by Stacy Schiff
Writing of such moments he was more than ever a man distinctly out of step with his time, searching for the common bond while those around him were busily clarifying their differences. In part a basic humility saved him from becoming a political creature. He who had written so vividly of his need for tenderness knew how vulnerable a man could be: “We men put on grand airs, but in our heart of hearts we know hesitation, doubt, distress.” In part he was an innocent, applying to the body politic the lessons he had learned on the airline. His aristocratic birth helped to save him, too, hoisting him above the fray; he loved the species, he would say, but not the masses. He had never been a believer in systems—his was an overweening faith that life lay in the contradictions, not in the formulae, in the doubting, not the certainties, the needs rather than the riches—and political parties seemed to him little more than artificial structures designed to save man from his loneliness. He was as much opposed to war as reminded in Madrid of why men were attracted to it. While he had no respect for Franco—Jeanson said he sputtered when he so much as heard the name—he came back from Spain as agnostic as ever. Davet saw that in his respect for the Loyalists’ courage he had somewhat identified with their cause. Difficult though it was, however—Saint-Exupéry left the country the day after German aircraft supporting Franco’s Nationalists bombed the Basque town of Guernica—he continued to take only one side: that of the individual against whatever threatened his sovereignty. “Franco’s soldier is noble; his opponent as well. I condemn any school of thought which—for coherency’s sake—is forced to reduce the enemy army to a pack of pillaging, imbecilic peons,” he wrote, as direct a political statement as he would make during these years, no heyday of ecumenicalism, in his notebook.
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Saint-Exupéry returned to Paris at the end of April well-versed, as he had not been before, in the difference between an anarchist and a Communist, but without a scrap of paper to show Paris-Soir. When May began to slip by and no text appeared forthcoming Henri Mille and Jean Provoust began to worry: would the war end before Paris-Soir was able to publish its special correspondent’s report? Fleury, then also employed by the paper, was this time dispatched to look after Saint-Exupéry. Every day he badgered him by telephone, and every day the truant supplied him with a fine excuse for delaying the delivery of his text. At last he was licensed to resort to more drastic measures: Fleury invited Saint-Exupéry to dinner at the paper’s expense. “Terrific,” responded the reporter, “we’ll have foie gras!” Several days later Fleury carried Saint-Exupéry’s first pages to the newspaper himself. Mille knew his writer well enough to proceed with caution, however, and did not run the piece immediately for fear that it might have no immediate successor. Sure enough Saint-Exupéry stalled again; only by the end of June did Mille have three articles in hand. These he began to run on the twenty-seventh of the month. A fourth installment was promised for early July but did not appear on schedule; Mille had spent two days biting his fingernails when his writer finally called to say it was ready. It was scheduled for the following day’s paper, and a cyclist was sent to pick it up. Mille had just finished reading the article when its author strode into the Paris-Soir offices, toward five in the afternoon. He needed the piece back, he explained, as he had forgotten to add something. Mille handed him his pages and watched helplessly as Saint-Exupéry proceeded to tear them up, stuffing the scraps of paper in his pocket.
In the end Mille got only three of his ten pieces—for which Saint-Exupéry had been paid in advance—in 1937. The rest of his Spain reporting, the bulk of which appears, slightly reworked, in Wind, Sand and Stars, he kept to himself until the following year, partly because he procrastinated and had not yet had a chance to cast it as he liked. (Three additional pieces, for which he was presumably not paid a second time, appeared in Paris-Soir just after the Munich Pact on October 2, 3, and 4, 1938.) Many of the stories of Saint-Exupéry the perfectionist date from this time: Jeanson was not the only friend who was collared for an urgent, unbiased opinion (although Saint-Exupéry seemed to revise according to his own instincts and not according to the suggestions of those friends bold enough to offer advice), and Mille was not the only editor to see his text disappear before his eyes. Gallimard, too, watched as Saint-Exupéry began to cut ten unnecessary lines from a Marianne piece and—marking up the page proofs with his pen—proceeded to revise his entire text at the printer’s. He was obsessed with the need to be perfectly understood or, as he put it, “reçu.” He procrastinated and procrastinated, hurriedly cobbled together a draft at the last minute, then revised over and over, beyond the point where he could comfortably do so. He played, in short, as fast and loose with the rules of journalism as with those of aviation.
There were times and places in 1937 where it was better to play by the rules, as the writer discovered this July. In midmonth he set out for a trip of several days with Madame de B in the Simoun. The two went first to Amsterdam, then on to Berlin, where Saint-Exupéry was surprised to find the French air attaché waiting for him at the airfield. Already much of the German sky had been declared restricted, a fact he either did not know or chose to ignore. He had not filed a flight plan; as soon as the Simoun had been spotted a call had been made to the French embassy. Nor did his trespasses end here. From Berlin Saint-Exupéry and his companion flew to Frankfurt, with the intention of visiting friends in Rüdesheim, outside the city. Over central Germany, about 6,000 feet above Kassel, the Simoun filled with a foul odor. It seemed as if paint was burning; distressed, Saint-Exupéry turned circles over the city, where he knew he could safely make an emergency landing. He left Madame de B at the controls while he checked behind the seats but found nothing amiss. While the smell persisted the Simoun gave no sign of trouble, and after circling five or six times the pilot continued on toward Frankfurt. His friends had informed him that the airfield at nearby Wiesbaden was prettier than that of Frankfurt; it was here that the Simoun now headed. Saint-Exupéry was prepared for a lovely airstrip but surprised all the same by the surreal sight of a beautifully manicured but unmarked and deserted field. It was a hot day; a lone windsock fluttered in the light breeze.
Saint-Exupéry landed to find he was far from alone on the Wiesbaden airfield. Instantly a swarm of Hitler Youth, bare-chested and in black shorts, materialized out of nowhere. Chattering away excitedly they surrounded the Simoun, in which pilot and passenger were held captive. An officer soon arrived on the scene and made a half-successful attempt at interrogating the foreign pilot. Saint-Exupéry answered in all the languages he knew, none of which was German. After a laborious exchange he was, however, made to understand that he had landed on a highly restricted military airfield. Resorting to mime—which seemed to work better than Arabic or Provençal—he offered to take off and land properly at Frankfurt. Nothing doing, replied the officer, repeating something about Kassel, spies, and Berlin. It turned out that an important chemical plant was located in Kassel, accounting for the odor over the city and—thought the Germans—for the Frenchman’s suspicious behavior. Changing tacks, Saint-Exupéry entered into a negotiation for permission to get out of the airplane. It was, after all, a blisteringly hot day, not the only reason he was drenched in sweat. Without mentioning that she spent it at her pilot’s side, Madame de B provided the only account we have of the afternoon in her biography of Saint-Exupéry:
After a thousand tergiversations, it was agreed that the airplane would be “pushed to the edge of the airfield” and that the suspects would be permitted to sit under its wings while awaiting a verdict. It was noon. A lovely summer afternoon went by in this manner: Saint-Exupéry, stretched out on the grass, sometimes laughing, sometimes fretting, smoked and downed the beers delivered to him by the future Luftwaffe pilots. Toward six in the afternoon an old officer drove up and walked toward the airplane. In fractured French he explained that Saint-Ex was accused of espionage, that he had circled Kassel to take photos and then had come to reconnoiter the military airfield at Wiesbaden.
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nbsp; Through Madame de B’s excellent connections the two were finally allowed to continue on to Frankfurt. Although the French ambassador in Berlin vouched for their innocence, they were accompanied on their flight by a German officer; he took the only passenger seat in the Simoun. Madame de B squeezed in between the two men. On leaving the ground Saint-Exupéry saw that the Hitler Youth had assembled to see him off. He could not resist turning once around the field, initiating a dive, and flying over their heads. Directly below the wheels of the airplane fifty young arms went up in a Nazi salute. The German officer held on to his seat, unhappily.
Several hours later Saint-Exupéry was seated at a table overlooking the Rhine, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, discussing National Socialism with a young German woman. It was not yet too late for a theoretical conversation; it was still possible for a Frenchman to sit in a German restaurant and discuss the problems with that country’s ruling ethos the way Frenchmen had sat in cafés at home and discussed what was wrong with their own for most of the 1930s. A fair number of Frenchmen had already begun to wonder aloud what it was the Germans were doing right: their country was in a shambles, and in leaps and bounds Germany was taking her place as the leader of Europe. As late as March 1938 Janet Flanner would report in The New Yorker that so long as war had not happened the French were willing to conclude that nothing at all had happened. They remained stubbornly preoccupied with their own problems—in particular with the state of the franc—as if those of the rest of Europe would go away if no Frenchman were around to hear the noise. There was all the same a sort of schizophrenia to the summer and fall, which began with a bang with the Semaine Artistique Allemande, an official Nazi propaganda week on the Champs-Élysées. German families traveled en masse across the border to the exposition, while at the same time, east of Strasbourg, at the French end of the Kehl bridge over the Rhine, a strange turret went up. “If it contains anything,” wrote Janet Flanner, “[it] contains something that, if popped out, would aim straight toward the German sentries at the bridge’s other end.”
In what felt like the comfortable shade of the Maginot fortifications, France’s were of course the feeblest of preparations. Nowhere was this more true than in the field of aeronautics. If the man in the street was tempted to think that Hitler was doing something right, any Frenchman vaguely associated with aviation had legitimate reason to agree. In 1935 France had had the largest military air force in Europe. In two years her production had fallen—despite a vastly increased budget—to thirty-seven aircraft a month. At the same time Germany was turning out 800 to 1,000 first-line warplanes a month. Many French aeronautics experts left for England; crippled by nationalization—at one point, with over 150,000 workers on strike, the entire industry skidded to a halt—France sought to purchase airplanes from the United States while she revamped her own program. The instability of the country as a whole took its toll on aviation: In the previous eight years France had had nine different air ministers and eight different air force chiefs-of-staff. By 1937 she held few of the new air records and was responsible for little that was new from an engineering point of view. Her presence in the air consisted less now of progress than of symbol: the world’s largest flying boat, a Latécoère 521 christened the Lieutenant-de-Vaisseau-Paris, was her pride and joy.
Originally conceived as a luxury aircraft, the Latécoère’s main salon had been exquisitely decorated with red-lacquered walls; its sixteen deluxe cabins—each of which bore the name of a constellation—included beds and bathrooms; its silver came from Puyforçat. Having sunk off the coast of Florida in 1936 the seaplane was now a less sumptuous vessel, but at the end of 1937 it nevertheless set five world records with Guillaumet at the controls. The fact remained, however, that the Lieutenant-de-Vaisseau-Paris, which dated from 1935, had been three years in the building at a cost exceeding $1.5 million. On the eve of World War II France had—for a whole array of social and political reasons, some of which had accounted for her earlier successes—still not managed to turn out either a cheap, mass-produced airplane or car. (Many “doodlebug-sized” vehicles were displayed at the thirty-first Salon d’Automobile in Paris in the fall of 1937, but these amounted literally to a case of too little too late.) The leading producer of aircraft matériel in World War I, the country found herself outpaced and outproduced by late 1939, when it mattered. As for the Lieutenant-de-Vaisseau-Paris, the aircraft fared slightly better than her first cousin, the Normandie. The seaplane, which was used briefly for maritime surveillance before the fall of France, was destroyed by the retreating Germans in 1944.
What was Saint-Exupéry, a man who could be counted on for nothing if not perspective, thinking as 1937 wore on? He had witnessed the bloodshed of Spain; he had met his Hitler Youth. He had seen France lose her lead in the air and he had listened to Mermoz and Guillaumet and Daurat and a host of friends and air ministry officials of different political persuasions expound on the tragedy. He continued to deal with these issues—and the others of the day—on a higher plane. In his notebooks he grappled with economic theory and its social implications, with the absurdity of any kind of patriotism founded on a forced conformity, with the invidiousness of politics. These ideas he set down more by way of meditation than by argument; dense with contradiction, these pages were never meant for anyone’s eyes but his own. Taken as a whole, however, they are valuable in that they tell us where Saint-Exupéry was when he was not participating in the dinner conversation, not castigating the French government of the moment, not involving himself in the unfolding dramas of the air ministry. Trying to make sense of a minister’s new policy with Werth one night, Saint-Exupéry stopped his friend in midthought: “Careful, I think we are anthropomorphizing.” From Freud to Marx to Einstein he was entirely taken with the intellectual issues of his time, but the pages of his notebooks of the late 1930s so seldom address current events that they can prove near-impossible to date. At the heart of their ramblings lay several insistent concerns: how to reconcile an individual’s thirst for profit with some social good; how to allow for a maximum of liberty in a world prone to tyranny; how to apply the happy lessons of Aéropostale to a social structure; how to nourish and motivate man in a machine age. Ségogne remembered that Saint-Exupéry returned from Moscow fascinated by the differences in speed with which a philosopher and a technician worked. Nothing in the world could make the former think more quickly while everything in the world—and profit first and foremost—conspired to make the latter produce more quickly. The result, Saint-Exupéry argued, is that we live in a technological age for which we are not yet spiritually prepared.
He conjured at the same time with a number of inventions. In 1937 he filed patents for two radio-navigation systems and a device for measuring fuel consumption. His reading had grown more and more technical; he read only science when writing himself. Madame de B reported that the pile on his bedside table included works by the mathematician James Jeans, the British astronomer Arthur Eddington, and the physicists Max Planck and Louis de Broglie, most of them pioneers in quantum theory. He was particularly fascinated by research into the nature of the atom and with the concept of entropy, investigations that yielded up a metaphysical side. He enjoyed lively discussions with Fernand Holweck, the French physicist and inventor. At the same time he also began the work he referred to as his “poem,” a book that bore no resemblance at all to anything he had written before and had more in common with the florid, aphoristic style and near-biblical presentation of Gide’s Nourritures terrestres or Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. He remained on the Air France payroll. Though he seems rarely to have lectured this year, Renault was still, at the end of 1937, supplying him with the latest facts and figures regarding its aviation program for his publicity work. In June he was promoted to captain in the reserve. It is unlikely that he thought much about the honor, which amounted to a formality; nothing about his comportment over the next year suggested that Saint-Exupéry expected to see himself in an air force uniform, though by th
e summer of 1939 he was saying, half in jest, that in the event of an outbreak of hostilities his captain’s cap was ready. Like the rest of France he had his own business to attend to: at the end of the year he stepped up his preparations for a third long-distance flight.
Madame de B asserted early on what has generally been accepted as fact: that Saint-Exupéry set out for what seemed at the time a gratuitous raid and would in retrospect appear to be a matter of pure folly because his life with Consuelo had become untenable. This was doubtless true, if conclusions can be drawn from the fact that by late 1938 the couple were living separately. As early as the summer of 1936 Saint-Exupéry had, however, been planning an American trip. It had initially been suggested to him by Conty; if I were you, Conty had told him in 1935, I would do something no Frenchman has yet done—fly the length of North and South America—especially as you already know the southern route. Saint-Exupéry seems to have been seduced by the fact that a straight line can be drawn longitudinally from Montreal to Punta Arenas. Evidently without consulting his friend, he sent his curriculum vitae to a New York–based journalist in June 1936 to ask for help in setting up a speaking tour. He proposed a month-long stay in America in April and May, during which he would lecture, in French, on “Aviation and Civilization.” Conty, he proposed, would speak on the operations of the European and trans-Atlantic airlines.
The American network of Alliances Françaises evidently committed themselves to the venture, which over the next year evolved into a flight covering both American continents but involving no lecture work. Saint-Exupéry began to ready his papers in March 1937, by which time he must have known he had the support of the air ministry, if not of Air France as well. (Sending a prominent aviator abroad in a familiar airplane to herald the glories of a country’s industry while at home that industry moldered amounted either to loose management of funds or an exercise in self-delusion, but the French faith in appearances was—in lieu of more substantive balms—by now stronger than ever.) By the fall of 1937 the Americas trip had become a reality; the ministry—billing the flight as a publicity trip to be undertaken by Saint-Exupéry in conjunction with the aviatrix Maryse Bastié, heading south from Montreal—wrote and cabled for the many necessary permissions. Saint-Exupéry’s own correspondence this winter included a series of long letters to Renault and its insurers regarding Raccaud’s expenses, for which the Wadi Natroun engineer was reimbursed only in November, twenty-two months after the Libyan crash.