Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life by Susan Hertog Read Free Book Online Page A

regret was that she could not enjoy it with her mother. 5
    For Anne and Charles, Christmas 1955 had fallen into shadow, darkened by the death of their mothers. Evangeline had died in September 1954, at the age of seventy-eight, after suffering for many years from Parkinson’s disease. And now, with their parents gone and Next Day Hill in shambles, Anne had the task of reinventing Christmas. While the Morrows and the Lindberghs were fragmented without the glue of Grandma Betty, Anne, feeling like the matriarch of the Lindbergh clan, was determined to keep her own family together.
    In December 1956, Anne and Charles traveled west to Colorado, with Anne Jr., sixteen; Scott, fourteen; and Reeve, eleven. They met Jon, now twenty-four; and Land, nineteen, in a rented cabin called Lazy T Ranch, a niche on Aspen Mountain.
    Jon had married Barbara Robbins in March 1954, in secrecy, much as Anne and Charles had done twenty-five years earlier. 6 It was a private, unannounced family ceremony in Northfield, Illinois, at the home of Barbara’s uncle William Miller, whose daughter was to become the wife of Anne’s son Land. Now, two and a half years later, Jon and Barbara had two little girls, Christina and Wendy.
    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 criticalattention 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