Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (67 page)

In January 1950, when Anne was sturdy enough to resume her writing, she returned to Captiva alone. The house she rented, then, on the bend of the road that linked Sanibel Island to Captiva, belonged to ’Tween Waters Restaurant and Inn. It was a simple, four-room cottage across from a stretch of expansive beach.

The beach is gone now, hammered level by storms, its white-powdered width slashed by huge iron pipes that pump sand to stem the erosion of a battered shore. But in 1950, Anne could walk barefoot across the unpaved road and out to the wooden pier to watch the gulls “dip and dive” into the waves below.

In the mornings she would write in a bare, curtainless room, drenched in the light and the wind of the sea, and later, after lunch and household chores, she walked along the deserted beach, absorbing its “rhythms” and hoarding its “treasures.”

“I collected shells,” said Anne. “There was nothing else to do on an island like that, and everyone else seemed to be doing it. I recognized how wonderful the freedom was of not having to do things every day
and being able to go into a room and just write what one felt … One sees through the writing. You sink into a more authentic place inside yourself.” Living without writing is like “trying to paint a picture without any shadows and I think without any perspective … I wrote about the experience of a woman having a solitary experience—some time of her own.”
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After returning to Darien in early spring, Anne met a woman who would become both a confidante and a midwife to her work. Ernestine Stodelle, a protégée of Doris Humphrey, ran an academy of dance in the basement of a local church. She was a vital, self-educated woman, the mother of three and the wife of the Russian theater director Theodor Komisayevsky. Married to a man she deemed a “genius,” and dedicated to her home and children, Ernestine believed that the conflicts in her life were much like Anne’s. But she felt like “pottery” to Anne’s delicate “porcelain.” Tall and lean, muscular yet graceful, with a sculptured face and riveting eyes, Ernestine was confident and unencumbered by guilt. She saw her commitment to theater and dance not as self-indulgence, but as a necessity to her living a whole and balanced life. “I knew how to live,” said Ernestine:

She taught Anne to use dance as therapy, and she shared Anne’s desire to read and to study. While Ernestine admired Anne’s physical strength and mental precision, she believed her “rhythms were out of sync,” and she taught her to balance “on a moment in time,” at the nexus of breath, body, and spirit. It was a lesson Anne would carry back to her work, using the fluidity of dance to harmonize the dissonance of her feelings and thoughts.

Together, they read Greek, Christian, and Indian philosophy and mythology. They studied Freud and Jung and went to the theater and
dance concerts. Comforting each other with their poetry and letters, they read the works of poets and novelists, hoping to find inspiration. As they studied the diaries of Katherine Mansfield, they taught one another the art of surrendering to universal truth and confronting the necessity of human suffering.

Like so many of the women from whom Anne had sought comfort—Mina Curtiss, Margot Loines Morrow—Ernestine was both strong and visionary, compassionate and provocative. Ernestine later said she gave Anne courage, “divining things in her that came to pass.”

In the summer and fall of 1950, Anne worked on her manuscript in Darien and returned to Captiva in January. Margot and Anne’s sister Con would come and go, grateful for their time together, away from their responsibilities of motherhood and home. Con and Aubrey Morgan now had three children and lived in Oregon. Margot, also the mother of three, was divorced from Anne’s brother, Dwight, and was finding her way as a single parent. Together, the three women walked the shell-laden beaches, talking of religion, philosophy, and literature, and of their need to find balance in their domestic lives.

Anne completed the book in 1953. After setting it aside for several months, she took the manuscript, which she called “The Shells,” to Kurt Wolff, publisher and editor at Pantheon Press. She had met him by chance at a meeting of the International Goethe Society in Aspen at Christmas 1948. Drawn to his incisive and cultured mind, Anne found him warm and responsive. He understood her needs as a writer as well as the demands of the literary marketplace. They had sustained their friendship through letters and visits, and now she sought his professional advice. Immediately, Kurt recognized the literary and commercial value of Anne’s book. He published it in March 1955, under the title
Gift from the Sea.
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The book, a prose poem, rose out of her diaries, her talks with her sisters, her family, and friends. It is the product of a quest for faith and harmony—for “grace,” not in the theological sense, but a state of peace and blessedness. “I was not looking for God,” she later said. “I was looking for myself.”
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To accomplish her task, Anne makes a bargain with her reader. Come with me, she says, to a place where distinctions slip away; where there is no time, no culture, and no preconceived notion of sexual identity. Only then can we see who we are. The beach and its primeval rhythms will strip us of pretense, and the “twisted strands” of our lives will gain clarity, meaning, and perspective. But for all its literary and philosophic glaze,
Gift from the Sea
is a personal statement of “hunger and thirst,” tempered by an implicit faith in Nature.

Faith was new to the feminist scene. The redefinition of American female roles had its roots in defiance. Anne’s mother and other turn-of-the-century middle-class, urban, educated women had fought for suffrage. Women of the twenties and thirties had thrust open the doors of educational institutions, making their way into professions once bastions of male dominance. Law, medicine, even governmental service, became accessible to those willing to pay the price of loneliness, frustration, and prejudice. But in 1955 women had traded college for marriage. The average age of a woman at the time she married was twenty, and it was quickly dipping into the teens. The proportion of women attending college in comparison to men dropped from 47 percent in 1920 to 35 percent in 1958, and 60 percent dropped out of college to marry. By the end of the 1950s the birth rate in the United States was overtaking that of India.
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“Home” had become the focal point of the postwar social order. It symbolized a sinecure amidst the uncertainty of a cold war. It was a microcosm of an ideal world—peaceful, safe, and technologically advanced—in a sea of potential nuclear devastation. Later, Betty Friedan wrote,

By 1955, nearly six million women had entered the marketplace. Unlike twenty years earlier, 30 percent were married, and 40 percent
came from the middle class. Furthermore, and perhaps most significant, 39 percent of women with school age children were employed. As a result of these changing patterns, a great debate broke out in American media: Could a woman be a wife and mother and still pursue a professional career? It was called “the woman problem,” and scores of social theorists rose to explain it. Feminists believed women were unhappy because they were compelled to stay at home. Antifeminists blamed the discontent of housewives on their violation of tradition, dogma, and social role.
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Amidst this conflagration of ideas, Anne retreated to Captiva to find her own solutions.

The universe Anne enters is Darwinian and amoral, governed by laws beyond human control. But for all its bare-boned obsession with death—the skeletal shells of wandering homeless creatures—she finds an affirming, life-sustaining force in the rhythmical turnings of nature and the sea.

It is a journey infused with classical literature and Christian doctrine, yet rooted in the teachings of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. A circular metaphor, womblike and nourishing, is the unifying principle
of Gift from the Sea
. At its center is a maternal force, nameless and sacred, that enlightens and transforms all who enter. It is an oasis—both full and void—that connects the individual to her unconscious, and the unconscious to the collective whole. Camouflaging her Hindu and Buddhist sources beneath the words of Christian saints and modern poets and writers, Anne chooses to articulate only those concepts which mesh with the writings of Saint Augustine, Saint Catherine of Siena, and the works of William James, Charles Morgan, Rilke, John Donne, and Saint-Exupéry.

The book comprises eight essays, six of them represented by shells, which reflect not only Anne’s process of revelation, but the biological and social life cycle of women.

Anne begins with the deserted shell of a snail-like creature called the Channeled Whelk. She, like the Whelk, has left her shell—her home in Darien—regressed in time and space to this soft, moist place. The simplicity of its form, the perfect spiral toward its apex, teaches Anne a “singleness of eye”—harmony in the midst of flux. The pattern
of women’s lives, Anne writes, breeds fragmentation, alienation, and the destruction of the “soul.”

But fragmentation is not only a female problem; it is a human problem that goes beyond feminist ideology. Best illustrated by the wheel, whose spikes radiate from a “central mother-core,” the problem is how to preserve the stability of the hub, no matter what shocks attack its periphery.

Anne has no answers, only clues, and they lie in the contours of her deserted shell. The act of “shedding”—the renunciation of clothes and objects—implies the loss of vanity, restraint, and pride. But this is only a “technique;” the road to “grace” lies inside.

The snail shell, glossy, round, and compact, has inner secrets to unfold. It is like the moon, powerful and solitary. It teaches women to confront their solitude and use it as a source of creativity. They must live in the present, like islands in time, respecting the boundaries of other shores. “No man is an island,” she says, quoting Donne, but “I feel we are all islands in a common sea.”

Anne rails at the insidious corruption of technology. Machines have made women’s lives easier and freer, she acknowledges, but Virginia Woolf’s ideal of “a room of one’s own,” formulated before women had a range of opportunity, shows us the limitations of economic independence. Many women who have time, money, and space have little knowledge of how to use it. Women have traded domesticity for the distortions of the marketplace. They have independence and affluence, but no tools for living the creative life.

We have lost not only the solitary hour in the sewing room, the kitchen, and the church, but that essential: the “right” to be alone. We no longer have the “uninterrupted moment” in which to nourish
our individuality and wholeness. We perceive one another as collections of functions, as fragmented social beings. William James, she says, called it
“Zerrissenheit”—
the state of “torn to pieces-hood.” It is a problem of the individual, but also a social disease endemic to a technological society that bows to the notion of progress.

A woman must not emulate the masculine pattern. To deny the value of traditional female life is to diminish humanity. A woman must cherish the powers of introspection—ways of listening and loving—provided by thousands of years of evolution. Anne implores the reader to dedicate time to creative work, something both separate and nourishing. Paradoxically, solitude is not selfish. To still one’s center is to create the strength and integrity required to touch the lives of others. The well-being of family, society, even “our civilization,” Anne writes, depends on women’s self-knowledge. Betraying her sense of wartime guilt, Anne implies her weakness is not questioning her husband’s views. Standing alone is a woman’s moral duty.

But once a woman has learned the techniques of self-renewal, how does she sustain the relations on the circumference of her wheel? In her fourth, fifth, and sixth essays, Anne defines the three stages of marriage. The first, a romantic fusion of identities, resembles the Double-Sunrise shell. The second, the unwieldy years of childrearing, resembles the ugly Oyster shell. And the last, the independent stage, moves like the Argonauta, untethered and free.

The Double-Sunrise, she says, is pure and beautiful—simple, perfect, symmetrical and unified. But as each partner performs its biological and cultural roles, the purity and unity is obscured by the specialization that is integral to family life. While it is only a stage in an evolving relationship, it can be reclaimed by the enforcement of simplicity; by celebrating, even if only for short periods of time, the essence of its original form—time alone. Do not be fooled, Anne cautions the reader, by fantasies of duplicating the passion and romance of an earlier stage of marriage.

The second stage of marriage, the Oyster shell, ridged with responsibility, is a sign of middle age. As one approaches the end of one’s
childbearing years, death is both visceral and real. But middle age, Anne asserts, is wrongly interpreted as a time of degeneration. It is an opportunity for new self-definition and for the shedding of pride, vanity, and pretense. It is a “second-flowering,” when one is free from the responsibilities of youth. There is time for the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual growth that was “pushed aside in the heat of the race.”