Though she published several books, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s career as a writer was perhaps overshadowed by her marriage to aviator Charles Lindbergh. The couple was rocked by scandal in the 1930s due to Charles’ support of isolationist and eugenicist movements. Anne was not simply a bystander to her husband’s activism; in 1940 she published “The Wave of the Future,” a pamphlet in support of fascism. The couple was ostracized for their pro-Nazi leanings. However, in 1955 Anne regained her reputation with the publication of “Gift from the Sea,” a series of meditations on life, love, and marriage. In a letter to her sister Constance Morgan, the confluence of Anne’s domestic and professional lives is made clear.
To Constance Morgan
Saturday, July 16 1955
Dearest Con,
The weather has changed—twice—since I wrote you so gloomily. First to cool, sunny and dry and now to damp again—fog-horn going, humidity 95 percent. But in the meantime it has been a better week. I think the weather has a lot to do with one’s spirits if one is on the edge. Also we are conditioned to summers’ being sunny, warm and dry (Maine again). Those foggy weeks were the violent exceptions that proved the rule and we rather enjoyed them by contrast.
I love your letters. They are a great joy to me because I think we are going through the same thing. It is all part of the adjustment to the new state. It cannot be creative. It is uncomfortable, hot or cold, humid or dry. “We are not supposed to like it.” It is part of learning to live again and enjoy it, which death blankets out temporarily. I think we just have to get through our summers and have our houses, our lives, and our bodies better on the other side of it. You, unfortunately, are living in pressure.
I saw Dana on his way to Newburyport. He seems much better and gayer and is going to write a review of a book, for SRL [Saturday Review of Literature]. I think he is making, or will make, his adjustment to a new stage in life. (He will never be free but he will find a new way to forget his trap.) And I think I can also adjust to a new set of positions vis-à-vis him. Not lean too much—not expect too much. See his great quality for what it is. I feel it is like some gigantic Virginia Reel. We are back somewhere at the beginning again.
In and out the window
In and out the window
In and out the window
As we have done before—
Stand and face your partners
Stand and face your partners
As we have done before!
This week I have had CAL [Charles Lindbergh] very pleasantly—some cleaning up and some swimming. He is busy and in good spirits—off again tomorrow. Also went to town to see Rosen and Jean Webster for lunch. This was interesting: Rosen on schizophrenia. Sometimes he manages to be articulate and lets one in, accidentally, a little, to what he does or tries to do. This is probably clearer at times like this since it is not about oneself.
What I got was this: most doctors try to dynamite all the bridges between the unconscious and the conscious because they are afraid of the unconscious (shock treatment, drugs, etc.). Rosen is afraid of the unconscious too, but fascinated by it. He tries to (1) keep the bridge open, even the most tenuous bridge—make more bridges, (2) be more permissive than most doctors about schizophrenic behavior, (3) give them what they want so they don’t have to go on asking and asking for it in all those strange ways and strange words and images over and over again.
I also felt very strongly his love of and interest in all forms of life—whether it may appear (curiously related to Schweitzer’s “reverence for life”). Cannot bear to blanket out life in any of its manifestations. This time I feel better after seeing him.
It seems to me, re your comments on the future (love or creative work giving a sense of it), that being in love obliterates the future. This is enough. Or perhaps what it does is to make us see time less artificially. Past, present, and future are all contained in it, all continuous. (This is also, incidentally, the sense of time in the unconscious. The unconscious, according to Rosen, has no sense of time; it is all co-existent.) It is like the movement in music called sosenuto. (How I love that movement and the word!) Creative work at its best obliterates the future. So does sex, of course. The idea of creative work, like the idea of being in love or the idea of what to eat for supper, gives one a substitute present and future. (When Mother was dying, you remember, we did not have or need a sense of the future. This was love, too. I sometimes think this period is reaction from that spiritual high and nostalgia for it—not so much for the past behind it.)
Well, so much for that rambling. I am struggling with the new air conditioner. It came yesterday and was installed. It was a very hot day and it took four hours to get the house cooled down from its noon-day heat. This morning we put it on early and I have been wearing a sweater and the windows are all fogged up and I have the light on!
Land writes it has rained every day in the mountains of British Columbia. They push three hundred head of cattle all day. It is very wet (“I guess I’ll learn the rough way”). What a life you lead out there!
Love—love
A.
P.S.
Even geraniums, you know, will not bloom summer and winter. I try to make them, of course. I took them out of the summer window-boxes and put them in pots inside; they stayed alive but they would not blossom. Then I put them all back into their summer frames. It took them a long time to recover. They are just now beginning to bloom again. Don’t you and I expect blossoms from ourselves all year round? (A little Vigoro is needed!)
From Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.
FURTHER READING
Lindbergh’s obituary in The New York Times.
Poetry from Lindbergh’s collection, The Unicorn and Other Poems.
Excerpts from Gift of the Sea, the book that restored Lindbergh’s reputation in the United States.