Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  Néri knew that information on two subjects was to be communicated to his pilot with special urgency: news regarding the whereabouts of Guillaumet, of whom Saint-Exupéry felt, after the Andes incident, more possessive than ever (he could be more nervous about his safe passage than Noèlle Guillaumet, whom he one night repeatedly abandoned in a Casablanca cinema to call the airfield while Madame Guillaumet, surely no less aware of the weather, calmly watched the movie), and news regarding mail from Consuelo, for the routing of which everyone on the African run had explicit instructions. Evidently Saint-Exupéry spent a good deal of time in the cockpit calculating where, exactly, he would intercept his next letter. As much in the first days as at the end, theirs was an unusual twist on domestic life. Consuelo was not particularly happy about her husband’s long absences, although she had certainly developed no habit of stability in her year’s marriage to the restless Gómez Carrillo. In Casablanca she told Néri that she wished Saint-Exupéry was not a pilot but a minister, a word which was pronounced “ministrou” in her Spanish-laced French. She came finally to live in Casablanca late in 1931—she would join her husband here again during the second half of 1932—at which time the two moved into the apartment that was to be their first marital home. “Come live with me,” Saint-Exupéry had written in a letter in which he promised she would be entirely happy in Morocco, “and fill my house with your marvelous chaos. Write on all the tables. They are yours. And put lots of disorder in my heart.”

  On this he could rely, as Consuelo’s domestic habits rivaled her husband’s. Fleury, invited to look up Saint-Exupéry in Casablanca after the memorable flight to Port-Étienne, did so at the first available opportunity. One afternoon he and the pilot were long in savoring their noontime apéritif and returned to the Saint-Exupérys’ apartment later than expected for lunch. Consuelo welcomed them graciously but appeared crestfallen: they were late, and her soufflé was ruined. They would have to make the best of a tin of sardines. Fleury thought nothing of this incident until it was replayed under similar circumstances, down to the last detail. Léon Antoine, who had so clearly remembered Saint-Exupéry’s grand entrance in Toulouse, was invited with his wife for a before-dinner drink at the Saint-Exupérys’ one evening in Casablanca. On their arrival their host opened a bottle. It was empty, as were all those that followed. He called in his domestic to ask where the Cinzano might have gone, a question that was answered with a shrug. Saint-Exupéry asked the young man to go out and buy a new bottle, a request that was met with a second shrug; although he had been given fifty francs that morning, the domestic was out of money. When pressed he came up with a list of items, clearly invented on the spot, on which he had spent the sum. After his performance Saint-Exupéry reached into his pockets for the money with which to send the young man out for a new bottle. Turning them inside out, he produced not a cent. In the end it was Léon Antoine who purchased his host and hostess their next bottle of Cinzano.

  Consuelo’s arrival in Casablanca did not go unnoticed. Henri Comte, a worldly general surgeon based in Casablanca who came to know the Saint-Exupérys well, was told by a fellow colonial that he had lunched recently at the Hôtel Excelsior at the side of a ravishing, unaccompanied young woman. Unable to contain his curiosity, he had leaned over and asked where she was from. Replied the young woman with the utmost seriousness, “I have come down from the sky, the stars are my sisters.” The day after hearing this story Comte was asked by a friend in Lyons to look up Saint-Exupéry; he was flabbergasted to discover that the celestial creature of whom he had just heard was the aviator’s wife. Comte and his wife could not help but be fascinated by the couple, who were quickly adopted by all of their friends. Together they spent many evenings at a seaside bistro called Chez Zézé, a favorite of Casablanca taxi drivers. The Comtes would pick Saint-Exupéry up at the airfield and drive him to the twenty-four-hour restaurant, animated by two mechanical pianos and a colorful clientele, where they would listen for hours to his tales. The pilot, having been up all night, was generally the last to succumb to fatigue. The departure of the Saint-Exupérys late in 1932 was perceived by the French community as a disaster: the herculean poet and his fragile wife were the source of much fascination. Said a friend who was to know the Saint-Exupérys a little later, on their return to Paris: “I have never forgotten the way Saint-Ex looked at her. So fragile and small, she charmed him … she surprised him, she fascinated him; in short, he adored her. That little bird never kept still. She perched according to her whim on her huge stuffed bear, that huge, flying stuffed bear that was Saint-Ex. They seemed to have walked out of an animated movie—a very animated movie—by Walt Disney.”

  ~

  From this decidedly colorful life Saint-Exupéry was abruptly removed several times: once in 1931, by good fortune; a second time by orders he might have preferred to have ignored; a third and final time, in late 1932, by tragedy. Night Flight, the novel he had written on scraps of mismatched paper all over South America the previous year and whittled down to 180 pages on the Riviera that spring, was published in Paris in October 1931. The reviews were glowing. Saint-Exupéry had given France something she had not seen since the days of Corneille and La Princesse de Clèves, when duty and honor reigned supreme; here was a tale of heroism, a slim, modern epic, one that might speak to the defeatism that had crept into the French novel since Madame Bovary. Night Flight “will relegate all novels of earthly chivalry to the nursery,” opined the reviewer from Le Matin. “It is not a novel; better yet, it is a great book,” announced Les Nouvelles Littéraires. The pilot at its center, wrote one admirer, was “the man of the century.” Simpler and more tightly reined in than Southern Mail, possibly in response to the critiques of that novel, Night Flight hums with contained emotion. Saint-Exupéry could not entirely forgo a certain lyricism—ironically this now won him the accolade Maeterlinck had applied to Gómez Carrillo, and for a second time Consuelo found herself married to “a poet in prose”—but Night Flight is crisp and lean as well, classic in its proportions, a battle with the elements on a scale with The Old Man and the Sea. Three mail planes head through dark skies toward Buenos Aires, one north from Patagonia, the second east from Chile, the third south from Paraguay. In Buenos Aires the pilot of the European mail will await them, flying east at midnight. In the end, however, only two aircraft arrive; the European mail will take off as scheduled but without the Patagonian mail, lost with its pilot to a ferocious cyclone.

  No one follows the mail’s progress more attentively than the steely Rivière, operations manager of the enterprise, whom Saint-Exupéry lent his own title but who got tangled up in 1931—as he does still today—in the legend of Didier Daurat. He, and not Fabien, the ill-fated flyer who perishes with the Patagonian mail, is the hero of the novel. Rivière dresses like Daurat and shares his fiber and bearing, but he thinks like Saint-Exupéry. His mission, as he sees it, is to temper his men like steel, to knead them into shape, to make them rise above themselves for the success of the gargantuan enterprise that is the mail. With few words and much severity he keeps his men in line, sending them out to do the impossible. It is because of Rivière that “the service of the mails was paramount over 20,000 miles of land and sea. ‘The men are happy,’ he would say, ‘because they like their work, and they like it because I am hard.” ’ And hard he is, shaking his men up so that the elements will not, seeing to it that they are held responsible not only for their own peccadilloes but for the faults of the weather as well. Rivière’s battle cry—which will echo throughout the work of Saint-Exupéry—is “Those are the orders.” His secret, according to his second-in-command: “If only you punish men enough, the weather will improve.” He himself wonders: “Am I just or unjust? I’ve no idea. All I know is that when I hit hard there are fewer accidents.” In France, in 1931, Rivière won comparisons with Moses, with the heroes of Greek drama. Raving about the novel the following year to Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller billed Rivière as “a Jack London superman, with more sophisticated rumi
nations.” (Miller rightly suspected that French literature is by no means crowded with such characters: there are plenty of heroes in French literature, but—outside of the seventeenth century—they are more prone to swashbuckling than to the exercise of ruthless discipline, and they rarely find their adversary in nature.) In Hollywood a measure of his strength could be taken from the fact that Rivière was seen as the greatest role that could have been written for John Barrymore. A few years later, when the stirrings of fascism had grown louder, the duty-obsessed head of the South American service would seem an advertisement for something far more dangerous. In 1931, however, Saint-Exupéry could do little wrong.

  While Rivière may seem a perfectly Nietzschean figure, while he looked to his men to be “Rivière the Great, Rivière the Conqueror,” the “old lion” reserved his highest admiration for a different brand of courage. He marveled most over the quiet satisfaction of a carpenter, the modest industry of a blacksmith before his anvil, the power of a gardener cultivating ground that forests would only be too happy to reclaim. If his interior dialogue is, as Miller noted, a step up from that which Jack London might have lent him, it is also familiar: Rivière asks himself the same questions with which Saint-Exupéry badgered Delaunay in Cape Juby. Is any amenity worth the crushed face of the worker injured during its construction, Rivière asks himself, thinking of a country bridge erected at a high cost in a far-off country. “Not one of the peasants using the road would ever have wished to mutilate this face so hideously just to save the extra walk to the next bridge,” he reasons. What is this higher value for which we strive, which we seem to think more precious than human life? “By virtue of what emotion,” Saint-Exupéry had interrogated Delaunay, “do we risk our lives, sometimes so casually, to move the mail?” Even if he cannot quite put his finger on what it is, Rivière knows that there is a greater good, which consists of whatever makes man eternal. “The mail,” Saint-Exupéry had concluded at Juby, “is sacred. What is inside has little importance.”

  For his portrait of man and superman he certainly relied on the operations director, who was to spend the rest of his life vainly attempting to pry himself loose from his fictional counterpart. But well before Daurat existed for him Saint-Exupéry had invented him: Rivière amounts to a fully fleshed-out incarnation of the gruff, taciturn Bernis, the hero of Saint-Exupéry’s first story, written and published before he had met Daurat. It was a figure for whom the fatherless son had a predisposition, as the indulged, iconoclastic aristocrat did for the stoicism, the steadfastness, the rigorous professionalism of the mail pilots. Military posturing meant little to him, but bowing to duty did. Arguably these were qualities he could fully admire because they were not naturally his own; Aéropostale transformed his life to a greater extent than it did most of its pilots. Saint-Exupéry always remained reverent before Daurat, whom he never addressed as anything but Monsieur Daurat, with whom he was not friendly until years later, and to whom he presented himself always like a small boy in search of a blessing. To him—ultimately probably to both men’s regret—he dedicated this novel. If Daurat provided living proof of something that Saint-Exupéry had for a long time thought existed, for which he carried around the Platonic template, he also later justified Saint-Exupéry’s abiding faith in that ideal. Saint-Exupéry’s posthumous and most ambitious book amounts to a long meditation on the father-son, ruler-subject dynamic, a study that can be said to have begun, on the page, with Night Flight. In 1941, at a time when France was most at a loss for leaders, Rivière’s creator wrote in a sort of Hegelian twist on the theme:

  On what does our salvation depend? On leaders. But we must agree on what we mean by a leader. A leader is one who governs without doubt. The manager [gérant] also governs—he arbitrates and administers—but the manager is not a leader.… A leader is one who needs us, needs us ardently. He is one who cannot forgo our participation, who solicits not only our effort in the task at hand but our constant invention, that which transforms us into creators. Because he needs our creations.… The leader is one who shows us enough respect to need us. Because almost anyone can give orders, can impose himself upon us from the height of a throne. But in what way do these posturings of a corporal have anything to do with authority? Authority entails creation.

  He had come a long way from the black-and-white reasoning of Night Flight, but the image of Daurat clearly still burned bright. Unlike most people in his life, his Aéropostale boss never disappointed him, nor could Saint-Exupéry, clinging to the ideal, ever let him.

  Much more of the pilot made its way into Night Flight than simply the consciousness he breathed into the character of Rivière. The novel is rich in autobiographical touches; it is, after all, the story of a struggle Saint-Exupéry had often enough lived firsthand. Once again he cribbed from his letters, painting a picture of a flight over the Andes exactly as he had described it in 1950 to his mother. The harbor of his childhood bed became that of the pilot of the European mail, whose sheets are smoothed by his wife, “as a divine hand calms the sea.” Rivière remembers a poignant conversation he had had with a young mother who had lost a child, a drama that had, by way of Gabrielle’s experience in 1925 and Louise de Vilmorin’s sister the previous year, already made its way as well into Southern Mail. Early on in the novel Rivière mercilessly fires a mechanic named Roblet who had worked in aviation since 1910 and who had outlived his usefulness; Saint-Exupéry had in fact himself been forced to terminate a veteran with the same name whom Mermoz had brought to South America and who had been the chief mechanic at San Antonio Oeste. Taxing work for any man, the position proved to be too much for a sixty-year-old. A thin layer of fairy dust still hangs over the story, which for all of its sobriety still sparkles with frozen jewels and buried treasure, even if it does not succumb to the overblown lyricism of Southern Mail.

  Nearly every element in the novel testifies to Saint-Exupéry’s love affair with the abstract. Its characters are not so much characters as they are walking moral entities. For Daurat, the inveterate leader, Saint-Exupéry invents the foil of Robineau, the small-minded inspector, the consummate “gérant” of his 1941 piece. (Robineau was modeled on an actual inspector, reputed to have borrowed and never returned a collection of rocks Saint-Exupéry assembled at Cape Juby, and on whom he now vented his rancor. Robineau is made to suffer from eczema and from a pathetic lack of intelligence; he wants nothing more than to save the company from some mortal danger but manages only to locate one rusting screw. He is isolated from the pilots once because it is his job to give orders, a second time because his orders do not earn him the respect accorded Rivière. Saint-Exupéry allows him all the same a little of their transcendence; he gives the fictional Robineau a rock collection, his “talismans to open doors of mystery.” Robineau longs to share his pebbles with someone: “All his long life only the stones had not been hard on him,” wrote Saint-Exupéry, confessing later to having been much amused by this unsubtle airing of his grievance.) Fabien and the pilot who is to carry the mail to Europe are portrayed as young archangels, both of whom remain faceless, one of whom never merits a name. Their wives, the only two women in the novel, represent a world apart, one that answers to different rules and that Saint-Exupéry pits squarely against that of Rivière. Again Saint-Exupéry explored what he saw as the divide between the heroic arena and the domestic front. While the scene in which the Europe-bound pilot’s wife wakes and prepares her husband for his evening battle with the stars may be the tenderest Saint-Exupéry ever wrote for a man and a woman, the forbearing wife amounts still to nothing more substantive than a little girl. Her husband draws on his heavy armor; she is shunted aside by the call of duty. When Fabien’s wife appears at the airfield for an explanation of her husband’s tardiness, Rivière dreads the encounter; she does not so much represent a lost pilot’s wife as “another theory of life.”

  One can dive deep into Night Flight for autobiographical traces but not for symbols, all of which are walking about on the novel’s surf
ace, posing as characters. It is a work in which the sky is described in detail but which is otherwise entirely devoid of place. There is nothing vaguely South American about it, and if the meteorological conditions could be reproduced the story could equally well take place in the sky over Mars. Saint-Exupéry clears the stage, the better to force us inside the hearts and minds of these men. His first novel had been a moody, autobiographical work. With Night Flight, he began to reach for the moralistic underpinnings that would anchor all his later work, more accurately categorized—with the possible exception of The Little Prince—as essay than as fiction, and that would ultimately evolve from essay to parable. His admirers like to say that Saint-Exupéry deserted the novelistic form because Night Flight was so widely misconstrued; in fact even in this work he is clearly headed toward the territory of the moralistes, an aviator in search of a higher world.

  Saint-Exupéry managed to fuse the active and the contemplative as skillfully as he ever would in the pages of Night Flight, among the finest he would write. This he accomplished through a series of narrative devices of which he was himself no doubt unaware. They were not purely literary; he could not have written a Lord Jim. The story is told in telegrams, flashbacks, emotional close-ups, a sort of literary montage, all of which struck an occasional reviewer as a camera’s-eye view of the world. More accurately it was a pilot’s-eye view. Fabien and the narrator make poetry of the night sky; Rivière thinks and communicates in a telegraphic shorthand reminiscent of Daurat but belonging to early aviation in general, as witnessed by Saint-Exupéry and Néri’s in-flight correspondence. The novel’s dialogue is so pared down as to resemble that of a screenplay more than a novel, a virtue that in the end played better on the page than on the screen, partly because what seemed an elemental struggle between man and the universe was in its themes and in its language a far subtler tale. One of the first to recognize Saint-Exupéry’s crystalline prose as deceptively simple was Stuart Gilbert, a translator of Ulysses, whom Caresse Crosby introduced to the aviator in the hope that he might render Night Flight into English. As Gilbert told an earlier Saint-Exupéry biographer, the limpid text proved far more troublesome than it had seemed at first glance. “And before I was through, I was taking passages to Joyce and saying: ‘Now how would you translate this?’ And Joyce would take a long squint and then say: ‘Well, let’s see …’ And I’d get my pages back later, revised by the Master.” The Joyce-enhanced Gilbert translation failed all the same to win over the English-language critics, a backhanded tribute, given Gilbert’s considerable gifts, to Saint-Exupéry and le mot juste.