Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  Only that night, at dinner in Alicante with Saint-Exupéry and two pilots bound for Oran, did Delaunay discover Valencia. His colleague’s description of the city was rigorously accurate, save that when Saint-Exupéry talked “the old city practically became a daughter of the sun; suddenly she was less dulled by the heat than richly carved out of light.” That night Delaunay claimed to discover the pleasure of “the music-lover listening to the virtuoso, following along on a one-dimensional score.” This was Saint-Exupéry in his element, Saint-Ex Scheherazade, the twenty-nine-year-old version of the late-night versifier of Saint-Maurice. He was more a natural litterateur than a born pilot; it seemed to Delaunay, that he lived entirely “pour avoir à exprimer” (“in order to have something to say”). In the commitment to the mails he certainly did not see what the others saw: it was for him a romance and a culture as much as a religion. Aéropostale gave him his subject, as well as a mantle of responsibility that brought him into his own. After all of his run-ins with discipline, the highly regulated life won him over. Ironically, it was in the sacrifice to the regularity of the mails that the erratic Saint-Exupéry felt himself to be in the service of a higher good. His was far more than an honest job to a man for whom an honest job would never have sufficed. In this respect he found himself among equals: nearly all the Aéropostale pilots were, in the words of Noèlle Guillaumet, “bad businessmen … [who] did not want to hear about money. In the end they attached only the faintest importance to those things that men traditionally care most about.” The grandeur of la Ligne freed Saint-Exupéry not only from a dreaded routine but also from the tyranny of petty things. Unfortunately, within two years the grandeur of la Ligne was to be found more in his writing than anywhere else.

  IX

  ~

  Toward the Country Where the Stones Fly

  1929–1931

  If we except those miraculous and isolated moments fate can bestow on a man, loving your work (unfortunately the privilege of a few) represents the best, most concrete approximation of happiness on earth. But this is a truth not many know. This boundless region, the region of le boulot, the job, il rusco—of daily work, in other words, is less known than the Antarctic …

  PRIMO LEVI, The Monkey’s Wrench

  Early in September 1929, on landing in Toulouse with the Spanish mail, Saint-Exupéry learned that he was to be transferred to South America, possibly for as long as two years. He was told nothing more and given six days to put his affairs in order. He spent them charging about chaotically, saying his good-byes in Agay and Saint-Maurice, running errands in Lyons, making a last stop in Paris. In the capital he felt much as he had before his departure for Toulouse three years earlier. He had few friends he truly cared about and they—Lucie-Marie Decour, Henry de Ségogne, Yvonne de Lestrange among them—were all out of town. As he had been a poor correspondent he had no one to blame for this but himself, which he did poignantly: “No one was around for this reunion, which I had arranged rather too silently.” He concluded that his friendships were in a state of great disorder, a condition he began to remedy as the distance from France increased.

  Yvonne de Lestrange was on the dock in Bordeaux to see him off the third week of the month. He was delighted to learn from her that the literary world was talking about Southern Mail; he probably told her that he had also received encouraging words from Gallimard, who wanted another book from him as soon as he could produce one. Either Yvonne de Lestrange or another friend delivered to him a letter from Decour before he set sail. His ship took a leisurely eighteen days to make its way from Bordeaux to Buenos Aires: Saint-Exupéry discharged a letter from Bilbao to his mother, from Lisbon to Renée de Saussine, from Dakar—where word from home awaited him—to Decour. He reported that he was spending his time at sea entertaining a group of young girls, under the careful supervision of their thick-waisted mothers. They dressed up in costume; they played charades; they admired the sharks and the schools of flying fish. In such company Saint-Exupéry felt at times fifteen again, at times inexpressibly old. Decour’s letter did nothing to alleviate his despair on that count: she had written to say she was engaged. From the Dakar harbor, alone in the ship’s bar after midnight, he acknowledged this happy news with mixed feelings. He had not himself been a candidate for Decour’s hand and did not begrudge her the marriage, especially as he had met and approved of the fiancé, a charismatic young lawyer who had been blinded in the war. He did, however, reproach her her timing. His whole world was in flux, he was off again for the unknown, and she had chosen this moment to deprive him of one of his few anchors. He repeated to her his observation that married friends were soon lost to him—this probably because they were less easy to coax from bed for a 3:00 a.m. literary discussion—and predicted that the same fate would befall her. Several months later he tried sheepishly, but without apologizing, to explain away this ornery letter. The best he could do was to say that his sadness could not be held against him as he did not himself know the cause of it. He suggested that he simply did not know how to write a letter of congratulations, itself a coy admission of wrongdoing. A little as a peace offering, he asked if Decour would allow him to have Gallimard send on to her the author’s proofs of Southern Mail.

  If Saint-Exupéry had been disappointed by his Parisian sendoff, he had no reason to be with his arrival. On the dock to greet him in Buenos Aires on October 12 were Mermoz, Guillaumet, and Reine, who welcomed him like the prodigal son. The hardy Reine raced forward to announce exuberantly that he had found him a luxurious apartment. “You’ll be more comfortable than in your Juby shack!” he promised. Saint-Exupéry responded with a firm and solemn handshake, one generally described as bone-crushing. He spent his first few weeks at the Majestic Hotel on the Avenida de Mayo, not far from the Aéropostale offices. At the end of the month he decamped to his new quarters, off the Calle Florida, the city’s most animated shopping street, though as it turned out the well-intentioned Reine had been wrong: he would have much preferred the Juby barracks. In his furnished apartment on the eighth floor of a fifteen-story building, one of the capital’s concrete marvels, he claimed to enjoy the same agreeable sensation of lightness he might were he to have been entombed in the Great Pyramid. He was to spend slightly longer in Buenos Aires than he had at Cape Juby, but he resisted the city with all his might. This time he truly felt exiled to the desert.

  After three massive waves of immigration, Buenos Aires in 1929 was a vast, flat, bustling metropolis of more than two million people. Its population was nearly as great as that of Paris, with the difference that Paris was 2,000 years old and for most of that time had been a pedestrian city; Buenos Aires was less than 400 years old and had been designed—most of it in the previous forty years—around the trolley car. Sixty years earlier the population of the Argentine capital had been one-tenth that of Paris; compared to the French city—and the citizens of Buenos Aires unabashedly made the comparison—Buenos Aires had been built in a day, and that without the benefit of a Baron Haussmann. To Saint-Exupéry the city resembled “a giant slab of badly cooked dough.” It had more in common with Chicago or Melbourne, spanking new, laid out in a hurry for maximum profit, rich in all things but history, a more successful human than architectural melting pot, true to its reputation as “the world’s most prodigious mushroom.” Every well-bred Argentine thought himself spiritually and culturally a Frenchman, but all her love of France could not make Buenos Aires look like Paris. A house dating from 1890 was considered old; the city’s architecture was a jumble of steel-and-concrete, New York–style skyscrapers, French-inspired hôtels particuliers, and small colonial homes, all piled atop one another. Saint-Exupéry noted, as did other early visitors, that the architects of Buenos Aires had been ingenious in their ability to suppress all perspective, even on their better work.

  The central part of town, where Saint-Exupéry lived and spent most of his time, was confined to a few narrow streets, poorly paved and generally mobbed, streaming with traffic, although one dr
ove into town more for ostentation’s sake than for expediency’s. The Calle Florida, roughly equivalent to London’s Bond Street but more the width of Wall Street, may well have been one of the prides of Buenos Aires—it boasted a Harrods and the city’s most exclusive club—but it was not a primary attraction to a man in love with the open sky. Most remarkable and most unnerving for Saint-Exupéry was the thoroughgoing absence of nature within the Argentine capital. Buenos Aires was almost entirely lacking in parks; built upon an estuary—“Río de la Plata” was as much a misnomer as “Río de Oro”—it is a city in which one can live for a year without once seeing water. Justifiably, Saint-Exupéry felt a prisoner of a concrete kingdom. So disenchanted was Le Corbusier by “the speculative chaos” of Buenos Aires when he visited that same year that he proposed the city establish an outer limit, around which it create a green belt, and beyond which it could continue to expand.*

  A man of the Old World, Saint-Exupéry did not take to the flamboyance of Buenos Aires’s nouveau riche society any more than to the city itself. In all fairness he had touched down amid a particularly closed society, one in which even the best-credentialed visitor found that doors opened slowly. He took his consolation in his frequent absences; he almost certainly flew more in his fifteen months in Argentina than at any other time in his life. Two days after his arrival in Buenos Aires he traveled 400 miles south to Bahía Blanca, the first stop on a proposed Patagonian line, as the passenger of Paul Vachet, then operations manager of the Argentine company. The two men continued on, over 600 miles of desolate coastline, to Comodoro Rivadavia, a frontier town that looked to Saint-Exupéry like a set for Chaplin’s Gold Rush. The crust of the earth around the low-lying settlement was as dented, he wrote later, as that of an old boiler; the community was itself hardly more picturesque. Comodoro Rivadavia owed its existence to oil, which had been discovered beneath it in 1907; blackened derricks presided over a town that otherwise consisted entirely of corrugated iron. On October 17 the two men returned to Buenos Aires with the second Comodoro Rivadavia mail, delivering it to the capital in twelve hours instead of the four to five days it had previously taken by boat. Since February Vachet had been busy organizing the route, which was nearly ready to be opened to regular service.

  If Saint-Exupéry was wondering what exactly he was doing in South America he was at last enlightened on the twenty-fifth, when he was told he would be replacing Vachet as operations manager. (Evidently without rancor for having to abandon to a colleague a route he had spent months prospecting, Vachet went off to set up a Venezuelan operation.) In his new position Saint-Exupéry, aside from opening up the Patagonian route, was to supervise the entire Argentine operation from an administrative point of view, to hire and manage its personnel and outfit and oversee its airfields. His annual salary was set at a princely 225,000 francs. He was a little proud, although he cloaked his satisfaction in melancholy, pining for the simpler life of the African coast. He wrote his mother that he hoped she would find in his success a “gratifying revenge” for all the reproaches she had had to endure from the family concerning his education. She had clearly “succeeded not so badly,” he wrote another family member, deflecting the credit a litle. In a new twist on an old theme, he began immediately to send money home. A banquet for the changing of the guard was held for the Aéropostale personnel in Buenos Aires on October 29, 1929; in a photograph of the evening, Saint-Exupéry, a cigarette in hand, looks serious and settled, and, true to his word, suddenly a little old. Probably the next morning, he set off again for Comodoro Rivadavia.

  Ever since Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont, the Brazilian-based French magnate, had bought out Latécoère in 1927, arrangements had been under way to span South America with mail routes. Argentina and Uruguay exchanged volumes of mail with Europe every year; the larger country alone received 3.5 million letters from the Continent. In February of that year Bouilloux-Lafont came to agreements with the Argentine, Uruguayan, and Chilean governments, much to the dismay of the Americans and the Germans. Mermoz, Vachet, and their colleagues forged ahead in establishing the new routes, inaugurating service with Paraguay on January 1, 1929; night service between Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires in April; and service to Santiago, Chile, in July. Single-handedly, with matériel imported from France and with a staff composed mostly of South Americans, Bouilloux-Lafont built up a vast network. By the time he was done nearly twenty airfields were in service, many of them carved out of virgin forest. The operation was hugely expensive but also a potential gold mine, especially once Peru had been yoked into the empire late in 1930, unlocking the shortest route from Europe to the Pacific.

  A sister company of Aéropostale, the South American enterprise went by the name of Aeroposta Argentina. Its best-known representative was Jean Mermoz: in two years he had quite literally opened up the sky of South America, landing in Brazil, in Patagonia, in Chile, in Paraguay, in Bolivia, and in Peru, never once failing in a mission—despite a harrowing crash in the Andes and an equally hair-raising experience in the forests of the Paraguayan Chaco, where he lived like a character out of James Fenimore Cooper for a week. He was a most welcome conqueror, and his legend grew enormous. In a country well-attuned to commercial opportunities his portrait soon decorated cigarette packs, ashtrays, matchboxes, perfume bottles. Certainly Mermoz’s repute went a long way toward paving the way for Saint-Exupéry and the rest of his colleagues, welcomed with open arms as bearers of the future in most of the continent’s outposts, save those where pro-German sympathy continued to flourish. Mermoz returned to France four months after Saint-Exupéry’s arrival; when he did so it was said that he distributed the keys of his kingdom to his friends. To Étienne went Brazil, to Reine Paraguay, to Guillaumet the Santiago–Buenos Aires route over the Andes, to Saint-Exupéry Patagonia.

  At the end of October, when Saint-Exupéry returned in his new capacity to Comodoro Rivadavia, he carried an Argentine pilot named Rufino Luro Cambaceres along with him in his Latécoère 25. Cambaceres left him in the oil town and continued south by car to prospect airfields that would allow the mail line to continue to Tierra del Fuego. En route the two men had stopped in San Antonio Oeste, a third of the way between Bahía Blanca and Comodoro Rivadavia, where no Laté 25 had yet landed. The coastal community’s airstrip was too short for the aircraft, and Saint-Exupéry was forced to land in a dry lagoon a few miles from town. On the thirty-first he returned alone to Pacheco, the aerodrome thirty miles outside of Buenos Aires that was rented to the Aéropostale operation and where he now laid claim to an office. The next day Mermoz, in a newly arrived Latécoère 28, officially inaugurated mail service to Comodoro Rivadavia. It would fall to Saint-Exupéry to open the full 1,500-mile coast Cambaceres was then prospecting to Río Gallegos, fifty miles north of the Strait of Magellan, the following year. He spent the intermediate months, or the Argentine summer, familiarizing himself with his new territory, organizing the existing but primitive airfields at Bahía Blanca, San Antonio Oeste, and Trelew, creating those south of Comodoro Rivadavia. He flew west to Santiago for a few days, north to Asunción to survey the new Paraguayan route. He no longer had to battle Moors and sandstorms but had exchanged them for wind and night, for airfields that were dusty in fine weather and swampy most of the time, overrun, as was that of Bahía Blanca, by snakes or scorpions, illuminated only by storm lamps and faint triangles of gasoline flares, on which a nocturnal windsock could consist of a handkerchief held at arm’s length by a radio operator helpfully waving an electric lamp in his other hand. These hardships, rather than the man-made ones of Buenos Aires, were those with which Saint-Exupéry liked to contend. Among them, none was as formidable as the Patagonian wind.

  ~

  The speed limit for Patagonian motorists in the early 1930s was set at twenty miles per hour and reinforced by bumps built into the pavement of the region’s few roads. To drive any faster was to risk a potentially fatal encounter with the stones that flew along the ground, carried by ferocious gusts that rushed down f
rom the Andes. The wind picked up in San Antonio Oeste, grew fiercer as one continued south, and was unceasing beyond Comodoro Rivadavia, where—among the strongest in the world—it could reach velocities of 125 miles per hour. It regularly flattened crops, knocked down herds, carried away roofs, bowled over trucks. Saint-Exupéry liked to laugh later about an order he had purportedly signed at Comodoro Rivadavia, prohibiting pilots from landing in that town when the wind speed exceeded ninety miles per hour. Given that the average speed of a Laté 25 or 26 was nearly the same, the effect, in one direction anyway, was that of revving the engine of a car mounted on blocks, if rather more dangerous.

  The visibility in South America could be exceedingly good: When a pilot can see 125 miles ahead of him and is opposed by a strong wind, he is more than anything prone to believe that he will never arrive at his destination. Often enough in Patagonia in the 1930s the struggle ended in the wind’s favor; a Latécoère 25 could be forced to retreat. Daurat recalled a day when the gales so overpowered Saint-Exupéry that he could not make it to the coast 600 feet away. On another occasion he could still see the airport at Río Gallegos an hour after he had left it. He put five hours into the 150 miles that separated Río Gallegos from Punta Arenas, the town of 25,000 people perched on the Strait of Magellan, finally running out of fuel a third of the way from his destination. The return trip was accomplished in under sixty minutes. It could take over an hour to climb 900 feet in such weather; landing was another ordeal altogether. The Argentine government arranged for soldiers to assist the aviators; twelve to fourteen of them were on hand for a Comodoro Rivadavia landing under the most favorable of conditions. They divided into two groups, forming a 150-foot-long, ninety-foot-wide corridor between them, into which the pilot would fly at nearly full throttle. Tail high, the pilot kept his throttle up so that the air speed of the machine remained equal to that of the wind. Several members of the ground crew then rolled a cart under the tail skid of the immobile machine; the aircraft thus remained horizontal, presenting a streamlined profile to the wind. At the same time, the soldiers rushed forward with long bamboo poles, which they hooked through metal eyes installed on the underside of the wings. In this way the aircraft was secured to the ground despite the winds. Slowly, on signal, the pilot then advanced full throttle into the hangar, guided by his Lilliputian captors on either side, cutting the engine only once he was partially sheltered. It was a dangerous and time-consuming exercise; jauntily Saint-Exupéry told friends that it combined elements of harpoon-fishing and rappeling. On one occasion a violent gust poured down from the mountains just as the soldiers had caught onto the plane, lifting one column of men six feet off the ground, shaking them loose in midair, and forcing the plane down on its opposite wing, crushing to death two of the men on its leeward side.