More on Anne Lindbergh

I'm only partway through The Flower and the Nettle by Anne Lindbergh.
 
A few important events in her life to bear in mind:

She was born in 1906.
She married Charles Lindbergh when she was 22.
Her first baby, Charles, was kidnapped and murdered when she was 26.
Two years later her beloved older sister Elisabeth died of pneumonia. Anne was 28.
Gift from the Sea  - 1955. She was nearly 50.
Her husband Charles died when she was 68.
The Flower and the Nettle  - 1976. A collection of her personal letters and diaries, 1936-1939. She was 70.
She died in 2001 at age 94.
(Her obituary in the NY Times.)

I find myself puzzled by the Lindberghs' lives and by Anne's diary (1936-1939) especially. The kidnapping and murder of her first child was by far the most important and traumatizing event in her life. Yet at p. 190 in the book, she's said baby Charles's name only twice, and that only in letters to her mother. She does not talk about him in her diaries. Once or twice she's vaguely mentioned the idea of a brother, in the context of her second child, Jon.

In 2008 Reeve Lindbergh, their youngest child, spoke about her famous father, noting that she'd never heard him mention baby Charles -- ever. People try to manage their grief various ways; Reeve said she thought the death of baby Charles was the force that damaged the Lindberghs' marriage so badly and drove them apart. This is to be expected. Perhaps it was more brutal, a more extreme separation, because of their public fame. 


Anne's eventual conclusions about marriage are expressed eloquently in Gift from the Sea, which I've already discussed here. The solitude and loneliness she embraces, the lack of intimacy and romance, the slow decline of a marriage, she accepts all these as normal and expected. In 1937, she clearly adores her husband and complies to him utterly. It's an "I worship the ground you walk upon, and so should everyone else" attitude. She longed for privacy and safety of course, as did he, and they felt they found it in rural England. I think they hoped they'd left America for good, but World War II drove them back there. I've yet to discover what went awry within the marriage in the 1940's, but by the early 1950's, Anne is involved in an extra-marital affair. I do wonder if they never dealt with the baby's death together, grieved together, dealt with the guilt together -- the child's death was a direct result of Lindbergh's fame. Did that fact haunt him relentlessly the rest of his life?

He is a shadow and a statue in The Flower and the Nettle, the father who is always working, always flying, who has no time to play games with them or tell stories. He is above all that simple play, in her eyes. She flies with him in his small plane to Germany, to France, even to India, leaving her small children at someone else's home in England. Wouldn't that scare her, after having a baby stolen from his crib, in his room at night? How did she leave them for weeks at a time to be co-pilot and tag-along with Charles as he did light diplomacy? She struggles with it, but always goes with him. Fast-forward to 1955 -- she goes to the beach without children or husband, looking for solitude, only sharing it a little with a sister. Within 15 years she's done a thorough about-face regarding her husband, in spite of bearing him six children.

Charles Lindbergh is more complex yet. The world-famous man whose family suffered so from his fame chose to have three additional families in Germany, fathering 7 children there. These families were kept secret from Anne and the family in the U.S., and were only revealed in 2003 after her death. Why would an intensely patriotic man, only a few years after WWII, begin families with 3 German women, especially when his first child was murdered by a German man? Did his fame, and the disaster it created, compel him to have children who were so hidden that even they did not know his identity? Did he long to have families impervious to the fear and danger he'd inflicted on his first family?

They were broken utterly, and their marriage was broken utterly, by the horror of the baby's death. Yet somehow they decided between them to just shove forward, be resilient, silent, strong, happy. They were both brilliant, creative, independent, ruggedly hard-working, and they used these qualities to move past the event, without success. It shredded them both.

Anne later longs for solitude, simplicity, peace, time to think away from that high-flying world. This is Anne in 1955. She's passed the stage of life when she leaps into a cockpit and flies into danger and uncertainty with Charles at the helm. She's at her own helm. Her world is within, and writing is her therapy. In her 1937 diary entries we find no mention of the event that shattered her world. Apparently in later diaries she addresses it, describes it, describes herself in it. The Flower and the Nettle is long; I may never get around to her other diaries. 

Four volumes of her published private diaries and letters share this interesting dualistic type of title: Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead; Locked Rooms and Open Doors; The Flower and the Nettle; War Without and Within. Her life was full of conflict and contrast. But in Gift from the Sea, the book baring her soul and her mind to her readers and winning her literary fame (fame, again!), there is no conflict, there is no war. She seeks simplicity, solitude, and peace. And she realized she could not have them with Charles Lindbergh.