Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  Immediately, Anne understood the book. After reading the handwritten seventy pages of the first draft, she wrote, “I am humbled.”21 After all her anger and alienation, she could not resist the honest beauty of his words. Charles was “gold” and Anne was grateful—grateful for the luxury of loving her husband. This book was proof of Charles’s integrity—a confirmation of the man she loved behind the maligned public image. And when Charles decided to take the job with Ford in Detroit, Anne could not bear the thought of living alone.

  For the moment, pregnant and spiritually spent, Anne felt like a physical shell—a vehicle of nature, an object of someone else’s desire. She felt empty and hollow, without moral or personal integrity. She feared that, left alone, she would crack. Charles’s presence made her whole and “real.” He was the keystone of her psychological survival. Twenty years later, Betty Friedan would call Anne’s reaction a common one: “the problem without a name.”22

  In a double soliloquy, Anne and Charles grappled with the loneliness of physical separation. Their solitary contemplations suffused their letters with newfound passion and eternal commitment. Each saw in the other an idealized image.23

  In the confines of a room at the Dearborn Inn in Detroit, Charles, too, tried to gain perspective on their marriage. In a letter to Anne he told her that his life without her would be barren and aimless—she was his window to a better world. He knew he was moving toward something beyond the mechanistic perversions of life, toward “something quite vague and indefinite, but something I know is there.”24

  But the more Anne pledged her undying love and idealized her marriage, the more the emptiness seemed to take hold. The farther she ran from the emotional truth, the more she plumbed the depths of her unhappiness. Again she felt like a prisoner in someone else’s life. But if she was, she had no doubt that she was the one at fault. Charles, with his confidence, had set her free. It was not he, not marriage, that was the enemy. “But where is the real me?” she asked. “It is completely buried … Can one be a good mother and write? … It means disciplining myself—my two selves.”25 Creative freedom seemed another kind of prison; it cut her off from the mainstream of life. Her present work, she concluded, despite her dread of the months of pregnancy, was to have a child.26

  At the end of June 1942, Anne did at last move with the children to Detroit. They rented a house in Bloomfield Hills, a suburb, Anne wrote, known for its beauty, its artistic interests, and the quality of its schools. Charles, rejoicing in Anne’s arrival, was intent on encouraging her to write. Anne, though tired and worn and feeling out of “season” in her last months of pregnancy, cultivated a moment of optimism. She was hopeful, she told Charles, that he had found an enclave in Detroit—a place where they could begin again.27

  But she felt displaced. Bloomfield Hills—in fact, the whole Midwest—she wrote, had the air of complacency attendant on the nouveauriches. From the garish rented house, to the manicured lawns and hedged gardens, to the insipid conversation at backyard barbecues, life was surrounded by unreality. Didn’t anyone understand the war? Had no one heard of the mass executions? Did they know the Germans were advancing in Russia? How could anyone ever again trust the Germans?28

  In fact, the Germans had accelerated the executions. Following the 1942 Wannsee Conference, where the systematic extermination of the Jews was set out in detail, camps were established in the occupied territories of the east. Bergen-Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek, all opened in that year, had a combined killing capacity of 60,000 a day. Between 1942 and 1944, the extermination capacity of Auschwitz would increase sevenfold.29

  While Anne recoiled in terror at the news of Hitler’s “final solution,” Charles remained silent and unperturbed. But, then, the systematic destruction of the Jews could hardly have been a revelation. Between July 1936 and January 1938, in the course of Charles’s six trips to Germany, he had witnessed firsthand the trajectory of Hitler’s “eliminationist” goals. While Lindbergh could not have known the details of the plan to exterminate the Jews, their legal, economic, and social exclusion and the violence leading up to Kristallnacht made it clear that the Nazis were working hard to resolve the “Jewish problem.”30 The possibility of deporting the Jews to slave camps as retribution for their crimes against the state was discussed within the Reich and surmised in the press long before Lindbergh’s decision not to return to Germany. Furthermore, his friendship with Henry Ford would have provided a direct link with the Nazi Reich. While Lindbergh would later state that he was not in contact with anyone in Germany after January of 1939, his friend and employer was a well-placed source of any information he might require.

  In a bizarre refraction of feeling, Charles’s compassion for the dying found expression in his treatment of his nine-year-old dog. Thor—tireless friend—was elevated to sainthood. Charles carried him around and planned his death, analyzing its logic and the meaning of its coming. He would poison him if it was necessary, he wrote. One should not interfere with death, but a dog should not suffer so much pain.31 For Anne, the death of Thor had a different meaning. It was the end of an era—her childbearing years.32 She sensed that the baby about to be born would be her last. As with Thor, there was nothing to separate her from death but the slow painful passage of time.

  On August 12, with Charles away in New York, Anne was taken to the Henry Ford Hospital in active labor. Since the murder of Charlie, birth had become a communion with death, a journey into her unconscious. Yet for all the pain, it was a flight into the awareness from which her writing would grow.33

  She counseled herself to “go with the pain”—to relax and release her body to its rhythm. Conjuring up a metaphor that would be crucial in her later work, Anne saw the contractions of birth as parallel to the movements of the sea. The ebb and flow of the tide would become the centerpiece of her book Gift from the Sea.

  But then, once again, she was plunged into a bottomless pit and separated from Charles. Ironically, it was at this moment of darkness, in the throes of pain, that Anne understood that only when she could stand alone would she and Charles truly be married.

  The voices that had haunted her at the birth of Jon again asked questions she could not answer. Strident and mocking, they asked: What is the secret of the universe? Did she deserve to live while others died? How could she bear a child with joy when so many children were tortured by the war? Her every answer was met with contempt. All was deception, the voices replied. As she railed against the nothingness, Anne gave birth to her fifth child.

  The child was a boy—“strong, sound and 7½ pounds,” noted Charles. They called him Scott, a name that had belonged to his maternal ancestors, the French-Canadian Lands.

  Later, at home, Charles would record that Anne’s experience was more than birth; it was a journey beyond “the science of psychology.”34 But for Anne, it proved a passage to nowhere. Once again buried beneath the weight of domestic chores, answering to the needs of her four children, anything beyond the moment seemed the stuff of dreams. To escape, she walked the fields of the Cranbrook School, which adjoined their home. By chance, she met, and found sanctuary in the home of the Swedish sculptor Carl Milles. And, despite her contempt for those who ignored the travails of war and history, Anne enjoyed the beauty and elegance of Milles’s art and his commitment to the culture of prewar France. In his home, at his studio, and with his friends, she found the friendship and encouragement she had been seeking.35

  Struggling against the howl of the winter wind and the materialism of wartime Detroit, she found, through the study of sculpturing, the longed-for escape from domestic routine and from her obsession with the atrocities of war. Here, in an artistic community, she began a new book.36 It would be a statement, she decided, of all she knew, a final testament, and an answer to Saint-Exupéry’s article “To All Frenchmen Everywhere.”37

  With the publication of Saint-Exupéry’s plea for French resistance, Anne saw again the cold-blooded practicality of Charles’s views. In simple a
nd elegant prose, Saint-Exupéry wrote a paean to war. Fighting a war, he wrote, was like building a cathedral. No amount of pain could justify one’s reluctance. One fought one’s enemies without doubt or judgment for the sake of one’s god and one’s country. Anne agreed.38

  She and Charles argued about the atrocities of war, about human suffering, about the role of fate. Defending his understanding of the laws of nature, the inevitable rise and fall of civilizations, Charles affirmed the necessity of suffering and loss. Strong nations would always subdue the weak. It was better to have war, he said, than to nurture the seeds of civilized decay.

  Desperate, Anne blurted out, “I want to be forgiven.”

  “For what? And by whom?” asked Charles.39

  On Christmas Day 1942, Anne did not go to church. She prayed at home, reading the Bible to her children as they sat by the fire.40

  29

  Through a Glass Darkly

  Anne returning home from a writing assignment in Europe, October 1947.

  (Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

  A DIALOGUE OF SELF AND SOUL1

  My soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;

  Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,

  Upon the broken, crumbling embattlement,

  Upon the breathless starlit air,

  Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;

  Fix every wandering thought upon

  That quarter where all thought is done:

  Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?

  —W. B. YEATS

  SPRING 1943, DETROIT, MICHIGAN

  As the cold Michigan winter of 1943 thawed into spring, Anne awakened with new insight. Her exile in Europe, and now in Detroit, had convinced her that she must acknowledge the evil inside herself or renounce the possibility of an honest life.2

  As if running out of time, she worked hurriedly on Steep Ascent. It was a fictional account of an incident that had occurred in February 1937, as she and Charles flew across the Italian Apennines and the Adriatic Sea toward India. Caught in a layer of shifting white clouds, they dared to climb into the sunlit world above. But, flying too high, they got lost in the mountains and were unable to find their way back on course. Without a sense of time or place, enveloped in clouds, they descended blindly through the fog, not knowing whether they would crash or survive. As they dived into the darkness, Anne prepared for the underworld, grateful for their children and the life they had. Then, as if from a dream, they awoke to the sea below and the steep green volcanic hills dotting the town.

  Like Listen! The Wind, the book is a descent into hell. A journey that begins in the Garden of Eden ends in a birthlike whirl through the chaos of the “pit.” Anne conceived it as the story of a “woman’s ordeal,” filtered through the metaphor of flight.

  Eve, the protagonist, is an American married to an English flier, Gerald, the antithesis of the reader’s conception of Charles. Indulgent, inefficient, stubborn, and injudicious, Gerald becomes Anne’s laboratory specimen for her study of Charles. Clear and bold as never before, Anne the narrator watches his every move, analyzing the premises and dynamics of their marriage, testing her husband’s strength against her ideal, and pitting her vision against his imperfect reality. No longer the child-bride of a God-like hero, the narrator is helpmate to a flawed and humbled man. This Eve has tasted the apple and can no longer deny the truth.

  The view from the back cockpit is like none the reader has seen before. Eve, pregnant, impatient, and longing for home, sits in silence as Gerald gets lost in the fog. “Perhaps I can see something he can’t,” she thinks, “even in the back cockpit.” But as they drop toward certain death on earth, all is suddenly and painfully clear. She has put her life in the hands of a man who is no wiser than she. And as death looms, Eve has a sudden conversion. She sees the truth in a blaze of light: virtue is more important than freedom. She must dedicate herself to her husband and children. Freedom is worthless without marriage and a family.

  For a fleeting moment, Anne had set herself free. But the book, named for a nineteenth-century Presbyterian hymn,3 remains a prototype of Victorian female virtue, even though it is Anne’s first public expression of an ethical vision different from Charles’s. Even as she repeats the Calvinist views of her ancestors, Anne’s diary reveals her ambivalence.

  The more clearly she saw Charles, the more frightened she became. She wrote in her diary:

  To write, I have decided, is to be possessed by the Demon lover the ballads talk of…. You are another person…. You don’t love your children or your husband at all.4

  Between the din of domesticity and the solitude of the written page, Anne observed and recorded the nuances of her feelings and relations. In the tradition of the woman novelist, not unlike Jane Austen, she used the written word to compensate for what she could neither do nor say.

  She cleaned drawers, bathed the baby, wrote letters, nurtured Jon—and wrote and recopied every chapter. She struggled to find a core of strength, hoping to become one with God.5

  But in spite of Anne’s efforts to compartmentalize her feelings, Charles could measure the distance between them. When she told him of a dream of a perfect love, young and beautiful, he grew irritated by her self-absorption and turned away, frightened that he could no longer satisfy her. The thought of their being separate was unbearable, he told her.6

  Her manuscript confirmed his view. It was not, he told her after reading it, a book she ought to publish now. It would not be well received by those who opposed their political views. Perhaps his reasons were more than political. Although Charles had begun to acknowledge his frailties, he could not bear public exposure. Seeing Eve’s husband as a self-indulgent, pipe-smoking Englishman was seeing Charles as a fool—flawed, stubborn, and insensitive—no matter how “gallant” or courageous Anne had made Gerald.

  She was disappointed, but she was also angry. She had thought that writing the book would have been enough. Now, she was not content to put it away.7 In defiance of Charles, Anne sent the manuscript to Harcourt Brace. Alfred Harcourt did accept the book for publication but printed only 25,000 copies, half the number of Listen! The Wind.

  Through the winter of 1943, Anne sought to reconcile the reality of her marriage, domestic life, and the Christian ideals she held true. Like her father, she went beyond the stern precepts of her ancestors’ Calvinism; she was searching for the “changeless light,” looking inside herself, trying to make peace with God.

  But, as if her life were imitating her art, Anne silenced herself at the very moment she sensed her power. She surrendered the manuscript of Steep Ascent to Charles, permitting him to edit her work. When he was finished, Anne hardly felt like celebrating. How far she had come from herself, she noted in her diary. Castigating herself for wasting time, she immersed herself further in studying sculpture.

  In the summer of 1943, as the Allied forces prepared to invade Italy and to bomb German war plants, Anne sat in the studio of her friend Milles, learning to model clay. What a relief, she wrote, to escape from oneself and the war in a way one could never do in one’s writing. She felt strangely anonymous, with no past and no future. But sculpture, Anne admitted, was hard work. Nonetheless, she felt productive and competent, excited by the Egyptian head that was taking form under her hands. Her work was reminiscent of Despiau, said one of her friends.

  By Christmas, though, Bloomfield Hills was like a place of exile—so far from the realities of the war. The Allied movements had been swift and incisive, and as Roosevelt and Churchill set the date for freeing France from occupation, the Nazis accelerated operations in the crematoria. Millions of people had been killed, half of them civilians. To fill the ranks of Allied soldiers at the front, five hundred thousand American men had been drafted between July through September.8

  By the start of 1944, Charles was getting restless. He had received permission from the Pentagon to test the Corsair bombers in the South Pacific, and was
eager to go.9

  On April 4, 1944, Charles left for Hawaii. Before leaving, as if to fortify himself, he went to the Smithsonian to look at his 1933 transpacific plane, the Tingmissartoq. He stood on the balcony above the craft and watched the men, women, and children filing past; then, as if to acknowledge his humility he walked below to touch the showcase glass. In the folds of his Brooks Brothers naval uniform, he had tucked the fifth draft of his flight narrative and a copy of the New Testament.10