Against Wind and Tide

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  And yet—I felt his attack on an old sore place.

  Moreover, the general effect of the attack has made me feel again trapped—by my name, my fame, my money, my position, my marriage.

  I suppose the real trap is my sensitivity—my inner vulnerability—my own weaknesses.

  But sometimes the outer traps seem very real. How to live free of the pressures that beset the famous & the rich in America? How to be oneself in the frames the world gums down over you?

  How to be oblivious of them? I know the answer really is being creatively occupied—engrossed—in your own work—so engrossed that nothing else matters.

  Here again, the logistics of a bad ten days of overwork in a house with sick children & interrupting obligations have kept me from the one outlet that could help free me.

  (Outside people who love you help, too, but I have been for the same reasons cut off from them.)

  Next week I must start again. Work—and a few warm outsiders—if possible—to laugh with me (telephoning Dana helped).

  [JANUARY 25TH, 1957, DIARY]

  … How strange & isolated & unloved one gets to feel in those trapped periods & a review like Ciardi’s is enough to make one feel that the whole world hates one! That, plus Monte’s letters supporting him!

  … How alone we are—C. & I—in the midst of our fame! He doesn’t mind it but I do.

  [MARCH 17TH, 1957, DIARY]

  … I have found two small rooms in an old house on 19th Street*—the new frame for seeing people—& a place to escape to for a night—perhaps to write in? It is charming & I have now put some of my own things in it—& it gives me a sense of the summer person I am when I wake up in it—detached & whole—not torn into shreds by the myriad head-of-the-house duties. I walk up & turn the key in my door. No one sees me & stops me—as at the Cos. Club—where I cannot go now without people recognizing me, coming up & asking me something or telling me what they think of my book or books—or the Ciardi review.

  This has gone on & on. His attack provoked an avalanche of angry letters back (most of them in exactly the same key as his angry & petty article)—which he then answered again in another long defense of his attack. (Some of this was interesting. I understood better what he was attacking in me—whom he sees as an example of “the genteel tradition.”) Then letters coming to his defense, etc. etc. I feel the SRL exploited the affair & whooped it up—like a horse-race.

  I think Ciardi is completely sincere but totally unaware of his motivations (this may make for a good poet—but it makes a bad critic) in attacking me & unaware of the penumbra into which his explosion fell. All of this has little to do, I think, with poetry or personalities but has to do with what Spender called “the pathology of literary success” in America. Also the curious phenomena of projection and negative & positive transference. I have become a kind of symbol—a Mother figure to the American public—because I married their Hero—is it?—or because I lost a child? Or because my other book offered women “a consolation prize” for frustration? I am gummed into a frame—Whistler’s Mother, complete with rocking chair & folded hands. Ciardi couldn’t bear Whistler’s Mother & called her a bitch (I can’t bear her either & I suspect she is a bitch)—but the American public don’t like her called a bitch. She is their mother. They don’t tolerate their mother being called a bitch. So they rose in fury against him. He was attacking a false picture; they were defending a false picture. The net result has been one more coat of shellac over me—the false picture of me in a frame.

  The criticism of the poetry per se I accept—it was exaggerated & unfair, but it had validity. But the anger was related to something else. He meant, I believe, to attack the phoney values, phoney praise, phoney sales of my books. If he had done it clear-sightedly he could have done a service to poetry, to book selling & reviewing, to himself as a critic & leader of taste, to the SRL as an instrument of good critical insight—& to me. But, as it was, he did it in such a petty & hostile way—attacking me with petty animosity—& so his attack illuminated nothing—proved nothing—& accomplished nothing—except to arouse the same kind of petty animosity in return.

  Nothing has been worth the candle. My poems were not worth his attack; his attack was not worth the letters that answered it. And all of it—attack, letters of defense & counter defense—has been on this blind, petty, unenlightened level. A waste of his time & energies as a good poet, a waste of anger—which was unproductive—a waste of target in me. And there I am—gummed tighter than ever into Whistler’s Mother’s frame.

  However, one must just keep on trying to break out of the frames that parents, teachers, husbands & wives, public & critics, put one in for their convenience & safety—by new action—new writing. It is hard to write when one mistrusts one’s talent—but I am beginning again.

  … I have put out feelers for new ways out of my ruts: the apartment, seeing people in town, the Institute in Phila., meetings. Not all of these will be fruitful, but one must try to break one’s frames in many directions.

  (Poor Ciardi does not know that I too am in revolt against the “Genteel Tradition”—it did not show in most of the poems but I am. How I have struggled against it & struggled for life! He too, poor man, is struggling, caught perhaps in the rut of revolt—one of the worst because one feels so self-satisfied in it.)

  [OCTOBER 8TH, 1957, DIARY]

  … My first look at Wendy* in Barbara’s arms—a golden baby—golden-haired—round—fruit-like—warm & cuddly & smiling—one of the fruit-like babies like Reeve, Land, Scott. Christie, on the other hand, as I wrote Land, comes of the line of hellions—ECM, Elisabeth, Ansy & Eiluned.* Erect & angular, sharp-nosed, sharp-eyed, precise in speech & step—& look. Very sensitive, very strong-willed, very intelligent. A character! She has all the tenacity of all sides of the family—Jim R.’s chin, ECM’s (“no-trump look”) tip-tilted nose, Elisabeth’s “sassiness,” CAL’s stubborn persistence, Jon’s determination. She is made of dynamite & having her will crossed sets off an explosion. A dangerous child, but with Barbara’s patience & love her heart will expand to accepting & living with the imperfect world & imperfect people & situations. I cannot help, of course, adoring her. Mother, Elisabeth, Ansy & Eiluned: I have always been in love with them. It is wrong to type them for their most essential quality is that they are unmistakably themselves. They have a good proportion of the masculine in them. (Ansy & Elisabeth were/are more feminine.) This child reminds me of ECM in that and in her erectness & her vitality. But her sensitivity & artistic qualities are like Ansy & Eiluned.… Wendy, I see as perfectly balanced, heart & mind—like Reeve. She is “loving & giving,” gave all her food to Sigee.

  [From a letter to Alan Valentine]

  October 11th, 1957

  Dear dear …

  It was wonderful to find your letter in my pile of unopened mail last night, coming back from a day and night at Bucks County.… The first time I have been in the apartment since I lunched there with you, and the first time I had left home since the children and grandchildren came. (They have all, including C. and Uncle, just left!)

  It has been a totally absorbing, very satisfactory and successful, but, to me, very exhausting three weeks. The presence and problems of Uncle, who is a darling person, added to its complications. I thought of our grandmothers, who certainly managed to have children and grandchildren, uncles and aunts in their homes for years without breakdowns. I did not break down, but I felt as if I was holding it all up, the load, on some tense part of the neck. No doubt this is some kind of God-illusion. One doesn’t have to be such an Atlas, or to assume one is indispensable, or to get so emotionally involved with each person’s set of values. (The indispensable something for C., Jon, and Barbara, Anne, Scott and Reeve, Uncle [his teeth!], the babies: each one is revolving to a different sun, a different time, a different cycle.) I try to mesh in with all of them and get worn out. There is something wrong with this; maybe you can tell me when we meet. Or perhaps by then I shall have had enough persp
ective to know!

  In any case, this is just to explain why I did not get a letter off to the Hotel Metropole, as I meant to do when I drove away from the parking lot, thinking so much of you as I drove out to Scott’s Cove, arriving a half an hour before we left again (C. came back) for Idlewild and Jon’s family. Also to explain my joy to get your letter last night, a joy, I suppose, compounded of many things selfish and unselfish. Partly because it spoke directly to a me that has been engulfed for weeks. I have been a faceless, eyeless, bodiless person. I know, of course, that this me that is a collection of functions as I have been this month (the functioning housekeeper-mother) is just as real as the artist-writer friend of Gramercy Park, but they seem like different people, and opposed; it is my life job to unite them. Partly a very real joy and relief to hear the released you that spoke in that letter. You cannot know how different the tone, and how relieved I felt to hear it, a weight off my heart. (Of course I carry both you and Lucia in my heart.)

  Until such time as we can resolve, dissolve, or learn to live with our indissoluble problems, it seems to me that periods away, and the acceptance of them on both sides, is the first, perhaps only constructive step for our complicated marriages. (I will talk to Lucia about this.) C. takes his openly and constantly. They are always rationally for work, not for escape, change or refreshment, but I cannot but believe they are really motivated by these last needs. It seems more difficult for me to take them. But that is partly because I am a woman with children still at home, and partly because it is so hard for me to break my ruts, to break away as I feel, instinctively, one must from time to time.

  Perhaps for movement, for life itself, for feeling, for awareness, one must continually break and break again one’s habits, the minute they become thoughtless and easy, the minute they lie lightly on one. And we are wrong to try to plan for peaceful routine. (Is there not a parallel in electricity for this making and breaking of currents?) Women err in this much more than men. I resent and resist the breaking of my routine, but I am always grateful when it is broken, and renewed.

  There is so much more to say but I must think it out. I have thought a great deal of the problems of women in the modern world just lately, in the last month! But it takes time and peace and isolation in my Little House to think it out. There has been none this fall so far. This morning’s letter, or jotting down of thoughts, has run on and on and is, I feel, rather incoherent. The weeks in Austria seem so far away and unreal. Perhaps your present peace and creativity gives me renewed faith in them. Don’t question them—take them … and my love,

  A.

  Wednesday, November 14th, 1957

  Dear Land,

  It is Wednesday evening. We have just finished the dishes. Father put his fish bones out for the coons but Sigee happened to be outside and cleared the plate. I have just corrected Scott’s theme (on a Camp Day!) and told Anne how to refuse a Mt. Holyoke tea invitation. Reeve is getting ready for bed. I am very sleepy but I have been meaning to write you for so long. I must start.

  Scott seems to have turned some corner and is doing better in school and seems happier in general. I have no doubt that your wonderful letter to him gave him a real boost just when he needed it. He was very pleased by it. Incidentally (not really incidental at all, but I was surprised at Scott picking it out) Scott said of that letter: “This is a very well written letter, don’t you think, Mother? I mean—that’s pretty good description there—Land is a pretty good writer!”

  I think he was right and I was pleased to have him notice it. We have not gotten around to his using your room. (Incidentally, again, Scott never imagined more than using it while you were away. It is your room—and you should always have the use of it. It is here ready and open for you. But it still would do a lot for Scott to be able to use it while you’re away.) We are about to line up the skis, boots, etc. in it to ship ahead for Aspen. We have a chalet—I gather the same one as last year.

  I went off last week (the week of the flying dog)* to New Boston and sat in the sun and copied and rewrote the chapters I did in Austria last summer. The first chance I’ve had this fall! I’d like to get another chapter rewritten before Christmas if possible. I’m now through the first rough draft of this very short—but tedious to write—book. Some of it I know is bad, some I suspect is bad, and a little of it I am not ashamed of!

  It is now morning. (I didn’t write all night!) Your father is about to go off for three weeks but plans to go to Aspen and seems quite cheerful about it, though he doesn’t expect to ski much!

  I enclose a New Yorker cartoon on the Satellite Situation. Anne came back from Mr. Peebles’ History Class with the latest gag on satellites—perhaps you’ve heard it? “They’re going to send up cows next—and that’ll be the herd shot around the world!”

  I cannot understand why someone in the State Department didn’t have the sense of form, manners, and statesmanship, or psychological insight, to immediately congratulate the Russians on their achievement. This would seem to me the line to take instead of this panic.

  It will be wonderful to talk to you—about your new life—and about our old one here. (Your father and I get very tired of the pressures around New York and the lack of wilderness and lack of peace to work. But where to move to?)

  Much love to you—

  Mother

  Scott’s Cove

  Saturday, July 26th [1958]

  Dearest Margot,

  Con has just forwarded your letter from Rome. (I have been home for five days from the island in Puget Sound.) Heavens, what a summer (yours)! I can only guess at it. And I can only contribute that our month of driving (C. and I, Land and Anne, last summer, with no one else and really no complications, was really also a great strain.)

  It is true what you say: everyone reverts to an earlier stage of insecurity: Land was desperately impatient. Anne wanted to sit in one place. I couldn’t make up my mind about anything. CAL pressed, lectured, criticized, and finally fled alone. But even after that it wasn’t too good. I arrived in Austria, feeling it, and especially I, had been a total failure.

  I just think adolescents today cannot be taken on trips abroad—as we used to be. They are too old, too independent, too interested in love and life and themselves to see anything else. The pre-adolescents are more open, more the way we used to be. I think Reeve and Scott would have been better and happier all summer than Anne and Land. (They did much better alone together.) Or perhaps one child alone! When I think of you with all seven—different families, all the extra pressures and insecurities that come out when you are away from home—I don’t see how it worked at all.*

  I don’t know that there is any solution to those difficult problems of double families. I have just seen Ernestine (yesterday, here for a swim) struggling with hers. The adolescents of another mother cannot be reabsorbed. They have to go out and live and make mistakes and suffer and then, perhaps, if you are an understanding person, they will come back to you gratefully as adults—but not as children.

  Since you are always—even in anger or impatience or tears—open and fundamentally loving and truth-seeking, they will feel that and will gain from it and learn to trust and come back to it. But I don’t think they can now. The misery comes from that persistent illusion that you can make them yours. One sees small signs of improvement and says: Ah, Now—Here it is! But it isn’t. It’s only an indication of an openness it will take years to fulfill.

  Anyway, the struggle to succeed all the time—to win through—is totally exhausting. I hope you have some time of not trying, of being alone with your own children—and here, being alone with John.

  The crisis in the Mideast seems to be better—from what one can see by the papers here—so I hope your plans to leave the children and come back here alone come through. I must say, I long to see you. Just selfishly, I feel I’ve had two summers already—four days with Con and a week on Jim’s island in Puget Sound (a totally wild out-of-touch beautiful spot in process of being organized as
a farm-resort-camp), but this summer rather inadequately prepared to feed, bathe, clean up after the twenty-four relatives that turned up!

  The four days with Con were wonderful, though we spent much of it in the kitchen because her two part-time helpers had been knocked out by a funeral. I had a much better and happier picture of her life there. Full, yes, but rich and peaceful, varied and happy. It has taken a long time but it is beginning to flower I think. Only she still has no time to write—or very little.

  I then proceeded by Jeep with Land, Scott, and Land’s dog Willy via three ferries (we missed one of them and spent the night in pup-tents in a campground) to Jim’s most inaccessible island off Vancouver,† where he had gathered all the young Millers, Robbinses, Lindberghs, and others to work at setting it up. Ages ranged from a baby of six months to Great-Grandma Robbins. We were scattered about in cabins and farm buildings and ate at a central farmhouse. Anne and three other girls did all the cooking and washing up for twenty-four people for two meals a day. And let me tell you, this is the system. She learned more in three weeks than I have in a lifetime about cooking! Reeve and another girl did all the babysitting, washing, feeding. Became quite the experts too.

  Everyone worked. It was the kind of disorganized first-summer-half camping place where you just worked all the time, but quite happily, to make things go. There wasn’t much chance to talk or privacy but you shared the island and beautiful brilliant sunny cool weather. We were so self-absorbed and isolated that when I came out a week later, I discovered with some shock that the world had almost burst into war—without our knowing it.* I then came back to an empty house: very silent, very hot, very humid, and everything overgrown outside. The shock of the change from totally communal active extrovert life to this one of total let-down in damp silence is very odd and I’m not yet used to it. I go to the Little House each morning and turn on the air conditioner and try to get back into my ghastly book but haven’t yet managed to get started. Probably it’s good to let down and look at things.