impersonal is not quite the right word since what could be more personal than being a practicing wife-mother? And yet one feels so much of the time that one is living under a mask, or under one of the masks that is oneself.

  Then came the week, or weeks, just before CAL’s take-off, full of the pressing last details of the new house just starting and all those other chores which, for CAL, have to be compressed into the single month he is home out of three or four.

  With his take-off, Reeve and
I have just begun to relax into our quiet life à deux in the big house, while blasting is going on for the little house. This week would have been “normal” had it not been for Anne’s sudden flight from Boston—almost like a war refugee’s, escaping so fast (lest she change her mind?) that she brought with her (rather typically) a bird-cage, a guitar, and her best evening dress! (These were all “brought for morale” and for aesthetic purposes, not practical ones.)

  (The tractor is inexplicably going again—and on Saturday! I have fled and am now in the big house.)

  I can understand your sense of relief at getting off and getting back to the peace of Oxford. (I can picture you working at the Brussels sprouts in your faded Swiss smock! And Lucia at her rock garden!) I think (re your description of the summer and my thoughts about my own fall), that one really needs a very different rhythm at our age, and it is difficult to reestablish it in the old place—be it North Haven, Darien or whatever. I cannot look on this new smaller house here with very much zest, though I approve and can see no better alternative. We must have a base here, and I love the sounds and sights of the cove. It is quite different with the chalet above Vevey, which is almost built, if bare and empty.* I feel I will be able to live the way I want—or the way I believe—there. Perhaps this is an illusion, the dream of the free unattached-to-responsibilities place.

  Still, it is easier to live a “new” life in a new place. I think all of us by middle age have lived so many compromises and so much unsuitable insincerity, and if we have grown and grown more perceptive, less ambitious, and closer to the truth of society and outer pressures, we feel at this age very impatient of the frustrations of living what we don’t particularly care for or about. Also time is precious. Why should one spend it on dull neighbors who happen to drop in, or old beaux of one’s children, or their fathers and mothers, etc.?

  I resent the waste of life more than I did. There is less time. There is less energy. My time for going to school teas or being nice to my children’s old teachers or friends, I feel, is over, and I have earned the right (by “being nice” for three decades or more!) to see only the people I like. Useless resolution: I succumb again and again to the accidental doorbell or call!

  Just the same, one can choose a spot—like Oxford or Vevey—where one can start relatively fresh and make adult friends for the inner real person.

  At any rate, all this was supposed to tell you that I have hope of a very simple, pleasant, relaxed life for at least some months of the year in Switzerland. I’m not so sure about Darien. And, of course, once one starts to live closer to the bone of what one believes and feels for a few months of the year, it makes the other months seem rather more unbearable than they were before, which is perhaps the hitch of living half the year in different places.

  We have at present nothing in the chalet, but we have packed up one of the VWs with a sleeping bag and a few indispensable cooking utensils, towels, soap, old shoes, and have ordered four wooden chairs from a carpenter, so we could set up house with these at any moment!

  I hope now to be able to get quiet enough to find the threads of a new book! I wasn’t able to this summer—too busy, perhaps intentionally too busy—with moving, housework and details to get to and by myself. And this fall has been worse because it has involved the emotions as well as the hands and legs.

  I must let this go. Do write again if you can; it means so much to me. Do give my love to Lucia. It was a wrench not to see her—not to talk. Time is short for friends too. My love to you, from Reeve and especially,

  Anne

  N.Y.C.

  Tuesday, October 23rd, 1962

  Dearest C.,

  I came in town to have dinner with Margot and John, but am now probably going back to the country with Ansy. I’m just as glad since Aubrey, Con and I were up too late last night listening to the news on Cuba and the rebroadcast of the President’s speech about the “quarantine” on Cuba.* Reeve came downstairs and snuggled into a corner of the sofa and said in a small voice: “I wish Father were here, I’d feel safer with Father.”

  In the meantime—Con and Aubrey are on their way back to Portland, and N.Y.C. is noticeably emptier (quite pleasant) because of the war scare. Ansy and I will drive back for supper (because a man has dropped out of Margot’s party and it makes it uneven to have an extra woman), and she will be there tomorrow and then go back down to Bucks County.

  … I got your note from Suisse saying that no more letters to Vevey—that you were off to Johannesburg and then Nairobi, so I assume Bell is in Johannesburg and have addressed this letter there—as well as to Kenya.

  Must stop. I do hope nothing blows up in Berlin. I don’t suppose Russia will fight over Cuba—not only Reeve misses you!

  Ashfield, Mass.

  November 11th, 1962

  Dearest C.,

  This letter will hardly be an answer to your long one to me about Ansy and psychiatry, which I got last week—much of which I agree with and hardly can answer, and where I differ with you can only, perhaps, be gone over by word of mouth.

  I have been reading an article in the Times magazine called an analysis of psychoanalysis. Not very deep, but rather good and objective—admitting the impossibility of any precise data about “cures” in answer to some of your questions, without arguing too deeply—or at all—just my opinion.

  I don’t think Anne is going to Rosen because it’s “smart” or “convenient,” and I really believe she believes she needs him—how “desperately” I don’t know. She is certainly a different person now than she was two or three weeks ago when she left Boston. She even looks different and is leading a fairly quiet and normal life there: keeping house in a very inexpensive apartment, studying German and guitar and riding horseback and walking and seeing Rosen rather regularly. It’s a good deal more normal than life in Boston was—or even Radcliffe life—and I think she sees more normal people and can come up here for weekends.

  Some of it is certainly “sugar pill”—or just being away from pressure and a pressured environment, and feeling she doesn’t have to make any decisions on her life for the moment and can look at the way she’s been acting, and certainly feels it’s been—some of it—a great mistake.

  I don’t think Rosen is equally good with everyone, as he has certainly had his failures. I don’t happen to feel that Anne is one of them. I do feel that she has been helped—that she is stronger than the spring in France or last fall. These states are hard to measure—I know you disagree. I don’t think the improvement is spectacular or fast, but I don’t see any retrogression. On the contrary—a slow and persistent growth and improvement. In the face of this, and in the face of the alternatives (in Radcliffe or in France), and in the face of not knowing anyone any better than Rosen (imperfect as he may be and certainly is), I would be hesitant of separating her from Rosen at this point.

  I would hesitate to take this responsibility on myself (after all, it was her choice and is her choice). However, you feel strongly about it and if you feel you want to take the entire responsibility for Anne, you might, when you get back, look around for a new psychiatrist, urge Anne to go to him, and stay around to make sure the reaction is good between them, talk to him regularly, and keep an eye on it, etc. You have certainly every right to do this. We would have to do this if Rosen died, and I am sure there are other good psychiatrists—perhaps better—for Anne. I also think there are a lot of worse ones.

  All this we can discuss when you get back. Our frameworks are very different but, as you say, even though they may clash, they seem to want to stay together—balance each other.

  Incidentally, I feel Anne—and perhaps this is the you in her—has quite a lot of objectivity about Rosen and the troupe down there. She is humorous about it and really not a hopeless devotee (Thank God) and doesn’t want to stay down there too long or too closely, and says she can’t bear to go to Florida with them. I also agree with you that “each year brings a decided advance in the judgment and emotional reactions.” />
  Enough of Anne. I liked your letter very much re the ranch and am sure it was invaluable to the boys. I hear (from Con) that they have decided not to buy that Montana ranch, which relieves me. I think it was too soon and too heavy an investment—and Land is not sure enough—and it also seemed to me too isolated. Now I must go upstairs. Your descriptions of Africa—in flux—are very vivid and interesting. It will be good to hear all this from you first hand. Reeve and I miss you very much.

  November 29th, 1962

  Dear Lonnie,*

  I was very glad to get your letter but sorry not to see you over the Thanksgiving weekend due to all the misunderstanding. I missed your telephone call since I was having my arms (both stupidly scalded with hot water) dressed at the doctor and it took longer there than I expected.

  You must try to forgive your mother—and perhaps me too—for being overprotective. This is a common failing of mothers. I think your mother was trying to protect you—perhaps me, as well, but mostly you, I think. And it was true we would have had no chance to talk Saturday since I was cook and hostess and dishwasher.

  That’s all I’ll say about that except that, though I’m fond of your mother and have known her a long time and feel desperately sorry for her (she has been through a lot), and though I knew and liked your father and valued his gifts, I am interested in you not for their sakes but simply for your own sake—as an interesting individual who has also gifts and sensitivity and courage and hope.