Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  The Gallimard edition sold out in a week, whipping up a storm of admiring reviews, then was recalled, though not because of the Germans. It had not escaped the notice of several Frenchmen that in singing the praises of the men of his squadron Saint-Exupéry had cited the heroics of a certain “Jean Israël.” This was more than they could stomach. In all fairness Saint-Exupéry had trumpeted Israël’s identity for all it was worth, making fourteen references to his Jewish nose in two pages of text. He must have been aware of what he was doing: he used Israël’s loaded name again later, deliberately, and when a careful writer uses a word fourteen times in quick succession it can safely be assumed he has done so for effect. Pierre-Antoine Cousteau led a virulent crusade against the book, “another demented Judeo-bellicose act.” “M. de Saint-Exupéry chooses his associates badly,” he snorted, reminding readers that the author of Pilote de guerre was also a great friend of Léon Werth. Surely a French writer had better things to do than to vaunt the courage of a Jew? He denounced the book as an act of treason, an appraisal with which other Nazi sympathizers agreed. As for the reviewers, asked another Frenchman, had they forgotten how to read? In mid-January the Vichy Commissioner of Jewish Affairs wondered what the censors had been thinking when they passed such a book, so insulting to the occupying power. The Gaullists remained deaf to these accusations of philo-Semitism, preferring those of their own.

  Like many banned books, Pilote de guerre soon became as popular—at least in reputation; copies were not easy to come by—as Gone With the Wind. (Saint-Exupéry was in good company: French collaborators objected as well to the Germans having passed Camus’s L’Étranger, and the Larousse Élémentaire was banned.) Two clandestine editions of Pilote appeared, one in December 1943 and one in 1944, but Gallimard was not allowed to reprint Saint-Exupéry’s earlier titles and his work fell out of print in France. Once the darling of the right-wing Académie Française, he was now off the shelves. In Casablanca a request for one of his books in 1943 raised booksellers’ eyebrows. Heller was severely reprimanded for his oversight and placed under house arrest for several days. For Gallimard, eager during the war years to direct attention away from the firm and unhappy about this tussle, the trouble caused by Pilote de guerre proved well worth it. He was later able to cite his publication of the volume as proof of his proper allegiances during the Occupation. (The blame for collaboration was directed entirely to Drieu La Rochelle and the NRF.)

  In the prison camp where he had been since the day before that described in Arras, Jean Israël read in the collaborationist press of the uproar his friend had caused. A month or so later a copy of Pilote de guerre was smuggled into the camp and passed around covertly. Israël read it with pride. In reality it is his name which betrays his heritage—his nose is entirely unremarkable—but he was happy to serve by whatever means he could. No other French writer in 1942 would have gone out, or went out, on a limb for a lieutenant named Israël. Few other French writers would have failed to admit that doing so was provocative. Only Saint-Exupéry—who spoke too eloquently to be ignored but too softly to suit anyone’s political agenda—could get himself banned for singing the praises of Jean Israël and condemned as a Vichyite, all at once.

  * Ultimately a discouraged Renoir conceded that the studios had a taste only for a “certain familiar treacle.” In retrospect he mellowed a little, allowing that the book’s exoticism had worked against it: in 1941 no one yet filmed on location, and it would have been difficult to make any studio look like the Libyan desert. For his part Saint-Exupéry appears to have begrudged Renoir the disappointment. He chastised his friend for having lowered himself to Hollywood’s standards and could not resist informing him that—blessed with the talent of a Michelangelo—he was spending his time embroidering pillows.

  * Saint-Exupéry took two different tacks with his health concerns, which mounted in his forties. With women and with several intimates he discoursed upon his pains in great detail. More often he tried to rise above them. Declares the desert chieftain in The Wisdom of the Sands, whose teeth are rotting and whose kidneys give him trouble as well: “I have found my consolation, which is not to let myself be cast down by these portents of a failing body, nor worn down by infirmities which are base and personal, locked up within me, and to which the historians of my empire will not accord three lines in their chronicles. It matters little that my teeth are loosening and that they will be pulled, it would be unseemly on my part to expect the least sympathy.”

  * The line—in which Saint-Exupéry declared they were all fools, the orderly who had misplaced his gloves no less than Hitler who had unleashed the war—has never been restored in the French edition of the book.

  XVI

  ~

  Anywhere Out of This World

  1942–1943

  “Women are an inspiration. It’s because of them we put on a clean shirt and wash our socks. Because of women we want to excel. Because of a woman, Christopher Columbus discovered America.”

  “Queen Isabella,” Mary [Cheever] murmured.

  “I was thinking,” John said, “of Mrs. Columbus.”

  SCOTT DONALDSON, John Cheever

  A solitary, awkward Frenchman trailing behind him a colorful past and floating in an aura of celebrity, Saint-Exupéry attracted a certain following in America. Fay Wray, who met him briefly through Ping and Laudy Lawrence, was smitten: “Oh, he was wonderful to look at! Big, tall, great black eyes that themselves looked like radiant stars.” In the New York Post, Elsa Maxwell described the man she considered the greatest living French writer as “a virile male, with great charm, a sort of power and enchantment, for women.” Kitty Carlisle Hart, who was introduced to Saint-Exupéry at Bernard Lamotte’s, thought him enormously sexy; like many who met him, she did not know he had a wife. (Those who did, like Anne Lindbergh, believed it common knowledge that the two were separated.) A member of his 1941 Lycée Français audience remarked fifty years later, “I don’t know if a nine-year-old can sense sex appeal or not, but he had it.”

  He did little to solicit attention. He did not need to; the “mignonnes” or “mignonettes,” as he called them, flocked to him, the swashbuckling celebrity who could vanquish anything but day-to-day life. For all of his shyness Saint-Exupéry was not unaware of the effect he had on women. He detested coarseness of any kind and did not speak of his conquests, but, now quite bald, did take to calling himself “le beau blond.” He rarely mentioned Consuelo, save to the other women in his life. Becker knew of his client’s variegated love life because he often performed commissions for his author (in an attempt to lure him to the United States in 1940 he promised he would meet him at the dock with six blondes, each more ravishing than the next); Galantière knew of the women because the two men were in constant touch. He volunteered more of an opinion on this subject than most of the writer’s friends. “Like all virile men,” noted Galantière, “he preferred the company of one woman to the company of several women, and the company of several men to that of one man alone.” He observed that while Saint-Exupéry’s taste ran to the frail, the shipwrecked, “he found himself now and then involved with women who were ‘not his type’—handsome viragoes, so to say, who attached themselves to him, listened with calculated attention to his reflections, tried to arrange his existence for him, and whom he had a hard time getting rid of because he simply did not know how to be brutal.”

  With one of the latter the writer and his translator dined in Chinatown late in November 1941. Galantière had known the woman in question from childhood and was disappointed that Saint-Exupéry had taken up with her. At thirty-eight she was stunning; her appeal extended to women as well as men, although Galantière thought Saint-Exupéry knew nothing of this history. At dinner she began to talk about Night Flight, which she had just read. As she spoke it became clear that she was an anti-Semite and a fascist; her interpretation of the novel provoked an explosion from Galantière, who held that she had entirely misconstrued the word “leader.” With his outbu
rst the conversation turned to one about democracy, a subject on which the two men violently disagreed. To Saint-Exupéry democracy was the creation of a corrupt, bourgeois government, the Third Republic; he had a certain nostalgia for authority figures, to which France is known to deliver herself when in trouble. (Said Pétain in 1940, “They only call me in a crisis.”) The debate continued in the car uptown, in which Galantière lost his temper. “Let’s stop right here; you’ve spent the evening defending the most loathsome ideas. You are clearly a fascist,” he fumed. As he got out of the car Saint-Exupéry put a hand on his translator’s shoulder. “You know that I love you dearly,” he said quietly. “Only please don’t call me a fascist, I’m not one.” For all of her tenacity Saint-Exupéry’s escort could not have seen very much of him in the hours that followed; Galantière woke to find a seventeen-page letter of explanation under his door. In it Saint-Exupéry quickly dispensed with the cornerstones of French democracy as practiced in America. There was more liberty to be found in a monastery than in the choice among three of Zanuck’s films; equality, he argued, like Tocqueville, reduced man to the lowest common denominator; fraternity hardly existed in a nonhierarchical society. There was more of it in the French army, insisted the man who had never been able to tolerate communal quarters, than in all of America.

  On the other kind of woman, who more resembled his wife, Saint-Exupéry lavished—by necessity—more attention. In 1942 he took up with the stunning wife of a Brazilian prince who fit what a friend described as the writer’s three criteria: she was tall, blond, and titled. He was often seen about town with Nada de Bragance, who looked disarmingly familiar; many of those to whom Saint-Exupéry introduced her thought at first that Madame de B was back in New York. (She was not, and for much of this period was on the outs with Saint-Exupéry, distance having taken its toll. To make a telephone conversation that she suspected was being tapped more palatable she threw in a few tributes to de Gaulle. Saint-Exupéry flew into a rage, convinced she had converted to the cause he so disdained.* He forgave her only later, in Algiers. After one particularly tempestuous conversation he hung up in a fury. The operator, still on the line, heard Madame de B crying at her end. “Don’t work yourself up about it,” she said, having come to recognize Saint-Exupéry’s voice. “You know he’ll call you back in five minutes.”) The writer admitted straight out that he was attracted to Nada because she was unhappy, not that any man would have been pressed to justify this particular attraction. “Her face, which is that of someone who is drowning, is so beautiful when she smiles,” he told a friend, who happened to be Madame de B. Displaying the kind of ingenuousness that was to drive the women in his life to despair he once asked her to check up on Nada, as both women were then in London. Madame de B complained that Nada was unbalanced. “Don’t speak like that of my women,” Saint-Exupéry chided her, “they are all crazy.” (Nada committed suicide after the war, jumping from a London hotel window.)

  The affairs were not necessarily sequential. Women were one of the few consolations New York had to offer a lonely man in poor health and at the mercy of a hostile climate; these were to be the most female-heavy years since Saint-Exupéry’s all-female childhood. As his anguish increased his need for refuge did as well: he bounced from woman to woman, although not all of these relationships were sexual and some were more notable for re-creating the intimacy he had known with his sisters. Hedda Sterne was a twenty-five-year-old painter, a Romanian refugee who had studied in Vienna and Paris, when an acquaintance introduced her to Saint-Exupéry in October 1941. Her family, which was Jewish, was in Europe; she was alone in New York and riddled with guilt. The two became instant friends. In long monologues the Frenchman poured out his heart to her, a tiny, striking young woman who made for a rather brilliant fairy princess. Hedda Sterne was to say that Saint-Exupéry nearly saved her life at a desperate and friendless time but she clearly saved his a little as well: she knew how to hold up her end of a relationship that was anything but conventional, which she describes as having been “entirely private, out of the ordinary world, soul-to-soul.” She felt privileged to open her door to an anguished writer who, once or twice a week, climbed five flights of stairs, late at night, to talk. In her vulnerability and with her discerning eye she may have provided Saint-Exupéry with a sort of substitute for Léon Werth. She helped the writer with an essay on his French friend and encouraged him mightily with The Wisdom of the Sands, which she adored. He wrote her that she had provided more “spiritual assistance” with that project than she could imagine.

  At least some and possibly all of the physical relationships were not consummated. Naturally this brought sex—which according to Pélissier Saint-Exupéry had generally regarded as “an episodic necessity”—to the fore. A deeply sensual man, his New York socializing amounted in part to attempts to feel like a cosseted boy, in part to desperate attempts to feel like a man. In this very private quest he was not helped by Consuelo, who had never been above making public statements about her husband’s superb legs, and who ran around New York announcing—much to ballast her own image as a femme fatale—alternately that her husband had just ravished her and that, having flown at high altitude, he was no longer able to satisfy her. In this and numerous other ways she made it clear to other men that she was accessible. Other women did all they could for Saint-Exupéry; one went so far as to drug him with Seconal to see if this might relax him a little and help him to perform. With Natalie Paley—an actress with whom Cocteau had also been enamored, a Romanov princess by birth—Saint-Exupéry found for some months the comfort he was looking for: “I desperately need to be pitied and consoled.… I am entitled to absent myself temporarily from the demands of life. I am entitled to have a heavy heart, and to entrust it to you to lighten.” Natalie soothed his nerves, diverting him with “that light of milk and honey which you radiate and which makes opening your dress as magical as daybreak.” In the course of a deeply erotic letter he admitted he had been fleetingly unfaithful; in another he admitted that he knew they would hurt each other in the end, “but such is the nature of existence. To experience springtime is to risk living through winter; to be present is to risk one day being absent.” Still, he assured her, despite his numerous affairs he had used the word “love” perhaps three times in his life. He did not think he would use it again, after her.

  Even while he was explaining to Natalie his feelings about divorce and remarriage—a statement to which he appears to have been moved by her elusiveness—he was cultivating a new friendship. In March 1942 he was speaking with Galantière at a Sunday cocktail at a friend’s house when twenty-eight-year-old Silvia Reinhardt, an acquaintance of Galantière’s, sidled up to the two men. She had recently read Wind, Sand and Stars and asked to be introduced to the book’s author. “Tell him I love him,” she instructed Galantière who, able translator that he was, got the message wrong. Silvia insisted; Galantière failed a second time to rise to the occasion. “Would you like my phone number?” she asked Saint-Exupéry directly, facing him square in the chest. “Oui, oui,” answered the man who claimed not to understand a word of English. The two began to see each other daily, inventing a private language that consisted of an approximation of several known ones and a fair amount of gesticulating. Silvia must have proved a master at this, as Saint-Exupéry bestowed on her one of his finest compliments: you know so well how to tell a story, he wrote her later. Evidence of their easy compatibility can be found in Lillian Ross’s Picture, in and out of which Silvia, as Mrs. Gottfried Reinhardt, flits eccentrically with her black poodle. Ross catches her at John Huston’s birthday party in 1950, “a slender, attractive, sardonic-looking lady with large skeptical brown eyes and a vaguely Continental manner, [who] moved with a sort of weary impishness among the guests.” When told by her husband to mingle with the wives Silvia responds, “I won’t mingle. I have an odd interior climate,” and wanders off. When the men adjourn to the next room for a game of poker she throws up her hands in despair: “Gottfried,
nobody ever listens to anybody else! It’s a condition of the world.”

  No one else communicated like Saint-Exupéry and Silvia, who—in a series of evenings that stretched over the course of a year and often began with a late dinner at Silvia’s Park Avenue apartment or at the restaurant Ruby Foo’s—saw no one else. As the telephone proved useless Saint-Exupéry rarely called. He appeared unannounced with a knock on the door, usually hours after Silvia—who never left the house for fear of missing him—had given up hope of his materializing. When Saint-Exupéry needed to communicate a point too fine to be trusted to their private Babel, Silvia asked him to write it down; she then passed on his note to the woman she had hired to tutor her in French. With pursed lips the Browning School teacher—clearly scandalized by the American woman’s involvement with a man who was to her a minor deity—translated these missives, as she did Silvia’s English-language responses. If Saint-Exupéry knew of this system he never let on. What mattered to him was that Silvia grasped the essential: she welcomed him with open arms (if with tears over his tardiness); she made him laugh; she never questioned him about the limits of their sex life, for which the writer offered no explanation; she fed and bathed and sheltered him; she encouraged him in his work, even in his singing, which she thought abominable. In fact the language barrier screened out most of what Saint-Exupéry liked to avoid. Silvia had no sense whatever of the French community’s vilification of her lover. Nor did she have any inkling of Saint-Exupéry’s shame over the French defeat, or his attempts, which multiplied late in 1942, to return to the front. She knew only that he was, by his own account, broken, sick of this world, tormented, drinking heavily. And that he was a most entertaining—and frustrating—companion. “Je suis usé,” Saint-Exupéry repeatedly told her, a statement she took to be an explanation of his impotence. At the end of an evening he would install himself on a chaise longue in her bedroom and read to her from his unfinished work, tears rolling down his face as he did so. Half-asleep on the floor, Silvia understood not a word.