Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  His criticism of Anne’s poetry raised one of the largest outcries in the history of The Saturday Review. Hundreds of letters poured in, most of them in defense of Anne.18 For Anne, the criticism was her self-damning voice reaching a deafening roar. Against all instinct and religious teaching, Anne had dared to become a writer, defying not only Old Testament prescript, but the bounds of traditional femininity. Although publicly silent, she was devastated—not certain she would ever write again.

  Although Ciardi’s moral condemnation was absurd, his assessment of Anne’s poetry was, in a sense, right. Her poems were “imprisoned” in conventional verse and rhyme, bound, for the most part, in couplets and quatrains, giving the appearance of careless cliché. But buried inside the restraint of form were the anger and rebellion that had made Gift from the Sea possible. Encoded in her poems is the pain of her self-denial and her false quest for salvation through her marriage to Charles.

  Published in volume form in the aftermath of her success, the poems gave the impression of spontaneous combustion, which belied the slow burn of their thirty years. Because they were arranged according to theme rather than chronology, the progressive sophistication of her work was not apparent. And Ciardi, eager to fit his theory to fact, neglected to read huge chunks of her book, concentrating in brutal detail on its weaknesses. While the great melodies of the Western canon—Shakespeare, Donne, Johnson, Rossetti, Dickinson, and Rilke—filtered through her lines, Anne’s poems read more like conversations with her mother—attempts to analyze, challenge, and transcend the Victorian womanhood for which she stood. Her poems banter with her mother’s, defying their precepts, embellishing their common truths, and imbuing Christian virtue, Greek myth, and biblical parable with raw psychological energy. Anne scrambles her mother’s rigid quatrains and perfect sonnets, as if breaking her verse were an act of rebellion. Like Anne’s travel books, bound by form, slouching toward art, her poems are meant to depict her emotions while protecting the integrity of her relationships.

  The centerpiece of the collection is “The Unicorn,”19 in which Anne’s voice becomes lucid in its determination. Virtue is not externally imposed; it is not a rigid standard of measure. Virtue is a personal choice through which one barters freedom for responsibility. The poem reflects Anne’s tension between duty and desire as much as it does her struggle to find a personal verse form. It finds completion when her emotion is spent. It is a confirmation of her message to women in Gift from the Sea: find the knowledge that will nourish and liberate your creativity within the bounds of marriage and convention.

  But in her poem “The Stone,”20 written during her breakdown and psychoanalysis, she exposes the pain of the struggle. In perfect couplets, Anne questions the value of everything—virtue, love, God, even the power of words—in explaining her pain. She tries to release herself from suffering, but a stone clogs “the stream” through which light, faith, and happiness flow. Here the Unicorn cannot transcend, and virtue is meaningless in a faithless world. Anne is not a saint after all. Life is uncertain, and the only “solvent” for the stone is love, yet she cannot find it, even in herself. The source of her suffering is faceless and inhuman; the only resolution is to embrace its darkness. It is from this paradox that her poetry rises. Though the rhyme itself may not be new, it serves to convey her personal rebellion. The Victorian symbol turns back on itself, presenting her with the possibility of survival.

  It is not whim that names the collection The Unicorn. Anne wants to be seen as a virginal martyr who transcends her moral frailties through creativity and virtue. Resigned to her prison, she is reconciled to her role. The only power she has is her writing, and now, Ciardi had voiced her deep fears of blasphemy against a vindictive God.

  Anne was shocked and humiliated by Ciardi’s criticism.21 Charles was rarely home, and without his presence or the rhythms of domesticity, the insights of Gift from the Sea seemed esoteric and untrue. Anne was hurt and lonely, not fertile with solitude. Not certain that she would ever write again, Anne sought consolation from Con, Margot, and her friends, including her long-time physician, Dana Atchley, now estranged from his difficult and quarrelsome wife, Mary. In Charles’s absence he was a sympathetic listener to Anne’s anger and fears, eager to encourage and support her.

  During Charles’s absence, Atchley was a frequent visitor to Anne’s home in Darien, but in the fall of 1956, Anne rented an apartment in New York, at 146 East Nineteenth Street. It was a personal retreat and a place for her to be alone with Atchley. He often stayed for a martini and dinner, and for morning breakfasts with their friends. They even appeared together at dinner parties, restaurants, and the theater. Atchley loved Anne much as Saint-Exupéry had, for her warmth, sensitivity, and intelligence. She banished his troubles and rekindled his passion. Unlike Anne’s relations with the French writer, her affair with Atchley was neither platonic nor fleeting.22

  A year after Anne had preached that women were the bastions of Christian virtue and the saviors of Western civilization, she had a sexual liaison with a married man. Although Charles never knew, Anne’s betrayal haunted her. Ciardi’s condemnation had an ironic twist, freeing her to be the “sinner” she knew she was.

  In the dead heat of summer, 1957, in her mother’s garden in Maine, she composed a poem heavy with disillusion and death. Her earlier poems had depicted her as a victim and a martyr; in this, her last published poem, she admits her complicity in her demise. As if looking Ciardi squarely in the eye, Anne adopts a new form, controlling the rhythm and the rhyme. Still in the garden of Adam and Eve, she is both the serpent and the sinner. Mistress of the house that once embraced her family, surrounded by memories of her mother and father, of Charlie and Elisabeth, Anne discards the illusions of her youth.

  She had been blinded by the summer of her youth, swollen with passion and bursting with bloom. Once she had raced with the tides of time; now she was mired in the tall tangled grass, suddenly prey to satanic temptations. Echoing her poem “No Harvest Ripening,” Anne writes of the deception of summer which belies the coming of the frost.

  But now Anne’s pain is profound and visceral. While the poem resonates Christina Rossetti’s “Springtime” and Emily Dickinson’s “Hour of Lead,” Anne challenges their faith in Nature. Winter is certain but spring, she says, may never come. The smiles of summer smolder with storms, and her perfectly formed couplets burn with anger and rebellion. Anne feels cheated and bitter at a life that should have yielded more than mediocrity and sin. She writes:

  This is the summer of the body but

  The spirit’s winter.23

  In one sweep of unstopped verse, Anne cries out for the fulfillment she believes she deserves. Her cry hangs unpunctuated, waiting for resolution—but there is none. Her fertility is waning, and the fruit is too long in the bearing. The “summer of the body” has sucked her spirit, and Anne passionately hungers for death.

  It was the last poem Anne ever published.

  32

  Dearly Beloved

  Anne and Charles at daughter Reeve’s wedding, 1968.

  (© Richard W. Brown)

  The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool’s paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all … Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrasts of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama.

  —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW,

  Man and Superman

  FALL 1959, DARIEN, CONNECTICUT

  Not quite autumn; there was a wilt to the trees, and the late-night air held the chill of fall. The hired car slipped through the streets of Darien, carrying Anne eastward toward the water’s edge. The manicured foliage grew thin and straggly as the paved, well-marked road
bent and narrowed toward a rustic bridge. As the car crossed over, the earth seemed to swing out from under it, jettisoning into an expansive sky. And then, encircled by water as if on an island, the car elbowed its way around Scott’s Cove, turning in to an unmarked drive.

  It was September 3, 1959, and, after three months in St. Denis, Switzerland, Anne relished the familiarity of home. The rambling stone-façade house, purchased in 1946, sat on four and a half acres of woodlands and meadows bordering the shore of Long Island Sound. To Anne, it had always looked “amorphous and ugly,” a practical concession to housing five children in a suburban town noted for its schools. Once brightly lit and bustling with children demanding to be heard, tutored, and fed, it was now dark and empty. Anne had told her housekeeper to leave the door unlocked; she would arrive late.1

  Anne opened the huge oak-paneled door and entered the small dimly lit vestibule. After the radiant alpine light, the heavily curtained rooms, hung with old tapestries and European paintings, seemed dense and dark. Red fabric draped the windows and walls, and thick textured cloths covered the sofas and chairs. A grand piano stood in one corner of the lamp-shaded room, walled by leather-bound volumes of encyclopedias. Only the sculptures—a wooden Saint Francis, a bronze head, and a Chinese horse—gave rhythm and flow to the unpatterned room.2 But life itself had lost its pattern; time was paced by the cadence of Anne’s thoughts. By now, she should have grown used to the silence. The children, except for Reeve, were rarely there, and Charles was almost never home.

  In 1953, Charles had become a consultant to the technical committee of Pan American Airlines and traveled frequently to aircraft plants in California and England. He had first met Juan Trippe, Pan Am’s chief executive, in 1927, when the fledgling company was bidding for airmail routes. They met again in the early 1930s, when Charles and Anne made their transcontinental and intercontinental survey flights. Trippe knew that his pilots would be eager to hear anything Lindbergh had to say. And his name, especially after the publication of The Spirit of St. Louis, which won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, enhanced his status.3

  But by April 1954, Charles had to limit his time at Pan Am. In an effort to heal wartime divisions and to acknowledge his contributions to aviation, President Eisenhower nominated Charles for the rank of brigadier general and then asked him to join the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, assigned to study ballistic missile defense. The committee traveled twenty thousand miles a year, screening four hundred locations, and visiting proposed rocket and missile sites in twenty-two states.4 Charles rarely spent more than a few days in Darien.

  For Anne, long-distance flight had become a burden; she no longer had the stamina. But in choosing to stay home, Anne had become the sole caretaker of their three teenage children: Anne Jr., Scott, and Reeve. Rambunctious and wild in their father’s absence, eager to push the limits of his rules, they defied Anne and the household staff. They ran off without telling anyone and stayed out long after midnight, scrambling up drainpipes before their mother awakened.5 Delighted to challenge Anne’s emphasis on neatness, they would smuggle wild animals into their rooms.6 Unwilling to be a stern taskmaster, overwhelmed by the burden of their total care, Anne withdrew to her writing room. It was as if she had retreated inside her body, feeling incapable of physical warmth. Although accessible to the children, willing to listen and give them comfort, she remained emotionally removed.

  If Charles’s absence created a vacuum, his presence was intoxicating. He never stopped talking or moving around, filling the air with frenzied sound and energy. During his short stays, he would turn the house into a military camp, instructing Anne, his lieutenant, in the proper workings of household and staff. Drilling his recalcitrant teenage troops with relentless questions and detailed checklists, he attempted to improve their moral standards with long-winded “pearls of wisdom,” intended to prevent the “downfall of civilization.”7 Anne Jr., whom Charles thought too clever for her own good, named him “Alcibiades High Fly,” after the Athenian politician and commander whose moral pretensions did not cloak his immoral self-indulgences.

  It was as if their home could not contain him. His relentless energy and ceaseless movements were dissonant interruptions in the rhythm of their lives. The sound of his steps, the boom of his voice, his constant trips up and down the stairs, all day long and even at night, sent waves of tension throughout the house. If someone, anyone—a child or Anne herself—dared to transgress, all his energy focused on the accused with an intensity that was primitive and painful to bear, even to witness. And yet at times Charles could be warm and playful, dispensing bear hugs and long-armed embraces. He read to them, and encouraged them to write, and taught them to hike, swim, and sail.

  Oddly, there was sadness when Charles left the house, as if “real life” had suddenly walked out the door. The house once again became hollow and dry. Everyone felt relieved and “free” but less alive and more vulnerable than before. Like his own father, Charles loved his children deeply but lacked the capacity for shared emotion that might have bred intimacy. He simply could not admit he had “feelings like other people.”8 Feelings held the promise of danger, while “reality” could be measured, analyzed, and mastered.

  By 1958, Anne’s ardor for Atchley had cooled to friendship, and in Charles’s absence, Anne turned to her publishers and friends, Helen and Kurt Wolff, for consolation. Helen was a maternal and nourishing woman who was also a devoted linguist and translator with an instinctive sense of style and language. A meticulous craftswoman and editor, she was fluent in German, French, Italian, and English. Twenty years her senior, Kurt, a gentleman with a classic education, was excited by the evolving cultural landscape of books, art, and music. Together they were an extraordinary pair; they understood the synergy between writer and editor, and viewed publishing as a medium synonymous with art.

  Kurt would write that “a publisher’s relationship with his author must be like a love affair in which he asks nothing and has already forgiven every failing in advance.”9 But that unconditional acceptance was a gift bestowed to the exceptional few. Helen and Kurt saw Anne as a woman of great talent who needed their confidence to harness her will. They believed in Anne—in the beauty of her poetic prose, in her ability to perceive psychological truth, and in the sincerity of her desire to master herself and her relationships.

  The half-Jewish son of a music professor, Wolff had left Germany in 1933, just as Hitler rose to power, with Helen, his second wife.10 They made their way to England and then to France, where their son, Christian, was born. After being arrested by the Nazis in Italy in 1939, they were freed and immediately sailed for New York, in January 1940. In prewar Munich, under the imprint of Kurt Wolff Verlag and Pantheon International, Kurt had been an innovative publisher, as eager to foster the expressionistic movement as he was committed to preserving classical texts. Fascinated by the culture that emerged after the First World War, he gave voice to young talent. And undeterred by geographical and cultural boundaries, he translated and disseminated, throughout Europe, the writings of Heinrich Mann, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Émile Zola, and Sinclair Lewis.11

  Nearly penniless on his arrival in New York, and unschooled in American business, he could not negotiate his way through established channels. But New York in 1941 was an extraordinary place, enriched by a vibrant European community that had arrived at the start of the war. Helen and Kurt acted as mediators, translating European titles for the United States market, and, within a year of their arrival, began a new publishing firm, named for the old Pantheon Press, in the cramped rooms of their Washington Square apartment.12

  Gift from the Sea was Pantheon’s first real commercial success. Having nursed her through the publication of her poetry and the John Ciardi ordeal, Kurt encouraged Anne to write a book about marriage, a fictional sequel to Gift from the Sea. But by September 1959, Anne had reached an impasse. After a feverish beginning, the book was barely moving. The characters, Anne believed, were sketchy
, mere mouthpieces for her ideas. She was untutored in the imaginative demands of fiction, and found her language stiff and monotonous, her dialogue unnatural and stilted. Her intent was to examine Eros and Agapé—physical and spiritual love—but it was also the story of a disillusioned housewife.

  Deborah, the protagonist, much like the narrator in Anne’s poem “Midsummer,” was suffocating beneath domestic responsibility, bogged down in time and self-delusion. Her creativity was sapped, her marriage was flawed, and she was trapped in an affluent and stifling suburb. This was the underside of Gift from the Sea, the knots tied in the back of Anne’s philosophical tapestry. Anne conceived the book as a medley of voices speaking in testimony to a failed ideal.

  When the children were young, Anne would retreat to her small, second floor writing room and sit at a table in a straight-backed chair. Strewn with shells and feathery quills, her desk held a tray of pens and pencils, a blotter, and a small blue writing pad. With the light of the window streaming over her left shoulder, Anne laid out her books and papers, much in the Morrow tradition, writing in long-hand, leaning back between her thoughts as she scanned her bookshelves and watched the birds skim the cove.

  Later she would work in a small gray tool shed behind the house bordering Long Island Sound. Its walls, crossbeams, and shelves decorated with remnants of driftwood, cork, and seashells, it must have reminded her of her time at Captiva when she first understood the fullness of her solitude.

  At first, the voices played easily in her head, clear and resonant and strikingly distinctive. Unaware of Anne’s disappointment in Charles as well as her affair with Atchley, Kurt was confused by her lack of passion, by the dull gray palate she chose to use. Where were the strong, authentic feelings, he asked? Where were the extremes of egocentrism and possessiveness, the tenderness and rage that Eros and Agapé demanded? And where was the central theme of happiness by which dissonance could achieve melody? Surely it existed.