Saint-exupery: A Biography Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1994 by Stacy Schiff

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York.

  Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  A portion of this work was originally published in slightly different form in The New York Times Book Review, May 30, 1993.

  Owing to limitations of space, acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published and unpublished material may be found on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schiff, Stacy.

  Saint-Exupéry: a biography / by Stacy Schiff.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79839-8

  1. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 1900–1944—Biography.

  2. Authors, French—20th century—Biography. 3. Air pilots—France—Biography.

  I. Title.

  PQ2637.A274Z829 1994

  848’.91209—dc20

  [B] 94–4011

  v3.1

  This book was written for Marc de La Bruyère

  Contents

  ~

  Cover

  Map

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  I A King of Infinite Space (1927–1928)

  II The Mother Country (1900–1909)

  III Things in Heaven and Earth (1909–1915)

  IV Lost Horizons (1915–1920)

  V Silver Linings (1920–1922)

  VI Walking on Air (1922–1926)

  VII Friends in High Places (1926)

  VIII The Swift Completion of Their Appointed Rounds (1927–1929)

  IX Toward the Country Where the Stones Fly (1929–1931)

  X Brightness Falls (1931–1933)

  XI Beyond the Call of Duty (1933–1935)

  XII “Tayara Boum-Boum, Tayara Boum-Boum!” (1935–1937)

  XIII Civil Evening Twilight (1937–1939)

  XIV Where Is France? (1939–1940)

  XV Resistance on Fifth Avenue (1940–1942)

  XVI Anywhere Out of This World (1942–1943)

  XVII Into Thin Air (1943–1944)

  Epilogue: Saint Antoine d’Exupéry

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Introduction

  ~

  The predicament of his birth is summed up by one encyclopedia in two words, “impoverished aristocrat”: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry began his professional life as a truck salesman. By 1929 he had distinguished himself as a pilot and published a first novel. Before another five years had passed he was unemployed, living hand-to-mouth. In 1939 he won both the American Bookseller Association’s National Book Award and the Académie Française’s Grand Prix du Roman for Wind, Sand and Stars; he seemed well on his way to a chair at the Académie Française. Five years later his politics—more accurately his lack thereof—made him so much a persona non grata that he lived in disgrace in Algiers, heartbroken and excommunicated, his books censored. That year he became the most famous French writer to go down as a casualty of World War II. He was forty-four years old.

  Saint-Exupéry did not so much live fast as die early. Our fascination with him has grown as a result, as it does with all things that end before their time, from the Titanic to Marilyn Monroe. The mystery surrounding his death—so neatly presaged in The Little Prince, whose hero witnesses forty-four sunsets—has further enhanced the myth. To it have been added the eulogies: Saint-Exupéry’s generation comes to an end only today, when he has been dead for fifty years. Survived by a great number of eloquent friends he has been flattened under the collective weight of their half century of praise. That avalanche has naturally provoked a second one: those who have labored to remind us that Saint-Exupéry was a man, not a god, have delighted in doing so vitriolically. The detractors have done no more than the keepers of the cult to reveal Saint-Exupéry himself; they have tangled only with the legend, of which the writer is now twice the victim.

  Under it all is buried one man, by no means ordinary, but not extraordinary either for the reasons we have come to believe. A pilot of indisputable audacity, Saint-Exupéry was anything but a disciplined flyer. He flew the mails only briefly, less than six years in all. He played a role in the pioneering age of aviation without having been one of its illustrious practitioners; he was more the Boswell of the early days. Relatedly, he was not much dedicated to routine. He displayed a stunning lack of personal ambition, and was a resolute nonjoiner. Disobedience was often to his mind the better part of valor. His friendships were solid but composed of equal parts loyalty and squabbling. His sentimental history is a thorny one. At the same time Saint-Exupéry was a man of tremendous, towering personality, of certain genius. Little of it crept into the tempest-tossed life, however; only a portion crept into the work. He was perhaps at the height of his powers recounting the tale of his near-death by thirst in the Libyan desert at the dinner table, over which his enchanted listeners plainly slumped with sympathetic dehydration. No one who met him ever forgot him.

  How could an aviator write, or how could an aviator write as lyrically as did Saint-Exupéry? And how did an aristocrat come to fly as a mail pilot? There was nothing predetermined about either career, and the worlds of letters and aviation were further apart—especially in France in the 1920s—than a man with a foot in each realm might have liked. Generally speaking the two are not professions that go well together. The writer lives with some detachment from experience, which it is his task to recast; a pilot works his trade with a fierce immediacy, perfect presence. One may reshape events, the other must nimbly accommodate them. For Saint-Exupéry the two careers—and with them the life and the oeuvre—were inextricably bound. His biographer enjoys no greater advantage. Most of his work is journalism, romanticized, but still autobiographical; what is not journalism pure and simple is easily enough decoded. The pages hold little fiction, limited fantasy, a vast sea of fact. And while Saint-Exupéry could be absentminded—six years into his marriage he could not remember his wedding date—he neither reinvented nor muddied the past. He was not untruthful. He put a gloss on things, but he lived, too, for that gloss, for a quixotism that would be his undoing. The fashion in which he shaped the events he faithfully reported ultimately tells us as much about him as do the events themselves. It makes it possible to begin to imagine the truly critical hours of his life, those he spent alone at several thousand feet, moments no biographer can touch.

  While the works are true to the life—the author’s mind wanders on the page just as it did in the cockpit; a common literary construction for Saint-Exupéry is “over A I was thinking of B”—they do not entirely stand in for the man. They are simple; Saint-Exupéry was not. The anguished writer of petulant, indignant, downtrodden letters is nowhere to be found in the early books. Here, too, the myths have taken their toll: Saint-Exupéry’s biographer commits to addressing the provenance of the Little Prince, that disarming visitor from Asteroid B612, and yet to date the chroniclers of his life have pretended that the man who wrote some of the most tender pages of our time had no private life, only a morass of a marriage. It is not easy to understand the Little Prince if one holds too much to the caped crusader of lore; it is at the same time too easy to write off Saint-Exupéry altogether if one takes him only at his written word. It is a richer life than he let on, poorer as it was in all the transcendent qualities that make the literature soar, so much more earthbound than it appears
to have been.

  A note on the name, which is pronounced Sant-Exoopairee, with all syllables accented equally: famous men famously change their names. Saint-Exupéry admitted he had “un beau nom” and was enough attached to it that he forbade two women who shared it—an elder sister and his wife—from publishing under it. (Both ultimately defied him.) Friends and acquaintances were to take liberties even where he did not: after a childhood of nicknames, he was transformed by others into “Saint-Ex,” who became the pilot of legend. He himself made only one concession on this front. When the writer settled in New York after the fall of France he authorized his American publisher to insert a hyphen into his name, so as to discourage those who insisted as addressing him as “Mr. Exupéry.” I have retained the late-arriving hyphen here; to do otherwise in English leaves an odd impression. “Is he one of the saints of France?” a confused son of Charles Lindbergh asked his mother in 1940. Laughingly Anne Morrow Lindbergh—who had fallen under the Frenchman’s spell the previous year—replied that he was indeed, if not in the usual sense of the word.

  I

  ~

  A King of Infinite Space

  1927–1928

  The sky has stars—the desert only distance. The sea has islands—the desert only more desert; build a fort or a house upon it and you have achieved nothing.

  BERYL MARKHAM, West with the Night

  In 1928 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was as settled as he would ever be. He had no financial worries, no romantic entanglements, no concerns regarding his employment. His home was the Western Sahara, his house a wooden shack that had sailed from France to the desert five years before. On one side it gave on the ocean, which at high tide lapped up against his window; on the other the desert. Dwarfed by an impressive-looking Spanish fort with a crenellated wall, the shack was meant to stand guard over a steel-and-fabric airplane hangar. Otherwise the perfectly flat horizon was obstructed only, occasionally, by the tents of nomads. Saint-Exupéry was twenty-eight years old, and since October of the previous year had been chief of the airfield at Cape Juby. “I have never,” he would write fifteen years later, “loved my house more than when I lived in the desert.”

  His furniture consisted of a plank lined with a thin straw mattress, on which he slept, and a door balanced on two oil drums, on which he wrote. The former was too short for the six-foot two-inch aviator; for the first months at Cape Juby he extended the bed with a crate that served as his pillow, until a friend suggested he might be more comfortable sleeping in the opposite direction. To his mother, whom he wrote regularly, he sent a list of the remainder of his worldly possessions: a water jug, a metal basin, a typewriter, a shelf of books, a windup gramophone, a deck of cards, and the Aéropostale records, the files of the airline for which he worked. Saint-Exupéry shared his home with four French mechanics and ten Moors, all fellow Aéropostale employees, a marmoset named Kiki, a dog, an outsized cat, and a hyena. For neighbors he counted the inhabitants of the Spanish fort, under the direction of an officious Castilian aristocrat named Colonel de la Peña. The northern coast of what was then the Spanish Río de Oro, an area roughly the size of Great Britain, today the Spanish Sahara, was further populated only by dissident Moors.

  There was every reason to think of Cape Juby, today the Moroccan town of Tarfaya, as “the most desolate airstrip in the world.” When its name was mentioned among Aéropostale pilots, a breed known for their sturdiness, the word “neurasthenic” sooner or later came up. The desert had its attractions—the aviator who had prospected the African line would swear to its incomparable beauty and claim the Sahara as his true mistress—but it was generally agreed that Cape Juby was a godforsaken place. A journalist who visited in 1929, just after Saint-Exupéry had left, commented on its “tragic solitude” before he had even landed on the strip of sand that served as the Juby runway. His observation was confirmed on entering the Spanish fort, where he was struck by the malaise of the men, by their “strange silhouettes of beggars or bandits. Their filth was so pronounced it seemed to be make-up. But even more than their slovenliness what was horrifying was their silence.” He assumed this misery to be the work of an evil spell cast by Colonel de la Peña until a French mechanic enlightened him: “Did you really not know that Cape Juby serves as a Spanish military penitentiary?” Jean Mermoz, probably the most celebrated of French pilots and one renowned for his vigor, lived at Juby for a week in February 1927. He reported that he had never “had so much an impression of a state of siege, of suffocation. The guards were barely distinguishable from the prisoners, their uniforms were in tatters, their espadrilles shredded, they were filthy, idle, silent.” Assisted by two Moors he had recruited as sous-chefs, Mermoz spent his week cooking for the French barrack, a revolver in his pocket. He slept fourteen-hour nights, practiced his Spanish, played a good deal of cards, and counted the days, which passed with an exasperating slowness.

  The Juby shack stood 600 miles south of Casablanca and 1,700 miles north of Dakar; Saint-Exupéry barely exaggerated when he wrote to a friend that he was “1,000 kilometers from the nearest bistro.” Water and provisions arrived by sailboat monthly from the Canary Islands; Juby offered no natural harbor, and its tides calmed enough to permit a landing only every four weeks. Its climate is not generally forgiving; temperatures rise to about 100 degrees during the day and the wind blows continuously, which meant that the Juby windsock remained stubbornly horizontal, usually filled by gusts from the northeast. With the wind blew sand, which got into everything; it seasoned most meals, and proved especially pernicious in its invasion of airplane carburetors and fuel supplies. The Western Saharan coast is the world’s most arid, but its air is exceptionally wet, even in the hottest season. Humidity is no friend to an airplane and it was even less so to the airplane of the 1920s: it soaked and inflated the cloth wings, which then separated from their support, and corroded the metal. Aviators can be forgiven for talking about the weather; for them it is a subject of paramount importance. Today pilots consult satellite-generated weather maps, but in the Spanish Sahara in the 1920s maps were cursory at best and meteorology amounted less to science than to intuition. Years after he had left Juby, Saint-Exupéry would remember having smelled a sandstorm brewing; he was delighted to have learned to decipher the “secret language” of the Sahara, to have “read the anger of the desert in the beating wings of a dragonfly.” Flying in such weather was not nearly as poetic. From a practical aviation standpoint, Cape Juby was no paradise.

  It is fair to say that had the mailplanes of the 1920s had a greater range, the French would never have imposed on the relative calm of Cape Juby. The Río de Oro was a misnomer on two counts: it is not a river, and it has no gold.* The Spanish had set up house in an inhospitable place, but that place happened to be strategically located for a mail line operating between Toulouse, the seat of French aviation, and Dakar, the largest French city in Africa, nearly 3,000 miles to the south. The mailplane of the time, the Breguet 14, flew at a cruising speed of eighty miles per hour and had an extreme range of well under 400 miles. These constraints had led the budding air service to negotiate with the Spaniards for the use of the only two refueling stops available in the Río de Oro, Cape Juby and its southern neighbor, Villa Cisneros, settlements about as far apart as Boston and Washington. When all went well the planes could make their way from Toulouse to Dakar in about fifty-five hours, making stops every 250 to 350 miles and traveling only in daylight; word of their progress traveled up and down the line by radio. The Breguet 14 was not an advanced aircraft: it was powered by a 300-horsepower engine, its propeller was wood, its cockpit open; it had no radio, no suspension, no reliable instruments, no brakes. One pilot observed that the gas gauge more accurately indicated the amount of sand in the conduits than of fuel in the tank. Saint-Exupéry commented that the compass was a fine invention in theory, but that in practice it resembled a weather vane.

  On average, a Breguet 14 broke down every 15,500 miles, which worked out to about one in every five
Casablanca-Dakar round-trips. The beauty of an unsophisticated airplane is that it is easy to repair: a hammer, nails, a saw, a block of wood, and glue were said to suffice in order to jerry-rig a Breguet 14 back into service. As Mermoz boasted: “We had created commercial aviation before there were any commercial planes.” If there were more casualties among planes than pilots, it may have been due to a fact another great French pioneer, Louis Blériot, had pointed out years before: “The ability to come crashing to the ground without hurting oneself does not lie in any special cleverness on the part of the pilot. It lies in what one might well term the elasticity of the aeroplane.”

  The African run had been inaugurated in May 1925, after which Dakar, the administrative seat of a colonial empire nearly twenty times the size of continental France, received its Casablanca mail in two days. (By sea a letter had taken a week in summer and two weeks in winter.) By the time Saint-Exupéry settled in Juby, the airline had begun to rely on the outposts of the Río de Oro as stepping stones to South America as well. Only when the Breguet 14’s were replaced by Latécoère 26’s, more robust aircraft with more powerful and reliable engines, could the Río de Oro be overflown. Until 1930, when that happened, the French were largely at the mercy of the Spanish, who knew as much; the Río de Oro is an oft-mentioned subject in the Madrid—Quaid’Orsay correspondence of the 1920s. Geography is littered with places that sprang up for reasons of utility and outlived their usefulness. The Breguet 14 and the African mail put Cape Juby on the map; the Latécoère 26 and the South American mail relegated it to oblivion.

  The year before Saint-Exupéry was stationed at Juby, Charles Lindbergh, who had just flown the Atlantic, noted that fog and sleet were the mail pilot’s two greatest adversaries. He was not acquainted with dissident Moors. The Río de Oro may have been a Spanish colony, but it was a colony consisting entirely of two forts, secure only in that their proximity to the sea facilitated speedy evacuation by boat. The Spanish did not venture far beyond their garrison walls; in a humorous letter to his brother-in-law, Saint-Exupéry wrote that if one strayed more than sixty feet beyond the fort one was shot at. At 150 feet one was killed or sold into slavery, depending on the season. Here again he exaggerated only slightly: months before his arrival two Spaniards had disappeared from the fort walls themselves. It did not take the Moors long to discover the value of a French aviator. The first pilots to be captured were held for ransom; in 1926, two were murdered and a third died from wounds sustained during his captivity. The letters bound for Dakar were opened, and franc notes fell out, and word got out quickly that the mail was a kind of airborne gold mine. Shooting at the planes became commonplace; Saint-Exupéry reported that the aviators were greeted like partridges. (He was also quick to note that the Moors had blessedly bad aim when it came to shooting objects from the sky, an art in which the Sahara offered little practice.) When an engine sputtered in midair it was a different story. There was ample reason for the French aviators to feel nervous about the Moors. They had been told that the head of the airline, Pierre-Georges Latécoère—known to be a very tough businessman—would not pay a ransom and that the Moors would cut them up slowly until the money was paid.