Wherever she was, my mother would write to friends and family members about the difficulties of being there: how rushed and pressured life was in the environment surrounding New York City, how isolated she felt on Maui, how constrained and proper the Swiss were—they made her want to “go out and get drunk.” I remember her telling me that she could never recall which house was stocked with what kitchen supplies, and that no matter where she was, she couldn’t find any tarragon.
I loved all of the houses, and visited her whenever I could. Switzerland was my favorite of her places, and reading these letters I see how casually I settled into her Swiss life in my teenage summers, happily taking it for granted that she would welcome me and my friends, not thinking much about the extra work our presence demanded of her. I think I remember doing at least some of the laundry and the dishes and the shopping. I wish I could go back and do it all.
However flawed I may have been, she loved me thoroughly, as she did all of her children. She would respond to our lives and our needs at any given moment, whatever else she may have had on her mind, with long, thoughtful letters: to Jon in the Navy, to Land in college, to Anne in France, to Scott as he struggled with issues of military service and citizenship, and to me, when my first child was born and I thought I would never write again. She addressed our joys and our sorrows with the gifts of her openness and wisdom, her willingness always to listen, never to judge, never to insist upon one course of action or another. To be treated with this kind of loving respect is priceless. None of us will ever forget it.
In letters to other family members and to friends, there is that same openness and understanding, whether she is writing to her sister Con (Constance Morrow Morgan), her brother Dwight (Dwight W. Morrow Jr.), her former sister-in-law and lifelong friend Margot Wilkie, or her beloved doctor and dear friend Dana Atchley. There are so many people here whose presence in her life, and in ours, I remember with affection: Helen Wolff, Alan and Lucia Valentine, Mina Curtiss, Dana Atchley, and others. Yet it touches me to see that she also wrote with an unchecked outpouring of compassion to Ruth Goodkind, a woman she had never met, whose son was killed by lightning at a summer camp he and my brother Land both attended in 1948.
I am a little sorry that she felt compelled to respond at all to what must have been a very angry letter from another Ruth, my mother’s sensitive and complicated friend Ruth Thomas Oliff (did she really tell my mother to “drop dead”?). It gives me a startled kind of satisfaction, though, to notice the tartness of tone in my mother’s response. I am reminded here that my mother was brought up to be a lady, not a saint.
I believe that there are love affairs, among my mother’s other experiences, revealed in some of her correspondence here, though “revealed” may not be the right word to use. She was remarkably discreet, so much so that one could argue (and some have) that these were not physical but emotional relationships, affairs more of words than of caresses.
Perhaps, but I can recall a conversation with her after my father’s death, a discussion of marriage in general and of her own marriage in particular, in which she talked about the most difficult time in her life with my father. It was not, as I expected it to be, the period following the death of her first child, but instead the years following the Second World War. (Maybe my “iron years” were also hers.) She told me that she had promised herself, during that very difficult time in her marriage, that “if things did not get better” by the time I had reached my tenth birthday (in October 1955), she would leave her husband.
“What happened?” I asked. I knew she had not left my father, but that was all I knew.
“Things got better,” she told me, enigmatically. She went through psychoanalysis with Dr. John Rosen in the early 1950s. She destroyed most of the written material related to that process, but she often said that the analysis made a tremendous difference in her life. I think, though, that certain intimate relationships also sustained her during those years. There are indications in the letters to both Dana Atchley and Alan Valentine that a loving friendship existed between my mother and each of these two men, something private, intimate, and exhilarating, yet able to fit into the context of the friendships among the married couples: Dana and Mary Atchley, Lucia and Alan Valentine, Anne and Charles Lindbergh.
Interestingly, most of my mother’s letters to Dana Atchley and to Alan Valentine were not destroyed or hidden away. In fact, the Alan Valentine letters were saved all together in one folder, not as handwritten originals, but typed in the manner of a manuscript. For whose eyes, ultimately, were these letters intended? Did my mother think she might someday incorporate this material into a book? Perhaps a book about the complexities of love? I don’t know. Some of the letters are here in this collection, for readers to wonder about. What I chiefly wonder myself, having read them, is whether there were others.
Did my mother really keep copies of absolutely everything she wrote? Or did she, as it seems likely my father did, destroy some of her most intimate correspondence entirely, while at the same time sending hundreds of carefully carbon-copied letters to the archives of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale?
My feeling, having known her for fifty-five years, is that my mother was more likely to employ subtlety than to engage in active concealment. I suspect that she started making carbon copies of her diaries and letters in deference to my father’s lifelong impulse to save all written materials “for the record,” in order to avoid being misrepresented (or, one might speculate, in order to control his own archive). After a while, it must have been second nature to make carbon copies, just another aspect of the experience of writing.
As I remember, my parents had what seemed an endless supply of light blue “air mail” pads of stationery, each pad with several accompanying sheets of carbon paper cut to size. Before writing a letter, my mother would tuck a piece or two of the carbon paper (shiny side down) between the top two or three sheets of paper on the pad. When she had finished the first page of her letter she would tear it off along with the two copies, and place the carbon paper neatly between the next two or three sheets. In that way, for every letter she sent she had a copy to keep and another to send to the archives at Yale.
I thought all this record keeping was odd, but no odder than any of the other things my parents did. As an adult I have been both grateful for the personal material my parents kept so carefully—how many people can see such meticulous and articulate evidence of the lives of their forebears?—and, at times, bewildered.
In one folder at Yale, along with the carbon copies (duplicates and triplicates) of letters to friends and relatives, Land and I found several charming postcards, one written to each of her children: Jon, Land, Anne, Scott, and Reeve. These were real postcards, decorated with Beatrix Potter–like scenes of little animals, with affectionate messages in my mother’s handwriting for each child at summer camp. But they were so clean! Had they never been sent? Or had she retrieved them from us somehow at the end of the summer, none of them the least bit grubby, each one pristine enough for the Yale archives? How could that have happened? And why?
“They’re copies,” Land said suddenly. I stopped, thought about it, and agreed with him. We looked at each other, trying to imagine our mother first writing five postcards, one to each child, then copying each message, word by word, on five other postcards. (Were they identical, the postcards? Did they have the same Beatrix Potter scenes?) Postcards for the archives. I still don’t know how to think about it.
Yet it is because of this remarkable and, yes, perhaps excessive saving of letters and diaries and postcards and telegrams, this extraordinary preservation of her own written output, that we can experience something of the life of a twentieth century woman with an acknowledged public presence and a remarkable interior life.
When she traveled to Europe after the war and observed devastation in Germany, she wrote; when she felt a deep conflict between her life as an artist and her life as a wife and mother, she wrote; when she spent an evening a
t the Kennedy White House, she wrote; when she learned of the death of a child or the death of a president, she wrote. She often wrote three or four long letters in one day, and yet in many of them she apologized for not writing soon enough, or often enough, or well enough. In her diaries, too, she often despaired of her inability to get “enough writing done.” One of the paradoxes of my mother’s life was that she wrote constantly, always chastising herself, in writing, for “not writing.”
She left us a bountiful record of conscious and compassionate thought, brought to life in words: not only in her published books of autobiographical fiction, her essays, and her poetry, but, equally importantly, in her diaries and letters. Her reflections upon her individual journey have brought meaning and inspiration to the lives of readers since she first put pen to paper. Her best-known book, Gift from the Sea, was first published in 1955; it has never been out of print.
These letters and diaries shed light upon some of the conditions that caused her to write that book, and follow the path of her life before and after its publication, from midlife through the beginning of old age. Her journey, though very personal, became a universal one. In speaking for herself, she spoke for us all.
*Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922–1928 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972); Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: Diaries and Letters, 1929–1932 (Harcourt, 1973); Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters, 1933–1935 (Harcourt, 1974); The Flower and the Nettle: Diaries and Letters, 1936–1939 (Harcourt, 1976); War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters, 1939–1944 (Harcourt, 1980). She also published eight other books during her lifetime, including both fictional and nonfiction accounts of her flying experiences, poetry, a novel, and personal essays.
LETTERS AND JOURNALS,
1947–1986
Trailer,* Contentment Island [Darien, Connecticut] January 5th, 1947 [DIARY]
This is the beginning of a New Year. I am back at the trailer again after a two-month absence. Such a difficult two months—so much learned from it—so much affecting this New Year that has been given to me that some of it must go down here, even if it is just a mental summing up.
As with all real conflicts, when one examines the particulars, they seem negligible. The particulars, in fact, are negligible. But when they have been pared away, one finds the basic conflict which is not negligible—but the basic conflict coming up again in one’s life. The same old conflict that one can never solve once and for all—the same patterns of behavior ready to catch you, the same pitfalls waiting for you. The trouble lies in believing one can settle these things once and for all. Why does one believe in the fairy tale pattern, the dragons killed at a single stroke and the Princess living happily ever after?
One wrestles with one’s dragons until the end of one’s life—it is a constant and eternal process. The crises in one’s life only show up in intensity what is going on every day. The crises are there, perhaps in order to illuminate the everyday struggle, so that one may recognize the adversary more quickly, so that one may learn the weaknesses in one’s own armor or tactics, so that one may be better prepared to fight, not “next time” but all the time—tomorrow and the day after.
With me it was again the basic conflict between the woman and the artist. Perhaps there are other ways of stating it. Perhaps one could say the ego of the artist. I found I was pregnant for the seventh time and felt, with an intensity and wildness of rebellion, that I could not go through it again.† I felt it was terribly wrong—a mistake and wrong and not meant to be. I rebelled against it with every fiber of my being, physically, mentally, emotionally. I was frightened of it—terrified—both physically and mentally. Afraid of the months of illness at the beginning that I always have, afraid of the abdication of the artist, the ego afraid of the depression that follows, afraid of the actual delivery, afraid of the long convalescence afterwards.
It was not the unreasonable fear of a woman who had never been through this.
I had been through it six times willingly, although after the fifth I felt afraid. It was a difficult ordeal but I had gotten through it saying, “This is the last. This is for a sister for Anne, but this is the end. You will never have to do this again.”
And after climbing up that long hill—the mountain of last winter—feeling exhausted, ill, depressed all winter, finally—finally—climbing up at the end of the summer to free mornings at the trailer. Pushing the details back, sitting still, alone (how long since I’d been alone), quiet, passive. To find—yes!—the first tender shoots of thoughts, of perceptions, of poems coming back. I could still write. I could write again! It wasn’t dead, as I had feared. My life opened up. I felt again, for the first time in years, young, alive, full of love and hope.
And then suddenly to be told, You must go through it all again! I felt unreasonably, irrationally despairing. This is the end. It will never come back again after this. This will kill me—probably not physically (though I dreaded it physically), but it will kill the person in me who writes. It will kill the real me.
At the same time I felt, perhaps equally strongly (and this grew as time went on), that I could not take it into my hands to interrupt the act already done. Would I spend my life then trying to justify it? Could I take what seemed to me the destructive, noncreative, negative way out? And if I did, would I bear incurable guilt over it—and what would that do to my life, my writing, my marriage? Could I say no to a child, to that act of God which had been the greatest experience in my life, from which I had learned the most? That experience—almost the only one—which I felt in other terms and had to put into writing the lesson life had taught me. “The word made flesh.”
How could I say no to that? And still write it? Would it not nullify all I had learned or believed? How could I justify it to myself, to my conscience? And yet instinctively, deeply, I felt it was wrong. I cried out against it. I would try to accept it and then fall back in a deep inner resentment and feeling of wrongness. I felt, in fact, exactly balanced between two wrongs. My body, my instincts and my ego said one course was wrong. My conscience, my patterns of behavior, and the patterns of outsiders said another course was wrong.
And yet one must take actions—to play the part of a rational being. And so I did. I went to my obstetrician (who had said after the last child that I shouldn’t have any more, that the uterus was getting thin, that after forty was when one got into trouble and he had also offered to perform an operation on me so I shouldn’t have any more—which I had refused).
He said there was nothing that he could do for me, that I was a “fine healthy woman” and to go ahead and have the child. “Give it away if you don’t want it!” (As if that were the point.) When I asked him about danger, he said there was no danger, that there was more danger in an abortion. When I said I was afraid, he said, “What are you afraid of? You’ve been through much harder things than this.”
I went away feeling bitter. I know that a friend of mine had been told by this same doctor that if she “got into trouble” to come to him and he would fix her up. But she had had a nervous breakdown and I had not. As far as the doctors and the legal end went, you could just go on and have babies until you die or go crazy—before anyone will help you. He was just scared to death to touch my case because I was famous. Also he embodies the world’s conservatism in these matters. “It’s taking life.” Well—I felt that too.
I found out that legally, before interruption could be legal, you would have to prove permanent physical or mental disability would follow having the child. This let me out unless I was willing to get an old family doctor and a psychiatrist and convince them that I would go crazy if I went through with it. I felt I could make out quite a good case, but I couldn’t stomach it, probably because I didn’t really believe it true.
I went to Dr. A.* at the Medical Center. At the first interview he said he would put me through a complete checkup but that probably Dr. H.’s* second estimate (“You’re just a fine healthy woman”
) was more correct than his first warnings. He then swept the physical aside and said, “Why are you afraid of it?” When I finished talking to him he said, “You have told me enough to convince me that an abortion is completely justified.”
I then told him how strongly I felt against abortion and that I could not accept a merely mental reason to interrupt this, that it would have to rest on the physical side of it. If I could go through it safely physically, that was my choice. If I couldn’t go through it safely, then I would accept, with difficulty, the other course. This was C.’s† feeling too.
He went ahead with the tests. Everything looked all right. I found I could, after talking to Dr. A., adjust much better to the ordeal ahead. I felt sure that if he checked me as all right physically, I would be. But more important, he accepted as valid all the other side of the conflict, the non-physical side, the non-physical fears and revulsions. He did not laugh at them, like Dr. H., nor find them un-understandable and untenable, like C. They were valid facts but not frozen facts. Something could be done about them. (I suppose this is basically C.’s thesis too—only it is easier to accept from a more dispassionate source like a doctor.) I felt, with this man’s help, I could go through this ordeal with more wisdom and ease than ever before.
The first tests showed everything all right. Then, on two small clues (“Probably nothing at all, but it is the kind of thing a doctor must run down”), I had more X-rays taken and it was discovered that I had a gall bladder full of small stones and that the “appendix attacks” I had had—especially that terrible one at the Ford Hospital after Scott’s birth, so much more painful than the delivery itself … after which I felt deeply and instinctively, “I cannot have another child” … which lay back of my dread of having my sixth child, Reeve—these were gall bladder attacks, not appendix.