Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  To this end he received nothing but encouragement from Eugene Reynal and Curtice Hitchcock, who—along with their wives—did everything in their power to make the foreign author feel at home. It was not their understanding that Saint-Exupéry was in town for a short stay, and Elizabeth Reynal and Peggy Hitchcock scoured the city for an apartment that would be to his liking. They found one with magnificent views on the twenty-third floor of 240 Central Park South; visitors often described it as a cockpit of a place. They equipped the kitchen and stocked the bar and refrigerator and filled the closet with hangers. Only when a fire was burning in the fireplace and a few friends were assembled for an afternoon cocktail was their author allowed to see his new home. He was touched and delighted, close to tears. He needed looking after, and Reynal, Hitchcock, and Becker were happy to oblige.

  His immediate problem was, of course, one of money. Wind, Sand and Stars had already earned him over $17,500 in royalties—roughly $200,000 today—but Saint-Exupéry’s bank account was blocked because of the war. Reynal and Hitchcock helped their author to draft an application for permission to draw on his account. Outlining a rather unusual budget, he explained to the authorities that he would require an additional $1,500 a month over and above the nominal sum he was allowed. He would need not only to rent an apartment and hire a secretary and a translator, but was also to require immediate medical and dental attention for lingering troubles from the Guatemala crash. (He spoke only of his jawbone, which he claimed had been broken in three places and never properly treated, but was suffering more from the still-unexplained fevers.) Given the circumstances under which he had left France he did not have so much as a change of clothes; he anticipated that he would run up a fair number of travel and entertainment charges. The Reynals vouched for the accuracy of his statements and generally opened their door to Saint-Exupéry, who became a frequent and unannounced caller at their East Sixty-sixth Street apartment. Elizabeth saw to it that he was well entertained and, as importantly, well translated; she, Galantière, and Becker ran the bulk of his linguistic interference. (Of Curtice and Peggy Hitchcock their daughter has said that his French was more fluent and hers more grammatical.) Few services were more valuable.

  Saint-Exupéry came to New York for four weeks and stayed for over two years but was no more willing to learn English—or able to speak it—in 1943 than he had been in 1941. He could read signs, and he could count. He could coax sense out of a text, probably more than he let on. He had no idea what people said when they talked. He was as accomplished a mime as he had proved to be in the Río de Oro and got along admirably with a smattering of French, Spanish, and German—he held whole tables of English-speakers breathless with his tales—but his refusal to so much as attempt a sentence in English was to color his exile greatly. He was not the first expatriate to fail to take to the language of his new country—F. Scott Fitzgerald proved equally impervious to French—but Saint-Exupéry did so in wartime, after having justified his exile by saying he had hoped to present France’s case to the American people and her government.

  He made light of his handicap, which was all unwillingness and not inability: when at last, under unusual circumstances, he submitted to English lessons in 1942, he proved to have an acute ear and an uncanny gift for imitation. “When I want a cup of coffee, I head toward the prettiest waitress and make her understand, through a series of gestures, that I need a cup, a saucer, a spoon, coffee, cream, and sugar. My act makes her laugh. Why in the world should I learn English when it would deprive me of that smile?” he told friends, in some company substituting an “oeuf à la coque” for the cup of coffee. In a more serious mood he would growl “I haven’t finished learning French yet” when asked why he made no effort with English, which his publishers, among others, were eager for him to master. This response hinted at the truth about his tenaciously held unilingualism: in any language he had a horror of miscommunication. Particularly during the hair-splitting arguments of the war years he valued little as much as lucidity. In interviews he insisted on a translator so as not to traffic in possible misstatements or stumble into awkwardness. At the same time, like all those who hesitate to speak the language of the realm for fear of embarrassing themselves, he was indulgent, encouraging even, of those who spoke a modicum of French. He preferred that they mangle the language of Molière than that he flounder around with words that might distort his meaning.

  His intransigence on this matter had its comic and tragic sides. Saint-Exupéry folded himself into New York taxis and—as if it were the most natural thing in the world—rattled off his destination in French. He played out extraordinary bits of theater with his cleaning woman, whom he called—pushing the limits of the French language—his “arrache-poussière” (roughly, his “dust-puller-upper”). He became expert at corraling friends into running errands with him. Robert Boname, the Air France Transatlantique engineer, accompanied him to the drugstore. Becker took him shopping for a new wardrobe. Lamotte translated while he priced Dictaphones, of which the writer went through several; he watched as Saint-Exupéry handed over nearly $700—for which he could equally well have had a car, and which sent Reynal and Hitchcock back to pleading with the bank on his behalf—for a sophisticated recording device. Doubtless he would not have done any of these errands alone had he been able to. He needed an audience, and this arrangement suited him. Madame de B spent nearly two months in New York this winter and did her share of communicating on her friend’s behalf. Yvonne Michel went with him to movies, despite the fact that he spent his time in the theater asking, “What’s going on? What’s happening?” Elizabeth Reynal found him French-speaking doctors; a long search for a bilingual secretary who could work a French typewriter, decipher Saint-Exupéry’s handwriting, and tolerate his eccentric hours turned up a Lyons native, Marie Bouchu McBride, who spent two years in the writer’s service. In situations that he was forced to tackle alone he turned to his other great friend, the telephone. From Saks he called a friend to ask him to explain to the sales clerk at his side that he would like the tie in the window with the red background. In a doctor’s office he and his physician went for several rounds like this, handing the phone back and forth. On one occasion he found himself alone with the doctor in a consulting room, which had no telephone. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch, Herr Doktor?” asked Saint-Exupéry, at which the two men tripped their way through an involved matter in a language of which each had only an elementary grasp. Under the circumstances it seemed the appropriate one to mangle.

  The language barrier proved more of an obstacle than Saint-Exupéry liked to admit, however. Generally it increased his sense of isolation: he arrived in New York a defeated man, and as the months wore on felt more and more a disenfranchised one. He had little love of America—it seemed to him that a country capable of designing a state-of-the-art washing machine might also apply itself to saving France—and he could hardly get to know her better when he could not speak her language, read her newspapers, glimpse what lay behind a culture that seemed to consist primarily of baseball, Coca-Cola, and chewing gum. As America had, in his mind, turned a cold shoulder to France, he felt personally rebuffed by her now. Raoul Aglion, an emissary of de Gaulle’s who arrived in Manhattan a day after Saint-Exupéry, reminded him that New York represented only a part of America. “Yes,” agreed the aviator, “but the heart of the country is here, and the heart is hard.” He cut a lonely figure, as the author of Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers, who met him through their mutual publisher, was quick to observe. More than ever he appeared to hail from a different planet. In part because he spoke a different language and was not of his world, in part because his concerns soared higher than ever above the practical or the immediate, he began to seem a kind of religious figure. Galantière saw him in retrospect as a “kind of preaching friar.” Others—responding more to his manner and his balding crown than to his lifestyle—took him for a monk. Some of his best friends in America were children, with whom language is optional. An adolescent girl
on whom he lavished hilarious lessons in deportment saw the halo as clearly as anyone. It was not that of a saint, Natacha Stewart Ullmann remembered later, “It was more like the ring around the moon.”

  He made contact with the War Department soon after his arrival, though not exactly for the reasons he had implied. In March he met with a representative from the army’s military intelligence division to whom he spoke about two inventions, probably the navigation devices he had been perfecting in Orconte. He came on strong. Reported Colonel Ralph Busbee to his superiors:

  The point is—this man—a genius almost to the point of being nuts—claims to have two inventions with respect to airplanes, which may prove of value. He is reluctant to ask for patents on them or proceed with further development for fear that the ideas are already under patent secretly by the U.S. Army. While not pro-Vichy, he has a wife and children [sic] in France, and naturally cannot sever connections. He wants to offer his inventions to the U.S. Army, of course hoping to make money, but is leery of telling anyone of them unless he is fully protected. He speaks French only but has an agent who speaks English [probably Galantière].

  Another officer followed up on this visit but nothing came of Saint-Exupéry’s proposition.

  In May, still insisting he would be returning to France in a month or so, he met a State Department official at a dinner at the Lazareffs, to whom he expounded on the taking of North Africa. “If at the time of France’s collapse anyone had offered the troops in North Africa a thousand planes with replacement parts, lubricating oil, gasoline, and all the necessary adjuncts, North Africa would be fighting today. If anyone turned up there now with the offer of a lot of planes and armored units, it would turn the tide … the seizure of North Africa would mean the seizure of unoccupied France,” he predicted. It was suggested that the War Department be in touch with the Frenchman, who seemed exceptionally well-acquainted with the geography of North Africa, a part of the world of which an accurate map was hard to come by in America at the time. In June the War Department made contact with him. It reported back to State a little dismissively: “For the record, this Division evaluates M. de Saint-Exupéry’s knowledge of French African territories as ‘good’ in some respects but does not consider it to be ‘exceptional’ by any means.” They did not feel he contributed anything to the War Department’s expertise. In part he seems to have been rebuffed because he was not a military man. Just as clearly, it did not seem as if anyone in the U.S. War Department was willing to put much weight in unsolicited advice offered them by a foreign reserve captain unable to speak a word of English.

  No one refused to speak Saint-Exupéry’s language more adamantly than the French colony in New York. After the fall of France some 20,000 Frenchmen had joined the existing American community, about ten times that size. A great number of these new arrivals were diplomats, artists, scientists, industrialists, financiers; most of them settled temporarily in and around New York and Los Angeles. Immediately they divided, less than neatly, into sects and subsects; in the same issue of The New York Times that carried the story of Saint-Exupéry’s arrival in New York, Pétain was quoted as asking the French people to put aside their rancors, prejudices, and mistrusts in the New Year. The Vichy faction—into which category most Frenchmen fell in 1941—were pro-Pétain, pro-Laval, or outright collaborationists; the résistants divided between Gaullist supporters and detractors. So institutionalized were the factions that when Raoul Aglion arrived in New York he was obliged to present his credentials at three Free French addresses. The resulting tour of Manhattan made for a kind of riddle; each representative claimed to be the only true friend of de Gaulle’s, an intimate since their St. Cyr days, and proceeded to discredit his rivals. Nor did the divisiveness confine itself to Fifth Avenue. Léon Werth, who spent the war unobtrusively in Saint-Amour, provided the following political profile of his son’s eleventh-grade class in Lyons: “20 Anglophiles, be it Pétainist or Gaullist; 14 fervent Vichyites, of which 2 Nazis; 3 Action Françaises; 3 advocates of collaboration; 6 indifferent.” At the Lycée Français in New York half the students refused to speak to the other half. A community humiliated is one eager to blame, and a community in exile is by definition one of gossip and betrayal. The behavior of America’s French refugees—as fine an example of collective bad behavior as exists—seemed to Washington in and of itself ample explanation for the defeat of France.

  Into this hornets’ nest walked Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a man determined to remain above politics. His prestige was incomparable; each political faction was determined to recruit him to its cause. He got his first taste of the level of discourse at the end of January, when word arrived—ostensibly from Vichy, but more likely from the mouth of an ill-wisher—that he had been appointed by Vichy to a council of notables. Saint-Exupéry was forced to call a press conference to repudiate the report. He wrote up a statement that Roussy de Sales translated, Galantière revised, Reynal and Hitchcock approved, and Becker’s secretary typed, and which he presented to the press in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton. The January 31 Times headline announced “Saint-Exupéry Dislikes Vichy Appointment/Writer-Aviator Says He Would Have Refused If Asked” and quoted him as saying he had no political agenda whatsoever. He indignantly denied all accounts to the contrary, as he would still be doing eighteen months later regarding the same charge. In one particularly bitter letter from a series of bitter letters addressed to André Breton he explained that he had done his best with the Vichy appointment: he had found it awkward to resign from a position to which he had never been formally appointed. It was true that he believed Pétain to be not the lesser of two evils but the least of three—he could be replaced at any time by a number of rabidly pro-Nazi French officials—and true as well that he had believed the armistice had been necessary. (It was also true that Vichy was capable of handing down appointments to individuals who were not only unwilling to associate with the spa-based government but whom—as was the case of the filmmaker René Clair—that government had declared persona non grata moments before.) Saint-Exupéry was reduced to an uncharacteristically shrill contention that he had amply proved his principles: Look at it this way, he told Breton: Half of my friends are dead, and all of yours are living.

  Allying himself with no camp, he was calumniated by all. He engaged in a number of heated conversations with de Gaulle’s representatives, instructed to convert the influential writer to the cause at all cost. In Saint-Exupéry’s eyes, however—as in those of the U.S. government—de Gaulle was a potential dictator. The writer instinctively mistrusted him and failed to understand what gave the headstrong general the right to say he spoke for a nation. Obstinately he continued to believe that Pétain had saved France from total destruction—he refused to listen when Aglion pointed out that no other country Hitler had invaded had signed an armistice with the Germans—and begrudged the general his ambition. (“How can you expect him to be otherwise? Ambition is the source of leadership,” Aglion vainly protested.) Like several of his Gaullist friends, Aglion was chastised for socializing with Saint-Exupéry. Yvonne Michel, who went to work for the French desk of the Office of War Information (OWI), was told to steer clear of him. Fanned by both sides, the rumors flew fast and furious. As the Gaullists had more to lose they did a particularly virulent job: the writer was seen lunching in Washington with Vichy officials (when he had never left town); he was known to be purchasing airplanes for Vichy (even while most of his friends leaned toward de Gaulle). When he was invited to speak at the Lycée Français in December the school received a series of menacing phone calls protesting that it was about to subject its students to “a Nazi.” To this day there are those who believe Saint-Exupéry to have been an anti-Semite, which he was not, for the same reason that got him blackballed in 1941: he refused to see men in terms of labels. De Gaulle, perceived as an interloper by the U.S. government, paid dearly for being unable to rally the celebrated writer—Aglion holds that of all those who refused to weigh in for the general, Saint-Exupé
ry did him the most harm—and de Gaulle, not the forgiving type, saw to it that he paid many times over for his lack of cooperation. Backs turned, doors closed, tongues wagged, even while Saint-Exupéry remained to American eyes the most famous of Frenchmen, a high-minded proponent of brotherhood.

  While he was unrealistic to think he could steer clear of partisanship, he persisted in believing this the only conscionable tack to take. Publicly he refused to criticize Pétain’s government—privately he referred to it as “that great jellyfish which is Vichy”—in which he thought, as late as mid-1942, the hopes of a majority of Frenchmen still to be invested. Unity seemed to him to be the order of the day and not at all a priority of de Gaulle’s. “They are not waging war against the Nazis,” said Saint-Exupéry of the general’s followers, “but against the French chef or elevator man at the Ritz who refuses to join them and whom they therefore consider a traitor.” One other person—who was for reasons of her own cut off from the world this year—shared his naïveté. Anne Morrow Lindbergh kept up with Saint-Exupéry through the press but did not dare call on him: having published The Wave of the Future in the winter of 1941, she felt she was now “the bubonic plague among writers.” She did not know enough about the French community to realize that Saint-Exupéry was already infected. Instead she prayed that the Frenchman could “stay free, pure and untouched, in an age when everyone is being smeared black or white, forced to take sides.” Her husband’s terse comment on the subject was that Saint-Exupéry represented the saint’s point of view, but that saints have a well-known habit of shirking their earthly responsibilities.