by Stacy Schiff
His Saurer year distanced him, too, from his past in that it made him something of a populist. Already in 1924 he had begun to romanticize squadron life: “I have never loved anything so much as that life of a draftee, that affectionate camaraderie with the mechanics and the clerks. I even loved that prison in which we sang all those lugubrious songs.” This seemed a curious statement coming from the soldier who would daily escape the Strasbourg barracks for his apartment in town. It was his first paean to the community of men, the kind of statement on which his reputation was later staked. Not unimportantly, it was written—to his mother—while he was still in his Boiron cage. He had been blissfully happy among the Saurer mechanics, who probably had not known what to make of him. He had not been slumming; he needed a job. But he had not needed to be seduced by this one. He was reacting to a heartbreak, to the frivolous society that had caused it, to a world in which he had no place and now knew that he desperately wanted one. There was no pretense at Saurer, no gratuitousness. “Café society never taught me anything,” he wrote Renée de Saussine in the same letter in which he reduced Pirandello’s art to metaphysical froth. “I like people who have been tied more closely to life by the need to eat, to feed their children, and to survive until the end of the month. They are wiser.” Jean Escot was not the only friend to note that Saint-Exupéry preferred to talk to an honest street sweeper than to a cultured man-about-town. He would always be an elitist—it was in his bones—but he had now sounded his democratic version of the seigneurial battle cry.
None of the months following the broken engagement favored literary effort and yet they were months that introduced Saint-Exupéry to his themes. He learned an enormous amount from his two insular years marked by purposelessness, loneliness, homelessness. He grew more and more impatient with the comfortable life out of which he had, sometimes unintentionally, so many times now opted. The unpaid bills, the uncertain future, the unhappy heart, the vanishing youth were godsends; they were the first labors to teach him what cyclones and sandstorms and a fledgling mail service would, in years to come, appear to have taught him. They turned him around, though not in the direction in which he was born to have headed. Originally of necessity, he developed a respect for that which made a man labor. The French edition of Wind, Sand and Stars opens with a tribute to “the obstacle.” Just as only an ex-loner could convincingly sing the praises of camaraderie, only a man who had very nearly fallen through the cracks of the system could write with passion of the tragedy of wasted potential, a situation Saint-Exupéry immortalized as “Mozart assassiné.“
For years Saint-Exupéry had lobbied for financial support with the plea that he could not live at odds with the world. In French this is phrased more poetically: “Je ne peux pas vivre comme un ours” (“I cannot live like a bear”). It was precisely the opposite advice Flaubert had offered the aspiring nineteenth-century writer: “Break with the world. Il faut vivre comme un ours,” and Saint-Exupéry, the idler who came to appreciate the preeminence of action, the indulged, profligate son who would make a near-religious appeal for the stoic, responsible life, began after two miserable years to see the wisdom in it. An aristocrat in a republic that no longer had a use for one, he was from the start at odds with his world. He may have been born privileged, but not to the world to which he now aspired. If family connections made him a writer sooner than he might otherwise have been there was nothing preordained about a Saint-Exupéry piloting an airplane. On this count his name and his station conspired against him. It took all of Saint-Exupéry’s tenacity to overcome the advantages of his birth; doing so was one of his greatest achievements. His education, the expectations of his family, the demands of a socially prominent fiancée took him far out of his way. When Gallimard first considered bringing out a collection of his work during the winter of 1925 Saint-Exupéry was a traveling salesman. In April 1926, when he Navire d’Argent published him for the first time, the author of “L’Aviateur” was an ex-pilot. Evidently it was his nostalgia for the air that captured the attention of the magazine editor who signed him on.
* The winners: Alexandre de Millo, Sacha de Manziarly, Jean Hugo, Gaston Gallimard, and Duff Cooper.
VII
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Friends in High Places
1926
There is nothing I dread more in life than being bound by the opinions of other people and being tied to a permanent routine.
CHARLES LINDBERGH, The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh
Jean Prévost, the literary editor of Le Navire d’Argent, met Saint-Exupéry for the first time at Yvonne de Lestrange’s during the second half of 1925. In a drawing room frequented by Gaston Gallimard, André Gide, and Jean Schlumberger the two men were very much the youngsters; side by side, especially in a salon full of lovely, fragile objects, they would also have looked like visiting footballeurs. Prévost was another armoire à glace, thick-necked, large-faced, and broad-shouldered; aware that his parents lived in the Champagne, Gide nicknamed him “the wild boar of the Ardennes.” Both physically and intellectually, he resembled a charging bull. Prévost prided himself on his athletic ability and was the only Frenchman who enjoyed a regular boxing match with Hemingway, whose robust prose he championed early on. In the first of these encounters Hemingway broke his thumb on Prévost’s skull; later he admitted to F. Scott Fitzgerald that he had made special arrangements with the timekeeper to cut the rounds short were Prévost to pummel him without mercy. (On at least one occasion their referee put an end to a two-minute round after forty-five seconds.) Years later, when Saint-Exupéry took Prévost up in his Simoun, the two men’s combined weights posed a problem. Before one takeoff Saint-Exupéry hastily scribbled on the cover of a book Prévost had brought aboard, “Go sit in the back.”
If Prévost was the first Frenchman to begin a literary career in the realm of athletics—his first book, Plaisirs des sports: Essais sur le corps humain came out this year—he was, unlike the Saurer salesman, no misfit in the world of letters. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, as close to a breeding ground for an intelligentsia as exists, Prévost had a prodigious memory, especially for verse, which he was said to be able to recite for forty-eight hours straight. This brand of genius was not always a winning one: Marcelle Auclair, who also met Saint-Exupéry at this time and would become Prévost’s wife the following year, once informed her husband that he could easily be replaced by a sports coach and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Prévost had every reason to be proud and easily found reason to be temperamental, if not downright disrespectful. He had a famous intolerance, for example, for Gide, another of Saint-Exupéry’s early advocates. The relationship with Saint-Exupéry, whose lack of presumptuousness and refinement would in themselves have won him over, seems to have been cemented in song: both commanded a vast repertoire of old French songs and delighted each other—as well, presumably, as Yvonne de Lestrange’s other guests—by pulling one after another of these forgotten tunes out of their oversized hats.
Prévost’s affection for Saint-Exupéry took the form of that of an older brother for a younger, which says something about how the truck salesman, taller and a year older than the editor, must have come across in his cousin’s living room. To Prévost as to other intimates later in life, Saint-Exupéry was known by his childhood name; Yvonne de Lestrange would almost certainly have introduced him as “Tonio.” Early on Prévost learned of Saint-Exupéry’s writing—this was no secret at Yvonne de Lestrange’s, where Gallimard had talked with him about a collection of stories earlier in the year—and expressed an interest in his work on behalf of Le Navire d’Argent, the literary magazine he had edited for Adrienne Monnier since the previous June. In the note that follows “L’Aviateur” Prévost gives a sense of the haphazard way Saint-Exupéry found his way into print: “I met him through friends, and had long admired the force and the finesse with which he described his impressions when I learned that he had written them down. I had a great interest in reading them; I think that he l
ost his manuscript, then reconstituted it from memory. (He composes everything in his head before setting it down.)” Clearly, Prévost, as well equipped as anyone could have been to appreciate Saint-Exupéry and his tales of adventure—traditionally there is as little nature as sport in French literature—had not had to lay siege to the famous ramparts. He had had his ear talked off.
In the late winter Saint-Exupéry put the finishing touches on his story, part of a larger tale called “L’Évasion de Jacques Bernis” on which he had been working for some time. Some part of it had been offered, unsuccessfully, to the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1924; subsequently it had turned into a loosely constructed novel. In a vastly reworked version, Jacques Bernis’s story, simmering all of these years as if in wait for a plot, would become Southern Mail. Generous as ever, Saint-Exupéry had shared the manuscript of his work-in-progress with his friends in 1925. Bonnevie and Sabran professed great admiration for it. Escot, who had read “L’Aviateur” with Saint-Exupéry hovering over him just before its author was scheduled to share it with Prévost, pronounced it fine. Saint-Exupéry agreed to deliver his pages to Prévost at the. Deux-Magots, one of the literary watering holes of the 1920s and ‘30s. Prévost appeared at the appointed time at the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés but the aspiring writer did not, and the editor ultimately left the café empty-handed. When he stopped by several hours later a sheaf of papers awaited him; so it was that the honor of submitting Saint-Exupéry’s first published story to its editor fell to the Deux-Magots cashier. Unconsciously this time, Saint-Exupéry had managed to leave his affairs in the hands of a woman. This arrangement may have been for the best as the accompanying submission letter ranks among the least enticing ever written:
Dear Sir: I regret to have missed you and leave you herewith my aviation story. I’ve corrected a few typing errors, but many have doubtless escaped me. If you find anything idiotic, blame it on me. There are a few errors in detail, especially in punctuation—I know nothing of these things—and if something strikes you as off please do tell me. If you want to be truly wonderful read this quickly; I am so eager to know what you think. I leave both you and the inviting bistro from which I write. I shall hope to see you soon. Saint-Exupéry
Prévost must have read the story quickly; the nonmeeting would have taken place in January or February and “L’Aviateur” appeared in Le Navire’s April 1926 issue. Prévost introduced its author as “an aviation and mechanical expert,” as good a description as any of the reserve air force lieutenant (he had been promoted in January) and former truck salesman. France is not a country in which aviators or truck salesmen publish—especially in a literary review alongside Rilke, Blaise Cendrars, and Martin Luther—and Saint-Exupéry was in any event unemployed in the spring. “L’Aviateur” reads as a pastiche of several tales, the first of which finds Jacques Bernis, after a splendid flight, making his familiar, poignant return to the city in which he feels so much an alien. Nearly word for word this passage finds its way into Southern Mail. The second capitalizes on the inherent drama of flight: An airplane one of Bernis’s students has taken up has not yet come down when a thick fog rolls in. Mortier—“who flies like a pig”—botches his landing as Bernis, on the ground, hisses, “Shut down, shut down, shut down” through clenched teeth. Mortier crashes; a group of soldiers gathers awkwardly around the wounded pilot. Bernis, who exhibits the discipline and reserve Saint-Exupéry would lend Night Flight’s steely Rivière, dismisses them all with a gruff professionalism that the author clearly already admired. When a second student, proud to have witnessed this brush with death, assures his instructor that he will in no way be deterred from flying the next day, Bernis refuses to applaud his courage. He shrugs off the tragedy as a common, work-related incident. In the last section of the story Bernis is himself sacrificed to the sport when—contrivedly—the left wing of his plane snaps off after a spontaneous display of acrobatics. The story proves equally brittle; the pieces do not add up to a whole, and the metaphors creak loudly. But already the twenty-six-year-old author had begun to articulate his favorite theme. Bernis, lunching in the pub near the military airstrip, listens in on the pilots’ conversations. He delights in the contrast between the brutal heroism of their exploits and the modesty of their language. Among them it is possible, he thinks, to be simple: “Ils font un métier. J’aime ces hommes.” (“They have a métier. I like these men.”)
Toward those who made literature their métier Saint-Exupéry was less drawn. All of the critical, early encounters of his literary career took place on the quai Malaquais—it was here that he met Prévost, Gallimard, Gide, and Ramon Fernandez—but the center of literary Paris was a ten-minute walk away, up the rue Bonaparte, past the Deux-Magots, east a few blocks along the boulevard Saint-Germain to the celebrated rue de l’Odéon. Resonating between Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company at number 12 and Adrienne Monnier’s Maison des Amis des Livres, the seat of Le Navire d’Argent, at number 7 was the epicenter of Parisian literary activity. On April 20, en route to the opening reception of a Walt Whitman exhibit at Shakespeare and Company, James Joyce termed this vibrant corner of the world Stratford-on-Odéon, an epithet that stuck. Beach’s guests that evening included Paul Valéry, Schlumberger, Valery Larbaud, Prévost and Auclair, T. S. Eliot, Monnier, Harry and Caresse Crosby, Hemingway, and Ezra Pound. In short it was a fine cross-section of the international literary community that had invaded postwar Paris. Had Saint-Exupéry attended the reception (he had not been invited) he might have met Lewis Galantière, who was to become his English-language translator, a stalwart support during his American years. Like Hemingway, he was, however, just on the brink of success. (The all-American March issue of Le Navire had been the first to introduce Hemingway to the French, with a short story; The Sun Also Rises was published in America in 1926.) Saint-Exupéry did not speak English, and by his mid-twenties had largely lost his taste for fiction. His impatience with clever conversation probably did not exempt the shop talk of writers. We have no evidence that he read any of the authors whom Beach and Monnier and Le Navire championed—he makes no bows to Whitman, Eliot, Hemingway, or Joyce—and certainly he did not socialize with the latter three. Singing old French songs with his boxing partner was as close as Saint-Exupéry seems to have got to Hemingway, although the two writers’ paths would cross again and their works would inevitably be classed together after their deaths. While it is easy to imagine Saint-Exupéry at Monnier’s table, feasting on her famous roast chicken in the dining room above the shop, we have no reason to think that he did so. At her address he may briefly have met Léon-Paul Fargue, for whom a place was always set at Monnier’s table and with whom he would while away a good deal of time in the 1930s, or André Maurois, a closer friend in American exile than on French soil, or Léon Werth, to whom The Little Prince was dedicated. If so, he left no lasting impression on these men of letters now.
As much as his inclusion in Le Navire allowed Saint-Exupéry some entrée to Stratford-on-Odéon, it was very much a closed world. The Republic of Letters, wrote the influential essayist Jean Guéhenno later, “is wholly contained in a few Parisian houses, some cramped magazine or publishing offices, some drawing rooms, some cafés, some artists’ studios, some attic rooms. It is not easy to penetrate this world. The real dialogue takes place between a few dozen writers who acknowledge each other, and that is all.” There was a bias against those writers who lived on the wrong bank (or as Gaston Gallimard’s biographer has put it, one could not pretend to have “l’esprit NRF” and live on the Right Bank), who published with the wrong houses, who frequented the wrong cafés. If Saint-Exupéry was not entirely of the literary village of Saint-Germain—one that would, by 1935, turn into the world’s artistic crossroads and one that, with his connections, he could more easily have entered than could many others—this, too, was by choice. A man with a great thirst for fraternity, he disliked clubbiness, and Saint-Germain of the 1920s was a particularly inbred community, as all-consuming as it was
small. When Jean Prévost wrote to Marcelle Auclair’s parents to ask for their daughter’s hand in marriage he did so on Navire d’Argent letterhead. When the two married in April 1926, one week after Beach’s Whitman exhibit, François Mauriac and Ramon Fernandez stood up for them. Both the bride and the groom published with Gallimard; their first marital home was a closet in Monnier’s shop. Yvonne de Lestrange was the godmother of their daughter, Françoise; she also happened to be a particularly close friend of Fernandez’s. This was literature as occupation as well as social obligation; to some the insularity of Saint-Germain represented its charm. The appeal of the close quarters of the super-gratin littéraire was lost, however, on a writer who craved action and who would on all occasions refuse the opportunity to play the intellectual. If there was one thing Saint-Exupéry hated it was a small world.
After Prévost took “L’Aviateur,” Renée de Saussine—who, along with Saint-Exupéry’s other friends, had very much suffered from his Saurer position along with him—breathed a sigh of relief. So the great versifier was to be a writer at last! Nothing doing, countered Saint-Exupéry; writing came as a consequence of experience. Once again, he began a search for gainful employment.