For those, like myself, who knew next to nothing about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, his image was always an uneasy mixture of nauseating whimsy (“The Little Prince”) and romantic derring-do (“Night Flight” and “Wind, Sand and Stars”). It is Stacy Schiff’s achievement in “Saint-Exupéry: A Biography” (Knopf; $30) not only to explain this apparent contradiction but to bring a legend alive. On the one hand, Saint-Exupéry was one of the great pioneers of aviation, a hero of France, and the most widely translated author in the French language, and, on the other, a member of that gruesome tribe—the Boys Who Never Grow Up. For Saint-Ex, as he was known to his colleagues, childhood was a lost golden age, its haunting memory both a blessing and a curse.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyons in 1900, into a family of minor nobility. His father, Jean de Saint-Exupéry, who worked for an insurance company, died before Antoine was four, and the five Saint-Exupéry children were brought up in two beautiful châteaus—one, at Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens, belonging to a great-aunt, and the other, near Saint-Tropez, to their maternal grandparents. It was in the former, with its mysterious attics and handsome, wooded park, that Antoine created what he described as “the secret kingdom” of his childhood, his “interior world of roses and fairies.” All his life, he was dogged by nostalgia for his early years. Well into adulthood, he wrote, “This world of childhood memories will always seem to me hopelessly more real than the other.”
The little Saint-Exupérys were indulged by their mother, Marie, who was loving, pious, and unceasingly attentive. The children were notorious in the neighborhood for unruly behavior, and Antoine, with his head of golden curls, was the most willful and unruly of them all. In tune with the times, he was fascinated by early experiments in flight and, at the age of twelve, attempted to construct an airborne bicycle. He also read avidly—his particular favorites were Jules Verne and Hans Christian Andersen—and began composing poetry at an early age. This he did mainly at night, ruthlessly waking up his brothers and sisters and dragging them into his mother’s room in the small hours to hear him declaim his most recent composition. (It was a habit that continued in later life. He thought nothing of telephoning his friends at three in the morning, and while he was in North Africa during the war he force-fed Benzedrine to his patient mistress so she would stay awake long enough to read through all five hundred pages of his work in progress.)
Unsurprisingly, the adult relatives of the Saint-Exupéry children regarded them as horribly spoiled, and intermittently did their best to impose discipline, which the children’s doting mother never could bring herself to administer. It was this disapproving attitude of aunts and uncles, Schiff suggests, that inspired the contempt of the narrator in “The Little Prince” for the grownup world. “I have lived a great deal among grown-ups,” he says. “I have seen them up close. That has not much improved my opinion.” Mme. de Saint-Exupéry, however, was the exception: her son saw her as the font of tenderness. “He wore this fierce maternal love as a sort of cloak wherever he went, pulling it more closely around himself as he aged,” Schiff writes.
Antoine failed to distinguish himself at school, failed again as a naval candidate at the École Bossuet in Paris, and, as a last resort, enrolled at the Beaux-Arts to train as an architect, showing, a fellow student remarked, as little aptitude for architecture as for dentistry. He supported himself on money that he borrowed from his mother, often lodging simply but eating lavish dinners in the grand houses to which his family name provided access. Even when he was established as a writer, Saint-Ex was never part of the international literary society in Paris—the world of “Stratford-on-Odéon,” of Pound, Hemingway, and Joyce (although when Stuart Gilbert, the translator of “Ulysses,” came to render “Night Flight” into English, he was so perplexed by the subtleties of the language that he turned to Joyce for help). Ever the man of action, Saint-Ex was impatient with intellectuals and uneasy with the claustrophobic company of the super-gratin littéraire, preferring his aviator colleagues; his publisher, Gaston Gallimard; and a few French writers such as Malraux, Maurois, and Gide. While he was living in Paris between sojourns abroad, he chose to conduct both his working and his social life in cafés, starting the day at the Deux Magots, then moving on to the Brasserie Lipp. But, however convivial the preceding hours, he usually finished the evening alone—as Schiff has it, “a drink at his elbow, a cigarette in hand, doing silent battle with a sheet of paper.”
In 1921, Saint-Ex received his call-up, and from the Strasbourg military base, where he was training, he wrote to his mother, “Maman, if you only knew the irresistible thirst I have to fly.” It is at this point, with his ascent into the air, that both Saint-Ex and Schiff’s book take off. For these were the great days of flying, with France magnificently preéminent. Even before the start of the First World War, France held more flying licenses than the United States, England, and Germany together, and by 1918 the French aeronautics industry was one of the biggest in the world. Saint-Ex was awarded his pilot’s license in 1922; his first flying job was with a commercial company, which specialized in taking tourists up for twenty-minute rides. After a brief period at this undemanding activity, he joined the Compagnie Latécoère the most ambitious of the country’s mail-carrying airlines, which became known as Aéropostale. France was then the second-largest colonial power, and Latécoère, with a fleet of Breguet 14s, was opening up a network of mail routes to French Morocco, to Dakar, and then to Buenos Aires, Rio, and Patagonia.
Nothing could have been better suited to the courageous, intransigent Saint-Ex than the life of a pilot with Aéropostale. The work was dangerous and demanding, the discipline rigorous, and the solitude unbroken. In his books, the descriptions of the hours spent alone in the cockpit are intensely evocative, as he recalls piloting his craft from Toulouse to Casablanca and Dakar, at the mercy of sandstorms, snow, and freak winds, flying low through mountain passes and over mile after mile of desert, where Moorish tribesmen shot at the tiny planes as though they were partridges. Although the Breguet 14 was the most reliable aircraft of the time, it was pitifully frail by current standards, with a wooden propeller, an open cockpit, and a range of well under four hundred miles; it had no radio, no suspension, no sophisticated instruments, and no brakes. Planes regularly broke down or crash-landed, and airmen were taken captive and held hostage for weeks at a time by tribesmen. Maps were crude, and pilots navigated by following landmarks—a row of trees, a farmhouse, a field, a river. It was easy to get lost in heavy rain or fog, or just in the dark, and weather predictions were often fatally unreliable. In “Night Flight,” for instance, the pilot, Fabien, very nearly fails to come through an unexpected storm:
With each new plunge the engine began vibrating so violently that the entire plane was seized with angry trembling. Fabien needed all his strength to control it. His head ducked far down inside the cockpit, he kept his eyes glued to the artificial horizon; for outside he could no longer distinguish earth from sky, lost in a welter of primeval darkness. . . . At this very moment the storm opened above his head and through a rift, like mortal bait glittering through the meshes of a net, he spied several stars. . . . At a single bound, as it emerged, the plane had attained a calm that seemed wondrous. There was not a wave to rock him, and like a sail-boat passing the jetty he was entering sheltered waters. . . . Beneath him, nine thousand feet deep, the storm formed another world, shot through with gusts and cloudbursts and lightning flashes, but towards the stars it turned a surface of snowy crystal.
After a year, Saint-Exupéry was made chief of the airfield of Cape Juby, in the western Sahara—probably the most desolate airstrip in the world. Never had he been happier. “I have a great need for solitude,” he wrote. “I suffocate if I live for fifteen days among the same twenty people.” He loved the wide spaces of the Sahara, and the silence:
He loved the isolation and independence, and the long, lonely flights, which are memorably depicted in his first novel, “Southern Mail” (1929). He made friends with the nomad children, and he came to depend on the fierce esprit de corps that existed between members of the company. “His religion was the mail,” Schiff writes, “and in his devotion to it he was bound inextricably to his comrades.” It was during this period that his reputation as a writer was founded, and through his writing that “la Ligne” became known to the world.
After Cape Juby, Saint-Ex was assigned to South America, to take part in the opening of mail routes linking Buenos Aires with Rio, Patagonia, and Paraguay. Here, in the violent tempests and grand silence of the Andes, he found a romance every bit as potent as that of the African desert. For the rest of his life, he talked about his memories of Patagonia, of glaciers and Indians, and of the sheep on Tierra del Fuego, “who, when asleep, disappeared in the snow, but whose frozen breath looked from the air like hundreds of tiny chimneys.” Often he flew at night, and it was this nocturnal “battle with the stars” that animated “Night Flight,” his second novel. The book was an instant success with the public; a film was made of it; and Guerlain produced a scent, Vol de Nuit, which was dedicated to Saint-Exupéry and sold in a bottle emblazoned with propellers.
For all his courage and his instinct for adventure, there remained in Saint-Ex something immature, a tendency to childishness. In life, as in his writing, he harked back constantly to childhood. Schiff notes that he frequently gave way to fretful displays of temper. He thought it funny to drop water bombs from upstairs windows, and a favorite game consisted of rolling oranges down the keys of a piano, which made it sound like Debussy. He was brilliant at word games and card tricks—“He spent less time writing than he did picking out the ten of spades,” one of his editors lamented—and was expert at fabricating miniature helicopters from maple seeds and hairpins. He often illustrated his letters with cute drawings of himself in bed or with a toothache, and dated them “I haven’t-the-foggiest-idea” or “the twentieth century.” In one he sketched the three parts of a journey—the last part a fat black square, “because it was nighttime.” He once excused himself to his American publisher for turning a chapter in late on the ground that his guardian angel had appeared and stayed to talk. (Schiff writes, “He could not very well have shown a guardian angel the door!”)
When it came to women, Saint-Ex fell for those with whom he could sustain his world of make-believe. His first serious love was Louise de Vilmorin, a minor writer and femme fatale, who, like him, was deeply nostalgic for an “enchanted garden childhood.” In her mother’s imposing house in the Rue de la Chaise, she told her stories, he recited his sonnets, and together they played at fairy prince and princess. But Loulou, for all her kittenish coquetry and otherworldly air, was a hardheaded Frenchwoman, and when the question of marriage arose Antoine’s lack of fortune easily outweighed the fantasies they had woven together in her top-floor room.
It was not until 1931 that Saint-Ex finally found a wife, Consuelo Gómez Carillo, who at first sight must have seemed like perfection. She was tiny and lovely and capricious. Seeing them together, a friend described the couple as a little bird perched on a huge stuffed bear, “that huge, flying stuffed bear that was Saint-Ex.” Once, when asked where she came from, the young woman winsomely replied, “I have come down from the sky, the stars are my sisters.” Her husband found this kind of thing charming—which was fortunate, as she had other traits that were less attractive. Consuelo was a mythomaniac of epic proportions, wildly extravagant, and ferociously jealous of her husband’s success as both writer and airman. (However, she enjoyed playing the role of celebrity widow when Saint-Ex disappeared for several days in December of 1935 during a highly publicized flight over the Libyan Desert; and after his death she cashed in by opening a restaurant called Le Petit Prince, over which she presided wearing a jaunty sailor’s cap with “Saint-Ex” in gilt letters on the peak.) Consuelo was bad-tempered, neurotic, flamboyantly unfaithful, and rarely on time. At a cocktail party in New York, Schiff relates, she passed the evening sitting under a large desk “from which a pale arm occasionally emerged, an empty martini glass affixed to its end.”
The Saint-Exupérys quarrelled murderously and were always separating, but it was Consuelo to whom Antoine returned time and again, and without whom, he always felt, he couldn’t live.
Soon after the publication of “Night Flight,” in 1931, Saint-Ex’s career as a commercial pilot came to an end. In spite of Latécoère’s pioneering expansion, it had been forced into liquidation, and by August of 1933 there were no independent airlines in existence; they had been subsumed under the all-embracing Air France. Saint-Exupéry was by now a star, the Joseph Conrad of the skies. Although hopelessly irresponsible about money, and nearly always hard up, he made an adequate income from journalism and from propaganda work for the newly formed national airline. It was on a goodwill mission for France that, in 1938, he went to the United States to attempt a record-breaking flight from New York to Nicaragua. This came to a premature end with a crash landing in Guatemala City, from which he emerged alive but badly hurt.
In 1940, Saint-Ex returned to New York, intending to spend four weeks promoting the French war effort. In the event, he stayed two years, unable to see a role for himself in a fallen France. It was the most miserable period of his life. He was isolated and ill; he refused to learn English, and was crippled by fever, suffering the results of years of physical injury and neglect. A friend visiting him after an operation found him lying in a darkened room, silent and depressed, with a copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales beside his bed. Schiff reports that Saint-Ex was politically at odds, too, with many of his compatriots in exile, stubbornly remaining neutral, and perceived as a Pétainist in the face of the majority support for de Gaulle. He consoled himself with a number of love affairs, but increasingly he sought a cozy intimacy rather than sex. He saw one of his young women friends, Silvia Reinhardt, almost every evening for over a year, in spite of the fact that she spoke no French and he almost no English. Saint-Ex, arriving late at night at her apartment, would settle on the chaise longue in her bedroom and, as Schiff memorably describes the scene, “read to her from his unfinished work, tears rolling down his face as he did so,” while, “half-asleep on the floor, Silvia understood not a word.” When Consuelo eventually arrived in the States to join her husband, she helpfully spread it about that high-altitude flying had rendered him impotent.
All this time, Saint-Ex was desperate to return to Europe and active participation in the war. He finally left America in April of 1943, to join up with a French squadron in Algeria. Needless to say, he was its most experienced and obstreperous member. His fellow-pilots were proud of him; his superiors regarded him as the most difficult command in North Africa. Although he was technically too old and far from fit—“only good for card tricks,” his critics said—Saint-Ex insisted on being allowed to fly. He was drinking heavily to dull the pain of his old injuries, and had to be helped into his aircraft: “His boots were laced for him, as he could not bend over. He had to be fitted into and extracted from the cockpit.” One pilot observed, “Saint-Ex was done for, and he knew it.” He made a number of sorties nevertheless, but he was both too impatient and too set in his ways to master the sophisticated technology of his aircraft, a United States Army Air Forces Lightning P-38. On one of his first missions, he damaged the wings of his plane, and a few days afterward, touching down at a hundred miles an hour and failing to pump his brakes, he ran off the end of the airstrip and crashed into an olive grove. The aircraft was wrecked, and Saint-Ex was grounded. Affronted and humiliated, he protested to his American operations officer, Leon Gray, “Sir, I want to die for France.” Gray replied, “I don’t give a damn if you die for France or not, but you’re not going to do so in one of our airplanes.”
Eventually, it was considered less trouble to restore Saint-Ex’s flying status than to deal with his furious entreaties. In May of 1944, he was posted to Sardinia, and shortly afterward he disappeared on a reconnaissance flight over southern France. When the war was over, he was proclaimed a hero, accorded in records “une mort glorieuse.” At the end of a star-chasing life, Consuelo said—giving her husband his due for once—he had taken a meteoric fall. His brave death assured the growth of his posthumous fame, in particular that of his final work of fiction, “The Little Prince,” written while he was in the United States and published in 1943.
That sad, sentimental story—with its quaint mop-top mannikin, on a visit to earth from his distant asteroid, impressing the stranded airman with his fey philosophy—became a seminal text for the sixties generation of dropouts and flower children. To others, it was unpalatably infantile. I never thought I could care about its author, but that was before I read Schiff’s book. “Saint-Exupéry” is a remarkable biography; indeed, it is impossible to imagine the job better done. It is balanced, perceptive, thoroughly researched, and exceptionally well written. The author is both sympathetic and clear-sighted, and by the last page I had the same feelings as Adrienne Monnier, the famous bookseller of the Rue de l’Odéon, about whom Schiff writes, “Initially Le Petit Prince struck her as puerile, but she found herself drenched in tears by the end. She realized she was crying not over the book but, belatedly, for Saint-Exupéry.” ♦
