Flight to the Sea

CAPTIVA, 1948. It’s early March, the loveliest time of the year. A woman walks the beach with a notebook in hand. She looks out at the blue-green water, at the seabirds circling, the sandpipers running down to the waves. Occasionally she stops to pick up a shell and examine it. The islanders know who she is—everybody in the world knows who she is—but they leave her alone. She seems lost in her own private space.

It would be hard to find a woman more emblematic of her times than Anne Morrow Lindbergh. True, the events of her life were unique and extraordinary, anything but typical. But her emotional concerns were those of millions of women. And she was able to express them in a way that “the average housewife” understood perfectly.

hese days some speculate that Lindbergh had a high-functioning form of autism. He had many of the classic symptoms. He was a loner. He was an extreme overachiever. He was a risk taker. The normal ebb and flow of everyday human relationships was beyond him. And there was also, at his core, a puzzling moral blindness.

Her background was one of wealth and privilege. Her father, Dwight Morrow, was a self-made businessman who rose to great heights. He became a partner of J. P. Morgan, then a United States senator, and was mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. Her mother, Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, was a social activist, involved in causes to improve the world. During World War II, she served as acting president of Smith College.

In 1927 her father was appointed ambassador to Mexico by Calvin Coolidge, and he arranged for Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly across the Atlantic and a worldwide hero, to come to Mexico City for a goodwill visit. A shy, 21-year-old senior at Smith College, Anne was home for Christmas, and she met the tall, handsome 25-year-old aviator in the garden of the U.S. Embassy. Though she considered herself the least alluring of the three Morrow sisters, she was the one Charles was drawn to. He took her flying. There was a spark, then something more. They were married several months later.

From her earliest days Anne had aspired to become a writer. It was a calling highly valued in the intellectual Morrow household. But as a sheltered college student, she didn’t have much to write about. Now, married to the world’s Prince Charming, new vistas opened to her. She learned aerial navigation and began to accompany Charles on his adventures, flying around the world to explore new air routes. Her book North to the Orient recounts the journey they made to Japan and China. It became an enormous best seller. She followed it with Listen! The Wind about a similar adventure, flying from Africa to South America across the Atlantic Ocean.

The Lindberghs began to raise a family. Their son, Charles Jr., was born in 1930, and they bought a 400-acre estate in the New Jersey countryside. It was there that their baby was kidnapped and murdered, resulting in what is still considered the Crime of the Century.

For Anne it was an unbearable tragedy, but she handled it with such dignity it made her a heroine in the eyes of the public. Later, she would confide to her daughter Reeve one detail about the ordeal that pained and disturbed her: Never once did she see her husband cry.

These days some speculate that Lindbergh had a high-functioning form of autism. He had many of the classic symptoms. He was a loner. He was an extreme overachiever. He was a risk taker. The normal ebb and flow of everyday human relationships was beyond him. And there was also, at his core, a puzzling moral blindness.

Anne sensed this blindness after they moved to Europe in 1937, ostensibly to get away from the prison their fame had created. The press followed them everywhere, and their growing family—they had two more children by this time—was in real danger from criminals and crackpots. They spent a year in rural England, then moved to an island off the coast of Brittany.

By this time, Charles had fallen under the spell of a man almost as extraordinary as he was.

Alexis Carrel was a French scientist who had won a Nobel prize in 1912. The two men met in 1930 and immediately sensed they were kindred spirits. They began working on a profusion pump that would eventually lead to the development of organ transplants. In doing so, they discovered they had similar ways of thinking. By today’s standards, these ways are disturbing. Both were firm believers in the natural superiority of the white race. They believed that superiority must be maintained and strengthened by eugenics. Carrel even advocated euthanasia—in gas chambers, yet—for criminals and mental defectives.

Both followed the rise of Hitler in Germany. Though they decried his brutal methods, they saw much to admire: a strong, decisive leader who had united his people and was now ready to do battle with the real menace—the Asiatic and Communistic hordes from Russia and the East.

Her husband’s transformation presented Anne with a problem. She had no particular political views, but Charles was her husband, the man she loved, and she felt she had to support him. With war looming, they moved back to the United States. Charles became a leader and chief spokesman of the America First movement, dedicated to keeping the country out of a European war. And Anne did what she always did when confronted with a crisis—she wrote a book.

Entitled The Wave of the Future, it was a poorly thought-out and unconvincing political tract, a sort of apologia for fascism. The world was changing rapidly, she wrote, and it was best to accept the new forms of totalitarianism, not fight them. True, terrible things were happening—she described these as the “scum on the wave”—but it was pointless to ignore the larger path of history.  The “democracies” (she always put quotes around the word) had failed.

The short little book, barely 41 pages, became a best seller and a controversial one. For the first time in her life, Anne made enemies. Her Morrow family members hated it. It went against everything her Anglophile, liberal upbringing held dear. And when Pearl Harbor was attacked and the country united against the Axis enemy that she and Charles had so publicly approved, they both became pariahs.

Charles’ was The Spirit of St Louis, an account of his epic flight. Anne helped him, of course, so much so that when it was published to great acclaim and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953, she became angry and depressed that he was getting all the attention over a book whose creation was guided so carefully and astutely by her. “He would not have told it—could not have told it that way if he had not married me,” she confided to her diary. She got a sweet dose of revenge when her own book, A Gift from the Sea, was published the next year.

The book was a collection of essays she had written during her solo visits to Captiva over the past several years. It was contemplative and inspirational in tone. She addressed the housewife of mid-century America, who was busy juggling the burdens (and, to a lesser degree the joys) of children, homemaking and marriage. “More noise, more planning, more interruptions, more quarrels, mess, picking up—less peace and practically no solitude.”

Captiva had provided her with the perfect metaphor: the seashells that covered its beaches. She described each one in a way that illuminated an aspect of what she and her readers were going through.

The channeled whelk demonstrated the importance of shedding unnecessary layers and seeking a simpler life. The moon shell came to represent the need every woman has for solitude. The oyster bed became the messy world of family life, and the argonauta spoke to marriage as it matures and changes.

The book was an enormous success. It won the National Book Award and, perhaps more importantly, sold many more copies than The Spirit of St Louis. It was, in fact, the best-selling nonfiction book of 1955.

A Gift from the Sea has come to be considered a classic of feminist literature, one of the very first of the genre. It also became the prototype of an enormously popular type of literature in the 20th century, the self-help book. It has never been out of print and is constantly being discovered by new readers, who find solace and inspiration in Anne’s lyrical, poetic prose.

Some critics complain that it is generic in its advice, a little too self-absorbed, and naïve in thinking that the average housewife can flee to Florida for a month by herself. Nevertheless, its success redeemed Anne. Her writing was acclaimed as never before as people tactfully forgot about her earlier nautical metaphor, The Wave of the Future.

For all its virtues, something is curiously missing from A Gift from the Sea. The man in the picture. The husband, the father, the partner. He is mentioned now and again, but it is certainly not a book about how to improve your marriage. Personal examples are nonexistent and marital love is rarely mentioned.

What is mentioned, many times, is how marriages evolve from a youthful perfection into something else, a sort of deadlocked draw, where each partner must continue to grow on his or her own or wither. This is certainly what was happening in Anne’s own marriage. After her book was published, she began analysis with her doctor/therapist Dana Atchley. Charles was adamantly opposed to such a thing—he considered any sort of psychoanalysis a sign of weakness—but Anne continued. It became the major conflict of their marriage.

To a large degree, it was also the end. Anne and her doctor began an affair; she transferred her emotional needs from her husband to Atchley. All this was done in the most discreet way. Some scholars refuse to accept the affair, but her daughter, Reeve, who understood her mother better than anyone, accepts it as fact. And as for what was going on with Charles, Reeve says her mother suspected something similar was happening, but she didn’t know what.

It’s a blessing she didn’t. Charles was traveling constantly, spending more time on his various consulting ventures, and his restlessness began to consume him. In 1957 he began an affair with a woman in Germany named Valeska, who worked as his secretary and translator. She introduced him to her circle of friends, including two sisters. He began affairs with both of them, too. Soon he had three secret households in Germany, with seven children by the women.

Thus, Charles began the bizarre pattern of the last 15 years of his life. He would spend a month or so at the family home in Connecticut, then disappear, flying off to Europe, claiming business with Pan American. In Germany he would travel to each of his three clandestine homes, visit with his new families, bringing gifts and acting the doting father. After a few weeks he would move on. His new children thought he was an American writer and were sworn to secrecy.

Three of the children held that secret until after their mother’s death. Then, in 2003, they announced who they were and the strange circumstances of their lives. The world was shocked, and the press smelled a publicity stunt, but DNA tests proved they were indeed Lindberghs.

Charles died in 1974. He is buried at his home in Maui, where he felt a spiritual connection. Anne lived to be 94. Her old age was odd and bittersweet. Dementia set in. She was cared for in a little cottage behind Reeve’s home in Vermont by a group of Buddhists who lived in the neighborhood. She stopped talking. All she did was read. She thought Reeve was her sister. And yet, on her nightstand she always kept some shells from Captiva.

Everyone assumed that she would be buried next to her husband in Hawaii. But that was not her last wish. After she died in 2001, her ashes were scattered on the sea at the Morrow family home in Maine. She had finally become her own person.