Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  Insofar as he was to do any writing this desperate fall and winter he devoted himself to that manuscript, a work that exalts the unfulfilled, obstacle-rich, sacrifice-prone life and reads like a hymn to all that cannot be bought, held, or even attained. André Beucler was well justified in saying later that Citadelle—The Wisdom of the Sands to English-language readers—would better have been titled “Memoirs of a tortured soul or meditations of a disillusioned hero.” Saint-Exupéry was far too miserable and far too uncomfortable at Pélissier’s to work in any sustained fashion; he managed to add to the existing work but not to perfect it. Still, he continued to bill the manuscript as “l’oeuvre de ma vie.” On August 7 one of its greatest admirers arrived in Algiers: Madame de B flew in from Gibraltar on an American airplane, raising a number of eyebrows. André Gide, who was not overly fond of her, went out of his way to attend a reception purely for the malicious pleasure of seeing the couple in action. The U.S. State Department continued to be amazed by her ability to travel freely around Europe and suspected her still of collaboration; they followed her and her sentimental life closely. In the end they concluded that she had made the trip to North Africa primarily to see Saint-Exupéry, whom they had been told (erroneously) she was to marry. She, too, eventually settled in at Pélissier’s. Two nights after her arrival she dined with Gaston Palewski, the chief of de Gaulle’s personal staff. “You must convince Saint-Exupéry that he is altogether wrong not to join de Gaulle,” he told her. She conveyed the message to her friend, who had not been in Algiers when she arrived, and whom she found balder, heavier, graying at the temples, but somehow more imposing than ever. He shrugged.

  Saint-Exupéry greeted Madame de B with 500 pages of Citadelle, which he expected her to read immediately. Naturally he shuffled around her nervously in Pélissier’s living room as she did so. Also as she read the sirocco began to pick up; before long the heat in the room grew unbearable. At about page 100 she proposed a trip to the beach. Saint-Exupéry was indignant. “If you put my book down now, it’s because it bores you!” “But I find it magnificent,” she objected. “Impossible, because you are tired of it!” pouted the author. “I am not tired of the book. I am tired from the trip, and exhausted from the heat. When I have stretched my legs a little I will be able to read more carefully,” Madame de B explained evenly. Amused by the familiar display of tyranny, she agreed to read two more pages. Saint-Exupéry disappeared while she did so, returning to thrust two tablets into her mouth. She was now free to go to the beach, he conceded. She would be able to review the manuscript that evening, when she was not sleeping; she had just swallowed a sizable dose of Benzedrine. Awake for forty-eight hours she had in fact nothing better to do than to read and reread his pages, after which she offered her written comments, with which the author was delighted. Madame de B had an appreciation of Citadelle which many of its author’s friends did not share and the two discussed the work at length, tossing out the names of translators who might render its ornate, highly stylized prose into English. “You are a little like Christ when you write your Citadelle,” Madame de B had observed, a statement with which the author had quietly agreed, eyes to the ground. In her opinion the manuscript was the only thing for which he continued to live. She remained in Algiers until early November, when she returned to London. Saint-Exupéry continued to write her that he had forgotten all of their little misunderstandings, that she was of capital importance in his life, that her advice was invaluable, and that he loved her, but the two were never to see each other again.

  In September 1943 the author paid a month-long visit to Henri Comte, the genial surgeon who had been a mainstay of his Casablanca days and who lived in a lovely villa in Anfa, overlooking the Moroccan capital. Comte’s hospitality did not in itself prompt the trip: Madame de B has suggested that Saint-Exupéry left Algiers so that Consuelo’s friends would not report back to her that her husband and his lover were staying together at Pélissier’s. In Anfa Saint-Exupéry continued his work on Citadelle, slipping his most recent pages under his host’s door as he wrote and interviewing him over breakfast. (Comte was not particularly forthcoming, having spent the night sleeping.) At the same time he vainly pursued the possibility of being parachuted into France to join the Resistance. The two made a pilgrimage to Marrakech, to the landscapes that had inspired Citadelle, but very little actually cheered Saint-Exupéry, who had begun most of all to fear the bloodletting the liberation was bound to unleash. “A lot of people are going to be shot next year,” he warned friends.* Sedgwick Mead, an American army doctor stationed in Casablanca, dined with the writer at Comte’s on two occasions and found him—despite his volubility and a virtuoso performance of his faux-Debussy, executed this time with eggs—visibly brokenhearted. He bristled at the mention of de Gaulle and snapped at Mead when the American mentioned a book that painted a rather unflattering portrait of the French military command. Mead also was offered a loan of The Little Prince in exchange for his comments. “He seemed generally preoccupied, as if it were a constant effort to recall his whereabouts,” he noted, an assessment with which the friends who visited with Saint-Exupéry in Algiers concurred. More and more he retreated to his bathtub, or immersed himself in math problems and word games. He was now more interested in diversion than in creation; he wrote few pages in Algiers, and his tubside experiments yielded up no new inventions. The result was that he forgot appointments, of which he made many. One morning an acquaintance stopped off to see him on his way to the Maison Blanche airfield. He found Saint-Exupéry shaving, and volunteered to check for mail for him at the field. An hour and a half later the writer opened the door to him with some consternation: “Have you forgotten something? You were just here three minutes ago,” he said. He had indeed lost track of time; he was still shaving.

  So much in need of diversion himself, he proved a sought-after guest in weary, worried Algiers. He was as ever capable of his highly original displays of humor—one acquaintance drew an unforgettable portrait of Saint-Exupéry dancing a kind of samba in a restaurant with a friend’s kepi, on which he joyously bounced a gargantuan soap bubble—though few friends took them at face value. Even those who knew him slightly remarked that he occasionally seemed on the verge of tears. For the most part, however, he remained so mesmerizing a raconteur, so accomplished a magician, that his presence was in constant demand. Jean Macaigne, with whom he had flown in South America, came to his former colleague’s rescue on one awkward occasion. Two hostesses had prevailed upon the writer for the same evening, and he had been unable to decline either invitation. On the night of reckoning he installed Macaigne at his window to assist in his decision. Macaigne deemed the company that arrived in the first car more than acceptable-looking and—having sent off his friend—genially stepped out to advise the latecomers that their guest regretted to have been suddenly called away.

  Saint-Exupéry wrote Silvia Reinhardt that he had played his oranges sur le piano all over North Africa and from the memories left behind he indeed seems to have left no keyboard untouched. He kept up a busy calendar—aside from his regular chess dates with Gide and with the writer Emmanuel Bove, his datebook shows that he had at least a lunch or dinner engagement every day—although he had never thrived on the social whirl and did not now. It was in this way that he made the acquaintance of Pierre Sonneville, the Free French captain who had invited him aboard the Curie. Sonneville and his whiskey had found refuge from a reception in the entry of a cloakroom, where a clearly bored gentleman sized them up warily. Suspecting that, despite Sonneville’s Croix de Lorraine, he was in the company of a kindred spirit, Saint-Exupéry motioned toward the crowd. “Does this interest you?” he asked. “I have a Jeep outside at my disposal; shall I give you a lift?” He then introduced himself.

  He stayed out late. Max-Pol Fouchet, an editor who briefly roomed next to him at Pélissier’s, noted that he inevitably knocked something over when he came in, generally long after Fouchet had gone to sleep. “Saint-Exupéry needed a propell
er,” he concluded, as apt a statement as anyone made about the wretched months in Algiers. He could not rise above the situation, could not extricate himself from the pettiness. There was nothing lofty about his existence this winter, anathema to this reverse Antaeus who late in the year was to state in a bitter letter explaining his politics, “Everything is ugly, seen close up.” As if in perfect dramatization of his floundering, his distraction and clumsiness combined with painful results early in November. On the fifth, in the middle of a blackout, he fell down the stairs in Pélissier’s entryway. “I failed to make out six marble steps, designed to be elegant under lights, back in the happy days when there were lights. Suddenly I found myself suspended in midair—but not for long. I heard a tremendous crash. It was me,” was how he described the incident to Comte, to whom he sent an X-ray of his back nine days later. Rattled, he had sat for five minutes in the stairwell. He had then proceeded, painfully, to the dinner to which he had been headed, at which the news that he had just broken a vertebra was greeted with general laughter. After consulting with Pélissier he kept his engagements the next day, proceeding on the seventh to a lavish reception thrown by the Soviets in a palace garden. He was in agony. In the middle of a lawn he found himself suddenly immobile; he prayed that people would continue to come over to talk to him, as otherwise he was sure to look idiotic. In a series of tiny steps he ultimately managed a more or less dignified escape.

  The mishap was one of several that poisoned the atmosphere on the rue Denfert-Rochereau. Saint-Exupéry was convinced he had fractured his spine. Pélissier, who had examined him, knew he had not. The patient countered by pressuring an X-ray technician to confirm his diagnosis. He then declared war on his host: November and December passed in a blizzard of notes and interminable letters, testimony to his pain (as to the time on his hands) and, as he saw it, to Pélissier’s inability to understand him. Mostly he begrudged the doctor his lack of sympathy. What he wanted—clearly on more than one level—was for someone to order him to take to his bed; he was in search of the license for the respite he had wanted since the fall of 1940. This Pélissier did not and stubbornly would not issue; Saint-Exupéry concluded that the doctor was heartless. Only after five weeks was he—still very much crippled by the accident—prepared to sound apologetic:

  I am well aware that you are neither the inventor of staircases, nor the inventor of the blackout, nor the cause of my distraction. And I know well that your science cannot restore my hair, or my teeth, or my youth, even if it might indeed save me on numerous occasions. I no longer reproach you for not being God. You are a friend, which is already a great deal. And you are “certainly” right, which is also a great deal, though extremely annoying.

  To Madame de B, to whom he had written a series of rambling letters over the course of his nonconvalescence, he at one point confided that the shock of the fall had actually helped clear his head.

  It did not, however, raise his spirits. He had been drinking heavily and did so more now, to dull the pain. The attacks of cholecystitis continued. Christmas left him meditating once again on his childhood, this time from a different angle: he spoke of it not as a refuge but as a resting place. Although he never said as much, he may have been aware that he was now three years older than his father had been at the time of his death. He wrote Consuelo as well as Madame de B of his despair, appealing to one for her sympathy and the other for her understanding. If there were distractions in Algiers there were no great loves. Silvia had stopped writing him and the mail to France was a difficult matter. A note scribbled to his family just after the New Year was delivered by parachute, but nothing came in the opposite direction. (To Madame de Saint-Exupéry her son wrote that he wished only that he could again sit by her side, in front of the fire, for a long talk. He would contradict her as little as possible, as she was in the end right about all things in life.) From Consuelo he had infrequent news and what he did have could be disturbing. During the summer he had cabled that he thought her idea to share an apartment with Denis de Rougemont unwise; that autumn Becker wrote to inform his client that his wife was receiving the regular sum they had agreed upon but had also presented him with a hefty clutch of bills. (His royalty account, from which Becker could wire money to North Africa, was not empty, and in Algiers Saint-Exupéry received his army salary through October.) He wrote Consuelo of his misery, of the senselessness of his existence, of his continued love. He desperately needed her; he asked her to row him gently toward old age. “Take care of yourself, watch out for yourself, guard yourself, never go out at night, never catch cold, never forget me, pray for me,” he closed one particularly poignant letter. He was incapable of taking care of himself and found the cold, for which he was unprepared, oppressive. The days of the tributes to freezing beds were over: he complained that he slept in his underwear, two pairs of pajamas, and a bathrobe. Not only was there no one to look after him but the man who had left America hoping to suffer as much as possible for those dear to him could not pretend to have anyone in his charge. He caved in to despair.

  At the end of the year several attempts were made to rescue him. In December General René Bouscat, the commander of the French air force, suggested that Saint-Exupéry be assigned to the air force section of the French military mission in America. (The pilot had ideas of his own: while this proposal was pending he wrote Consuelo to say he hoped to return to the United States to appeal Dunn and Gray’s August verdict.) De Gaulle judged the idea “inopportune.” At about the same time General François d’Astier de la Vigerie, long a close associate of de Gaulle’s, mentioned that he would like to put the pilot to work in England; Saint-Exupéry did all he could behind the scenes to influence the matter. When Bouscat inquired into the affair he was informed by the chief of de Gaulle’s cabinet that in the end d’Astier had not taken up Saint-Exupéry’s case with the general, who in any event saw no reason to take the captain off reserve status. “It would not appear opportune for this officer, whose military service does not now seem necessary, to be sent to England,” reported the aide. (Quickly enough de Gaulle’s veto was quoted on North African café terraces as “Leave him in Algiers, he’s only good for card tricks,” a comment that made its way back to Saint-Exupéry.) He received the news on January 10 from a friend who was almost too abashed to deliver it. It sent him into a rage. Now more than ever he heaped abuse on de Gaulle, sometimes alienating friends—among them Gide and Kessel, who tired of his tirades—in the process. He was going nowhere and reserved some of his anger for Algiers: the city was “a trash heap,” “a basket of crabs,” “a dump for the dregs of humanity,” “a tomb,” “a human desert,” “a moldy, provincial police station.”

  Jean Genet’s prescription for saintliness was pain put to good use; Saint-Exupéry had nothing to do, no cause in which to enlist his suffering. He wanted to cry, he did cry, he shivered with cold, he chain-smoked, he cursed his room at Pélissier’s, he ranted and raved—to the tune of a note dispatched every fifteen minutes—when his host had the ill sense to borrow his sole remaining copy of The Little Prince on the January afternoon when a representative of Alexander Korda’s was meant to carry it off to the London-based producer. He could not produce a decent sketch of the Little Prince. He wanted to burn Citadelle. He wrote in the most desultory of fashions. He decided to be flattered to be single-handedly credited with de Gaulle’s failure in the United States; at least then he could pride himself on being—as Anne Lindbergh saw her husband to be in 1941—a sort of Antichrist. In the New Year he suffered a brief, imagined bout with stomach cancer, from which he won a reprieve only late in February, when tests incontrovertibly showed that he was free of the disease and Pélissier managed to convince him that his gastrointestinal distress was the result not of cancer but of too many sulfa drugs and too much spicy food. The hypochondria served a purpose: Saint-Exupéry’s imaginary ills provided a viable reason for him to be sidelined, in defiance of all his principles. He wanted to enter a monastery; he wanted to turn the clo
ck back a few centuries; he wanted to become a gardener. He weighed the advantages of prison over death. (They were few.) He thought back repeatedly, with near-longing, to the last night and last morning in Libya, to the last seconds under the bay of Saint-Raphaël. At the end of January 1944 he attended a small dinner thrown in honor of the newly arrived British representative to the CFLN (the position amounted to the closest thing that existed at the time to ambassador to Paris), Duff Cooper, and his wife, Lady Diana. The evening ended gaily with a glass of cognac at the Coopers’ home. Saint-Exupéry held forth with a deck of cards, entirely enchanting the diplomat’s wife. Suddenly he paused in midshuffle. “This morning I consulted a fortune-teller,” he announced to the assembled guests. “Clearly she didn’t recognize the insignia on my uniform and took me for a sailor, because she predicted my imminent death in the waves of the sea.” The room fell silent.