Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  At a great number of café and dinner tables in the 1930s, Saint-Exupéry told and retold his tales. He had little choice, as he would add few new ones to his arsenal between his near-death in the bay of Saint-Raphaël in 1933 and his near-death in the Libyan desert in 1936. In effect he was trying out his drafts of Wind, Sand and Stars, although no one knew so at the time and few would have cared, privileged to be on hand when he chose to perform. He was not bombastic, and he did not playact. He was neither a bore nor a rhetorician; he did not—like Fargue—have a brilliantly rich and varied flood of phrases at his disposal. He resorted instead to long trains of simple words, melted down by a flat, nearly faltering voice that brought his precise images to life. Henri Jeanson, a quick-witted satirical writer of whom Saint-Exupéry was particularly fond, submitted as everyone to his not-so-special effects: “If it was cold in his story you were cold, and if it was hot you wiped your brow. You died of thirst, and inevitably someone would venture, on tiptoe, to open a window.” In the right company he could hold forth all night, moving from club to club across Paris until breakfast, or reading until dawn in the apartment on the rue de Chanaleilles from the pages he kept, badly sorted, in a hatbox. Jean Galtier-Boissière, the influential, radical left-wing editor who chronicled these years in detail, met Saint-Exupéry for the first time at an official banquet at the ministry of air, probably in 1936. Jeanson was there as well, as were a number of flying aces, including Maurice Bellonte. The two nonflyers took it upon themselves to lighten up a stuffy evening by provoking the solemn, overdressed maîtres d’hôtel into laughter; they felt everyone else was kowtowing to the minister, which made for a miserable dinner. Finally they got an assist from Saint-Exupéry, who had sat silently throughout the meal. Over petits fours he unexpectedly lit up and launched into a vigorous account of his days in the desert, of Guillaumet’s triumph over the Andes. The party broke up at 4:00 a.m.

  Jeanson had introduced Saint-Exupéry to Galtier-Boissière—he introduced him as well to Louis Jouvet and Gaston Bergéry—but for all of his new acquaintances his circles stayed small. He liked familiar faces. One day he and Jean Prévost sat down to lunch together on the rue Saint-Dominique, five minutes from the rue de Chanaleilles. They were hesitating between the poached and the fried fish when Beucler and Jean Giraudoux walked in; the four resolved to lunch together as often as possible, which amounted to three or four times a year, until the war. “The only problem,” commented Prévost at one of these gatherings, in a Russian restaurant, “is that we all speak at once.” Happily the four men agreed on most things, above all that the world was becoming a less and less hospitable place. “The essential,” Saint-Exupéry would murmur, “is to be alive. We can’t forget that. But nowadays the living are obliged to defend themselves as if they were threatened at all times.” To his oldest friends he remained loyal; he continued to keep Escot from sleep. He dragged him to an all-night Montmartre bistro, where Escot struggled to stay awake as Saint-Exupéry covered page after page with algebraic equations. Escot better appreciated the caricatures Saint-Exupéry drew of the bistro’s other patrons, not always an innocent art. One night he attracted the attention of a man at a neighboring table who felt the artist had stared a bit too long at his wife. Saint-Exupéry amiably started up from his chair to supply the reason for his attentions; rising to his full height proved to be explanation enough for his jealous neighbor.

  Occasionally he could be persuaded to drink on the Right Bank by Néri, Guillaumet, and company, who frequented the cafés of the Champs-Élysées because of their proximity to the Air France offices at the corner of the avenue George V and the rue Marbeuf. He turned up one day in the company of Maryse Bastié, the aviatrix, to meet a group of dancers and gymnasts in a studio near the Place Clichy. Nadia Boulanger’s studio, which he also visited on occasion, was nearby. He mixed his company, at least the best friends of his companies, some of whom—depending on their affiliation—called him Tonio (his wife and family), some Antoine (most of the other women in his life), some Saint-Ex (the Aéropostale staff and anyone who met him after he was famous, although he did not appreciate their familiarity). With pride he introduced Guillaumet to Werth with a simple, declarative “Ça, c’est Guillaumet.” He got as far as Versailles, when André Chamson, the writer and radical socialist politician, became the curator of the palace and entertained there on Sundays. He and Consuelo journeyed to Caresse Crosby’s house on the edge of the forest of Chantilly, where Consuelo did all the talking. Her attention alone drifted when her husband spoke; an irrepressible raconteuse herself, she was jealous of his hold on the spotlight. As often as not, however, she had plans, and audiences, of her own. Saint-Exupéry might tempt a cohort into a jaunt to what he billed as a friend’s house in the country; the house turned out to be the prepossessing château of Yvonne de Lestrange at Chitré. Gaston Gallimard joined him for a visit to Chitré one day when the two were out motoring together and the writer realized they were nearby. Both men were in casual clothes; Saint-Exupéry breezed in by the service entrance, borrowing a domestic’s tie as he waited to be announced.

  Mostly, however, he could be glimpsed on the Left Bank, in Montparnasse or Saint-Germain, where he was best-known. While he lived in the middle of this world, he fit into it only around the edges. He does not seem to have taken part, for example, in the June 1935 International Writers Congress for the Defense of Culture, an antifascist gathering and one of the most important literary events of the 1930s, but two weeks earlier did attend a Fernandez-moderated panel on Malraux. Afterward he continued on to the Deux-Magots and to dinner—at a long outdoor table animated by Malraux, Guéhenno, Fernandez, Gide, and a host of others—at the Saint-Benoît, one of his favorites. On the Left Bank the world was small: it was no more than a ten-minute walk from the rue de Chanaleilles to Gallimard’s offices, to the Brasserie Lipp, to the Saint-Benoît, to Gide’s apartment on the rue Vaneau, to Yvonne de Lestrange’s, to Léon Werth’s. This was fortunate for Saint-Exupéry, who had an aversion to exercise of all kinds. One day he called Werth on the rue d’Assas to say, “I’d very much like to see you, but my means of mobility are feeble.” When he did have money in hand he was a taxi driver’s dream, hailing a car for short distances, suspending meters with his late-night conversations. Georges Pélissier, a doctor friend who met Saint-Exupéry in 1931, spent the latter half of an evening parked before his hotel in a taxi—hours earlier the driver had been instructed to choose his destination—listening to Saint-Exupéry deliver a monologue on his search for God. In the front seat the driver slept. Behind the wheel of a car he was his passenger’s nightmare, piloting at breakneck speed around Paris, which was how he endeared himself to his American publisher, Curtice Hitchcock, when the two met for the first time in 1932. Said Bernard Lamotte after an excursion that deposited him breathless in front of La Coupole: “That day, I understood what aviation was.”

  Everyone was happy to remark on Saint-Exupéry’s tastes, if only because a list of his favorite things furnished an excuse for long-windedness. Above all, said Beucler, he loved to sing, to invent disguises, to perform his card tricks. Above all, wrote Beucler elsewhere, “he liked honesty, women, cheese, and practical jokes,” an observation no less true for being perfectly alliterative in French. It was still easy to recognize the chief of the Cape Juby airfield: “He appreciated disguises; word games; strolls; simple, bawdy old French songs; concision; literary truth. He liked Bach, Nietzsche, Élie Faure, Puccini, André Gide, jazz, the cinema, humor, solitude, great gatherings of friends, with one well-mannered drunk in attendance, on the condition that he was in reality less drunk than he let on.” He had, probably a function of his size, a great capacity to hold his liquor, and he had, particularly in his idle thirties, a fairly constant thirst. He smoked up a storm. He loved a good aïoli, available in a restaurant on the rue Gît-le-Coeur; a little bar on the Right Bank where the obliging patronne cut hefty slices of ham; the temple of cheeses that is Androuet. He would climb stairs for a sup
erbly prepared plate of pieds de cochon grillés. For the most intimate evenings he preferred a little bistro on the corner of the rue Vaneau and the rue de Chanaleilles, where dessert was accompanied by cries of “Tonio, sing!” and where he would oblige. The list of subjects that interested him was exhaustive: He talked, with Fargue, of Balzac, the Middle Ages, Gérard de Nerval, Mallarmé, Roosevelt, boxing, comic books, Marxism, mythology, snobbism, Picasso, psychoanalysis, the Medicis; with Pélissier, about genetics, astronomy, sociology, mysticism, Bach, van Gogh; with Beucler, of Spinoza, Greek beauty, poetry, free love, algebra, word games, social structures; in his notebooks, of Christianity, the problems of capitalism, banking, taxation, chemistry, Einstein, Planck, Newton, liberty, justice, language. When someone told him of something new he listened with fanatical attention, opening his mouth a little, arching his long eyebrows, jotting down a few lines in his notebook, and never failing to double-check the information the next day, by telephone. When he spoke he often sketched, or—if more vested in his conversation—gesticulated madly, slapping his thighs. His discourse proceeded with a series of “Have you noticed?” and “That reminds me,” openings that allowed him plenty of latitude.

  While his meditations were, in the words of Léon Werth, “lighter than air,” he performed the games he so adored with great seriousness. His card tricks were unforgettable. Against amazing odds and often without himself handling the deck, he could pick out a card on which he had asked someone to focus. For one particular demonstration he chose a willing assistant—a woman, for example. His powers worked most effectively if she were the most attractive one on hand. Saint-Exupéry would ask her to shuffle and reshuffle his deck and to focus on a card; if she then lay the cards out on a table, facedown, he could get her, as if guided by some mystical force, to point to the back of the card she had selected but never shown him. Although his victims made claims to the contrary—Saint-Exupéry was particularly pleased by the stupefaction of a polytechnicien who took him aside and whispered, “You’re a sorcerer, aren’t you?”—there was no trick in his repertoire that an intuitive card-handler with a good grasp of probabilities, a deft touch, and plenty of time could not master. There was reason why he preferred to work with a virgin deck and reason why he refused to perform in front of certain very skeptical friends, whom he accused of ruining his concentrationr

  A deck of cards provided a convenient way of ducking attention, a better tack than the insolence of which Saint-Exupéry was also capable. To the woman who asked him one day how many hours he had spent flying he responded, more out of abashedness than anything else, “Dunno. Do you count the hours you’ve spent in an elevator?” With a card trick he could charm and deflect; he could also cultivate the kind of childish wonder he felt to be in such short supply in the world. Best of all he did not need an Indochinese swamp or a Saharan dune to do so; in the right mood, he could create it anywhere. And he did: “He spent less time writing,” lamented Jean Prévost, “than he did picking out the ten of spades.” He invented word games and other conundrums: Beucler remembered a game with matches, one with anagrams, another involving a series of apéritif stains on the table. He devised psychological tests; one split the world into two kinds of people, those who needed to understand everything, and those who could believe in miracles. He liked to torment acquaintances with odd questions: Why wasn’t the image reflected in a spoon reversed horizontally as well as vertically? Are you aware, he asked an Aéropostale colleague one day, that you are in the process of creating your past? He could be fascinated by the functioning of an eyedropper. His love of gadgets—which he would be able to indulge fully in America—continued. He fiddled with a variety of inventions, mostly on paper.* He envisioned an early kind of pay-per-view television; he described to Pélissier the workings of photoelectric cells; he laid out the idea of a genetic code. At the end of 1934 he filed the first of his ten patents, for a blind landing device operated by radio waves.

  The lists of what Saint-Exupéry ate, drank, and enthused about are long. The list of friends to whom he wholly unburdened himself is short. The mainstays of these years were Guillaumet, Werth, and his old friend Ségogne; Beucler, Prévost, André Chamson, Jeanson, Jean Lucas, Fargue, and Ramon Fernandez were intimates. He opened up slowly; Saint-Exupéry and André Maurois knew each other for ten years before they became friends in America, during the war. His personal life remained always a closed book, at least to his male friends, even when he acknowledged it to be problematic. He asked about no one else’s. He had a low tolerance for gossip and lost his temper when others did not. Several years earlier, after Madame de Saint-Exupéry had questioned Consuelo about Gide and Yvonne de Lestrange and after Consuelo’s answers had elicited some disapproving remarks (with which she had then bludgeoned her husband), he wrote his mother: “Only with difficulty have I forgiven her for having trafficked in idle gossip, for having shared with you insignificant details concerning private lives, which are nobody’s business at all, details which I reproach you for having solicited and which I ask you now to forget.” Among friends he could be, as Jeanson put it, “slow to take off,” waiting hours to join the conversation, even then wandering off on his own for some time. He did not suffer fools gladly, clamming up immediately in their presence. “He would leave us his body, out of politeness, for appearance’s sake, and come back for it later, after the nuisances had left,” wrote Jeanson of such occasions. He was more quirky than he was effortlessly, brilliantly spontaneous, as were the premier conversationalists of his generation, Cocteau and Malraux. When he felt he was attracting attention in a public place he buried himself in his newspaper or looked away, a delinquent schoolboy trying to make himself invisible. When asked for an autograph, which he was regularly as the 1930s wore on, he blushed and made polite conversation while nervously rubbing a finger behind his ear. Henri Jeanson knew a surefire way to get his goat. If he came across the writer strolling about Saint-Germain he would bellow from as great a distance as possible, in as distinct a voice as possible, “Saint-Exupéry! Saint-Exupéry!” In a panic his friend would race toward him, begging for mercy.

  He was as ill-suited to deal with celebrity as he was ill-equipped to master politics. These were indeed the convivial years, yet at the end of the day Saint-Exupéry spent them alone at a series of small tables, a drink at his elbow, a cigarette in hand, doing silent battle with a sheet of paper. A caged bird, he did what a caged bird does: he sang. By 1938 he had produced—all of it in the guise of magazine articles, most of it, under duress, for the money on which to live—the bulk of Wind, Sand and Stars, a book that bears no sign of Paris and in general no clues to the prosaic details of its author’s life. Once, from across a café, Blaise Cendrars furtively observed him at work on a set of page proofs. Like so many of the portraits drawn of Saint-Exupéry in his thirties Cendrars’s is a still-life: “He gestured with his left hand, not as if he were reciting verse, but rather as if he needed to shoo away the pesky shadow of an airplane, which wandered like a fly across his pages.”

  ~

  In the spring of 1935, Hervé Mille and Pierre Lazareff, editors of Paris-Soir, proposed that Saint-Exupéry travel to Russia as a special correspondent for the four-year-old paper. The two newspapermen may have thought of Saint-Exupéry for the assignment because an impressive flyover had been planned in Moscow to mark May Day. Since his Marianne series three years earlier he had contributed only one piece to the NRF—the four-page description of Punta Arenas, published in April 1933, had been written on café stationery at the Royale and chez Lipp—and three short aviation pieces to Marianne. The Paris-Soir assignment represented a great stride forward for Saint-Exupéry, who was offered a handsome amount for the trip. A wildly successful combination of sensational reporting, serious journalism, and photographs, Paris-Soir was France’s most popular paper, with a circulation more than ten times greater than that of Marianne. It was the property of Jean Prouvost (to whom Jean Prévost had introduced Saint-Exupéry), who was always h
appy to see a prestigious writer in its pages, even if he may not have been the obvious choice for the assignment at hand.

  Characteristically, Saint-Exupéry did not jump at the opportunity. He had few others, however, and after his crash course on Russian history—doubtless he also picked the brains of his cousin André de Fonscolombe, who was half-Russian—he set off by train for Moscow, arriving on April 29. He would protest always that journalism was beneath him—reporting and screenwriting were, to his mind, the twin vampires of the literary life—but his dispatches from this short trip are among his more successful efforts. Saint-Exupéry did his best to defy deadlines and revised beyond the last possible minute. (He was not above distracting printers with a bottle while he re-edited his texts.) His Russian pieces, however, conveyed by telephone to Paris, are among his freshest; in them there was less poetry and more of the man, less gloss and more sparkle. In the first of them, telephoned to Paris three days after his arrival and acknowledged in the second as “an outright surrender on my part to headline pressures,” he described a May Day he had nearly missed. He had found Soviet bureaucracy as uncongenial as any other, and had been unable to obtain a spectator’s permit for the Red Square celebration.