Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:
Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is North to the Orient
Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow married in 1929. He was already one of the most famous (and recognizable) men in the world due to flying the Atlantic in 1927. She was an innocent girl from an illustrious accomplished family who had just graduated college. Nothing in her life would prepare her for the reality of being married to Lindbergh: the danger of flying in those days, the peripatetic nature of his lifestyle, and also, the fame. She knew all that going in (as much as she could), and chose him anyway. It was an adventure. They honeymooned on a battered old boat, where no one could get to them. They lived in makeshift rental houses. They traveled extensively. She learned to fly. She also learned radio operation. They had their first son, Charles (who would be kidnapped and murdered), and soon afterwards, Charles and Anne took off on a flight over the North Pole to the Orient. Charles was surveying the vast area for possible landing strips, and also promoting the freedom of air flight to a population that had barely gotten used to the idea. The two left their baby son with Anne’s mother, and took off.
It was dangerous work. They were literally in the middle of nowhere. There was no one to rescue them if they went down.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh was a writer, as well, although up until that point she had just kept a private journal (5 volumes of which were eventually published). Her journal entries continued through the Orient trip, and somewhere along the way, with her newfound fame, she thought of turning the experience into a book.
In 1935 North to the Orient was published.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, perhaps the most famous “aviation writer” there is, admired her books on flying, and even wrote an introduction to one of them. North to the Orient is a classic in that small genre of flying books. Not only is it a fascinating look at the early days of aviation, but Morrow Lindbergh’s prose – describing the disorienting beauty of flight – is memorable and poetic. She doesn’t quite match Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars, but she comes close. At that time, it was still inconceivable to most of the population that you could actually get high enough in the air that you could see the curve of the earth, or you could see for miles and miles. It was magical, new territory, frightening and vast. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s writing reflects that. She is not “over” flight. She still hasn’t gotten used to it. That shows in her transcendent exhilarated writing.
The book is a great mix of practical situations, problem-solving, and poetic fancy.
Here, she describes the flight to Aklavik, a tiny hamlet far up in the Northwest Territories in Canada.
Excerpt from North to the Orient
Our first sight of the Mackenzie delta was twelve hours before. We had flown all night from Baker Lake. It never grew dark. For hours I watched a motionless sun set in a motionless cloud-bank. For hours we skirted that gray, treeless coast, stretches on stretches of bleak land scattered with icy lakes. Always the same. Until I wondered, in spite of the vibration of the engine which hummed up through the soles of my feet, whether we were not motionless too. Were we caught, frozen into some timeless eternity there in the North? The world beneath had no reality that could be recognized, measured, and passed over. I knew that the white cloud-bank out to sea hung over the ice pack – that it marked, like the fiery ring around an enchanted castle, the outer circle of a frozen kingdom we could not enter. I knew from my husband’s chart, handed back from time to time, that we followed the shore of Canada along Amundsen Gulf to the Beaufort Sea. At one time we crossed a gray arm of coast which he pointed out as a tip of Victoria Island. “Victoria Island” – one of those pale pink lands which float off the top of the map – no, I could not believe it.
In the middle of the night I tried to break the unreality by getting in touch with some radio station. It was late, but Coppermine, a trading post a hundred miles south, might be listening for us. I sent out our position: “Over – – – Cape – – – Crocker – – – north – – – of – – – Bathurst – – – inlet – – – 3:45 GCT (Greenwich civil time) – – – Lindbergh.” Would anyone believe us! Recklessly, I even sent out a message on short wave to the station at North Beach near New York. It was ten forty-five in the evening in New York. No sound, no reply to my message, but through the ear-phones I could hear dimly some big station’s unintelligible rattle. Perhaps Edmonton – perhaps Chicago or New York. Perhaps even, over the top of the world, Japan or China. I sat back and closed my eyes to the gray wastes below me, those fields of the moon. An exile on another planet, I listened to the far-off chatter of the world.
Finally the sun set. Caught just below the horizon, it continued to light the sky with a strange green glow, like that from a partial eclipse. We turned our backs on it and set our course southwest toward Aklavik. The land stretched out dark ahead of us.
We were both quite sleepy as we turned this corner of the flight. My husband, who had done all the flying, gave me the controls while he slept for short periods of a few minutes. Then he would fly again while I slept. During one of these naps I was jerked awake. Splutter – putt, putt, putt. The engine stopped. The nose of the ship dropped. We swayed forward. I could see my husband bent over the gas valves. Then the comforting splutter, splutter of the engine picking up again. One of the pontoon tanks had run dry. That was all. But I was stark awake by this time and wondering where we would land if the motor failed. I had been flying by compass and by that indistinct line, like the dregs of a wine bottle, that meant the horizon. Now I looked down at the ground below.
There, spread out for miles ahead, like so much tangled silver thread, were the meandering channels and watercourses worn by the Mackenzie River on the last slow lap of its journey to the Beaufort Sea. So many and so tortuous were the streams which made up this mammoth delta that I wondered how we would ever find the right bend in the right river, and Aklavik. Each circling stream had about the same course, the same number of tributary streams, some desultory and half choked with mud, others completely stopped at one end, making half-moon lakes – silver sickles of water.
As we came down lower and skimmed over the surface of one stream, we could not see across to another, for the banks were pine-covered. A strange sight in this treeless land, as though the great army of firs which had started out to accompany the Mackenzie River only a short distance had decided not to abandon her completely until she had safely reached the end of her journey, and had marched by her side even into this barren land, a think phalanx of green.
It was three o’clock in the morning when we finally found the settlement – a big settlement for the North, about twenty or thirty houses, two churches, radio masts, and even another plane pulled up on the bank. At this hour it was so light that people ran out of their bungalows with cameras to take pictures.
As the roar of the motor died we heard for the first time that sound peculiar to the North, a bedlam of howling dogs. The term “howling dogs” suggests back yards. This was the cry of a wild animal. And yet it was essentially the cry of resentment against the intruder – a strange bird which, roaring down the river, had broken the silence of their white night.
Sheila–
Unrelated to this particular posting, I have been browsing through a poetry anthology compiled by Garrison Keillor called “Good Poems,” which contains a number of good poems, many by poets unfamiliar to me. I thought you would enjoy the following:
Lending Out Books
by Hal Sirowitz
You’re always giving, my therapist said.
You have to learn how to take. Whenever
you meet a woman, the first thing you do
is lend her your books. You think she’ll
have to see you again in order to return them.
But what happens is, she doesn’t have the time
to read them & she’s afraid if she sees you again
you’ll expect her to talk about them, & will
want to lend her even more. So she
cancels the date. You end up losing
a lot of books. You should borrow hers.
Pretty much on target, huh?
SURPRISING TRIVIA: I recently discovered, and you might already know, that Eli Wallach was the first choice to play Maggio in “From Here to Eternity” but decided instead to appear in Tennessee Williams” “Camino Real” on Broadway. So the part was offered to the next best actor, Frank Sinatra, and the rest is history. I found this out in a small but extremely incisive tribute to Sinatra by Pete Hamill, called “Why Sinatra Matters.” Hamill knew Sinatra and had many fascinating conversations with him, which Hamill relates. Surprisingly Sinatra was a reader, and his favorite book was “The Great Gatsby.” I highly recommend the book; Hamill has written a number of novels and other books and is a terrific writer.
God – Anne morrow Lindbergh had to be a saint – her husband makes Tiger Woods look like Alan Alda – Who knows the pain that woman went through – With Seven children out of wedlock and an affair with a german woman and her sister – the wikipedia entry states that during the last seventeen years of his life “Charles Lindbergh came and went as he pleased”-
How could Jimmy Stewart play him in a movie?
Children from other relationships
From 1957 until his death in 1974, Lindbergh had an affair with German hat maker Brigitte Hesshaimer (1926–2003) who lived in a small Bavarian town called Geretsried (35 km south of Munich). On November 23, 2003, DNA tests proved that he fathered her three children: Dyrk (1958), Astrid (1960) and David (1967). The two managed to keep the affair secret; even the children did not know the true identity of their father, whom they saw when he came to visit once or twice per year using the alias “Careu Kent.” Astrid later read a magazine article about Lindbergh and found snapshots and more than a hundred letters written from him to her mother. She disclosed the affair after both Brigitte and Anne Morrow Lindbergh had died. At the same time as Lindbergh was involved with Brigitte Hesshaimer, he also had a relationship with her sister, Marietta (born 1924), who bore him two more sons: Vago (1960) and Christoph (1966). Lindbergh had a house of his own design built for Marietta in a vineyard in Grimisuat in the Swiss canton Valais.[109]
A 2005 book by German author Rudolf Schroeck, Das Doppelleben des Charles A. Lindbergh (The Double Life of Charles A. Lindbergh), claims seven secret children existed in Germany. It says Lindbergh “came and went as he pleased” during the last 17 years of his life, spending between three to five days with his Munich family about four to five times each year. “Ten days before he died in August 1974, Lindbergh wrote three letters from his hospital bed to his three mistresses and requested ‘utmost secrecy'”, Schroeck writes, whose book includes a copy of that letter to Brigitte Hesshaimer.[citation needed]
Two of the seven children were from his relationship with the East Prussian aristocrat Valeska, who was Lindbergh’s private secretary in Europe. They had a son in 1959 and a daughter in 1961. She had been friends with the Hesshaimer sisters and was the one who introduced them to Charles Lindbergh. In the beginning, they lived all together in his apartment in Rome. However, the friendship ended when Brigitte Hesshaimer became pregnant by him as well. Valeska lives in Baden-Baden and wants to keep her privacy, as mentioned in many German and International Reuter’s newspaper articles, in Rudolf Schroek’s book and a TV documentary by Danuta Harrich-Zandberg and Walter Harrich.[citation needed]
In April 2008, Reeve Lindbergh, his youngest daughter with wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh, published Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age and Other Unexpected Adventures, a book of essays that includes her discovery in 2003, of the truth about her father’s three secret European families and her journeys to meet them and understand an expanded meaning of family.[110]
Chris s: Cutting and pasting from Wikipedia does not an expert make.
Out of all of the things to criticize Lindbergh for (and there are many), you pick infidelity?
I don’t give a rat’s ass if he was unfaithful. It is the least interesting thing about this very interesting man.
Do a little bit more research, chris s, otherwise you look foolish. I have read all the Lindbergh kids bios, as well as the books written by AML and her husband – as well as Scott Berg’s massive game-changer biography of Charles Lindbergh. A complex figure. Did a lot of good, was a great pioneer (and not just in aviation – look into his work in medicine and organ preservation and a heart pump – the invention he came up with which has saved lives). Worthy of far more attention than your little gnat-like comment about his infidelity would suggest. He was a conservationist, he was pro-technology, he was a forward-thinker, a brilliant pioneer. He was also a flawed human being, who was married to another flawed human being – and she made her peace with much of her life (read The Gift of the Sea to see some of her tactics for inner peace) – certainly worth your looking into unless you are so close-minded you couldn’t bear to read them. I suppose you know best.
How about you look into his thoughts on Germany? The medal from Goebbels? His work with America First? His anti-Semitism? Plenty to criticize there. Unless you were totally unaware of it – maybe your main source Wikipedia doesn’t mention it?
Why would Jimmy Stewart play him in a movie, you ask?
Oh, I don’t know, because flying across the Atlantic in 1927 was an amazing feat that changed the world, and Billy Wilder was directing?
Any more stupid questions?
Milt – sorry, I missed your original comment. I have that same Garrison Keillor book! That’s a great poem about lending books. I very very rarely lend books, and any time I HAVE leant a book I have regretted it.
Certainly – Charles Lindbergh was a huge figure and i can’t disagree with your points.
I always felt Lindbergh was incredibly naive politically – his views on race were hopefully tempered in his later years. He did see first hand with his german visit how powerful germany was and his insights into their machinery and power may have fueled his isolationist views – However, later, Lindbergh fought in WWII as a pilot in top-secret missions and continued to work for some of the major air lines –
As you mentioned, Billy Wilder directed Spirit of St Louis- but i also believe that Jimmy Stewart was about 50 or so when he played Lindbergh (Stewart and Lindbergh only about five years apart) and i don’t think the movie went over too well due to him being so much older – i may be wrong on that.
His blatant infidelity and his whole other family in Germany never made the Berg book. I believe it was disclosed later after the women passed on – anyway, its still shocking that the man would carry on with two other families and such – again, similar to Tiger Woods – his daughter admitted while he was angry about the other family – she knew that it was typical of her dad to be that secretive and that controlling. Interesting man and life
Chris – There isn’t anything you can tell me about Charles Lindbergh that I don’t already know. I have read all of the books. I have been obsessed with the man and his wife since I was 15. Nothing you say is news to me. Not really interested in hearing you talk about it any further. Not after the idiotic way you started out commenting here. Sorry. First impressions count.
I’m just writing to tell you, Sheila, that I too became obsessed with Anne Morrow Lindbergh, her diaries and letters especially, since I was a kid although I actually was reading them as they came out, anticipating each new one in a manner I formerly reserved only for Nancy Drew books. I’m older than you. I appreciate your keeping her books alive for new readers here and was super excited to learn a new book has come out with the postwar diaries which may shed some more personal light on her relationship with Lindbergh, but to reply to Chris, she seems to have developed alternative relationships of her own, and staying married for decades as the 20th century unfolded had to be one heck of a challenge for those two.