Lindbergh, Anne Morrow (1906–2001)

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Lindbergh, Anne Morrow (1906–2001)

American poet, novelist, and aviator, particularly known for sensitive autobiographical observations and philosophical insights. Born Anne Spencer Morrow on June 22, 1906, in Englewood, New Jersey; died on February 7, 2001, in Vermont; daughter of Dwight Whitney Morrow (an investment banker and later ambassador to Mexico and U.S. Senator) and Elizabeth Cutter Morrow (later board chair and acting president, Smith College); Smith College, A.B., 1928; married Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. (an aviation pioneer), on May 27, 1929 (died August 26, 1974); children: Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. (1930–1932, killed in infancy); Jon Lindbergh (b. 1932); Land Lindbergh (b. 1937); Anne Spencer Lindbergh (1940–1993, who wrote 14 books for middle-graders and young adults as well as the novel Nick of Time); Scott Lindbergh (b. 1942); Reeve Lindbergh (b. 1945, who wrote the autobiographical novel, The Names of the Mountains, and the reminiscence of her youth in Darien, Connecticut, Under a Wing).

Selected writings:

North to the Orient (Harcourt, Brace, 1935); Listen! the Wind (Harcourt, Brace, 1938); The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith (Harcourt, Brace, 1940); The Steel Ascent (Harcourt, Brace, 1944); Gift from the Sea (Pantheon, 1955); The Unicorn and Other Poems, 1935–1955 (Pantheon, 1956); Dearly Beloved: A Theme and Variations (Harcourt, Brace, 1962); Earth Shine (Harcourt, Brace, 1969); Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters, 1922–1928 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972); Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: Diaries and Letters, 1929–1932 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973); Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters, 1933–1935 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); The Flower and the Nettle: Diaries and Letters, 1936–1939 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters, 1939–1944 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).

On February 1, 1937, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, having left Reading, England, en route to Rome, were lost in the air. Their craft was a British-made Miles Mohawk, a monoplane. Suddenly in the midst of the hazardous Italian Alps, Charles looked at his map, shook his head, and reversed the plane's direction. Anne shouted, "This is a hell of a place to get lost!" Both knew there might be time to pull out. They also knew they might hook a wing on the side of a mountain. Finally, Charles put on his goggles and turned to his wife, asking as he began his blind descent, "Got your belt on?" Anne later wrote in her journal:

I nod. Yes, that means be prepared for anything. Very likely death…. We start turn ing. The flaps are out, a quiver of sensation as we go under. There is no turning back. We must go through it now. Nothing to do but wait. Down in the mist, darkly…. I do not mind dying. I am glad for our life.

The couple eventually spotted the coast of Genoa and landed safely in Pisa. Within a year, Anne Morrow Lindbergh was at work on a novella concerning the incident, one published in 1944 under the title The Steep Ascent. She communicated a curious sensation she felt through the persona of a leading character, Eve:

This then was life: not to be hurried, not to be afraid, not to be imprisoned in oneself. To be open, aware, vulnerable—even to fear, even to pain, even to death. Then only did one feel ecstasy filling one up to the brim.

On June 22, 1906, Anne Spencer Morrow was born in Englewood, New Jersey. Her mother Elizabeth Cutter Morrow was an extremely active writer and civic leader. Her father Dwight Whitney Morrow was a hard-driving, intensely ambitious banker, a partner in the firm of J.P. Morgan. Anne grew up serious, sensitive, and withdrawing, a girl who felt much over-shadowed by her highly talented family. She

later wrote: "I was the youngest, shiest, most self-conscious adolescent that—I believe—ever lived." The slender brunette attended the Chapin School in New York City, but only began blossoming at Smith College, where she received distinction as a writer and poet. Essays on women in the time of Samuel Johnson and on Madame Sophie d'Houdetot , a woman who frequented the 18th-century French court, won two of the college's major literary prizes. In 1928, Scribner's Magazine published her poem "Height."

Never again would Anne's life be so tranquil. In late December 1928, her father—then U.S. ambassador to Mexico—sought to alleviate major tensions between the two nations by asking Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. to fly his Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Mexico City. Because of his solo fight from New York to Paris in May 1927, the 26-year-old Charles had suddenly become the most famous person in the world. During a visit to the Morrow residence, the retiring Charles took Anne on two flights, even giving her some basic instruction. It soon became known that the couple had fallen in love. Because of a natural desire for privacy at a time when Charles was literally besieged everywhere by admirers, the Morrow family arranged for a clandestine marriage at its Englewood residence on May 27, 1929.

Neither Anne nor Charles enjoyed being considered public property and hated the fact that crowds followed them everywhere. "I felt like an escaped convict," she later wrote. "This was not freedom." Indeed, "fame is a kind of death; it arrests life around you." Yet the couple were devoted to each other. Although for years Charles was definitely the dominant figure in the marriage, Anne felt liberated from the anxieties of adolescence. During a speech given in 1979, she said, "My husband always believed in me—believed in what I could do."

In the first year and a half of their marriage, the couple made eight transcontinental survey flights. Their planes were single-engine craft, poorly equipped for instrument flying and often dependent upon ground sighting. In September 1929, they flew from Florida to Central and South America with Pan American Airways president Juan Trippe. In April 1930, the Lindberghs set a transcontinental speed record by flying from Los Angeles to New York in under 15 hours. All this time, Anne was becoming an accomplished aviator. In January 1930, she became the first American woman to be awarded a first-class glider pilot's license. She later confessed that initial fears concerning her first takeoff gave way to "an ecstatic experience I have never forgotten or regretted." By May 1931, when Anne had received her private pilot's license, she had flown solo, and afterwards mastered high-frequency radio, navigation, and Morse code.

Morrow, Elizabeth Cutter (1873–1955)

American author and educator. Born Elizabeth Reeve Cutter in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 29, 1873; died on January 23, 1955; daughter of Charles Long and Annie E. (Spencer) Cutter; graduated from Smith College in 1896; further studied at the Sorbonne and in Florence, Italy; married Dwight W. Morrow (then a lawyer, later U.S. Senator and ambassador to Mexico), on June 16, 1903; children: Anne Morrow Lindbergh (b. 1906); Elisabeth Reeve Morgan (d. 1934); Constance Cutter Morrow; Dwight Morrow, Jr.

After her husband was appointed ambassador to Mexico, Elizabeth Cutter Morrow wrote many articles about the Mexican scene, including The Painted Pig (1930), a story for children; four other juvenile books followed. Made acting president of Smith in 1939, she became the first woman to head that college since its founding. Deeply opposed—though without naming names—to the isolationist views of her famous son-inlaw, in 1940 she advocated repeal of the neutrality law and urged the government to send munitions and supplies to the Allies. "There are some things worse than war. There are some things supreme and noble that are worth fighting for." Active throughout the war years with War Fund drives, speechmaking, and the U.S.O., Morrow was also hopeful of the "Lasting Effects of Women's War Activities." Never before in history, she claimed, had women's potential been so recognized. On campuses, women were being trained in subjects seldom offered. Morrow urged that this continue in the postwar period, pleading for a "wider distribution of responsibility."

suggested reading:

Current Biography Yearbook. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1943.

In July 1931, the Lindberghs began a round-the-world flight to see if the Great Circle route, close to the Arctic, was suitable for commercial flight. Beginning in Long Island, they made stops at Manitoba, the Northwest Territories, Alaska, Siberia, Japan, and China. During the trip, the plane was forced down three times. While in Nanjing (Nanking), the couple engaged in emergency flood relief. Near the walled city of Hinghwa, they were besieged by hundreds of starving Chinese about to sink their aircraft, who retreated only when Charles fired a pistol in the air. Another time, when the plane was beginning to turn over, the couple had to jump into rushing water. The trip was suddenly terminated in October while the Lindberghs were in Shanghai. Dwight Morrow, then U.S. senator from New Jersey and possible Republican presidential candidate, had unexpectedly died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

During these flights, Anne was co-pilot and navigator. At the outset of the Asian trip, when Charles was accused of needlessly exposing his wife to danger in Hudson Bay country, he replied, "You must remember that she is crew." Anne asked herself, "Have I then reached a stage where I am considered on equal footing with men?" While in the cockpit, she frequently wrote lyrical narrative accounts that, in some form, were often published.

The Lindberghs built an estate, "High-fields," near Hopewell, New Jersey, where in June 1930 Anne gave birth to her first child, Charles Junior. Tragedy struck the family when, at about 10 pm, on the bleak, windy evening of March 1, 1932, their infant son was found missing from the second-floor nursery. One of the most publicized crimes in American history, it generated 38,000 letters of advice and sympathy, led to massive federal police efforts, and involved continued efforts to contact the kidnappers. Charles sought, with some success, to mastermind the entire search, while Anne quietly and stoically lent support. One newspaper wrote, "Never in the history of motherhood has a more gallant fight been waged than is being waged by Anne Lindbergh." Biographer Dorothy Herrmann notes, "In Anne's case, the press was not resorting to hype. She was in fact handling the nightmarish situation with a dignity and courage that were awe-inspiring." At first, Anne believed that her son would be returned unharmed, but all hopes were shattered when, on May 1, the body of the dead infant, badly decomposed and half eaten by wild animals, was discovered near their home. Anne wrote in her diary:

I feel strangely a sense of peace—not peace but an end to restlessness, a finality, as though I were sleeping in a grave…. To know any thing definitely is a relief. If you can say "then he was living," "then he was dead," it is final and finalities can be accepted.

On July 30, however, she wrote to herself: "This is the hour of lead." Only in August, when her second son Jon was born, did she again find some happiness. She confided to her diary:

I felt life given back to me—a door to life opened. I wanted to live, I felt power to live. I was not afraid of death or life; a spell had been broken, the spell over us that made me dread everything and feel that nothing would be perfect again. The spell was broken by this real, tangible, perfect baby, coming into an imperfect world and coming out of the teeth of sorrow—a miracle. My faith had been reborn.

Also therapeutic was a second major survey flight, begun in July 1933. Lasting five months, the trip involved 30,000 miles and four continents. Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, the Soviet Union, Spain, Gambia, and Brazil were among the 20 countries visited. Charles claimed that this trip and the previous Asian one of 1931 were far more dangerous than his solo flight across the Atlantic. Scientifically and commercially, it was far more productive. Again Anne was co-pilot, radio operator, and navigator. This time, however, she was mentally fatigued and occasionally frightened, emotions she hoped to ward off by poetry. Fully aware of the frequency of air crashes in the early '30s, she confided to her log after one experience of dense fog and flying blind: "I … am in a panic the whole time, and every time we go through a day like that I think I cannot go on with that kind of life." She was, she continued, experiencing "a kind of uncontrolled physical terror, exaggerated by imagination." At this point, she held the world's record for ground-to-air radio transmissions. For her service during this flight, in March 1934 she was awarded the prestigious Hubbard Gold Medal of the National Geographic Society.

Life is a gift, given in trust—like a child.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Upon returning from China, the Lindberghs briefly rented an apartment in New York, then—seeking more privacy—lived on the Next Day Hill in Englewood. The latter move was a mixed blessing, for both Charles and Anne chafed under Elizabeth Morrow's dominant personality. Yet it was a Morrow houseguest who gave Anne the professional confidence she so sorely needed. British writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson had been commissioned to write the authorized life of Anne's father. Upon reading Anne's article "Flying Around the North Atlantic," published in the September 1934 issue of the National Geographic, Nicolson praised her writing, telling her it was worthy of far more than long letters to family and friends. Referring in October 1934 to Nicolson's appreciation of her latent talent, she wrote to herself:

The Thing rose up inside of me and possessed me. For twenty-four hours I felt young and powerful. I felt life not long enough for all I wanted to do, and I lay awake at night, my mind racing and my heart pounding.

In the spring of 1935, Anne's first book, North to the Orient, was published. Based on her 1931 trip to China, it concentrated on her perception of such visual images as "the most beautiful pagoda." A second book, Listen! the Wind (1938), covered ten days of the 1933 flight, focusing on Santiago, an island in the Cape Verde group; Bathurst in Gambia, Africa; and flight across the Atlantic to Natal, Brazil. North is marked by exuberant innocence; Listen! is characterized by a contemplative caution. Although both books were bestsellers, Anne often lived under severe strain. Unlike Charles, who was working on a heart valve with Dr. Alexis Carrel of New York's Rockefeller Institute, Anne felt that she had no real vocation. A year after the kidnapping, she wrote: "I think about it all the time—it never stops—I never meet it. It happens every night—every night of my life." Such anxieties were reinforced by renewed kidnapping threats on her son Jon.

During this time, Anne had also felt deep anxiety for her ailing elder sister Elisabeth Reeve Morgan , who in December 1934 died of a defective heart at age 30. Pondering the transience of all life, Anne had written two years before: "I look at her and think, Life is captive here—now—soon it will go. Why can't we hold it, why can't we help it?" According to biographer Herrmann, by January 1933 Anne had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Sensing people courted her only to gain access to Charles, she wrote that September:

Damn, damn, damn! I am sick of being this "handmaid to the Lord." They think they can wangle me, if they can't get at him, make up to me…. Where is my world and where will I ever find it?

The controversy over Bruno Richard Hauptmann merely capped the pressures to which Anne was subjected. "It is starting all over again!," she wrote. Arrested in September 1933 for the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, Hauptmann stood trial in the winter of 1934–1935. The press and the hordes of spectators soon turned the sleepy little town of Flemington, New Jersey, where the trial took place, into a circus. Anne had to relive publicly the agonizing last hours of her first son's life as she took the witness stand, though she never lost dignity and poise. From the start, she personally believed that Hauptmann, who was found guilty and executed, had been a party to the crime. The couple always retained absolute faith in the innocence of their own servants, although the perpetrators appeared to know sudden shifts in the Lindbergh family schedule, in fact the exact hour on which to strike. (Hauptmann's conviction remains a source of controversy, however, and alternate theories abound.)

Finding no refuge from incessant public attention, in December 1935 the Lindberghs moved to England. At first, they rented Long Barn, a country house in Kent belonging to the Nicolsons, where they remained for two and a half years. When, in July 1936, Charles was invited to Nazi Germany to secure air intelligence for the U.S. military attache in Berlin, Anne accompanied him. In a letter to her mother that was published only in 1998, she referred to Hitler as "a mystic, a visionary who really wants the best for his country and on the whole has a rather broad view." She expressed admiration of Germany's sense of "a directed force," manifested in "hope, pride, and self-sacrifice," while opposing "their treatment of the Jews, their brute-force manner, their stupidity, their rudeness, their regimentation." Her diary entry for August 18, 1938, read: "The Nuremberg Madonnas in Nuremberg look down on a lot of un-Christian things." During this time, flights were made to such nations as France, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, and India.

In the summer of 1938, the couple moved to the beautiful if desolate island of Illiec, near St. Gildas, France, so as to be near Charles' scientific associate, Alexis Carrel. Anne was irritated by the primitive 19th-century house, which lacked heating, plumbing, and electricity. Moreover, she was apprehensive over the possible outbreak of another world war. When, in October 1938, at a stag dinner in the U.S. embassy in Berlin, Reich air minister Hermann Göring presented Charles with the Service Cross of the German Eagle, a high German air decoration for civilians, Anne was mortified. Knowing that a refusal by Charles, who had no foreknowledge of the event, would only embarrass the U.S. diplomatically, and realizing that he would be strongly attacked for accepting it, she privately called it "The Albatross."

Although the Lindberghs had decided to spend the winter of 1938–39 in Berlin, they balked upon hearing of the anti-Jewish atrocities of Kristallnacht. She asked, "How can we go there to live?" Charles and Anne lived instead in Paris, though both were by now being vilified as pro-Nazi. When in April 1939 a new world war became imminent, the family left for the U.S., living first at Next Day Hill, then at Lloyd Neck, Long Island, and Martha's Vineyard.

Having returned home just before the outbreak of the conflict, the Lindberghs opposed the interventionist measures of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anne because of her abhorrence of war and Charles on military and strategic grounds. She believed her outspoken husband was "criminally misunderstood, misquoted, and misused," claiming that only columnist Walter Lippmann debated Charles on fundamental issues. Because of their isolationism, many of their old friendships were broken, including those with the Carrells and the Nicolsons, and Anne suddenly entered into a strained relationship with her own mother, a strong interventionist. Anne's article, "A Prayer for Peace," was published in the January 1940 issue of Reader's Digest. Writing before the fall of France and the Battle of Britain, she called for a negotiated peace based on "mutual interests and mutual advantages." Otherwise, she feared, only Russia would emerge victorious and "other Hitlers will arise from the seeds of hate in another twenty years."

Anne's next effort, a 41-page book entitled The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith and published in September 1940, immediately became the nation's number one nonfiction bestseller. Fifty-thousand copies were published in its first two months and Reader's Digest quickly offered a condensed version. In the book, she stressed that the U.S. must face the new world of dictatorships not by entering a destructive war, but by fostering domestic reform and spiritual renewal. Although the work is still misinterpreted as an apology for fascism, she specifically wrote, "I cannot pledge my personal allegiance to those systems I disapprove of, or those barbarisms I oppose from the bottom of my heart, even if they are on the wave of the future." The wave itself, she continued, involved new social and economic forces discovered—but often badly used—Germany, Italy, and Russia. Seeing how the term was misinterpreted after publication, she wrote: "Will I have to bear this lie throughout life?" Given her pacifist leanings, it was hardly surprising that she channeled all royalties to the American Friends Service Committee, the only group she found "living up to the reality of the word mercy."

In a subsequent essay entitled "Reaffirmation," published in the June 1941 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Anne defined the wave as "a

movement of adjustment to a highly scientific, mechanized, and material era of civilization, with all its attendant complications." She opposed all dictatorial ways of meeting this adjustment "from the depths of my conviction."

In Anne's diaries, she called Hitler "that terrible scourge of humanity" and continually expressed horror over German atrocities. On September 11, 1941, Charles claimed that American Jews were in the forefront of interventionist agitation and spoke of "their greatest danger to their country" lying in what was later called the media. Anne was shaken. She had been unable to convince Charles to delete his attack, calling it "unconsciously a bit for anti-Semitism." Three days after Charles had given the speech, she wrote in her diary, "I would prefer to see this country at war than shaken by violent anti-Semitism." She wrote in 1976, "The degradation and horror that was uncovered at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau was worse than war."

Once the U.S. entered the conflict, the Lindberghs moved to Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit, because Charles was involved in military aviation work at Henry Ford's Willow Run. Anne remained in Michigan when Charles worked for United Aircraft in Hartford; in 1944 he became a civilian test pilot in the Pacific, flying 50 combat missions for the U.S. navy and air corps.

In 1944, Anne produced a well-received novella, The Steep Ascent, the third of her trilogy of flight chronicles and her first attempt at fiction. Here she sought to translate the anxiety felt during her flight from England to Italy into a parable of universal experience felt by all women. In a letter to a friend, she wrote of the work:

I have put everything in it—everything I learned from that life in the past. It is a flight over the Alps but it could be anything. Childbirth or getting married, or the mental and moral struggles one has. There are those same peaks ("Is this all there is to the Alps?") and those same abysses ("I am abandoned—they have abandoned me!") It is my whole life.

After the war, the Lindberghs lived primarily in Darien, Connecticut. In the summer of 1947, Anne traveled to Europe, there finding material for articles later published in Reader's Digest, Life, and Harper's. Commenting on Britain, France, and West Germany, she deplored the starvation, hopelessness, and Kafkalike bureaucracy. "The basic values of our civilization," she wrote, "are crumbling away like this rubble." By then, Anne had given birth to several more children, boys in 1937 and 1942 and girls in 1940 and 1945.

For the first time, tension existed in the Lindbergh marriage. Charles was frequently away as an aviation consultant, leaving Anne alone to fend with childrearing. Furthermore, according to Charles' biographer A. Scott Berg, "when he was at home, he monitored [her] so closely as to infantilize her." In the mid-1950s, she considered divorce, sought solace in psychiatry, and entered into an affair with her physician, Dana W. Atchley.

In one attempt to find her own identity, in the spring of 1955 Anne spent a week with her sister Constance Cutter Morrow at Captiva Island, Florida. Her meditations from that week, contained in eight essays published under the title Gift from the Sea (1955), again catapulted her into national prominence. The most popular of her works, the book remained at the top of the bestseller list for 51 weeks and so far has sold seven million copies. Finding symbols for such entities as aging, love, possession, and solitude in the shape of certain seashells found on the beach, she stressed the need for women to seek internal change through contemplation and self-renewal. She denied that complete sharing in marriage was ever possible and called upon partners to love "the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky."

Anne's next book, The Unicorn and Other Poems (1956), contained 35 of her works. It too made the bestseller list, outselling by a wide margin all other poetry books published that year. Some critics, however, were negative. Poet John Ciardi, writing in the January 12, 1957, issue of the Saturday Review of Literature, called it "an offensively bad book—inept, jingling, slovenly, illiterate even." Ciardi received hundred of protest letters (one of which asked, "Why club a butterfly?") while Review editor Norman Cousins himself responded in Anne's defense, "There are few living authors who are using the English language more sensitively or with more genuine appeal."

Devastated by the review, Anne permanently abandoned poetry. Yet, she wrote another novel. Using a stream-of-consciousness technique, she produced Dearly Beloved: A Theme and Variations (1962), a work that focused on the deeply embedded ambiguities in modern marriage. Centering on a single incident, a wedding service, it conveys its message by exploring the psyches of the guests, both men and women.

By the late 1960s, the Lindberghs had focused their major attention on environmental issues. In 1966, Anne's Earth Shine was published Consisting of two long essays that had previously been featured in Life magazine and her 1970 commencement address to Smith College, the book compared the tranquility of Cape Canaveral with the launching of Apollo 8, then described a family safari in East Africa. In addressing herself to the matter of the Vietnam War protests, she suggested that they were rooted in "a deep instinctive protest against the growing dehumanization of our world—against an industrialized, mechanized civilization in which the flame of life itself is sputtering."

Beginning in 1971, Anne Lindbergh started publishing five volumes of excerpts from her diary, which she had begun in 1922 and which she continued intermittently for much of her life. In 1979, she said publication was motivated by the "many false stories" about her and Charles, "so many rumors, and silly things said." Writes biographer Herrmann, "Few other writers have lived so documented a life." Indeed, literature scholar David Kirk Vaughn predicts that her published diaries and letters may be the most enduring of all her written works. Preferring to edit existing diaries rather than work on an autobiography, she prefaced the first volume by saying:

Once started on the painful journey toward honesty, with the passage of time one has increasingly the desire not to gloss over, not to foster illusions or to create fixed images, inasmuch as this is humanly possible. One wants to be an honest witness to the life one has lived and the struggle one has made to find oneself and one's work, and to relate oneself to others and the world.

In the early 1970s, the Lindberghs built a simple house on Maui island, Hawaii, where Charles died of lymphatic cancer in August 1974. Anne Morrow Lindbergh then lived in seclusion at Scott's Cove, Darien. In 1991, she suffered her first stroke. Experiencing dementia and memory loss, she was nursed by trained caregivers and died in Vermont on February 7, 2001.