by Stacy Schiff
The writer thought of his book as an exploration of the dark; we know he began it thinking of his childhood evenings at Saint-Maurice. Later he cited as his literary influence a little-known work of Jules Verne, Les Indes noires, which he claimed to have read when he was ten: “Usually considered rather tedious, [it] seemed to me an infinitely majestic and mysterious work.” Its fantastic images persisted in his mind for years: in 1941 he recalled that “the action takes place in subterranean passages dug thousands of feet below the earth’s surface, where light never penetrates.” One critic counted sixty-three uses of the word “night” in the novel, and it is true that the book amounts, as Gide stated in his short preface, to a meditation on “the night’s dark treachery.” Only one kind of imagery is more prevalent: Night Flight is bloated with ocean-going references. The book overflows with seas, waves, anchors, submarines, tides, ships, divers, harbors, with metaphors concerning all things nautical. Saint-Exupéry had been overflying the South American coast for a good year, but it is impossible not to think of him in 1929 at Brest, during that short summer when he lived among and learned from sailors. It was entirely appropriate that reviewers of Night Flight should start to give way to the temptation to compare Saint-Exupéry with Conrad, and Night Flight to Typhoon.
On both sides of the ocean Saint-Exupéry was hailed as a classicist, which must have made the author of a book about aviation—even one with a decidedly Old World name—smile. In 1932, when the novel was published in America, it was greeted as “an enduring modern classic,” as a superb portrait of “modern courage,” as the best description of flight in print, a distinction it arguably holds still today. In a mixed notice in The New York Times Book Review, Louis Kronenberger conceded, “For the first time the airplane achieves at least a nodding acquaintance with art.” Some friends proved loyal: Benjamin Crémieux, a Gallimard reader to begin with, managed to review Night Flight not once but twice, in Les Annales in September and again in the NRF in October. In the second piece he found himself addressing the thorny question of what an airline pilot was doing writing a book. From a publicity point of view this worked to Saint-Exupéry’s advantage in 1931—as did the Gide preface and the fine reviews and the Gallimard imprimatur, often a necessary if not sufficient condition for the winning of awards in France—and it came as no surprise that the book was rumored in November to be a serious contender for the Prix Fémina, one of the country’s most prestigious literary awards. The other short-listed title was Jacques Chardonne’s Claire; both men were said to be in the running for the Prix Goncourt. Of the two Saint-Exupéry was the lesser-known writer, and the only one who happened to be flying the mail between Casablanca and Port-Étienne while the jury deliberated.
On December 4 he received at least three cables. The Fémina jury had, by a vote of twelve to three, awarded him the prize. A second cable, from the company, granted him permission to return to Paris to accept the honor, although he was expected to fly the South American mail with him to Toulouse. And in what may have in the end amounted to the most significant of the dispatches, Mermoz sent his heartfelt congratulations. Saint-Exupéry arrived in Toulouse toward mid-month after a twenty-hour flight, drenched in grease and further disguised by a three-day beard. The 1931 Fémina laureate wore a decaying pair of espadrilles, stained trousers, and—over a bare chest—a blue cotton overcoat, belted at the waist with a piece of string. Two hours later he was on the Paris-bound train, having rustled up a wrinkled suit. He checked into the Hôtel Lutétia, a grand old Left Bank establishment, where Consuelo and his mother joined him. A bellboy was charged with the revitalization of his wardrobe, and a barber was sent to his room to make the pilot look a little less like a latter-day Robinson Crusoe. None of these efforts would have put him any more at ease at the Fémina reception, where his vanity no doubt deserted him, as it reliably did on such occasions, rendering him awkward, red-faced, and mute. “If a friend approached him at such a time,” wrote a woman who would see him through many of these tortures in the next ten years, “he glommed on to him as to a life vest, crushing his hand in silence.”
Otherwise Saint-Exupéry seemed to have his dual existence firmly under control. He appeared to be a man doubly blessed: He was an exotic creature in two worlds, much valued in them both. While one newspaper marveled that the Fémina laureate was not a professional writer, another noted that he liked to draw his flying colleagues into discussions of Valéry, Spinoza, and German Romanticism. Unfortunately, Saint-Exupéry would soon enough find this a more difficult balancing act than navigating amid the stars, one that would require more from the department of explanations than that of stoic brevity. Still on leave, he spent Christmas with Consuelo at Saint-Maurice, the last time the family was to do so.
~
Sometime before the Fémina jury had cast its votes, Saint-Exupéry read several reviews of Night Flight that displeased him. From Port-Étienne he fired off a bitter letter to Crémieux, who, presumably with its author’s permission, published it in excerpted form in the December 15 issue of Les Annates. No writer is immune to criticism, but it was typical of Saint-Exupéry to have focused on the dissenting voices in what was otherwise a torrent of praise. He was a thoroughgoing malcontent: he told Yvonne de Lestrange he was disappointed to have won the Fémina and not the Goncourt, a complaint for which she had little sympathy.* His letter, written in November, doubtless carried more weight for having appeared after he had been named as the Fémina winner. So began a period of his life that constituted a sort of apologia, in which the author of Night Flight was to do more talking than flying.
The charges against Saint-Exupéry were threefold and somewhat contradictory. He had been taken to task for a certain mysticism, an element he could not and did not deny in his work, although he did dismiss the suggestion that he was a disciple of Tagore, the Nobel Prize—winning Indian poet very much in vogue at the time. He was more aggrieved to read that his imagery was precious, in any way contrived. What could be more natural, he asked, than for an image to pop spontaneously into one’s mind in a situation so dire that it precluded rational thought? To illustrate his point he referred back to the evening with Néri—which he first let congeal into prose in this letter—when the two men had been “lost in interplanetary space.” Over and over he had set his cap on stars; they had had to head toward something. Having repeated this exercise a number of times, he had said to himself, ‘I’ll never be able to find the one on which I live!” The image of “a single inhabitable star” had come to him naturally, as much he claimed, belaboring his point a little, an invention of his body as his mind. In moments of equal duress even the most primitive of men resorted to a rarified dream world well above language, he argued; the results represented near-subconscious attempts to make sense of a situation. On another occasion, bouncing along among the stars without the benefit either of a horizon or an artificial horizon, a single image had come to mind: he had been performing a trapeze act on an apparatus suspended from the stars. The image might sound precious but it was not a matter of literary fakery, which he disdained as much as anyone. “Any farmer has equally poetic dreams every night,” he assured his critics, who surely knew as little on that score as he did. He had answered Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s question: he did indeed conjure with these images while flying an airplane; he was somehow able to navigate by what looked to him to be “the frozen glitter of diamonds.” And he had amply illustrated what set him apart from most pilots, who might well have found their thoughts—especially at 2:00 a.m., in the hold of an endless, inky fog, low on fuel, and having lost their bearings—confined to technical matters instead of veering off to the oneiric.
At the same time he defended himself against the charge that he had no business writing about his métier. The division of labor is more strictly adhered to in France than elsewhere: French taxi drivers write but rarely publish their memoirs; aspiring litterateurs write but do not support themselves driving taxis, having come to their field early or never. “Must
one then be a eunuch to speak of love? And not be a literary critic to speak of books?” asked Saint-Exupéry, sensibly enough. A village blacksmith who had written a bad book about his anvil was not likely to fare any better on the subject of château life, of which he knew nothing. Here Saint-Exupéry somewhat ducked the issue. He knew full well that he was pushing the envelope of the literary world with his other life, and he knew equally well that no village blacksmith was likely to come thundering into Saint-Germain to claim the 1932 Prix Fémina. He had benefited from loopholes in the regulations that governed membership in both worlds, and now began to find that having footholds in two camps amounted to having a place in none. For the next few years he would be a little like Voltaire, exhausting himself in attempts to pacify both Church and State.
After the holidays, for reasons that may have had to do with the continued unraveling of Aéropostale, Saint-Exupéry did not return to the African line. Instead, in mid-February, he reported to Marseilles, along with Mermoz, to begin work on the Marseilles—Algiers route. From here he would have read countless newspaper accounts of the political-industrial intrigue swirling around Bouilloux-Lafont, which was now uglier than ever. He was scheduled to make two round-trips as copilot, after which he would train for his seaplane airline transport rating. Thereafter he would be entrusted with the five-hour flight over the Mediterranean, one that amounted in good weather to what Saint-Exupéry called “an afternoon stroll” but that continued to claim one or two lives annually. Marseilles did not hold the same attractions as the Río de Oro or even Argentina, but it did have the virtue of being a short flight away from Agay and Nice, where Consuelo presumably resettled. Gabrielle d’Agay’s younger daughter vividly remembered the morning when her uncle swooped down on the bay in what looked to her four-year-old eyes to be a “fat green mosquito,” interrupting the children’s work on a sandcastle and attracting a crowd on the beach. She was slow to recognize the figure who strode to shore in helmet and goggles and not terribly pleased when she did to learn that her uncle was about to carry her mother off for a short flight. The two departed laughing, Gabrielle wearing a jacket over her bathing suit so as not to catch cold. Her daughter clung to her father’s leg as she watched the aircraft take off.
Probably this was one of Saint-Exupéry’s happier moments that spring, when the grumblings of a second group who held that one does not write about one’s profession began to be heard. Saint-Exupéry’s sudden bout with literary fame did not sit well with many of his colleagues, who felt it had been won at their expense. If, as the adage went, Mermoz cleared and Guillaumet ploughed, it now looked as if Saint-Exupéry—single-handedly—reaped. The pilots resented as well his near-deification of the operations director, who was hardly the one who risked his life. As the Saint-Germain crowd felt a writer was not meant to have dirt under his nails, the Aéropostale pilots could not help but assume that a Fémina laureate was pretentious. Saint-Exupéry began to pay the price for having been—despite his years of service—always a little exceptional, a little distracted, a little unpredictable, a little too refined. It is less likely that the success of Night Flight put a swagger in his step than that he was plainly taken to task for having violated a cardinal law of the profession. Didier Daurat had impressed upon his men that they were manual laborers, public servants: “You should see your name in the newspaper exactly once, the day you have been careless enough to get yourself killed,” he counseled. This advice Saint-Exupéry had ignored. He may in the end have been the one responsible for the immortality of their enterprise but he now paid dearly for having portrayed its glories. In the early 1930s he was as popular among some of his peers—the pilots more than the mechanics—as John Glenn initially made himself among the early astronauts. In their own ways, both men reached out toward the public, violating a fraternal code of silence.
None of Saint-Exupéry’s colleagues confessed to turning a cold shoulder that spring, but Saint-Exupéry wrote several pained reports of having been frozen out by his peers. He appealed to Guillaumet’s sympathies:
For having written this ill-fated book I have been condemned to poverty and to the enmity of my colleagues. Mermoz will tell you what has been said about me by those whom I no longer see and of whom I was once so fond. They will tell you how pretentious I am. And there is not a soul, from Toulouse to Dakar, who doubts this. One of my most serious concerns has been my debts; I haven’t always been able to pay the gas bill, and am wearing clothes I bought three years ago.… My repeated disillusionment, this injustice, have kept me from writing you. Maybe you, too, thought I had changed. And I could not bear to justify myself to the one man whom I consider a brother.… So my whole life is ruined if my best friends turn their backs on me, if it has become a scandal that I fly on the line after the crime I have committed by writing Vol de nuit.
A year or two later, he claimed he no longer had the courage to set foot at Le Bourget. Brokenhearted, he wrote Guillaumet: “You don’t know, you can’t imagine, how much I have suffered these last two years.… Life is indeed merciless.” His timing only made the matter worse: he had chosen the worst possible moment to write a book that appeared to sing the praises of Didier Daurat.
By summer the Aéropostale scandal had escalated to the point where the company was reduced to issuing a twenty-five-page brochure in its own defense, entitled La Vérité sur l’Aéropostale. In June, in a particularly ugly turn of events, Daurat was accused of having tampered with the mail. In an interview on the twenty-seventh with Abel Verdurand, who had replaced Beppo de Massimi on the Marquis’s resignation a year earlier, Daurat was asked over and over why he had intercepted, opened, and ultimately burned envelopes bound for Buenos Aires. The record shows him capable mostly of sputtering “Infamies!” “Calumny!” Why, he asked, pointing out that his accusers were men who disliked him in the first place (one was Édouard Serre, who claimed that the letters he had sent to his wife while he was held prisoner in the desert in 1928 had been opened), would he stoop to such behavior after twelve years of arduous service? Why, countered Verdurand, don’t you speak to the accusations? It was agreed that Daurat would resign at noon on Wednesday morning, the twenty-ninth, in Toulouse. Unflappable, he reported to his office that morning and left at his usual time for lunch. When he returned two hours later he found that the lock on his office door had been changed. Evidently he stood immobile for a minute before the door. Then, without displaying the least hint of emotion, he walked off without saying a word. His admirers did not share his restraint. Mermoz, for one, immediately and loudly began to argue for his return. Saint-Exupéry said he spoke as well for him and for Guillaumet when, on July 15, the three were asked by the company’s interim management what improvements they would like to see, and Mermoz responded that if Daurat remained in place the improvements would take care of themselves. (Daurat was replaced by Serre. In early 1933 Daurat, the original operations director, won a suit for his back salary; he was rehired that summer in a lesser capacity.) Mermoz had his quibbles with Daurat—“he has obvious failings, but his virtues are solid and his integrity is beyond reproach,” he wrote a friend—but he firmly believed that the enterprise belonged to those who had built it, and in his mind that was first and foremost its operations director. Even if he had hoped to avoid being caught up in the Daurat maelstrom, Saint-Exupéry found himself automatically involved in the affair. He had written what now seemed a hugely political book, in which he had taken a contentious, highly public stand on his ex-boss’s behalf.
He was recalled from or left Marseilles the same month, for reasons that are unclear but which he attributed later to his literary sins. His presence on the run had not been welcomed by his peers: “The most insignificant of my actions served as the pretext for absurd dramas,” he wrote of his short tenure in the port city. Most likely he was recalled and, in angry response, requested a leave of absence from the company. He had personal reasons to request a vacation at the time: this year his mother finally sold the Saint-Maurice châ
teau to the city of Lyons—it became a summer retreat for children—and the house needed to be emptied. In July Saint-Exupéry returned to help with the packing. This exercise in loss and order could not have improved his spirits. Earlier he had warned that without Saint-Maurice, the only family seat he recognized, he and his sisters would be “like lost chicks.”
Whatever the terms of his departure from Marseilles, all was clearly not well between the pilot and the company this summer. According to a letter he received from Toulouse late in the month, he had asked for a two-week leave as of July 1, then requested an extension, which he had never bothered to confirm. Nor had he put in an appearance at the airfield. He was asked to notify Toulouse as to his return date and crisply informed that he was currently enjoying an unsalaried leave. If only to secure a paycheck, the letter sent him scurrying back to Montaudran. By August he was based again in Morocco, having taken an apartment with Consuelo on the rue Nolly in Casablanca. Consuelo had been troubled by a series of asthma attacks; Saint-Exupéry requested this two-month posting at least in part with her health in mind. He now picked up again where he had left off when news of the Fémina had reached him, but much of the pleasure was gone. He was demoralized, all the more so because he felt he was flying only for money, which failed to equal what he and Consuelo were spending.
