Book Review: Hour of Gold Hour of Lead

Title: Hour of Gold Hour of Lead

Author: Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Date: 1973

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

ISBN: none

Length: 323 pages with index

Illustrations: four black-and-white photo inserts

Quote: “I was warned by my husband-to-be...‘nver write anything you wuld mind seeing on the front page of a news­paper.’..I stopped writing in my diary completely for three years.”

The “hour of gold” in this book is what Mrs. Lindbergh wrote about her life during those three years. As a result, the first section of her memoir, the happy bit, is sketchy, patchy, and not much fun to read; it consists of letters that were preserved by friends and relatives, but the letters were kept as short and cryptic as possible. She was a minor celebrity in her own right, married to a major one. Although it was well known that both of the glamorous couple liked their privacy, they were hounded by reporters, fans, and weirdos wherever they went. The photo sections show that they were too good-looking, in too conspicuous a way, to get far incognito.

The second section comes from the “hour of lead,” in which Mrs. Lindbergh resumed keeping a diary to vent the anguish she felt when her first child, Charles Junior, was kidnapped. A few older people still remember how the newspapers publicized the Lindberghs’ effort to raise ransom money, only to discover that Junior had been dead all along.

In the third section, after the long crisis period, Mrs. Lindbergh seems to have felt that she reached a degree of healing. Since we’re still reading letters and diaries that were written at the time, this resolution is not as obvious as a more psychotherapy-oriented book might have tried to make it. What may be most important, for any reader who might have lost a family member, is what Mrs. Lindbergh seems never to have needed to say in so many words: the Lindberghs didn’t blame each other for the tragedy. They grieved. Sometimes they isolated themselves, apparently by mutual consent, and sometimes they tried to be nice to each other. They believed that marriage was for life. In some ways they seem to have grown closer together; among other things Charles Lindbergh seems to have resigned himself, although this isn’t spelled out in so many words either, to the fact that he’d married a writer, who was going to write, and write about him, and if he wanted any privacy he’d better keep her manuscripts well guarded rather than trying to discourage her writing.

They were Christians, in a modest and unobtrusive way, but this third section is not the religious story some readers might have hoped for. There is a rather derisive reference to the kind of people who were saying that of course God had been holding up the planes, earlier in the book. Mrs. Lindbergh refers vaguely to a “Christian belief in immortality, in rebirth,” which aren’t the biblical words and which now suggest Pagan beliefs more than Christian ones, but she was not a theologian—or even a Bible maven—and probably we do know what she meant; in 1932 relatively few Neo-Pagans were using “rebirth” to mean “reincarnation,” and likewise relatively few fundamentalists were asking churchgoers whether they had been Born Again. What is specifically described in this “healing” section are temporal kinds of love. Charles Lindbergh was “marvelous.” Having the rest of the family still alive, in another day’s entry Mrs. Lindbergh reports someone tactlessly saying to her, “But you are happy,” then lists her living relatives, friends, and in-laws and concludes, “Yes, I am happy.” By the end of the book there’s another baby. 

This book is recommended to anyone interested in studying Mrs. Lindbergh as a writer, and to any bereaved persons who can tolerate the possibility that a simple day-by-day narration of someone else’s grief might sound even more appalling than whatever they’ve been going through.

Readers with depressive tendencies may need to be warned that, although Mrs. Lindbergh later remembered the last months of 1932 as the end of her time in the depths of grief, even on page 317 she’s still feeling “bitterly and passionately that I had lived too much in the past years.” The book ends on a hopeful note, with a friend who had seemed near death recovering enough to be married, but it stops short of the really happy times that lay ahead as the Lindberghs continued flying, writing about flying and about other things, and raising their other children.

If you’re depressive and doing research on the writer or her family, you need only slog through this book and on to the next volume—but it’s a long slog and I don’t currently have a copy of the next volume to offer. However, your library might still have one.