by Stacy Schiff
~
Saint-Exupéry, André Prévot, and the crated-up Simoun F-ANXR sailed for New York on the île-de-France during the first week of January 1938. The trip had continued to evolve, both in terms of schedule and itinerary. The French consular staff who had obtained landing rights for the pilot had been under the impression that he was to take off from Montreal on October 14, 1937; in November Prévot was still writing Saint-Exupéry notes about work that was being done on the Simoun’s propeller and on its new radio. In December the air ministry thought the departure imminent; neither pilot nor mechanic obtained his American visa until after the New Year, by which time the Simoun’s test flights had finally been completed (and when Maryse Bastié was already in Uruguay, as part of her goodwill tour of South America). Gaston Lavoisier, who test-flew the Simoun at Le Bourget, remembered Saint-Exupéry only in foul moods. The pilot was displeased with the flight results, expecting more of the aircraft than it could reliably deliver, and unappreciative of Lavoisier’s cautions as to its limitations. Perhaps with his counsel in mind the pilot repeatedly made a curious claim in the weeks preceding his departure for South America. On the île-de-France he told an acquaintance that he was setting off despite the fact that he was going to have a serious accident, which he would survive. In New York he told one friend he was doing “what he had to do,” another that he knew the trip to be a vain conceit, but thought it probably his last shot at a long-distance flight. To others he confided, “This trip is risky.” Then he would touch wood and add, “Fortunately I’m lucky. Nothing will happen to me.” The record does not show if Prévot was on hand or not for these pronouncements; he was in any event to find out about his boss’s clairvoyance soon enough.
In New York Saint-Exupéry checked into a twenty-fifth-floor room at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel on January 11. He saw friends, and he met with Eugene Reynal and Curtice Hitchcock. The vice president of the Century Company, which had brought out Night Flight, Hitchcock had known Saint-Exupéry since 1932, when the two men had met for dinner in Paris. (Consuelo had served memorably as interpreter, and Fargue as program director, until the wee hours of the morning.) He and Reynal, who had met Saint-Exupéry separately in Paris in 1932 and shared his colleague’s admiration for his work, were now doing business as Reynal & Hitchcock. For some time they had been eager to make the Frenchman their author. (In an exchange fitting to the life, Hitchcock had asked a representative to speak to the author about the American rights to his books at the end of 1933. The representative had written back that December: “St.-Exupéry spent two minutes under the water in an airplane accident near Nice a few days ago. When he returns to Paris I shall get in touch with him.”) Probably at this time the pilot agreed to let an impish man of courtly demeanor and quiet humor serve as his literary agent in America. A Cairoborn, Sorbonne-educated thirty-six-year-old of Austrian and French descent, Maximilian Becker had come to New York as a concert pianist, having seranaded the king of Siam. Shortly after his arrival he fractured both wrists while ice-skating; he never again touched a piano (or an ice skate), opening a literary agency instead. Among his early clients he counted Simenon and several other French writers; Jean Prévost introduced him to Saint-Exupéry.
With Becker’s help the writer prevailed now on a fresh set of editors with a fresh set of results. (Parisian publishers and newspapermen had grown a little tired of his tin-cup routine. Gallimard remembered that on one occasion, when Saint-Exupéry had pushed his charity to the limit, the writer headed off to see Jean Provoust at Paris-Soir. Provoust had left strict instructions that he was not to be let in, but Saint-Exupéry managed to charm his way into the newspaper owner’s office anyway, only to be told he could not have a loan. “Who do you take me for? God himself?” exploded Provoust. Taken aback, Saint-Exupéry replied, “Yes,” and left with a check.) In New York he submitted a few disparate pieces of journalism to Eugene Reynal, billing them as the first three or four chapters of a new book. Reynal did not read French easily but was able to see that the pages—most likely the Marianne series of 1932 and an assortment of Paris-Soir articles—were rough and rather disconnected. They were beautiful, however, and Saint-Exupéry claimed to need some special equipment for the South American flight, and with Becker’s help a very favorable contract was drawn up for a new book, separate from the author’s standing agreement with Gallimard. All of this happened quickly; the contract—granting Saint-Exupéry the largest advance he had yet commanded—was signed a week after his arrival.
Saint-Exupéry was less impressed by the frenetic pace of New York life than by various aspects of American aviation, which he found to be superbly organized. He was especially taken with continual radio broadcasts, by which a pilot could navigate along aerial highways, an advance that had not yet come to France. He claimed it had taken him only two hours to familiarize himself with a system that was most of all superior in its very simplicity: “With the American navigation system, any tourist, even one unfamiliar with radios, can fly through the night in perfect safety,” he marveled, probably lamenting a little his original Simoun. American broadcasts came in very handy in his case. As a test run for the new Simoun he offered to take Richard de Roussy de Sales, then a Paris-Soir correspondent in New York, to Washington, where Roussy de Sales had business. First he asked if Roussy de Sales had ever flown to Washington before; he had, often. Once in the air Saint-Exupéry turned to his passenger and asked, “Now, which way?” He could not believe that—having gone by air to Washington many times before—the journalist did not know the route, and he had brought no map. (Nor could the air traffic controller in the Washington tower believe that the pilot landed without contacting him, an oversight for which Roussy de Sales was forced to expiate through embassy channels.) The Simoun had been uncrated and reassembled at Newark airport, while Saint-Exupéry conferred on his routing with officials of Pan American Airways. The airline was then flying three times weekly from Brownsville, Texas, to Guatemala City and on to Panama; their representatives counseled the Frenchman to use this southbound corridor, after which he could continue down the west coast of South America to Punta Arenas. A sustained flight over the Caribbean—Saint-Exupéry’s original intention had been to hop from Florida to Cuba to Panama and on to Ecuador—in a single-engine aircraft seemed inadvisable, although the pilot balked a little at the reasonable suggestion. “I prefer to be over water than lost among a bunch of stones with which I’m unfamiliar,” he commented. He was, however, officially in America on a goodwill mission and not on a record-setting flight—his insurance covered him only for the former—and, deciding in favor of caution, he borrowed Pan Am’s slightly longer route to South America.
The Simoun was test-flown at least four times at Newark without incident, but Saint-Exupéry and Prévot’s first two attempts at departures for their 9,000-mile flight were thwarted by heavy rains. On the morning of Tuesday, February 15, unwilling to wait any longer, Saint-Exupéry made a third start, although the weather had not entirely cleared and he was forced by fog and head winds to land in Atlanta and in Houston. (Later he boasted that—the radio-navigation system being as good as it was—he had not once consulted his map between New York and Atlanta. He certainly had not pored over it at the last minute: Curtice Hitchcock attested that he could think of nothing on the eve of his departure but the highly elaborate wristwatch he had just acquired.) South of Houston the weather presented no problems, and Saint-Exupéry made only brief, scheduled stops in Mexico City and Veracruz. Madame de B called him in the coastal town as he had asked her to, having supplied the telephone numbers of all the airfields in advance. He was ecstatic to hear her voice; she could hear the noises from the airstrip in the background as they spoke. The Simoun continued on to Guatemala City, where the pilot must have made a last-minute decision to stop. His original intention—one to which the French minister to Central America had been alerted, though later than he liked to know such things—had been to fly from Veracruz over Guatemala and directly on to Nicaragu
a. Saint-Exupéry landed at the La Aurora airfield in Guatemala City at about 12:30 p.m. on the sixteenth and in his brief ground time again revised his itinerary. He now proposed to continue nonstop on to the Panama Canal Zone but changed his mind after conferring with Pan Am officials at La Aurora, who warned him he would have trouble taking off with enough fuel to make it through to Panama; the altitude of the La Aurora field favored a lighter aircraft. He revised his flight plan accordingly (the embassy officials had had the good sense to obtain visas for him for every country in which he might conceivably land), cabling the news to the Paris-Soir correspondents in New York who were following the trip: “IMPOSSIBLE TO TAKE ON SUFFICIENT FUEL BECAUSE ALTITUDE AND VERY UNEVEN STRIP. WILL STOP-OVER MANAGUA.”
Several minutes later the two men climbed into the Simoun. Saint-Exupéry performed his run-up and at about 1:30 taxied down the mile-long runway. It was a windless, hot afternoon. At the north end of the field, beyond a low fence, lay an abandoned gravel pit, on the far side of which stood an aqueduct. These now began to approach although the Simoun had not yet picked up the speed necessary for takeoff. As the end of the field loomed Saint-Exupéry attempted to pull the airplane up anyway—he could have done little else—but it settled down again. He maneuvered to the left to avoid the oncoming fence and attempted to bounce the Simoun into the air, but the aircraft only shuddered back to earth a second time from a height of about seven feet, losing part of its left wing and the left aileron to a fence post, crashing nose first into the gravel pit, bouncing about forty feet farther along the ground, twisting around 180 degrees as it did so, and depositing Prévot in its wake, pinned down by the engine.
This time Saint-Exupéry did not leap from the wreckage. He was found still in his seat in the demolished cockpit. According to the head of the American Legation in Guatemala, who was on the scene within fifteen minutes of the accident, the instrument panel, firewall, and engine had all been shorn from their places, leaving the front of the cockpit entirely open. None of this is obvious in photographs of the crash, in which the Simoun looks like a mangled lump of scrap metal and from no angle bears a resemblance to anything that flies. Saint-Exupéry was not much better off himself. As he commented later, “When they pulled me from the plane, I was the biggest piece of wreckage.” He later ascribed his survival to the very fragility of the aircraft, which had crumbled on impact. In a more solid aircraft he imagined that he would have roasted to death.
An ambulance pulled up instantly to transport the two men to a military hospital. By all rights the Simoun should have burst into flames, taking the flyers with it, especially as the area around the crash was drenched in fuel. Saint-Exupéry and Prévot, who were still conscious as they were carried off the field, did not look particularly lucky, however, and the first reports had it that neither man would live. Both were bloody messes; Saint-Exupéry had clearly suffered extreme head injuries, and Prévot’s right leg was mutilated, broken in several places. For a variety of reasons they had now flown together for the last time. The French minister to Central America, Monsieur Lavondes, sent word to the Quai d’Orsay a few hours after the crash that both men wanted to reassure their families that they were alive. Prévot supplied his father’s name and address; Saint-Exupéry asked that Madame de B be contacted. Shortly after having done so he lost consciousness.
Saint-Exupéry’s goodwill mission of 9,000 miles had generated few headlines outside the pages of Paris-Soir. His crash 3,400 miles into the trip made news in many countries, although French reporters generally shied away from the cause of it: the Simoun’s gas tanks had, despite the Pan Am warning, been overfilled. Probably Prévot operated on the assumption that a Guatemalan gallon and an American gallon are the same, whereas in fact an Imperial gallon is closer to five liters and a U.S. gallon to about four. In any event it was Saint-Exupéry’s responsibility as the Simoun’s pilot to verify the state of the gas tanks. French journalists exonerated him by focusing on the inadequacies of the Guatemalan airfield, the result of which was a certain resentment in the Central American city against French aviation in general and French airplanes in particular, not exactly the intended fallout from an air ministry—sponsored goodwill mission. In some respects history had just repeated itself as farce, which may have explained why Saint-Exupéry—with an abundant sense of humor but a low tolerance for foolishness—did not anywhere write about this crash, which was to mark him more profoundly than any of the others. He could not have helped feeling a little embarrassed.
He did make occasional mention of his convalescence, which was long, and which kept him in the Guatemala City hospital for over a month. He was to claim that he lay for many days in a coma but no official report on his condition corroborates this, and the fact that he managed to communicate daily with Madame de B would seem ample evidence to the contrary. He did arrive at the hospital unconscious and displayed all the signs of serious concussion, which goes in French by the impeccable name of “commotion cérébrale,” waking in a state of confusion no doubt exacerbated by the language barrier, a high fever, and a host of other injuries. Listed by Dr. Echeverría Ávila, the colonel who headed the hospital, these consisted of nasty bruises on his right wrist, elbow, and left forearm, and damage to his left eye (Saint-Exupéry was particularly concerned about his vision), the left side of his forehead, his bottom lip, his left shoulder, and his chest. His heart was racing. Overlooked were several actual fractures—Saint-Exupéry would maintain always that there had been eight and doubtless now felt there were at least twice that many—including one in his left shoulder, which as a consequence healed badly, preventing the pilot from ever again lifting his left arm above his head.
Later he wrote in Harper’s Bazaar of how he had floated back to the real world in the Guatemalan hospital “through a thick syrupy atmosphere.” One night he awoke, freezing cold, and begged his nurse for the sheet “that heals wounds.” The nurse protested that such a thing did not exist. He tried to picture himself making his army bed, saw that there had been a top and a bottom but no third sheet, and decided she must be right. Nonetheless sometime after the crash he found himself back in Lyons, at the little station at the top of the funicular that runs up to the Fourvière basilica. There at the exit were the same advertisements he had known as a child, among them a poster for “Girardot’s Linen Sheets—a sovereign soother of aches, pains, and wounds.” The image, wrote Saint-Exupéry, had been “tucked away in a dim corner of my mind for nearly thirty years.” In fact it had not been bundled away so neatly and never would be. In signal acts of tenderness sheets get smoothed—or do their soothing act—in every one of his works, from the short story “Manon Danseuse” on.
Saint-Exupéry’s friend Pierre de Lanux, an American-based professor and lecturer, read about the accident in The New York Times of February 17. Within days he had decided to cancel his appointments for the week and make the arduous trip from Cleveland—he had been on a lecture tour when he got the news—to Guatemala City. He knew Saint-Exupéry’s life was not in danger but thought he must be lonely and in terrible pain. (It was almost too perfect that he should have been reading La Boétie, Montaigne’s great friend, in the train from Louisville south.) A Guatemalan colonel accompanied him to the hospital on the twenty-second, ushering him to a ground-floor room off a lushly planted courtyard. There was continual commotion in the court, but Saint-Exupéry’s quarters were quiet, even without the luxury of a door. He must have been overjoyed to see Lanux, who in addition to being a stalwart and erudite friend spoke twice as much Spanish as did he, conjuring together Latin, French, and his abundant charm. Lanux found the patient lying on his back, his hands bandaged, on the mend but in poor shape. Most impressive was the wound to the face, which ran from Saint-Exupéry’s eyebrow to his eyelid and pointed to an inflamed and bloodshot left eye. The patient complained of internal pains and moved his upper torso with great difficulty; he had an appetite only for milk and meat and suffered a burning sensation in his stomach. Moreover, as a re
sult of the tetanus shots he had received, he was covered in hives.
His lodgings, however, were adequate and the personnel kind, which made sense since the race to pick up his hospital bill had been won by the Guatemalan government itself. The orderlies indulgently rolled his bed to a telephone so that he might call his Parisian friend. A French doctor had been sent from Mexico; having made a tour of Guatemala City’s medical clinics, he decided that Saint-Exupéry was best off where he was. His patient was miserable and groaned a good deal; Lanux indulged him by slipping him aspirin, forbidden by the doctors, the only gifts, Lanux lamented later, he had ever been able to offer the friend who so often bestowed on him the middle-of-the-night pleasure of his half-minted prose.
Within forty-eight hours Lanux was off, leaving Saint-Exupéry to fend for himself. By nature he was of course the worst of patients: Guatemala left him with a number of persistent problems, some of them exacerbated by his imagination. Pélissier, himself a doctor, recalled having taken his friend to see an eminent colleague in Paris in 1939 for back pain which he suffered whenever he was upright. The doctor made his diagnosis and wrote Saint-Exupéry a prescription, which he felt would alleviate the worst of the problem. In the car leaving the appointment, the writer disputed the diagnosis point by point and proceeded to tear up the prescription, tossing its pieces to the winds. His immediate challenge in Guatemala was to keep his left arm, which became badly infected, and which the military doctors planned to amputate. He may have had some assistance in his campaign to hold on to it from Consuelo, who arrived in Guatemala aboard the Wyoming on March 5. She claimed later to have saved the arm but was not the only woman to say as much. After a few days at her husband’s side she headed off to see her family in El Salvador, where Saint-Exupéry followed her for a ten-day stay after his release on the eighteenth, presumably now meeting his in-laws for the first time. As Consuelo remembered the encounter, her father greeted her husband warmly: “Come settle here. We will give you more plantations than you can cross in an entire day in a powerful car.” Respectfully Saint-Exupéry responded: “My dear father-in-law, my dear mother-in-law, it is too late for me to cultivate coffee beans. My job is to till the clouds.”
