Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  Fall moved swiftly into winter, but Christmas didn’t bring its usual consolation. It was eclipsed by preparations for Elisabeth’s wedding, which took place on December 28 at the Morrows’ home in Englewood. On the day of the wedding, preoccupied with memories of her marriage to Charles when her father was alive, three years earlier, Anne quietly set out the glasses and the wine, recorded presents, mingled with the guests. Relieved not to be the center of attention, Anne was pleased to play a secondary role; it was her true nature. Consonant with her father’s notions of “composing differences,” Anne tried to harmonize the varied strains of the guests, to orchestrate the voices and memories. She greeted every guest with a smile and introduced each to the other. Balancing the numbers on each side of the room, she made certain that everyone felt important and comfortable. In her parents’ home, among her family and friends, she had the luxury of just being “Anne.”

  Suddenly the music began and everyone found a place to view the procession. Aubrey and Uncle Jay, her father’s brother, strode down the aisle. Uncle Jay tried not to cry.26 And then came the wedding march: Con, a bridesmaid, enveloped in blue velvet and pink orchids, looked serious and demure. Even as Elisabeth came into view, Anne’s eyes could not leave her little sister.

  Dwight Jr. escorted Elisabeth down the aisle, reminding Anne of her father. A flood of emotion overtook her as she focused her eyes on Elisabeth. But it wasn’t only Elisabeth she saw. In her sister’s clear and penetrating beauty, Anne saw the essence of Elisabeth, the prototype of femininity. As so many times before, Anne was content to be in her sister’s shadow. Yet even at this joyous occasion, one of rebirth and communion, Charlie’s death haunted her. As she watched the wedding procession, she chastised herself for her baby’s death. Over and over, she repeated to herself that “it could not have happened. It could have been another way.”27

  For now, Anne tried to run from her feelings, busying herself with activities she usually shunned. She went shopping, often, “like a man to drink.”28 She visited sick friends in the hospital and dined in New York with Charles’s colleagues and visiting dignitaries.

  As she rode the subway in Manhattan, she bitterly scanned the crowd. “Which one of you killed my boy?” she thought to herself, trying not to cry. These people—these horrible street people who read the tabloids; they were already dead, she wrote.29

  By the turn of the year, Anne knew she could no longer hide. She had to permit herself to feel and to think. She had to write.

  Conceived in December 1931 and completed in January 1934, North to the Orient30 is the account of Anne’s 1931 flight with Charles through Canada, Alaska, Russia, Japan, and China. But it is also an allegorical prose poem filled with the clarity and spirituality that grew out of her sorrow. It is an act of faith inextricably linked to the birth of Jon. While the kidnapping of Charlie stole the meaning of words, the birth of a new son resurrected Anne’s faith in the creative process. It is not a book Anne could have written before the death of her father or the kidnapping of her infant son. It is too free-ranging in its speculation, too assertive, too metaphysical to be other than the product of profound suffering. It is, in fact, the very act of suffering that imbues the Lindberghs’ flight with meaning and converts Anne’s simple diary notes and letters into moral allegory. It is Anne’s rage diffused and codified to achieve reconciliation and universality. It is an odyssey, written by one with an almost “animal desire” to find her way “home.”

  But at the time of her writing, Anne had no home. North Haven and Next Day Hill no longer existed as Anne remembered them; she would not return to Hopewell. The “home” she left in the summer of 1931 was the scene of her childhood, full of a loving and enveloping family, which could never be the same. Her father was dead and her son had been murdered. Nonetheless, Anne knew that she must find her way back to the “knot,” which fastened her faith to life before they died, if she were to make sense of her experience and go forward with hope. She had to return to the innocence that belied her vulnerability in order to unravel its “mysteries.”

  Implicit in Anne’s narrative is the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Anne is Ariadne, the king’s daughter, who waits at the entrance of the Labyrinth for her hero to return, guided by the ball of thread she has given him. But Anne’s Ariadne is a technological heroine in a technological age, with the skill and freedom to ride alongside her prince, capable of as much conquest as he. Anne is at once the lovesick maiden and the agent of their safe return. She, like Ariadne, devises the plan that brings them home. This is Anne’s moment of triumph—the story that renews her faith and hope.

  The Lindberghs’ seven-thousand mile flight, which soared above geographic and cultural boundaries, is the perfect metaphor for her psychological journey. Isolated in her sorrow, Anne uses the narrative to rail against a universe indifferent to human suffering. Through the art of narrative, she grieves and searches for reconciliation. It is a “daydream” in the Freudian sense, a creative vision in which the author splinters her psyche into literary representations whose conflict and resolution will make her whole.

  Anne is both the protagonist and the narrator, the observer and the heroine. The people she meets on her flight are pilgrims; each a different person to test her virtue and teach her lessons.

  At their first stop, Baker Lake, an isolated trading post on the flatlands of the Northwest Territory, Anne is the first white female the Eskimos have ever seen and the first woman to visit the European fur traders at their camp. As if reinventing herself through their eyes, Anne examines the Victorian notions of the feminine ideal, the symbol of delicate beauty, moral purity, and “home.” Laughing at the discrepancy between herself and the symbol, Anne probes the universal need for intimacy and security. Like the animals they trap, the traders at Baker Lake burrow beneath the ice, hiding from their feelings in order to survive the loneliness. Anne becomes the object of their projected fantasies; they treat her as warmly as if she were sister, mother, or wife. A feminine ideal, Anne cracks their icy surface with the magical power of her words. Language, she concludes, can crystallize memories raised from the dark seas of the unconscious.

  They fly deeper through the white summer nights of the Northwest Territory to the Mackenzie delta, on its northern shore. There, in the bleak and frozen land, Anne feels like an exile in time and space. They stop at Aklavic, a sophisticated settlement of twenty-eight houses and two churches in frequent contact with the “outside world.” Unlike the people of Baker Lake, the Eskimos and settlers here have radio apparatus and are visited yearly by a boat that brings letters and packages, food and dry goods from the mainland. To Anne, the arrival of the boat seems to symbolize the longing of men, women, and children for the comfort and possessions of “home.”

  As they span the Arctic Sea to the northernmost part of the Alaskan peninsula, Port Barrow, they are enveloped by fog. In the gray half-light of the Arctic sun, as they move farther into an abyss, Anne loses hope of arrival or retreat. Aided by the good will and competence of the stationmaster at Point Barrow, they blindly climb the walls of white fog. Once again, in exile in a barren and icy land, Anne explores the power of the spoken word. Their host, a doctor, is also a preacher who translates portions of the New Testament into the language of the Eskimos. Through the doctor’s renditions of biblical stories and hymns, Anne confirms her need for a connection to a spiritual force, one that transcends the particularity of culture and language. Words, while they are limited instruments of human experience, connect not only man with man but man with God.

  Their next stop is Nome, an old mining village on the south coast of the Seward Peninsula on the Bering Sea. There in the busy harbor, among the tarnished remnants of a gold rush town, Anne sees examples of the folly of human narcissism. By observing the chief of an ancient Eskimo tribe who is forced to sell trinkets to tourists in order to survive, Anne studies the social mythology of demigods, pathetic symbols of power in a universe beyond human control. The chief is taller and
stronger than any of his tribesmen—he belongs to the “born rulers of the earth.” And yet, Anne says, he is nothing more than a clown who ceases to be the king when he does not perform. He is worshipped as an image of royal invincibility. But he is, in fact, the court jester. Narcissistic, arrogant, and domineering, he mistakes his image for reality. Like Charles, Anne implies, he is the plaything of Nature, a “flying fool” deified by man.

  Once again, they fly across the Bering Sea to its northeast peninsula and the Sea of Okhotsk. On the tiny Russian island of Karaginskiy, the secular concerns of a scientific and industrial society have obscured the spiritual aspects of life. This, Anne writes, is another barren land, no less sterile for its civilized modernity. Nonetheless, Anne finds a common bond with these women, whose culture and language are alien to her own. Spreading her photographs of Charlie on the table, Anne becomes connected to them and to “the boy” she left at home. While the Communist Party has replaced the priesthood, the human spirit cannot be crushed. Feelings and relations are the basis of what it means to be human.

  Leaving Russia, they follow the chain of islands linking the Kamchatka Peninsula to Japan. The small island of Ketoi, with its little harbor cupped inside green volcanic peaks draped in fog, looks like the idyllic scene in a Japanese print—timelessly tranquil.

  Like the skilled writer of a mystery tale, Anne slowly builds toward an overwhelming realization. Both writer and protagonist, ubiquitous surveyor and helpless victim, Anne spins a tale of pursuit by a monstrous Giant—the menacing fog. Her intent is to depict a battle of wills, confrontation between Man and Nature. Slowly the “shimmering unreal world,” too beautiful to be threatening, succumbs to the enveloping fog. As fear creeps over her, Anne tries to keep it away with cold analysis, only to find herself imprisoned within it.

  The Japanese stationmaster advises them to turn back, but his power, demonstrated only in words, is impotent against the force of Nature. Charles, her husband, is the true hero, the one who can conquer the Giant. He is the perfect shape of manhood—or is he? Until now, Charles has been the absent, invisible pilot-operator. Suddenly, he moves to center stage. He is the hero, tested to the very edge of the warrior’s courage. Yet, writes Anne, Charles looks like a skeleton, flattened against the wind, a man “gritting his teeth in his lost fight.” His is the very face of death. He, the jester who once made the princes laugh, is silenced by the power of death.

  The flight slips further into allegory as Anne confirms her insights among the kind-hearted and provincial inhabitants of the remote islands of Japan. But all symbolic references cohere in her description of the Japanese tea ceremony, an event that does not have a geographic center. Even the reader though understands that it takes place on the outskirts of a city on one of the larger Japanese islands. Anne leaves the ritual remote from time and space, disconnected from the social realities of life in Japan. The tea garden is an oasis, an aesthetic setting apart from the turmoil of daily routine. If language has expressed the magic, silence is now the harmonizing melody. Words breed meaning, and yet they cannot touch the essential core.

  All the people Anne meets on her pilgrimage “home” share one need: to be participants in a human and spiritual community. Anne asks, “What is essential to human life?” and carefully strips humanity of its social and cultural artifacts: language, convention, and technology. “Home” is no longer a physical refuge; it is the stillness at the center of one’s mind, giving rise to self-knowledge and reconciliation. Silence is the alchemy that changes the artifacts of language and culture into the “gold” of beauty and art. Words and symbols, though no more than representations of human experience, are the only means for deriving understanding from the past.

  Contrary to Hebrew scripture, Anne does not decry the graven image, the semblance of life through art. It does not presume power; it imbues life with meaning.

  Death is the finality that cannot be challenged. But, Anne writes, it does not mean oblivion. Those we love must die, yet aesthetic symbols can re-create our memories and sustain our love. The bridge of words is like a beautifully woven “band of cloth” spanning the space between lovers. And, by implication, so is her book.

  Anne cannot return to the home of her childhood. North Haven is forever changed; she cannot know again the joy of seeing her father and the baby wave good-bye. But life, stripped of certainty and magic, still holds room for affirmation. The scars of loss have been healed by art, the “beautiful abyss” between earth and sky. Anne has defied the God of her ancestors and justified the blasphemy of the written word. She has unthroned Charles, crowned Nature and Chance, and has begun to find her long way “home.”

  15

  Purgatory

  Anne prepares for the Hauptmann trial, Englewood, 1935. (Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts And Archives, Yale University Library)

  With rage or despair, cries as of troubled sleep or of a tortured shrillness—they rose in a coil of tumult, along with noises like a slap of beating hands, all fused in a ceaseless flail that churns and frenzies that dark and timeless air like sand through a whirlwind.

  —DANTE,

  The Inferno,

  FOREHELL, CANTO 3

  JANUARY 1933, ENGLEWOOD, NEW JERSEY

  The New Year resounded with life. The baby was growing fat and strong, and more and more Anne released herself into the moment, feeling “younger and gayer” than she had in the long dark months before. Thoughts of Charlie’s death intruded, but Jon’s presence soothed everything.

  While New York sank deeper into the Depression, and the restaurants and hotels were somber and half-empty, Anne and Charles moved in the rarefied circles of the wealthy and the famous, insulated from a country in turmoil. Foreign governments vied to honor them; the giants of industry and commerce pulled them to their side. Face to face with the beautiful, coiffed, and velvet-gloved women of New York society, Anne set aside her “mask.” Her own feelings, so close to the surface, made her self-conscious and vulnerable.1

  They went to Amelia Earhart Putnam’s house for dinner. But it was to be a “prickly” evening. Earhart seemed to look right through her, disdaining Anne’s conventional femininity. Extending her long and gracious hand, Earhart asked coolly, “Have you read A Room of One’s Own?”2

  It was as if Earhart knew how difficult it was for Anne to break free of Charles. Among female pilots, Anne never earned a reputation as a true flyer. To this small coterie of women, Anne, who didn’t fly solo, was viewed as an appendage to Charles. Earhart’s question was almost rhetorical.

  During the first week in January, Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West arrived in town for their “American tour.” Nicolson, a British foreign officer, a novelist, and a biographer who had recently abandoned his diplomatic career, was feeling middle-aged and depressed. His new career as a journalist and a radio broadcaster was unsatisfying. His wife, Vita, however, a bisexual with enough energy and optimism for both of them, had earned herself a reputation as a novelist. Both had become popular among the British avant-garde as social commentators and literary critics. Their public speeches and radio broadcasts supplemented Nicolson’s uncertain income and Vita Sackville-West’s shrinking family funds.3

  On their first night in America, the Nicolsons dined with the Lindberghs at a private dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. Nicolson was “shy to meet them,” he wrote in his diary, after all they had been through. Charles was more complex than he had imagined. Nicolson was struck by Charles’s physical beauty, as well as his “intellectual forehead, shy engaging manner, and his thin, nervous, capable fingers.” His wife, wrote Nicolson, not referring to Anne by name, was “shy and retreating rather interested in books, with a tragedy at the corner of her mouth.” Anne felt an immediate kinship with Harold. Vita appeared “veiled,” but Anne found him open and warm, interested in her and in literature. Their conversation, which moved quickly from author to author, finally centered on Virginia Woolf. They talked about her books, sharing one another’s impress
ions. Nicolson was admiring of Woolf’s work, though critical.4 Anne was puzzled by his comments on Woolf’s books. She did not then know that Woolf was one of his wife’s lovers.

  As March 1, the anniversary of Charlie’s death, grew near, Anne could not stop the flood of memory. Try as she did to dam it up, it swept over what she most wanted. And every night Anne recounted to herself the events in the last moments of her boy’s life.5

  But the reddening maples and the crack of the tulips through the frozen soil relieved her pain. She walked through the woods and sat on a log in the sun. In lyrical cadence, she wrote an ode to the eternal flow of life.6

  Writing and flying were her only consolations. Flying, like art, Anne would later write, cut her free from the “strings” of memory and her daily routine.

  Cut her free. This was the puzzle, one she had not yet solved. How to be grounded in daily life, yet be alive and creative, open to the beauty and adventure of flying and art? Her instincts pushed her into solitude, and her desire to fly took her away from Jon. While her writing had brought her self-reflection, she had not applied her insight to life. She knew she had to separate Charles’s needs from her own, but for the moment, her ambivalence was paralyzing. She could neither commit herself fully to the care of Jon, nor could she ignore Charles’s demands that she fly.