Lindbergh

by A. Scott Berg

  Anne’s week came to a perfect end during her final afternoon’s walk. Roaming out to the far beach, she turned over a piece of dried seaweed and uncovered an argonauta—a rare, transparent, feather-light mollusk shell. She had just used that very object as the symbol for the next stage of relationships in The Shells—that period after the double-sunrise and the oyster bed of home and children—when “Woman must come of age by herself.” Anne had recently tried to buy an argonauta but could not find one for sale. “And here,” she wrote in her diary, “was one given to me—at the moment I had ceased to look—or to want. Here was a gift from the sea—tossed up at my feet. Something I had never expected to find.”

  The holiday glow did not linger. Back home, the Lindberghs promptly reverted to their roles of victim and critic, as she returned to the oyster bed and he to his life as an argonaut. Anne was further beset by her brother’s persistent struggle with mental illness—“a shattering problem,” Anne divulged to one of her adoring correspondents, “which continues & has absorbed so much of my time & my emotional capacity for the last two years. It has taken all the extra emotional reservoir left over from my children & my husband.” As much as anything, it kept Anne from completing her book. And then, Dwight Jr.’s severe condition unexpectedly solved many of Anne’s problems.

  Morrow had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Believing he was a lighthouse having trouble beaming his light (or, other times, that he was all the saints rolled into one), he was sent to a closed hospital, where doctors believed his condition would only worsen. Although separated from her husband, Margot Morrow was determined to continue her search for someone who might aid in his recovery.

  She heard about a controversial psychiatrist in Pennsylvania named Dr. John N. Rosen, who reputedly saved hopeless patients through radical treatments. Anne and her mother interviewed him and were greatly impressed. “It was really breath-taking,” Betty Morrow wrote of the meeting, “—his confidence—his unprofessionalism & his sympathy. We came out gasping—but convinced that here was someone whom we must have work w. Dwight.”

  The maverick doctor insisted on Morrow’s being checked out of the hospital and set up in an apartment with a couple who would see that all his needs were met. Rosen said he would work with him every day for six weeks. The patient was far from cured after a month and a half of therapy, but after two years he stopped hallucinating. From then on he was able to reintegrate his mind, ultimately earning a Ph.D., securing a teaching position, and remarrying.

  During this period, Rosen recognized Anne’s fragile mental state and suggested he treat her depressions as well. She cautiously agreed, reared like the rest of her clan to resist admitting to imperfection. But her unhappiness was undeniable, and she came to crave the appointments, which she attended every day of the summer of 1952. “I spent a year or two in therapy just crying,” she would later admit.

  The sessions caused a series of “storms” at home all summer, arguments with Charles about everything from the way she undercooked the asparagus to her failure to complete her book. The unspoken subtext of his anger seemed to be her growing need for analysis. While Charles had long been sympathetic to his brother-in-law’s plight—“He put all his name and fame at my disposal,” recalled Margot Morrow of that period when she was desperately searching for somebody who could help Dwight—he failed to understand why Anne would want to discuss her most personal problems with a stranger. He suggested that it was a sign of weakness. Charles would never admit that he was afraid of what she might say about him or, worse, that he was losing control over her—that she might truly become, as her chapter on the argonauta suggested, a creature of her own free will, learning “how to stand alone.”

  Anne began to welcome Charles’s absences, finding them a relief from his relentlessness. His departures were hard on her, because she found herself “a quiver of anxiety,” wondering if she would “be able to do it all without him—as he wants?” But the days his trips got canceled and he was stuck in Darien with his pent-up energy were harder. He would spend hours at a time fussing over legal matters, insurance policies, and finance. He compiled lists of “Things to Do,” which he divided into three categories—Current, Immediate, and Near Future. Those done, he might busy himself with household inventories or making lists of all the planes he had ever flown, places the house trailer had been, books he had read. Or he might refine the packing list for his trips, sorting and weighing each item until he had reduced his standard load to a mere twenty pounds—and that included a dark-blue dacron suit, shoe polish, medical supplies (carried in a sock), stationery, dictionary, maps, his disguise of a beret and eyeglasses, even emergency food.

  There was always mail to catch up on, most of which he never read, responding only to envelopes from recognizable senders or those letters which his secretary deemed important. A few biographies of him were in the works, in which he took no part except in discouraging friends from speaking to any of the authors. On the other hand, he made himself available to authors writing about Robert Goddard, Dwight Morrow, his grandfather Dr. Land, Henry Ford, and the Isolationist movement. And he was always in the middle of a new book himself. Even stopping for a red light, his children observed, he would instinctively reach for a knife- sharpened pencil and the blue paper pads he ordered from Bristol-Streeter in New York to scribble fragments of his life.

  His papers in order, he filled folders with pages of tasks for everybody in the house to perform, lists he would carry to meals and bark out to Anne and the children. It made everybody in the family uncomfortable, “as if the dentist were picking your mouth trying to find cavities,” Anne wrote. She began to grasp Dr. Rosen’s observation about “compulsive outward orderliness being a compensation for inward dis-orderliness.”

  Lindbergh’s obsession with the Cold War distracted him from his internal strife, and trivial matters assumed grave importance. He sometimes got so worked up over the eventuality of a third World War that his mother-in-law thought he was “a madman!” Because he was away from home so often, he went so far as to prepare Anne to act alone in the event of a nuclear attack. Scott’s Cove was very safe, he said, but should war break out, Maine would be safer. New York should be avoided at all costs as it was “a key target, and vulnerable both by air and sea”; and dental appointments should be canceled, as there was the Soviet threat of sabotaging the water supply. When Anne said the kitchen needed a new stove, Charles told her to postpone the decision on this “important and complicated subject” until they could analyze the purchase “from personal, economic, and military standpoints.” Charles, Mrs. Morrow wrote in her diary, “needs a steady job.”

  There was no want of offers, most of which he refused—everything from teaching at M.I.T. to General Wedemeyer’s recommending to President Eisenhower that Lindbergh serve as Secretary of Air. He did, however, maintain a series of positions on several boards, at which he worked indefatigably:

  In April 1954, Lindbergh served on a commission created by Congress to select a permanent location for a United States Air Force Academy. The five members traveled eight thousand miles, inspecting twenty-one sites from the air and fifteen on the ground, before deciding on a location eight miles north of Colorado Springs. The selection prompted eighty-seven-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright to wire Lindbergh, “YOUR EYE FOR A SITE IS AS GOOD AS YOUR EYE FOR A FLIGHT.”

  For six years, Lindbergh served on scientific committees whose mission was to develop ballistic missiles. Well into the fifties, America assigned low priorities to such programs, while the Russians saw their value, achieving what Lindbergh considered “extraordinary results with spatial missiles—the first satellite in orbit, the first missile to the moon, the first photograph of the moon’s back face.” Among the dozen other members of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles Scientific Advisory Committee, a distressed Lindbergh became a vocal supporter of the development of long-range, nuclear-warhead ballistic missiles and an ardent spokesman for “the establishment and consistent sup
port of a long-range space policy.” Meetings of these Air Force Management committees kept Lindbergh on the go—from discussions with senior Air Force officials at the Pentagon to talks with senior officials of aircraft companies, RAND Military Advisory Group, and the technological giant Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge in Southern California.

  Turning to more mundane matters, Lindbergh filled stretches of unscheduled time with inspection tours on behalf of Pan American, trips almost entirely of his own devising. When he was not at office meetings in Manhattan on company business, Lindbergh inspected Pan Am flights and facilities around the world, taking several major trips a year. In 1953, he focused on the Caribbean; 1954, South America; 1956, the mid-East; 1959, South Africa. During three weeks in 1955, he flew from Port of Spain in the West Indies to Rome, via San Francisco, Tokyo, Bangkok, Rangoon, Karachi, and Istanbul. With each trip, Lindbergh became less concerned with the cockpit than the cabin—meal service, the size of the PAA flight bag, hot versus cold towels. Lindbergh admitted that he was not the best judge of first-class amenities, as he preferred sitting in the “tourist” section of the plane, the less elaborate service granting him more time to sleep. Lindbergh accepted but one dollar a year (plus expenses) from Pan Am for all his work, until Juan Trippe insisted on a $500-a-month retainer. By the end of the decade, Lindbergh’s time away from home increased.

  For Anne, their marriage had become something of a sham. She wrote page after page about the “agonies of mind & emotions—spirit” and the “banked bitterness” she felt toward her husband for not being there for her. Fortunately, Dr. Atchley always was. “Dana pulled me through,” she wrote in her diary, “… kept me alive.” Trapped in his own difficult marriage, with a quarrelsome wife, the physician made time for Anne in his office after his scheduled appointments. Between visits, he dashed off short notes to her on prescription-size slips of yellow paper, which he folded in half and mailed in plain envelopes. He found her replies, on cerulean stationery, fortifying enough to call “blue vitamins.” By the end of 1953, he admitted that the most cheering thought during his dark hours that year had been the emergence of Anne waving “goodbye to [her] lifelong pal, guilt” and realizing her potential. Anne completed The Shells; and in the spring of 1954, when a letter from a publisher she had met five years earlier invited her to submit her manuscript, she did.

  Kurt Wolff had been a publisher in Germany before he found much of his inventory being tossed into the Nazi bonfires of 1933. This half-Jewish bibliophile found refuge in France and Italy before emigrating to America in 1941. Within a year, he had started Pantheon Books, which began in his Washington Square apartment. Pantheon quickly distinguished itself not only as the translators and publishers of André Gide, Paul Valéry, and C. G. Jung, but also as the creators of physically beautiful books, featuring the work of such artists as Alexander Calder, Ben Shahn, and Marc Chagall. Publishing “world literature” in the American marketplace had kept Pantheon a small and financially modest house; and Anne felt the courtly Wolff—a friend of her favorite author, Rainer Maria Rilke—would be a sympathetic reader, the first publisher to whom she would expose her fifteen-thousand-word manuscript.

  The day after reading it, Wolff wrote the author, “I need not tell you that it is a lovely and touching book—written with that scrupulous care and workmanship which distinguishes you … I think you have made the case of women in this country, in our times, poignantly clear.” With few suggestions to offer, he said, “if you see any way of confiding this book to us, we would try to translate it into a printed shape appropriate to its contents. I would be both proud and happy to have this privilege. But I will bring no pressure to bear on a conscience as delicate as yours.” He did not have to.

  By fall, Anne was correcting galleys of her retitled book, announced in Pantheon’s Spring 1955 catalogue as Gift from the Sea. Anne’s expectations for so personal and slender a book—not even one hundred undersized pages of text—were naturally low. She was resigned to its quiet publication in the shadow of Charles’s persisting success with The Spirit of St. Louis.

  Gift from the Sea blossomed into one of the most phenomenal triumphs in publishing history. It sold six hundred thousand copies in hardback, ranking number one on the bestseller list for a year; paperback sales exceeded two million copies. Pantheon enjoyed its first great financial windfall, paving the way for such future bestselling authors as Pasternak, Lampedusa, and Günter Grass. But it was this small American book that put the internationally celebrated publishing house on the map, continually requiring new editions and translations, continuing to make “religious” bestseller lists forty years after its publication.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book spoke to a century of women. It bridged the “victories” attained by feminists of her mother’s generation with those of the Women’s Liberationists of her daughters’ generation. “Perhaps the great progress, humanly speaking, in these past twenty years, for both women and men, is in the growth of consciousness,” she would observe on the book’s twentieth anniversary. That, she believed, was largely the result of men and women talking to each other, “openly and honestly, often arguing and challenging, but at least trying to explain what they felt could never be explained.” For the generation of postwar housewives and mothers—whom she called “the great vacationless class”—Gift from the Sea opened that dialogue.

  Sadly, the two foremost feminists in Anne’s life did not live to see the publication of her book. On September 7, 1954, after years of suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh died at the age of seventy-eight. Unhappy in her youth and in her marriage, she had struck out on her own as a teacher in the wilds of Minnesota, and later in the Detroit school system, never allowing herself to be trapped. And yet Anne puzzled for a long time over her years of peculiar behavior, realizing decades later that Evangeline had been, no doubt, chemically imbalanced. Anne and Charles met in Detroit for her simple funeral service in the old country church on Orchard Lake, where Evangeline’s grandfather Lodge used to preach and where she and “Brother” worshipped as children. She was buried in Pine Lake Cemetery, amongst her kin. Charles never delved into the sources of his mother’s troubles, for it would have meant prying into his parents’ marriage—a Pandora’s box he chose never to open.

  Three months later, Anne’s mother suffered a stroke, which took her speech and left her partially paralyzed. A few weeks after that, she suffered a second stroke and her condition deteriorated. After a life of service—to family, schools, community, and church—Elizabeth Cutter Morrow died at the age of eighty-one.

  While Charles took enormous pride in the success of his wife’s book, he was not present to witness it. He traveled more that year than any in his life—eleven times across the Atlantic and once across the Pacific, in addition to various trips within the Americas. His repeated abandonments made Anne question her own book’s sincerity. “There is a terrible irony in it with Gift from the Sea heading the best-sellers week after week, preaching ‘Solitude—Solitude!’ she wrote in her diary. “Here I am, having just what I say I want & it does not seem to be the answer! Then is the book all ‘hooey’ as I sometimes feel? I don’t think so, but the truth of it is not relevant to me at this moment in my life.”

  Having become the nation’s most popular author emboldened Anne to publish the book she had dreamed of since childhood, a collection of her poetry. Pantheon released The Unicorn and Other Poems: 1935–1955, thirty-five selections, in September 1956. Most of the poems bespoke the artist’s loneliness—images of barren trees, bolted doors, abandoned roads, broken shells. The book’s final poem concluded with a couplet that revealed something of what her marriage had both cost her and provided her:

  Blow through me, Life, pared down at last to bone,

  So fragile and so fearless have I grown!

  Anne’s book was published to prominent reviews of considerable acclaim. Volumes of poetry seldom sold more than a few thousand copies; but Pantheon had printed t
wenty-five thousand copies before its September publication, and another forty thousand for the Christmas rush. It was not until January 1957 that anybody took serious issue with the book; and the result was a literary flap the likes of which had hardly been seen since The Wave of the Future.

  Poet John Ciardi, poetry editor of The Saturday Review of Literature, came out of his corner swinging. “As a reviewer not of Mrs. Lindbergh but of her poems,” he wrote, “I have, in duty, nothing but contempt to offer. I am compelled to believe that Mrs. Lindbergh has written an offensively bad book—inept, jingling, slovenly, illiterate even, and puffed up with the foolish afflatus of a stereotyped high-seriousness, that species of esthetic and human failure that will accept any shirk as a true high-C. If there is judgment it must go by standards. I cannot apologize for this judgment.” He proceeded to lacerate her poems, practically line by line. Nobody had ever treated Anne Lindbergh that way. Even in the hysteria over The Wave of the Future, reviewers had gone out of their way to be polite.

  The response from the Saturday Review’s readership was overwhelming. On February ninth, the magazine published a small sample of the hundreds of irate letters its editors had received, with demands for Ciardi to apologize if not resign. The debate grew into what the magazine’s founding editor, Norman Cousins, would later call “the biggest storm of reader protest in the thirty-three-year history of the Saturday Review.” It swept into classrooms, cocktail parties, libraries, even onto the pages of other periodicals. Cousins himself felt compelled to take his critic to task, chiding him for applying the word “illiterate” to Mrs. Lindbergh or her books. “There are few living authors who are using the English language more sensitively or with more genuine appeal,” he wrote. “There is in her books a respect for human responses to beauty and for the great connections between humankind and nature that gives her work rare distinction and that earns her the gratitude and loyalty of her readers, as the present episode makes clear.” But he would take no action against Ciardi, standing instead by the independence of his reviewers’ opinions.