by Stacy Schiff
He was afterward flown back to New York on a Pan Am DC-3, an airplane fitted with sleeping compartments, which he found roomy and sensationally comfortable. He could not get over how far America had taken night flying: the weather between Dallas and New York had been dreadful, and the DC-3’s pilots had flown the entire route on instruments. Saint-Exupéry was shocked to find the aircraft’s other passengers wholly indifferent to this arrangement. He arrived in New York on March 28 and fell into the arms of Guillaumet, in the United States on Air France business at the time. Madame de B met him in New York as well and arranged for him to borrow the Beekman Place apartment of a very close friend, Colonel William J. Donovan, head of the OSS in World War II. As Donovan’s daughter’s room had the best view, giving on to the East River, Saint-Exupéry settled into her bright yellow quarters for the remainder of his convalescence. His friend stayed on with him for about a month to see to his medical care, taking him to an osteopath daily. During this time X-rays revealed a number of fractures that had been overlooked in Guatemala, and the pilot discovered that, among other things, he had lost his ability to hold his liquor.
He was, however, soon very much up and about, whipping up small storms of static electricity by rubbing the soles of his shoes on Donovan’s carpet, then touching the key to the darkened apartment’s door, and acquainting himself with what seemed to him America’s infinite variety of gadgets, well-represented in the Beekman Place apartment. He enlisted his host’s law firm, Donovan & Leisure, to arrange for a sale of his patent for a low-visibility landing device, something he had been eager to do for some time. He ventured out to make his first real American purchases, discovering to his joy that the language barrier afforded him the opportunity to assemble small harems of attractive salesgirls. He lost weight, as he had after Libya, for the best. And he lunched now with Lewis Galantière, to whom both the Roussy de Sales brothers and Reynal and Hitchcock had introduced him before the crash. A Federal Reserve banker who could claim the distinction of having found Hemingway his first Paris apartment (slight and myopic, Galantière had not fared as well in the ring as had Jean Prévost), Galantière had been educated in Paris and had translated Sherwood Anderson into French. He continued to dabble in criticism and fiction. He was now charged with the task of translating Saint-Exupéry and of helping him to find a narrative device with which to fit together his farrago of pieces. On Beekman Place the pilot began to sort through the journalism that had been his thirties, in search of a book.
~
Still looking haggard, Saint-Exupéry sailed back to France aboard the Normandie early in May. What little remained of the Simoun had already been arranged to be sold and returned separately; Saint-Exupéry had a merry time in July explaining to a Paris customs inspector, the kind of man who was his downfall, why he should not pay duty on the compass he was bringing back to France with him. Clearly this device had been part of the original Simoun, explained Saint-Exupéry through gritted teeth, “as it is impossible for an airplane to leave the factory, and navigate, without this instrument.” A few items of sentimental interest—including a strip of red metal that Lanux had admired the previous year at Le Bourget—had been salvaged and carried by Lanux back to New York, wrapped in newspaper. These may or may not have included the pilot’s maps and documents, which were sent back to France via the embassy and some time later returned to him. When they arrived he called Pélissier to join him in a package-opening ceremony. Together they tore at the paper; out of a fake leather briefcase in which Saint-Exupéry had filed his maps fell a quantity of Guatemalan earth and dried blood. Both men were silenced. Generally speaking it was a quiet return, not the kind of which headlines are made, and it was to be a quiet couple of months before Saint-Exupéry was—both spiritually and physically—recovered.
He moved about restlessly this summer. He was in Paris briefly in July when Eugene Reynal and his new wife came through town; the three enjoyed a long and festive lunch at the Ritz, ably translated by the lovely Elizabeth Reynal, who was as much at home in French as in English. Saint-Exupéry appeared in fine form, which must have been a relief to a publisher who had signed him on only to watch him check into a Guatemala City hospital. He kept the Reynals long at the table. The honey-mooners were to head off for a trip around France; their new author insisted on providing them with a complete gastronomical itinerary, beginning with a four-star establishment outside Lyons, where the next day the Reynals found themselves sampling pâtés at 11:00 a.m. Having mentioned Saint-Exupéry’s name they were not allowed from their table until well into the afternoon.
The writer was almost certainly in Agay when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth came to visit Paris in midmonth, a visit billed as the most extravagant public event since the Armistice. Planned as a gesture toward preserving European peace, the celebration—on which the French government spent over 24 million francs—turned into a four-day party, during which only those in Paris who were in uniform did anything resembling work. In Agay Saint-Exupéry got to know his sister Gabrielle’s children, entertaining them with the magnificent new car he had managed to acquire, the most memorable feature of which from his niece Mireille’s point of view was the electric razor on the dashboard. Her uncle explained that it was extremely practical for the man who was late, gleefully demonstrating his ability to shave and drive simultaneously. He tried to encourage Mireille to draw, producing for her a quick sketch of her future husband. The drawing of a handsome young man was captioned “A husband for Mireille, by her venerable and revered uncle, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.” Mireille was counseled to hang it over her bed and study it before sleep every night, so that she would recognize her intended when she met him.
Saint-Exupéry went on to Geneva and revisited his childhood haunts, in Fribourg and in Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens. He spent part of August with Yvonne de Lestrange at Chitré, where his conversation continued to dazzle André Gide and where his card tricks left his mentor convinced he was clairvoyant. He made a stop in a tiny town in southeastern France to call on Marguerite Chapeys, the former Saint-Maurice housekeeper, about to be made famous as the mistress of the linens in Wind, Sand and Stars. And most likely that summer he and Madame de B paid a visit to the Benedictine monastery at Solesmes, which Saint-Exupéry remembered from his childhood, and where he was overwhelmed by the beauty of the chants at vespers.
Everywhere he went he carried with him his bundle of journalism. By the time he arrived in Vichy for a cure in September—it was during this stay that he ran into his Strasbourg aviation instructor and recalled for the Aébys his first solo flight—the bundle had grown. He was still enough troubled by his injuries to consider surgery for some lingering problems but continued to work in his sporadic fashion, fixated on the book. Lewis Galantière spent the summer at Sherwood Anderson’s estate in Trout Dale, Virginia, under a constant rain of letters from the author, whom he was translating furiously, although each missive—which instructed him to cut large portions of the adventure writing and proposed a multitude of tiny, stylistic revisions—did considerable damage to his schedule. (When he complained of this to Lazareff, the Paris-Soir editor could only regale him with stories of all the others who had suffered at the hands of Saint-Exupéry’s perfectionism.) Galantière had made a number of editorial suggestions, chief among them that Saint-Exupéry concoct better transitions between various sections (the Spanish sections proved especially problematic), that he write an expanded chapter on the machine, that he give some thought to unifying his remarks on aviation and its place in the modern world, that he add new material to the manuscript. More action, less philosophy, counseled Galantière, who had from the start a clear vision of the book. As their translator could communicate with their author better than either of Saint-Exupéry’s publishers Reynal and Hitchcock deferred to him editorially; it is unclear when Gallimard learned of the project, but it is certain that Galantière had no counterpart in France.
A great number of people were credited in a great number
of dedications with the birth of Wind, Sand and Stars. (In Jean Prévost’s copy Saint-Exupéry thanked the writer for having forced him to work and added that he hoped Prévost liked the book, as he had suggested he write it.) In France few were as instrumental as Hervé Mille, to whom Saint-Exupéry went in October because he once again found himself short of funds. (As interminable as his pecuniary difficulties seemed, they were to end with the publication of Wind, Sand and Stars, which Becker that month sold as well to a British publisher.) A percentage of the monies the writer had been advanced for the Guatemala trip had gone to the government as payment of back taxes, and the authorities were still after him. It seemed Saint-Exupéry had not felt it necessary to declare various subsidies he had received for the trip, as he had never seen this money himself; the French tax collectors felt differently. His accounts had been further depleted by the month’s stay in New York, which had somehow, despite Donovan’s hospitality, cost him more than 30,000 francs. He complained as well that he was running up substantial medical bills as a result of the crash. When the writer went to Mille looking for help the editor did not balk, despite the fact that Saint-Exupéry was already famously in debt to Paris-Soir. Instead Mille suggested that he might already have—among his Air France pieces, among the miscellaneous articles he had contributed to specialized aviation publications, among his rough drafts and false starts—something that he could sell the paper. He instructed him to collect all of his writings and to meet him the following evening near the Gare Montparnasse, at a comfortable restaurant. Saint-Exupéry arrived at Chez Jarraud with two bulging briefcases. After an excellent dinner author and editor cobbled together a series of three pieces, consisting as much of the writer’s reflections as of his adventures.
Saint-Exupéry had been out of touch with his American publishers for large parts of the summer, much to their despair. By early fall Hitchcock had taken to telephoning Becker daily for news of his author, of which there was none. By October, however, Saint-Exupéry was ready to send on these 10,000 words, strung together at Chez Jarraud. “I think that this last chapter gives the book all its breadth,” he wrote Becker on October 7, having cabled that the pages were traveling to New York on the Normandie. “I published it in three installments in Paris-Soir this week, to test the waters, and it was very well received.” The articles in fact consisted of his delayed impressions of the Spanish Civil War; in October 1938 they were more timely than ever, less concerned with Spain than with man and war. Three days before they had begun to appear, France and Britain had agreed in Munich to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, an act about which few in France harbored illusions. When he returned to Paris after the signing of the pact, French premier Édouard Daladier was met by crowds at the airport; his initial reaction was that they were there to lynch him. Daladier knew very well that he had paid an enormous price for a brief delay of the inevitable. When it turned out that the airport crowds were admiring ones, he said under his breath, “The idiots, they don’t know what they’re applauding!” France was not, however, going to go to war over Czechoslovakia—57 percent of the population favored the Munich agreement, as did both L’Intransigeant and Paris-Soir, Paris’s two most popular evening papers—even though troops had been in place along the Maginot Line since March.
Saint-Exupéry was as disturbed by the course of events as anyone—“When we thought peace was threatened, we discovered the abomination of war. When we thought war had been averted, we tasted the shame of peace,” he wrote—and suggested to Becker that his agent try to cash in on the topicality of his pieces by selling them to an American magazine. They might run, he suggested, with a revised opening, with a few lines about the anxiety with which the French were following events in Central Europe. At Chez Jarraud Saint-Exupéry and Mille carved out six additional articles on the desert adventures, most of them reworked versions of the Marianne series of 1932 and the Air France pieces. These ran in Paris-Soir in November to extraordinary acclaim and were later folded, nearly word for word, into Wind, Sand and Stars.
Saint-Exupéry’s had been a profitable housecleaning, though it drove Galantière to despair. He had been working as quickly as he could, shaping the book as he went. He had his hands full, given Saint-Exupéry’s many convictions, great and small, and the writer’s supple prose, cleaner now but no easier to translate than it had been years earlier for Stuart Gilbert. Translating from French into English is always a reductive act: it takes more words to say almost anything in French, and a translator working in that direction finds that whole seas of nuance evaporate when an attempt is made to channel them into English, a more specific language, that of business, not diplomacy. Raoul de Roussy de Sales put it best, speaking of literature of a different kind: “The difference between an American cookbook and a French one is that the former is very accurate and the second exceedingly vague. A French recipe seldom tells you how many ounces of butter to use to make crěpes Suzette, or how many spoonfuls of oil should go into a salad dressing.… American recipes look like doctors’ prescriptions.” Nowhere was this more true than with Saint-Exupéry’s lyrical, image-heavy prose: what sounds lush in French—from Chateaubriand to Proust—will in a poor translation turn purple in English. From these kinds of embarrassments Galantière saved Saint-Exupéry, making no secret of his hard work, “because translating you is a little like translating Rimbaud.” Privately, a little tug of war went on, as it will between editor and author, this one aggravated by the distance, by the author’s constant emendations—he tried to cut nearly a quarter of his pages, though Galantière insisted on salvaging them for the American edition—and by the sheer size of the task. Early on Galantière told Saint-Exupéry that he was a miserable judge of his own prose. After a second collaboration he would allege that the author was virtually incapable of putting a book together on his own.
Ultimately Saint-Exupéry complied with Galantière’s request for an additional chapter. Late in the year, at the suggestion of Hitchcock, who had presumably heard him tell the story, he wrote up his oft-told tale of the Patagonian cyclone. Titled “The Elements,” the chapter makes for one of the most marked differences between two very different books, the English-language edition of Wind, Sand and Stars, in which it figures, and the French-language edition of Terre des hommes, in which it does not. This chapter was by no means written in the neat little hurricane in which it is said to have been: Saint-Exupéry worked and reworked these fourteen pages long after the rest of the book had fallen into place. Later he explained that the difficulty had come in casting the struggle in the simplest possible terms; he had needed to pare down his language so as to accentuate the enormity of the battle. He was still finishing the account when he asked Galantière to read through the American text from start to finish, probably in November, to see if it flowed well and seemed less a recycled series of articles, and if the last section, of which he was so proud, did not indeed seem a “crowning achievement.” He wanted desperately for the whole to add up not to an adventure book but to a sort of moral call to arms, and to this end moved the section “The Men” to the front, so that the reader might be inspired by the examples of Guillaumet and Mermoz. This was not what Galantière had in mind—the philosophizing overlay is certainly what dates the book most—but it was what his author wanted. Moreover, it was, wrote Saint-Exupéry, applying a little pressure, also the right decision in the opinion of Gide, to whom he had shown the text. (At some point before or during the preparation of Wind, Sand and Stars, Gide is said to have pressed a copy of Conrad’s 1906 Mirror of the Sea into Saint-Exupéry’s hands, proof that it was perfectly legitimate to forge a book out of a loose collection of sketches.)
Saint-Exupéry was sufficiently obsessed with the project to talk of coming to New York at the end of the year to work with Galantière on the last chapters. He imagined a few days at sea to be just the kind of rest he needed, and thought he might continue on toward the heartland of America, where he hoped to begin a novel. (Becker encouraged him in this
direction, promising that he could sell serial rights alone in the novel for $35,000 after the success Wind, Sand and Stars was bound to have.) The author did neither in 1938, when he appears more than anything else to have been casting about for a place to go. He found it at the Hôtel Lutétia, to which he returned in late September. The place Vauban was abandoned; Consuelo settled a few blocks away in a smallish apartment on the rue Barbet-de-Jouy, a hundred yards or so from the old rue de Chanaleilles apartment. Henceforth, save for a brief period in America, the Saint-Exupérys were to maintain separate addresses.
The writer was, all the same, often enough reduced to scouring the town—or the country—for his wandering wife. Toward the end of the year he moved as well to an apartment of his own, a small studio that he and Madame de B found together, at 52, rue Michel-Ange, in the 16th arrondissement. As he traveled to Algiers to see Pélissier just after Christmas 1938 and corrected the French proofs of the new book in Agay in January, the rue Michel-Ange initially provided him with little more than a mailing address. He did finally manage a two-week stay in America early in February 1939, by which time Reynal and Hitchcock had already bitten off their nails, as they had announced an early spring publication date for Wind, Sand and Stars. Their author arrived with revised text in hand but was spared his publishers’ rage for two reasons: the pages were good, better than anyone had dared hope, and the book had been sold to the Book-of-the-Month Club, making it necessary—and profitable; Saint-Exupéry received nearly $5,000—to delay publication until summer. The writer spent his time looking over Galantière’s shoulder and helping to coordinate the two editions, which for all his perfectionism he did not object to adapting to their different audiences. Probably it helped a little that for all his discussions with Galantière, he was unable to vet the English-language edition closely.
