Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

* Overtaken by events, “Lettre à un Américain” did not appear in Life, which never did publish a Saint-Exupéry piece. The short text was read over the air in the United States by the actor Charles Boyer in April 1945.

  * According to one member of the 2/33, he signed off simply with “Out” because he was unable—or unwilling—to pronounce “Over.”

  Epilogue: Saint Antoine d’Exupéry

  ~

  It’s worth it, it’s worth the final smash-up.

  MERMOZ, as quoted in Wind, Sand and Stars

  What happened between the time Saint-Exupéry took off from Bastia on July 31, 1944, and the time he would have run out of fuel six hours later remains a mystery. Toward 1:00 o’clock Gavoille summoned Vernon Robison, the American liaison officer assigned to the 2/33, to sector control. Saint-Exupéry was late returning, Gavoille explained, his mouth twitching; would the lieutenant please call for him? Robison did, repeatedly. (There had been a dress rehearsal for this afternoon: Saint-Exupéry had been overdue returning from a previous mission, when Gavoille had also handed Robison a microphone. The pilot was thought to be over the Mediterranean; he radioed from the skies of France that he had not yet completed his mission and asked for permission to do so, which his commanding officer reluctantly granted.) This time no response was forthcoming. The two men hoped against hope; it all came down to the kind of pregnant wait, heavier by the minute, which the lost pilot had himself so indelibly described in Wind, Sand and Stars. At 3:30 Robison filed the interrogation report for Saint-Exupéry’s eighth and final mission: PILOT DID NOT RETURN AND IS PRESUMED LOST. Not everyone understood the enormity of the loss as Gavoille felt it: one American who was in the operations room that day remembered having been told that “a Frenchie” had failed to return and that he was a writer but did not recognize his name. (“I was twenty-three and illiterate,” he explained years later.) That evening, Rockwell and a fellow American officer showed up at the French mess, to which the pilot had invited them the previous day. They, too, were shattered by the news, although, as Gavoille put it, “the traditions of aviation were maintained.” The evening passed in song. Most of the 2/33 clung to the hope that their illustrious colleague had landed in Switzerland or been taken prisoner. When the 1/22—of which squadron Saint-Exupéry was officially still a member, having only been detached to the 2/33—called around to see if they might pry additional information out of the Allied command they got nowhere. They were unable to impress upon the security-conscious Wing that the rules applied to everyone but not to Saint-Exupéry.

  The day after his disappearance the Algiers newspapers began to speak of him, then fell silent. The gossip-mongers were happy to step in where the news left off. It would not be surprising, tittered one camp, if Saint-Exupéry had delivered his airplane to Vichy. Was it really true, asked another, that Saint-Exupéry had been assassinated by the Gaullists? Pélissier received word on August 2 from the High Command; he had been listed as the party to alert in case of accident. In part obscured by happy events, the news that the writer was lost filtered out gradually. The acceptance of his death was yet slower in coming. It was as if all of the eulogies he had written over the years now came back to attach themselves to him; his friends and family were as reluctant to grant him the respect and perfection due the dead as he had been reluctant to grant them to Mermoz in 1936. Late in the evening of August 9 Léon Werth was half-listening to the radio when he heard that his great friend was reported missing. He thought back to the wide-ranging discussions and the mind-boggling card tricks—to the years of tardiness—and concluded that his Tonio was lost but alive. A week later he had not abandoned this hope. Jean Israël heard the news over the radio as well; he was entering his fifth and last year of captivity in an officers’ prison camp. His response to the announcement was that of Daurat, who reported that the news threw him into total shock.

  Anne Lindbergh read of Saint-Exupéry’s disappearance on August 9 and put her finger on one of the reasons for the ache it caused. There was, wrote a woman supremely qualified to know, a vast, terrible difference between “lost” and “dead.” She imagined “the man who spoke ‘my language’ better than anyone I have ever met, before or since” to be like a soul in Dante, drifting between heaven and hell. On August 10, when American troops were within eighty-seven miles of Paris, The New York Times reported the writer missing. Not all the indications of a forthcoming Allied victory were positive ones: Jean Guehénno, who had remained in France throughout the war but had not published, heard about Saint-Exupéry just before reading that Drieu La Rochelle had attempted suicide. (Drieu, who had kept the NRF afloat for the Germans, would succeed the following year.) Seven days later Pour la Victoire announced the aviator’s news to French-speaking New Yorkers. The paper’s editor imagined Saint-Exupéry to be hidden away in France and wagered he would resurface.

  That same week, acting on Saint-Exupéry’s instructions, Gavoille asked one of his pilots to deliver the writer’s manuscripts to Pélissier. He did so in direct defiance of military regulation (his affairs should have gone to the ministry) “but for Saint-Ex,” the officer wrote Pélissier, “it’s the least I can do.” It was an appropriate gesture: from the grave Saint-Exupéry continued to corrupt the rule-bound. Colonel Rockwell had seen to it that the letters to Dalloz and to Madame de B were delivered; Dalloz took his to Gide, who read the dispiriting document aloud, sentence by sentence, emitting a pained “Ah!” as he put down the paper. De Gaulle’s acting foreign minister, René de Massigli, carried the second letter to London, where Madame de B had already received the news of its author. At the end of the month Curtice Hitchcock sent on the article Saint-Exupéry had drafted for Phillips to the editor of Life. In his covering letter he wrote: “I can’t somehow believe Saint-Ex won’t show up somewhere back of the maquis lines before this thing is over.” He was sure enough that his daredevil author would again reappear to treat the matter of payment for the piece lightly. He wrote that if the author was still alive he was certain to need the money, and that if for some reason he was not, his wife would.

  Reluctant though his friends were to accept his death, few were surprised to hear of Saint-Exupéry’s disappearance. He had been saying his good-byes since 1942—when he saw Fleury off in New York late that year he did so with a handshake and with the comment, “And if I disappear, you can be sure, it will be without regrets”—and letters to his intimates over the year that followed amount to variations on “I don’t give a damn if I die.” Hedda Sterne and Silvia Reinhardt knew when he left New York they would never see him again (Silvia met her future husband the night after Saint-Exupéry’s departure, when, still in tears, she cut a particularly fetching and tragic figure); Madame de B very strongly suspected when she saw him in Algiers that he would be shot down. Anne Lindbergh—who over the course of the next two and a half months was to pass through every stage of grief on the Frenchman’s account, which loss she compared to that of her sister or her baby—conceded that she had expected the news for some time. “He wanted to make the supreme sacrifice,” she wrote, feeling as if she had been stabbed through the heart; “he went back for that.” Like others of his friends she breathed a sigh of relief for him. “It’s for the best. He’s free now,” commented an officer who had seen him regularly in Algiers. We do not know how or when Consuelo—who had so many times before lost her husband—received the news of this final separation. Although her behavior often belied her attachment, she, too, was long in believing him to be actually gone.

  Max Becker felt his client had been courting death for some time. Those who did not think he was flirting with an early end nonetheless had to admit that he had fallen prey to a deep despair. “Let’s be honest,” said Anne Heurgon-Desjardins, who visited with the writer every time he called on Gide and for the last time on July 26. “Saint-Exupéry no longer wanted to live.” He had clearly prepared his death—he had said his goodbyes, had issued the equivalent of a last testament to Gavoille, had made known his plans for hi
s manuscripts, had harped on his indifference to life—and the fact that he did so has been construed by some as his having arranged for it. This seems unlikely. All reconnaissance pilots flew alone, unarmed, into enemy territory with only their speed, their altitude, and their wits to protect them, and all reconnaissance pilots flew with fear. While Saint-Exupéry may not have expected to have survived the war it is not at all clear that he had truly lost his desire to do so. More and more he fell into expressions of despair and explosions of disdain—he was by 1944 no longer either the open-minded dialectician of the 1930s or the high-minded mystic of Wind, Sand and Stars—but his life’s correspondence can be read as one long roar of discontent. Nor did he entirely shy from embracing the future. Bill Donovan reported that the pilot had come to see him in mid-1944 to ask if he might serve in the OSS; the second week of July he had written Pélissier that he hoped the war would end soon, before he was entirely exhausted (“avant que j’aie fondu tout entier”), as he had work to see to later.

  All the same, dying for France was consistent with Saint-Exupéry’s principles and, for once, entirely within the realm of what was expected of a man of his background. Raoul Bertrand, to whom the writer’s chess set had gone, did see a sort of implied death wish in his friend’s last days. He termed this a sister of charity, the noble response to small-mindedness. Denis de Rougemont, who like almost everyone who had known Saint-Exupéry became his eulogizer, put this best: “As for honor, it is easier to die for than to live by.” Saint-Exupéry had never been a man of his time; the hour of history in which he had felt at home lasted only so long as pilots flew without the benefit of instruments. Many men outlive their time but Saint-Exupéry, stooped and stiff, had grown rigid, unrealistic to the point of gracelessness. Since he was a young man he had bemoaned the end of an era; had he survived the war he would as well have had to admit that his days of active duty were over. This—more than the épuration, more than de Gaulle’s ascension, more than what he accurately predicted would be an age of bowling alleys and assembly lines—he would have abhorred. John Phillips has pointed out that in the twenty years since his friend had learned to fly aviation had grown stronger while he had grown weaker; the men with whom he lived in Corsica could fly circles around him and knew as much. Probably they were less aware that for pilots of his generation a certain nearly senseless risk-taking was an integral part of the sport, the foolishness that lent duty its flavor. Pilots of his era knew only one end. They did not aspire to breathing their last at home in their beds.

  Dying for France was not a prerequisite of the second of Saint-Exupéry’s chosen professions. Four hundred and fifty French writers perished in World War I, but when Publishers Weekly called the roll of prominent French writers in October 1944 it went something like this: Benjamin Crémieux dead in a Nazi concentration camp; Gide in refuge in Rome; Jules Romains in refuge in New York; Roger Martin du Gard in Nice. Malraux, Eluard, Aragon, and Sartre were all well, several of them veterans of the Resistance or of prison camps. Jean Prévost also fought with the Resistance; he had died the day after Saint-Exupéry had disappeared, when he walked into a German ambush in the south of France. Céline was in exile (and ultimately in prison) in Denmark. Saint-Exupéry was missing. He was to go down in history as the most celebrated French man of letters to die in the war for the simple reason that most French men of letters did not see active combat after the fall of France in 1940. In a country which an American intelligence agent reported “had been made almost psychopathic ally sensitive to defeat,” this was to prove, as the pilot himself might have guessed, a thankless distinction. In 1945 he was the most prestigious French author in the eyes of the Americans, but by the time his generation had come to take over French letters he was gone.

  Saint-Exupéry did not reappear; a mass was finally said for him in the east of France a year after his last mission. In April 1948 he was officially deemed to have died for his country, for which sacrifice a French writer’s copyrights are extended by thirty years. Speculation continues to this day, however, as to the circumstances surrounding the last flight, the mystery of which is conclusively solved every few years, or with about the same regularity as Amelia Earhart’s final moments are reconstructed. We know that the Cape Corse radar tracked Saint-Exupéry into but not out of France on the thirty-first. It is possible that he went down over France, probably in the Alps; it is slightly less possible that he overflew the Riviera at a very low altitude, too low for the radar to pick up any sign of his aircraft, and disappeared into the Mediterranean. (If he was flying “on the deck,” as it is called, he presumably was doing so either because he had had trouble with his aircraft or was paying a visit to Agay, not part of the scheduled mission.) No one can be sure exactly why he fell from the sky. The spectrum of possibilities is evenly represented by his previous missions, plagued by mishaps, any one of which could equally well have proved his last. Over the years a number of eyewitnesses have stepped forth to testify that they saw a P-38 go down off the coast of France between Cannes and Saint-Tropez on the thirty-first; they may actually have seen Meredith go down on the thirtieth, however. The sky over Corsica in late July was thick with Allied bombers and fighters preparing the invasion. None of those airmen—or any of the air-sea rescue units in the area—noticed a P-38 shot down that afternoon, as they would have been likely to.

  In 1981 an unofficial report from a Luftwaffe flyer named Robert Hiechele came to light in which the young German claimed he had shot down a Lightning on the thirty-first although he was on a routine surveillance mission and had not been authorized to do so; there seems no viable explanation for why an official report was not filed by the Focke-Wulf pilot, who under any circumstances should and would have been proud of his victory, especially one over a mighty P-38. (Heichele, who had just turned twenty-one, died a few weeks later and was buried about fifteen miles from Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens.) His account, energetically denied by the Germans, cannot be substantiated. Searches of the Mediterranean have been inconclusive, although at this writing an American-made screw found in the sea near Toulon was thought to yield some clue to Saint-Exupéry’s death. No one has yet undertaken a wide-scale search of the Alps, which would be exceedingly difficult.

  Whether he went down because of an inhaler problem (probably the most humane alternative as oxygen deprivation goes undetected by the pilot, who blacks out first) or because of an enemy fighter, Saint-Exupéry’s was a noble death, what is called in French “une mort glorieuse.” Instinctively right about so many things, Consuelo said in 1946 that her husband’s had been a perfectly appropriate death, nearly a custom-designed one; at the end of a star-chasing life, his had been a meteoric fall. We may hope he got exactly the brand of death he wanted, a subject on which, like most, he had an opinion. In the 1930s a Marianne editor asked him if—after all of his close calls—he had come to prefer one end to another. He knew Saint-Exupéry would not be offended by the unusual question, the kind he liked. Stipulating that his answer was not for publication, at least not until he was “truly dead,” the pilot readily catalogued the options. He had concluded that water was best: “You don’t feel yourself dying. You feel simply as if you’re falling asleep and beginning to dream.”

  ~

  His untimely and enigmatic death—or as some saw it, his martyrdom—would assure Saint-Exupéry’s legend. It did not, however, bring out the best in everyone. Pélissier held on tightly to the manuscripts that Gavoille had gallantly passed on to him; the ministry of air was forced to sue for their return and retrieved them finally—at some cost—late in January 1945. Gavoille remained a loyal friend on all counts. That month the ministry asked how to contact the flyer’s family. His commanding officer provided the name and address of Madame de B, who maintained that Pélissier had not released all of the documents in question. During these proceedings an inventory was drawn up of the writer’s Corsican belongings, which makes for a poignant comment on a life. In the end his possessions amounted to little more than h
is 915 typed pages of Citadelle and a host of other notebooks and papers (one typescript of Teilhard de Chardin, another spiritual man with deep ties to the natural world, was initially credited to Saint-Exupéry), a stapler, a broken pipe, a regulation GI wardrobe, seven pairs of shoes, four pairs of pajamas, a bathing suit, fourteen handkerchiefs, a set of watercolors, a deck of cards, a bag of toiletries, two electric razors, a small sum of money in various currencies, a silk bathrobe. In July Consuelo took legal action to reclaim the remainder of her husband’s possessions, the last of which finally made their way, via the air ministry, back to his family three years after his death. The distribution of the estate proved equally messy. A man with a professed taste for the simple, Saint-Exupéry left two women—his wife and his mother—to profit equally from his work,* and a third—Madame de B—as his literary executor. This sensible if awkward arrangement left Madame de B in the position of having to remind Saint-Exupéry’s American agent that while Consuelo was to receive half the royalties on her husband’s work she was not to be in any way involved in the publishing plans for those volumes.

  It was not with Consuelo but with Gallimard that Reynal & Hitchcock had their troubles. Saint-Exupéry’s French publisher charged in 1945 that all of the American editions of the writer’s work were illegal, as they had never consented to them. Gallimard claimed they had had no prior knowledge of the U.S. editions, an astonishing allegation given that Reynal & Hitchcock had had a contract with the best-selling writer since 1938, had corresponded with Gallimard about the copyright for Arras, and had heard no objections from the French publisher in their mutual author’s lifetime, during a year of which the author received his Gallimard mail in care of his New York editors. Gaston Gallimard approached what probably resembled the truth when he wrote Hitchcock that many French publishers found themselves in embarrassing positions in 1945, having been deprived of relations with the world for many years, during which time the works of their authors had appeared—and turned a profit—elsewhere. Reynal & Hitchcock had nothing to gain financially from circumventing Gallimard, whose proceeds came out of the writer’s earnings; having always been generous in their dealings with their profligate author and circumspect in their contractual negotiations (the French rights in The Little Prince, for example, were automatically to revert to Saint-Exupéry upon the liberation of France) they were flabbergasted. In part they wrote off the misunderstanding to their author’s clumsiness in his business dealings, imagining him telling Gallimard of the arrangements he had made independently with a shrug of his wide shoulders and a “Gaston, I have done a terrible thing.” (Even such nonchalance on Saint-Exupéry’s part does not explain how Gallimard could have been oblivious to the best-selling American editions of his titles; the world was smaller than that.) Litigation between the two firms—Reynal repeatedly referred to it as their “impasse”—continued until 1948. An envoy from the French side, Albert Camus, ultimately served as intermediary. The suit was resolved exactly four years after Saint-Exupéry’s death with a court order that allowed both of his publishers to claim victory.