Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  Saint-Exupéry remained more intent on seeing America enter the war than on throwing his weight behind either Pétain or de Gaulle, a conviction shared by Renoir, whose profile was lower and whose opinion therefore more his own. “I detest the French in America,” Renoir wrote his friend in 1942, listing only a few exceptions. “I am happy to renounce the politics of my ex-country altogether. I like Monsieur Roosevelt, and I like neither Vichy, which permits a few too many executions, nor de Gaulle, who strikes me as a bit too opportunistic.” By this time Saint-Exupéry was finding the American climate one of outright hostility. “I have been more courageous in not deviating from the road set by my conscience, in spite of two years of insults and defamation, than when photographing Mainz or Essen,” he wrote a friend toward the end of his American stay. He reported to Renoir that he could barely breathe, that he was in dire need of an archangel who might guide him past his ill-wishers and show him the way. Once a citizen of the world he was now profoundly French, down, as they say, to the marrow; his patriotism, however, was of a different stripe from de Gaulle’s, ironic given Saint-Exupéry’s famous faith in strong leaders and what should have been a certain tolerance for reinventing the rules. He might have been consoled by the fact that half the French in occupied France were now in the business of informing on the other half, a practice that left the Germans as perplexed by the Gallic character as was Washington. He would not have been any happier had he stayed home; he thought he would be happier anywhere else in the world, save London. The defamatory bordered finally on the hilarious: to the list of accusations leveled against Saint-Exupéry was added, with the publication of The Little Prince, the assertion that he was a Royalist. No one in the French community had more reason to complain of the intolerance, the pettiness of his countrymen than he, whose publications over the next years were to leave a trail of acrimonious political debate—and an exhausted author laboring futilely to clarify his unforgivably neutral stand—in their wake.

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  Reynal and Hitchcock, to a great extent oblivious to the nuances of this drama in 1941—from their vantage point it seemed simply as if all the French in New York were having nervous breakdowns—were well aware that they had on their hands a best-selling author with no immediate project. Saint-Exupéry was allowed a few weeks to settle in at 240 Central Park South and then reminded that he should be writing. “When tact failed, a little pressure was applied,” remembered Galantière, who told him, “It is your duty to explain France, to explain the defeat to people who believe that the French did not put up a fight.” Saint-Exupéry bristled at the idea of having to defend his country and, as always, at the idea of writing for a fee. He was made to see the virtues of the idea: some twenty volumes on the fall of France had already been published, many by people who had been in America since 1939 (an exception was René de Chambrun, whose I Saw France Fall came out in 1940); the embassy Vichy supporters in Washington and the Gaullist factions in New York spent so much time denouncing each other that France was lost in the shuffle. Protesting that he had nothing to say, Saint-Exupéry wrote a few chapters, but the book went nowhere.

  His heart was not in the project. As late as May 1941 he was still hoping to get back to North Africa, if not to fight for France then to devote himself to the pages he had been honing since 1938, to be published as The Wisdom of the Sands. (Of this idea Galantière and Elizabeth Reynal, to whom fell the task of dragging the war book out of him, remained unaware.) His telephone rang incessantly, with invitations or with news of the lastest piece of gossip making its way around town on his account. Madame de B went back to France at the end of March, leaving him to fend for himself. His crippling fevers continued, cutting him down in the middle of a dinner, making it impossible for him to remain on his feet, waking him—teeth chattering and freezing cold—in the middle of the night. (The language barrier caused him pain on this count, too: Saint-Exupéry found that no one felt sorry for him when he reported he was running a 41° [105°F] fever.) The sulfa drugs allowed him to function by afternoon, when he suffered only mild fever and a bit of nausea. His teeth continued to bother him; he found that as a result of his 1923 accident his left eye was prone to infection. He wore dark glasses and complained to various friends of his pains. Even with the help of sedatives he was unable to sleep, although this particular affliction may have had more to do with the pots of black tea he consumed while he worked at night than with anything else.

  He was further distracted by a number of projects that came of the new friendship with Jean Renoir. In Hollywood in March Renoir read the copy of Wind, Sand and Stars that Saint-Exupéry had given him days after the Siboney had docked in January. He was overwhelmed, and spent the next two months trying to get Darryl F. Zanuck, to whom he was under contract at Fox, to read the book. He felt he could make of it a great film, “without a doubt the most beautiful film of my life.” Saint-Exupéry admired Renoir’s work tremendously and was thrilled by the idea. In all modesty he concurred that Renoir could extract from Wind, Sand and Stars “something truly monumental.” The filmmaker knocked himself out looking for someone in Hollywood who felt similarly; while the book’s synopsis made its way around town he energetically plotted his next steps, providing Saint-Exupéry with a crash course on the baroque workings of the studios, careful always to make sure that his enthusiasm for the project could be heard above the producers’ rejections. At the same time Saint-Exupéry joined the battle closest to Renoir’s heart: to extricate his twenty-one-year-old son from North Africa. That spring he wrote a diplomat friend in Rabat on Alain Renoir’s behalf: “I wouldn’t bother you for a favor for just anyone. I detest recommendations and have always refused to pass manuscripts along to Gallimard. This leaves me with a certain available credit, for those I truly love. It is on this credit that I now draw.”

  In early April he flew to California for a brief stay. By then it had been agreed that the unifying drama of the Wind, Sand and Stars film would be the Libyan adventure and that the book’s other episodes would be folded in as the trek across the desert progressed. A love interest was added, and the hero—rechristened Bernis—was supplied with a confidante in the form of a mischievous twelve-year-old sister. Renoir set up an appointment for the two men with an influential agent, whom he hoped would handle the project. The agent held court in a plush neo-Georgian office lined with beautifully bound books; so offended was Saint-Exupéry to discover that nothing lay inside their bindings but a concealed bar that he refused to charm during the interview. Afterward he was capable only of sputtering “He’s a pig! He’s a pig!” about one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Over the weeks that followed he bombarded Renoir from New York with his ideas for the project, recorded on twelve-inch acetate lacquer disks. These late-night monologues were peppered with his usual treasures. He might interrupt himself to address Dido Renoir, whom he assumed was listening. In a typical aside he would say, “Dido, I know you’re there, and I know you think I’m a fool,” continuing on to defend himself. Often the recordings closed with a card trick. He admitted to being stumped by the ending of the film but outlined a number of comic and picturesque touches, some more convincing than others.

  He experienced his usual share of technical difficulties with the recording device, which had a habit of whistling. At other times he complained about its efficacy, more constant than that of the human mind: “It’s problematic because the disk turns quickly and that prevents me from thinking,” he complained to Renoir after one long pause, admitting he had not done his homework. When there was nothing to say he discoursed on the nature of silence. On one occasion he had to concede that he had nothing further to add but could not stop talking because he could not very well send Renoir a blank disk. He lamented that a long, friendly silence could not be conveyed from one coast to the other and begged Renoir to understand that this was not his fault, simply a mystery of nature.

  So it [the machine] forces me to speak without having anything to say.… So you are going to f
ind me a bit of a cretin. I’m forced to cast about for ideas, but with ideas, when you go looking for them a priori like that, without knowing for what or about what or why, you find nothing. Nothing at all. You don’t find any ideas. It’s as with fishing—you know, when you go in search of a fish and you have a piece of line and a net and a float—myself I’ve noticed that you never catch anything. Fishing for ideas is like that, it yields the same result.

  One thing that did stimulate the manufacture of ideas was difficulty. “Did you notice that, during the war,” Saint-Exupéry continued, ice cubes rattling in the background, “the French General Staffs, since they didn’t know they had any difficulties, didn’t have any ideas? Since they knew nothing, they had no problems.”

  The arrival of his recordings in Hollywood was as much cause for apprehension as celebration. The monologuist expected an immediate response. He sent the disks to California by overnight mail and signed out, “I think that I will have a cable tomorrow night if you are kind.” If he heard nothing he telephoned immediately. Renoir was hard at work on a film; it was impossible for him to keep up with his New York—based friend, and the records came to represent a kind of torture. Relief came in the form of the author himself, who took the train to California in mid-August. He had a long-standing invitation from the Renoirs, who were aware that he was homesick and depressed. In no way inspired by the New York heat, he was making little headway with the book; he may have thought he could salvage the film of Wind, Sand and Stars, which had by now fallen by the wayside.* The events of 1940—and a crossing like that on the Siboney—could be in themselves sufficient to draw two Frenchmen of the same generation together, but with the genial Renoir Saint-Exupéry already had a good deal in common. Six years his senior, Renoir had learned to fly in Ambérieu; he had flown reconnaissance missions in World War I. (Jean Gabin wears his pilot’s tunic in Grand Illusion.) He, too, had an abundant sense of humor and a hearty appetite for life. He had no taste for polemic and a clear enough view of the foibles of his countrymen that his mordant 1939 masterpiece, The Rules of the Game, had been reviled. More temperate than Saint-Exupéry, Renoir adapted quickly to America, settling in easily to a shingled house on Hollywood Boulevard. Here he installed Saint-Exupéry in an upper-floor suite, where every effort was now made—on the Renoirs’ part, and on that of the California-based Lazareffs’—to reduce the number of obstacles that stood between the writer and his work. Someone turned up an electric typewriter, though this proved more a novelty than a help with the book. A number of secretaries volunteered their services, working off Dictaphone recordings the author left when he retired for the day, at breakfast time.

  Saint-Exupéry and Renoir’s rapport did not extend to their hours. As the author continued to work at night and the director by day the two rarely saw one another. Saint-Exupéry’s presence made itself felt, however; he took up a lot of room in a house. He had acquired the habit of making a meal of toast spread with congealed olive oil, said by a doctor to be beneficial to the liver, and promptly emptied the Renoirs’ refrigerator to make room for his collection of oil-filled saucers. He shuffled around loudly while he worked at night. He tacked papers to the walls of his room, scribbling on or near them; he kept Renoir—who was terrified of fire—on the verge of emotional collapse by throwing lighted cigarettes into his wastepaper basket. Few complaints were filed, however, at least in part because Saint-Exupéry was not up to being chastised. He was dispirited and ill, by now far beyond the point where he could make a secret of his fevers. In the middle of an afternoon he would be sick to the point of delirium. Pale and dripping with sweat, he seemed—especially to those shorter than he, which was nearly everyone—as if he might at any moment keel over. Hélène Lazareff looked after him, helping him to a couch when she could, putting him in touch with Jean-Louis Lapeyre, the foremost French physician in Los Angeles. In eight days he suffered three such attacks, each with a fever of 104° or higher. One afternoon he fainted; a few days later he agreed to an operation proposed to him by a specialist, who diagnosed the problem as urological in origin. Saint-Exupéry heard out Dr. Elmer Belt with a little more patience than he had accorded most physicians—at least in part because Belt had no designs on his gallbladder—but put his own gloss on the diagnosis. He claimed the ailment resulted from his 1923 crash, in which a splinter from the aircraft’s wooden seat had sliced through his perineum, leaving him with a lump of scar tissue just outside the neck of the bladder. Belt theorized that a pocket of urine collected here from time to time, playing host to infections.

  It was generally not a pretty subject, though Saint-Exupéry described the surgery in great detail—and with several modest illustrations—to Galantière. He felt he owed his translator an explanation for his irregular behavior and for a litany of complaints that he feared Galantière might have heard as ravings of “a neurasthenic little girl.”* In this respect he was happy to report that he was—and had been for three years—seriously ill. (He may have written for a second reason: he sounds positively enchanted with Belt’s clever diagnosis.) Otherwise he was exceedingly eager to see to it that the nature of the surgery remain confidential. Most of his acquaintances in California were told he had malaria. In New York word went around simply that he had been treated for an old fracture. The patient and his physician ultimately fell out because Lapeyre divulged Saint-Exupéry’s condition to a New York surgeon who looked after the writer as well and who called Lapeyre for details of the operation. “Everyone in New York is going to know why I’m here, which is none of their business,” cursed the writer, before deciding to treat his physician to the cold shoulder.

  The convalescence was as indecorous as the truth. The operation having been performed in what the writer described as a “not very sterile zone” he suffered afterward from a long series of infections. There was some postoperative hemorrhaging, accompanied by a number of excruciating spasms. Saint-Exupéry’s eye flared up as a result, and the whole ordeal took a toll on his nerves. He was several weeks in the hospital. It was, he said, Guatemala all over again, a little less painfully. It was nearly as long this time until he was up and around, but he did not so much want for company: among others, the Renoirs, the Lazareffs, and René Clair came to see him. Annabella, the star of Anne-Marie and now the wife of Tyrone Power, paid him a visit when she heard where he was. She found him in a darkened room with no flowers, demi-moribund, a huge man in a tiny bed that looked as if it were about to collapse under his weight. He told her she was kind to come, that it was sad to die. The two made awkward attempts at conversation until Annabella spotted a book on the writer’s bedside table. It turned out to be a collection of Andersen’s fairy tales, which she opened to “The Little Mermaid.” She began to read the story but finished it by heart; she was rewarded by a magnificent smile as the patient returned to life and to an hour-long conversation about his favorite characters. His petulance, too, revived him. He called Dido Renoir to ask that she arrange for the hospital staff not to put carrots on his dinner plate. “But he doesn’t have to eat them,” the nursing staff informed Madame Renoir, who passed the message on to Saint-Exupéry. “Of course I don’t eat them. It’s the sight of them I can’t stand; they make me sad!” he exploded, as he did again the next day when a fresh helping of carrots appeared before him. His convalescence continued in a rented two-room apartment, where he spent his day prone on a couch, receiving few visitors other than Annabella, who brought him picnic lunches and listened appreciatively as he spun his tales.

  In October Renoir finally prevailed upon him to move back to Hollywood Boulevard. Gradually he returned to work, abashed that the book Reynal & Hitchcock hoped to publish this fall had barely progressed. He apologized to Galantière for his tardiness, promising that he was more despairing of it than his translator could possibly be. He got out a little, meeting various Caltech scientists, including Theodore von Kármán, with whom he shared descriptions of his inventions. He attended a dinner at the home of Dr. Belt and his wi
fe, at which he was asked what America could do for the war effort. He was ready with his answer: “As things stand your country devotes 90 percent of its industrial potential to making consumer goods Americans want—in other words cars and chewing gum—and 10 percent to stopping Hitler. Only when those figures are reversed—10 percent to cars and chewing gum and 90 percent to stopping Hitler—will there be any hope,” he responded, cramming all of his feelings about America into a single statement.

  By November, when he took the train back to New York, Saint-Exupéry had written a portion of Flight to Arras. He was feeling better—he had gone a full month without a relapse—but could still not say he was entirely cured, and would be rehospitalized in New York. He traveled east in the same train as Dr. Belt and his wife, whom he joined for the three-hour stopover in Chicago. On leaving the station he refused to check one of his bags, evidently a cumbersome one. Dr. Belt explained that they would hardly be able to maneuver around the city with the suitcase in tow but was long in convincing his patient, who protested that it contained his “brain child,” by which he could have meant Flight to Arras, The Wisdom of the Sands, or some combination of the two. With some misgiving he handed over the valise, but its absence soon began to torment him. He checked his watch so often that the Belts decided to return to the depot early; at the station doors the Frenchman raced ahead through the crowd. The Belts arrived at the baggage check as the case was being handed over. Saint-Exupéry hugged it to this chest and—rolling his eyes to the heavens—proclaimed in the language that may have seemed to him appropriate to a moment of invented drama, “Gracias a Dios! Mi niño está salvado!”