Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (68 page)

The last stage of marriage, symbolized by the Argonauta shell, rides on “the chartless seas of imagination.” It is a stage marked by full “becoming,” that stage toward which every other moves. A play on words, Argonauta is not only an illusion to Jason the Greek adventurer in search of the Golden Fleece, it is also the name of a shell Anne found by chance on Treasure Island in the Bahamas—a mollusk with arms like an octopus, the female of which clings to a thin featherweight shell. With the shedding of biological and cultural specialization, this stage, Anne writes, offers both partners the freedom to find new patterns and connections. It is a marriage of two selves, two solitudes, unhinged and alone, yet united in a common purpose.

Here Anne’s insight reaches its apex. It is the feminine “gold” for which she has been searching through twenty-five years of marriage to Charles. A true marriage, she writes, requires individual strength and separate borders. These are the principles on which marriage rests.

As if she and Charles did not suffice as a model, Anne illustrates this stage by recounting “a perfect day” with her sister. Its perfection lay in a common rhythm, touching without intruding on each other’s space.
Clothed in philosophical musing, it reads like a admonition to her husband.

Anne calls it “intermittancy;” it is an internal as well as a social imperative. One must respect the flow of personal experience and also the relation between oneself and society. Solitude and marriage are not sufficient for “grace.” Grace implies dedication to others. Here Anne’s Presbyterian teachings are manifest. Autonomy breeds selfishness, and women are the keepers of the family and social ethic. In the small circle of their home, women must lead themselves and their families through the path of “temptation,” thereby regenerating the commitment to social values. Simplicity, solitude, and intermittency—these are the “gifts” one takes home from the sea.

Gift from the Sea
marks Anne’s coming of age. Finally, she stands alone. The book asserts her legitimacy as an artist and redefines marriage as a union of equals. For the first time, Anne speaks straight to the reader in a commanding voice. She strips contemporary womanhood of its Victorian limitations and challenges the distortions that devalue the traditional female voice. It is alchemy, fired by desperation, which changes the “forbidden” graven image—the written word—into a means of spiritual and ethical enlightenment. She has moved from the fundamentalist teachings of the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament revelations of John, finally giving herself permission to write.

“I’ve been a rebel,” she says with pride and with anger, as though the very act of rebellion defined her personhood.
¹⁸
When asked, she can recite the list of acts that have earned her the role. But her only authentic
rebellion, she implies, was to become herself—to shed the expectations of her parents and her husband, and to find the space and time to write.

The book was an immediate and unqualified success. Quickly, it climbed to the bestseller list, remaining at the top for eighty weeks. Within its first year, it sold more than 300,000 copies.
¹⁹
It was a rare phenomenon: a conflagration of individual insight and social consciousness which challenged the conventions of marriage and childrearing. Like many feminists, Anne Lindbergh believed that biology was not destiny. It was, however, a moral responsibility. Women, she concluded, had the right to pursue their independent lives, but they must make certain that their choices reflected their values. She understood, too well, the price she and her family had paid for her own fame and ambition. The success of
Gift From the Sea
lay in Anne’s moral vision: Women wanted distance from wife and motherhood without abandoning their children or destroying their marriages. They sought independence without discarding traditional values.

Gift from the Sea
was “an awakening” in the classic feminist sense, no less poignant than that of Kate Chopin’s heroine, Edna Pontellier, portrayed fifty years earlier. But unlike Chopin’s book,
The Awakening
, which casts its heroine as a shameless adulterer, Anne’s book represents female consciousness inextricably tied to Christian values. No less than Chopin’s heroine did Anne understand the price she paid for marriage. She knew that her husband and her children possessed her; she knew she had bowed to social expectation. But while Anne felt constrained by her domesticity, she did confirm the value of a sacred ideal. She resolved not to abandon her family and her virtue for the solitary life of a writer and an artist. Chopin’s heroine commits suicide, surrendering to the wild amorality of the sea; Anne nourishes her creativity and faith on its ebb and flow.

Some critics compared Anne’s book to
Walden
, hailing her as a female counterpart to Henry David Thoreau, but Anne’s philosophy challenges his individualism. Thoreau believed that the state derived its
power and authority from the individual, who was free to break its laws at will. True to the Morrow ethic, the premise of Anne’s philosophy is the sacredness of the whole—the inviolability of family, community, and state. Anne validates the supremacy of law over individual will on the assumption that it represents the common good. Both Anne Lindbergh and Henry David Thoreau confirm the lessons of nature in a mechanical age and the divinity of self-revelation through meditation. But Anne’s solitude, unlike Thoreau’s, had a singular purpose—to enrich and consecrate her relationships. Family, community, and the state—these were the institutions that exalted one’s humanity. To live for oneself alone was the stuff of “sin.”

While some saw Anne’s book as “psychobabble,” most found it a thoughtful analysis of contemporary life and the human condition, as pertinent to men as to women. And nearly everyone, no matter the point of view, saw
Gift from the Sea
as the work of a disciplined and accomplished poet.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh on Treasure Island, Bahamas, 1950
.

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

A
nne sat in the bare, darkened rooms of Next Day Hill amid the half-packed boxes of her mother’s possessions. While her spare, curtainless room in Captiva had resounded with life and regeneration, her parents’ home, stripped of its objects, seemed a woeful shell of death. Gone was the shine of tabletops and chandeliers, the deep softness of sofas and chairs, and the scent of fresh-cut flowers. Lost was the grandeur, and with it the ethic that had lifted the Morrows above the banality of pretense—puritan piety and public service.

Four months earlier, Anne’s mother had died. During the week of Thanksgiving 1954, Betty, eighty-two, suffered a stroke, and as the paralysis progressed, she sank into a coma. Anne, constantly at her side, was relieved that she seemed free of pain. On January 24, 1955, her death was noted in the press: the passing of Mrs. Dwight Morrow, the wife of the ambassador and mother of Mrs. Charles Lindbergh, poet and wife of the famous airman.
²
Although Betty’s poetry had received little attention, Anne’s literary success heightened its value and its public acclaim. And so Betty was remembered not only as an educator and a public servant, but also as a writer and poet.
³
It was the eulogy Elizabeth Cutter might have wanted.

During the twenty-four years since her husband’s death, Betty became the philanthropist she had set out to be. In Englewood, she served as a board member of the hospital, the library, and several schools, as well as director
of the Community Chest. Above all, she was a champion of women’s education. After her service as the first female acting president of Smith, in 1940, Betty remained a tireless fund-raiser and spokesperson for the college. In her will, she bequeathed nearly a million dollars to charities, including the institutions she had served in Englewood, as well as Union Theological Seminary and the churches she attended. But no institution, public or private, received more than Smith and Amherst. In profound gratitude for the opportunities given to her and Dwight, she bequeathed each college a hundred thousand dollars. The remainder of her $9.4 million estate was divided equally among her three children. Anne, Dwight, and Con each received life interests in trusts and $50,000 in cash.
⁴

Shuttling between Darien and Englewood, Anne began the tortuous process of sorting through her mother’s books, furniture and clothing. It was a tedious job which must have evoked memories of the loss of Charlie, Elisabeth, and her father. And yet, the house must have also resonated with the joy of Christmas, weddings, and good times. Within its walls her mother had never been happier, more productive or strong. But surrounded by the mere objects of her mother’s life, Anne felt strangely disconnected from its meaning. Just as she had searched Charlie’s closet to find “her boy,” Anne soaked herself in the stark realities of settling the estate and preparing the house for occupation by The Elisabeth Morrow School. The cycle of life, nonetheless, seemed confirmed. After her work in Englewood was done, she planned to fly west to visit with her children. Her first grandchild, Christina, Jon’s daughter, had been born that spring and Anne delighted in its promise of regeneration. Her only regret was that she could not enjoy it with her mother.
⁵

For Anne and Charles, Christmas 1955 had fallen into shadow, darkened by the death of their mothers. Evangeline had died in September 1954, at the age of seventy-eight, after suffering for many years from Parkinson’s disease. And now, with their parents gone and Next Day Hill in shambles, Anne had the task of reinventing Christmas. While the Morrows and the Lindberghs were fragmented without the glue of Grandma Betty, Anne, feeling like the matriarch of the Lindbergh clan, was determined to keep her own family together.

In December 1956, Anne and Charles traveled west to Colorado, with Anne Jr., sixteen; Scott, fourteen; and Reeve, eleven. They met Jon, now twenty-four; and Land, nineteen, in a rented cabin called Lazy T Ranch, a niche on Aspen Mountain.

Jon had married Barbara Robbins in March 1954, in secrecy, much as Anne and Charles had done twenty-five years earlier.
⁶
It was a private, unannounced family ceremony in Northfield, Illinois, at the home of Barbara’s uncle William Miller, whose daughter was to become the wife of Anne’s son Land. Now, two and a half years later, Jon and Barbara had two little girls, Christina and Wendy.