Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  Saint-Exupéry’s litiges were not confined to the political. Over the winter he continued the feud with André Breton that had simmered—a little bit tended by Consuelo—through the summer. In June he had been raked over the coals in VVV, the Surrealist magazine, which again made hay of the 1941 Vichy nomination. The argument took a more personal turn later in the year. Breton had evidently visited the Saint-Exupérys and had not been charmed by his host’s habit of reading to his guests. (Consuelo had let her husband know Breton was bored, and Saint-Exupéry had immediately desisted.) Saint-Exupéry was clearly very bothered by Breton’s criticisms; claiming he had never been difficult with any of his friends, he repeatedly invited Breton to Northport for a conciliatory afternoon. We probably do disagree about a hundred thousand things, he conceded, but we doubtless agree about another hundred thousand. There was no reason for the two men to avoid each other; Saint-Exupéry had nothing but respect for those whose opinions differed from his own, and no time for disagreements. Surely Breton could turn a deaf ear to the lies that were being spread about him. He had risked his life to be here today to argue with Breton; they would not change each other, but why not come to lunch anyway? His saintly approach had a predictable effect on the heretic, who responded by throwing more mud in his face.

  On the home front, more than ever, he found himself harassed at the end of 1942. Consuelo vacated her Central Park South apartment during the last week of November and the couple—having left the Bevin House, the multiple fireplaces of which had to be stoked daily to keep the house livable in winter, as Saint-Exupéry did not like furnace heat—moved in December to a town house at 35 Beekman Place. Consuelo had found the duplex apartment, which probably did not represent any more strain on the family’s finances than did two Central Park South apartments and the Long Island home; New York City rents were particularly modest at the time. She may have sold her husband on the idea because the house, separated from the East River by a private garden, represented the most tranquil accommodations Manhattan had to offer. From her point of view it meant that the couple could continue to live together, as they had on Long Island. Much impressed by the cream-colored carpets, the huge walls of mirror, the cozy, upper-floor library, Denis de Rougemont said he knew of no more charming residence in New York. Adèle Breaux found the spacious living room, with its brown velvet upholstery and its dark wood wainscoting, a definition of perfect taste.

  Most of these charms were lost on Saint-Exupéry, whose own tastes continued to run to the ascetic and who gave Hannibal free rein of the place. He was wholly inconvenienced by the move, which allowed Consuelo an excuse to buy him a $600 antique Spanish writing table. (“I consider that a useless waste of money. Our stay here is temporary and besides, you know that I don’t care what kind of table I write on as long as it is stable,” he reprimanded her in front of Breaux, with whom he shared the page proofs of The Little Prince one Sunday just after the move.) Between the return from Northport and the departure from Central Park South he wrote Silvia of the uproar, which had caused him in turn to mislead her about a rendezvous:

  I understand why you are upset with me. I understand fully, I understand too well. I am terribly upset with myself. I am in despair over the missed trains, the bungled appointments, the lost addresses, the bills, the un-returned phone calls, the reproaches, the difficult reconciliations, the hurt friends, the headaches when it is time to talk, the vacuum of ideas when it is time to write, the three dinners accepted for the same evening.

  She had to forgive him; he had been cooped up for forty-eight hours in two rooms along with the movers, Consuelo and her friends, Marie McBride and her typewriter, a cook gone mad who persisted in making scenes, a telephone that had not stopped ringing, and a constant stream of visitors. It had been like working in Grand Central Terminal. His head was bursting; the last thing he needed on top of it all were Silvia’s reproaches. In a matter of weeks he would learn that Flight to Arras had been banned in France.

  On the thirty-first the Saint-Exupérys hosted a late-night dinner for the Bonames and four or five other couples at Beekman Place. The Bonames came into town from the suburbs and so arrived before their host and hostess, who had gone to mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Saint-Exupéry showed up with a red nose but all the same barely made it through the introductions before exploding: “For goodness’ sake! If you don’t catch pneumonia in the church you can’t possibly feel as if you’ve attended midnight mass!” (He raged in a similar fashion against American progress as manifested in precisely the kind of gadgetry he so admired: “If they continue to mechanize everything,” he told Fleury as he accompanied him through the sliding doors of Pennsylvania Station, “in a few years no one in America will know how to open a door.”) After hors d’oeuvres the group sat down to a New Year’s Eve dinner, with Saint-Exupéry and Consuelo at far ends of a vast table. A flutist—a friend of Consuelo’s on whom her husband claimed he had never before set eyes—installed himself behind the writer and periodically entertained the guests with airs. Saint-Exupéry was in an entertaining mode as well; he plunged into the story of a breakdown in dissident Africa. He held his guests spellbound with the account, leading up to the repair of the aircraft just as the Moors appeared, rifles in hand, on the horizon. At this critical moment a volley of saucers flew toward his head from the opposite end of the table, where they had been dexterously launched by Consuelo. Her husband bore up under this siege with more facility than most of the others of 1942 (there is no record of how he fared with the oeufs en gelée that Consuelo boasted of having bombarded him on an earlier occasion): according to Madame Boname, who was seated, en garde, to his immediate left, Saint-Exupéry reflexively caught each missile in midair, extending his right arm, then his left, each time without blinking, and all without missing a beat of his story. The assaults—that of the Moors, and that of the flying saucers—let up simultaneously, claiming no casualties.

  ~

  Since his arrival in New York, Saint-Exupéry had said he wanted only to fly again. For two years there had been no front on which he might do so, although as early as Pearl Harbor he had drafted a proposal for a squadron of French volunteers who might fight under the Americans. In 1942 he talked incessantly about getting back in uniform, if not always when expected to: Elizabeth Reynal introduced him to Helen Gahagan Douglas in the hope that the congresswoman would be able to help him with what Elizabeth described as his obsession, but the writer, for whatever reason, did not broach the topic of his reenlistment. In “An Open Letter” he as much as announced he would leave as soon as he could for the front, the landing in North Africa having created one. According to Maurois, he and Saint-Exupéry offered up their services immediately. The two officers were told at the end of 1942 that an emissary of Giraud, General Antoine Béthouart, would be making his way to America and were advised to take up their case with him. Béthouart arrived with the new year. The first item on his agenda was to ask the Americans for weapons for the French army in North Africa. The second—on which Béthouart had probably not counted—was to dispel the American impression of two rival French armies, one behind Giraud and the other behind de Gaulle.* Saint-Exupéry did all he could to see that he never amounted to anything less than the general’s third priority.

  Most of the readers of “An Open Letter” saw in it Saint-Exupéry’s announcement of a return to the front. Anne Lindbergh read in it something stronger, “the pull to sacrifice, to death.” She thought her friend felt a need to pay his debt to what he referred to as the saints of France, the 40 million people living under the German boot. He had in fact nearly said as much in an essay completed in 1942, originally meant to have prefaced a book on the exodus from Paris by Werth and originally entitled “Lettre à Léon Werth.” In it he initially sang the praises of his great friend—“If I write a page, and then I imagine Werth critiquing it, I discover in that page imperfections that I would not otherwise have detected”—although the specific references to Werth and the long passa
ges in which his friend paid him tribute were later cut. Brentano’s planned to publish Werth’s 33 jours with Saint-Exupéry’s preface—by then titled “Lettre à un ami”—in the spring of 1943 but did not do so (33 jours appeared forty-nine years later, in Paris); ultimately they did issue Saint-Exupéry’s Lettre à un otage, on its own, in June 1943. The text was still directed at Werth, whom his friend addressed in the second person, although his name does not figure in the essay. As he stood in for all of France Saint-Exupéry took a little artistic license: he added that the friend over whose fate he anguished was in danger not only because he was French and a Jew but because he was sick, which Werth was not.

  Lettre à un otage (Letter to a Hostage) is a haunting essay, shot through with the “pull to sacrifice” Anne Lindbergh noted in “An Open Letter.” It arguably stands as the most crystalline expression of Saint-Exupéry’s thinking. In its fifteen pages he compresses all of the ideas that, bloated by parable, bulk out the pages of The Wisdom of the Sands; he urgently recapitulates those to which he slyly gave voice in The Little Prince, a book dedicated to Werth. On the crowded boat to America he looks back to Juby and realizes that in its desolation it was the home he most loved; he makes the only mention he will make in a published work of the loss of Guillaumet; he pays tribute to the Fleurville lunch; he pours out his anguish. He expresses suddenly a need for his past—not his childhood, but his past, for the “lovely shipload of experiences” that is his hard-won maturity. He had always written odes to friendship but nowhere else on the page—save in The Little Prince—is he so alone, having lost the ties, the relationships that for him constitute France. These friendships are his only riches: especially in the early drafts of the much-worked-over manuscript he pleaded with his friends to survive the war, to make sure the storm passed them by. If they no longer existed, neither did he. They could age later. Above all he was haunted by the image of Werth, a man he loved and who loved him beyond reason, the friend who had taught him, as he had tried to teach Breton, that “If I differ from you, far from undermining you, I enhance you.” It was for Werth, for that brand of friendship, for a lunch on the banks of the Saône that he wanted to fight again. That was the best he could do: he might be a soldier, but the 40 million hostages in France were nothing less than saints.

  Comfortably installed on Beekman Place, he clearly envied them their sacrifice. He shared his misery with Hedda Sterne, stopping by her East Fiftieth Street apartment in the evenings when he was out walking Hannibal. Repeatedly he grumbled that he had no truths to offer men, that he had no desire or ambition but to save his country, that he must have been put on earth for some reason but did not know how to make himself useful. His work of the last year had convinced him, if he needed convincing, of one thing: “Words,” he told Yvonne Michel, “are noises emanating from the mouth. You must judge people on who they are and what they do.” He had long said that he preferred to waste his sweat to his saliva; the written word now seemed to him entirely insufficient. (In better spirits he was to quip that language was like sex among turtles: not terribly well-designed.) In 1943 he began to talk about signing only with his blood. Consuelo heard the most fervent articulations of this despair: After General Béthouart had seen to his reenlistment, early in 1943, her husband informed her that she would be better off without him and that he would be better off dead. There are all kinds of torture, and Saint-Exupéry had his preferences. He went into a rage when—having realized he did not have an article of clothing he could pack for North Africa and that he was running low on funds—Consuelo came home with an armload of new dresses. He asked her how much she had spent; she jumped down his throat. Yet just before he sailed or during the crossing he wrote her: “I’m off to the war. I cannot bear to be far from those who are hungry, and know only one way to make peace with my conscience, which is to suffer as much as possible. To search out the greatest possible suffering.… I am not leaving in order to die. I am leaving in order to suffer and thereby be united with those who are dear to me.”

  He learned in February that he would be mobilized and he expected to leave on or around March 1. He was thus making his preparations when, on February 15, the French battleship Richelieu docked in New York for repairs, setting off what was to become a nightmare of public relations for the Gaullists in America. Lured by various forms of propaganda, 350 members of the ship’s crew deserted to join the Free French while in New York harbor. (By that time two rival French recruiting offices had been set up only a few doors from each other on Fifth Avenue; more than a few confused sailors enlisted with Giraud when they meant to enlist with de Gaulle.) Fascinated by life on board the battleship, Saint-Exupéry evidently visited the Richelieu with Consuelo, Maurois, and several other friends. On the last Saturday of the month he ran into a Richelieu sailor in a midtown jewelry store and plied him with a series of questions. The twenty-year-old sailor, Georges Perrin, had no idea who Saint-Exupéry was but submitted all the same to the interrogation. With great enthusiasm the older man then mentioned that he, too, was to be reenlisted. “In what branch?” Perrin asked, in perfect innocence. “In the air force,” replied Saint-Exupéry, who remained entirely composed when asked his rank. He was in no way put off by the sailor’s questions and may even have been relieved to be traveling incognito. He spent some two hours discussing the war with Perrin, making on him an indelible impression, mostly of humility.

  “Saint-Exupéry changed people—at least while they were with him,” Galantière was to write. “His presence put heart into the timid, abashed the impudent, closed the liar’s mouth.… He had a glance that stopped witless smut in mid-telling.” Like all idealists he brought people up to his level. This was the quality the writer so admired in Werth, whom he wrote could “ennoble” the mechanic looking after his Bugatti with a simple handshake. He claimed that Werth had taught him that grandeur and civility were contagious, and he lived as if they were. In an early draft of Lettre à un otage he wrote that a smile was no less binding than a pact between empires. He got to know the late-night Red Arrow messenger who carried his missives all over Manhattan well enough to accompany him home to Brooklyn for a bachelors’ dinner. When he called on the Hitchcocks at Gramercy Park one Saturday afternoon he rang at the wrong apartment; he spent an hour charming their Irish neighbors and left without seeing his publisher. De Gaulle spoke always of France and of the grandeur of France; Saint-Exupéry, for all his lofty perspective, for all his weighty pronouncements, planted himself at the other end of the telescope. For him, the individual was the empire.

  Throughout February he saw to—or delegated—the necessary arrangements. He submitted to Hélène Lazareff a shopping list that she and Dorothy Thompson filled for him, Hélène seeing to the Alka-Seltzer, the toothpaste, the aspirin, the shaving cream, the socks, and the cigarettes, Dorothy to the equally specific list of art supplies, including ink for Saint-Exupéry’s Parker pen, with which he was enamored. Not only had he no respectable clothes, he had no uniform. On February 26 he wrote a check for $100 to the Brooks Uniform Company, having located the closest approximation of a French air force uniform New York had to offer. His travel orders did not come through in early March, however, which left him with plenty of time to put his affairs in order. On the twenty-ninth he signed two agreements with Reynal & Hitchcock. He granted Becker power-of-attorney to make all decisions concerning Wind, Sand and Stars, Flight to Arras, and The Little Prince. Everyone who saw him during these weeks reported him to be in effusively high spirits. De Rougemont—with whom Saint-Exupéry spent nearly an entire night demonstrating that only two economic systems, Stalinism and feudalism, were viable (de Rougemont did not think he would be able to repeat the argument)—described the condition as one of “intellectual euphoria.” Beaming, he received Ping Lawrence and a few other guests for what he billed as a farewell dinner. Late in the night he assembled them in the upstairs study, where he read The Little Prince from beginning to end, in the middle of a blackout test, by candlelight, as t
he snow fell outside. Midway through, Consuelo arrived for dinner.

  Generally Consuelo behaved badly throughout the month of March, crying and screaming in the hope of preventing her husband from leaving New York; she told visitors he was going off to be free of her. Saint-Exupéry had taken leave of his wife often enough to have predicted the results: the Little Prince’s rose at first refuses to say good-bye to him, then, in a miserable attempt to send him off graciously, overcomes her vanity long enough to lash out, “Don’t linger like this. You have decided to go away. Now go!” Consuelo carried on as she had before the Libyan misadventure, though a little closer to home. “Hers is the worst case of self-induced hysteria that I have ever witnessed. Whoever heard of a wife carrying on like that when her husband is about to set off for war! The screaming has been unbearable. It is absolutely shameless,” announced the nurse who opened the door to Adèle Breaux early in March. She was on her way to administer sedatives. The strain showed on Saint-Exupéry, whom Breaux found jumpy and fatigued.

  He appears to have said his good-byes several times. On what he thought was to be his last night in America, or said was his last night, or what others chose to remember as his last night, he did some or all of the following things: visited with the Hitchcocks, and joined their children in a water-bomb attack on the pedestrians of Gramercy Park; put in an appearance as the guest of honor at a small farewell dinner given by Jean Mercier, a prominent engineer and inventor, and his wife, Simone, who asked Saint-Exupéry what he would like her to serve and obliged with a platter of cuisses de grenouille à l’aïoli; dropped off the drafts, typescript, and proofs of Lettre à un otage—as well as a disk on which he had recorded “The Prayer of Loneliness” from what would become The Wisdom of the Sands*—with Hedda Sterne; signed a great number of copies of The Little Prince. The next morning at seven he woke Silvia Reinhardt. In an old flannel nightgown she opened her door to find her friend standing before her, looking ridiculous in a uniform of which he was clearly very proud. The sleeves billowed out over his hands; the skin-tight jacket pulled over the chest; the gold-embroidered emblem on the breast pocket looked “like an amoeba run amok.” He told her he had come to say good-bye. “I wish I had something splendid for you to remember me by, but this is all I have,” he said, handing over his Zeiss Ikon camera and tossing a rumpled brown paper bag onto her entryway table. In it was the preliminary manuscript of The Little Prince.