So Well Remembered

By A. T. Baker

LOCKED ROOMS AND OPEN DOORS: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1933-1935 352 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $7.95.

Few writers have combed their own lives for meaning more assiduously than Anne Morrow, the shy, highborn girl who married Charles A. Lindbergh at the height of his fame. Her books range from North to the Orient to Gift from the Sea. At their best they establish her as a womanly writer of considerable skill and restraint and justly give her a stature apart from her role as the Lone Eagle's wife. "Damn, damn, damn," she once confided to her diary. "I am sick of being this handmaid to the Lord!"

Now 67, she has in recent years been recombing that life, issuing volumes of edited diaries and letters that began with her opulent childhood (Bring Me a Unicorn, 1972) as daughter of Morgan Partner Dwight Morrow, and Ambassador to Mexico. The second volume was last year's bestselling account of the tragic kidnaping of her son (Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead). This third volume begins when the Lindberghs were still hounded by reporters, and ends when they decided to escape it all and find a new life in England. The result is short on drama, but it rises to savage yet poignant moments. On a rare trip on a New York subway, Anne Lindbergh records: "Horrible horrible-looking people. I wanted to say, 'And which one of you killed my boy?' "

Scattered Details. She takes trips with Charles, serving as navigator and radio operator, and then, leaving behind her new son Jon, embarks on a five-month flight in a pontooned Lockheed Sirius to explore air routes over the Atlantic. Scattered among the details of such travel are passages of sharp perception. Commenting on a dinner with Harold Nicolson and his wife V. Sackville-West, Anne writes: "What is there about the English? You seem to be talking openly with perfect naturalness when--snap--the blind goes up (or down, actually) ... and you're left staring at the shutters." On the first anniversary of the tragedy. "The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to."

Beyond therapy and the usefulness that a diary can have for the emotionally distraught, Locked Rooms and Open Doors shows a born reporter's desire to get things down exactly. "I must write it all out, at any cost," Anne admits. "Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living."

The book also reveals the author as a person of courage in tragic and trying circumstances. She refers to Lindbergh as "Charles" or as "C." Still, an attentive reader learns a good deal about one of the enduring marital relationships of the century. There came a moment when, almost four years after the kidnaping, a earful of news photographers forced the limousine taking 3-year-old Jon home from school to the curb, then flashed bulbs into his terrified face. It was only a month after Anne had taken an apartment in New York. But Lindbergh abruptly decided they must quit America for England. As the family set sail, Anne wrote in the diary: "All my life seems to be trying to 'get settled' and C. shaking me out of it. But you like it? Yes."

A.T. Baker

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