Flight Logs

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/books/review/flight-logs.html

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Published 60 years ago this fall, Charles Lindbergh’s autobiography “The Spirit of St. Louis” was both a commercial and a literary success; it nabbed the 1954 Pulitzer Prize for biography. Indeed, the man known today primarily as the first pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic succeeded in redefining the memoir as we know it. “It has,” the novelist John P. Marquand observed, “a timeless quality and an authentic strength and beauty that should cause it to be read by this generation and by many following — as long, in fact, as anyone is left who cares for fine writing and high courage.”

All of America was now admiring Lindbergh for his words as well as his deeds. Upon receiving an inscribed copy in early 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared that it would have “an honored place” in his library, adding that his wife had already read the entire book aloud to him. Schoolchildren were even more enthusiastic. In a fan letter, 12-year-old Alan James Robert Strong called it “the greatest book . . . that will ever be printed.” Within just three months, “The Spirit of St. Louis” sold nearly 200,000 copies. The following year, Warner Brothers won a widely publicized bidding war for the film rights, and Jimmy Stewart portrayed Lindbergh on the screen in 1957.

In fact, “The Spirit of St. Louis” was not Lindbergh’s literary debut. In June 1927, just a month after his famous flight, the 25-year-old Lindbergh received galley proofs of a ghostwritten autobiography from his publisher, George Putnam. Considering the manuscript “cheaply done,” Lindbergh took on the writing himself, and managed to bang out a 40,000-word replacement in just three weeks. “We,” as the book was called, sold more than 600,000 copies in its first year.

But a decade later, this University of Wisconsin dropout, who had flunked freshman English, once again decided to become an author. Though further removed from the events themselves, Lindbergh was convinced he could now capture them more vividly, and in contrast to the first go-round, he would now choose every word with the utmost care, working doggedly in planes, trains and automobiles all over the globe on what turned out to be his 600-page magnum opus.

In his preface, Lindbergh explained that he sought to do more than provide just the definitive account of his journey. Records, he said, are “often incomplete. They restrict your perspective by bringing you too close to the area they cover.” Seeking “impressionistic truth,” he aimed to capture what he had thought about as he flew. Weaving in flashbacks from his childhood in Minnesota and Washington, D.C., Lindbergh shared some of the formative experiences that shaped his character. To give his text immediacy, whole sections are in the present tense.

As I learned during my recent examination of the roughly 13,000 handwritten and typed manuscript pages, which he would later deposit in the Library of Congress, Lindbergh cranked out six complete drafts. Before getting to the main event, the flight itself, he told the story of how he collaborated with Donald Hall, the chief engineer at San Diego’s Ryan Airlines, to construct his airplane in just 60 days. As he acknowledged, he relished the opportunity to insert himself into every phase of the operation. “There are great advantages in building a new plane instead of buying a standard model,” he wrote. “I can inspect each detail before it’s covered with fabric and fairings.” The second section, “New York to Paris,” which takes up the last two-thirds of the book, consisted of 33 segments, one for every hour he spent in the air. These are rendered in precise, carefully chiseled prose; a reader feels as if he is a co-pilot, seated right next to Lindbergh as he tinkers at the controls.

By the fall of 1951, Lindbergh felt sufficiently comfortable to show a version to his first reader — his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, by then a best-selling writer of memoirs and diaries in her own right. Soon afterward, he began preparing the manuscript for publication, and for the next couple of years he combed through all the details time and time again, laboring over every punctuation mark. As his friend Paul Fisher, then the public relations director of United Aircraft, quipped, Lindbergh could be “credited with perfecting the transitional, zone-to-zone, man-for-man, freewheeling nonskid hyphen.” (Always the obsessive, Lindbergh had invented the safety checklist, the systematic protocol that pilots review once they strap themselves into the cockpit.) To perform “accuracy checks,” he sent copies to the dozens of people involved in the flight, like his financial backers in St. Louis and his colleagues at Ryan Airlines.

While Lindbergh’s autobiography received nothing but raves — in both the United States and the roughly dozen foreign countries where it appeared — it was beset by a central contradiction. He wanted to give readers a glimpse of his inner world, but he had no interest in sharing anything about his private life. When Newsweek came knocking, he declined, stating: “About a personal story, I am most anxious to avoid these whenever possible, much as I appreciate your suggestion. . . . I prefer to live and work quietly.” He gave a similar response to Edward R. Murrow, who had proposed a two-hour sit-down interview for an episode of “See It Now.” Like “The Education of Henry Adams” (1918), another Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography that left out the key event of the author’s adult life — his wife’s suicide — Lindbergh’s memoir concealed more than it revealed.

As we now know, Lindbergh had much to hide. Though he alluded to his “stable family life” in the preface, his storybook marriage with Anne was already coming apart at the seams. (This tension is the subject of the recent novel “The Aviator’s Wife,” by Melanie Benjamin.) Anne’s final volume of letters and diaries, “Against Wind and Tide” (2012), documents how she was constantly weighing whether to divorce her husband in the decade after World War II. She felt baffled by his mercurial behavior: Lindbergh would stay with her and the five children only a few months a year, rarely saying where he was going. The family couldn’t even count on him to be home for Christmas. In the end, a shared passion for writing turned out to be the glue that kept the couple together.

And as the book neared publication, Lindbergh was flying around more than ever. In June 1953, he took on a part-time job as a consultant to Pan Am, and over the next six months, he journeyed twice to Europe and South America, and once to Africa and New Zealand. “This is not a tempo that I recommend, or intend to maintain indefinitely,” he wrote to a friend in early 1954, “but it’s going to continue for a few weeks or months, I’m afraid.” Actually, the constant travel never did stop, in part because by the late 1950s, Lindbergh had begun affairs with three German women, with whom he would eventually sire seven children. As his recently discovered love letters reveal, he regularly visited all three of his secret German families four times a year until his death in 1974.

In middle age, Lindbergh chose to identify himself as a writer rather than an aviator, and he began a third memoir soon after finishing “The Spirit of St. Louis.” Before his death, he passed on about 2,000 manuscript pages to a friend, the publisher William Jovanovich. This material would become the 400-page posthumously published “Autobiography of Values” (1978). But in sharp contrast to its predecessor, this volume, which interwove philosophical speculations on aviation and technology with some early events in his own life, flopped with both readers and critics.

When not writing specifically about his 1927 flight, Lindbergh was unable to organize his thoughts. But his triumph in 1953 did constitute a brush with literary immortality that must have been deeply satisfying. As one of his many admirers, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, wrote in the summer of 1954, “By now you must be swept away by the deluge of praise for your truly great book.”

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>Joshua Kendall’s latest book is “America’s Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation.”