by Stacy Schiff
~
By the time Saint-Exupéry returned to France at the end of 1928, he was legendary along la Ligne, now as much for his resourcefulness as for his distraction. He had discovered the luxury of urgency, which he wore well. It transformed his childish persistence into an impressive sangfroid in the face of danger, his love of performance into a welcome ingenuity when it came to diverting the tired, the despondent, the shipwrecked. His childish tyranny—still an element in his friendships—looked, on the mail line, more like leadership, confidence. (In all guises it could cause friction, however: the mail pilots thought it their right to test-fly any newly repaired aircraft at Juby before heading off over the desert, but the chief of the airfield firmly insisted on taking these machines up himself.) He had grown close to Mermoz and to Guillaumet and was now within the bosom of the Aéropostale family as within his own. He discovered that “there is no fraternity more welcoming than a professional one … [that] the winds, the storms, and the long, nocturnal anguishes make for a common homeland.”
Tales of his bravado circulated quickly. One night in a Casablanca restaurant in January 1929 Joseph Kessel heard about Saint-Exupéry’s magnificent desert rescue missions, of the détente he had orchestrated at Juby. He wrote that these exploits were narrated by a sort of fevered chorus and included the tales in his own passenger’s-eye view of the mail line. (Kessel’s Vent de sable followed the publication of Southern Mail by a matter of months. Saint-Exupéry’s first novel did not merit a review in he Figaro Littéraire, but the excerpt from Vent de sable that appeared in that publication in November happened to be one describing his camelback rescue of the Breguet.) Blaise Cendrars, returning to France from Brazil by boat the following year, was treated to a long catalogue of the herculean tasks accomplished by this ace, this soldier, this paladin, this adventurer, this knight-errant, this broad-shouldered tendre, the most taciturn man in the company but also its enfant terrible. He was most struck by the account of an episode that had taken place in early December 1927, when Saint-Exupéry and Maurice Dumesnil waded for three hours through a hip-high Senegalese swamp to rescue a downed Guillaumet. Most of these tales swelled in the retelling: Cendrars heard that Guillaumet, Saint-Exupéry, and Dumesnil spent the next three days entirely absorbed by a furious game of chess while they waited to be rescued, an account that added two full days to the misadventure. (Cendrars admitted to having been most impressed by Saint-Exupéry’s purported insouciance in the midst of this wait; he found this a sure mark of heroism.) It was, however, clear to the men with whom Saint-Exupéry worked—and to no one more so than Didier Daurat, who was most responsible for having nurtured the transformation—that a different creature had emerged from the desert. Now there was Saint-Exupéry and also Saint-Ex: Kessel wrote that an infinite margin separated these two distinct individuals.
Early in 1929, Saint-Exupéry the man of letters submitted his manuscript of Southern Mail to Gallimard. It was accepted—a contract was signed on February 20—and the publisher made its traditional commitment to the author’s next seven volumes. This gave Saint-Exupéry something a little different to celebrate from his colleagues, who had been, during his time at Juby, concentrating on opening up South America to airmail service. In May 1928 Mermoz linked Rio de Janiero and Buenos Aires by thirteen hours in a Latécoère 28, a staggering feat in the eyes of the South Americans, who had never dreamed that the 1,250 miles separating the two cities could be forded in the course of a day. On Bastille Day 1929, Mermoz officially inaugurated Buenos Aires—Santiago service with Guillaumet, to whom it was entrusted. The glory of Aéropostale had now begun to be celebrated widely: these advances figured prominently in the newspapers. In large part they were due to a number of new planes that Latécoère—sorely aware of the limitations of the Breguet 14—had been developing in 1927 and 1928.
By early 1929, the Latécoère 25 and 26, the latter capable of 425-mile hops, had by and large replaced the Breguet 14. These two airplanes—the first Latécoère machines designed specifically to carry the mail—were not only more powerful than the Breguet; they carried passengers and were equipped with radiotelegraph. They did not routinely break down; they could be flown at night, and began, as of mid-1928, to speed service all along the airline. But the Paris–Buenos Aires mail, as Mermoz complained that year, spent eight to ten of its fourteen days in motion on a slow-moving French boat, an insult to the men who knocked themselves out to move the envelopes from Paris to Dakar, then on from Natal, on the Brazilian coast, to Buenos Aires, in a total of two days at either end. It remained still to cross the 1,600 miles of ocean between Dakar and Natal by air. The technology with which to do so was clearly in the offing; what was needed was a skilled pilot for the grueling Senegal–Brazil leg, one who could navigate by the stars and also fly a hydroplane.
Proof that, at least by now, he had come to respect the writer as a pilot, Daurat thought of Saint-Exupéry for the task. He was rare among the Latécoère staff in that he had had training in higher mathematics, the stuff of which navigation is made. Early in 1929, he was enrolled in an elite course in celestial navigation offered at the naval academy to promising young lieutenants and to a few pilots from the private sector. So it was that in April, after a brief stay in Paris during which he did some preparatory work at Saint-Cyr, Saint-Exupéry found himself in Brest after all. He was only ten years late.
General Lionel-Max Chassin, then a brilliant naval lieutenant, headed up the specialized course. He was eager to get off to an informal start with his eleven students, not much younger than himself, and arranged for a first meeting of his class to take place on the terrace of the Café Continental, Brest’s best café, at 6:00 p.m. Ten young men and a second instructor assembled at the appointed hour. Some time later an apologetic Saint-Exupéry appeared; he had lost his way in the winding streets of Brest’s old city, where he had rented a room. He made an unforgettable entrance. If Saint-Exupéry had stood out on an airfield Saint-Ex now stood out among precisely the kind of men whose background and schooling resembled his own. Chassin remembered the effect produced by his massive student, “this big, rough-hewn devil with the shock of dark, unruly hair, his powerful forehead, and his luminous expression of intelligence and kindness.” Saint-Exupéry and the course’s sole engineer were the only two men not in uniform; the pilot was five or six years older than his classmates (and two years older than his instructor) and balding. If his fame had not preceded him his classmates at Brest were well aware all the same that the Aéropostale pilots were not exactly paper-pushers. He was immediately baptized “Juby.”
Chassin’s course got off to a lively start. The genial professor ordered a round of vermouth and cassis, after which the senior officer among the students did the same, as was proper. Chassin’s colleague offered up the next round; Saint-Exupéry then broke with tradition, proposing a round of vermouth and cassis on behalf of the civilian students. Thirteen Noilly cassis and a few drunken choruses later the group was on familiar terms. Saint-Exupéry clearly felt comfortable within this circle, in which company he elaborated on the terrors he had caused at Bossuet. He must have taken particular pleasure in relating the story of the failed entrance exams to the naval academy, which he now attributed—as any writer whose first book was on the presses that April would have been tempted to—to a failing grade in French. The group’s camaraderie was cemented in the evenings, not only in the brasseries of the city, but on the roof of the old château where the courses were held. Here Chassin and his students assembled, sextants in hand, to map the evening sky. When the clouds rolled in, as they do often in Brest, the astronomers chatted happily for hours, in the chill, as they waited for the skies to clear.
If Saint-Exupéry was famous in Brest it was neither for his tales of the desert nor for his schoolboy antics, however. He distinguished himself immediately with his “clumsiness and his lively intelligence,” proving as brilliant on the theoretical plane as he was hopelessly maladroit on the practical one. Chassin noted th
at his student had an innate feel for mathematics: though he had been lost in the educational system he had not forgotten any of his earlier training, and had as good a grasp of calculus as any of the young lieutenants. He displayed a remarkable ability to locate subtle relationships between two seemingly unrelated phenomena; as Daurat had also observed, he could disassemble a complex question into its simple components with alacrity. Invention came naturally to him. He was a genius as an engineer, more successful now than he had been with his flying bicycle or his irrigation system. There was only one difficulty with the navigational apparatuses Saint-Exupéry devised at Brest and shared in confidence with Chassin: by and large, they existed already.
He did not win high marks on the practical level; his missteps were still being catalogued years later. He smashed an expensive quadrant, broke a magnetic compass, misplaced a hydrographic circle. He miserably failed a pop quiz on magnetic derivation, spending an entire afternoon in a panic-stricken sweat only to arrive at a series of outlandish answers. He ignored Chassin’s repeated reminders that the pilot of a hydroplane pulled back on his stick to take off rather than forward, as in a conventional tail-dragger; Saint-Exupéry dutifully pushed the stick forward, thrusting the floats downward into the water. The plane, its pilot, and his instructor ploughed into a ferocious whirlpool. On another occasion he very nearly drowned himself. Chassin had been teaching his students to fly a two-motor Latham hydroplane, one peculiarity of which was that its drift-ometer hatch was exceedingly difficult to close. He had issued specific instructions that the driftometer was as a consequence not to be touched for any reason, instructions that Saint-Exupéry alone ignored, consulting the mechanism and then neglecting to close the hatch before landing. After much frantic hand-waving, he and the Latham, both of them waterlogged, were lifted from the bay by a dockside crane. Saved from the waters he began to make excuses for his awkwardness; Chassin confined himself to treating Saint-Exupéry coldly, a punishment from which his student suffered more than he might have from any other.
In his letters from Brest he does not sound as if he is thriving, probably because of the workload. He wrote his mother that Brest was “not much fun” and that he would love her to visit but (inexplicably) had only debts at the moment. He missed Saint-Maurice terribly and reported that he needed a vacation. In a melancholic mood he wrote Ségogne in May, after the birth of his friend’s daughter. He reported that he was tired of his life, which seemed to consist of either sand or sea, both of which were notoriously poor in greenery and women. He was sure Ségogne, as a new father, would be proud and insufferable, which he conceded was only natural under the circumstances. He could be a solitary creature, as one friend with whom he watched a leisurely Brest sunset—seated thirty feet from each other without exchanging a word—was quick to note.
At Brest as at Bossuet, he was distracted by literature, this time more legitimately. He was greatly preoccupied—too much so, in Chassin’s opinion—by the correction of the proofs of Southern Mail, which he must have received early in May, the same month that an excerpt from the book appeared in the NRF. As soon as the novel’s proofs arrived Saint-Exupéry shared them with his instructor, whose opinion he valued greatly. (Chassin was favorably impressed.) In the end the novel became so much a part of life in Brest that spring that the entire class was able to recite the first page of the book by heart. Nor did Saint-Exupéry’s obsession confine itself to his classmates. His Parisian cousin, Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, himself a naval officer, remembered having been deprived of a night’s sleep by a dramatic reading of Southern Mail just after Saint-Exupéry had received the proofs.
The young author was not always so emboldened. Also in April, at Gallimard’s suggestion, he paid a call on André Beucler, a writer of about his age who already had a number of publications to his credit and who was something of a permanent fixture at the publishing firm. Beucler remembered feeling an immediate sympathy for the shy, robust individual who darkened his doorway and awkwardly pulled a set of proofs from his pocket with the words: “My publisher, who is also yours, has sent me to ask you for a short introduction to the book I have here. I apologize for disturbing you.” (Beucler would have been forewarned of the intrusion: evidently Saint-Exupéry had called the previous day and left word with Beucler’s family. Moreover, Beucler, who had a few years earlier been Gaston Gallimard’s roommate and who now very much played the role of his emissary-at-large, had recently complained that his ambassadorial duties left him little time to write. Gallimard countered that Beucler was living a privileged life in his employ but all the same threw him the Saint-Exupéry preface—which he requested for the next day at noon—to placate him.) The introduction, largely a meditation on the heroism of the Aéropostale crew, indeed appeared on Gallimard’s desk the day after Saint-Exupéry’s visit. In it Beucler presented the first novelist as one of the company’s star pilots. “Saint-Exupéry is not a writer,” he explained, making an impressive case instead for his being a hero. Months later, when Beucler and Saint-Exupéry had become friends, Beucler regretted not having been more effusive in his praise for the work. He found its author astonishing, radiant, the kind of man for whom heads turned in the street. He was interested in everything, always eager to divulge a subtle observation on which he had clearly meditated for some time. Said Beucler, recalling a series of walks and dinners, bookstore visits and afternoons in cafés: “He seemed to hold a degree in all subjects.”
This was ironic in light of his fate in Brest. In July Saint-Exupéry passed his final examination, as did all of his classmates. At the end of the term, however, the air force colonel in charge of the program paid a visit to the academy, partly to remind Chassin of the prestige of his course. Its reputation had only been enhanced by its association with Joseph Le Brix, an early instructor and a hero since 1927 for having made the first nonstop crossing of the South Atlantic. For the course to retain its cachet, the colonel explained, it was necessary that Chassin flunk two students. The young lieutenant protested but so did his superior; ultimately Chassin relented and handed over the names of the last two of his eleven students. One of them, the next-to-last, happened to be a very promising officer whose career the Ministry wanted in no way jeopardized. “Give me the name of the ninth,” ordered the Colonel, forcing the professor to deliver up Saint-Exupéry, who had fallen to ninth place only because of the points his mishaps had cost him. (Such interventions were not unheard of. Five years earlier Philippe Pétain had stepped in on Charles de Gaulle’s behalf at the École Supérieure de Guerre, when a costly “assez bien” the lowest grade accorded, was raised to a “bien” without which de Gaulle’s entire career would have been compromised.) Saint-Exupéry was failed; it was as if the system could only conspire against him. Mercifully, this was to be his last academic experience.
~
Southern Mail, meanwhile, was published in July. Suzanne Verneilh and her husband, who had been the chief of the Agadir airfield when Saint-Exupéry had been posted to Juby, ran into their ex-neighbor that month in Paris and made a dinner date with him at a favorite restaurant in the 17th arrondissement, near their apartment. Saint-Exupéry arrived at the Maisonette Basque a little late and greatly distracted, a copy of Southern Mail under his arm. The book had come off the press that day. He put the volume down on the table next to him without saying a word, but Madame Verneilh noticed a look of secret delight cross his face as he did so. Uncharacteristically, he paid no attention to what he was eating; he let Verneilh make all the conversation. He was oblivious even to the “superb blonde” who stared at him from across the restaurant all evening and to whom Verneilh had to direct his attention. Occasionally he reached out furtively, dreamily, to caress the cover of the book. Madame Verneilh doubted that the first novelist even remembered having eaten that evening, much less where and with whom. She and her husband left him at the corner of the avenue Carnot and watched as he headed off toward the Arc de Triomphe, the slim volume pressed tightly to his broad chest.
Southern Mail’s first major reviewer was the eminent Edmond Jaloux, writing in Les Nouvelles Littéraires. Responding to Beucler’s preface he observed that heroes generally wrote poorly, but was quick to note that this author was an exception to the rule. He was much taken with the novel—though understandably more so with its impressions of aviation than with the love story of Geneviève and Bernis, which struck him as superfically treated—and Saint-Exupéry was much pleased by the notice. Literary circles are small everywhere but especially so in France: Jean Prévost did not feel disqualified from writing about Southern Mail although he had been the first to put Saint-Exupéry into print and had helped to steer him to the Gallimard stable. He reviewed the book glowingly in the September edition of the NRF. He too had high praise for Saint-Exupéry’s ability to render action on the page; he found the discontinuity of the story consistent with the reality of experienced adventure. An indulgent friend and reviewer, he was all the same forced to admit that the sentimental part of the novel was awkwardly handled. (Except for The Little Prince, this observation would prove as true of the work as of the man. Stung by these comments and reined in by his natural discretion, Saint-Exupéry henceforth steered wide of matters of the heart on the page.) Prévost was struck in particular by a line of Saint-Exupéry’s quoted in Beucler’s preface: “I have loved this life that I have never really understood, a life that is not at all regular. I don’t even know how I got here; it was all a lark.”
In August Saint-Exupéry was back at that life. Didier Daurat seemed in no way put off by his pilot’s failure at Brest, although he must have concluded from Chassin’s reports that Saint-Exupéry was not meant to be the first man to pilot a hydroplane across the South Atlantic. (The honor fell to Mermoz the following year.) He put Saint-Exupéry to work on the Toulouse—Casablanca route, now piloting Latécoère 25’s and 26’s, the aircraft that would change the geography of the African coast. That month, in the middle of a heat wave, Saint-Exupéry and Henry Delaunay, who had joined the company at about the same time, flew through the night with two mechanics from Alicante to the beach of Valencia to rescue a downed Latécoère. The mechanics set to work immediately on their arrival, at 10:00 a.m. Delaunay voted to nap on the beach under an airplane wing as they worked, but Saint-Exupéry vetoed the idea and insisted on visiting the ancient city, one with a rich history, having passed through the hands of nearly every conquering people since Greek times. For the next few hours he dragged a sulking Delaunay through hot, dusty streets, from sad church to crumbling fortification. It seemed to Delaunay that the deserted, sun-struck city consisted mainly of beggars and flies; his ill humor—which he made no attempt to conceal—was not improved by the fact that the two found nothing to drink except warm beer.
