Book Review: North to the Orient, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1935)

 

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, author and aviator. 

Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1931, on the trip chronicled in Anne's book North to the Orient.

Hardcover copy of North to the Orient, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1935.

North to the Orient was Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s first book. Published in 1935, the book recounts a 1931 journey Anne took with her husband, aviator Charles Lindbergh. With Charles flying and Anne operating the radio, the Lindberghs flew over northern Canada, Alaska, Japan, and China, mapping possible routes for commercial air travel. Charles and Anne flew in a two-seater Lockheed Sirius Model 8, with pontoons for water landings. The plane is now at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.  

Anne Morrow Lindbergh was a talented writer, and her prose is vivid and memorable. She wanted North to the Orient to be something more than merely a travel book, and it is much more than just a “and then we went here” account of their trip.  

The Lindberghs were America’s glorious young couple, and their trip was highly publicized. The day of their departure from Long Island, Anne meditated on the difference between how she and Charles were treated by the press: “Over in the corner my husband is being asked vital masculine questions, clean-cut steely technicalities or broad abstractions. But I am asked about clothes and lunch boxes.” (p.17)  

I wish that maps were included in North to the Orient, as I found myself Googling the remote settlements the Lindberghs were flying to. In Baker Lake, Canada, supplies only arrived once a year. One of the men who lived there told Anne and Charles, “Our newspapers are a year old. We get three hundred and sixty-five at a time, and read one every day—just as you do at home—only, of course, the news is a year late.” (p.35) This was a fascinating detail, and I kept mulling this over in my head long after I read it. 

One of my favorite passages was Morrow Lindbergh’s evocative description of a 12-hour overnight flight from Baker Lake to Aklavik. “It never grew dark. For hours I watched a motionless sun set in a motionless cloud-bank...Always the same. Until I wondered, in spite of the vibration of the engine which hummed up through the soles of my feet, whether we were not motionless too. Were we caught, frozen into some timeless eternity there in the North?” (p.43)  

Scattered throughout the book are occasional glimpses into the Lindberghs’ life together. Anne writes that Charles “was scientific and orderly and efficient enough for two.” (p.74) I can believe that. This is a man who trimmed the margins of the maps he took on The Spirit of St. Louis, in an attempt to save every ounce of weight he could.  

At the time of their trip in 1931, the Lindberghs left behind their 1-year-old son, Charles Lindbergh Jr. By the time North to the Orient was published in 1935, the Lindbergh’s baby was dead, the victim of one of the most notorious kidnapping cases. The accused kidnapper, Bruno Hauptmann, was found guilty in February 1935 and was appealing the verdict on death row when North to the Orient was published. (Hauptmann was executed in 1936.)  

Anne Morrow Lindbergh does not mention any of these dramatic events in North to the Orient, but there is a scene where she shows a Russian woman photographs of her young son. Knowing what will happen, the scene becomes especially poignant.  

“The trapper’s wife made big circles with her hands to show how big his eyes were and pointed to the photograph she liked the best. Then, picking out others, she made me understand by pointing again, ‘This looks most like his mother,’ and ‘This is like his father.’” (p.77) 

Anne and Charles have tea in Japan, and their host tells them that there should always be five people at the traditional tea ceremony. Anne has this insight: “A good number, I thought. If one talks to more than four people, it is an audience; and one cannot really think or exchange thoughts with an audience.” (p.106) That’s a fascinating idea: when does a group become an audience? 

When the Lindberghs arrived in China, the country was suffering from catastrophic flooding of the Yangtze River. Charles made several flights surveying the devastation for the Chinese government and supplying aid to the victims.  

A year after the publication of North to the Orient, the Lindberghs were at a dinner with King Edward VIII of England when Anne had the following encounter: 

“Those two women: ‘I’ve just read your book, Mrs. Lindbergh,’ then turning to the Beauty beside her, ‘She’s written a book!’ They both look at me with astonished curiosity. ‘Has she written a book?’ Incredulous, as though to say, ‘She has a pet chimpanzee,’ or ‘She hangs by her teeth in the circus’! I feel like Alice in Wonderland. Somehow this demands an explanation: ‘It’s just a book about our trip, you see.’ ‘Oh,’ said the Beauty, somewhat relieved and comprehending. This is not so strange. ‘Oh, a sort of a diary, I suppose.’ ‘Well, not exactly—I wrote it two or three years later.’ Vague confusion on the part of the ladies. Then (ah—the explanation!): ‘Did you write it yourself or did someone help you with it?’ ‘No,’ I laugh out loud, ‘oh no, I wrote it myself.’ ‘Well...well, all yourself.’” (The Flower and the Nettle: Diaries and Letters, 1936-1939, p.61-2)  

The Appendix to North to the Orient makes entertaining reading, as it lists all of the equipment the Lindberghs took along. There are long lists of emergency equipment for landing on both land and water. There is also a flight log for the trip, which lasted more than two months. Charles Lindbergh could not have found a better partner for his flights than Anne, as she mastered radio transmissions and took all of the twists and turns of the journey in stride.  

I was reading North to the Orient in a coffee shop when a woman sitting next to me commented that she had read the book as well. We chatted briefly about what a good writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh was. I was pleasantly surprised that the 87-year-old book I was reading sparked a conversation. North to the Orient is a testament to Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s superb writing, as the book still feels fresh today.  

Book Review: Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, by Paul Theroux, with photos by Steve McCurry (2015)

The cover of Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, by Paul Theroux, 2015. The photo shows an old movie theater in Warren, Arkansas, by Steve McCurry.

Author Paul Theroux, photo by Steve McCurry. Theroux has written about 50 books.

Abandoned gas station on Route 301, Allendale, South Carolina. Photo by Steve McCurry.

Paul Theroux’s 2015 travel book Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, marks the first time that Theroux has written a travel book about the United States. Theroux has some specific criteria for his book: he stays away from the big cities of the South and only examines the tiny towns. He finds poverty that reminds him of Africa, but also friendly people who welcome him in and quickly pour out the stories of their lives to him.

Deep South has an interesting structure, as traveling in his own country and journeying on his own timetable allows Theroux to revisit some of the same people and places in different seasons. While this sometimes leads to a deeper and richer sense of place, it also makes for some inevitable repetition. 

At the start of the book, Theroux writes, “I was to discover that America is accessible, but Americans in general are not; they are harder to know than any people I’ve traveled among.” (p.10) Theroux explains further, writing that in contrast to other cultures, in America “One is more often greeted with suspicion, hostility, or indifference. In this way Americans could be more challenging, more difficult to get acquainted with, more secretive and suspicious and in many respects more foreign, than any people I have ever met.” (p.23) I found this to be an interesting observation from a traveler as seasoned as Theroux. I wonder if American’s attitudes toward a traveler would change if the traveler is from another country? Is Theroux sometimes greeted with suspicion because he is an American asking questions about America? An advantage to being a traveler is that you are an outsider, and therefore get to ask questions that no one else would.

Deep South fascinated me because the South is an area of America that I haven’t explored much. When I was 15, my Dad and I took a road trip from Minneapolis down the Mississippi to Memphis. Just like the Paul Simon song, we went to see Graceland. We drove into Mississippi to see Elvis Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo, but that’s as far south as we went. I still haven’t been to Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, or South Carolina. I’ve been to Florida, but Florida is really in its own special category. 

As someone who has spent most of my life in Minnesota, I haven’t encountered that many Southerners. (Why would anyone move from the South to a place known for cold and snowy winters?) When I spent a semester in Washington, DC during college, I had a friend in my dorm from Tennessee. As smart as he was, I remember him once insisting to me that Abraham Lincoln had owned slaves. (No, he didn’t.) One of my college history classes was “The Civil War,” and we had one guy in the class who was from the South. He ended up dropping the class, shortly after attempting to argue that Robert E. Lee was more liberal on slavery than Abraham Lincoln. I still don’t know many people from the South, but I'm good friends with a co-worker who grew up in Alabama. She’s reading Deep South now as well, and it’s been interesting to compare our notes on it. 

The urban-rural divide in America really fascinates me, so I was eager to learn more about the rural areas of the South that Theroux focused on. Theroux sometimes repeats himself, which is perhaps understandable over the course of a 440 page book. He constantly reminds the reader that various Southern towns remind him of ones he’s seen in Africa. This is perhaps justified as something that all travelers do-we compare things we are seeing for the first time to things we have seen before. Theroux also wonders many times why more isn’t being invested in the South-either by the state and federal governments or by private foundations, like Bill Clinton’s Clinton Foundation.

Throughout the book we see towns like Greensboro, Alabama and Allendale, South Carolina that have been devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs.  An officer in a bank in Greenville says to Theroux, “Things are worse than they look.” (p.118) I couldn’t help but wonder if Theroux had traveled through rural towns in the North, what would he have found? Would he have encountered the same mixture of poverty and decaying small towns where industry has moved on? 

Theroux encounters his share of stereotypical southern tropes, such as when he attends gun shows. Religion also surfaces as a theme, as Theroux attends several different churches where the congregation is largely African American. After quoting a long list of signs that we are in the Last Days from an evangelical radio show, Theroux sums up his feelings towards those prognosticators: “Last Days? Don’t they know? These traits are the traits of all days, every day, everywhere.” (p.305) 

Theroux’s writing is sharp and incisive, and people instinctively trust him, as they open up to him and reveal their thoughts and worries. One of the most interesting people Theroux runs across is Randall Curb, a book lover who has now gone blind, living on his own in Greensboro, Alabama. Randall could surely be a character in a book of Southern fiction, an intelligent man who is very sensitive and also suffers from depression. 

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Theroux said that one of the differences between the North and the South is how friendly people are: “I have a new policy of always saying hello in the post office now, and I get very strange reactions. You say hello to a stranger in the North and they think you're drunk. Or if it's a woman, she might think you're a stalker. They might think you're insane. Why? Because you said hello. But in the South, it's a normal interaction. And for me, it's a very great advantage if people are approachable.” 

Steve McCurry’s photos at the back of the book are all excellent, but they seem almost like something of an afterthought. His photo for the cover, of an old movie theater in Warren, Arkansas, with the evocative name of “Pastime,” is just perfect. Pastime, so close to “past time,” bringing to mind the image of a South in a state of perpetual elegant decay. 

Deep South is a fascinating look at a part of America that doesn’t get much media attention, and although the book has its flaws, it’s well worth your time.