Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  Only one option would have allowed Saint-Exupéry to have qualified for military training as a pilot without having to prolong his commitment to the army. If he could obtain a civil license he would automatically qualify as a student pilot, and he would owe the army no more than the compulsory two years. This was the expensive (and highly unorthodox) alternative—if he had volunteered for an additional year the training would have been free—but it was also the one Saint-Exupéry chose. In the end, it was less his officers he needed to finesse than his mother. She must have had other ideas for her son, whom she had been pressuring to study during his service (he reported that this was next to impossible, given his exhaustion after all the physical exercise), and of whose schemes she must by now have grown wary. He could not make himself more clear in his letters, in which he writes directly to her now-lost objections: “Maman, if you only knew the irresistible thirst I have to fly.” “It seems to me that you would like to discourage me. Tell me that you would never do that?” “I’ve thought, questioned, discussed.” “I swear to you that there is no cause for concern.” “You told me in your letter only to make a well-thought-out decision; I promise you that this is one. I don’t have a second to lose, hence my haste,” wrote the young man in need of a significant sum of money. We have no way of knowing which of these arguments ultimately sent Madame de Saint-Exupéry to her banker for a loan; she must have been particularly susceptible, however, to her son’s single-mindedness, as to his plea: “I need an occupation which suits me, otherwise I’ll amount to nothing.” He did not sound as if he had altogether enjoyed his six expensive, unproductive Parisian months. Early in June Madame de Saint-Exupéry sent the money.

  At the other end the negotiations had been easier. Saint-Exupéry called again on Robert Aéby, this time in uniform, and asked if there were any way he might learn to fly. (“Do you remember me?” he asked, although ill-dressed aristocrats passionate about flying and serving as ground crewmen were generally in poor supply in Strasbourg.) Aéby told him he would need the authorization of his commanding officer, as well as the permission of the CTE. Not only was there no formal flight instruction at the Neuhof field at the time; Aéby had never taught anyone to fly. Moreover, it was unthinkable for a military man to pilot a civilian aircraft.

  Not long afterward Commander Garde, acting with the complicity of Captain de Billy, convened a meeting in his office. Present were the head of the CTE, Saint-Exupéry, and Aéby, who was amazed at what transpired. Contrary to all regulations, Commander Garde authorized the private to submit to training. This exception had been made on no other field. Garde attached several conditions to his permission: Saint-Exupéry’s lessons were to take place outside of his required hours; each man was to give his word of honor to keep the enterprise secret; no photographs were to be taken of the student with a CTE plane or in Aéby’s company. Saint-Exupéry and the CTE director agreed on the sum of 2,000 francs for the instruction. The men swore, shook hands, and the matter—“a veritable conspiracy,” in Aéby’s words—was settled. “I beg you, Mother, not to speak of this with anyone,” wrote Saint-Exupéry, requesting the funds, of the events that were to transform his life.

  Lessons began in the Farman F-40 equipped with dual controls on June 18. On that day Saint-Exupéry made three circuits of the field and landed three times for a total of fifteen flying minutes. After the first landing Aéby advised his student that he could be less “brutal” with the controls, standard advice to the novice pilot. He flew regularly in the next weeks, before 8:00 a.m., at midday, or after 6:00 p.m.; he needed to complete twenty-five hours of training to obtain his license, and knew he was scheduled to be transferred imminently to Morocco. He set about realizing his dream with a vengeance, flying both the gunner flights required of a rampant and his CTE circuits daily. Aéby observed happily that his student’s reactions were sure and his judgment quick. The Farman’s motor was mounted at the tail, which allowed the two men to converse easily without being bothered by the noise of the propeller. Aéby found that conversations with his student were short, however; a certain gulf persisted between them. It could not have helped that in Aéby’s logbook his student was “the Count de Saint-Exupéry,” to be addressed as “Monsieur le Comte”; Saint-Exupéry probably thought Aéby unable to understand his passion. He would not have known that his instructor had an impressive history of his own in the fine art of circumventing regulation. A soldier in the German army, Aéby had learned to fly while recovering from a serious wound; in 1918 he injured himself with a propeller so as to avoid being sent back to the front. After the Armistice, when Alsace was returned to France, Aéby had joined the French army as an aviator but was assigned to the navy, a transfer that led him to resign from the military. In the three weeks the two men spent together the veteran was all the same unable to screw up the courage to tell his student that his landlady had twice come to see him in the hope that he might advise “Monsieur le Comte” that it was unwise to leave large bank bills crumpled up on the floor of his apartment, where she found them when she cleaned. (When, just before Saint-Exupéry’s departure for Morocco, Aéby did mention these conversations, his student took offense, directing at Aéby the scorn that had accumulated for all those who ever asked him to tidy his room.)

  At the end of two weeks, the two men had made twenty-one circuits in eleven lessons on the Farman: “conservative flying.… Careful and gradual turns. Slow, lazy landings—no spins or loops,” as Saint-Exupéry described it to his mother. The Farman had seen better days, however, and Aéby—aware that his student did not have the patience to await its repair—introduced him to the Sopwith, a more rapid and delicate plane. In his letters Saint-Exupéry complained that the cantankerous Farman had already cost him several precious lessons; he doubtless shared his frustration with Aéby as well. The pair made two circuits in the British craft on July 8, both executed to Aéby’s satisfaction. On the morning of the ninth they made a third, after which Aéby climbed out of the airplane. “Take off!” he ordered Saint-Exupéry, who despite the fact that he had asked Aéby every day when he might solo now responded with a flabbergasted, “What?” A few minutes later, at 11:10, he was off, alone and aloft for the first time. He had only two and a half hours’ flying time under his belt.

  Saint-Exupéry’s takeoff and circuit were without reproach; Aéby fired off a green flare to signal that he should land. His approach to the field was too high; five meters from the ground he realized his mistake and accelerated, a little too brusquely. The motor sputtered, but caught again after a second. Saint-Exupéry landed safely and took off on a second circuit, this one without incident. Aéby noticed afterward that as a result of the first landing Saint-Exupéry’s puttees had been singed; his student reported that the airplane’s engine had caught fire. Patiently Aéby informed him that it had not, but that in accelerating as quickly as he had he had caused it to backfire. He was generally pleased with his student and in the afternoon crossed the field to report on his progress to Commander Garde, whom he informed that the private had now soloed. The commander consulted his file and directed Aéby to stop the lessons there. Seventeen years later Saint-Exupéry and Aéby met again, when the student recognized his instructor on a café terrace in Vichy, where the Aébys and Saint-Exupéry were taking the cure. (Ironically, Saint-Exupéry was recovering from a serious crash in Guatemala.) The former pupil, now a celebrity, bought the Aébys an apéritif and conjured up his solo flight of that morning for Madame Aéby: “If you only knew, Madame, how happy I was up there, all alone for the first time. I never wanted to see a landing flare. And I do believe that if I had had enough gas I’d still be up there!”

  From Aéby’s point of view the events of the summer of 1921 were no less extraordinary. The rampant had not officially earned a license but he had learned to fly on a military field on which all instruction was prohibited, in uniform, aboard a civilian plane belonging to a company authorized only to offer joyrides, under the supervision of an ex-pilot of the
German army who had never before trained a student. His protégé had indeed found friends in the right places. As if further proof of this fact were needed, a remarkable display of selective ignorance was made by the Ministry of War on Saint-Exupéry’s behalf late in June, probably after his mother’s intercession: the Ministry delayed his transfer to Morocco by two weeks so that Saint-Exupéry might complete the training of which they had ostensibly known nothing.

  ~

  It got hot in Strasbourg in mid-June, and Saint-Exupéry began to wilt. He did not record the effect the weather would have had on his flying—heat makes an airplane sluggish, notably at takeoff, and haze interferes with a pilot’s vision—but complained bitterly of the toll it was taking on his chess partner, who was too sunstruck to prove a worthy opponent. He was so uncomfortable that he claimed to be judging art—of which he could not have been seeing a good deal at the time—solely on its calorific value. He told his mother he had lost all appreciation for the roseate, luscious eighteenth century and found his taste now ran to lithographs of the Mont-Blanc glacier and of the Russian campaign. How he was going to survive in Morocco remained to be seen, but he was eager to be off. “To go as a pilot to Rabat, I’m so happy. The desert seen from an airplane must be sublime,” he sighed at the end of his three months in Strasbourg.

  His pretransfer leave was abbreviated because of his training with Aéby, but he met his mother in Paris early in July before sailing from Marseilles to Tangier. Late in the month he joined the 37th Fighter Group, then stationed six miles outside of Casablanca, to find his Strasbourg hopes for a sublime desert dashed. “Where are the banana, the date, the coconut trees of my dreams?” he groused. He yearned for the verdant lawns of Saint-Maurice, for the gardens of France. “When I come across a bush, I pull off several leaves and stuff them in my pocket. Then back in my room I study them with love, I turn them gently. It does me good,” wrote the man whose best-known hero would travel through interplanetary space on account of a rose. He did not yet know that the desert was to be his most fertile ground, his secret garden, the place where he grew more than anywhere else. “You cannot commune with the desert if you continue to carry with you the noise of the city,” Saint-Exupéry concluded years later, and in the summer of 1921 Paris and Strasbourg rang still in his ears.

  His love affair was not much assisted by the company he kept. It was noteworthy that from Strasbourg and Casablanca Saint-Exupéry took no new friends; he must have kept himself as much apart as his living arrangements in Alsace and his grumblings from Morocco suggested. He complained often of his unremarkable pilot friends, who could hardly have seemed otherwise to a military man who waxed poetic on the subject of the group’s sleeping arrangements:

  The open-air barrack is filled with the kinds of complaints you hear on the seas; as the rain has surrounded it with lakes you can’t help but be reminded of Noah’s Ark. Inside, each of us has silently buried himself under his white mosquito netting, which gives the impression of a girls’ boarding school. Just as you are getting used to this idea, as you feel yourself beginning to grow shy and charming, you are awakened by fierce swearing. To this you respond with equally fervent curses; around you the little white mosquito nettings seem to tremble with fright.

  He wrote damningly of the routine, which was at first slow and unexacting; he railed against a life of chess, raids on the natives’ fig trees, and crab fishing at low tide. Though he could be happily distracted by a Moroccan sunrise or a visit to the souks, he made himself miserable with the thought that he had bungled his life. His despair came to a head toward the end of his exile, when, despite the fact that he was proceeding apace in his training, he wrote home: “Still this anguish of not knowing which road to take. Architecture school is so long [it was a three-year program], so long, and I have so little faith in myself.” Earlier the soldier had informed his mother that he had discovered the vocation for which he was born and which had escaped his notice at the Beaux-Arts: charcoal drawing. Now that seemed as worthless as the correspondence courses in aeronautical engineering he had considered. “Verse, drawing, all that comes naturally to me. But what is it worth? Very little. I have no faith in myself.”

  Nonetheless he continued to write sonnets, which he submitted to his mother for approval, and to request books (the works of Anna de Noailles, the poetry of Charles Péguy) and periodicals. (He hoped his mother would treat him to subscriptions to the NRF and Arts Décoratifs for Christmas.) His descriptions, which still gleam with the magic of Hans Christian Andersen, begin as well to sound like someone else. In the souks of Casablanca, where he claimed his solitude was more easily forgotten because the passageways can only be navigated single file, golden babouches—destined to become Bark’s babouches—talk to him. And in recounting for his mother how he learned to fly with a compass he laid the groundwork for one of the most indelible scenes in Wind, Sand and Stars. From Casablanca he reported:

  Tonight, by the peaceful light of a lamp, I learned to orient myself by compass. Maps are laid out over the table, and Sergeant Boileau explains: “Arrive here (and we lean intently over the diagrams) and you head 45 degrees west.” … I dream.… The sergeant wakes me: “Pay closer attention … now 180 degrees west, unless you prefer this shortcut.” … Sergeant Boileau offers me a cup of tea. I drink it in slow sips. I dream that I am lost, in dissident territory. I yearn to join long missions through the desert.

  Later, in Toulouse, he would sit down for a similar session with the legendary Henri Guillaumet: “I spread out my maps and asked him hesitantly if he would mind going over the hop with me. And there, bent over in the lamplight, shoulder to shoulder with the veteran, I felt a sort of schoolboy peace.” The tendency to dream while being instructed was something he would never outgrow. Had he known about that second lesson in navigation, however, only a little more than five years down the road, he might have succumbed less to despair in Casablanca.

  What ailed the student pilot commonly went by the name of homesickness. All the music he most loved made him sad: it was too happy, too tender, too moving. He told his mother her letters were the only bright spots in his life. His missives to her were infinitely sweet—save when she did not write. The repeated refrain went something like this: “You’ve done everything for us and I’ve been so ungrateful. I’ve been selfish and clumsy. I haven’t at all been the support which you’ve needed. It seems to me that every day I learn a bit better to know you and to love you more. It’s true as ever; the Maman is the only real refuge for a man in need. But why don’t you write me anymore? It’s unfair to wait impatiently for the boat and not get any mail.” At times he proved so needy he even forsook specificity: “Send me photos, send me letters, send me whatever you like, but send me something.”

  Two things, aside from the cooler weather, saved Saint-Exupéry from his melancholy. More and more often he was flying. Initially he made an average of six early-morning landings in a Breguet 14; soon he was confident enough of these to deem them masterpieces—and to push the envelope of the official itinerary. By November, when he sat for his reserve officer exams in Rabat, he was flying 150-mile triangles from Berrechid to Rabat to Casablanca in the mornings and caving in to exhaustion in the afternoons. By the end of the year he was flying to the southern frontier and back, about a five-hour trip. (When he saw Casablanca, some fifty miles in the distance on his return, he reported that he felt the pride “of the Crusaders arriving in Jerusalem.”) He offered his mother two portraits of himself, one of them in words. In the drawing he looks like a deep-sea diver of the 1920s.

  If you could see me in the morning, muffled up like an Eskimo and stout as an elephant, you would laugh. I have a balaclava which—like a mask—covers my entire face save for my eyes, and over the aforementioned eyes I wear goggles. A big scarf around the neck, your white sweater, and over it all a fur-lined flying suit. Enormous gloves and two pairs of socks in my huge shoes.

  Still the morning cold at 7,000 feet was severe. But it was with an ad
mixture of pride and fascination that the student pilot reported on having spent twenty minutes trying to fit his chilled hand into his pocket to withdraw a map.

  Marc Sabran, too, came to the rescue. No one made Morocco more livable than the talented Lyons friend who had remained the standard by which all friendships were measured. Sabran was evidently now himself an officer posted in Rabat; if the two had not found each other sooner, they did at the end of the year when Saint-Exupéry spent eight days in Rabat for his exams. Sabran’s presence clearly dulled the pain of the ordeal, for which the young pilot claimed to be unprepared and about which he remained nonchalant. He claimed not to be tempted by the few years in “an appalling school of military theory” to which the exams would admit him, and exerted himself very little. If he did pass he warned his mother that he planned to resign from the military. Faced with the prospect of “mechanical and insipid” military schooling, he decided that a degree in architecture again looked attractive. He was, however, entirely enchanted by squadron life, and Sabran now introduced him to another kind of squadron.

  In Rabat Sabran took his friend to meet Captain Pierre Priou, the high commissioner of native affairs in Morocco. An artist and musician, Priou avidly welcomed the lettered and well-bred of the young French officers-in-training to his home. He lived high up among the labyrinth of Rabat’s gleaming, white-washed homes: “One feels as if one is walking in the polar snow, this part of the Arab town is so bathed in moonlight,” wrote Saint-Exupéry. The captain’s house abutted a mosque set on slightly lower ground. Not only was the muezzin’s cry closer and clearer than in the streets below, but his guests could look down into the mosque from above, as into a well. Otherwise the captain’s visitors were doubtless unaware of the passage of time. Soon after Saint-Exupéry’s exams Sabran was posted to Casablanca; he made a regular habit of taking his friend back to Priou’s with him for forty-eight-hour leaves beginning on Saturday evenings. Typically, Sabran, Saint-Exupéry, and four other young men descended upon the captain. Their dinners were high-spirited; the conversation scintillating; the music exquisite; the poker consuming, at least until three or four in the morning. (Madame de Saint-Exupéry was presumably not overjoyed to learn that although her son sounded happy this new vocation was costing her up to sixteen francs a night.) She could not worry that she had been forgotten, however; here was a scene that moved her son to borrow a sheet of his host’s stationery: “I write you from an adorable mauve drawing room, buried in big pillows, a cup of tea in front of me and a cigarette on my lips. Sabran is at the piano—Debussy or Ravel—and a group of other friends are playing bridge.” The glow cast by the evenings in this oasis was warm enough to color the entire country, which Saint-Exupéry now saw sparkling under a carpet of red and yellow flowers. For the first time he had discovered a society that suited him perfectly. The hours were loose and the regulations lax, the friendships firm and the conversation invigorating. Insofar as it was possible he had transposed the aesthetic trappings of the family hearth onto military or dormitory life. It was the kind of situation in which he shone, and under the North African sun he now began to blossom, if not to put down roots. With the flying, and with the drawing room of Captain Priou, he was not a long way off from seeing that “greatness comes first—and always—from a goal outside of oneself. As soon as one locks a man within himself, he becomes poor.”