Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (70 page)

Anne and Charles at daughter Reeve’s wedding, 1968
.

(© Richard W. Brown)

N
ot quite autumn; there was a wilt to the trees, and the late-night air held the chill of fall. The hired car slipped through the streets of Darien, carrying Anne eastward toward the water’s edge. The manicured foliage grew thin and straggly as the paved, well-marked road bent and narrowed toward a rustic bridge. As the car crossed over, the earth seemed to swing out from under it, jettisoning into an expansive sky. And then, encircled by water as if on an island, the car elbowed its way around Scott’s Cove, turning in to an unmarked drive.

It was September 3, 1959, and, after three months in St. Denis, Switzerland, Anne relished the familiarity of home. The rambling stone-façade house, purchased in 1946, sat on four and a half acres of woodlands and meadows bordering the shore of Long Island Sound. To Anne, it had always looked “amorphous and ugly,” a practical concession to housing five children in a suburban town noted for its schools. Once brightly lit and bustling with children demanding to be heard, tutored, and fed, it was now dark and empty. Anne had told her housekeeper to leave the door unlocked; she would arrive late.
¹

Anne opened the huge oak-paneled door and entered the small dimly lit vestibule. After the radiant alpine light, the heavily curtained rooms, hung with old tapestries and European paintings, seemed dense and dark. Red fabric draped the windows and walls, and thick textured cloths covered the sofas and chairs. A grand piano stood in one corner of the lamp-shaded room, walled by leather-bound volumes of encyclopedias. Only the sculptures—a wooden Saint Francis, a bronze head, and a Chinese horse—gave rhythm and flow to the unpatterned room.
²
But life itself had lost its pattern; time was paced by the cadence of Anne’s thoughts. By now, she should have grown used to the silence. The children, except for Reeve, were rarely there, and Charles was almost never home.

In 1953, Charles had become a consultant to the technical committee of Pan American Airlines and traveled frequently to aircraft plants in California and England. He had first met Juan Trippe, Pan Am’s chief executive, in 1927, when the fledgling company was bidding for airmail routes. They met again in the early 1930s, when Charles and Anne made their transcontinental and intercontinental survey flights. Trippe knew that his pilots would be eager to hear anything Lindbergh had to say. And his name, especially after the publication of
The Spirit of St. Louis
, which won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, enhanced his status.
³

But by April 1954, Charles had to limit his time at Pan Am. In an effort to heal wartime divisions and to acknowledge his contributions to aviation, President Eisenhower nominated Charles for the rank of brigadier general and then asked him to join the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, assigned to study ballistic missile defense. The committee traveled twenty thousand miles a year, screening four hundred locations, and visiting proposed rocket and missile sites in twenty-two states.
⁴
Charles rarely spent more than a few days in Darien.

For Anne, long-distance flight had become a burden; she no longer had the stamina. But in choosing to stay home, Anne had become the sole caretaker of their three teenage children: Anne Jr., Scott, and Reeve. Rambunctious and wild in their father’s absence, eager to push the limits
of his rules, they defied Anne and the household staff. They ran off without telling anyone and stayed out long after midnight, scrambling up drainpipes before their mother awakened.
⁵
Delighted to challenge Anne’s emphasis on neatness, they would smuggle wild animals into their rooms.
⁶
Unwilling to be a stern taskmaster, overwhelmed by the burden of their total care, Anne withdrew to her writing room. It was as if she had retreated inside her body, feeling incapable of physical warmth. Although accessible to the children, willing to listen and give them comfort, she remained emotionally removed.

If Charles’s absence created a vacuum, his presence was intoxicating. He never stopped talking or moving around, filling the air with frenzied sound and energy. During his short stays, he would turn the house into a military camp, instructing Anne, his lieutenant, in the proper workings of household and staff. Drilling his recalcitrant teenage troops with relentless questions and detailed checklists, he attempted to improve their moral standards with long-winded “pearls of wisdom,” intended to prevent the “downfall of civilization.”
⁷
Anne Jr., whom Charles thought too clever for her own good, named him “Alcibiades High Fly,” after the Athenian politician and commander whose moral pretensions did not cloak his immoral self-indulgences.

It was as if their home could not contain him. His relentless energy and ceaseless movements were dissonant interruptions in the rhythm of their lives. The sound of his steps, the boom of his voice, his constant trips up and down the stairs, all day long and even at night, sent waves of tension throughout the house. If someone, anyone—a child or Anne herself—dared to transgress, all his energy focused on the accused with an intensity that was primitive and painful to bear, even to witness. And yet at times Charles could be warm and playful, dispensing bear hugs and long-armed embraces. He read to them, and encouraged them to write, and taught them to hike, swim, and sail.

Oddly, there was sadness when Charles left the house, as if “real life” had suddenly walked out the door. The house once again became hollow and dry. Everyone felt relieved and “free” but less alive and more vulnerable than before. Like his own father, Charles loved his children
deeply but lacked the capacity for shared emotion that might have bred intimacy. He simply could not admit he had “feelings like other people.”
⁸
Feelings held the promise of danger, while “reality” could be measured, analyzed, and mastered.

By 1958, Anne’s ardor for Atchley had cooled to friendship, and in Charles’s absence, Anne turned to her publishers and friends, Helen and Kurt Wolff, for consolation. Helen was a maternal and nourishing woman who was also a devoted linguist and translator with an instinctive sense of style and language. A meticulous craftswoman and editor, she was fluent in German, French, Italian, and English. Twenty years her senior, Kurt, a gentleman with a classic education, was excited by the evolving cultural landscape of books, art, and music. Together they were an extraordinary pair; they understood the synergy between writer and editor, and viewed publishing as a medium synonymous with art.

Kurt would write that “a publisher’s relationship with his author must be like a love affair in which he asks nothing and has already forgiven every failing in advance.”
⁹
But that unconditional acceptance was a gift bestowed to the exceptional few. Helen and Kurt saw Anne as a woman of great talent who needed their confidence to harness her will. They believed in Anne—in the beauty of her poetic prose, in her ability to perceive psychological truth, and in the sincerity of her desire to master herself and her relationships.

The half-Jewish son of a music professor, Wolff had left Germany in 1933, just as Hitler rose to power, with Helen, his second wife.
¹⁰
They made their way to England and then to France, where their son, Christian, was born. After being arrested by the Nazis in Italy in 1939, they were freed and immediately sailed for New York, in January 1940. In prewar Munich, under the imprint of Kurt Wolff Verlag and Pantheon International, Kurt had been an innovative publisher, as eager to foster the expressionistic movement as he was committed to preserving classical texts. Fascinated by the culture that emerged after the First World War, he gave voice to young talent. And undeterred by geographical and cultural boundaries, he translated and disseminated, throughout Europe, the writings of Heinrich
Mann, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Émile Zola, and Sinclair Lewis.
¹¹

Nearly penniless on his arrival in New York, and unschooled in American business, he could not negotiate his way through established channels. But New York in 1941 was an extraordinary place, enriched by a vibrant European community that had arrived at the start of the war. Helen and Kurt acted as mediators, translating European titles for the United States market, and, within a year of their arrival, began a new publishing firm, named for the old Pantheon Press, in the cramped rooms of their Washington Square apartment.
¹²

Gift from the Sea
was Pantheon’s first real commercial success. Having nursed her through the publication of her poetry and the John Ciardi ordeal, Kurt encouraged Anne to write a book about marriage, a fictional sequel to
Gift from the Sea
. But by September 1959, Anne had reached an impasse. After a feverish beginning, the book was barely moving. The characters, Anne believed, were sketchy, mere mouthpieces for her ideas. She was untutored in the imaginative demands of fiction, and found her language stiff and monotonous, her dialogue unnatural and stilted. Her intent was to examine Eros and Agapé—physical and spiritual love—but it was also the story of a disillusioned housewife.

Deborah, the protagonist, much like the narrator in Anne’s poem “Midsummer,” was suffocating beneath domestic responsibility, bogged down in time and self-delusion. Her creativity was sapped, her marriage was flawed, and she was trapped in an affluent and stifling suburb. This was the underside
of Gift from the Sea
, the knots tied in the back of Anne’s philosophical tapestry. Anne conceived the book as a medley of voices speaking in testimony to a failed ideal.

When the children were young, Anne would retreat to her small, second floor writing room and sit at a table in a straight-backed chair. Strewn with shells and feathery quills, her desk held a tray of pens and pencils, a blotter, and a small blue writing pad. With the light of the window streaming over her left shoulder, Anne laid out her books and papers, much in the Morrow tradition, writing in long-hand, leaning
back between her thoughts as she scanned her bookshelves and watched the birds skim the cove.

Later she would work in a small gray tool shed behind the house bordering Long Island Sound. Its walls, crossbeams, and shelves decorated with remnants of driftwood, cork, and seashells, it must have reminded her of her time at Captiva when she first understood the fullness of her solitude.

At first, the voices played easily in her head, clear and resonant and strikingly distinctive. Unaware of Anne’s disappointment in Charles as well as her affair with Atchley, Kurt was confused by her lack of passion, by the dull gray palate she chose to use. Where were the strong, authentic feelings, he asked? Where were the extremes of egocentrism and possessiveness, the tenderness and rage that Eros and Agapé demanded? And where was the central theme of happiness by which dissonance could achieve melody? Surely it existed.