Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:
Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is War Within & Without: Diaries And Letters Of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1939-1944
Anne Lindbergh’s journals of these terrible years read, at times, like one long apologia for her husband’s work with America First, the non-interventionist group which was very active in America in the lead-up to war, and then become completely defunct with the attack on Pearl Harbor. But those years leading up are important, and are not really remembered, since the war was such a defining event and our participation in it. But the 1930s is when so much of the philosophy of the 20th century was hashed out – not just in America, but in Europe – with the Spanish Civil War, and the rise of Hitler, and the rise of Stalin – old alliances breaking down, new ones forming. It is still a tough decade to get a grip on (although if you want to see all of the philosophies battling it out in one family, just research the Mitford sisters!) It seems clear that Communists are bad, and so was Hitler, but for a time there the Communists were the only ones who took the threat of Hitler seriously and knew he had to be fought. This was true in Germany and elsewhere – Hence, the alignment of many people with Communists. But then, of course, the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin came and knocked over everyone’s chess pieces. It is also important to remember that it was difficult to know what exactly was going on in Russia at the time, how totally isolated it was. Reports of the Great Terror, and the show trials, came out of Russia, but they beggared belief … Nobody seemed able to get a grasp on what was happening (although there are a few notable exceptions). People like George Orwell and Arthur Koestler and Rebecca West were on the right track, but nobody seemed willing to listen to what they had to say. If the Communists were bad, then who would fight Hitler? (There was, also, the little fact that people seemed ready to believe in Socialism at that time, which also makes sense – the world was in the worst Depression it had ever known. Capitalism had obviously broken). I am fascinated by this decade, and it seems there are so many different angles to look at it, so many different “ways in”. One of the most important decades of the 20th century (if not the most important).
Back in America, struggling under the Depression, and still in recovery from the OTHER world war, the isolationists picked up steam. Why should we worry so much about Europe? Let’s not get involved. Charles Lindbergh, who had been to both Germany and Russia, pushed himself to the forefront of the isolationist movement. He was not just a symbolic figure, used in their posters and propaganda. He went out of his way to get publicity, making speeches (some of them quite controversial). He didn’t care if the publicity was bad. There is one notorious speech where he clearly blames the Jews for their problems in Germany. Anne begged him to edit that bit out – she seemed to understand the context (or what she thought was the context) of his words, but that now was not the time to say it. Lindbergh ignored her advice. Very quickly he became one of the most hated men in America, and the viciousness of that hatred was in direct correlation (of course) to his former hero’s status. He was a hero for flying the Atlantic, yes. But then, with the kidnapping and murder of their first son, he became a tragic figure, even more beloved, because he was so human. How far he had to fall. His reputation has still not recovered. And I suppose that’s right. He was a complex man who lived a long life. He made choices in the 1930s that not only were unpopular in that decade (except with his America First colleagues), but – in hindsight – seem ignorant and blinkered, not to mention anti-Semitic.
The Lindberghs had moved back to America. They again lived a peripatetic life, settling in various rented homes (I can’t keep track of them all), and they kept having children. In between 1932 and 1942 they had five children. So these years were busy exhausting years for the couple, in terms of parenting. There are times, in this journal specifically, where I feel that Anne was suffering from depression. She was too busy to devote time to her own work. Charles, who was always very focused, did not understand this and did what he could to make things easier for her. They had nannies to help with the kids. He built her a writing shed in the backyard of one of their homes, where Anne could go to work on her next book. Only she never found the time to go out there. She would lie in bed distraught about this, and there are a couple of times when Charles expresses to her worry and sadness that she seems so willing to give herself up. He basically begged her to get back to her own work. That it was okay, yes, they had all these kids, but she should feel free to devote time to herself. Life isn’t always simple, though. Anne was probably exhausted, with very little mental energy left to go out to a writing shack and try to create something. But I like Charles for his worry about his wife. A marriage isn’t good if you have an unhappy wife!
Lindbergh’s speeches for America First created an uproar. Anne’s family did not hide their displeasure. Anne and Charles found themselves on the outside of things, shunned, in essence. And Anne, who was always very close with her family, found herself on the defensive. Many of the letters in this volume, to her mother, her sister, involve her defending her husband’s philosophy, and also defending his right to speak his mind. It’s painful to read. Once Pearl Harbor happened, Lindbergh gave up his isolationist stance. He requested to be recommissioned in the US Army Air Corps and he was turned down. A punishment. Incredible, but you can see where they were coming from. He then went to a bunch of aviation companies, offering his services as a consultant. He worked hard during the war, troubleshooting problems with the various air bombers being developed. He got himself a position in the Pacific, and actually flew combat missions. If you look at the 30s in their own context, Lindbergh was a patriot. But like I said, his reputation as a pacifist and anti-Semite (he probably was a little bit of the second) remains.
Philip Roth’s book The Plot Against America imagines an alternate history where Lindbergh defeated FDR in the 1940 elections and became President. In Roth’s imagining, Lindbergh’s Presidency allowed antiSemitism to come out in full force in America, and become a philosophy on which America made its policies.
Anne went to bat for her husband repeatedly, although in her journals she expresses her anguish at the criticism he received. Meanwhile, she was raising 5 young children. And trying to do her own work. And dreading war.
The volume opens with the Lindberghs returning to America in 1939 after a couple of years living in England and France. 1939 was a dreadful year, and Europe was hunkering down for war. Many Americans living over there left at that time. The Lindberghs settled down on Long Island. Most of Anne’s family lived in New Jersey, so she was thrilled to be back close to them, and also thrilled that her children of school age could experience American schools for the first time.
Within a month of their return, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry comes to visit the family. I don’t believe the two aviators had ever met. Saint-Exupéry had written an introduction to one of Anne’s books and had made an observation about her that cut Anne to the core. “He had seen all that in me?” She felt, even before she met him, that he was a kindred spirit. The entries of his brief stay with the Lindberghs (complete with multiple car breakdowns) goes on for pages and pages and pages. Perhaps Anne was feeling a bit isolated in her own marriage. Perhaps she was looking for intellectual companionship (she did not bond with her husband on that level). She didn’t have an affair with Saint-Exupéry, at least not an actual physical affair, but it is clear that she has fallen head over heels for him. Something has opened up in her in her encounter with this man. Something profound. When he disappeared in 1944, she grieved it as hard as if she had known him all her life, even though she had only spent one weekend in his presence. More than anything, what she felt when she met him was a sense of recognition, and the Saint-Exupéry entries are some of the most romantic things she has ever written.
He SAW her. He RECOGNIZED her. It was powerful stuff.
Her feelings for Saint-Exupéry were so strong that Charles admits he feels a little bit jealous. Although there was a language barrier, and Anne was in charge of translating, her French wasn’t that good – so the three people communicated as best they could. Charles had been late coming home, so Anne was left alone with Saint-Exupéry for a while, and they mainly talked about writing. But whatever was going on was happening on a level that has nothing to do with language. It was a powerful rapport between them, and Charles recognized that. It made him a bit uneasy.
I’ll post one of the Saint-Exupéry entries.
Excerpt from War Within & Without: Diaries And Letters Of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1939-1944
Sunday, August 6th
M. St.-Ex comes down while we are all at breakfast and tells us with some amusement that when he went to bed last night he didn’t notice there were two doors to his room. This morning he got up, went out the wrong door, and could not find his way about. “The bathroom was the second door on the right …. but there is no right … je suis fou!” Land comes in – a cherub with golden hair. St.=Ex looks at him, overcome, it seems to me, with his beauty.
Jon takes him out to see the tortues and talks French to him. “Mais, il parle trés bien le français!” says St.-Ex, delighted.
We talk all morning on the porch, C. and he on Aviation, Germany’s strength, England’s next move, France’s inherent strength, war tactics. Of war: it is so terrible, I say, it must be avoided at almost any price, and he agrees.
Also, C. tells the Göring lion story and at the crucial point Land hands St.-Ex a turtle, which proceeds to act. “Tout a fait comme le lion de Göring!”
There is really nothing to say at this point but “Heureusement que vous n’êtes pas dans un uniforme splendide!”
I ask him to write in our copy of Wind, Sand and Stars, which he does – something polite besides his name – and C. says then that I must write something in Listen! the Wind, which we have given him. I can think of nothing to write except, “In gratitude for the adventures he has given us” and then a quotation from Whitehead on adventure (in English, of course).
We go swimming at 12, and then C. and I take him to his friends outside of Huntington. I don’t know exactly how we find the way, because he is talking all the time about a crash he was in, under water and almost drowned. (He has been in an incredible number of crashes – bad ones – but I don’t see how a man who is that much of an artist can fly at all.)
We ask him if he will come back again and he says he’d love to come back for supper. So we plan to come for him at 5. C. and I talk about him, going back. I am convinced he is going to be killed if he goes on flying. C. talks of the impossibility of being absolutely first-rate – perfection in the world of action – and being anything else (at the same moment). And I suddenly remake an old discovery. It is the striving after perfection that makes one an artist. It is the sense that one is imperfect, unfulfilled, unfinished. One attempts by a superhuman effort to fill the gap, to leap over it, to finish it in another medium. And one creates a third and separate thing: “Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China. But he discovered America.”
The stutterers (or those who cannot speak well or quickly like me) write. But it is not enough to be a stutterer. One must also have glimpsed a vision of perfect articulateness which presses one on to compensate for one’s inadequacy.
After a quiet lunch I lie in the sun, try to comfort my body after these intense hours of living only in the mind.
Then we go for St.-Ex at 5. He is doing card tricks on the porch with his friends. One man is so ill that it makes me tremble to be near him, to feel his tremulous nearness to Death. I am so conscious of him and his lassitude – life flowing out of him and the gap between us and him, and also of his wife’s tired, carved, sharp and patient anguish – like an old hurt – that I can hardly pay attention to anything else. Is there as much of a gap between life and death.
Then we come home and swim – only I can hardly immerse myself in it; my mind is going so hard, is so quickened, that I can only think of more and more things to say. I can only feel horizons breaking and then breaking again in my mind, like the locked ice pack in the spring – pieces breaking off and flowing away, with a tremendous roaring.
And all the time the sense of life being so precious and running away so fast that not one fraction of a second must be lost.
Coming home in the car we talked – he and C., really, I translating – of missing the desert, of desert weather. How danger and solitude are the two factors that go to form a man’s character, that do the most for him. There is a kind of mountaintop, clear, cold-air austerity about him that reminds me of Carrel or of a monk, dedicated to something – what?
He says he can talk to us as to his own family, and how quickly one recognizes that one is on the same level. “Je comprends tout ce que vous dites.” (“I understand all you say.”) “There are the people one can talk to and there are the people one cannot talk to – there is no middle ground.” The three greatest human beings he has met in his life are three illiterates, he says, two Brittany fishermen and a farmer in Savoy.
“Yes,” I say, “it has nothing to do with speech – quick brilliant speech – though one thinks it has when one is young.”
“Oh, yes,” he says, “mistrust always the quick and brilliant mind.”
And then he goes on to say that the great of the earth are those who leave silence and solitude around themselves, their work and their life, let it ripen of its own accord.
I believe this so utterly that it is like my own thought.
Of the Despiaur head he says that it is a chef d’oeuvre because it does not say it all the first time one looks at it but bit by bit. And that he had thought from my writing that I could sculpt!
We have supper on the porch – with a very red sea and very green trees – and they talk about the state of France, what is wrong with it, various ills, alcoholism. We talk about Dr. Carrel, too, and how they must meet. (And we get bitten by mosquitoes). A little June bug gets caught in my hair. I take it out hastily, a little afraid, and then put it on the table. (If you kill it … I think.) But he picks it up gently and looks at it. “It is trying hard to take off,” he says, and when it does, only to land on his arm. “It was hardly worth taking off for such a short flight!”
Then we walk down to the beach. He talks about the south of France (the interior), where he says we must go and which we would like, and people he would like us to meet.
I say of La Grande Chartreuse: “Quelle vie admirable!”
And we talk of Illiec, where we want him to come. Though in this changing world I fear neither of those things will come true. We are living in a dream interlude – before what cataclysm, I don’t know but fear.
We walk home through the heavy drowning sea of cricket song.
St.-Ex talks of Baudelaire, his life, his poetry. He says that Baudelaire was great not for what he said but because he was one of those who knew best how to knot words, and he recites some of his poetry to me and goes on, about his theory of style – that the same words arranged differently became banal, did not mean the same thing. The unexpressed finds expression in style, rhythm, etc. – words carry only half the freight. Of how inverted words sometimes gave quality.
Yes, I say, it is the breaking of rules, but cannot explain all I mean by that, which is much more – a union of the familiar and the strange which makes for an artistic creation – in fact, for any creation.
Then he talks of the poetic image – which is, technically – very exciting. He describes how in comparing things one has one object and another object and a bridge with which they are linked – so-and-so is like so-and-so. Like is the bridge. But sometimes one has no bridge. The mind must vault the gap, one’s mind creates the bridge. It creates a new thing entirely. A whole new civilization – in the case of “Les Archevêqyes de la mer” one’s mind imagines a whole hierarchy of things, an imaginary world.
“But perhaps this doesn’t interest you?”
“Oh, yes … yes!”
Then he takes the example of the stereoscope – two pictures of the same thing taken from a different angle – you put them together and the mind makes the adjustment. The mind supplies a third picture.
I tell him about the missionary in Baker Lake, translating the 23rd Psalm – the Lord is my shepherd – to the Eskimos in terms of reindeer and whale blubber. He asks about the Eskimos – where they interesting people? I talk a little about their rigid codes. C. disagrees and cites their changing of wives.
Yes, I say, but for utilitarian reasons, not for pleasure. Is that more moral? C. asks. Of course, St.-Ex and I answer together, looking at C.
I hardly know, looking back, which are my thoughts and which his, for he would start a train of thought and I would go off on a line of my own, jumping ahead, finishing his thought, whether correctly or not I can’t tell.
All of this, of course, is not accurately stated, because it has been translated and filtered through my mind. I wonder if it would not be the same if I met any of the people whose minds have touched mine in books – Rilke, or Whitehead (but no, I could not talk to him), V. Woolf (when I most admired her), L.H. Myers (for his preface to The Root and the Flower and Strange Glory), Thornton Wilder, for his Our Town. The man who wrote They Came Like Swallows. Victoria London for Jenny in February Hill. Perhaps my excitement comes because so rarely do I tap that world (my world – even if I am not a master in it – world of artistic vision). I have not yet found my circle, my friends, my nation. If this is true then “O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!”
What a commentary it is on human communication in this world. How impossible it is to know other people. When one finds a person who has the same thought as yours you cry out for joy, you go and shake him by the hand. Your heart leaps as though you were walking in a street in a foreign land and you heard your own language spoken, or your name in a room full of strangers.
We get ginger ale and milk and C. and he talk on what he wants to do in this country and see – planes, factories, etc. St.-Ex says he wants to see the Grand Canyon!
Then to bed, very tired. What a comfort is C.’s unspoken understanding. “Give us this day our daily bread.”
