Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

but though his aim was to liberate a patient from the distortions of the mother’s psyche, he had no taste for defying convention. Little boys were boys, and little girls were girls, and the nuclear family was a sacred institution. Because he also believed that the neurotic person could use his dreams as tools for understanding, he told Anne that she was not “sick” but was trapped in a developmental lag caused by her upbringing. She should leave behind the “toxins” of family and home and, instead, pay heed to the “demons” that haunted her dreams. His desire to foster Anne’s independence directly opposed Charles’s desire to punish her. Once the salve to all her wounds, Charles now seemed poison.
    Undaunted by Anne’s illness, Charles continued to seek his place on the public stage. As much as he hated the “political game,” he insisted on pressing his message. Ironically, his prewar pro-German position underwent a new interventionist twist. In April 1947, Charles declared the defeat of Germany a Pyrrhic victory.
    We won the war, but lost the quality of Western Civilization. The world is weakened by famine, hatred, and despair. We have destroyed Nazi Germany … only to strengthen Communist Russia. The war might have been prevented, but now in its aftermath we owe Europe financial and military assistance. There is no cost too high to prevent the domination of an “aggressive power.” 6
     
    Russia was strengthened, but Charles was wrong. The “quality of Western Civilization” was about to flourish. One year later, the American Marshall Plan and the British cosponsored Berlin airlift would save the German people from starvation and economic chaos.
    In his 1947 book,
Of Flight and Life
, Charles wrote that the war had been a conflict between brothers damned by the same demon. Science and Technology, not the Germans, were to blame. A world disconnected from Nature and from God had bowed to a golden calf, wreaking death and destruction, and solving nothing with its pain. Surely the Bolsheviks would inherit the earth, now that the German spirit was crushed. Hope lay in the heart of Man if he turned himself inward toward the light of Christ. Charles was beginning to wonder whether that was possible. 7
    In 1948, Anne and Charles revisited Captiva Island with their children, staying in a house rented by Jim Newton. Anne recalled, from her first visit a decade earlier, the island’s primeval beauty, which seemed to belong to another world.
    In January 1950, when Anne was sturdy enough to resume her writing, she returned to Captiva alone. The house she rented, then, on the bend of the road that linked Sanibel Island to Captiva, belonged to ’Tween Waters Restaurant and Inn. It was a simple, four-room cottage across from a stretch of expansive beach.
    The beach is gone now, hammered level by storms, its white-powdered width slashed by huge iron pipes that pump sand to stem the erosion of a battered shore. But in 1950, Anne could walk barefoot across the unpaved road and out to the wooden pier to watch the gulls “dip and dive” into the waves below.
    In the mornings she would write in a bare, curtainless room, drenched in the light and the wind of the sea, and later, after lunch and household chores, she walked along the deserted beach, absorbing its “rhythms” and hoarding its “treasures.”
    “I collected shells,” said Anne. “There was nothing else to do on an island like that, and everyone else seemed to be doing it. I recognized how wonderful the freedom was of not having to do things every dayand being able to go into a room and just write what one felt … One sees through the writing. You sink into a more authentic place inside yourself.” Living without writing is like “trying to paint a picture without any shadows and I think without any perspective … I wrote about the experience of a woman having a solitary experience—some time of her own.” 8
    After returning to Darien in early