Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life by Hertog Susan

Author:Hertog, Susan [Hertog, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-05-05T23:00:00+00:00

—VIRGINIA WOOLF,

Granite and Rainbow

SPRING 1935, NEXT DAY HILL, ENGLEWOOD, NEW JERSEY

Anne sat at a desk in her mother’s home, pouring her rage into her diary. She felt like a victim of God and man, but what could she do? Rail against an inscrutable God? Or her loving husband, as much a victim as she? Or herself, for failing to protect her child? It was impossible to unravel the threads of Charlie’s death; each path led nowhere.

She knew it was the ordinary things that mattered. They were the “safety, the infinite safety and deliverance from terror.” The hand on one’s shoulder, the leaning of one’s head, the breath of her child, her hand on his curls—these were “the great wells of security and faith” that built the “precious structure of life.”1

When Smith College offered Anne an honorary degree for her accomplishments in aviation, she was indignant. All she had done, she wrote to Con, was be a good wife. She had done nothing that warranted an award. Nevertheless, Charles was extraordinarily proud, she wrote. Why, she wondered. Because she was a reflection of him?

Contemplating the poetry of Yeats, she wrote in her diary that “love has nothing to do with happiness, and marriage very little to do with love.”2

In April, Anne submitted the final draft of her manuscript of North to the Orient to Harcourt Brace. Afraid that they might publish it only because she was Charles’s wife, and just as afraid that they wouldn’t publish it at all, she whipped herself into a panic. Charles panicked, too. On rereading the manuscript, he had said that if he read the first paragraph, he would not read the book. Throughout the week preceding the submission, Charles had edited the manuscript, going through every chapter with painstaking precision, changing the smallest words and phrases. Anne felt she would “burst” with anxiety, but it was better to burst than to die inside. Perhaps, she consoled herself, she should just have another child and worry about “fundamental” things.3

She had not expected a response for at least a week, but she was called by Mr. Harcourt the following evening, just as she was putting Jon to bed. “It is splendid,” he said. “I would take it even if it were written by Jane Smith. It’s a good story, it’s moving, it’s well-constructed, and parts of it border on poetry.” He wanted to close the deal at his office the next day with her and Charles.4

Joyful beyond anticipation, Anne went out to the garden, just as she had as a little girl, to take stock of her life. This time she counted her moments of triumph, not her sins: the Jordan Prize for writing that she had won at Smith, her first kiss, Charles’s asking her to marry him, the birth of her children, Harold Nicolson’s confirmation of her ability to write. It wasn’t happiness, she wrote; it was “something fiercer,” and she wondered whether her joy and pride should make her ashamed. But she could not deny a sense of power.

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