Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life

by Susan Hertog

  Intrigued by the musical structure of the piece, Kurt gave Anne a recording of the fugue from the Anna Magdalena Notebook by Bach. The intricate texture of chord and melody seemed to echo the emotions she was seeking. Although Anne was grateful for Kurt’s genteel criticism, she was disturbed by what his comments revealed. She could not make happiness in marriage the central theme of her book. This was neither her belief nor her intent. To define the goal of marriage as happiness was to delude oneself. Of course, happiness was possible at fleeting, precious moments, she wrote, but harmony and selfless love seemed nothing more than a myth; the bride and groom and the wedding ceremony were symbolic expressions of eternal hope. Completely happy marriages, she wrote, were of certain types: (1) simple-minded; (2) very young; (3) very old; (4) European; and (5) second marriages in middle age.13

  Anne no longer saw the world in the bright colors and stark boundaries of her youth. The landscape of middle-age love was gray, not black and white, but it had a beauty of its own—like the muted palate of a painting by Boudin. She no long indulged in idealized perceptions; like the Unicorn of her poem, Anne was resigned. And yet her vision had matured and softened in recent years. The message she wanted to carry forward was tinged with pain, but still held the promise of joy and love.14

  Kurt wrote back, “I would not wish to change your palate. I would consider it a sin against the Holy Spirit. You have to follow your own law, and only then will you be able to reach not absolute perfection, which is a myth, but your own perfection. And now I wish you, with all my heart, a time of blessed creativity.”15

  But Anne’s work was not blessed. After a year and a half, during which she produced nothing, Helen and Kurt began to worry. It was clear that Anne was anguishing over the book, and they feared she would abandon it. It would be a loss and a sin, Kurt admonished her. She had a rare gift for internal monologue, and she had touched a subject universal in meaning.16

  After a summer in St. Denis, Anne struggled through the fall of 1958 and the winter of 1959, cutting, rewriting, and pacing the book. In Charles’s absence, Anne “hungered” for the company of Helen and Kurt. In the summer she walked with them along the woodland paths outside their home in Zürich; in winter, along the “mechanized and hellish” streets of Manhattan. When she wasn’t with them, she longed for their presence, and when family or work thwarted their meetings, Anne wrote them letters. Lovingly, they gave her advice and perspective through books, music, and literary quotations, constantly affirming the necessity of her struggle and the worth of its outcome. Helen summed up their views in a line from the French philosopher Jean Reverzy: “If I reconciled myself with life, I would be at odds with myself. That would never happen, for everything perishes except disorder.”17

  But reconciliation would not come. Life at home was a constant struggle. The children, difficult and rebellious, consumed her time and drained her will. Charles’s mood swings had gotten worse; when he did come home, he continued to be dictatorial and angry. Again, Anne was smothered by domesticity and bereft of a husband who was also a partner.

  Like a good friend, Helen understood that Anne needed a dose of her own medicine. Echoing the words that Anne had used in Gift from the Sea to inspire others, Helen counseled her to find her “center.” Anne’s creative energy, Helen noted, dissipated in the rush of daily domesticity. She must set herself free—discard her schedule and her endless caring for others. She must make her work the focal point of her life.18

  By Christmas 1959, three years after Anne had begun the book, Kurt’s encouragement turned to surrender. He wondered whether Anne could complete the book. He wished her patience, and the goodwill of the Gods, and he pledged his unfaltering friendship. Above all, Kurt wanted Anne to know that he believed in her and would always be there for her. Friendship, he mused, was like an eternal harvest—joyful, pure, and enduring.19

  Clearly, Anne’s characters were fragments of herself, and her book was more than a “story.” Each voice became an instrument for analyzing her failing marriage and for assessing the options for reconciliation. Each character allowed her to examine every aspect of the marriage. With the precision of a fine watchmaker, she sought to put the pieces together again. How could she remain married to a man whose insensitivity and egoism evoked her contempt, whose presence was as vacant as his absence? Should she, like “Beatrice,” get a divorce? Could she, like “Frances,” become reconciled? Perhaps she would resign herself to loneliness.

  Christmas, as usual, buoyed her spirits, but by the turn of the year, the Lindbergh name was again on the front page of the Times. An extensively researched biography, written by Kenneth Davis, pointed a finger at Charles’s prewar Nazi entanglements. His friend Truman Smith tried to wash him clean by writing, in his published memoirs, that Lindbergh “was forced to accept the German medal. He was on a mission to ease the financial plight of Jews.”20 But Smith’s comments were pathetically transparent, a frail attempt at protecting Lindbergh, as well as exonerating himself, a tinny challenge to accepted fact.

  Anne passed the cold and rainy summer of 1960 in St. Denis and stayed on through the winter in Vaud. Switzerland had become Charles’s central base for his Pan Am inspection tours, and neither she nor he had much interest in returning to Darien. They decided to build a cottage of their own in Vaud, and sell the large house on Scott’s Cove, with the intention of building a smaller one on its eastern shore.

  With Charles away and the children traveling or at school, Anne sat on her verandah, still intent on “attacking” her book. Her promises to the Wolffs, however, dissolved into nothing. Kurt, now ill with heart disease, feared that he and Helen had failed her. What had they done, he asked, and what could they do? The failure was inside herself, Anne answered.

  But by Christmas 1960, something cracked; Anne’s thoughts began to flow. Immersed as if in a dream, Anne abandoned housework for the book. She wrote, nonstop, all morning and most of the afternoon, emerging dazed from her writing room.21 Deborah’s friend “Beatrice,” named perhaps for Dante’s muse, who led the poet through Paradise, had finally taken form. Anne now returned to her portrait of the mother of the groom, “Frances,” hoping she could bring the book to completion.

  Alone in Darien through 1961, a year when Christmas seemed not to come, Anne struggled blindly to bring Frances to life.22 Hungry and thirsty for the Wolffs’ approval, Anne promised to repay them for their nourishment by handing them the final draft of the book.23 In the summer of 1961, five years after her feverish beginning, Anne completed Dearly Beloved. For two weeks, Charles stayed home, correcting hundreds of small inaccuracies in language and expression, filtering out the errors. It was Charles who delivered the manuscript to Kurt.

  Dearly Beloved24 is the story of a family wedding in a suburban home much like Next Day Hill. The ceremony is reminiscent of Elisabeth’s marriage ceremony to Aubrey Morgan thirty years earlier. The thoughts of Deborah McNeil, a middle-aged housewife, as she projects herself into the minds of her guests, are what construct the narratives. Through them, we see the diverse interpretations of the meaning and purpose of marriage.

  It is also a moral allegory, a drama of ideas resonant with Biblical story and literary myth. Modeled on the Anna Magdalena fugue by Bach, voices rise and fall and variant chords harmonize into a common melody encompassed by a prelude and coda. What begins as a playful minuet, suddenly darkens with the pounding clash of dissonant chords. Light and darkness struggle and chase, as the melody strives again to be heard. The melody is marriage, the variations are the internal monologues of the guests, and the embracing principle is Christian virtue.

  Three generations of the Gardner family gather in a garden resplendent with flowers, blazing in reds that light the rooms and cast their glow on the faces. But it is the Garden after the Fall, after betrayal and deception, shame and divine punishment. It is Anne’s vision of her moral exile after having broken her wedding vows.

  Deborah, mother of the bride, allows the reader to know of
her anger, inadequacy, and disillusion. Although she wants to sound a call for ethical and spiritual awakening, she fears that she is tainted with blasphemy, desecration, and temptation. As the bride and groom, symbols of “blessed union,” walk toward the altar, and the words of the marriage ceremony are recited by the minister, Deborah’s thoughts verge on madness.

  Deborah, mad prophetess and suburban housewife, seeks the answer to her question. Is marriage a blessed union or a kind of suicide, a delusion that takes the place of emotional and sexual reality? Until this moment, the delusion of marriage is barely audible beneath the melody of the text. Now it takes control of the narrative. As the monologues of three generations converge in Deborah’s mind, they become refractions of one another, living in the same dream.

  Deborah casts herself out of the garden and into a private Hell. But this Hell of Deborah’s, unlike the narrator’s in Listen! The Wind, has no fatal disease, no demonic presence. The evil lives inside Deborah’s mind, and Anne examines it in sordid detail. The book, written when Anne was fifty-five, is her first expression of her sexuality. Neither her published diaries nor her previous books reveal her sensuous nature.

  Hell, Anne concludes, is the reality of one’s mind—the unfulfilled hopes, the choices not made, the perfidies and betrayals, the lusts and temptations, the petty destruction caused by ordinary acts, the self-denial and self-delusion. But what kind of life has she created, Deborah asks? And who is this man she has married?

  With little attempt to disguise Charles, Anne creates, in Deborah’s husband, John, a hero who hides behind a mask of invulnerability. In her earlier books, Charles remains the shadow of a man; here, he is painted with merciless honesty. John, says Deborah, never cares about her problems or her daily decisions; he is content with platitudes. He speaks to Deborah in “a different language,” a rational tongue alien to hers. A scientist who is governed by reason, he nails her with “the good strong nails of his logic.”

  Deborah rages as she mimics the sadism of her husband’s diatribes, making herself into a Christ-like martyr.

  Bang, bang, bang. Nailed to her faults forever, she couldn’t move, couldn’t walk away and leave them, like a goose nailed to the barn floor for a pâté de fois gras … Nailed through a webbed foot, forced to go on gorging forever.

  Shades of Saint-Exupéry give dimension to Anne’s portrait of John, as Deborah remembers a Frenchman she might have loved, a man with whom conversation had been communion. But love, she reminds herself, is not the same as marriage.

  As hellfire consumes, it also illuminates. Deborah represents triumph over the devil, and now she claims her victory. Through Beatrice, the virgin who leads the poet through Paradise, Anne makes the case for divorce. Through Frances, that is, Saint Francis, devoted to humility and poverty, she makes the case for marriage as self-sacrifice.

  When the ceremony ends, Deborah has made a choice: the ideal of marriage is worth the sacrifice. Deborah’s life, asserts Anne, is finally “real.” She is the artist-mother she has always wanted to be: the composer of the wedding, the playwright of the scene, as creative as any writer or musician. In the garden of her private hell, she has eaten the apple, yet been blessed after her fall. All that remains is for her to love John, to confirm and to sanctify their imperfect union.

  One can only imagine the conversation between Anne and Charles as they sat in their bed in Darien, with Anne’s manuscript pages piled around them. As Charles scoured each page for “mistakes and inaccuracies,” he must surely have sensed Anne’s dissatisfaction, her emotional cry. Perhaps he wondered whether Anne, like Frances, had betrayed him. Or whether, like Deborah, she had sacrificed herself to preserve their tarnished marriage. Perhaps he even questioned his moral standards and wondered whether he could play according to Anne’s rules.

  33

  Argonauta

  Eric, Peter, and Erin, three Lindbergh grandchildren, on the beach near Argonauta, the Lindberghs’ home on Maui, Christmas 1972.

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

  The Garden of Eden is behind us, and there is no road back to innocence; we can only go forward. The journey we started must be continued. With our blazing candle of curiosity, we must, like Psyche, make the full circle back to wholeness, if we are ever to find it.

  —ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH, Earthshine

  SPRING 1962, DARIEN, CONNECTICUT

  Anne grew thin with insight. The equation was simple; less body, less pain. As she turned fifty-six, her vigor was cerebral. She wore her collars high and her buttons closed, lightly tied with a long, limp bow.

  Dearly Beloved, published in the spring of 1962, received disappointing reviews. It was thrown into the stockpile of “women’s books,” viewed as a sequel to Gift from the Sea, lacking poignancy, substance, and drama. As Anne had feared, her “voices” fell flat, treated by critics as platitudes. Anne’s now familiar housewife-saint was greeted with a critical yawn.

  She wrote to Helen that the book was a failure. It was praised by those who did not understand it and rejected by those who thought they did. Now that the storm of publicity was over, Anne hoped to find the cool light of objectivity.1

  Anne was right. Those who didn’t toss the book out, still didn’t seem to understand it. Virgilia Peterson of the New York Times saw it as a portrait of “three happy marriages” and called it nothing more than “flowers” arranged carefully in a jar.2 The Christian Science Monitor, perhaps grasping the message of the story, brushed it off as something perverse.3 But it was a commercial success; more than a hundred thousand copies in hardcover alone were sold and it immediately climbed to the top of the best-seller lists of the Herald Tribune and the Times. It stayed at the top of the Times’s list for nearly thirty weeks.

  If the book did “fail,” it was because Anne had not told her story. While demanding total honesty of herself, she had let the book play at the edge. As usual, the story was clothed in beautiful imagery, which camouflaged its intent. At first its publication released Anne’s energy, spinning her back into domestic routine and spurring her to plan trips abroad with Charles. Then the poor reviews sent her back into retreat, and once again she sat alone in her room, wondering what she could possibly write next. In the winter of 1962–1963, she looked through her diaries, letters, and notes, hoping to find a kernel for another book. Writing, she wrote to Kurt, connected her to life in an essential way, fostering her growth and deepening her roots.”4

  Charles, now sixty years old, had grown solid and sturdy. No longer boyishly straight and “slim,” he was finally filling the potential of his form. Still able to outdistance his sons, he walked with brisk, long-legged strides, and his whitening hair and pale cheeks heightened the penetrating blue of his eyes.

  In 1961, after seven years as a consultant to the air force, and after being disillusioned by the encroachment of technology on the woodlands and farmlands he had known as a boy, he was back to flying for Juan Trippe at Pan Am. Now a director as well as a consultant, he crisscrossed Europe and America several times a year, meeting Anne in Darien or in their newly built chalet in Vevey. Dressed in a navy pinstripe suit, with his clothes and sock-wrapped razor stuffed into a small bag, he would pull the brim of his gray fedora over his eyes and board a commercial plane. After heading straight for the back, he would sprawl out with his papers and books, attracting little attention from tourists or staff. And yet all the attendants had been alerted to his presence. They whispered in the cockpit, “Lindbergh’s aboard,” but they had been forbidden to take notice or to engage in conversation. All were content to play his game, just glancing as they passed him, pretending that he was no one of any importance. Charles, now a detached observer, saddened by the antiseptic luxury of jet flight, would watch the stewardesses walk up and down the aisle serving full-course meals on household trays. It was, he found, hard to remember that they were 35,000 feet above the same Atlantic Ocean he had flown over thirty-five years earlier in a 300
-horsepower plane.

  He traveled for months at a time, often cutting a wide swathe through the gamelands of East Africa while also alloting time to Pan Am. His growing interest in wildlife conservation had convinced him that “civilization” was not “progress,” and he sought to understand primitive human and animal life in the jungles of Tanzania and Kenya, places untouched by guns, planes, and “white men.” He believed that, in spite of the advances of science and technology, Western culture had alienated man from his place in nature, denied him spiritual connection with life, and deprived him of the “miracles” of God’s creation.5

  There was an aspect of Charles’s conservation philosophy that harked back to his childhood in Minnesota. On the front porch of his riverside home, he had listened to his father’s spoken memories of dense virgin woodlands filled with deer and of clear skies blackened with wild geese. Later, he regretted having taken the path of scientific inquiry. The only true criterion by which to measure progress, he wrote in “Civilization and Progress,” was the quality of human life. There was no reason to believe that the spear-thrusting Masai of Kenya lived less happily or well than his Pan Am colleagues in the boardrooms above the streets of New York.

  Anne’s time in Darien was punctuated by visits to and from the children—Jon and Land and their families out west, her brother Dwight, now a professor of history at Temple University, her son Scott, now enrolled at Amherst, and her daughters Reeve and Anne, students at Radcliffe. But the children seemed to register the strain of a marriage defined by their father’s absences and their mother’s loneliness and disappointment. Anne Jr., a blond Botticelli beauty with an incisive mind and acerbic wit, had grown severely depressed. When she talked of dropping out of school, and Anne encouraged her to see Dr. Rosen, Charles was furious. His anger was stoked by their son Scott, as argumentative and tenacious as he. Rebellious but sensitive, he would not comply with Charles’s notions of “manhood” and discipline. Scott was opposed to the war in Vietnam, unhappy at Amherst, and hoped to find refuge at Oxford in England. He and his father fought incessantly about the responsibilities of “patriotism,” and Charles demanded that Scott remain in this country and serve in the military. Anne would develop migraine headaches, feeling powerless to protect Scott from Charles.6 When she did summon up the courage to defend Scott, asking Charles to see how deeply his criticism affected their son, she could not move him. Charles persisted in expressing his contempt for Scott’s behavior.