Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  To Ségogne he wrote a rhapsodic letter the following week from Dakar:

  We went to sleep on the sand, but toward three in the morning our wool blankets became thin, transparent; the moon had cast an evil spell. At three in the morning we were freezing and had to get up. We went back up to the terrace where we sat on the wall; we were three to watch over the desert while the sergeant slept. And I could tell you how many jackals, how many hyenas made love that night. I could tell you the number of shooting stars, those that took advantage of the sergeant’s sleep: they were three. On the first, I made a wish: that this night last a thousand years. On the second, which fell to the north, that everyone would write me. On the third, that all women in the world might be tender. Then it was so calm, so quiet, it was such a marvelous night that I did not dare further disturb the stars.

  Ségogne saved this letter, which struck him as particularly polished; he guessed at the time it was to become a draft of something. He was right: the incident found its way into two newspaper pieces, Southern Mail, and Wind, Sand and Stars. Although Ségogne surely got the most personal—and the most poetic—account of the evening, all five were trial runs for the sixth, more abstract version, that of The Little Prince. In Southern Mail Saint-Exupéry reduced the cast to two men, one of whom has dropped in on the other from interplanetary space; alone in the desert, the two trade confidences about their respective planets. Bernis follows the sergeant up to the parapet for a cigarette. “Are you the Sergeant of the Stars?” he asks, but gets no answer. In the moonlight the two men break into a rousing chorus of the children’s song “Il Pleut, Il Pleut Bergère.” By the time they finish it is daylight, and the sergeant helps Bernis to repair his plane, sending off the “young god” with a heavy heart. “From what paradise, beyond the sands, do such handsome messengers so noiselessly descend?” he asks himself. It is the riddle that, sixteen years later, will plague the narrator of The Little Prince, whose fable is prefigured in many ways at Nouakchott, where a different course in astronomy takes place. In an early version of the manuscript Saint-Exupéry goes so far as to give the captain-governor of Port-Étienne, who otherwise resembles the Nouakchott sergeant, a wife. Toward the end of the evening, in mid-desert,

  Our hostess shows us her garden. Three cases of real earth had been shipped to her from Montluçon; they had therefore traveled 2,500 miles. She sprays them every night with water, which arrives once a month from Bordeaux. From this earth grow three green plants. We caress their leaves gently, as if they are jewels. The captain says: “It’s my park. And when the wind whips up the sand, drying everything, we take it down to the cellar.”

  Like the shipwrecked evening that lent Wind, Sand and Stars its name, this was an incident that stayed with Saint-Exupéry. He recycled it several times, turning and turning it like a prism for the purpose of his narratives. Guillaumet and Riguelle were probably no less moved by the jewels in the desert sky, by the glint of moonlight on the Breguet’s wings; it does not take a poet to recognize the poetry of the Sahara at night. Saint-Exupéry, who could be off-handed but who in none of these accounts felt the need to exaggerate (save that he gives the sergeant twenty Senegalese guards in Southern Mail), was taken by the more human elements of the fantastic evening, by the twin powers of distance and isolation, by the ready intimacy they created, by the uncommon importance of home and of homeland and all that represents the two, by the mythmaking that goes on in the mind of a man, especially a solitary man, especially a solitary man in God’s country, the desert. His profession had the effect of making man larger than life but Saint-Exupéry, as he practiced it, began to see man as smaller and smaller, everywhere as isolated as the sergeant at Nouakchott, until urgency or a heartfelt cause drew him to his fellows. He was hundreds of miles from, but had not forgotten, Saint-Germaindes-Prés. “It is a little lonely in the desert,” observes the Little Prince. “It is also lonely among men,” replies the snake.

  ~

  A day or two later the pilot found himself in Dakar, a city that might have been on another planet from Nouakchott and to which he took an immediate dislike. There was nothing transcendent about flat, gray, modern Dakar, then about half the size of Le Mans. At all times of the year Dakar is humid, even when it is not hot; in February Saint-Exupéry complained that he sweated profusely from the minute he got up in the morning. He compared Senegal’s premier city to Asnières, a rather glum suburb of Paris; he wrote his mother, with scorn, that he had traveled three thousand miles to find himself in a suburb of Lyons. Dakar was more bourgeois than bourgeois France, more provincial than the provinces, he wrote, railing against the uselessness of the small, inbred community that—with its petty politics and heightened sense of self-importance—was an inevitable fixture of the colonial world. He felt stifled, and was stuck in Dakar until the twenty-fourth of the month, when he was to begin flying up and down the coast to Casablanca.

  At first Saint-Exupéry joined his colleagues in various nightclubs in town, in one of which he met Guillaumet’s future wife for the first time. (He would be a witness at the couple’s wedding in 1929.) Noëlle Guillaumet never forgot her first impression of Saint-Exupéry, flailing about on the dance floor of a Dakar club with a girl who barely came up to his shoulder, a sock garter trailing behind him. He was not much for the nightlife Dakar had to offer, the colonial decadence of which he found repugnant; another account has him off in a corner of a Dakar nightclub reading Plato’s Dialogues. In all the wrong ways the city reminded him of the prisons of habit in which the provincial bureaucrat lived out his days; it brought to mind “those little village bistros along the roadside where one sometimes winds up to gulp down a quick lemonade, and in which one rediscovers, like the walls of a prison, like an impossible escape, the player piano, the calendar, the pool table, and above all the smell and the greasy tables and the waitress shuffling around in her slippers.” It was worse still. Everything in the city seemed to Saint-Exupéry either unfinished or dilapidated. No water ran in the sinks; doors refused to close; the municipal clocks had been broken for ten years. “Everything is here, but none of it works,” he lamented.

  Even on a monthly salary of about 6,000 francs, or about two hundred and thirty-five 1927 dollars, Dakar was expensive for Saint-Exupéry. His room alone, at the Hôtel de l’Europe, cost five hundred francs a month. He made himself feel a little at home by displaying one of his mother’s pastels on his night table, along with a crumbling branch of a hazelnut tree she had given him; he tucked away three years of her letters in his drawer. The month before he had bought himself a little Moroccan carpet in the Casablanca souk, which presumably decorated his Dakar room as well. He reported that he had felt a different man since making this purchase, almost too neatly appropriate for a footloose aviator living an Arabian tale: “I have a little parcel of land, I have a homeland, I have a little rolled-up carpet.” Sometime this winter he went lion hunting, an obligatory sport in Dakar; he wounded but did not kill his prey, and admitted that he would have felt equally challenged hunting rabbit. He toyed with the beginnings of Southern Mail and he complained, at least in his letters. But he also knew that it was from Dakar that he would head off in search of the kind of magic he had known at Nouakchott. He could only hope that his crankshaft would give way, so that he might realize the kind of adventures of which he dreamed. This wish, unlike those made from the parapet at Nouakchott, was regularly granted.

  From the end of February until early in the summer Saint-Exupéry flew the mail up and down the coast. His letters—which went to all the usual correspondents save for Renée de Saussine, on whom he now began to give up—are postmarked Port-Étienne, Cape Juby, Villa Cisernos, Dakar; often enough he carried them himself the 1,700 miles up the desert coast, a trip that would have taught anyone the meaning of infinity. A Breguet 14 moving at eighty miles per hour over rolling sand gave an impression mostly of immobility, like a rowboat on the high sea. He was happy, and reported to his mother—in the same letter in which he asked that
she leave the word “Count” off his envelopes—that he had finally found his calling. He managed only on his fourth or fifth attempt to make some sense of his new life in a letter to Sallès; he was still feeling out its virtues, the appeal of which surprised him a little. In particular Saint-Exupéry marveled over the distance, which was at once liberating and poignant; his past seemed as far-off and immaterial as the headlines in a provincial newspaper sound to a nonnative. “I know that I am terribly independent,” he finally concluded. “I have a great need for solitude. I suffocate if I live for fifteen days among the same twenty people.”

  With the women in his life he allowed himself to be less than perfectly affirming. The same mail that took an envelope to Sallès extolling the virtues of isolation included one to his friend Lucie-Marie Decour in which he wrangled with some last reservations. The next morning at six he would be aloft over dissident territory, between Cisneros and Juby, fired at like a partridge. “Sometimes I think I must be an idiot,” he confessed. “I wonder what I’m looking for in all this, if the more intelligent choice is not simply to be happy.… I have chosen the most difficult life—and the most uncertain—because I think that otherwise one amounts to nothing, and because people like the —— disgust me. But what if I’m wrong? What if it’s all a matter of pride? What if it only serves to wear me out?” His female friends and his mother represented a world he saw as incompatible with the realm of action but which a part of him nonetheless still craved. Half in jest he wrote his brother-in-law, Pierre d’Agay, to find him a ravishing girl with whom he might have a family. He dreamed of elevators and bathrooms and eau-de-cologne and of that eminent symbol of civilization: of well-pressed sheets. He got down from his Breguet covered in oil; he asked Sallès to send him some industrial-strength soap, for which he would be reimbursed, saying that it took him hours to clean up after a flight without it.

  His doubts extended beyond the luxuries he knew he was missing. From Casablanca in January he wrote Renée de Saussine openly of his fears. He was not happy when he was told to expect fog on his flights. He did not want to die. (“The world would not lose much but I’d lose everything,” he wrote.) He may have been made more aware of his own mortality by the apparent death eighteen months earlier of Sabran in Tangier; in May a second Fribourg friend, Louis de Bonnevie, would pass away as well. He trembled a little at the idea of heading off to Dakar, of overflying dissident zones. He was fixated on the Moors. He had a decided taste for risk but only during the day; at night his anxieties got the better of him. Then his world, and the ties that bound him to it, seemed hugely fragile. At night, too, courage struck him as nothing short of ridiculous: “It’s hogwash,” he wrote Lucie-Marie Decour. (He may have said more about himself than he meant to when he wrote his mother that he only ever lived after nine at night. At that time he could see through the virtues that made other men proud, and at that time his anxieties ran wild.) Courage seemed to him more a matter of contempt than anything else. It was not in his eyes a particularly admirable trait: “I don’t even know whether I’m courageous or not. The only things I worry about are the tachometer, the pressure gauges, the altimeter. Those are the only things that count.” The quality of bravery seemed to him increasingly flimsy the more he crashed, the more he came to know the dangers of the desert. To Yvonne de Lestrange he wrote memorably the next year that he had come to understand why courage came last on Plato’s list of virtues. It amounted to “a touch of anger, a spice of vanity, a lot of obstinacy, and a tawdry ‘sporting’ thrill.” There are, of course, many definitions of courage: the man who regularly piloted an unreliable plane over hostile territory for the sake of the mail and who succeeded most of the time, often enough by the skin of his teeth, could not help but see the quality differently from the man who meticulously prepared himself and his airplane for several months for a thirty-three-and-one-half-hour solo flight across the Atlantic in quest of a $25,000 prize.

  Saint-Exupéry succumbed neither to any sense of self-importance nor to his misgivings. After these first few months on the African route, after a first crash in Senegal, he began to rise well above his misgivings. He got used to the danger, the heat (which could keep a Breguet from climbing above 600 feet), the glaring sun, the traveling interpreters, the long days, the layovers. What may once have been fear soon turned into fascination; in a very short time he went from being green to being wise beyond his years. And the distraction that had on occasion concerned his colleagues began to evidence itself as abstraction.

  In May 1927, with Lefèbvre, then chief mechanic at Villa Cisneros, as his passenger, Saint-Exupéry flew from Cisneros south to Port-Étienne. He had arrived in Cisneros with the mail, which was slow in being unloaded; the escort plane meanwhile turned circles overhead. The discharging of the mail took a long time, however, which did not make the Breguet’s air-cooled engine, slowed during this period, very happy. Several minutes after Saint-Exupéry and Lefèbvre took off, somewhere just over—and barely over, as Lefèbvre remembered it—the Bay of the Río de Oro, the engine began to cough and clang and sputter. It had overheated, a condition that would have been further aggravated should Saint-Exupéry have tried to gain any altitude. He had little choice but to skim the waves, which he now did, serenely, the escort plane at his side. Lefèbvre, as well acquainted with the humors of an engine as anyone, thought it prudent to prepare for the inevitable swim: he removed his shoes and set about disrobing. What was Saint-Exupéry doing during this time? He was making sketches that he passed backward with broad smiles to his passenger. In them the two men appeared as deep-sea swimmers, as Robinson Crusoe look-alikes on a tiny island, as prisoners of the desert.

  Ultimately, Saint-Exupéry flew back toward land and—despite a long mechanical series of coughs and hiccoughs—on to Port-Étienne without incident. At the Port-Étienne airfield, to Lefèbvre’s great surprise, he noted in the Breguet’s journey log: “Good aircraft. All okay.” That evening at dinner the mechanic could not help but question the pilot’s judgment. Saint-Exupéry replied, a little slyly: “Look here, Lefèbvre, it can’t be a bad airplane if it carried us all the way here.”

  This conversation did not prevent the pilot from assuring Lefèbvre on another occasion: “Flying an airplane is different from driving a car; you don’t have to watch the road. An airplane is made to fly straight, on its own.” His claim sounded curiously like that made some years later by William T. Piper, the president of the Piper Aircaft Corporation: “Once you have learned to fly your plane, it is far less fatiguing to fly than it is to drive a car. You don’t have to watch every second for cats, dogs, children, lights, road signs, ladies with baby carriages and citizens who drive out into the middle of the block against the lights.… Nobody who has not been up in the sky on a glorious morning can possibly imagine the way a pilot feels in free heaven.” For the very reason that he manifested this nonchalance under conditions where it amounted, in the late 1920s, to either courage or idiocy, Saint-Exupéry was no Latécoère mechanic’s first-choice pilot. (One went so far as to say that he was much esteemed by his colleagues except on those occasions when they were required to fly with him.) What he demonstrated amounted less to grace than insouciance under pressure. But posterity had much to gain from his imperturbability, at least as much as it did from Lindbergh’s determination, which this month set the world on end. It seems entirely likely that Saint-Exupéry did some of his clearest thinking during his flights up and down the African coast in 1927, when he was flying the most primitive plane he would ever fly. “How is it possible,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh wondered of him several years later, “that he kept his mind on the gas consumption while pondering the mysteries of the universe? How can he navigate by stars when they are to him ‘the frozen glitter of diamonds’?”

  Saint-Exupéry’s first logbook has been lost, but like all of the Latécoère pilots he made plenty of unscheduled landings between 1927 and 1929, certainly more than found their way into Wind, Sand and Stars. It was not an acciden
t that won him a leave in the summer of 1927, however, but a serious attack of dengue fever, an infectious disease that causes severe muscle and joint pains. It landed him in a Dakar hospital for a few weeks, a nightmarish stay he liked to describe for his friends afterward, dwelling on the condition of the roommate whose body played host to a tenacious army of fat, red worms. Saint-Exupéry’s illness won him a reprieve from the brutal Dakar summer, so hot and windy that the French women and children were routinely sent back to Paris. He returned to Gabrielle and her husband’s home at Agay, on the Riviera—the house that would henceforth take the place of Saint-Maurice as his refuge—to recover his strength. It was from this leave that he was recalled posthaste by Daurat to Toulouse and packed off, with a few hours’ warning, early in October, for what turned into his thirteen-month stay as chief of the airfield at Juby.