Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (69 page)

Shy and solitary, Jon had pursued Barbara with uncharacteristic tenacity, throwing pebbles at her dormitory window and following her around the Stanford University campus. Tall and graceful, with a chiseled face, Barbara had a compliant air that must have seemed familiar to Jon. The daughter of a domineering businessman and pilot, and a mother whose inability to assert her needs drove her to an early suicide, Barbara had a vulnerability akin to Jon’s.
⁷
Now a recognized oceanographer and deep-sea explorer, Jon looked like a Morrow but carried himself with the restraint of his father. Sensitive yet demanding, Jon never said more than was necessary, and had a secret, closed-mouth smile.
⁸
Above all, he seemed to live in the same bubble of silence he had created as a boy in England.

For two weeks, Anne and Charles skied and sleighed through the snow-covered woodlands, playing with their children and grandchildren in the mountain sun. Gone were the lavish accouterments of Christmas at Next Day Hill—the poinsettias, the Mexican bands, the white-gloved servants, and the china and crystal. But three generations alone in the woods re-enacted the rituals that confirmed the values at the crux of the Morrows’ life. For Anne, Christmas would always be “a prayer and a promise,” an invocation of God, and a renewal of vision. But at the turn of the year, Anne returned to Darien to find herself the object of damnation.

In September 1956, Anne had published her first collection of poetry. Until then, she had published each poem individually, usually in
The Atlantic Monthly
or in
The Saturday Review
, never attracting critical
attention or considering her work worthy of critical notice. But after the accolades for her lyrical prose in
Gift from the Sea
, Kurt and his wife, Helen Wolff, encouraged Anne to publish her poetry in book form.
The Unicorn and Other Poems
represented nearly thirty years of writing, from simple statements of feeling to diatribes against an indifferent God.

Pantheon, anticipating success, printed 25,000 copies of the book for September publication and another 40,000 for December. But despite the strong sales,
The Unicorn and Other Poems
was poorly received by the critics, and Anne was immediately embarrassed. Her poems were such “waifs,” she wrote to a friend.
⁹

The critics agreed that Anne had overstepped her bounds. She was an essayist—a woman’s writer who had dared to enter a masculine realm.
Gift from the Sea
may have displayed a powerful female voice, but it also provoked a backlash of misogyny, even from women. The rules were clear: if she dared to speak about the lives of women, she would have to bear the weight of their preconceived frailties. Anne’s achievement, wrote Bette Richart in
Commonweal
, was domestic, not poetic, “like flower arranging or china painting.”
¹⁰
She was a Woman Poet, a “poetess,” with the cultural fatuity of the “second sex.”
¹¹

In January 1957, just as Anne thought the storm of criticism was over, John Ciardi launched a literary crusade. Fallen Catholic turned missionary poet, English professor turned literary critic, Ciardi was the newly appointed poetry editor of
The Saturday Review of Books
. From the moment he took that seat, he “systematically set out to uproot genteel poetry,” the kind written, he explained, by celebrities with more face than substance, and “blue-haired old ladies” whose poetry reflected little more than the polite conventions of a bygone era. For Ciardi, Anne Lindbergh, wife of Charles and female spokesperson for the middle-aged middle class, seemed to “fill the bill perfectly.”
¹²

In the January 12 edition
of The Saturday Review
, Ciardi showed his contempt for Mrs. Lindbergh’s collection. It was his “duty,” he wrote, to expose her “offensively bad book—inept, jingling, slovenly, illiterate even, and puffed up with the foolish afflatus of a stereotyped high-seriousness, that species of esthetic and human failure that will accept
any shriek as a true high-C.” Her poems were mindless clichés, he wrote, with tortured rhymes and bad grammar.
¹³

Unsatisfied with literary condemnation, Ciardi also attacked the “low-grade humanity” of her work, lacing his criticism with hell-fire damnation. “Mrs. Lindbergh’s poetry,” he wrote, “is certainly akin to Original Sin, and in the absence of the proper angel I must believe that it is the duty of anyone who cares for the garden to slam the gate in the face of the sinful and abusive … What will forgive Mrs. Lindbergh this sort of miserable stuff?”
¹⁴

Ciardi’s condemnation of Anne was probably a reflection of his spiritual turmoil. After spending a childhood begging for forgiveness from a devout Catholic mother who played on his fears of divine retribution, Ciardi had turned to the study of literature and poetry. The poet, he wrote, was a divine conduit for superior culture. A paternalistic leader who “lured” his readers through sound, imagery, symbol, and rhythm, the poet directed them to a higher law.

“Luring” intellects wasn’t his only intent. Both at the University of Michigan, where he received his master’s degree in 1939, and at Kansas City University, where he later taught, Ciardi had earned a reputation as a womanizer, intent on proving his sexual potency to female students and colleagues’ wives. Conquest and control defined his relationships with women, and female poets were special targets.
¹⁵

But clearly Mrs. Lindbergh was more to Ciardi than a pretentious lady with a penchant for rhyme. She was the wife of Charles Lindbergh, known for his political “sins.” Ciardi had a political agenda of his own.

In 1947, he had been a spokesperson for the Progressive Citizens of America, a political action committee comprising many artists, academics, and political radicals who became disaffected with the Democratic Party after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. At its prow was Henry Wallace, secretary of agriculture under Roosevelt and the 1948 presidential candidate for the Progressive Party. In 1940, Wallace had condemned Lindbergh as “the outstanding appeaser of the nation.”
¹⁶
And in 1948, Ciardi campaigned for him throughout the summer, six nights a week, earning a reputation as Wallace’s “right-hand, golden-tongue”
pitchman.
¹⁷
But when Wallace lost the election to Harry Truman, Ciardi turned his attention to literary matters.

His criticism of Anne’s poetry raised one of the largest outcries in the history of
The Saturday Review
. Hundreds of letters poured in, most of them in defense of Anne.
¹⁸
For Anne, the criticism was her self-damning voice reaching a deafening roar. Against all instinct and religious teaching, Anne had dared to become a writer, defying not only Old Testament prescript, but the bounds of traditional femininity. Although publicly silent, she was devastated—not certain she would ever write again.

Although Ciardi’s moral condemnation was absurd, his assessment of Anne’s poetry was, in a sense, right. Her poems were “imprisoned” in conventional verse and rhyme, bound, for the most part, in couplets and quatrains, giving the appearance of careless cliché. But buried inside the restraint of form were the anger and rebellion that had made
Gift from the Sea
possible. Encoded in her poems is the pain of her self-denial and her false quest for salvation through her marriage to Charles.

Published in volume form in the aftermath of her success, the poems gave the impression of spontaneous combustion, which belied the slow burn of their thirty years. Because they were arranged according to theme rather than chronology, the progressive sophistication of her work was not apparent. And Ciardi, eager to fit his theory to fact, neglected to read huge chunks of her book, concentrating in brutal detail on its weaknesses. While the great melodies of the Western canon—Shakespeare, Donne, Johnson, Rossetti, Dickinson, and Rilke—filtered through her lines, Anne’s poems read more like conversations with her mother—attempts to analyze, challenge, and transcend the Victorian womanhood for which she stood. Her poems banter with her mother’s, defying their precepts, embellishing their common truths, and imbuing Christian virtue, Greek myth, and biblical parable with raw psychological energy. Anne scrambles her mother’s rigid quatrains and perfect sonnets, as if breaking her verse were an act of rebellion. Like Anne’s travel books, bound by form, slouching toward art, her poems
are meant to depict her emotions while protecting the integrity of her relationships.

The centerpiece of the collection is “The Unicorn,”
¹⁹
in which Anne’s voice becomes lucid in its determination. Virtue is not externally imposed; it is not a rigid standard of measure. Virtue is a personal choice through which one barters freedom for responsibility. The poem reflects Anne’s tension between duty and desire as much as it does her struggle to find a personal verse form. It finds completion when her emotion is spent. It is a confirmation of her message to women in
Gift from the Sea:
find the knowledge that will nourish and liberate your creativity within the bounds of marriage and convention.

But in her poem “The Stone,”
²⁰
written during her breakdown and psychoanalysis, she exposes the pain of the struggle. In perfect couplets, Anne questions the value of everything—virtue, love, God, even the power of words—in explaining her pain. She tries to release herself from suffering, but a stone clogs “the stream” through which light, faith, and happiness flow. Here the Unicorn cannot transcend, and virtue is meaningless in a faithless world. Anne is not a saint after all. Life is uncertain, and the only “solvent” for the stone is love, yet she cannot find it, even in herself. The source of her suffering is faceless and inhuman; the only resolution is to embrace its darkness. It is from this paradox that her poetry rises. Though the rhyme itself may not be new, it serves to convey her personal rebellion. The Victorian symbol turns back on itself, presenting her with the possibility of survival.

It is not whim that names the collection
The Unicorn
. Anne wants to be seen as a virginal martyr who transcends her moral frailties through creativity and virtue. Resigned to her prison, she is reconciled to her role. The only power she has is her writing, and now, Ciardi had voiced her deep fears of blasphemy against a vindictive God.

Anne was shocked and humiliated by Ciardi’s criticism.
²¹
Charles was rarely home, and without his presence or the rhythms of domesticity, the insights
of Gift from the Sea
seemed esoteric and untrue. Anne was hurt and lonely, not fertile with solitude. Not certain that she would ever write again, Anne sought consolation from Con, Margot,
and her friends, including her long-time physician, Dana Atchley, now estranged from his difficult and quarrelsome wife, Mary. In Charles’s absence he was a sympathetic listener to Anne’s anger and fears, eager to encourage and support her.

During Charles’s absence, Atchley was a frequent visitor to Anne’s home in Darien, but in the fall of 1956, Anne rented an apartment in New York, at 146 East Nineteenth Street. It was a personal retreat and a place for her to be alone with Atchley. He often stayed for a martini and dinner, and for morning breakfasts with their friends. They even appeared together at dinner parties, restaurants, and the theater. Atchley loved Anne much as Saint-Exupéry had, for her warmth, sensitivity, and intelligence. She banished his troubles and rekindled his passion. Unlike Anne’s relations with the French writer, her affair with Atchley was neither platonic nor fleeting.
²²

A year after Anne had preached that women were the bastions of Christian virtue and the saviors of Western civilization, she had a sexual liaison with a married man. Although Charles never knew, Anne’s betrayal haunted her. Ciardi’s condemnation had an ironic twist, freeing her to be the “sinner” she knew she was.

In the dead heat of summer, 1957, in her mother’s garden in Maine, she composed a poem heavy with disillusion and death. Her earlier poems had depicted her as a victim and a martyr; in this, her last published poem, she admits her complicity in her demise. As if looking Ciardi squarely in the eye, Anne adopts a new form, controlling the rhythm and the rhyme. Still in the garden of Adam and Eve, she is both the serpent and the sinner. Mistress of the house that once embraced her family, surrounded by memories of her mother and father, of Charlie and Elisabeth, Anne discards the illusions of her youth.

She had been blinded by the summer of her youth, swollen with passion and bursting with bloom. Once she had raced with the tides of time; now she was mired in the tall tangled grass, suddenly prey to satanic temptations. Echoing her poem “No Harvest Ripening,” Anne writes of the deception of summer which belies the coming of the frost.

But now Anne’s pain is profound and visceral. While the poem resonates
Christina Rossetti’s “Springtime” and Emily Dickinson’s “Hour of Lead,” Anne challenges their faith in Nature. Winter is certain but spring, she says, may never come. The smiles of summer smolder with storms, and her perfectly formed couplets burn with anger and rebellion. Anne feels cheated and bitter at a life that should have yielded more than mediocrity and sin. She writes:

In one sweep of unstopped verse, Anne cries out for the fulfillment she believes she deserves. Her cry hangs unpunctuated, waiting for resolution—but there is none. Her fertility is waning, and the fruit is too long in the bearing. The “summer of the body” has sucked her spirit, and Anne passionately hungers for death.

It was the last poem Anne ever published.