Against Wind and Tide

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  *Christian Wolff (1934–), son of Helen and Kurt Wolff.

  *Maria Wolff (1918–), Kurt Wolff’s daughter from his first marriage to Elisabeth Merck.

  *Jacqueline Feydy, Julien’s sister.

  *The tiny private island off the coast of Brittany, France, which the Lindberghs bought in 1938. They lived in the nineteenth century stone manor house there (with no plumbing or electricity) for much of that year.

  †Alexis Carrel (1873–1944), French doctor, scientist, author, and controversial eugenicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1912. He co-authored, with CAL, The Culture of Organs, and the two men worked together to create the first device that allowed organs to function outside the body during surgery. His wife was Anne-Marie-Laure Gourlez de La Motte.

  *Another bison—the horns, the back, the back feet—the front feet—the stomach.

  *Let’s go!

  †Mayor’s office.

  *Con’s daughter Saran Morgan was married to Robert Hutchins on January 4, about two weeks after Ansy married Julien.

  *Francis Randolph, a friend of Margot Wilkie’s and AML’s.

  *Jon and another diver had taken part in one of a series of experiments devised by aviation and ocean engineer Edwin Link. To explore the viability of living and working at great depths, the two men stayed for forty-nine hours at a depth of 432 feet in Link’s “Submersible, Portable, Inflatable Dwelling” off the Bahamas, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen.

  *From “The Gnu Song,” by British singer-songwriters Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, popularized by Tom Lehrer in 1958.

  †Sue Vaillant Hatt (see note this page).

  ‡This refers to a second safari, in October 1965, in which the Lindbergh children and their spouses (except for Land and his wife) participated.

  *The Vietnam War.

  †In 1965 Jon and Land bought a 4,000-acre cattle ranch in the Blackfoot Valley of western Montana.

  *Erin Lindbergh, Land and Susie Lindbergh’s daughter.

  *Nigel Nicolson (1917–2004) was an author, member of the British Parliament, and co-founder of the British publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicolson. He was a son of Sir Harold Nicolson (biographer of AML’s father) and Vita Sackville-West; the Lindberghs rented their house in Seven Oaks, England, from 1936 to 1937.

  †Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters, 3 volumes, edited by Nigel Nicolson (London: William Collins, 1966–1968).

  *AML’s article “A Safari Back to Innocence” was published in the October 21, 1966, issue of Life magazine.

  †From The Three Ways of Ancient Wisdom, by Nancy Wilson Ross (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966).

  *From “The Prejudices of Youth,” a speech delivered by Buber in 1937 and reprinted in Israel and the World: Essays in a Time of Crisis, by Martin Buber (New York: Schocken Books, 1948).

  *In January 1967 Jon chartered a forty-foot sport fisher so the Lindberghs could study the “whale nursery” in the lagoons of Baja California for an article that would be published in the December 22, 1967, issue of Life magazine.

  *AML’s cairn terrier.

  †This reply to an invitation from President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson was handwritten in formal (centered) style.

  *A friend who lived in Switzerland.

  †Eglantine Moreillon, a friend who lived in Vevey, Switzerland.

  *The one-room chalet built uphill from the Lindberghs’ home in Monts-de-Corsier, which AML used as a writing retreat.

  †Ernestine Stodelle (Mrs. John Chamberlain), an original member of the Humphrey-Weidman Company, modern dance troupe. She wrote about dance and philosophy, founded the Choreo-Lyric Dance Company in New Haven, and taught dance technique in Connecticut and at New York University. John Rensselaer Chamberlain, book reviewer, journalist, and longtime contributing editor at National Review.

  *CAL began working with the World Wildlife Fund’s parent organization, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, or IUCN, in 1962, reporting on and cataloging threatened fauna around the world. As time went on, his involvement with the WWF grew, and in 1966 he became a member of its board.

  †In an effort to increase tourism in the United States during the late 1960s, the Johnson administration pushed a voluntary “see America first” strategy, asking Americans to defer overseas travel.

  ‡The Lindberghs’ housekeeper and cook.

  *Reeve would marry Richard Brown, a photographer and teacher, in June 1968.

  *This is a reference to CAL’s concerns about the world’s increasing population.

  †Alika Watteau, Belgian painter, novelist, actress, and animal rights activist.

  *Gregory Bateson (1904–1980), an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, semiotician, and cyberneticist.

  †Florida Scott-Maxwell (1883–1979) an American psychologist who also wrote fiction, nonfiction, and plays.

  ‡Judith Jones (1924–), an editor at Alfred A. Knopf.

  *Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist. A pioneer in the study of animal behavior, he was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1973.

  †Sam Pryor, a retired Pan American executive and conservationist, and his wife, Mary, sold five acres from their extensive Maui property to the Lindberghs in 1968. A small house the Lindberghs called Argonauta (after a shell featured in Gift from the Sea) was built there in 1969.

  *Imelda Marcos (1929–) was the wife of then president of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos, who was eventually deposed in a coup in 1986, after years of martial law.

  †CAL made repeated visits to the Philippines during the 1960s, as part of his efforts to promote the preservation of indigenous species (including human tribal groups) threatened by technological development.

  *French for the snaillike Moon Shell.

  †The publication of AML’s letters and diaries.

  *Honolulu is actually 118 miles from Hana.

  *A Philippine government official who claimed to have discovered an isolated tribe that lived Stone Age lives in the Philippine rain forest. After President Marcos was deposed in 1986, groups of anthropologists, journalists, and linguists met with the tribesmen, some validating Elizalde’s claim, others insisting why it was a hoax.

  *A Benedictine abbey in Bethlehem, Connecticut, where AML and CAL sometimes went for retreats.

  †Dwight Morrow Jr. had married Nancy Lofton in November 1970.

  *For AML’s first volume of letters and diaries, Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters, 1922–1928 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).

  †AML’s elder sister, Elisabeth Reeve Morrow.

  *Monica Stirling (1916–), British novelist and biographer, and a good friend of AML’s.

  *Betty van Dusen, wife of Pitney van Dusen, theological writer, professor, and president of Union Theological Seminary.

  *Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: Diaries and Letters, 1929–1932 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).

  *Vice Admiral Emory Scott (“Jerry”) Land (1879–1971) was a first cousin of CAL’s mother. He was a highly decorated naval architect, specializing in submarine construction.

  †Elizabeth Lindbergh Brown.

  *Nesta Obermeier, a British expatriate and friend, daughter of Sir Francis Younghusband (1863–1942), British army officer and explorer whom the Lindberghs met on early flying trips.

  †Eliette Christen, a Swiss physiotherapist.

  ‡Dick Robbins, brother of Barbara Robbins Lindbergh.

  *Harriet Beecher Stowe’s metaphor, in a letter to her sister, for the effort it took to write novels while caring for a husband and seven children: “I have been called off at least a dozen times … to nurse the baby, then into the kitchen to make a chowder for dinner, and now I am at it again, for nothing but deadly determination enables me ever to write: it is rowing against wind and tide.…”

  *From the poem “Robinson Crusoe’s Story,” by Charles E. Carryl, in Modern Amer
ican Poetry: An Introduction, edited by Louis Untermeyer (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1919).

  *Stephen Mitchell (1943–), American poet and translator.

  †The manuscript for Osprey Island, a children’s book by Anne Lindbergh Feydy that would be published by Houghton Mifflin in 1974.

  *Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters, 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).

  *Corliss Lamont (1902–1995), philanthropist and supporter of varied socialist and civil liberties causes. A onetime suitor of AML, he was a lifelong admirer.

  *Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was a Jesuit priest, paleontologist, geologist, and philosopher whose writings on theology and evolution brought him into conflict with the Catholic church, and whose teachings continue to influence writers, artists, and philosophers.

  *The Flower and the Nettle: Diaries and Letters, 1936–1939, was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1976.

  †The Vagabond Path (New York: Scribner, 1972). Dame Margaret Iris Origo (1902–1988) was an Anglo-Irish biographer and memoirist who spent most of her life in Italy.

  *See note on this page.

  †See note on this page.

  *Edith Cutter Yates, Elizabeth Cutter Morrow’s younger sister.

  †Dōgen Zenji (1200–1253), Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher.

  *Dr. Milton M. Howell, a physician based in Hana, Maui, who had treated CAL for several years, and who took charge of his care in the last few days of his life.

  †Manager of the Hana Ranch, who helped with the logistics of CAL’s burial.

  ‡Another in the series of shell names the Lindberghs gave to their various homes.

  §AML enclosed a copy of The Spirit of St. Louis.

  *Autobiography of Values, a memoir by CAL based on a manuscript he had been working on at the time of his death, was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1978. It was edited by Bill Jovanovich and Judith Ann Schiff, of the Yale University Library.

  *When building Tellina in 1962, CAL researched and designed a bomb shelter for it, equipped to withstand even a tidal wave, in the event of a “megatonnage underwater burst” along the coastline. He felt it was practical to build a bomb shelter in a nuclear age. AML stored cases of Pedro Domecq sherry in it, which was also practical.

  *The first line of the poem “To Autumn,” by John Keats.

  *A foundation established on the fiftieth anniversary of CAL’s New York–to–Paris flight, whose mission is to promote the Lindberghs’ philosophy of balance between technological innovation and the preservation of nature. Its name has since been changed to The Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation.

  †War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters, 1939–1944 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).

  *Alan Valentine died in 1980.

  *From the last stanza of “The Dry Salvages” (the third of the Four Quartets):

  … These are only hints and guesses,

  Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

  Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

  The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

  †Still Pond, No More Moving is another game from AML’s childhood.

  *The period of “middle adulthood” described by social scientist Erik Erikson as between the ages of forty and sixty-five.

  *From XXXII, “From far, from eve and morning,” in A Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman (1859–1936).

  *Following a divorce from Julien Feydy in 1975, Ansy moved from Paris to Washington, D.C., and married the Polish-born composer, conductor, and pianist Jerzy Sapieyevski. They had one son, Marek.

  *Elsie Wheeler and her husband, “Link,” bought the large house in Darien from the Lindberghs when they moved into the smaller house they had built.

  †AML’s cairn terrier.

  *The Swiss handyman and plumber who cared for the chalet.

  †Châtel-St.-Denis, the district capital of Veveyse, a few miles north of the chalet and the nearest town of any size for groceries, etc.

  *Dana Atchley died in June 1982 at the age of eighty-nine, having practiced medicine until he was eighty-five. Mary Atchley died in May of that year.

  *Dr. Ida Davidoff (1904–2001), friend of AML’s and former professor of psychiatry and psychology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, also a marital and family therapist in private practice in New Canaan.

  *From The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas (New York: Viking, 1974).

  *Ansy’s son, Charles Feydy.

  *Could be translated from the French as either “the good death,” “the well-being of death,” or “the goodness of death.”

  *Barbara and Jon Lindbergh divorced in 1983.

  *Jon had married Karen Wylie Pryor, a writer and biologist specializing in behavior and learning.

  *Louisa Munroe Harris, a friend of AML’s since childhood.

  †Susan Hoguet, author-illustrator of children’s books, among them (as illustrator) Next Time Take Care, text by Anne Spencer Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), and The Tidy Lady, text by Anne Spencer Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989). A good friend of Ansy’s, as well as a close friend and companion of AML’s.

  Acknowledgments

  This book was written over the course of forty years by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who never thought it was a book at all. Yet years later, after her death, members of her family saw this material and thought it should be published in some form. The gathering and editing of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s diaries and letters from 1947 to 1986—and one or two pieces of her other writings—took place, sadly, without the author’s skillful editorial assistance. But the project was completed nonetheless, through the hard work, patience, determination, and perseverance of a great many people, all of whom deserve thanks.

  First of all, “The Team”: Land Lindbergh, Reeve Lindbergh, Kristina Lindbergh, and Carol Hyman. We worked together not for four decades but for four years, whether at the Yale archives, in Vermont, over the telephone, or by e-mail: reading, selecting, editing, arguing, often laughing, and sometimes close to crying our way through the material as we steadily labored to get the job done. We did it, dear team. God bless us, everyone!

  We thank our families, too, whose support and forbearance made the work possible. Janet McMillan kindly and patiently sent Land to Vermont and Connecticut whenever his fellow team members needed him. Patton Hyman offered us his valuable wisdom, some delightful and delicious dinners, and his legal expertise. Andrew Hyman transcribed literally hundreds of pages of handwritten letters and gave us the benefit of his very perceptive and often refreshing thoughts. Nat Tripp and Bob Conte put up with many hours of intense conversation among the team members, and Nat also treated the whole crew to night after night of his superb cooking when we got together in Vermont.

  From the beginning, the project had the support of the Lindbergh Literary LLC, composed of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s literary heirs: Jon M. Lindbergh, Land M. Lindbergh, Scott M. Lindbergh, Reeve Lindbergh, Constance Feydy Hoffman, and Marek Sapieyevski. We are grateful for their trust and for their faith that someday something positive would emerge from our efforts. Constance Feydy Hoffman also typed out quantities of wonderful letters written to her mother, Anne Spencer Lindbergh, by her grandmother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Several of these are included here. Thank you, Connie! Thanks to Barbara Robbins and to Susie Miller for sharing family photographs of people and places AML loved.

  Thanks to our Morrow and Morgan cousins and to our beloved aunt, Margot Wilkie, for their interest and assistance along the way. Thanks to the Valentine family—Garrison, Laurie, and Sarah Valentine—for providing letters from Anne Morrow Lindbergh to both of their parents and for sharing family photographs of Alan and Lucia Valentine.

  It would have been impossible to create this book without the assistance and encouragement of Judith A. Schiff, William Massa, and the archivists and staff at the St
erling Memorial Library at Yale University. Thanks so much to you all.

  Thanks to Jennie Dunham and the Dunham Literary Agency, for good work on our behalf.

  Finally, we are grateful to our editor, Altie Karper, and to everyone at Pantheon/Random House for believing in Anne Morrow Lindbergh once again, and always.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh was born in 1906. She married Charles Lindbergh in 1929 and became a noted aviator in her own right, eventually publishing several books on the subject and receiving several aviation awards. Gift from the Sea, published in 1955, earned her international acclaim. She was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame, the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and the Aviation Hall of Fame of New Jersey. War Within and Without, the penultimate installment of her published diaries, received the Christopher Award in 1980. Mrs. Lindbergh died in 2001 at the age of ninety-four.

  Gift from the Sea is also available as an eBook: 978-0-307-80517-1

  In this beloved classic—graceful, lucid, lyrical—Anne Morrow Lindbergh shares her meditations on youth and age; love and marriage; peace, solitude and contentment as she set them down during a brief vacation by the sea.

  “A sensitive, tensile, original mind probes delicately into questions of balance and relationship in the world today.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A wise and beautiful book.”

  —Harper’s Magazine

  For more information on the publisher:

  Visit Pantheon Books: http://www.pantheonbooks.com

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  Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in 1948

  Anne with (from left to right) Reeve, Ansy, and Scott, in 1950

  (Photograph by Lucia Nebel White)

  At Jon Lindbergh and Barbara Robbins’s wedding in 1954. From left to right: Janey Robbins, Wendy Robbins, Reeve, Dick Robbins, Barbara, Jim Robbins, Jon, Anne, Charles, Scott, Land, and Ansy.