Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  More remarkable than the friendship with Werth, cemented during these idle, Left Bank years, was that Saint-Exupéry could at once consort with a confirmed anarchist and the right hand of Colonel de La Rocque. Jean-Gérard Fleury—whose sympathies, like most people’s, lay somewhere between the two—remembered Saint-Exupéry’s open-minded, eclectic approach to political discourse. He painted a picture of him at his prime in 1935, when political discussions were heated. In his tiny rue de Chanaleilles living room the ex-pilot one night received more guests than he could seat. Present, on chairs or on the floor, were an adherent of the right-wing Action Française, a Communist, a Croix-de-Feu, and one or two others, representing among them a complete spectrum of the era’s political views. Naturally the discussion turned to politics. Saint-Exupéry patiently heard each of his guests out, questioning them in turn, coaxing them into cogent summaries of their philosophies. Finally, recapitulating each man’s argument, he demonstrated in a flourish of intellectual sleight-of-hand that they were all of them in perfect agreement with one another. His guests were horrified.

  His interests were universal and yet Saint-Exupéry remained—possibly because of his allergy to dogma—surprisingly naïve as well. Before he journeyed to Russia in May 1935 as a special correspondent for Paris-Soir he asked an acquaintance of Léon-Paul Fargue for a crash course in Soviet history. Prince Alexander Makinsky, a White Russian refugee, was shocked to find Saint-Exupéry ignorant even of the most recent and much publicized events. He saw different things in Russia than most French intellectuals, nearly all of whom made pilgrimages east in the 1930s and nearly all of whom wrote about their trips. Malraux investigated dogma and made the standard tour of the factories. If Saint-Exupéry set foot in a Soviet factory he did not write about the visit; he sent home tales of old French governesses, of Polish workers crammed into an eastbound train, of border guards and porters in stations. His focus strayed always from the sweep of history to the individual. Seduced though he had been with Marx on the page—and especially by Marxist economics—he came home from Russia as fearful of the tyranny of the majority as he was of dictatorship pure and simple. There were other nonjoiners—Louis-Ferdinand Céline was one—but Céline denounced Communism before declaring his independence. Almost irresponsibly in a country where nothing lies outside of political interpretation, Saint-Exupéry neither advocated nor denounced, leaving himself open to interpretation by anyone who wanted to claim him.

  Revolution was everywhere in the air and current events all-consuming; Saint-Exupéry, casting about in the midst of the chaos for something to do, continued to dream of escape. While he saw more and more of his literary friends, he continued to damn the success that had obscured his greater love and exiled him from la Ligne. To an Argentine colleague who had evidently kept up a hefty, one-sided correspondence with him since his departure he wrote of his despair; he said he had given up hope of ever knowing the peace he had known in South America, the very memory of which now pained him. “When I read your letters I could so clearly see the vast open spaces of the South that my heart would break,” wrote the man whose existence was increasingly confined to two Parisian arrondissements. He compared himself to a lovesick suitor, compelled to destroy the portraits of the woman at the root of his illness. In April he attempted to buy a used Farman 402 but for some reason the airplane never came through. Possibly because, as a result of the February uprising, new Air Ministry officials were appointed that spring, or possibly because, as a sort of walking icon, Saint-Exupéry was a dangerous man to leave on the streets at a dangerous time, he was at last approached by Air France about a job.

  Jean Chitry, public relations director for the new company, was responsible for contacting the ex-pilot in March. Either he or his superiors had recognized the potential embarrassment of leaving Saint-Exupéry out in the cold while the venture with which he was so much associated in the public’s mind fought to establish itself. Chitry and the pilot made each other’s acquaintance at the Brasserie Lipp, where Chitry tackled the matter head-on. “You’re not up to anything these days?” “No,” replied Saint-Exupéry. “Wouldn’t you like to join Air France’s propaganda service?” he ventured, evidently unaware that he could just as well have been offering Cyrano de Bergerac an office job. Saint-Exupéry exploded: “You must be joking. Can you see me flying a desk? Clearly you don’t understand.… Of course I’m broke, I’m in a hell of a jam right now, but all the same you must be kidding.”

  Chitry made the best of his unpleasant task, assuring Saint-Exupéry that he would not be installed behind a desk. He needed a technical adviser on films for the company (one on the soon-to-be-opened Marseilles—Algiers line was already under discussion), a writer who could spell things out accurately for the press, a lecturer who could speak intelligently about Air France’s glories. Saint-Exupéry seemed mollified by this explanation, or, after a few moments’ reflection, reminded of the attractions of a paycheck. He asked about salary; Chitry got back to him with a modest figure. “It’s not much, but it will pay for my cigarettes,” mumbled Saint-Exupéry, who late in April received a letter confirming that a place could not be found for him in the cockpit but offering him a position, in France and abroad, as a publicist. He was to receive 3,000 francs monthly as well as a minimum bonus of 1,000 francs each time his work took him up in a plane. (As a Latécoère test pilot his base monthly salary had been 5,000 francs.) The irony of Saint-Exupéry’s having been assigned to do public relations for an enterprise from which he had been blackballed because of his fame seems to have been lost on all concerned.

  As Saint-Exupéry must have expected, the job proved to be a sinecure, though not an especially profitable one. He did not complain about this, nor did he express any concern that the position was a sop. There was no work until June, when Saint-Exupéry flew to Algiers with Chitry, the director Félix Forestier, the head of Air France in Marseilles, and two journalists to make the documentary Chitry had alluded to in his initial conversation with Saint-Exupéry, released as Week-end à Alger. Saint-Exupéry immersed himself so deeply in the project and proved so helpful on all fronts that Chitry put him to work on a second film with Forestier. A celebration of the early days of Aéropostale, Atlantique Sud opened in July 1936 to commemorate the one-hundredth crossing of the South Atlantic. According to Chitry it was primarily Saint-Exupéry who directed the thirty-minute documentary, which went on to play in cinemas for nearly twelve years. The film brought in not a cent for the ex-pilot, who had not wanted his name attached to the project. Generally he kept his distance from his film projects, too much a purist for collaborations of the artistic variety.

  He kept his distance, too, from the articles he contributed over the next few years to the Revue Air France, few of which were signed. Again these heralded back to the early days of Aéropostale. In a piece that ran in the magazine’s spring 1935 issue—and that, like most of what Saint-Exupéry published during these years, was folded into Wind, Sand and Stars—he wrote of three Moorish chieftains with whom he spoke in 1931 after their visit to France. Unimpressed by the Normandie and the Eiffel Tower, they had succumbed to the majesty of a tree, the reality of a cow. They had been held spellbound by a waterfall that convinced them once and for all—along with, Saint-Exupéry admitted, the Folies-Bergère—that the god of the French was more generous than the god of the Moors. In the last lines of the article, which did not make their way into Wind, Sand and Stars, Saint-Exupéry wrote of the price the Moors had paid on their return home, the price every traveler pays for having his horizons broadened: “The Sahara seems to them emptier, the game of war more illusory. For the first time they realize the Sahara is a desert.”

  In mid-July, without great enthusiasm, he left for Indochina for a one-month research trip. Flying by way of Damascus, he arrived on the nineteenth in Saigon. He was greeted at the airfield by Pierre Gaudillère, a floatplane pilot and radio-navigation specialist who had been a classmate at Brest. Presumably he saw his sister Simone in t
hese first hours as well; in any event, Saint-Exupéry did not stay long in Saigon. The afternoon after his arrival he and Gaudillère set out in a Lioré et Olivier 190, accompanied by three colleagues, to visit the Cambodian temples of Angkor. Twenty minutes into the flight the engine abruptly died; Saint-Exupéry made an expert landing on the Mekong River, and the Vietnamese mechanic ministered to the floatplane. Five minutes after a second takeoff they were forced down again, at the muddy confluence of the Vaico and Soirap rivers, with an engine that refused to turn over. Here, on the edge of the jungle, in an eerie wilderness of scruffy trees and yellow water sixty miles from Saigon, anchored to a mangrove tree, they were forced to spend the night. They knew they would be rescued by a launch bearing a towing cable and a solid breakfast in the morning; Gaudillère’s only concern was for Saint-Exupéry’s health, as he was the only one of the five men unaccustomed to the climate and at risk of catching malaria.

  Such concerns were far from Saint-Exupéry’s mind in what was for him clearly a reprise of the Río de Oro evening that lent Wind, Sand and Stars its title. He was jubilant, having in his misadventures never before encountered snake- and spider-infested tropical swamp. As the sun set he and Gaudillère made themselves comfortable on the upper wing of the Lioré, legs dangling over the silent motor; their colleagues bedded down in the hull. Accompanied by the occasional splash of a fish and the constant drone of mosquitoes, Saint-Exupéry unpacked his bag of tales for his friend. He spoke of the world of men, from which this delta seemed exempt; he sang old French folksongs, adapted slightly to accommodate Asian history. Presumably the night was worth any embarrassment the trip might otherwise have cost him: an empty gas tank had been the cause of the engine trouble, and Saint-Exupéry did fall ill afterward, flying back to France as a passenger. He arrived in Marseilles on August 12. He would continue to collect an Air France salary for at least three years but aside from a two-week lecture tour of the eastern Mediterranean in late 1935 and a few additional articles he did little more to earn it. It kept him on the bandwagon, however, even if his method for promoting Air France’s new ventures consisted largely of appeals to the past. Professionally he now amounted to what Jean Prévost termed him posthumously: “un artiste en souvenirs.”

  It was not a profitable line of work. Saint-Exupéry reported a gross income in 1934 of just over 48,000 francs—one fifth of what he had earned in Argentina. Slightly less than half represented monies Gallimard had advanced him for his writing; the remainder was his Air France salary. He spent more than every cent of it. Jean Mermoz estimated that until late 1935 Saint-Exupéry cost him about 350,000 francs, none of which he saw again. As a borrower Saint-Exupéry could not have been more winning, or more demanding: clearly he subscribed to Montaigne’s belief that a service asked a true friend amounts to an honor bestowed upon him, as the principal aim of each friend is to find occasion to cater to the other. Penniless, Saint-Exupéry comported himself as ever en grand seigneur. Fleury reported that the writer might equally well treat an intimate to a sumptuous meal with an extraordinary selection of wines or relieve him of half the money in his pocket. (“How much do you have on you?” he asked Fleury on a day when the journalist confessed to be carrying sixty francs. “Good. I’m leaving you half. Give me thirty francs,” instructed Saint-Exupéry.) If the Bugatti he drove during these years—which was his on loan from Gaston Gallimard, a great lover of automobiles—was not at his disposal, Saint-Exupéry might without warning requisition the car of a friend. It is always practical to have a lawyer in the family, and Fleury dedicated his services to the former Aéropostale pilot. On several occasions he intervened when Saint-Exupéry’s distraction combined with his poverty to cause him serious embarrassments. In the most dramatic of these episodes, Fleury was asked to rescue the writer from jail, where he had spent the previous forty-eight hours, deprived of his tie and shoelaces. His crime: he had neglected to attend to a series of summonses sent him for a speeding ticket. Two gendarmes had arrested him on his doorstep.*

  Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry’s disregard for money was bohemian where her husband’s was aristocratic; it yielded the same results. Her tastes were expensive, her grasp of numbers vague. Her asthma took its toll both in medical and travel bills; she felt as if she were suffocating in wintry Paris, and repeatedly during these years Saint-Exupéry was forced to find accommodations for her in the south of France. On the rue de Chanaleilles the couple carelessly stored their money in an entryway vase; legend has it that their savings went up in smoke one day when a friend extinguished a cigarette in the family bank. The franc was cheap in 1934, when a cup of coffee and two croissants could be had for a few sous and the rate of exchange was twenty francs to the dollar, but neither of the Saint-Exupérys was able to make deflation—or any future windfalls—work to his advantage. Few things mattered less to Saint-Exupéry than money and yet—with a wife to support and time on his hands in a city full of distractions—that was precisely what these years were about. He was nonetheless never too hard up to disdain the stuff. In a 1935 Marianne article written, like all the others, solely for financial gain, he extolled the virtues of friendship, all that which was too priceless to be bought. “A night flight, with its hundred thousand stars, its serenity, its few hours of sovereignty,” he wrote toward midyear, just before he and Consuelo had reached the breaking point, “money cannot buy.”

  Saint-Exupéry’s predicaments met with varied reactions among his creditors. He could count on a backroom drink and a loan of 500 francs from Jarras, the café proprietor on the rue Bonaparte, to whom he had remembered to send the occasional postcard from South America. It seems that Gallimard was to some extent obliging. Crémieux was to say of him: “Gaston Gallimard is something like this. If you ask him for a raise, he moans that he can’t afford it, that business is too bad. On the other hand, if you tell him you dropped 10,000 francs at the gaming table, he’ll give you that amount right away.” The landlord on the rue de Chanaleilles was not as broad-minded. Shortly after the Marianne piece had appeared—after the gas and electricity had been cut off for lack of payment, and after Consuelo had dramatically offered to find a job scrubbing floors—the Saint-Exupérys decamped for a series of hotel rooms, leaving Consuelo’s Pekingese with their former concierge.

  ~

  Saint-Exupéry’s only permanent address in the 1930s was at the lively intersection of the rue de Rennes and the boulevard Saint-Germain. He set up shop in the afternoons at the Café des Deux-Magots, in the evenings at the Brasserie Lipp. He scheduled his meetings, he worked, he ate, he socialized here; together the two cafés constituted his office, his drawing room, his social club, his retreat, the Grand Balcon of his thirties. One friend was to say later that his ten years of friendship with Saint-Exupéry were spent almost to a meeting in a succession of public places; most of what was to become Wind, Sand and Stars was written at the Deux-Magots. These were the years when Saint-Exupéry sat still to a large extent, and the great majority of the portraits we have of him paint him here, in 1934 and the five years that follow, drinking, recounting, sulking, expounding, correcting his texts, shutting the two establishments down. There were many reasons for doing so, not least of all because the writer had at times in the thirties no other place to work. In attempting to make sense of his own ambivalence toward objects Jean-Paul Sartre explained that he preferred “to sit on chairs which belong to nobody (or, if you like, to everybody), in front of tables which belong to nobody: that’s why I go to work in cafés—I achieve a kind of solitude and abstraction.” Saint-Exupéry, who never owned more than a few sticks of furniture, was of the same school. Nor was he alone in making Lipp his headquarters. Léon-Paul Fargue, the silver-tongued bard of Saint-Germain, perhaps its most cultivated full-time flâneur, wrote of the brasserie: “One couldn’t write thirty lines in a newspaper in Paris, paint a painting, or hold strong political opinions without devoting at least one evening a week to this café restaurant.… Lipp is certainly one of the places, the only on
e perhaps, where for the price of a draft beer one can have a faithful and complete summing-up of a political or intellectual day in France.” He was himself a late-night fixture at the establishment, to which he had a special connection: his father, a glassware-factory owner on whose fortune Fargue still lived, had designed the restaurant’s ceramic tiles.

  It seems fair to say that a little of Léon-Paul Fargue wore off on Saint-Exupéry. Fargue had a long-standing reputation for arriving hours late at his destinations (and then with a superb bon mot), closing cafés, leaving taxis idling in streets while his brilliant conversation rushed on, habits for which Saint-Exupéry was soon also renowned. He needed no encouragement to lead the life of a Parisian night owl but got it from Fargue, who often turned up at the Boeuf sur le Toit when Lipp had closed its doors, sometimes with the author-aviator in tow. On one occasion he issued Saint-Exupéry a certificate: “I the undersigned, Léon-Paul Fargue, officer of the Académie Française [an untruth], certify that I have kept Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, commander of all things, out to an ungodly hour, because when I see him I cannot let him go.” Often the two left each other only when harassed by a café waiter or a hotel porter. Together they made the gastronomic tour of Paris. Blaise Cendrars remembered his first glimpse of Saint-Exupéry, at the Brasserie Lipp. “Straddling a chair, among a circle of admirers listening to Léon-Paul Fargue telling his imaginary tales after midnight, he listened along with the others but laughed more loudly.”

  He was by no means uniquely the sorcerer’s apprentice. When in form Saint-Exupéry could hold not only whole tables but whole restaurants under his spell. Beucler, with whom his friendship had blossomed after the Southern Mail preface, told of a long summer evening with Fargue, another friend, and a model who seems either to have been accompanying Saint-Exupéry or the friend. The five piled into a taxi and set out from the terrace of the Deux-Magots in search of a restaurant acceptable to everyone. They inspected neighborhood after neighborhood, winding their way from the east side of the city to the west and back again, clearly as pleased to be loose on the town in one another’s company—practically in one another’s laps—as they were eager to sit down to dinner. They wound up in Neuilly, when their glamorous escort could no longer stave off hunger. Fargue began the meal with a story and promised to read, over dessert, pages from a typescript he had in hand. In the meantime, something he said prompted Saint-Exupéry to begin to weave a colorful fairy tale. One by one the restaurant’s tables fell silent as his cadences took over the room. When he finished his audience sat paralyzed, as one, recalled Beucler, watching the credits roll at the end of a powerful film. Fargue returned his typewritten pages to his coat pocket. “A shooting star has just fallen in my glass,” he declared.