Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  Early in 1933 Didier Daurat arranged for Saint-Exupéry to return to Toulouse as a test pilot for Latécoère, then operating solely as an airplane manufacturer. He met with varying degrees of success in this line of work. As one colleague observed, test-flying did not exactly play to his strengths, requiring as it does fierce attention to detail. It was, however, remunerative, especially in a depressed economy. In four months Saint-Exupéry’s salary and bonuses totaled 33,000 francs, or the equivalent of $16,000 today. That July he test-flew forty torpedo seaplanes destined for the navy; if the Laté 290’s passed muster at Montaudran they were sent south to the base at Saint-Laurent-de-la-Salanque, where they were equipped with floats and test-flown on the adjacent lake. Louis Marty, the chief mechanic at Montaudran in 1933, recalled that Saint-Exupéry experienced some initial difficulties putting down the aircraft but adapted quickly and soon piled up more than 200 hours as a seaplane pilot. The forty aircraft were checked out and delivered to the navy without incident; Marty and Saint-Exupéry—who regularly lunched together during this period—drank heartily to the occasion.

  With other assignments Saint-Exupéry was, notoriously, less successful. He took off one day in a Latécoère 350 although one of the aircraft’s engines was clanging loudly on the runway and the trimotor sputtered and smoked as it climbed. As he initiated his approach to the airfield a huge piece of sheet metal detached itself from the plane and spiraled to the ground. It was the Latécoère’s door, which the pilot had forgotten to lock before takeoff. In another Laté 350 he flew to Paris, where the aircraft was to be examined by a group of air ministry officials. The trip ended with an emergency landing outside the city because of mechanical difficulties. (As if to add insult to injury, the Laté 350 never advanced beyond the prototype stage.) Equally memorable was the test flight Saint-Exupéry made in April in a Latécoère 28, one of a series bound for Venezuela. He was to take each aircraft to an altitude of 10,000 feet and fly it at full throttle over a three-mile course, noting any difficulties that arose. On his return from one such flight he reported that the aircraft had leaned so severely to one side that he had nearly lost control of it. He was entirely unable to say which way the Latécoère had listed, however. Asked for his flight pad, on which he was meant to record his observations, he displayed a lovely sketch of a woman. Jean Gonord, a fellow pilot who spent the first few weeks of May in Saint-Exupéry’s company, took away from the experience an impression of a man “floating above the concerns of the world.” He remembered that Saint-Exupéry and his pen were inseparable in the cockpit, although he hesitated to say if they were so in the name of official business.

  Gonord lodged with the writer at the Hôotel de France in Perpignan, seven miles from the test center at Saint-Laurent. He met his doom nightly at the chess table. The two would begin a game after dinner, from which Saint-Exupéry excused himself at midnight to telephone Consuelo. One-half hour later he would return to checkmate Gonord in minutes. These small triumphs did nothing to endear the life of a test pilot to him. To a friend in Paris he described, ears abuzz, hands black with oil, the endlessness of a Perpignan evening. “I know no one here and want to even less,” he wrote from his café table in a particularly misanthropic mood. “The laughter and snatches of conversation that make their way to my corner are a torture. These people seem to be simmering quietly away—like a stew pot—to the end of their days. What point is there to their lives?” Essentially this was a reprise of his 1926 letter to Renée de Saussine, from the Toulouse café where he was mistaken for a regular. From Perpignan, however, he was not to set out to do battle with the Pyrenees or the Moors; he must have worried that the prosaic was contagious. His spirits were not improved by a visit from two happily married friends (possibly Ségogne and his wife), whose domestic bliss he found suffocating. He admitted that there was a certain peace, a security that he hated. His environment only served to remind him of his dread of stagnation; the rotting seaweed that perfumed Saint-Laurent provided a neat correlative for his inner state. He wrote that he was most attracted to what was close but inaccessible, his recipe for adventure.

  Saint-Exupéry’s career as a test pilot came to a soggy and definite end a few days before Christmas in a Laté 295. The floats of a 293 had been designed to angle slightly downward to assist takeoff, making it imperative for the pilot to land with the aircraft’s nose well up. Such an approach came as second nature to a naval aviator but less so to a pilot like Saint-Exupéry, accustomed to landing a tail-dragger on a runway, which is done tail high. On December 21, carrying with him a naval lieutenant, a staff engineer sent from Paris especially for the flight, and a mechanic, Saint-Exupéry landed the 293 in the bay of Saint-Raphaël as he might have landed a ground plane, ploughing the tip of the floats brutally into the water. The impact was so great that one of the floats cracked; the aircraft flipped over, catapulting the naval lieutenant—who had been seated next to Saint-Exupéry, had seen what was coming, and had opened his escape hatch—out over the ocean. The mechanic managed a miraculous escape through the machine-gun aperture and, with the assistance of the sailors on a patrol boat that rushed to the scene, forced a door open to rescue the engineer, who could not swim. Saint-Exupéry, who could see nothing in the moss-green water and who blindly groped for a door in what he thought was the ceiling of the Latécoère but what was in fact the floor, disorientedly made his way to the back of the aircraft, swallowing water as he did so. Serenely he resigned himself to death. In the tail of the plane he bobbed into an air pocket that allowed him momentarily to clear his lungs; he was surprised to find the convulsions of the return to life so brutal when death had been so gentle. “In truth, death isn’t nearly as disagreeable as they say,” he marveled later. He made a good deal of this observation, as of the fact that in his confusion he had not noticed how cold the water was. In the end—after what could not have been more than a few minutes but were surely among the longest few of his life—he was saved by his colleagues, who heaved him, half-drowned, onto the patrol boat. He coughed up seawater for some time.

  Few men write elegies to 800-horsepower motors but Saint-Exupéry did, in Wind, Sand and Stars:

  Air and water, and not machinery, are the concern of the hydroplane pilot about to take off. The motors are running free and the plane is already ploughing the surface of the sea. Under the dizzying whirl of the scythelike propellers, clusters of silvery water bloom and drown the flotation gear. The element smacks the sides of the hull with a sound like a gong, and the pilot can sense this tumult in the quivering of his body. He feels the ship charging itself with power as from second to second it picks up speed. He feels the development, in these fifteen tons of matter, of a maturity that is about to make flight possible. He closes his hands over the controls, and little by little in his bare palms he receives the gift of this power. The metal organs of the controls, progressively as this gift is made him, become the messengers of the power in his hands. And when his power is ripe, then, in a gesture gentler than the culling of a flower, the pilot severs the ship from the water and establishes it in the air.

  He referred to the close call at Saint-Raphaël in print only in passing, notably in Flight to Arras, imagining what a fellow reconnaissance pilot must have felt when his plane burst into flames around him. All his friends, however, heard the story and learned how agreeable Saint-Exupéry had found this near-surrender, for which he later claimed he had, underwater, run a comb through his hair. How much easier it had been, he told the Gallimards, to succumb to death than to contemplate a return to life, to the debts and trivialities.

  Back in Paris after the holidays he continued the good fight. He lobbied Dautry on Daurat’s behalf in February. Unemployed, he wrote a long and urgent letter to Monsieur Foa, Air France’s new operations director. He was furious that in the airline’s eyes he continued to pay the price of his celebrity and heatedly argued his case. Night Flight should have done the company some good, he reasoned, whether Rivière resembled Daurat or not; it
had been written long before the Aéropostale scandal began; he had explained as much to Dautry; he had been denied a position in the new company; in the end he had taken a salaried position at Uatécoère only in order to survive. His bitterness verges on the pathetic as he is forced—uncharacteristically—to boast a little: “After all I’ve done for you, how can you object to my return? I’ve done everything—for Reine and Serre alone I landed more than ten times, without a radio, without an escort, in the most remote corners of dissident territory.” He was humiliated to be reduced to begging, particularly since “la Ligne should be for me a bit like a family.” The letter—like the conversations that preceded and followed it—fell on deaf ears. Foa continued to hold to the party line, insisting that the company was not in a position to hire supplementary personnel and that taking on Saint-Exupéry would constitute precisely that.

  As his fortunes waned his celebrity increased. One year after its publication Night Flight found its way onto the reading lists of most of France’s lycées and universities; the number of the country’s student pilots promptly doubled. Nearly 150,000 copies of the book had been sold by early 1933. In March 1934, Clarence Brown’s film of the novel opened in Paris, where it enjoyed a ten-week run. Often Saint-Exupéry was recognized on the street, by those who neither wrote nor published. French culture is preserved in the names of the finer things in life: in 1862, when Flaubert’s Salammbô caused a sensation, a new kind of petit four was christened; Chateaubriand and Brillat-Savarin are guaranteed their immortality the gastronomic way. In 1933 Guerlain introduced a pert, spicy perfume in a bottle emblazoned with a constellation of propellers. It was dedicated to Saint-Exupéry and his colleagues and named “Vol de Nuit.”

  Saint-Exupéry’s feelings about the fragrance have not been recorded; his nostalgia for night flying often enough was. In a preface to a history of aviation published by Maurice Bourdet the same year, Saint-Exupéry remembered how the early morning sky can cleanse a man’s heart, especially that of the pilot flying the mail north from Dakar to Casablanca: “As you slowly descend the stairway of the stars toward the dawn, you feel purged.… When—engine throttled and idling—the pilot drifts down toward the landing field, surveying the city in which men dwell with all their afflictions, their financial concerns, their baseness, envy, spite, he feels pure and invulnerable.” His four pages were an ode to another time and place as, appropriately enough, was Bourdet’s text, in which mention was made of France’s having fallen behind in military aviation while Lufthansa bounded ahead. Saint-Exupéry had as well another kind of past glory in mind. More and more, aviation had become a science, its pilots technicians. The airplane for him—a key perhaps to his lack of success as a test pilot—remained not a “collection of parameters, but an organism of which one takes the pulse.” He was stalled in the days of flying by what the French call pifomètre and we call instinct, by meditation rather than calculation. These days were now over. “Before writing, one must live,” he had counseled Renée de Saussine in the 1920s. It would often seem as if he stopped living when Aéropostale stopped flying; the creation of Air France made him a writer. In 1934 he applied for a passport and listed “aviator” as his profession. Six years later, a new passport was issued to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “man of letters.”

  ~

  Four days after Saint-Exupéry wrote his plea to Foa, Paris erupted in a bloody riot. Protests against high taxes and an escalating cost of living had begun the previous year, but on February 6, 1934, hundreds of thousands of Parisians took to the streets—converging on the Place de la Concorde—to express with paving bricks their feelings about government corruption and state-supported swindling; the Aéropostale imbroglio had been far from an isolated event. The day turned into “bloody Tuesday” when the Gardes Mobiles began to fire into the crowd. The official death toll came to twenty, although over 2,000 machine-gun shots were fired at the Place de la Concorde and as many people were wounded. The next year was spent reading about Stavisky and the related tangle of political developments, out of which ultimately arose Léon Blum’s Front Populaire.

  Saint-Exupéry—who now set up shop on the Left Bank, where he and Consuelo moved to a modest rue de Chanaleilles apartment in July—was not sheltered from these political winds. Neither was he, unlike a great number of intellectuals, swept away by them. He read Marx, and he met Victor Serge and Gaston Bergéry, the eloquent, independent Deputy; like everyone else he spent long evenings at café tables discussing France’s shift to the Left and her neighbors’ disconcerting lunges to the Right. The day after the riots, on the terrace of the Café Weber, he drilled a new acquaintance on the events of February 6 well into the morning. His mentor André Gide committed briefly to Communism, which he glorified in the daily press; André Malraux, whose La Condition humaine had won him a Goncourt in December and who had been the toast of Paris ever since, took his vows, traveling to Moscow several times, delivering ninety-eight brilliant speeches for the Communist Party in 1934 and 1935. No one was more bitten by the Communist bug than Paris’s wealthy intellectuals, a society to which Saint-Exupéry maintained his connections. For all of his fascination with theory he evinced little interest in party membership of any kind, however. His name and his background would have inclined him more naturally to the Right but he was too much of a nonconformist to endorse their dogma; his cousin André de Fonscolombe theorized that if Saint-Exupéry was more drawn to Marxism than to fascism it was simply because the former held, in his estimation, more intellectual interest. Still, it is not entirely easy to be a gentleman Marxist with a name like “de Saint-Exupéry.” Mermoz’s formal association with the neofascist Colonel de La Rocque began in 1935, and though this sprouted largely from his disenchantment with the state of French aviation, Saint-Exupéry, who shared his sentiments, made no attempt to follow in his footsteps. “I have no taste for polemics,” he had written to Foa in February. For the next years, while everyone in France succumbed to round-the-clock polemicizing, he stubbornly remained his own man.

  Beginning in 1935 Saint-Exupéry traveled with a thin leather notebook in his breast pocket. His impatience with party lines rings loud and clear in these pages, published after his death as Cornets. In 1935 he confessed to “an immense difficulty in distinguishing the aims of the French Left from the aims of the Right.” He felt the two carried on their debate without knowing anything of each other’s stance and in complete ignorance of the facts: no fascist really knew what was happening in Germany; no advocate of the Front Populaire understood Spain’s troubles. His mistrust of politics is writ large in Carnets; fundamentally he objected to labels, which limit a man’s freedom. “To sell a man into slavery is one hundred times less unjust … than these divisions between the orthodox and the heretical. I could equally well choose as labels ‘rice and prunes’; the outrageousness of the situation would be clearer.” There is, of course, always a discrepancy between a man’s life and his letters. Saint-Exupéry’s Carnets read like a workbook of political economics; he lived above the fray. Gide dabbled in politics all his life and in the Communist fervor of the early 1930s appeared as one of the great believers, yet it was he who recorded that he was reading Goethe in German a month after the fall of France. During the war, he flatly penned lines like “Finished Le Rouge et le Noir in the night during a rather heavy bombardment.”

  Nothing better illustrated Saint-Exupéry’s neutrality than the company he kept. The closest friend he made outside the Aéropostale family began to play a major role in his life now, although Saint-Exupéry and Léon Werth had met in 1931. An essayist and novelist probably best-known for his art criticism, Werth could not have had less in common with Saint-Exupéry. Twenty-two years his elder, he was an anarchist and a Jew; his writing—in all he was the author of twelve volumes and a great number of magazine pieces—verged on the surrealistic. As angular and lithe as Saint-Exupéry was round and portly, Werth had a track record as a nonconformist. His months in the trenches in World War I had made him a p
acifist; a trip to French Indochina in 1924 had made him an anticolonialist. A man of the Left and a Bolshevik supporter, he won a reputation as a “fierce free-thinker” for having been quick to denounce Stalin. He was a man who took little for granted and great pleasure in the exchange of ideas, and it was no wonder that when the two men were introduced by the newspaperman René Delange it was a coup de foudre. The two were said not to have left each other’s sides for days. Werth’s shadow hangs over Saint-Exupéry’s Carnets; Saint-Exupéry would go on to refer to Werth in three books and dedicate two others to him. In the lines that preface The Little Prince—one of the most charming dedications ever written and one that has earned Werth his place in the French edition of Trivial Pursuit—Saint-Exupéry describes him as “the best friend I have in the world.” At the armistice, which Saint-Exupéry did not live to see, Werth turned to Jean Lucas, the former chief of the airfield at Port-Étienne: “Peace, without Tonio, isn’t entirely peace.”