Anne Morrow Lindbergh: A Biography
by Susan Hertog
Doubleday. 592 pp. $30.00
There is only one good reason to write a book: because you are obsessed with the topic. Few books pass the obsession test, but those few stand out like phosphorescent fish in literature’s murky depths. They hold a reader’s interest through sheer force of passion, whether he happens to care for the topic or not. Susan Hertog’s Anne Morrow Lindbergh passes the test. Lots of books are called definitive biographies, but this actually is one. It is exhaustively researched and lovingly written. It has the texture and fineness of hand embroidery. This is one life that will stay written.
Mrs. Lindbergh is a topic I don’t care for—I liked her even less after reading the book—but hers is, beyond question, one of the Big Lives of the 20th century. Born in 1906, she is Charles Lindbergh’s widow; from his epoch-making solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 until he cozied up to Hitler in the late 30’s, Lindbergh was the world’s favorite hero. In 1932 the Lindberghs’ twenty-one-month-old boy was kidnapped and murdered; it was the crime of the century—and the pursuit, trial, and execution of the murderer are the narrative centerpiece of this biography. Mrs. Lindbergh accompanied her husband on many of the venturesome and dangerous survey flights of the 1930’s that helped create commercial aviation; under his prodding she became a pilot, navigator, radio operator, explorer, and adventuress. Then, in the years leading up to World War II, when her husband became the nation’s top America Firster—a belligerent, snarling pacifist—she stood loyally by his side. These are ample ingredients for an epic poem, a Hollywood movie—or an engrossing book, which Susan Hertog has written.
Mrs. Lindbergh was also a big-selling author. She published travel books, notably North to the Orient (1935)—which at any rate has a superb title—and Listen! The Wind (1938); also fiction, political essays, poetry, journals, and meditations, of which Gift From the Sea (1955) is the best known. The early travel books were widely admired. As for the rest, they were so generally disliked by intellectuals at the time and are so generally ignored or dismissed by critics and professors today that one has to assume she did something right.
But after touring her accomplishments, one finds oneself agreeing with Mrs. Lindbergh herself that, as a writer, she is nothing much. Except in her brief stint as an apologist for fascism in Wave of the Future (1940), her outstanding trait is colorlessness. Reading this biography, you wonder whether colorlessness might not partially explain her enormous appeal to her readers. Beige is a more popular curtain color than chartreuse, and Mrs. Lindbergh’s beige thoughts harmonize nicely with any point of view.
Some of those thoughts, as conveyed by Susan Hertog: “You must be open to your subject, respectful, and patient. But life, too, was an art, no less demanding and perhaps more important than writing.” “As the leaves began to fall from the tulip trees, Anne wrestled with the idea of ‘time.’ Time was not linear, she concluded; it was determined by association, moods and sensations.” “The human spirit cannot be crushed. Feelings and relations are the basis of what it means to be human.” “Anne makes a bargain with her reader. Come with me, she says, to a place where distinctions slip away, where there is no time, no culture, and no preconceived notion of sexual identity. Only then can we see who we are.”
Two of her literary efforts call for special comment. In the year it came out, E.B. White summarized Wave of the Future: “In the revolutionary turbulence of fascist countries she finds a promise and a token—an ultimate answer to poverty, unemployment, and depression.” Susan Hertog says of this book (uneasily) that the author “does not excuse the Nazi evil; she merely explains it.” When the biographer is so patently uncomfortable, the reader winces. White had a terser opinion of the fascist ideal Mrs. Lindbergh defends: “It stank at the time of Christ and it stinks today.” I wouldn’t trade those eleven inelegant words for Anne Lindbergh’s entire output.
As a poet, she is nearly beyond parody. “These August skies/ Are all too fair to suit the times—so kind/ That almost they persuade the treacherous mind/ It still is summer and the world the same.” She uses “so” the way quacks once used leeches, as an all-purpose emergency measure: “Saint for Our Time,/ Christopher, come back to earth again./ There is no age in history when men/So cried for you.” As our poet herself might have described these verses: So plodding they,/ so helplessly unmusical that we may/ have stumbled here on the absolute number-one worst poet of the 20th century,/ Eh?
Had she never published a word, she would be a more attractive figure: her life is fascinating and instructive even if her writing is not. Lindbergh was a capital-H handful. Anne wanted to stay home and rear their children, but her husband expected her to join his expeditions and write them up afterward—which she did. It might have been admirable in her to say no, but her devotion is admirable, too. After the ordeal of the kidnap-murder, Lindbergh fled the country and settled in England; then he set up shop on an island off France, then in Paris, then in various other places which never seemed to suit him. She followed faithfully, which could not have been easy
She bore up under the ordeal of kidnap, murder, and trial in a way that moved and inspired the whole world. And if she emerged from the 1930’s bitter at America and its vulgar rowdiness, its obsession with celebrity, its oblivious mosquito-swarm of reporters, and the whole democratic mess, who can blame her? From the moment she married Lindbergh, her fate was to be gossiped over, photographed, written up and tracked down relentlessly by meddlesome strangers. She flits through old news photos at a run, clutching her children, like a tortured windblown soul condemned for the nation’s sins (not her own) to the posh outer circle of hell. Wind is a motif in her writing.
She cracked twice under the strain—which is only to say that she was human, no heroine after all. First she published Wave of the Future. Then in the 1950’s she had an adulterous fling in a Manhattan apartment evidently rented for that purpose. Her adultery seems peculiarly tragic, because her devotion had cost her plenty. As she followed her husband into the air, all over the world, and down into the Nazi depths, it was possible (even while you shuddered) to admire her every step. But she is no longer a candidate for the Nobel Prize in devotion.
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That Anne Lindbergh emerges as an unattractive person is striking proof of Susan Hertog’s integrity. She tells us up front how greatly she admires Mrs. Lindbergh; tells us that Anne Lindbergh’s writings meant much to her and still do. Then she dishes out the facts, which demonstrate that her idol is hollow. As writing acts go, this one is heroic. Many readers will conclude that Susan Hertog is a more engaging, smarter, and more sympathetic writer by far than the writer she has written a book about.
In any case, Mrs. Lindbergh’s remains a life for every thinking person to contemplate. I have a copy of the 1939 Life magazine (discussed in the book) with a famous cover photo of Anne Lindbergh. It is a suffering face, and the story behind it is an emblematic story. Anne Lindbergh had devoted, wealthy parents; looks, brains, and self-possession; a husband who was the greatest catch since Napoleon. But her baby was murdered; her man was a genius of sorts who also turned out to be a reckless, restless, sometime sadist; and her life was a tragedy.
Those raised eyebrows and set lips that frame an unspoken, unspeakable question—even if you have never heard of Anne Lindbergh, you recognize that face; you have seen it somewhere before; it is the face of the 20th century. It moves us not to admiration but to pity, and sends us back to a question debated but left unresolved in the Talmud: whether, when all is said and done, the creation of the world could possibly have been worth it.
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