The Colonel's Lady

By L. M.

BRING ME A UNICORN: Diaries and

Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh,

1922-1928

259 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

$6.95.

Old Friend Corliss Lament sent round his suggestions for summer reading in Maine--the Apology, Crito, Phaedo, etc. "I haven't told you about Groton and dear Dwight," young Anne Morrow writes to her sister from Smith College. "He was so sweet and dear and such fun." With a certain pleasant gush, these fragments evoke an age--the long-gone innocence of growing up in Englewood, N.J., in an atmosphere of affluent rectitude and Jamesian family tours of the Continent.

Admirers of Mrs. Lindbergh's style, which tends toward what might be called Ladies' Magazine Transcendental, will be charmed enough by this sort of thing. Others may read on until they confront a footnote to real and romantic history--the meeting of Anne and Charles Lindbergh, who stayed with her father, U.S. Ambassador Dwight Morrow, and the family in Mexico City in 1927 just after "the Lone Eagle's" famous flight. "What did I expect?" Anne asks her diary. "A regular newspaper hero, the baseball-player type." What she found was "a tall, slim boy in evening dress --so much more poised than I expected." Lindbergh, she wrote, "is taller than anyone else--you see his head in a moving crowd and you notice his glance, where it turns, as though it were keener, clearer, brighter than anyone else's, lit with a more intense fire."

At first Lindbergh seemed interested only in Anne's sister Elizabeth. Even in her diary Anne called him Colonel L. She confided unhappily: "I want to be married, but I never, never will." Certain prides and prejudices needed working out: "He never opens a book, does he? How that separates him from our world. It is hideous to think about--a hideous chasm." The courtship actually began during a special sightseeing flight, Lindbergh at the controls, which resulted in a characteristically girlish epiphany: "Clouds and stars and birds-- must have been walking with my head down looking at the puddles for 20 years."

For all her youthful revelations, Mrs. Lindbergh does little to disturb the privacy that she and her husband have always insisted upon. Thus there is only one mild note from Anne to Charles. In the last letter of the book, the author matter of factly tells Corliss Lament: "Apparently I am going to marry Charles Lindbergh. He has vision and a sense of humor and extraordinarily nice eyes'. And that is enough to say now "

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