Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:
Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is Hour Of Gold, Hour Of Lead: Diaries And Letters Of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1929-1932
This volume, which covers the early years of the Lindbergh marriage, up until the horrific kidnapping and killing of their first born, is made up mostly of letters that Anne wrote to her family, mainly her two sisters, and her mother. Once their baby was kidnapped, Anne Lindbergh mainly kept in touch with Charles Lindbergh’s mother, writing her sometimes 2 letters a day giving her updates. I suppose since she was in New Jersey at the time, and surrounded by her family, there would obviously be no letters written to family members. And it appears that her letters during these busy, happy, horrible years took the place of a regular journal. She was too busy. By marrying Lindbergh, she had signed on for an unconventional life anyway. First of all, he was one of the most famous men in the world. So there was that weirdness. Second of all, he was a pilot and a mechanic. Not that there’s anything weird about mechanics, but she came from a different world – a more literary world – a contemplative world made up of the grey areas. For Lindbergh, there were few grey areas. It was black and white. After all, when you are flying a plane over the Atlantic and you have to problem-solve, by yourself, with no radio contact to the outside world, you can’t afford those vast grey areas. So there was a deep difference in the characters of these people … but it seems to me (just from an outsider’s glance) that the difference worked well. If Lindbergh had married someone just like him, it never would have worked. And Anne Morrow would have suffered if she had married someone who also lived in a primarily emotional (subjective) place. They balanced each other out. So by marrying Lindbergh, she was accepting a life where she would constantly be challenged to do things she was afraid to do. She would learn to fly an airplane, first and foremost. She would have to meet new people every day (something that scared her, she was quite shy and had no self-confidence). She would have to learn how to do small-talk with elected officials, at the various teas and dinners set up to honor Lindbergh, and she would also have to learn how to travel light. REAL light. I believe the Lindberghs lived in rented homes their entire marriage. Maybe later on, in retirement, they bought. But through the 30s and 40s, when they were having their many children, they were renters. There was no stability. At least not economically, or geographically. They could not “settle down” in one area. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, often still breastfeeding, had to learn how to just pick up their entire house, move it, and pick up the next day as though they were in the same location. This is difficult for most people. People, in general, seem to gravitate towards stability, and needing at least a home base. The Lindberghs had no home base (although New Jersey came close). This was probably not the world Anne Morrow’s parents had dreamt of for her (there was no possibility of Anne herself getting a job, with such a peripatetic lifestyle), and something she could never have dreamed possible herself, back in college, writing romantic poems and mooning about unicorns and French poetry. But Lindbergh himself needed her subjectivity too. He relied on her for that. Their reactions to the kidnapping were totally different, Lindbergh throwing himself into the investigation with a single-minded focus, and Anne keeping the home fires burning. Their grief was shared in private moments, but it obviously would be a scar from which they would never really recover. A horrible thing. And, not for nothing, but it seems like they executed the wrong man. I know there are books out there with conspiracy theories about who actually did it (one theory is that Anne’s older sister Elisabeth was responsible), but none of those are very convincing to me. But I am not convinced either that Hauptmann did it. The rush to find the culprit was obviously intense.
Anne doesn’t really get into that a lot in her letters/diaries. It seems too awful to even acknowledge or elaborate on. She was pregnant again, too, during this entire chaotic time, and was afraid she would lose the baby. It had to have been beyond words. I can’t even imagine.
There are some heartrending moments in this volume. She picks up her journal again after a couple of years, and says that losing their son “has made something tremendous of our marriage”, an incredible admission. So honest.
Lindbergh was so famous that their marriage had to happen in secret. And their honeymoon trip was spent camping in isolated areas (they had a pitstop on Block Island!). To disguise herself on the first leg of their trip, Anne dressed up as a boy. I mean, this stuff is just too good to be believed. There was no luxury on their trip. They spent it in an old boat, tooling around various harbors, with Anne learning how to cook over an open fire, and helping her husband with repairs on the boat. Romantic, right? Actually, it sounds very romantic. Her letters home during this time are filled with enthusiasm and curiosity about her new life. Everything is exciting because she’s with HIM, the man of her dreams.
They traveled extensively during the first years of their marriage. (Well, they always traveled extensively. The times when they put down roots are few and far between). Lindbergh was invited everywhere, to promote aviation – to open new airports – to advise new aviation companies, etc. Naturally, they flew everywhere, and Anne’s perspective on that is amazing to read. It’s all so new – not just to her, but to the world in general: seeing the world from a birds’ eye view. Everywhere they went they were welcomed with open arms. It was often an exhausting schedule. But then the two of them would climb back in the plane, and have some privacy. Of course they couldn’t talk, it was too loud, but they would pass notes, and just enjoy the solitude, the time away from the jostling hordes.
The second part of this volume (the “hour of lead” part) is tremendously sad, almost unreadably so. It was brave to publish it. You ache for this couple. In her eloquent prologue, Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes how “sorrow set her free”, a complicated thought. She had been so swept away in her romance to this famous man, and suddenly was thrust into the world of celebrity by being married to him. It was a trial by fire, and she responded by clamping down on all kinds of feelings and expressions. She valued privacy above all else, and found that it was the best way to deal with her marriage. But that would have come back to get her in the end, because her personality was, by nature, disclosing. She was open in her writing, and the self-censorship she imposed on herself (in her letters and elsewhere) would have ended up wearing her down. It was not right for her. With the unspeakable tragedy of the loss of her son, she realized that there were higher values than “discretion or privacy”. Being open about her experience was how she would survive it.
A tough lesson. And one Lindbergh needed to learn, too. He took his wife’s lead on that. She helped him to grieve, something he found nearly impossible, since he was such a fix-it guy. But he could not fix this one.
Here is an excerpt from the “hour of gold” section, the happy section. She and Lindbergh spent the first year of their marriage, on the go. Sleeping in bedrolls, or in guest houses, traveling the United States by airplane. This is a letter to her family (addressed to her mother, but meant for the whole family) in 1929. She and Lindbergh are in San Francisco.
Excerpt from Hour Of Gold, Hour Of Lead: Diaries And Letters Of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1929-1932
TO E.C.M.
Burlinggame, California, July 13th
Outside San Francisco
Darlings –
I feel so very far away from you. We have been visiting the Eastlands for three days here. It is great fun to be in a family again, but I want my own family. C. is away all day or locked up in a room talking airlines and engines and “efficiency”. And I have met people and seen gardens and houses etc.
It seems so strange to be in this kind of social life with none of you here. I do not feel at all married. This is the first chance I’ve had to write. I think C. finds the social end rather tiring. It does not seem so much of an effort to me. It is rather a game, this meeting many kinds of people and trying to keep things going.
For instance, I feel as though I’ve scored a point when I am not baffled by a young and shy German gentleman, when I am able to (instead of sitting in red and painful silence – red because he is blushing) bring out my three and only points of contact: 1, the Parker Gilberst; 2, the Harz Mountains; 3, All Quiet on the Western Front! As a matter of fact, I think I get two points for that, because both point 1 and point 3 brought that bright and grateful flash of recognition. The Harz Mountains did not score at all, but perhaps I didn’t pronounce them correctly! It reminds me somehow of surf riding. The Harz Mountains was only a gentle ripple that took me nowhere, but I was swept along quite nicely on All Quiet, and I rolled ahead for miles on Mrs. “Gib”!
C. thinks it’s better not to make any effort (unless they interest him). Perhaps it is less tiring on the whole, his way – you give none of yourself and take none of them. But it is so deadly dull. Still, it is a nervous game and we are both rather tired after the high pressure of the last two weeks. C. has to work all day and then talk too at night, sometimes.
……………
We have just had a heavenly weekend in a log-cabin camp in a valley of tall redwood trees and a little mountain stream. We went there alone, walking, canoeing, etc. There was no noise except for cones falling on the roof at night. It was heavenly.
Today C. took up two planeloads of managers of railroads and families. Most of them had never been up before and were very nervous. I sat trying to look as calm and casual as possible, hoping it would have some effect. I tried to convince them that there really were three motors and that there is no such thing as an “air pocket”. However, the noise is just bad enough to prevent any point from getting across.
Mrs. Railroad (leaning across to me): “Do’t you sometimes hit air pockets and fall for miles?”
A.M.L. (loud and clear): “There is no such thing as an ‘air pocket’ – there are just currents of air going up or down.”
Mrs. R. (vaguely horrified): “Really, really – you really have been in an air pocket! Helen, she says she has been dropped in an air pocket.”
A.M.L.: “There IS NO …”
Mrs. R.: “What? … Oh, Willie, sit down in your seat. Don’t move around like that in a plane.”
I am about to explain that it won’t upset things even if he does move around, but I know that’s hopeless.
Did you meet Dr. Merriam when he was in Mexico? Very amazing and interesting scientist (geologist and archaeologist). We are trying to get some photographs for him.
To my great disappointment, and C.’s too, Will Rogers was not on the first TAT trip. I will tell you about Amelia Earhart sometime. Now, just that she is very likable and very intelligent and nice and amusing.
This is a divine country – there is a kind of bright golden “bloom” over everything, like autumn, and you smell eucalyptus leaves burning in the ditches, a rich spicy smell and warm and golden. All the hills are covered with stacks of golden wheat, and the sea glints at you from all directions, and yellow gorse runs along the roads and falls over the cliffs, and I kicked up golden dust when I opened the gates for C. as we drove through fields and farms today. Maybe it’s just the way we feel, C. and I, when we get off together, alone — all gold, that extra golden bloom over everything!
