IN these days when fat, blowzy books are being courted by people who should know better, it is particularly pleasing — at least for me — to find a new volume which is as trim as it is expressive. North to the Orient proved beyond shadow of doubt that Anne Morrow Lindbergh, for all her busy and haunted life, could write as few professionals. Now in Listen! The Wind (Harcourt, Brace, $2.50) she continues with the exploration of that stratosphere of experience in which she and her husband move with such assurance.
This is a disciplined, very human, and eloquent account of a ten-day period in that now historical survey which the Lindberghs made of the North Atlantic Ocean in 1933. Why the author singled out these ten days for her narrative becomes increasingly clear as the reader proceeds, for in this short chapter of time and flight are epitomized the precaution, the persistence, and the peril with which they lived during the six months it took them to study the air routes between America and Europe. As Colonel Lindbergh says in his crystalclear Introduction, ’On most flights our plane was heavily loaded when measured by conventional standards. Our safety lay not in dogmatic formulas of performance and structure, but in the proper balance of constantly changing factors. Sometimes safety lay in a quick take-off, as among the icebergs at Angmagssalik; sometimes in a long range, as for our flight across the Atlantic to Brazil. And always in extra rations and emergency equipment.'
For her story Mrs. Lindbergh selected only one step of their Seven-League Boots, the step from the coast of Africa to the coast of Brazil. It was a hazardous step because of the wind; a vivid step because of the three pauses at Porto Praia, Bathurst, and Natal; a step which momentarily opens up for the landlubber a vision of tropical hades, of moonlight and blind flying. The selfcontrol of these two is remarkable. This book takes you into their confidence. You see their anxiety as the Colonel struggles to get the overladen plane off the water. You watch the play of humor and efficiency in that little cockpit as she radios for position. You read the messages pushed back and forth between them. You feel the heavenly relief with which they spiral down to Natal at the end of 2000 miles. A precise and sensitive book — I wish it were longer.
I must mention my enjoyment of another ‘domesticity,’ that gay, unassuming biography, Charles Laughton and I, by Elsa Lanchester (Harcourt, Brace, $3.50). She has seen him off stage and on: she was his fourth wife in Henry the Eighth and his second in Rembrandt. But in real life she is his first and in the bargain an actress who observes life with zest and without affectation.
