Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  At first Saint-Exupéry sailed easily through these troubled waters. Most of the Americans were unaware of his stature—Leon Gray asserted that “he didn’t know him from a bale of hay”—and those who were stood more in awe of the aviation pioneer than of the Académie Française laureate. He reinvigorated the 2/33, entertained the American ground personnel, and—away from the base—engaged in a little propaganda on his own and the 2/33’s behalfs. Mid-June found him back in Algiers, begging Robert Murphy, President Roosevelt’s brilliant right-hand man in North Africa, to set up a meeting for him with Elliott Roosevelt. The writer had already called once on Roosevelt shortly after his arrival; he now hoped to lobby for the 2/33 to be entirely outfitted with P-38’s and immediately assigned a full slate of missions. Characteristically he did not feel he had made himself clear at the meeting with Murphy on the sixteenth and sent a lengthy follow-up letter the next day. For the first time since his 1933 correspondence with Air France he resorted to selling himself to get what he wanted: it was a different approach altogether from the one he had used seventeen years earlier with Latécoère’s Beppo de Massimi, before whom his ardor to fly had made him mute on the subject of his first published story. For Murphy he listed the titles of his books and the honors that had accrued to them (he had some difficulty remembering what the National Book Award was called) and made the case that he could write a new Flight to Arras only if he were to fly regular missions again. At the same time, he thought it best he dispense with “an absurd myth,” the one about the effects of high altitude on the older pilot. Nothing could be further from the truth, explained Saint-Exupéry, who knew full well that an older pilot is a less resilient pilot, one far more susceptible to the effects of G-forces. To Murphy he must have sounded like a child insisting that swimming after a meal will not bring on cramps. While he was at it, without naming names, he expressed his deep disaffection for de Gaulle.

  A matter of weeks before he stoically argued his case before the American Saint-Exupéry had painted a very different picture for his wife, to whom he had reported essentially that he was a walking wreck. His liver gave him trouble two days out of three; when it did not he suffered from nausea. As a result of the Guatemala crash one of his ears hummed continuously. Only with great pain could he carry a five-pound package, or get out of bed, or bend to the floor. He had already taken enough sulfa drugs to kill a horse; without them, he claimed, he would be dead. In 1942 Consuelo had observed—rather astutely, as it turned out—that no country other than France would allow her husband to fly again at his age and in his condition. Nine days after the visit to Murphy his promotion came through. Four days later, on his forty-third birthday, Major de Saint-Exupéry was cleared by the French air force medical examiner in Algiers for high-altitude missions.

  He alternately gloated and grumbled about this dubious triumph. He was quick to inform Hitchcock—who had remained skeptical that his author would see active service in the air—that he had proved him wrong, that he had resisted all the usual efforts to be turned into a propagandist, that he was flying the fastest airplane in existence. (The word “petulance” exists in French but means “exuberance.”) He had, a little late, or so it must have seemed to Hitchcock, rather fallen in love with America. He was in awe before its war effort. (A kind man, Hitchcock wrote back that he was not going to attempt to dissuade Saint-Exupéry from flying, as he knew his efforts would be futile. A canny publisher, Hitchcock took the liberty of sharing his author’s kind words for America with The New York Times. In a press release he announced to the world that the writer was once again in the neighborhood in which he had met the Little Prince.) To Chambe and Pélissier Saint-Exupéry wrote—even as he continued to prove the life of the squadron—of his despair, of his disgust with camp life. He hated standing in line for his food and devouring it, standing up, in ten minutes; nothing was a greater torment to him than sharing a room with two other men. (His roommates in turn fell asleep to the sound of his pen scratching its way across the page.) He confided in Pélissier that the simplest of physical tasks was to him as great a challenge as scaling the Himalayas. He inveighed even against the coveted P-38: the marvel of American technology amounted to “a sort of flying torpedo that has nothing whatever to do with flying and, with all its screens and buttons, makes of its pilot a sort of chief accountant.”

  Gavoille and the members of the 2/33 were more conscious of the pilot’s resistance to the P-38 than of his despair, which was for the most part confined to his letters. A parachutist from a nearby training camp commented that the Lightning’s speed seemed both to intoxicate and to frighten Saint-Exupéry, who could not get over the fact that Algiers and Tunis were now eighty-five minutes apart. A new recruit to the 2/33 who translated his voluminous American fan mail thought its recipient allergic to the aircraft’s sophisticated instrument panel. On the one hand he had no interest in wasting his time learning to master the machine; on the other while in the air he did everything in his power to exceed the call of duty, which in the military is known as defying orders. With a little over ten hours’ training under his belt he flew his first mission, over the Riviera, on July 21. It was his first view of the homeland since the summer of 1940; he was in the air for nearly six hours and was—by all but one report—perfectly successful. A few days later in a little basement restaurant in Algiers where he dined with Pélissier, the French actor Jean Gabin, and a few others, he talked of how moved he had been to see France again. Initially he had been put off by the sterility below him; from 30,000 feet he could detect no signs of life. France is dead, he had thought, growing melancholic. Then little gray puffs of smoke began to appear around his aircraft. “They were firing at me! France was alive! I was so happy,” he reported. “My dear friend,” countered Gabin, “myself I prefer melancholy.”

  In July the Americans began to catalogue Saint-Exupéry’s eccentricities with a different concern from the French. They kept a close eye on their P-38’s: it was a little bit a case of one national treasure versus another. According to Colonel Frank Dunn, Roosevelt’s second-in-command, Saint-Exupéry had on an early training mission cranked down the window of his Lightning at 30,000 feet, losing his oxygen mask in the process; he had descended so quickly the wings of the aircraft had been damaged. Gavoille, who got on well with the Americans, had dutifully but awkwardly reported the mishap to Dunn. On August 1 he appeared again at the commanding officer’s side. “This is very, very difficult,” he began. Saint-Exupéry had gone up for his second mission, from which he had been forced by engine trouble to return after forty minutes. He had not pumped his hydraulic brakes and had, after touching down at about 100 miles per hour, run off the end of the airstrip, crashing into an olive grove. As the pilot described the damages later, the undercarriage had collapsed, after which the left wing and engine had hit the ground; the aircraft had then tipped and the right wing and engine had taken a hit. The result was a Lightning that would never fly again. The 6,000-foot runway was more than long enough and all the pilots had been briefed about the braking system; as hydraulics were new to the French, the Americans “jabbered and hollered and screamed about them constantly.” Dunn’s and Gray’s memories diverge a little at this point. As Gray remembered things, he discovered on consulting the record that Saint-Exupéry had had an earlier mishap with his brakes. He recalled having told Gavoille that he was to take his pilot off flying status until he was properly trained. Dunn was certain that he had himself initiated this disciplinary action (Gray reported to Dunn, but either man had the authority to make the decision on his own, and the two did confer either just before or just after it was made). Dunn maintained that he had grounded the pilot as much for the August incident as for a set of photographs Saint-Exupéry had taken of a French château—probably Agay—while he was meant to be surveying military installations on his earlier mission. He remembered having grounded the pilot immediately, as Gavoille looked on. One thing was certain: it was not the case, as the pilot would repeatedly claim
in the diatribes of the next months, that he was taken off flying status on account of his age.

  The accident came as no great surprise to anyone but the severity of the punishment did. To the French it seemed as if American chauvinism was at work. To the Americans the incident proved yet again that the French were hopelessly irresponsible.* Saint-Exupéry naturally railed against what seemed to him an injustice, pure and simple. “Yes, the Lightning would never fly again, but all the same, to ground a man for that!” he sputtered, to some ears a cavalier statement to make about an $80,000 airplane in the middle of a war. He could not fathom the Americans’ severity; neither could he accept the decision as final. (He probably did not know that some of his friends grudgingly approved of the Americans’ action. Even Gavoille felt that medically and technically Dunn and Gray had been in the right.) A few days after the incident he threw a lavish banquet for the entire French squadron and a handful of American officers, nearly 100 men in all; Dunn and Gray were seated to the immediate right and left of their host. Invitations from the French were rare at the time, and neither officer had any doubt about why he was there. “If he was taken off flying status on Monday and he had a big couscous dinner on Thursday, why, there was a reason for it,” recalled Gray.

  The candlelit banquet took place in a magnificent villa overlooking the bay of Tunis. Saint-Exupéry’s guests were seated on the floor, where they were waited on by a small army of local girls. The wine flowed freely through nine or ten courses, and the “Marseillaise” was sung. Saint-Exupéry swore at the outset of the meal that he would be able to empty all the water carafes during the course of the evening without anyone noticing and succeeded in doing so. He appears to have had the same conversation with each of the two guests of honor, both of them twenty-eight, the age he had been at Cape Juby. Toward the end of the evening the veteran leaned in toward Dunn. Slowly knocking his fist against his chest he declared, “I want to die for France.” (The actual emotion may have been more complex than his English allowed.) Dunn shook his head. “I want to talk with you for three minutes,” Saint-Exupéry persisted. “The answer is no, no, and no,” replied Dunn. On Gray—who had earlier been pressured strenuously by Gavoille to reconsider the order—he used the same line. A more moderate man than Dunn and one who was not haunted by the alleged château photographs, Gray had come more slowly to the conviction that the Frenchman be grounded. Nonetheless he felt, like Dunn, that orders were orders, and when the pilot turned to him to repeat, “Sir, I want to die for France,” he was ready with his answer. “I don’t give a damn if you die for France or not,” he informed Saint-Exupéry, many bottles of superb wine into the evening, “but you’re not going to do so in one of our airplanes.”

  ~

  In Dunn’s opinion, René Gavoille had in Saint-Exupéry the most difficult command in all of North Africa. He could not have been said to have been proved wrong by the few days that followed. In a joint show of patriotism and impertinence, the pilot flew about frantically in search of someone who might put him back on flying status, a little like Jacob wrestling with the angel. He could not help himself: he was used to military regulations crumbling under his weight as all regulations tended to. The morning after the banquet he evidently left Algiers at dawn to seek out OSS Chief Donovan. Within the week he was back on Chambe’s doorstep, pleading that Giraud, who was still to be in power for a few more months, take up his case with Eisenhower. He was lucky; the object of his scorn had just read Flight to Arras, with which he had been pleased (if only, suggested Chambe, because he knew the volume had distinctly displeased de Gaulle). While Saint-Exupéry paced in Algiers Giraud badgered the Americans; according to Chambe, the French commander-in-chief ultimately won a concession of a sort from the Allied commander. After a number of entreaties Eisenhower is reported to have exploded: “This Frenchman is driving us crazy! Reenlist him! With luck he’ll bother us less in the air than on the ground!” In the end Saint-Exupéry was not authorized to rejoin his squadron, however. On August 8 he made a brief visit to La Marsa; the squadron’s logbook reports that he was on the verge of leaving for a mission to the United States. The same day de Gaulle made a triumphant entrance into Casablanca, where he felt his presence “served as a symbol and a center of French authority.”

  Saint-Exupéry wound up not in America but at Pélissier’s, his headquarters for the next eight months, the bleakest of his life. The doctor installed his guest in a narrow, half-furnished room, originally a linen closet, in his second-floor apartment. Overnight the space disappeared under a sea of paper, on which floated Saint-Exupéry’s rumpled shreds of American khaki. Pélissier’s was a bustling household. His medical offices were in the apartment and his living room served during the day as a waiting room; as lodging in Algiers was scarce, he often took in other boarders. His housekeeper did her best to look after the esteemed house guest (and to contain his damages) but he was, despite her attentions, far from comfortable. Most of those who visited him here—and a constant stream of American, British, and French visitors rang for Saint-Exupéry at 17, rue Denfert-Rochereau—were struck by the fact that the writer seemed perpetually on the point of leaving. He indeed was, at the outset; he had been more settled at Cape Juby. He had moved in only provisionally and soon enough discovered that his lodgings allowed him neither to write nor to receive as he liked. When Pélissier heard that his guest intended to decamp he flew into a rage, however; not wanting to appear ungrateful, Saint-Exupéry changed his mind. He remained deaf to the advice of friends who counseled him to move on. And so the world’s worst house guest—it was Pélissier who noted that Saint-Exupéry automatically lost your keys and managed to burn everything in sight with his cigarettes—refused to budge from the half-furnished, underheated linen closet, out of politeness.

  It was not long before he began to refer to the room as his cell. Nor was it long before he came to realize that the walls he was butting up against were not the gray ones at Pélissier’s but the more rigid ones of another man’s intransigence. Despite his claims to want to remain above the fray he had been vocal and direct in his first months in Algiers; if he had been ostracized in New York for his silence he now found that every word he had uttered against de Gaulle in North Africa was to come back to haunt him. He was hardly installed at Pélissier’s when he wrote Madame de B, then in Lisbon, that he had proof that the Gaullists were intercepting his mail: “It’s as if I were in prison. Letters sent to me end up in a dark closet, God only knows where, from which they never emerge.”* Few punishments could have been more cruel to a cloistered man who had so often risked his life for a bag of mail, but the worse was yet to come. De Gaulle’s stock had at last begun to rise—by November Giraud was no longer even a member of the CFLN—and his ascent was prepared by what Kenneth Pendar saw as his “warriors of propaganda,” men ready to direct their pens of vitriol at anyone who dared stand in the general’s way. The future French leader’s behavior on Saint-Exupéry’s account did nothing to betray the impression formed of him by the American, who for his own reasons thought de Gaulle “revengeful, unforgiving, treacherous, disloyal, and filled with hate.” (The ex-premier Paul Reynaud perhaps said it as well but more delicately: “De Gaulle has the character of a stubborn pig, but he has character.”) On good authority Saint-Exupéry was advised to watch his back and to tread lightly, which he was not often able to do. One ill-wisher hailed him publicly with “Hello, my dear member of Pétain’s council.” (All Saint-Exupéry could muster by way of response was a near-gentlemanly “Of course you know that at this moment you are behaving like a bastard.”) Some time that winter he asked for, and was denied, an audience with de Gaulle. Early in 1944 he made friends with the commander of the Curie, a Free French warship, and with his men; the crew applied for permission for the writer to join them on their next patrol. The Admiralty was succinct in its refusal: “Saint-Ex is not a Gaullist!” When Pierre Dalloz, Ségogne’s friend who had met Saint-Exupéry in 1939 and who was now active in the Resistance
, returned to Algiers at the end of November, he found the writer living in a state of total disgrace.

  There was a more effective way still of humbling Saint-Exupéry. In late October de Gaulle delivered a speech in Algiers in which he named those French writers who were to be applauded for having chosen exile over collaboration. Saint-Exupéry’s name—like that of Maurois, who was Jewish, who had fled to New York, who was at the time a French army captain in North Africa, but who was not a Gaullist—was conspicuously absent from the list, which included a number of lesser writers. (Had Saint-Exupéry behaved properly he would have done what Joseph Kessel did: Kessel met with the general in London at the beginning of 1943, was instantly won over, and happily lent his pen to the cause.) When L’Arche, an Algiers literary review, proposed including Lettre à un otage in its premier issue that winter other writers protested that if Saint-Exupéry’s work appeared in the publication theirs would not.† In what was surely the heaviest blow, his works were banned in North Africa. He watched, indignantly, as crates of French-language titles arrived from New York but his own did not. For the second time Flight to Arras had effectively been censured by his own countrymen. (By a supreme irony the book was actually less available in Free France than in occupied France, where an underground edition was now circulating.) Under the circumstances it was not surprising that when the author lent out Arras, The Little Prince, or Lettre à un otage—he traveled always with a few copies of each—he did so only for intervals of twenty-four or forty-eight hours. For different reasons he lent The Little Prince to Gelée on the condition that it be returned with a written report and he read over the shoulder of Dalloz, circling his old friend and checking regularly on his progress, when he sat him down in Pélissier’s living room with pages of Citadelle. Tell me what you think, he implored Dalloz, only don’t say anything that might hinder my work. With Pélissier he was more forceful yet. “Admit it,” he prodded after a long reading to which the doctor did not immediately respond, “It’s without a doubt the best writing I’ve done.”