Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (71 page)

Intrigued by the musical structure of the piece, Kurt gave Anne a recording of the fugue from the Anna Magdalena Notebook by Bach. The intricate texture of chord and melody seemed to echo the emotions she was seeking. Although Anne was grateful for Kurt’s genteel criticism, she was disturbed by what his comments revealed. She could not make happiness in marriage the central theme of her book. This was neither her belief nor her intent. To define the goal of marriage as happiness was to delude oneself. Of course, happiness was possible at fleeting, precious moments, she wrote, but harmony and selfless love seemed nothing more than a myth; the bride and groom and the wedding ceremony were symbolic expressions of eternal hope. Completely happy marriages, she wrote, were of certain types: (1) simple-minded; (2) very young; (3) very old; (4) European; and (5) second marriages in middle age.
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Anne no longer saw the world in the bright colors and stark boundaries of her youth. The landscape of middle-age love was gray, not black and white, but it had a beauty of its own—like the muted palate of a painting by Boudin. She no long indulged in idealized perceptions; like the Unicorn of her poem, Anne was resigned. And yet her vision had
matured and softened in recent years. The message she wanted to carry forward was tinged with pain, but still held the promise of joy and love.
¹⁴

Kurt wrote back, “I would not wish to change your palate. I would consider it a sin against the Holy Spirit. You have to follow your own law, and only then will you be able to reach not absolute perfection, which is a myth, but your own perfection. And now I wish you, with all my heart, a time of blessed creativity.”
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But Anne’s work was not blessed. After a year and a half, during which she produced nothing, Helen and Kurt began to worry. It was clear that Anne was anguishing over the book, and they feared she would abandon it. It would be a loss and a sin, Kurt admonished her. She had a rare gift for internal monologue, and she had touched a subject universal in meaning.
¹⁶

After a summer in St. Denis, Anne struggled through the fall of 1958 and the winter of 1959, cutting, rewriting, and pacing the book. In Charles’s absence, Anne “hungered” for the company of Helen and Kurt. In the summer she walked with them along the woodland paths outside their home in Zürich; in winter, along the “mechanized and hellish” streets of Manhattan. When she wasn’t with them, she longed for their presence, and when family or work thwarted their meetings, Anne wrote them letters. Lovingly, they gave her advice and perspective through books, music, and literary quotations, constantly affirming the necessity of her struggle and the worth of its outcome. Helen summed up their views in a line from the French philosopher Jean Reverzy: “If I reconciled myself with life, I would be at odds with myself. That would never happen, for everything perishes except disorder.”
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But reconciliation would not come. Life at home was a constant struggle. The children, difficult and rebellious, consumed her time and drained her will. Charles’s mood swings had gotten worse; when he did come home, he continued to be dictatorial and angry. Again, Anne was smothered by domesticity and bereft of a husband who was also a partner.

Like a good friend, Helen understood that Anne needed a dose of her own medicine. Echoing the words that Anne had used in
Gift from
the Sea
to inspire others, Helen counseled her to find her “center.” Anne’s creative energy, Helen noted, dissipated in the rush of daily domesticity. She must set herself free—discard her schedule and her endless caring for others. She must make her work the focal point of her life.
¹⁸

By Christmas 1959, three years after Anne had begun the book, Kurt’s encouragement turned to surrender. He wondered whether Anne could complete the book. He wished her patience, and the goodwill of the Gods, and he pledged his unfaltering friendship. Above all, Kurt wanted Anne to know that he believed in her and would always be there for her. Friendship, he mused, was like an eternal harvest—joyful, pure, and enduring.
¹⁹

Clearly, Anne’s characters were fragments of herself, and her book was more than a “story.” Each voice became an instrument for analyzing her failing marriage and for assessing the options for reconciliation. Each character allowed her to examine every aspect of the marriage. With the precision of a fine watchmaker, she sought to put the pieces together again. How could she remain married to a man whose insensitivity and egoism evoked her contempt, whose presence was as vacant as his absence? Should she, like “Beatrice,” get a divorce? Could she, like “Frances,” become reconciled? Perhaps she would resign herself to loneliness.

Christmas, as usual, buoyed her spirits, but by the turn of the year, the Lindbergh name was again on the front page of the
Times
. An extensively researched biography, written by Kenneth Davis, pointed a finger at Charles’s prewar Nazi entanglements. His friend Truman Smith tried to wash him clean by writing, in his published memoirs, that Lindbergh “was forced to accept the German medal. He was on a mission to ease the financial plight of Jews.”
²⁰
But Smith’s comments were pathetically transparent, a frail attempt at protecting Lindbergh, as well as exonerating himself, a tinny challenge to accepted fact.

Anne passed the cold and rainy summer of 1960 in St. Denis and stayed on through the winter in Vaud. Switzerland had become Charles’s central base for his Pan Am inspection tours, and neither she
nor he had much interest in returning to Darien. They decided to build a cottage of their own in Vaud, and sell the large house on Scott’s Cove, with the intention of building a smaller one on its eastern shore.

With Charles away and the children traveling or at school, Anne sat on her verandah, still intent on “attacking” her book. Her promises to the Wolffs, however, dissolved into nothing. Kurt, now ill with heart disease, feared that he and Helen had failed her. What had they done, he asked, and what could they do? The failure was inside herself, Anne answered.

But by Christmas 1960, something cracked; Anne’s thoughts began to flow. Immersed as if in a dream, Anne abandoned housework for the book. She wrote, nonstop, all morning and most of the afternoon, emerging dazed from her writing room.
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Deborah’s friend “Beatrice,” named perhaps for Dante’s muse, who led the poet through Paradise, had finally taken form. Anne now returned to her portrait of the mother of the groom, “Frances,” hoping she could bring the book to completion.

Alone in Darien through 1961, a year when Christmas seemed not to come, Anne struggled blindly to bring Frances to life.
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Hungry and thirsty for the Wolffs’ approval, Anne promised to repay them for their nourishment by handing them the final draft of the book.
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In the summer of 1961, five years after her feverish beginning, Anne completed
Dearly Beloved
. For two weeks, Charles stayed home, correcting hundreds of small inaccuracies in language and expression, filtering out the errors. It was Charles who delivered the manuscript to Kurt.

D
early Beloved
²⁴
is the story of a family wedding in a suburban home much like Next Day Hill. The ceremony is reminiscent of Elisabeth’s marriage ceremony to Aubrey Morgan thirty years earlier. The thoughts of Deborah McNeil, a middle-aged housewife, as she projects herself into the minds of her guests, are what construct the narratives. Through them, we see the diverse interpretations of the meaning and purpose of marriage.

It is also a moral allegory, a drama of ideas resonant with Biblical story and literary myth. Modeled on the Anna Magdalena fugue by
Bach, voices rise and fall and variant chords harmonize into a common melody encompassed by a prelude and coda. What begins as a playful minuet, suddenly darkens with the pounding clash of dissonant chords. Light and darkness struggle and chase, as the melody strives again to be heard. The melody is marriage, the variations are the internal monologues of the guests, and the embracing principle is Christian virtue.

Three generations of the Gardner family gather in a garden resplendent with flowers, blazing in reds that light the rooms and cast their glow on the faces. But it is the Garden after the Fall, after betrayal and deception, shame and divine punishment. It is Anne’s vision of her moral exile after having broken her wedding vows.

Deborah, mother of the bride, allows the reader to know of her anger, inadequacy, and disillusion. Although she wants to sound a call for ethical and spiritual awakening, she fears that she is tainted with blasphemy, desecration, and temptation. As the bride and groom, symbols of “blessed union,” walk toward the altar, and the words of the marriage ceremony are recited by the minister, Deborah’s thoughts verge on madness.

Deborah, mad prophetess and suburban housewife, seeks the answer to her question. Is marriage a blessed union or a kind of suicide, a delusion that takes the place of emotional and sexual reality? Until this moment, the delusion of marriage is barely audible beneath the melody of the text. Now it takes control of the narrative. As the monologues of three generations converge in Deborah’s mind, they become refractions of one another, living in the same dream.

Deborah casts herself out of the garden and into a private Hell. But this Hell of Deborah’s, unlike the narrator’s in
Listen! The Wind
, has no fatal disease, no demonic presence. The evil lives inside Deborah’s mind, and Anne examines it in sordid detail. The book, written when Anne was fifty-five, is her first expression of her sexuality. Neither her published diaries nor her previous books reveal her sensuous nature.

Hell, Anne concludes, is the reality of one’s mind—the unfulfilled hopes, the choices not made, the perfidies and betrayals, the lusts and
temptations, the petty destruction caused by ordinary acts, the self-denial and self-delusion. But what kind of life has she created, Deborah asks? And who is this man she has married?

With little attempt to disguise Charles, Anne creates, in Deborah’s husband, John, a hero who hides behind a mask of invulnerability. In her earlier books, Charles remains the shadow of a man; here, he is painted with merciless honesty. John, says Deborah, never cares about her problems or her daily decisions; he is content with platitudes. He speaks to Deborah in “a different language,” a rational tongue alien to hers. A scientist who is governed by reason, he nails her with “the good strong nails of his logic.”

Deborah rages as she mimics the sadism of her husband’s diatribes, making herself into a Christ-like martyr.

Shades of Saint-Exupéry give dimension to Anne’s portrait of John, as Deborah remembers a Frenchman she might have loved, a man with whom conversation had been communion. But love, she reminds herself, is not the same as marriage.

As hellfire consumes, it also illuminates. Deborah represents triumph over the devil, and now she claims her victory. Through Beatrice, the virgin who leads the poet through Paradise, Anne makes the case for divorce. Through Frances, that is, Saint Francis, devoted to humility and poverty, she makes the case for marriage as self-sacrifice.

When the ceremony ends, Deborah has made a choice: the ideal of marriage is worth the sacrifice. Deborah’s life, asserts Anne, is finally “real.” She is the artist-mother she has always wanted to be: the composer of the wedding, the playwright of the scene, as creative as any writer or musician. In the garden of her private hell, she has eaten the
apple, yet been blessed after her fall. All that remains is for her to love John, to confirm and to sanctify their imperfect union.

One can only imagine the conversation between Anne and Charles as they sat in their bed in Darien, with Anne’s manuscript pages piled around them. As Charles scoured each page for “mistakes and inaccuracies,” he must surely have sensed Anne’s dissatisfaction, her emotional cry. Perhaps he wondered whether Anne, like Frances, had betrayed him. Or whether, like Deborah, she had sacrificed herself to preserve their tarnished marriage. Perhaps he even questioned his moral standards and wondered whether he could play according to Anne’s rules.