Book Review: The Steep Ascent, a novel by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1944)

The paperback cover of The Steep Ascent. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

The Steep Ascent, published in 1944, was Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s first novel. Her first two books North to the Orient and Listen! The Wind had been non-fiction accounts of flights with her husband, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. Morrow Lindbergh also unfortunately published a short book in 1940 titled The Wave of the Future, a defense of American non-intervention in World War II that didn’t really renounce fascism.  

The Steep Ascent was apparently based on a real incident during a flight the Lindberghs took over the Alps. I can’t help but wonder if Morrow Lindbergh’s decision to turn the flight into a novel was informed by the unpopularity of Charles and Anne’s embrace of isolationism. As World War II dragged on, I doubt there were people clamoring to read any non-fiction by either Lindbergh. Framing the story as a novel and setting it in the pre-World War II era was perhaps an attempt to make the book less tied to current events.  

It’s always a curious experience to read a novel that you know is very closely connected to real life. It’s hard not to see the characters of “Eve” and “Gerald” as the real people Anne and Charles. Morrow Lindbergh does make a slight attempt to differentiate Gerald from Charles, as Gerald is British. But when we read about the resentment Eve has towards Gerald when they follow the wrong valley in the Alps, it's easy to think that it’s actually Anne’s resentment towards Charles.  

Morrow Lindbergh was an excellent writer, and there are excellent passages throughout The Steep Ascent. As frustrated as Eve is about packing for their journey, she realizes that if Gerald ordered her to stay behind, “Why—all the delicate structure of their marriage would tumble, like those glasses that are shattered, without a human hand touching them, by a single note ringing at precisely the right vibration.” (p.23)  

There are excellent descriptive passages about flying throughout the novel, as you might expect, given the extent of Morrow Lindbergh’s experiences with flight. One of my favorite passages was this one about taking off: “There comes a moment in a take-off, long before the wheels leave the ground, when you know you are going to get off. It is as though at some indefinable point the plane shifts its allegiance from earth to sky.” (p.47) 

There are lots of spiritual and Biblical allusions throughout The Steep Ascent, perhaps a foretelling of Morrow Lindbergh’s most famous book, Gift from the Sea, published in 1955.  

Because Eve can’t communicate very easily with Gerald, thanks to the roar of the plane’s engine, nearly all of the novel takes place within her stream of consciousness. I really liked this beautiful passage: “To appreciate life, Eve was beginning to realize vaguely, you must take it at all its levels; at its top crust, at its middle everyday layer, and then at some deeper inner core she wasn’t quite sure of and couldn’t analyze and had only felt once or twice in her life, in great moments.” (p.64)  

Morrow Lindbergh started writing the novel in late 1942. She wrote in her diary entry for November 17, 1942: “I find it is quite painful to push open that inner door. It is not that the experiences then were painful nor yet that they were so happy that I look back with too much longing on them. It’s just that I feel it—life—so vividly, almost more vividly than I did then, and its very vividness is a kind of anguish.” (War Within and Without, p.270-1) So it often goes for artists, who feel so deeply.  

In her diary entry for February 4, 1944, Anne is faced with bad news: “C has seen Harcourt, Brace, who report that the Book-of-the-Month Club has turned down my book—apparently because they have received a number of fanatical letters saying that if the club took my book they’d resign...Harcourt, Brace has planned a 25,000 first edition (half of what the first edition of Listen! The Wind was.)” (War Within and Without, p.361) This shows us the very real difference between the world of 1938 and 1944, and how public perception of the Lindberghs had shifted greatly during that time.  

The Steep Ascent is an interesting little book, at 128 pages it’s really more of a novella length, but worth reading for people interested in the Lindberghs.