Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  By June the French reviews had dwindled to a few but the American raves had begun to come in. The book remained on the best-seller lists for nine months; by August more than 150,000 copies had been sold, swelling Saint-Exupéry’s royalty account. In New York that summer he was thrilled to find his photograph in bookstore displays all over town, more delighted even with this very American tribute than he had been with the dignified honor bestowed upon him by the Académie Française. The book continued to seduce, as its elegiac accounts of the most harrowing of feats still do. Simone de Beauvoir picked up a copy in November and passed it on to Sartre; the two thought Saint-Exupéry talked drivel when he ventured into philosophy but fell under his curious spell all the same. De Beauvoir wrote Sartre that Terre had been the first book in a long time that had made her dream. Sartre agreed that it had left him homesick for a world he did not know, nostalgic for a life he had not lived. He talked of being “under the influence” of Terre des hommes as it is easy to be, drunk on its author’s images and idealism, urged on by his example to overreach oneself. In its high-mindedness everyone saw what he wanted. A volume that arguably did claim that work set one free, Terre was as much admired in Germany as in France in 1939. Saint-Exupéry was later co-opted by the maquis and the Vichyites, by existentialists and Catholics and Marxists and humanists, the way Péguy was to be celebrated both by the Résistance and by Vichy. It was entirely appropriate that Wind, Sand and Stars, winner of the Académie Française’s prize for the best novel of the year, should be voted by the American Booksellers Association to be the best work of nonfiction published in 1939.

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  France enjoyed a last gasp of frivolity that spring and summer, when the stage and screen hits were Giraudoux’s Ondine and Disney’s Snow White. Janet Flanner commented that it had “taken the threat of war to make the French loosen up and have a really swell and civilized good time.” For Saint-Exupéry as well these were lighthearted months, spent among the best friends he would know. On March 1 he attended the baptism of Anne de Ségogne, his goddaughter. He was not known to have been a father himself and expressed no more regret about this than about not having a house full of fine furniture, but his feelings as far as others were concerned had not changed in the ten years since Ségogne’s first child was born. Saint-Exupéry had written him: “You are going to be proud and insufferable. Which is only natural: I don’t think much creation in life measures up to that of a little living being.” The Easter holidays found him in the south of France, first at the Werths’ country house in Saint-Amour, not far from Saint-Maurice.

  From here he set out late one morning with Suzanne and Léon Werth and their fifteen-year-old son, Claude, in the family’s Bugatti. In a leisurely fashion—Saint-Exupéry was not at the wheel—they made their way north to a small inn, in the village of Fleurville, overlooking the Saône. On the terrace of the Café de la Marine, in the warm, spring sun, the two writers ordered Pernods; they watched as a German bargeman, his wife, and a French mechanic worked on the river. Saint-Exupéry hailed the trio and invited them for a drink; they talked of war, which the foreigners assured him the German people were unwilling to fight. The French mechanic recognized Saint-Exupéry and asked him to autograph a postcard of the Saône, which he did. Lunch was a straightforward affair, consisting of a fine saucisson served with pain de campagne, a friture de poissons, and a poulet à la crème; for Saint-Exupéry the clear light of nostalgia transformed this simple repast and these few hours of perfect communion into the kind of totemic moment he had known under the stars in Nouakchott. As clean, well-pressed linens seemed to him always the very expression of civilization, he would later consider peace as that afternoon by the Saône. In Lettre à un otage (Letter to a Hostage), written in New York in 1942, he described the lunch—leaving out the autograph-seeker, and sacrificing the friture to the saucisson—as a true miracle, the kind that makes little noise. We know little of what was said at the lunch table but the afternoon was clearly not without its magic. More than a year afterward Werth wrote in his journal of the “shrines of memory” created by friendship: “At Fleurville, the Saône, the pale trees, the chicken, the friture will always have for me the taste of friendship.” He was still thinking about the outing four years later, when, unbeknownst to him, Saint-Exupéry had written about it as well.

  From Fleurville Werth drove to Lyons, depositing his wife and son at the train station. Saint-Exupéry had insisted that Werth accompany him on a visit to Sallès’s, a scant 150 miles away at Tarascon; there was an added attraction in that Ségogne was vacationing with friends nearby, in Arles. By overriding Werth’s objections that arriving at what was bound to be a rather advanced hour with a stranger in tow did not constitute proper behavior, Saint-Exupéry managed to assemble his two oldest friends and one of his two best friends. As they sat down to a late dinner, suddenly and visibly moved, he flung out his long arms and announced: “Tonight, three of my best friends are together. I have never been so happy in my life.” It is unlikely that anyone got much sleep that evening. From Tarascon Saint-Exupéry moved on, with Ségogne and an architect friend, for a short tour of the region. In the Camargue delta Ségogne and Pierre Dalloz paused to admire the church of Saint-Gilles. A baptism had just released a group of screaming children into the square; Saint-Exupéry disappeared along with them. He turned up later, radiant, in the village pâtisserie, surrounded by twenty admirers busily licking sugar off their sticky fingers. At Aigues-Mortes he again proved, as Dalloz put it, that “he preferred human beings to old stones.” While Dalloz and Ségogne visited the Tour de Constance, the Académie Française laureate-to-be inserted himself with the greatest of ease into a game of boules being played in the shadow of the town’s fortifications.

  At the end of May Saint-Exupéry and Madame de B rejoined what remained of the Aéropostale family outside of Biscarrosse, where Guillaumet had been working with the Lieutenant-de-Vaisseau-Paris. The occasion was Guillaumet’s thirty-seventh birthday, as well as the awarding of Saint-Exupéry’s rosette of the Légion d’Honneur; with Guillaumet as his sponsor, he had been named an officier in January. Lucas and Néri, who was also a member of the Lieutenant-de-Vaisseau-Paris team, joined them, as did the Guillaumets’ terrier. There was singing and a cake with thirty-seven candles and some old-time boisterousness but there were no speeches, as both guests of honor were too moved to attempt one. Saint-Exupéry owed Guillaumet more than simply his decoration. The most quoted line in Terre des hommes, Guillaumet’s “I swear that what I went through, no animal would have gone through,” resounds even today: Gérard d’Aboville, the closest thing modern France has had to an adventurer, practically paraphrased the aviator when explaining what had possessed him to row alone across the Pacific in 1991. On reading Guillaumet’s official report after the Andes crash Saint-Exupéry had written him that he deserved a chair at the Académie Française; it now appeared as if Guillaumet was winning one for his friend. Guillaumet even figured in the public announcement of the award in December, when the director of the Académie mentioned that what the Immortals had most of all admired about Terre des hommes was its author’s “virile affection for his companions … his marvelous account of the martyrdom of Guillaumet.” In inscribing Vol de nuit to his friend Saint-Exupéry had promised that his next book would be titled Guillaumet. It was not, although Terre des hommes—a specially printed copy of which Saint-Exupéry hand-delivered at 2:00 a.m.—is dedicated to him. During this Biscarrosse visit Guillaumet invited Saint-Exupéry to join him on the Lieutenant-de-Vaisseau-Paris’s crossing to New York, scheduled for early July, an idea that entailed a certain rewriting of Air France regulations. In his notebook Saint-Exupéry defined liberty as “the ability to defy probability”; he flexed this well-developed muscle again now, by no means for the last time that year.

  After several conversations, Louis Couhé, the head of Air France Transatlantique, took the brunt of Saint-Exupéry’s conviction. No passengers were allowed on test flights, and there w
as little reason for an exception to be made for someone who had no official relation with the company. At the end of what appears to have been a full day of discussions Saint-Exupéry succeeded in convincing Couhé to designate him “pilote complémentaire.” “Didn’t he after all possess,” reasoned the indulgent director, “all the necessary licenses?” So it was that Saint-Exupéry was officially listed as a second pilot of the forty-two-ton flying boat when in fact he spent the July 7 crossing from Biscarrosse to Long Island Sound mostly looking over Guillaumet’s shoulder. During the four-day layover in New York he had his first glimpse of his likeness in bookstores and met with his happy publisher and with his agent, who took him on a late-night tour of the Harlem jazz clubs. At dawn on Bastille Day the flying boat—which all aboard knew to be a dinosaur in its time, when the Pan Am Clipper was zipping regularly across the ocean—took off from Long Island in what unexpectedly turned into the first nonstop flight of a commercial airliner from the United States to France. Saint-Exupéry earned his keep during these twenty-eight and a half hours, regaling the crew with stories, reading Guillaumet passages from the French-language proofs of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Listen! The Wind, to which he had agreed to write a preface. The diversions provided by this “passager mascotte” must have been particularly welcome at lunchtime, when it was discovered that the crew’s meals had inadvertently been frozen with dry ice and would require hours to thaw.

  On landing he left Biscarrosse immediately for Yvonne de Lestrange’s, where the Guillaumets were to join him. (Guillaumet was longer than expected in Biscarrosse, and when he and his wife finally drove up to Chitré that evening they found a miserable Saint-Exupéry perched by the side of the road. He had spent two hours running between the road and his cousin’s telephone, convinced that, having braved tke North Atlantic, Guillaumet had been lost to western France.) The two glowed with triumph, a feeling the writer this time immediately conveyed to paper: Paris-Soir carried an account of the transatlantic flight on July 22. In it Saint-Exupéry expressed his usual regrets about commercial aviation having grown a little paunchy, a little “embourgeoisé” but himself claimed to feel ten years younger after his trip, which had been like a childhood revisited. He sounded similar notes in two other pieces that appeared this summer, the first of which prefaced a special issue of a magazine on test-piloting edited by Conty. In it he made the case for intuition over mathematical equation, wisdom over science, a case entirely in keeping both with his approach to mathematics and his approach to piloting but heresy, had anyone noticed, in a country run by engineers. In July he tinkered with the preface to the Lindbergh book, the translated manuscript of which had been given him in mid-June. Henri Delgove, Lindbergh’s translator, happened to be a native of Le Mans, and he had received a warm welcome on the rue Michel-Ange, where Saint-Exupéry had agreed to write the piece. Delgove may have rued the day. The author began his reading of the manuscript shortly before the Lieutenant-de-Vaisseau-Paris took off, cabling that he was so impressed with the work that he wanted to write a longer preface, provided that Delgove could wait until mid-July for its delivery. Mid-July came and went. The third week of the month Delgove and Jean Lucas locked Saint-Exupéry in his room for an evening and went off to Montparnasse to see a movie. After midnight they returned to the rue Michel-Ange to look in on their prisoner; they found him haggard, disheveled, and in a cold sweat, but they also found several sheets of microscopic text. They put the author to bed on the couch.

  Delgove’s battle was not yet over. The next weeks brought communications from Saint-Exupéry from Cannes and from the Normandie, on which he set sail again for New York on the twenty-sixth, less than two weeks after his return on the Lieutenant-de-Vaisseau-Paris. “Tell Delgove to replace page 3 line 10 ‘rapports’ with ‘relations,’ ” he cabled. Robert de Saint-Jean, a Paris-Soir contributor, ran into the writer on the boat and heard all about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the second time, appropriately, that Saint-Exupéry had sung her praises in mid-Atlantic. Their conversation was interrupted by a radiogram from Lindbergh’s French publisher, the response to Saint-Exupéry’s asking how much longer he might be allowed to make revisions in his nine pages of text. While he fiddled with his pages Saint-Jean inventoried the wonders of the Normandie, from the clay-pigeon range to the canine life vests to the prison. Among the ocean liner’s marvels he listed Saint-Exupéry’s card tricks. What most impresses you on board? he asked the prestidigitator. “The Camembert is always perfectly ripe,” volunteered Saint-Exupéry, who spent a great deal of his time with the ship’s captain discussing transatlantic travel and whether its future belonged to the sea or the air. His case was assisted once more by Guillaumet, who was crossing the North Atlantic again that week and who had promised to overfly the Normandie. During Saint-Exupéry’s third night at sea he did so, flying as low as he could and circling the illuminated ocean liner twice in his Latécoère 522. All of the Normandie’s passengers turned out on deck for the superb sight. Néri hastily transmitted a message to the boat’s captain; according to Saint-Jean, who had no reason to be privy to such information, it read: “HAVE CELEBRATED FIRST OVERFLIGHT NORMANDIE BY FRENCH FLYING BOAT WITH CHAMPAGNE. REGARDS TO SAINT-EX. GUILLAUMET.” The Latécoère 522 arrived in New York the following day, followed, forty-eight hours later, by the Normandie.

  The Saint-Exupéry’s evidently worked out a truce this summer after a miserable winter of abuse and crises and “sacrifices acrobatiques” the first two on Consuelo’s part and the third, claimed the writer, on his. He was by now far more often with Madame de B than with his wife, who given the opportunity did her best to slander her rival. Nonetheless Saint-Exupéry continued to see and write Consuelo regularly, not only to keep her on the straight and narrow, a job he entrusted, in his absences, to the patient Suzanne Werth or, when geography allowed, to his mother. This summer he spent about as much time with her as he did attempting to track her down. On June 16, for example, the couple had dinner with the Werths, but by the twenty-first Consuelo had disappeared again. Together they had found a charming three-story country home with a large garden, a pond, a greenhouse, a tennis court, an aviary, and a rabbit hutch in La Varennes-Jarcy, twenty miles southeast of Paris; Consuelo thought that her husband’s health called for some time in the country. In the course of the two hectic weeks between trips to America Saint-Exupéry signed a lease for the property, to be rented at 15,000 francs a year. An option to buy the house—known as “La Feuilleraie”—was included in the lease, though it may have been suggested by the lessor. Consuelo installed herself here this summer, although she was less often at La Feuilleraie than her husband might have liked, and he was less often a visitor than he could have been.

  He had been in New York for only three days when he received a Saturday morning phone call from Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who had just read his preface. She was flattered and thrilled (enough so to start in on her copy of Wind, Sand and Stars); would he like to come for dinner and the evening, she asked him in French, noting that he spoke “pas un mot” of English. The Lindberghs were newly installed in Lloyd Neck on the north shore of Long Island; it was agreed that Charles would call for their guest that afternoon. As things worked out Anne headed into town for him, a little nervous, more so after being told at the Ritz-Carlton that Monsieur de Saint-Exupéry was waiting in the bar. “One of those drunken aviators,” she was thinking as she headed in to meet the enormous Frenchman, a full foot taller than she and in all ways overpowering, but somehow familiar and as charming as ever, maybe even a little more so. A block from the Ritz, the conversation already flying fast and furious, Anne’s car stalled; Saint-Exupéry chose the moment to pull a copy of the preface from his pocket. Mrs. Lindbergh found herself in the arduous position of having to “talk back in French, always an effort, talk to the taxi driver who was pushing us, and explain what was wrong with the car in French and then in English, all at the same time.”

  By the time the two had made their way to Pennsylvania Station, where they
sat on high stools drinking orangeade at the counter—like children, thought Anne, herself once described as Lindbergh’s “child-wife”—they had got to the subject of rhythm in writing, than which Saint-Exupéry claimed nothing was more important. Between Manhattan and Lloyd Neck they had covered America, aviation, art, the desert, exile, poetry, and Alfred North Whitehead; read through the preface together; lost all track of their surroundings; and begun to finish each other’s sentences. In her diary afterward Anne described all the symptoms of having been on an idyllic first date: she had suddenly found that she had had an enormous amount to say; she had gone ahead and said it; because her companion understood her so well she was moved to say more; she worried she had bored him. For his part Saint-Exupéry was a little flirtatious. When Anne quoted D. H. Lawrence as having said of marriage that men and women should be like two poles that held a world between them, he laughed: “Oh—not so far apart as all that!” He offered his own definition: they should be like bees, gathering honey and bringing it home to the hive.

  In the Lindbergh kitchen there was no sign of Charles. His wife and Saint-Exupéry had dinner alone after a few card tricks, which Anne saw as her guest’s bashful way of putting himself at ease. Legends in their own time, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Charles Lindbergh did not meet until almost ten that evening. Anne felt relieved to observe the conversation—which she translated—move immediately to a “higher” plane, one which could also be described as a less personal one. The two pioneers compared notes on the thrills of the early days in the air: “But I never know,” confessed the Frenchman, “whether it is not my own youth I am regretting.” He steered Lindbergh around to his favorite subject—man and the machine, and man’s spiritual needs in a technological age—making known his distaste for fascism, evidently rather gently. Lindbergh, whose friendship with Germany was already well-enough established that his name was hissed in newsreels, took no offense, although he also admitted to having had trouble following the brilliant tumult of Saint-Exupéry’s conversation.