Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (57 page)

She thought she recognized him, like a man she had seen in one of her “dreams.” She explained her presence and, after a quick exchange of pleasantries, they crossed the street to her car, but no sooner had they gone around the block than the car stalled.
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By then, it hardly mattered. For Anne and Saint-Exupéry, time had stopped. While the Park Avenue traffic honked around them and a taxi driver tried to push their car, they were lost in conversation. Anne flitted from English to French, at once shouting out the window to the taxi
driver, explaining the situation to Saint-Exupéry, and talking “furiously” about the unconscious rhythm of language and books.

After leaving the car at a repair shop, they went to Penn Station and took the train to Lloyd Neck. How unusual, they agreed, to have touched each other, from so far away, through the power of their written words. It was as if they spoke the same language, a language, Anne implied, that her husband didn’t understand. They talked about writing and its limits within the walls of symbol and culture. They shared the sensation of being both a “spectator and an actor” in their work, of finding communion in physical separation and the difficulty of gaining philosophical distance on ordinary life. How wonderful to be understood, Anne later wrote.

“Je sais, je sais,”
each murmured to the other, finishing sentences before the other could speak. The meeting was a consummation, and Anne, like a shy and inexperienced lover, wondered whether she could maintain “the pitch.” He commented on the clarity and the classicism of her work; she on the metaphysical subtlety of his. She said how flying did not separate you from the elements, but, rather, bathed you in them—only to remember that he too had written those words. In his eyes, she saw her image, perfectly formed and immediately confirmed. The crowning moment was their discovery of their shared love of Rilke, who articulated everything they felt. Later Anne would quote the poet’s words in her diary:

Anne felt liberated and completely understood by someone who was a perfect stranger. To her surprise, he treated her like his equal. She wrote in her diary, he “… fenc[ed] with my mind, steel against steel.”
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Saint-Exupéry, too, was pleased. Anne was an attractive and cultivated
woman who understood his maverick life. He had been born to an aristocratic family but had little facility for the military or politics. Much like Charles, his only gifts were a taste for adventure and a desire to fly. Trained as a civil pilot, he had charted the mail routes into South America and Africa, and his books had grown out of his long night flights and his experience when downed in the Sahara. In 1939, he had reached the pinnacle of his literary career, but his personal life had become a vacuum.
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His wife, Consuelo, was an aspiring and unconventional sculptor of bohemian tastes. A petite and delicate Latin beauty, as rash and capricious as a child, she had grown distant, unable and unwilling to understand his work. At one time he had delighted in her energy, but now he understood the price he had paid. If, as he had written, love was at the “essence” of life, he believed there was little hope for his “salvation.” Anne had succeeded where Consuelo had failed. She had lived a creative life within the bounds of domesticity. The warmth and understanding he had sought from Consuelo flowed easily and effortlessly from Anne.

When Charles returned home, it was nearly ten o’clock, and Anne was relieved to be a mere spectator. Saint-Exupéry and Charles moved breathlessly from subject to subject, Anne wrote in her diary, finding a higher level than her own. They spoke of the machine and its role in society, and of the spiritual aspects of political nationalism. But Saint-Exupéry, unlike Charles, had little taste for political ideology. He believed the meaning of life was an ineffable mystery, and that men joined political “brotherhoods” to assuage their loneliness. If Charles believed in the superiority of “types” and chose to emphasize the differences among them, Saint-Exupéry believed that “each individual is an empire,” and that there were as many truths as there were men who dreamed.
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In his presence, it was as if, Anne later wrote, her name had been spoken in a room full of strangers.
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Saint-Exupéry stayed less than twenty-four hours, but their meeting had changed everything. He had done something no one else had done. He saw Anne apart from Charles. Through his eyes, she was not an appendage
of her husband; she was a thinking, sensitive, and skilled artist. While others had seen
Listen! The Wind
as the account of a transatlantic flight, he had understood her journey through Hell. Saint-Exupéry was to Anne the truest of heroes, conscious of himself and alive to the meaning of every moment.

A
nne Morrow Lindbergh, circa 1939
.

(Brown Brothers)

A
nne was afraid of Charles. She was afraid of following him and afraid of losing him. She was afraid of defying him and afraid of betraying him. Most of all, she was afraid of being left behind. Had she dared to express her doubts about German aggression, she would have been subjected to Charles’s anger and ridicule. She knew he would never change his mind and that the rift might be impossible to repair. Saint-Exupéry was right. Anne did not have the courage to stand alone; that would have been an unbearable anguish.

Charles’s beliefs, she wrote, were “beautiful and strong,” yet they made her “tremble.” In this “Armageddon,” she wrote, there would be no middle ground. She would have to take sides, but she could not. Her thoughts resonated with her father’s speeches and essays written during and after the First World War. Dedicated to the Covenant of a League of Nations, he had written, “Whether a single state wills it or not, it belongs
to a society of states [which must] establish a civil society universally administering right in accordance with law.” While national sovereignty was a moral imperative, he wrote, consonant with the growth of democratic principle, the actions of one state influenced the cooperative efforts of the community. The tension between the “ideal of liberty” and the “ideal of world order” must constantly be reconciled by law and reason.

A renegade state had no more right to aggression than a passive state had to neutrality. Reflecting the teachings of Leviticus, Morrow didn’t believe in the luxury of “isolation;” of standing by to watch another state starve and die. To cut off “entanglements” was to cut off the “liveliness, comfort, and happiness of millions of people.” Of course Morrow detested war and its devastation, but he believed it was often necessary to clear the path for human progress. The danger to America, he wrote, was measured not by military invasion but by its moral commitment to the international community. Growth required sacrifice and discipline. “Only then can we have the unity and courage to bring the world nearer to a dependable international guarantee of the territorial and political integrity of all nations, large and small.”
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Now her mother was defending her father’s words against the views of Charles. Torn by the conflict, Anne wondered naïvely why there was a need for war at all. She hated any show of force; it was against her nature. But how could she desert Charles? And how could she live without him?
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On August 22, Hitler told his generals that the “extermination” of Poland was about to begin. Although he had made a pact with the Soviet Union he vowed to crush Stalin. “Whether the world believes it doesn’t mean a damn to me … Be hard … Be without mercy. The citizens of Western Europe must quiver in horror.”
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One week later, sitting at her desk in Lloyd Neck, Anne wrote in her diary that negotiations between Poland and Germany had stopped. War, she was certain, was inevitable. The waiting stirred her darkest memories. In her mind, her failure to protect her baby and her complicity with Charles and his pro-German views, were synonymous. She wrote in her diary, “The child is dead in Europe.”
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Anne’s body pulsed to the sounds of war as she imagined guns booming in the distance. That night, unable to sleep, she sat by her window, watching the moon rise against the trees and the dim gold lights of the Connecticut shore. Suddenly, she found herself on her knees praying—praying as she had not done since Charlie died. It was as if she had been touched by God. She felt empty of anguish, clear and free. Like the birth of her babies, it was both a death and a resurrection.
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But what and who had died? The next morning, as Anne sat on the steps of her seaside house, peeling unripe chestnuts with Jon, the realization came. The realities of war were harsh, and her husband’s stance was implacable. No matter how repelled she was by his antiseptic pragmatism, it was her duty as his wife and the mother of his children to submit to his views. Charles and the children were everything to her. They were her microcosm, her war job, small and meaningless in the scheme of things, but nonetheless an influence in a shattering world.
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Her thoughts turned to her friends in Europe and the terible fate that lay ahead of them.
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She imagined the horror of human suffering and wanted to make it her own. And she saw something else—an America “shocked out of its senses” and turning against Charles.
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Charles remained aloof, scanning the events with disciplined detachment. It was clear to him that Britain and France would not prevail against the Germans. Furthermore, he did not question the justifications for Germany’s transgressions. But he was concerned that the American press might push the United States into a war.
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Their influence made Charles wonder whether he could even think of living permanently in New York.

As the Germans stormed Poland, Roosevelt declared a state of “limited national emergency,” which authorized him to accelerate conscription and call reservists to active duty. On the night of September 15, in a small broadcasting room in Washington, Charles spoke nationwide, with Anne by his side, urging Americans to stay out of war.
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He set forth an isolationist doctrine, couched in the admonitions of the Founding Fathers, that drew on the xenophobia of the public. What
good had the First World War done, he asked? It had cost over a hundred thousand men and millions of dollars, debts that we were still paying. Involvement in a European war was a fathomless pit that would put our country in debt for generations to come. And what did this war have to do with us? It was an internecine battle among “sister nations,” not a threat to the “white race.” The Versailles Treaty, which had reduced the size of Germany and demanded tens of billions of dollars in reparations, had proven that no one could legislate strength among nations. In 1936, when Hitler first came to power, the Allies might have persuaded Germany to disarm; now, they were paying for their errors. Anne found his speech visionary yet practical. It was Charles at his best.