by Stacy Schiff
His playmates were often older children as well. When Annabella Power came to New York for an acting job, Saint-Exupéry coaxed her out of her room at the Hotel Pierre to feed the squirrels in Central Park. She was eager to perfect her accent for her performance and excused herself to race off to an English lesson. He was indignant she could think of abandoning his squirrels. “We were twelve years old when together,” reported Annabella, echoing many of Saint-Exupéry’s escorts. At Silvia’s he devised a game he called “des oranges sur le piano.” By rolling one orange up and down the black keys and a second over the white he was able to produce what sounded to most ears like honest Debussy. He got a great deal of mileage out of his Dictaphone, on which he recorded a series of animal noises, or a Mozart symphony, overlaid with several friends’ recitations of French classical verse, scanned to accord with the tempi. One visitor arrived to find him amusing himself by “recording his voice on top of itself: singing first one part of a sailor song into the mike, then, in the same track, another, and listening rapturously to the strange results.” He played the recordings—to which his guests had no choice but to contribute—forward and backward; he replayed the solos he bullied them into performing at the most compromising times. He interviewed his visitors. Gleefully he directed his friends in a hilarious rendition of a group of French provincials getting their first glimpse of New York from the top of a Fifth Avenue bus.
The diversions were not always as puerile as they seemed. Many friends and acquaintances visited with Saint-Exupéry while he played in his Central Park South bathtub but few who did—apart from those he designated his “wave-maker”—were aware that they were visiting with him in his laboratory. The Reynals found their author hunched over the bathtub one morning when he was to have met them for an important lunch with the head of research for Bell Laboratories. He had proved oblivious to repeated knocks on the door, which the building’s superintendent had had to open; in his bathtub he was toying with methods with which to launch a silent invasion of France. He experimented with wave motion, convinced that the difference between the velocity of the waves at the surface and below the surface of the Atlantic could power a tiny submarine. Robert Boname, the engineer who was often Saint-Exupéry’s consultant in these matters, built him a wood-and-plastic model with which he continued his tubside experiments—barefoot, his pant legs rolled to his knees, paddling a hand vigorously in the water—in a Northport inlet. The paper helicopters with which he littered Central Park South—a basket of which he once unloaded from the top of the Empire State Building—were designed to the same end: he thought the enemy could be surprised by a motorless autogiro. (Boname was skeptical about the invention, which he did not feel could function without an impossibly long rotor, but the writer ignored his counsel.) Several of his ideas Saint-Exupéry conveyed to von Kármán, then an adviser to the air force. Galantière’s favorite was a fleet of large underwater barges on which dismounted airplanes could be hauled, by submarine, across the Atlantic. Equally intriguing was the underwater vessel in which the inventor proposed to make his way back to France, said to have consisted of a sort of fish-shaped coffin outfitted with a rudder and mobile scales. Of course he was not the only one experimenting in such realms; the U.S. War Department received some fantastic mail during these years. Saint-Exupéry’s irrepressible inventing and high-level international contacts appear to have caused some concern among government agencies, however. A curious May 1942 intelligence report had him organizing an aircraft construction enterprise in Brazil with Fleury, not what the United States wanted a resident alien who was believed to be “if not pro-Vichy, at least pro-Pétain” to be doing.
The starry-eyed innocence and the deep-seated sense of responsibility caused Saint-Exupéry more trouble than they did the Little Prince, who traveled better, who had the good fortune to meet a wise fox, and of whom less was expected. The latter half of the writer’s American stay turned into a struggle between two conflicting sets of needs: those of a small boy in search of comfort and a grown man who either was or felt he was shirking his duty. He dreamed of liberating France but was done in by all lesser obligations. Having failed to appear for a dinner at the Reynals he wrote Elizabeth with his excuses. He was dead tired, he was unhappy and anxious. “So I’m a bit scatter-brained, and I forget dinners and appointments. Know that I am horribly distracted but don’t think that I am negligent,” he begged her. He remained, with mixed results, childishly addicted to honesty. When Consuelo was mugged in 1942—the thief hit her over the head before making away with her bag—he chose to confide his anguish to Silvia. This was patently not a subject on which she cared to hear him expound. He had not moved from Consuelo’s bedside for forty-eight hours, he could neither eat nor sleep, he had suddenly realized that if anything were to happen to her he would not be able to go on living. She had her flaws but she was his wife, and he felt responsible for her “like a captain for his ship.” He realized he had abandoned his post, a painful admission for a man who acknowledged that he had little aptitude for affairs of the heart but who prided himself on being a loyal friend, an excellent shepherd. The remorse was the same he suffered for living far from his besieged country. There was ample reason why—in the only line of The Little Prince in which Saint-Exupéry reaches out and collars his reader—he offers up a version of “Mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.” His regret that he could not do so ate away at him. And yet, writing from the next room, to the sound of Consuelo’s labored breathing, he could not help but tell Silvia how alone he felt, how exhausted he was, how much he needed to see her.
Idealistic, or fussy, he remained too much the individualist to submit to behavior that might have simplified his life. As Maurois said of him, “Either he dominated the conversation or he dreamed of another planet.” Renoir put it more bluntly: “I think it is fair to say that, throughout his entire stay with us, and no doubt in America until the day he left, Saint-Exupéry was not in the United States.” He was unable to make himself heard—clearly—in Washington or in the French community in exile, and by his taste for grandeur and his obsession with lucidity was condemned to the margins. In 1942 the rest of his countrymen took sides, although they often enough had to struggle with their consciences to do so, and although they often disagreed violently with their fellow partisans. Not having to search very far for his inspiration, Saint-Exupéry wrote a satire of the adult world.
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The bulk of the manuscript was completed by mid-October. Reynal and Hitchcock—who had heard little about the project in the preceding months—were very happy with it; Hitchcock wrote of the title that would turn into the best-seller among Saint-Exupéry’s works, “I am perfectly delighted with the little book, and have high hopes for its success.” A contract was drawn up in November, when Saint-Exupéry was again short on funds and when the text was ready to be typeset. Reynal & Hitchcock began advancing their author his monies immediately, although nothing was finalized until the last week of January 1943. By that time it was clear that The Little Prince would not, as its publishers had hoped, appear in February, and the contract had grown to a two-book agreement. Saint-Exupéry was granted a $3,000 advance for the children’s book and for a short volume he was to deliver on the position of France and the French in the modern world, a work that doubtless would have corresponded little to that description but that he was not in any event to write. (An amendment to his Canadian contract signed in March turned that project into a novel, due in the fall.) He continued, through the early part of the winter, to fiddle with his illustrations for The Little Prince and to agonize over their proper placement in the text.
On November 8, 1942, in one of the most complex maneuvers in military history, American troops landed in North Africa. The news reached New York that evening. Among the many prophecies of Saint-Exupéry proved true by Operation Torch was one that he had made to a French restaurateur who had despaired of the objectionable table manners of an American couple in his New York establishment. “They
are barbarians,” the Frenchman had sniffed. “Yes, barbarians who will help us to win the war,” Saint-Exupéry had agreed. Reactions to the momentous news varied. The French army, under the orders of Pétain, fired on their once and future allies. De Gaulle, who had not been informed of the military operation, partly because of his unpopularity among the Vichy troops in North Africa, partly because he had behaved badly toward Roosevelt, partly because Roosevelt did not like him in the first place, was incensed. Roused from bed and told of the American move the six-foot five-inch pajamaed monument sputtered: “Well, I hope that Vichy will throw them back into the sea. One doesn’t make one’s way into France by breaking and entering.” Saint-Exupéry, of course, was jubilant.
In response to the landings the Germans occupied all of France. Vichy was no longer, which again dramatically changed the political landscape, notably in America and in North Africa. Those members of the French embassy and consulate in the United States who refused to reconsider their loyalty to Pétain were escorted with their families by the FBI to a luxury hotel in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where they were sequestered until they changed their minds or—as was the case of neary twenty diehards—were later exchanged for American diplomatic personnel held by the Germans. Along with several other groups (one attempted to recruit Saint-Exupéry, asking him to put in a word on their behalf with Donovan), de Gaulle’s representatives lobbied to be recognized as the French authority in America. This left Washington to wonder once again who, and where, was France. Was an opportunistic renegade general based in London any worse than an illegitimate puppet government that had just cost the United States 1,500 casualties? Aglion remembered that wartime France represented a situation so far afield of American State Department experience that the United States fell back on policies forged in Latin America, where illegitimate governments were often recognized for want of a better alternative, and armies could be counted on to rise up against their leaders.
Not having forgotten the bitterness of his experience with Flight to Arras (which was only now published in France) but evidently feeling as if he could this time adequately brace himself, Saint-Exupéry dipped a toe into the polemical surf. On November 29 The New York Times Magazine carried his “An Open Letter to Frenchmen Everywhere,” a version of which the author also read over the air in French. Once again he pleaded with his countrymen to set aside their differences, to focus not on representing France but on serving her; the American action in North Africa should have put an end to all discussion of Vichy’s real and alleged sins. Leave those, he argued, to the historians and the war tribunals. As for any discussion of who should command: “Our real chief,” he wrote, “is France, now condemned to silence.” And as for the provisional organization of France, this could be entrusted to Britain and the United States. With Vichy out of the picture there was no longer any excuse for sects, clans, divisions. Frenchmen should be asking only how they could free their country. Saint-Exupéry suggested that all those who had thus far been silent—by which he meant the non-Gaullists—should write Cordell Hull, the U.S. Secretary of State, of their desire to serve in whatever way the American government saw fit, stipulating that in the interests of French unity the organization remain outside of politics. “The State Department will be astonished at the number of Frenchmen who will take their stand for unity. For, despite our reputation, most of us at heart know only love of our civilization and our country,” he wrote.
His sincerity left him open to ridicule, which was what he earned from most of his American-based compatriots. A fair number saw in his text a direct attack on de Gaulle. One former French air force officer wrote in a letter to the Times that Saint-Exupéry was himself furthering divisions among the French by implying that de Gaulle was the leader of a sect. He got endless flak—and still does today—for having suggested that any political organization of France could be entrusted to the Allies, an idea that was anathema to de Gaulle, who went so far as to appoint the full cast of a shadow government, down to the préfets and the sous-préfets, before setting foot back in France. Henry Bernstein, the outspoken playwright who had written so vitriolically of Vichy as to have been stripped in absentia of his French citizenship, took Saint-Exupéry to task for having gone easy on Pétain. “We cannot, however touching the appeal, by however brilliant a writer, by however courageous an aviator, by however nice a man, say mildly, ‘We’ll let bygones be bygones,’ ” he wrote, patronizingly, in a long letter to the Times. A few praised the author’s noble sentiments, but generally the piece only incited to riot. Why, fumed Bernstein, are the Americans and British entitled to their differences of opinion, whereas the French are labeled—the words were Saint-Exupéry’s—“little baskets of crabs” when they quarrel? American readers were moved by the writer’s eloquence but did not see how his appeal would amount to much, given what they had seen of those same “little baskets of crabs.” For them the piece fell squarely in the realm of literature.
Once again, too, Saint-Exupéry proved a master of poor timing. The Americans had backed the wrong man in North Africa—loyal to Pétain, the army had no interest in accepting Giraud as Supreme French Commander, proving that the Latin American analogy only went so far—and had to engage in some nimble, behind-the-scenes negotiating to bring around Admiral Darlan to the Allied cause. As the American press was quick to point out, this was an expedient but distasteful solution; Darlan was known to be antipathetic to the British and thought by many to be a Nazi. Named High Commissioner in North Africa, the admiral shared control of the French armed forces in North Africa with Giraud as of mid-November. The American landings entailed all kinds of treacheries, but nothing compared to the Alice-in-Wonderland logic of the Darlan solution: the admiral’s power stemmed from the fact that he gave orders in Pétain’s hallowed name. Arguing that Pétain was now a prisoner of Germany and no longer responsible for his own decisions, he continued to do so, and was obeyed, despite the fact that he was now issuing anti-Axis orders. In Vichy one of Pétain’s staff members remarked, “We live in sad times when we cannot trust our traitors anymore.”
The American press objected fiercely to Roosevelt’s installation of Darlan, who for all of his usefulness caused the president an enormous amount of embarrassment. (Roosevelt and many people were put out of their misery when Darlan was assassinated on Christmas Eve.) Darlan’s unexpected entrance on the scene—only because of an odd twist of events was he in North Africa at the time of the landings in the first place—muddied the waters for Saint-Exupéry as well. In one of the most painful attacks upon him after the Times piece appeared, Jacques Maritain, the esteemed Catholic philosopher, published a long article entitled “Il faut parfois juger” (“Sometimes One Must Judge”) on the front page of the anti-Vichy weekly, Pour la Victoire. Maritain was more cool-headed than most of Saint-Exupéry’s detractors but made the unassailable point that the writer could not publish such a piece and claim to be above the fray, could not publish, in fact, without himself ceding to language, which he claimed he distrusted. In a most dignified manner he accused his compatriot of being vague and unrealistic. Saint-Exupéry was shown Maritain’s article by its author before it appeared and allowed to contribute a statement to the newspaper; essentially he blamed his troubles on the Times translation and asked Pour la Victoire to carry his piece in the original French, which it did. (Galantière could not be blamed on this count, having left for London in October, but the writer would have been hard-pressed to find fault with the Times, which had evidently paid four different translators to render him into English, at least one of whom did a perfectly serviceable job.) He wrote Maritain directly on December 19; he had been profoundly hurt by his criticism, especially as it came from someone who did not generally stoop to polemic and whom he greatly esteemed.* He had written his piece for the non-Gaullists, in French, before the Darlan problem; he wished Maritain would read it in that light. He engaged in a certain amount of hair-splitting and pleaded a little: say what you will, he entreated, but please do
not misconstrue my intentions. He showed less restraint when arguing about the piece with Raoul de Roussy de Sales, who had been on the Gaullist payroll since the previous fall, though with mixed feelings. The two men nearly came to blows over “An Open Letter” in December. They never patched up their differences; two days after this bitter argument Roussy de Sales died of cancer.
