by Stacy Schiff
In New York, shamed by Galantière and Elizabeth Reynal, he returned single-mindedly to Flight to Arras. He buried Galantière in an avalanche of revisions; to the person most familiar with the extent of his perfectionism, Marie Bouchu McBride, he later dedicated a copy of the book with thanks for her having typed it ten times. For all of his delays—from his barrel of excuses he now offered up the one about the interfering guardian angel—he had never written a book more quickly. This one took eight months from start to finish, and much of that time Saint-Exupéry was out of commission or procrastinating. On the one hand, shaken by Guillaumet’s death and by his own ill health, he was suddenly aware of his mortality and inclined to hurry; he wrote Madame de B that he thought The Wisdom of the Sands probably required another ten years’ work, more than he had in him. On the other hand he railed against Reynal & Hitchcock’s deadlines, which he naturally did his best to mow down. Patiently Galantière explained to him that he could not wait ten years to write the book just because he felt he would think more clearly in ten years. Less patiently Saint-Exupéry responded that ideas, like fruit and children, had to mature. Later he was to say—groundlessly—that he had been too hurried to work his alchemy with Flight to Arras.
The timing was more crucial than he realized initially. Scheduled for a November 1941 publication, Flight to Arras read differently when it appeared in February 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Topicality carried little weight with Saint-Exupéry at this point in his life, however. He was more determined than ever to express himself with the utmost of lucidity, claiming that he preferred to starve than to put his name on a book with which he was not happy. “I prefer the sale of 100 copies of a book I don’t have to blush for to the sale of 6 million copies of a bad book,” he wrote during the tug-of-war with Galantière that consumed November and December, pointing out that Descartes had changed the world but that Paris-Soir, with its millions of readers, was unlikely to. He spent long hours railing at his translator, in letters usually written as the sun was rising, when he might have been finishing the volume; it was imperative to him, however, that Galantière understand his perspective. He was not writing for February 22, the publication date Reynal & Hitchcock proposed when December came and went, but for the next decade. Accordingly he was most interested in extracting some kind of lasting truths from the events he was to describe. When shortly after Pearl Harbor he lectured to a group of students, an appearance into which he was bullied by Dorothy Thompson, he dwelt not on the conflict at hand but on how his audience might enrich their lives. He knew of only one method: sacrifice to a higher cause. Similarly Flight to Arras—a book conceived as an apologia for France and touted by Reynal & Hitchcock before its publication as the story of a day in the life of a reconnaissance pilot—was for its author a work about responsibility, about charity. He was enraged by his publishers’ emphasis on the journalistic when he wanted to produce a volume rich in philosophy. The former, he wrote Galantière one January morning before the sun was up, he could have tossed off at the age of five. “What is the use of overcoming a host of diseases, accidents, exams, ill-fated love affairs, tax audits, and other assorted nuisances if it all leads to my repeating—without progressing one iota—what my nanny already told me? I see no need to propagate in 1942 what she knew perfectly well in 1900. That can wait until the year 2000. It might then even be thought original, as it will then have been forgotten.”
His health did not finally delay the book but did leave its mark. It was appropriate that Saint-Exupéry should now write about danger: if anything he felt more vulnerable physically in America in 1941 than he had when flying through enemy fire in 1940. (When his health gave him no cause for concern he succumbed to hypochondria, not a common disease for a man who had repeatedly bluffed his way past medical examiners. Born years before of his fear of syphilis, that anxiety was to plague him increasingly in his forties.) At the top of a sheet on which he sketched a new invention he set down a list of friends and relatives he had lost, beginning with his brother. He claimed that his sudden sense of his mortality released him from certain concerns, among them his irritation with the chatter in New York; it also inclined him, and Arras, in a more spiritual direction, where he was headed anyway. Galantière would have liked to have stopped him—especially after Pearl Harbor, he felt Americans wanted a demonstration of democracy and not a hymn to charity—but Saint-Exupéry mostly got his way. His quasi-mystical musings (he was incapable of systemic philosophical analysis) color the book. So does his divorce from his body, which he appears to have wished he had left in California. He seems to conclude somewhere over Arras that his body is “a kind of flunkey” that he has taken an inordinate amount of time to dress, bathe, groom, and feed over the years. It was in 1941, however, that he was inclined to slough it off: “I don’t care a button what becomes of you.… One way and another, I have dragged you through life to this point; and here I discover that you are of no importance.” Not everyone recognized in this a cry of faith. Anne and Charles Lindbergh read and discussed the excerpt of Flight to Arras that appeared, the second in a series of three, in the February issue of the Atlantic. Declared Charles: “I think it was awful the way he talked about his body.… If I’d been his body I’d have gotten chicken pox just to get even with him!”
~
Nearly everyone who mattered to Saint-Exupéry heard portions of the book before it was published. The telephone is a dangerous weapon in the hands of a dejected man who needs constant reassurance and keeps odd hours; Saint-Exupéry did not shy from using his, to the tune of about seventy-five dollars a month, half of what he paid his secretary. At his dining room table or at an all-night deli he scribbled until dawn, dictating his illegible pages for Marie McBride, who did not see him before noon. At any point during this time his friends’ sleep was in jeopardy. Like most writers, Saint-Exupéry was incapable of keeping to himself a passage with which he was happy. Unlike most writers, he retained from his Aéropostale days the conviction that nothing was more thrilling than a middle-of-the-night call from a friend in need. Galantière, who was translating chapter by chapter, took the brunt of his generosity. When the telephone rang at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. he knew immediately who was calling; he got used to hearing himself dole out half-asleep praise. “I don’t think that it ever occurred to him that of the two of us, only he was awake,” he said later. Yvonne Michel, Lamotte, Lanux, Lazareff, Becker found they could not stay angry at Saint-Exupéry for costing them their rest, although not everyone was honestly able to tell the difference between the text they heard in the middle of one night and the previous version of the same text, which they had heard in the middle of the previous night. Only Lamotte grumbled a little. “Listen, Bernard, I’ve just written four pages, do you want to hear them?” Saint-Exupéry woke the painter to ask one evening. Lamotte wondered if the reading could wait until the next day. “Why tomorrow?” Saint-Exupéry persisted. “Because it is two in the morning and in theory people sleep at this hour, even if you don’t,” Lamotte informed him, though he was still on the phone twenty minutes later. Saint-Exupéry had better luck with his West Coast friends, less easy to disturb. When he called Annabella and Tyrone Power late in the year to read them chapters of The Little Prince they thought him only hopelessly extravagant.
One person who had been spared these impositions was Consuelo, who arrived in New York toward the beginning of 1942, as Galantière was wresting the last pages of the book from her husband. The writer had agonized for some time over whether or not to bring his wife to America; his friends seemed to think she would cause him less trouble in New York, where he could keep an eye on her, than in France, where—with predictable results—he was unable to. (He got her news from Madame de B, who encouraged him to send for her, and relied on his mother to run interference.) Probably in the end the decision to come to America was Consuelo’s: it would have been a difficult trip for anyone to make against her will. (She would claim that she had shamed her husband
into bringing her over, threatening to make a scandal if he did not take her back, and this may have been true.) Back in New York, Lazareff, the former Paris-Soir editor, helped collect a number of affidavits in support of Consuelo’s visa application. Saint-Exupéry—who had not found female companionship to be in short supply in New York—by no means broadcast the news of his wife’s arrival. One night he called Jean-Gérard Fleury, himself recently arrived, to requisition him and his car for the next morning. He did not mention a destination; Fleury found himself at the Hoboken pier before he was told why he was there. Dutifully he loaded Consuelo’s bags into his Pontiac and chauffeured her—as she regaled the men with stories of Oppède—to Central Park South. That afternoon Saint-Exupéry telephoned the Reynals, frantic. Consuelo had arrived and he had to be decent to her; were they possibly free for dinner? The Reynals joined the Saint-Exupérys on a circular banquette at the restaurant at 240 Central Park South that evening. On one side of the table the author, under his breath, told Elizabeth how relieved he was that his wife was in town only for a few nights. Across the table Consuelo gaily informed Eugene Reynal of her delight to be in New York on a six-month visa. Without her husband’s knowledge she then arranged to move into a twenty-second-floor apartment in the building. Saint-Exupéry made the best of the situation; some of his greatest trials now began.
According to Fleury, it was Consuelo who—in a late-night brainstorming session—put forward the French-language title for the book, Pilote de guerre. (New York had by now become a center of French-language publishing—an edition of André Maurois or Saint-Exupéry could sell 15,000 copies—and Pilote de guerre was brought out simultaneously with Flight to Arras by the Éditions de la Maison Française.) Reynal & Hitchcock, after much casting about, had already settled on Flight to Arras. Saint-Exupéry was bad with titles, and there is no record of how he felt about these. He was not—despite his protests—altogether displeased with his text. He had laced the account of the reconnaissance flight with memories and musings, stitching exactly the kind of personal credo he had been lobbying for to the end. It was not a perfect match. His riffs about the primacy of Man over the individual and the duty of charity date the book more than the events it describes, though they won him comparisons to the Bible in 1941. While he agonized over these statements the volume engages more successfully on another level: it provides a very true portrait of a man, no run-of-the-mill hero. German antiaircraft fire brings out a Saint-Exupéry the Libyan desert did not; Arras is a deeply personal book. Renoir, with whom Saint-Exupéry had fallen out of touch this year, wrote Becker that he missed their mutual friend but that when he wanted to spend fifteen minutes with him he leafed through Pilote. In the first line we catch Saint-Exupéry the reconnaissance pilot, a man for whom attention is all, daydreaming. He performs his card tricks, confides his late-night anxieties, fumbles for a match, loses his gloves, grouses, daydreams some more. He is proud, impatient, in pain. He hums into his oxygen mask (“Hum like that, Captain, and you’ll pass out,” Dutertre warns him), he admits he has good days and bad, has lost a brother at a young age (which he gets wrong). He is stubborn, he is bitter, he is cocky about his chess game, he is not immune to the effects of alcohol. He confides his feelings on being asked to autograph one of his books. All of this he does—eighteen months after the events in question—mostly in the present tense, which lends the account of the man and the mission a fierce immediacy. He does not mention, in a volume awash in humility, tenderness, fraternity, that his life as he writes is devoid of all such things, though he may have intended to. The original first line of the manuscript—dotted with cigarette burns and coffee stains, scribbled so much in haste as to be in parts wholly illegible, the margins decorated with a series of little figures—read, “It is becoming so difficult to live.”
Conceived as a volume on the fall of France, Flight to Arras was a war book by the time it was published. It won raves on both counts. It was universally thought to dwarf all other accounts of the French defeat; writing in the Atlantic Edward Weeks declared, “This narrative and Churchill’s speeches stand as the best answer the democracies have yet found to Mein Kampf.” Published on February 20 the book sold out its first printing before any reviews had appeared. Lamotte had contributed a series of illustrations to the volume, enlargements of which hung in bookstore displays all over New York. Copies of Arras were piled high in Bloomingdale’s windows. Reviewed on the front pages of The New York Times Book Review and the New York Herald Tribune Books section, the best-selling volume turned into one of the ten biggest books of 1942; Reynal & Hitchcock made every effort to keep it in stock despite a tightening paper situation. Not all of the critics fell for Saint-Exupéry’s brand of mystical rambling, but everyone agreed that he wrote “like a soliloquizing angel.” He was allowed more latitude than most essayists not because he was a stylist but because he was a soldier. It seemed doubly noble that a man who had risked his life for his country in near-suicidal reconnaissance missions should be so much obsessed with making some larger sense of the whole war experience.
Wail though Saint-Exupéry did about the project, Flight to Arras proved the best use of his American time, more or less what he claimed he had left France to accomplish. The prestige of France was low in 1942, and Arras was judged by many to be the single most redeeming piece of propaganda on her behalf. As the first indication many Americans had had that the French had made an effort to resist the Germans, the volume greatly influenced public opinion. (Saint-Exupéry saw to it that a copy found its way to the White House via Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, whom he knew socially. He inscribed the book: “For President Franklin Roosevelt, whose country is assuming the immense task of saving the world.”) Having defended his country once with his person and once on the page, he was in some eyes twice a hero. The language barrier spared him readings and an author tour, but he became a most sought-after lecturer and guest, the jewel in every hostess’s crown. These engagements he accepted reluctantly. Anne Morgan, head of the Coordinating Council of the French Relief Societies, invited him to lecture in her living room to a group of fifty socially prominent women, for whom Saint-Exupéry was to sign copies of Arras. He snapped his way nervously through a box of wooden matches as he spoke. After his remarks he was rushed by the crowd, in which he recognized a familiar face: that of “Ping” Lawrence, the wife of Laudy Lawrence, who represented MGM in Europe. “I want to talk to you,” he said, leading her by the hand into the next room, where he engaged her in conversation behind an oversized armchair, entirely out of view. After he was introduced to a crowded meeting of the American Association of Teachers of French in a New York University hall he whispered something to the chairman, who brought forward a chair that he placed sideways on the stage. Saint-Exupéry addressed his muffled remarks to the far wall of the auditorium. An hour before he was to lecture at the French Institute Pierre Bédard, its director, decided to check in on him. He found the writer in his bathrobe, oblivious to the commitment. He managed to get him dressed, fed, and bundled off—nearly on time—to the Institute, where 450 people were waiting to hear him speak.
Saint-Exupéry did not think he had written a controversial book but braced himself, if only out of habit, for “the calumnies and resentments.” He was well-advised to do so. In March the French consul-general in New York reported respectfully on the success of Arras to the Vichy ambassador in Washington, a fervent Pétainist, describing the book as the first account of the war to rise above politics. Soon enough politics rose up to meet it. The last lines of the book, which are enigmatic, created great consternation. Read by Vichy as a call-to-arms, they were seen by the Gaullists as defeatist. For once the two sides had something in common: they joined in denouncing the text. Saint-Exupéry racked his brains to try to make sense of the objections; he could not defend himself on one count without opening himself to attack on three others. (Ironically, he had meant to damn no one but the Americans, for not having come to France’s rescue.) He looked
long and hard for evidence of his solidarity with Vichy but could find only one line of text regarding the government, which he thought a rather subtle condemnation. Flabbergasted, he interrogated every Gaullist he knew. He had defended Vichy, they told him, in defending the armistice. “But I didn’t write about the armistice,” objected Saint-Exupéry. “Yes, but you made it look to the Americans as if the French army had been beaten,” came the reply. Why had he written about only one mission, they moaned. The word on the street—in this case Park and Fifth Avenues—was that Saint-Exupéry had made the war effort look skimpy.
The controversy heated up after the French publication of the book at the end of the year. By moving to America Saint-Exupéry had neatly sidestepped the to-appear-or-not-to-appear question with which writers who were living under the Occupation—and France was at the end of 1942 fully occupied—had to wrestle. To submit a book for publication at this time was to do business with a group of men committed to collaboration. There were many reasons to do so, of course, not the least of them that writers have to eat. Jean Guéhenno cited another: “The man of letters is not the noblest of human species. Incapable of living very long in obscurity, he will sell his soul to see his name appear. A few months of silence, of disappearance, drive him to his wits’ ends. He can take it no longer.” Saint-Exupéry was more fortunate than most writers in that his publishing fortunes were as good if not better outside France, but it was imperative to him that Pilote de guerre appear in his own country; he had not written the book expressly for Americans. He saw to it that a copy of the manuscript made its way to Ségogne, who was instructed to have it published in France at all cost. Nothing appeared in France without the approval of the censors, to whom Gallimard submitted the text in the fall. Saint-Exupéry’s was an account of doing battle with Germany but mostly it was an elegiac description of war; his work had already been held up by the Germans as an example of the best kind of French literature. Gerhard Heller, the young, literature-loving German at the head of the review section of the Propagandastaffel, was closest to Gaston Gallimard, of all the French publishers. He passed the book for a December 1942 publication, although one line was censored and its print run limited to 2,000 copies.*
