Saint-exupery: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

  * His mother’s share was to be divided among his mother and his two sisters.

  * The manuscript was originally titled Harvest of the Stones.

  † The 1947 issue of Confluences is dedicated to Saint-Exupéry.

  * Léon Werth did not see the text for which he was so much responsible until five months after his friend’s death, when Gallimard sent him a special edition.

  * The asteroid Saint-Exupéry, twelve miles in diameter, orbits between Mars and Jupiter, about 280 million miles from the sun.

  Acknowledgments

  ~

  A great number of people contributed in a great number of ways to this project. No one has been more helpful than the National Air and Space Museum’s R. E. G. Davies, whom I initially sought out for his expertise in airline history and who turned out to be a polymath and a grammarian of the first rank, in short the best friend a writer could have. His additions to the manuscript have been invaluable, as have his deletions from it. I doubt I have taught him anything but dearly hope I amused him a little. I stand as well in debt to the prodigious research conducted by Jean Lasserre and Colonel Edmond Petit of the French aviation journal Icare, whose twenty years of documentation often proved difficult to better.

  Those interviewed for this volume are too numerous to thank individually but I am indebted to each of them and hope they will accept this collective mention of my gratitude. Many of them are thanked in the notes for their contributions. I should also like to offer collective thanks to the members of the American 23rd Photo Reconnaissance Squadron, who were forced to endure my endless queries. They may all blame Captain Sylvester Bernstein and Colonel John S. Masterson, who passed on their names. For memories, insights, documents of all kinds, and suggestions for further research I am particularly grateful to: Raoul Aglion, Max Alder, Sergeant Richard L. Andrews, Annabella, Paul Barthe-Dejean, Maximilian Becker, Royce Becker, Jean Bénech, Robert and Mary Evans Boname, Pierre and Dorothy Brodin, Anthony Cave Brown, Guillemette de Bure, Pierre Chevrier, Jean-Marie Conty, Aleta Daley, Elizabeth Reynal Darbee, Colonel Frank Dunn, Colonel Raymond Duriez, Colonel Jean Dutertre, Marius Fabre, Stephen Freeman, Norman T. Gates, General René Gavoille, Françoise Giroud, Madeleine Goisot, Colonel Leon Gray, Colonel André Henry, Henry Hyde, Colonel Jean Israël, Colonel Alain Jourdan, Ormonde de Kay, Nikos and Laurie Kefalidis, Mary S. Lovell, Fernand Marty, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Tex McCrary, Yvonne Michel, Colonel Edmond Petit, John Phillips, Silvia Reinhardt, Alain Renoir, Colonel Vernon V. Robison, Selden Rodman, Anne Roque, Richard de Roussy de Sales, Ysatis de Saint-Simon, Henri-Jean de Saussine, Howard Scherry, Arnaud de Ségogne, Dr. Sheldon Sommers, Hedda Sterne, Bikou de Lanux Strong, Joseph Tandet, Robert Tenger, Dorothy Barclay Thompson, Jacques Tiné, P. L. Travers, Claude Werth, and Helen Wolff.

  Saint-Exupéry was a gypsy, which puts his biographer at a considerable disadvantage. As he had no fixed address he had no top desk drawer; the clue-rich clutter of a life barely existed for him. That which did has been dispersed throughout the world. He was in the habit of entrusting his papers to the women in his life: many of these pages have survived, though not all of them can be located and the largest portion of those that can are not available to a biographer. For documents of all kinds I am therefore especially grateful to the following individuals, institutions, libraries, and their staffs: The Académie Nationale de l’Air et de l’Espace in Toulouse, where Martine Ségur could not have been more welcoming; the Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base; the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art; the Archives Nationales, with a special thanks to Michel Guillot; Françoise Grimmer and the archives of the Association des Amis de Saint-Exupéry in Paris; the Bibliothèque Nationale and its superbly helpful staff at the Versailles annex; the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet; the French Cultural Services in New York; the French Institute in New York; Lilly Library at Indiana University and its assistant curator of manuscripts, Rebecca Campbell Cape; the McGill University Library; the Bibliothèque Municipale de Montréal; the Musée Air France; the Musée de la Poste; the Archives Division of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington; the National Archives, where I leaned heavily on John Taylor and Ken Schlessinger; the New York Public Library; the Pierpont Morgan Library, where I owe special debts to Robert E. Parks and to Dr. Ruth Kraemer, who kindly allowed me an early look at her transcription of the manuscript of The Little Prince; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin; the Service Historique de l’Armée de l’Air in Vincennes and its director, General Lucien Robineau; the University of Alberta Library; Brigitte J. Kueppers at the Arts Library Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles; Ned Comstock at the Cinema and Television Library, University of Southern California; and the Westmount Public Library in Montreal, which quietly houses what may well be the best collection of Franco-American books in North America.

  Special thanks must go to Frédéric d’Agay, Saint-Exupéry’s great-nephew, for permission to quote from Saint-Exupéry’s unpublished work. I badgered him shamelessly with queries throughout the long course of this project. I should like to express my appreciation to Harcourt Brace as well for having shared with me documents from the Reynal & Hitchcock archives and for allowing me permission to quote from them in the text. Karen Weller-Watson at Harcourt was also unfailingly generous with her time when she had no reason to be.

  I have leaned very heavily on my friends and family in writing this book and owe a variety of huge personal debts, chief among them to Nancy Barr, Susan Bergholz, Emmanuel Breguet, Walter Bode, David Colbert, François Cornu, Mary Deschamps, Harry Frankfurt, Mitchell Katz, Elinor Lipman, Maclab Enterprises, Dona Munker, Clarita Puyaoan, Mort and Ellen Schiff, Geri Thoma, Andrea Versenyi, and Meg Wolitzer. The New York University Biography Seminar provided spiritual and intellectual sustenance. I cannot help but thank Apple Computers, over whose wizardry I marveled every day.

  For the early enthusiasm of Ashbel Green, my Knopf editor, I am very grateful, as I am to Carmen Callil and Jonathan Burnham. Also at Knopf, Jenny McPhee and Jennifer Bernstein adroitly shepherded this book through the production process. Marc de La Bruyère has proved a model of several rare qualities, none of which was more appreciated in the long course of this project than his unfailing savoir-faire. He read these pages with fierce attention while his home life collapsed around him. Without the constant ministrations of the most extraordinary of literary agents, Lois Wallace, the pieces of that life would have been impossible to fit back together again. Pétain complained that he was called only in a crisis; Lois did not, and kindly refrained from pointing out that the situation at hand rarely ever constituted one.

  Notes

  ~

  Notes for primary sources follow, keyed to the first few words of each quotation. (A selected list of secondary sources can be found in the Bibliography, this page.) There is no central repository of Saint-Exupéry’s texts. Several typescripts have made their way into the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale; an early manuscript of The Little Prince remains in New York, at the Pierpont Morgan Library; the drafts and proofs of Lettre à un otage can be found at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Saint-Exupéry’s letters to his family, published and unpublished, are conserved at the Archives Nationales in Paris. Madame de B has retained her correspondence, which no researcher has yet consulted. Most of the rest of Saint-Exupéry’s correspondence remains either in the hands of the families of his correspondents or has found its way—via auction houses—into private collections around the world.

  Saint-Exupéry appears throughout the notes as SE. His texts, and the collections in which his papers or essential documents concerning him can be found, have been abbreviated as follows:

  LSM Lettres à sa mère (Paris: Gallimard, 1984)

  LJ Lettres de jeunesse (Paris: Gallimard, 1953)

  SM Southern Mail (New York: Harcourt Brace Jov
anovich, 1971)

  NF Night Flight (from Airman’s Odyssey, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984)

  WSS Wind, Sand and Stars (from Airman’s Odyssey, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984)

  FA Flight to Arras (from Airman’s Odyssey, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984)

  LP The Little Prince (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971)

  OTAGE Lettre à un otage (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 1959)

  CITAD The Wisdom of the Sands (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1979)

  CARNETS Carnets (Paris: Gallimard, 1975)

  EG Écrits de guerre, 1939–1944 (Paris: Gallimard, 1982)

  SLV Un sens à la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1956)

  AAA Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

  ANAT Archives Nationales, Paris

  BL Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Butler), Columbia University, New York

  BN Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

  ML Pierpont Morgan Library, New York

  NA National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  QO Archives of the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Quai d’Orsay, Paris

  SHAA French air force files, Service Historique de l’Armée de l’Air, Vincennes

  All of Saint-Exupéry’s books appear in their published translations unless noted. Translations of Lettre à un otage, Saint-Exupéry’s letters, and the journalistic pieces are the author’s, except where noted.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. his wedding date: He got it wrong on a 1937 Air France information sheet, now in the archives of the Musée Air France.

  2. “un beau nom”: Quoted in Jean Escot, Icare 69, Summer 1974 (hereafter Icare I), 111.

  3. “Is he one of the saints”: See Anne Morrow Lindbergh, War Within and Without (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 122.

  I A KING OF INFINITE SPACE

  1. “I have never”: OTAGE, 392.

  2. his worldly possessions: LSM, 125.

  3. “the most desolate”: Jean-Gérard Fleury, “Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,” Pour la victoire, August 4, 1945. Generally Fleury’s rank among the supreme descriptions of the glory days of the airline. See especially La Ligne (Rio de Janeiro: Atlantica Editora, 1942). “tragic solitude,” “strange silhouettes,” and “Did you really”: Joseph Kessel, Vent de sable, Les Éditions de France, Paris, 1959, 149–50.

  4. “had so much an impression”: Jean Mermoz’s 1927 letter to his grandparents is reproduced in Jean Mermoz, Mes vols, Flammarion, Paris, 1937, 49–50.

  5. “1,000 kilometers”: SE’s letter to Lucie-Marie Decour was published, along with several others, as “Lettres intimes d’Antoine de Saint-Exupéry à une jeune fille,” Le Figaro Littéraire, July 8, 1950, 1. The pioneering description of the Río de Oro appears in G. Louis, “Casa-Dakar à bord d’un avion postal,” Les Reportages de “La Vigie Marocaine,” May 1923, 1–24. I am grateful to Marie-Vincente Latécoère for having provided additional archival accounts of the early days of the airline. A fine, detailed history of the Río de Oro is to be found in John Mercer, The Spanish Sahara (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976). I have relied as well on John Gretton, The Western Sahara (London: Anti-Slavery Society, 1976).

  6. “secret language” and “read the anger”: WSS, 84.

  7. “We had created”: Quoted in Jean-Gérard Fleury, La Ligne, 170.

  8. “The ability to come crashing”: Louis Blériot, in Claude Grahame-White and Harry Harper, The Aeroplane: Past, Present, and Future (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1911), 205.

  9. Lindbergh commented on fog and sleet in We (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), 176.

  10. SE to his brother-in-law, LSM, 180.

  11. SE on the Moors’ poor aim, cited in Jean-Gérard Fleury, Chemins du ciel (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1933), 41.

  12. “to set off to the rescue”: Didier Daurat, “Saint-Exupéry Pionnier de la Ligne,” Le Figaro Littéraire, July 31, 1954.

  13. “The bearers of water”: From SE’s preface to José Le Boucher, Le destin de Joseph-Marie Le Brix (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Française, 1932).

  14. “Don’t put ‘Count’ ”: Reproduced in Icare 37, Spring 1966, 10.

  15. “a little bit our Queen”: Jean-René Lefèbvre, cited in Claude Mossé, Mécano de Saint-Ex, Éditions Ramsay, Paris, 1984, 119.

  16. “I have turned out”: LSM, 164.

  17. “a constant need”: Unpublished letter to Charles Brun, evidently a former professor of SE’s, from the SE family archives. The postmark is blurred but the letter appears to have been mailed on March 31, 1927.

  18. “a superficial, chattering”: LSM, 164.

  19. “a marriageable man”: LSM, 171.

  20. “un beau gigolo” and “I wish I were”: LJ, 94.

  21. “Mickey-Mouse nose”: General L.-M. Chassin, “Souvenirs sur Saint-Ex,” Forces Aériennes Françaises, April 1959, 537. Chassin described SE’s looks many times but never strayed far from this description.

  22. “I am delighted”: From SE’s correspondence with Lucie-Marie Decour, Le Figaro Littéraire, July 8, 1950.

  23. “When my engine coughs”: SE family archives, from the Charles Brun letter, op. cit., presumably March 31, 1927.

  24. “a heavy-footed explorer”: SM, 22.

  25. “barriers of breeding”: Lindbergh, War Within and Without, 442.

  26. “when in France”: to Decour, Le Figaro Littéraire, July 8, 1950.

  27. “You’re engaged”: SE’s letter to Charles Sallès is included in Cahiers Saint-Exupéry I, Association des Amis de Saint-Exupéry, éd., Gallimard, Paris, 1980, 25–27.

  28. “It is my role”: LSM, 187.

  29. “Frankly it’s sweet”: LJ, 121.

  30. “tasted of the forbidden”: Sallès letter in Cahiers Saint-Exupéry I, op. cit., 26.

  31. “goodness, his rectitude”: Didier Daurat, Miroir de l’histoire, June 1962.

  32. “great white dervish”: Didier Daurat, Saint-Exupéry tel que je l’ai connu, Dynamo, Liège, 1954, 7.

  33. “Captain of the Birds”: LSM, 191.

  34. “strangely dressed”: Marcel Migeo, Henri Guillaumet (Paris: B. Arthaud, 1949), 99.

  35. “Say hello”: Jean-Gérard Fleury goes on at length about Toto in La Ligne, 100–101.

  36. See also Migeo’s Guillaumet, op. cit. For additional details regarding Toto and about Juby in general I am indebted to Marius Fabre, whose letters of February 6, April 9, and October 4, 1992, dispense with whole chapters of legend.

  37. “locks and bolts”: Migeo, Guillaumet, op. cit., 63.

  38. Henri Delaunay’s account of the Juby evening is from L’Araignée du soir (Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1968), 68ff., and is reprinted in Icare I, 150–53.

  39. “Our nearest neighbors”: SM, 4.

  40. “We are as much strangers”: To Decour, Le Figaro Littéraire, July 8, 1950.

  41. “Let me describe”: ibid.

  42. “There is a silence”: OTAGE, 394.

  43. “it was impossible”: Henri Delaunay, from L’Araignée du soir, reprinted in Cahiers I, 35.

  44. “By virtue of what”: ibid., 31–32.

  45. “The mail is sacred”: SE quoted in Richard Rumbold and Lady Margaret Stewart, The Winged Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953), 33.

  46. “Anyone who has”: OTAGE, 394.

  47. “like opera lights”: LSM, 187. SE described the canned foods and the early evening to Decour, op. cit.

  48. “That’s a lot”: In LSM, 189, the line is quoted as “Enfin c’est toujours ça.” The original, ANAT, looks more like “Enfin c’est long ça.“

  49. “chicks” and “I ready myself”: Decour, op. cit.

  50. Only SE’s account of the February trip to Casablanca survives, ANAT.

  51. On SE’s reading habits, Léon Werth, from his catalogue preface to the Bibliothèque Nationale’s Saint-Exupéry exhibition, Paris, 1954, and Suzanne de Verneilh, unidentified clipping of July 31, 1950, Association des Ami
s de Saint-Exupéry archives. On his reading list, LSM, 193.

  52. “He did not actually”: Suzanne de Verneilh, ibid.

  53. On Gide and Fernandez, LSM, 191.

  54. “interior world”: Edmond Jaloux, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, July 6, 1929.

  55. better left unpublished: In the 1940s it was not unusual for SE to cross Southern Mail out in the front matter of the copies of the books he dedicated. In 1941 he told a reporter he had written a novel before Night Flight and “wished he hadn’t”: Otis Ferguson, Common Sense, May 1941, 131.

  56. Joseph Kessel’s (possibly imaginative) re-creation of the readings is from Mermoz (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 119–21.

  57. Conty’s recollection of the reading: Interview with author, January 5, 1991.

  58. “But you’ve already”: France-Amérique, March 9, 1952, 10.

  59. Lola’s appetite for CS: Fleury, La Ligne, 104.

  60. “Is it good?” and the conversation with Guillaumet, Migeo, Guillaumet, 87.

  61. “You eat greens”: WSS, 93.

  62. “The children play” and the rest of the account of Bark to “golden slippers” is drawn from WSS, 99–107. Additional details come from Didier Daurat’s confidential note of August 18, 1928, to the Paris Latécoère office (Musée Air France, D39), in which Daurat makes much of the Spanish mismanagement of their territory, as well as from Kessel, op. cit., 140.

  63. “We were sending”: SM, 80.

  64. “a salad” and the mechanic’s-eye view of the mishap to “happy as a child” are René Lefèbvre’s, from Mossé, 192–200. SE’s version, WSS, 26–27.

  65. “We unloaded”: WSS, 27. The original Paris-Soir account appeared on November 10, 1938.