Read Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life Online
Authors: Susan Hertog
Determined to begin again to set down their roots, Anne and Charles canvassed the English countryside in search of a home.
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Cambridge didn’t suit them, and Charles needed to be near enough to London to have something to do. For the first time, they realized they had cut all their ties. Time was suspended as they meandered through the small country towns with their Victorian structures, too large and too expensive to rent. London, they decided, was at least familiar, and that familiarity alone would root them in a country that grew more alien each day. They turned to Harold Nicolson for help.
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Nicolson gave them a tour of Parliament and, over lunch, discussed with them the possibilities of renting a home near London. When Anne said she wanted a house that would “welcome” her, Nicolson replied that he knew a house that would “jump all over her like a Spaniel.” It was his beloved Long Barn, home to him and Vita for fifteen years after their return from government service in Constantinople in 1915.
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As Anne and Charles drove through the lush countryside of Kent toward the fourteenth-century village of Sevenoaks, their spirits rose with anticipation. Lost in the winding hills surrounding the village, they searched for the Nicolson home. “Crouching” over the brow of the next hill, shielded from the road by low feathery trees, the rambling house sat behind a gate at the end of a courtyard. As they opened the gate, Anne felt that it was like slipping into another realm. It was the sheltered and bucolic world she and Charles had imagined when they built their house in Hopewell four years earlier.
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The house seemed to reach out to embrace them. Finally, they had found “security.”
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Long Barn consisted of a fourteenth-century hall-house and a sixteenth-century L-shaped cottage and barn. Not quite two miles from
Vita’s ancestral home, Knole, Long Barn had provided not only the consolation Vita craved for her lack of inheritance, but fertile ground for the art of gardening. It was here, in the intricately terraced gardens of Long Barn and in the long, poplar-lined vistas that spread like spikes into open fields, that Harold and Vita consummated their love of the earth, and it was here that Vita wrote her epic poem, “The Land.” The gardens of Long Barn were the prelude to their floral masterpiece at Sissinghurst Castle, a medieval home only twenty-one miles away, on the outskirts of Kent.
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Nicolson truly loved the place, and his offer to Anne and Charles was an act of generosity that Anne understood the moment she walked through the gates.
Her belief that the best gifts were those given lightly and gratuitously would later be turned into metaphor.
A
LMS
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Like birds in winter
You fed me;
Knowing the ground was frozen
Knowing
You did not need my gratitude
Softly
Like snow falling on snow
Softly, so not to frighten me,
Softly,
You threw your crumbs upon the ground
And walked away
.
While Anne and Charles found refuge in the rolling hills of Kent, life in the United States was harder than ever. At a time when 38 percent of American families still had an income of less than a thousand dollars a year,
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the Lindberghs gave no thought to conventional employment. As news of their life filtered back home, neither the public nor the press was eager to let them forget the price they had paid for
their wealth and fame. It was reported that on the third anniversary of Charlie’s abduction, Dwight Jr.’s room at Harvard had been scavenged by thieves.
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They had stolen letters written by Betty Morrow to Dwight Jr. in the aftermath of the kidnapping and during the throes of the trial. The theft, though petty, underlined the continued violation of their privacy.
March 6 was moving day. Anne woke up singing a German song she sang only when she felt gay. She and Charles packed the back of their car while the nurse left for Sevenoaks by train. Followed by a reporter, they stopped on the way to buy two dozen narcissi and some anemones from a nice old man. When they arrived, Jon was eager to run and play, pleased with the gardens and the birds and the chance to throw stones into the pool. But the joy Anne felt on entering the house seemed suddenly to belong to someone else. As she surveyed the rooms and rearranged the furniture, Anne sensed Elisabeth’s presence, as though she were coming to pay a visit. Even now, she didn’t feel grown up. When she and Charles sat down to dinner that evening, it was as if they were “playing house.”
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The next day, Anne sat on the stone steps above the rose gardens and thought of Hopewell and of the suspended days of waiting for little Charlie’s return. The air had been warm and springlike, just like this, she thought. But her sadness seemed out of place amidst all this beauty. Anne felt profoundly alone, like a stranger in a strange land.
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That same day, March 7, Hitler stormed the Rhineland. While he hailed the act as a protest of the Franco-Soviet pact, it was a move calculated to test the Allied response. England, France, Belgium, Italy, and the League of Nations, though outraged, retreated in silence. Had they retaliated, Hitler later said, he would surely have fallen. In point of fact, Hitler had only four brigades.
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Ensconced in Kent, Anne and Charles argued about the morality of France’s position. Anne took a pacifist view. Why, she wondered, was there war at all? Why couldn’t there be trust among nations? Charles believed that war was an inevitable part of the cycle of life. They should have “crushed” Germany after the Great War, he said, shifting the
blame to the Allies. The “middle course” of humiliation was what had created Hitler’s frustration.
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Anne was puzzled by the seeming nonchalance of the English toward the imminent threat of war. While segments of the American population were outraged by the violation of the Treaty of Versailles, England and Germany played a game of denial, she wrote in her diary. Germany had violated the peace treaty, and England refused to respond. To Anne’s surprise, the newspapers were clearly pro-German. If only they would stop acting like bullies in a schoolyard, attacking people just to prove they could.
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Denial seemed the order of the day, even back in New Jersey. Bruno Richard Hauptmann protested his innocence, buttressed by the howlings of his indignant wife and the sustained protest of Governor Hoffman. But the drama of the kidnapping was drawing to a close. In spite of Hauptmann’s appeals and his thirty-day reprieve, the state court upheld its ruling, echoing the argument of the prosecutor, David Wilentz. Even if fifty people had conspired in the kidnapping, Hauptmann was one of them.
On April 4, 1936, Hauptmann walked in silence toward the execution chamber at the state prison. Fifty official witnesses and newspapermen watched behind a three-foot canvas barrier in the brightly lit execution chamber. Its tall white-washed walls, with the neat rows of wooden chairs, had the grotesque air of theater. Head held high, Hauptmann stepped quickly into the electric chair and his two spiritual advisers read to him from the Bible in German. The two-thousand-volt current was turned on at 8:44
P.M.
Three and a half minutes later, he was pronounced dead by the attending physicians.
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Large crowds filled Times Square, waiting for the news to be flashed on the high electric sign. When it did appear, at 8:47, a strange whisper rose from the crowd, as if the sharpness of consonants might desecrate the moment. Slowly, the crowds drifted away.
On hearing the news of her husband’s execution, Anna Hauptmann screamed, “Another man is guilty. There is another man.”
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While Anna Hauptmann seemed betrayed by her inability to understand her husband, Anne, in England, was growing certain that she understood Charles. Love, she wrote in her diary, was “seeing in every little act of a person the essence” of who he is; she must teach herself to accept Charles exactly as he was. The essence of Charles was “fast,” “concentrated,” and “relentless.” As he tore home from London on a narrow winding road through the darkness of a rainy night, his race seemed a metaphor.
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Anne’s feelings of unworthiness dissipated amid the beauty and security of Long Barn. The house was a spiritual reservoir. She would hold it in her mind forever.
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Just as people made permanent marks of peace on one another’s lives, so could places. Their happiness brought Anne and Charles closer to each other and to Jon. They walked for miles each night through the open fields, savoring the beauty of early spring.
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Charles had found that the people at the Pasteur Institute in London valued his previous work with Carrel, and had bought a row of books on big-game hunting in Africa. Anne prayed silently that he wasn’t planning a trip to Africa.
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But the more Anne nestled in the security of Long Barn, the more she worried that it was an illusion. She feared everything in life, she told Charles, as though there were “great pits on either side” of her path, waiting to swallow all that she valued and loved. Charles, as usual, tried to assuage her fears.
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Social life in England was stiff and vacuous. Appearance and convention suffocated warmth and spontaneity. “Everyone calls everyone Darling,” she wrote in her diary; everyone touched each other with their summer-white gloves. Everyone except the king; he was fascinating. He understood his role and played it well. Anne saw a piece of herself in the lonely king—a victim of tragedy. Like Shakespeare’s kings, he struggled to fit his humanity into his crown. Anne sensed his frustration of trying to live an authentic life, trapped in the prison of convention.
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With Jon enrolled in the local school, Anne once again had time to
write. She tried to keep alive the memory of her transatlantic trip, recalling her experience and her desolation. The key to writing, she noted, was a moment of insight like a window to a distant landscape. The rest are just shells, structures to support your vision. You must be open to your subject, respectful and patient. But life, too, was an art, no less demanding and perhaps more important than writing. If only she could be like Charles or the Carrels. They lived artful lives of precision and purpose.
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Developing a metaphor that would become a definition of contemporary womanhood, Anne wrote that “everyday living” was like “walking on a tightrope,” demanding balance and strict control. Marriage was the most important thing in life, and her commitment to Jon was its essence. But as she worked daily on her narrative, Anne resolved to find standards and measures of her own.
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While Anne, in the walled English garden, contemplated the relation between life and art, Kay Smith, in Germany, read the
International Herald Tribune
in her apartment in the center of Berlin. There, she found an item to tell her husband. Charles Lindbergh had been to Paris on an inspection tour for the French government. Impressed that the Lindberghs were no longer home-bound, she wondered aloud whether Charles would consent to inspect the German planes on behalf of the United States government.
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Kay’s suggestion grew out of her husband’s frustration. Truman Smith, the American military attaché in Berlin for the past year, saw factories and barracks springing up all around him, the unmistakable signs of a war machine. He had read
Mein Kampf and
took Hitler’s plans seriously.
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But he was an infantry man, an expert on guns and tanks and ground forces. He did not have the knowledge to analyze the military implications of aircraft. In spite of his well-cultivated contacts within the Reich, Smith had no information to send home to Washington. His new aviation assistant, Captain Theodore Koenig, also lacked the necessary experience and the technical knowledge.
Pursuing Kay’s idea, Truman negotiated through Air Minister Hermann Goering and State Secretary for Air Erhard Milch with
Chancellor Hitler. Hitler was eager to strike a deal. The presence of Charles Lindbergh on the eve of the Olympic Games would thrust Berlin onto the center stage. Lindbergh, Hitler agreed, would be permitted access to factories, research facilities, and combat units, with full government protection, if he promised to attend the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.
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He wrote to Truman Smith that he and his wife were eager to see the German civil and military developments in aviation. Nonetheless, he had one major request. The government, he wrote, must promise to protect him from the sensational press coverage which had encumbered his foreign visits in the past. Hitler gave his word through his ministers to Smith that the government-controlled press would be severely restricted.
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On July 22, ten days before the Olympics, Anne and Charles took off from Penshurst, a secluded airport in Kent. In their small, gray low-winged monoplane, they rose high above the feathery grass and the sleepy fields of Kent. Anne saw the house, down below, looking small and unprotected, and the figure of Jon doing a war dance and waving a towel. As they flew over the Channel toward the coast of Belgium, Anne felt their plane was a sanctuary. No matter how life changed below, the sky would always remain the same. Cathedrals pulled the houses toward their center, making each town look like a wide-eyed daisy. By tracking the canals and railroad tracks, Anne and Charles could follow the maps through the fields and forests of Germany. They landed in Cologne, next to an octagonal stone tower; it appeared very German, noted Anne—“large and blocky.”