Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead

Locked Rooms and Open Doors

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I've recently started reading Anne Morrow Lindbergh again. I read the first title a few months ago, and was hooked by her way with words, her ability to describe an experience, a party, etc. in a way that made me say, "Yes, that's it exactly!" Her marriage to Charles Lindbergh and her undergraduate training in writing led to the publication of a series of travelogues about their duo flights around much of the world. (See North to the Orient for the first one). Lindbergh spent the early years of their married life charting flight paths for the newly formed airline companies, and she traveled with him as the radio operator, communicating with headquarters or a partnering ship and collecting valuable data in the field of ground to air communication.
Despite this daring life, she cherished the times home with her family, the long weeks of taking the baby for a walk, laughing over his antics, and writing long letters to her mother and sisters of his first steps. Hour of Lead covers the tense time after their firstborn Charlie was kidnapped, and the eventual end to that tragic affair. She continues to grieve throughout Locked Rooms, and I was able to see the closeness of her family as they helped the young couple through this time. One of my favorite letters is the one she wrote to her sister who had sent her roses on the first annivesary after little Charlie's death.
I feel a kinship with this writer that is hard to explain. She is, after all, a self-proclaimed feminist who delights in the changing attitude toward the proper place of women. She seeks to rest her self-meaning on her work as a writer, a fellow aviator. But perhaps it is because underneath it all, I see the true Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The one whose heart thrills at the knowledge that she will soon be home with her child. The shy, self-effacing woman who often felt overwhelmed by press crowds and demands for social appearances. The writer who sought to express and understand her own journey through depression and grief, who was too candid to hide the fact that life occasionally made little sense, and who never lost sight of the more important things in her life: her beautiful children and her home. Someone has said that an author always writes more than he intends, and thereby creates a work of art that is more true. I think this sums it up beautifully.
Happy reading.