Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (72 page)

Eric, Peter, and Erin, three Lindbergh grandchildren, on the beach near Argonauta, the Lindberghs’ home on Maui, Christmas 1972
.

(Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

A
nne grew thin with insight. The equation was simple; less body, less pain. As she turned fifty-six, her vigor was cerebral. She wore her collars high and her buttons closed, lightly tied with a long, limp bow.

Dearly Beloved
, published in the spring of 1962, received disappointing reviews. It was thrown into the stockpile of “women’s books,” viewed as a sequel to
Gift from the Sea
, lacking poignancy, substance, and drama. As Anne had feared, her “voices” fell flat, treated by critics as platitudes. Anne’s now familiar housewife-saint was greeted with a critical yawn.

She wrote to Helen that the book was a failure. It was praised by those who did not understand it and rejected by those who thought they did. Now that the storm of publicity was over, Anne hoped to find the cool light of objectivity.
¹

Anne was right. Those who didn’t toss the book out, still didn’t seem to understand it. Virgilia Peterson of the
New York Times
saw it as a portrait of “three happy marriages” and called it nothing more than “flowers” arranged carefully in a jar.
²
The
Christian Science Monitor
, perhaps grasping the message of the story, brushed it off as something perverse.
³
But it was a commercial success; more than a hundred thousand copies in hardcover alone were sold and it immediately climbed to the top of the best-seller lists of the
Herald Tribune
and the
Times
. It stayed at the top of the
Times
’s list for nearly thirty weeks.

If the book did “fail,” it was because Anne had not told her story. While demanding total honesty of herself, she had let the book play at the edge. As usual, the story was clothed in beautiful imagery, which camouflaged its intent. At first its publication released Anne’s energy, spinning her back into domestic routine and spurring her to plan trips abroad with Charles. Then the poor reviews sent her back into retreat, and once again she sat alone in her room, wondering what she could possibly write next. In the winter of 1962–1963, she looked through her diaries, letters, and notes, hoping to find a kernel for another book. Writing, she wrote to Kurt, connected her to life in an essential way, fostering her growth and deepening her roots.”
⁴

Charles, now sixty years old, had grown solid and sturdy. No longer boyishly straight and “slim,” he was finally filling the potential of his form. Still able to outdistance his sons, he walked with brisk, long-legged strides, and his whitening hair and pale cheeks heightened the penetrating blue of his eyes.

In 1961, after seven years as a consultant to the air force, and after being disillusioned by the encroachment of technology on the woodlands and farmlands he had known as a boy, he was back to flying for Juan Trippe at Pan Am. Now a director as well as a consultant, he crisscrossed Europe and America several times a year, meeting Anne in Darien or in their newly built chalet in Vevey. Dressed in a navy pinstripe suit, with his clothes and sock-wrapped razor stuffed into a small bag, he would pull the brim of his gray fedora over his eyes and board a commercial plane. After heading straight for the back, he would sprawl out with his papers and books, attracting little attention from tourists or staff. And yet all the attendants had been alerted to his presence. They whispered in the cockpit, “Lindbergh’s aboard,” but they had been forbidden to take notice or to engage in conversation. All were content to play his game, just glancing as they passed him, pretending that he was no one of any importance. Charles, now a detached observer, saddened by the antiseptic luxury of jet flight, would watch the stewardesses walk up and down the aisle serving full-course meals on household trays. It was, he found, hard to remember that they were 35,000
feet above the same Atlantic Ocean he had flown over thirty-five years earlier in a 300-horsepower plane.

He traveled for months at a time, often cutting a wide swathe through the gamelands of East Africa while also alloting time to Pan Am. His growing interest in wildlife conservation had convinced him that “civilization” was not “progress,” and he sought to understand primitive human and animal life in the jungles of Tanzania and Kenya, places untouched by guns, planes, and “white men.” He believed that, in spite of the advances of science and technology, Western culture had alienated man from his place in nature, denied him spiritual connection with life, and deprived him of the “miracles” of God’s creation.
⁵

There was an aspect of Charles’s conservation philosophy that harked back to his childhood in Minnesota. On the front porch of his riverside home, he had listened to his father’s spoken memories of dense virgin woodlands filled with deer and of clear skies blackened with wild geese. Later, he regretted having taken the path of scientific inquiry. The only true criterion by which to measure progress, he wrote in “Civilization and Progress,” was the quality of human life. There was no reason to believe that the spear-thrusting Masai of Kenya lived less happily or well than his Pan Am colleagues in the boardrooms above the streets of New York.

Anne’s time in Darien was punctuated by visits to and from the children—Jon and Land and their families out west, her brother Dwight, now a professor of history at Temple University, her son Scott, now enrolled at Amherst, and her daughters Reeve and Anne, students at Radcliffe. But the children seemed to register the strain of a marriage defined by their father’s absences and their mother’s loneliness and disappointment. Anne Jr., a blond Botticelli beauty with an incisive mind and acerbic wit, had grown severely depressed. When she talked of dropping out of school, and Anne encouraged her to see Dr. Rosen, Charles was furious. His anger was stoked by their son Scott, as argumentative and tenacious as he. Rebellious but sensitive, he would not comply with Charles’s notions of “manhood” and discipline. Scott was opposed to the war in Vietnam, unhappy at Amherst, and hoped to find refuge at Oxford in England. He and his father fought incessantly about
the responsibilities of “patriotism,” and Charles demanded that Scott remain in this country and serve in the military. Anne would develop migraine headaches, feeling powerless to protect Scott from Charles.
⁶
When she did summon up the courage to defend Scott, asking Charles to see how deeply his criticism affected their son, she could not move him. Charles persisted in expressing his contempt for Scott’s behavior.

The other children had developed their means of coping with Charles. Jon, earlier than the others, had learned to keep the peace by acting obedient and remaining silent; Land, now a cattle rancher in Montana, chose to keep the buffer of distance between them. Sunny-faced Reeve seemed unscathed until long into adulthood when she could face the emptiness of her father’s absences and the fullness of his rage. Even as she treasured her mother’s sensibilities, she questioned her timidity and emotional reticence.

Anne spent the spring of 1963 alone in their chalet in Vevey and often visited Helen and Kurt Wolff in Locarno. Weakened by heart disease and no longer able to bear the stress of independent publishing, Kurt had moved his and Helen’s base to Locarno, expecting to make a full retirement. But William Jovanovich, at Harcourt Brace, lured them back with an offer so attractive that they could not refuse. He suggested they become his co-publishers, retaining both the name and the prestige of their imprint and protected by the financial resources of a large concern. Happy to resume his beloved work, Kurt once again traveled throughout Europe, reestablishing old contacts, meeting new authors, and bringing manuscripts to Helen to have translated and edited for the American and European markets. Totally engaged, Kurt seemed rejuvenated.
⁷

On the afternoon of October 21, 1963, after their usual stop at the Bookfair in Frankfurt, Kurt and Helen took a detour through Marbach to visit the National Museum on their way to a meeting of Gruppe 47, a coterie of German-language poets, essayists, novelists, and dramatists who grappled with the social issues of Europe. Just seven kilometers from their destination, they stopped at a hotel in the small town of Ludwigsburg, and Kurt decided to take a walk. As he crossed a street,
a tanker truck pulled into reverse. In his attempt to outrun it, Kurt was pinned by the force of its thrust. He died three hours later of massive internal injuries.
⁸
Those who knew him called his action thoughtless and impulsive, yet somehow consonant with his character. He died taking one more chance, believing his instincts would carry him through.

Helen received the news alone at the hotel. Three days later, surrounded by publishers and authors from all over the world, Helen buried Kurt in Marbach, home of the German Literary Archives, the largest collection of literature in Europe. His colleagues hailed him as “the most distinguished literary publisher of the twentieth century.”
⁹

To Anne, his sudden death must have seemed a familiar blow. Like the kidnapping of Charlie, the unexpected death of her father, and the disappearance of Saint-Exupéry, this death catapulted Anne from the lull of an ordinary day into the horror of loss. The man who had been a friend and a collaborator, who had loved her with “a purity” and a fullness of heart she had rarely known, was suddenly gone. As with Saint-Exupéry, when Anne wrote, she wrote for him. And once again, she had not had the chance to say good-bye.

The week before Christmas 1963, Anne Jr. married Julien Feydy, a young student she had met in Paris the year before. As usual, information was withheld from the press. It was a quiet service in the town hall of Dordogne, where the groom’s father, a university professor, owned a large manor house and estate.
¹⁰
Within the week, Anne and Charles returned from France with Helen Wolff to spend Christmas in Darien.

On Christmas day, Charles declared that “everything will be the same.”
¹¹
Helen would edit, Anne would write, and he would ease their way. But as he watched the women grieve for Kurt, he must have wondered whether he could fill his place. Once again Anne’s grief had taken her to a place where Charles could not follow, and he must have known how she had changed. To Anne, heroism was no longer a physical act; it was a journey toward enlightenment and awareness. Anne’s magnificent “cathedral” of a husband, in spite of his noble intentions, was incapable of responding to her intellectual or emotional needs.

Nevertheless, in February 1964, Anne accompanied Charles to East
Africa. She had long been a passive listener to his stories about a place that stirred him as nothing had since his early days of flying. Her visit did indeed convince her of Africa’s beauty—but she contracted viral pneumonia and had to remain in bed most of the spring.

By fall, Anne was hard at work again, reading and editing her letters and diaries. It was a project she had begun with Kurt, and now she was carrying it through, with the help of Helen. She wanted to shape a dramatic narrative, smooth enough for publication. Quite sure that she would never write another novel, she hoped that the story of her youth would be more compelling than any fiction she might imagine.

The bout with viral pneumonia in the spring of 1965 had left Anne physically exhausted, but it was an exhaustion she seemed eager to cultivate in order to free herself from Charles’s schedule.
¹²
Nonetheless, Anne agreed again to accompany Charles to Africa during the Christmas holiday. Inspired, perhaps, by her memories of the trips with Charles in their “golden days,” she invited the children to join them. The safari would be a family expedition. Land refused to travel with his father, but Jon and his wife, Barbara, Anne Jr. and Julien, Scott, and Reeve traveled with Anne and Charles, without guides or guns through the “big-game lands” of Serengeti, Lake Manyara, Kilimanjaro, Olduvai, Amboseli, and Ngorongoro. Charles assumed his usual military stance, commanding his family as if they were troops on a battlefield. In fact, nothing had changed since their honeymoon. Charles held the maps, decided their course, orchestrated the folding and unfolding of their gear, and delegated responsibilities according to what he saw as their collective needs. “This isn’t a democracy,” he was fond of saying; “this is a beneficent dictatorship.”
¹³

While Anne cooked their meals by campfire in the 120–degree heat, Charles went off scouting with the local game wardens. Feeling deserted by Charles, one day, in the Chumba Valley, Anne and the children staged an all-out mutiny, packing up the Range-Rovers so that they could head off for cooler and more temperate terrain. Charles returned and demanded that they unpack. Persuaded by Jon to obey, the children and Anne did as they were ordered.
¹⁴

Though the family reunion was a failure, it was invaluable for Anne. On October 21, 1965, coincidentally the second anniversary of Kurt’s death, Anne published “Immersion in Life” as the cover story of
Life
magazine. It was one of Anne’s old-time travel pieces, reminiscent of
North to the Orient
and
Listen, The Wind:
a physical journey as a moral adventure, an exploration of the connections between man and nature and man and God. Writing in the first person, with the “innocence” of a child’s eye, Anne piles image on image, wrapping the reader in sight, sound, and smell until he is enfolded in the landscape. It is a musical piece, as thunderous and dissonant as the
Dearly Beloved
fugue, but dominated by a sweeping, harmonizing melody. It is confident and commanding as never before, modulated and precisely controlled, strong in detail, yet lyrical in language. Like all her narratives, it is a disguised sermon, filled with the demands of her Calvinist ancestry. But it is also the exercise of literary imagination in the comprehension of God’s will. It is the sanctification of literature as prayer.