Saint-exupery: A Biography Read online

  Not every evening—or afternoon—was so entertaining. The mail passed through Juby only once every eight days, which left Saint-Exupéry seven days of silence in between. When the visiting pilots arrived they were grilled for news of the world, even before being offered a chance to wash up; they would unload their fabulous tales of la Ligne, each of which grew with its retelling, like those, Saint-Exupéry observed, of the Middle Ages. Aside from the regularity of these arrivals and departures—the high points of the week and the only rhythm by which time was measured—there was little routine. Saint-Exupéry occupied himself with his paperwork and flew the airfield’s four planes every morning to rid them of condensation. The months at Juby would inform all of his writing, but it is particularly difficult to divorce the image of the Little Prince alone on his planet, carefully watering his rose every morning, from that of Saint-Exupéry in the Río de Oro, dutifully drying his planes. He played chess with the Spaniards; he wrote letters in which he lobbied for mail and for gramophone records; he. visited the Moors. On occasion he flew the mail to Casablanca. He was acutely aware of his isolation. “Our nearest neighbors,” he wrote in his first novel, Southern Mail, “were five to 600 miles away, also trapped by the Sahara, like flies in amber.” “We are as much strangers,” he wrote a friend in January 1928, “one from the other as planets in the solar system.” In a fine mood he would report that he had read, or gone boating, or made a topographical study of the region. When the solitude weighed more heavily he reported: “Let me describe my life: It’s morning, it’s noon, it’s evening. Every day repeats itself, without any events more interesting than these. I read a little; I smoke a lot; I take walks of about a quarter-mile.” It was, he would write time and again, a monk’s life.

  Saint-Exupéry did not find this altogether disagreeable. He was, by his own admission, frightfully prone to abstraction, and few places favor meditation more than the desert. There was plenty of silence, of which he had for some time claimed a great need, and which he learned to classify:

  There is a silence of peace when the tribes are reconciled, when the cool evening falls.… There is a midday silence, when the sun suspends all thought and movement. There is a false silence, when the north wind has died and insects, torn like pollen from the interior oases, arrive to announce the sandstorms from the east. There is a silence of intrigue, when one learns that a faraway tribe is plotting something. There is a silence of mystery, when the Arabs discuss their incomprehensible differences among themselves. There is a tense silence when a messenger is late returning. A sharp silence when, at night, one holds one’s breath to listen better. A melancholy silence, when one remembers those one loves.

  He wrote repeatedly of his “monk’s cell,” of his “monkish” life and dispositions, but he did so always with fondness. His religion was the mail, and in his devotion to it he was bound inextricably to his comrades. It was said that for Mermoz “it was impossible to consider an immobile mail bag as anything less than a stalled heart.” The zeal was contagious if curious, too. One day Saint-Exupéry cornered Delaunay to ask a question that had clearly been causing him tremendous anxiety: “By virtue of what emotion do we risk our lives, sometimes so casually, to move the mail?” Delaunay was of little help, but his floundering did not deter Saint-Exupéry, who went on, a believing soul who had not necessarily found God. “The mail is sacred,” he wrote later, “what is inside has little importance.” The isolation, the abnegation, the single-mindedness of Juby were a tonic to a young man undisciplined, a little frivolous, in great need of being needed. “Anyone who has known Saharan life, where everything appears to be solitude and nakedness, mourns those years as the most beautiful he has lived,” he wrote two years before his death.

  There was nonetheless a low point, and it began about two months after his arrival, at Christmas. The chief of the airfield spent Christmas Eve listening to the Moors prepare for a war, setting off flares, which illuminated the sky “like opera lights.” It would end, he assured his mother cynically, “like all of the big Moorish spectacles, with the theft of four camels and three women.” As the provisions were delayed from the Canary Islands, dinner amounted to a less-than-festive banquet of canned foods; the evening proved so melancholic that Saint-Exupéry turned in at ten o’clock. The good news: he had written six lines of a book. “That’s a lot,” he informed his mother. The New Year began on a similar note, less because of any new crises than because of a lack thereof. Relations with the Spanish were on as even a keel as they would ever be. The mail planes arrived and departed; Saint-Exupéry, feeling the mother hen, greeted and sent on his “chicks” weekly. If an airplane seemed to be late coming in he prepared to set off to the rescue: “I ready myself for great adventure with a certain vanity; but then a far-away hum announces that the plane will come in, announces that life is altogether more simple than I had thought, that romanticism has its limits, and that the lovely persona in which I have dressed myself is somewhat ridiculous.” He was meant to be the king of desert repairmen, and yet from early December 1927 until the summer of 1928, when he was on duty, the Latécoère mail planes miraculously made their way to and from Juby, over 750 miles of dissident territory, without incident.

  This rhythm altered a little late in February, when Saint-Exupéry reported to Casablanca with an inflammation of the eye. The condition may have resulted from his many hours of desert flying, impossible without dark glasses and dazzlingly bright under any circumstances; it may have been an infection that resulted from an earlier injury and that flared up with some regularity as he aged. It was clearly painful, though it does not appear to have impeded the pilot—who was not hospitalized in Casablanca—from enjoying himself during his convalescence. The condition would have cut into his desultory reading, of which he seems to have been doing a fair amount at Juby: he asked the pilots always for more technical manuals, for which he had a voracious appetite; by mid-1928 he had read a number of novels, of which he favored Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph and Colette’s La naissance du jour (Break of Day). For some time he had traveled with a volume of Baudelaire. It was later said of him that he was more likely to fondle than to read a book, and this habit seems to have been confirmed already at Juby. The wife of the chief of the Agadir airfield, four hours away by air and Saint-Exupéry’s closest neighbor, remembered the pilot landing with a plane full of record albums that he would trade for books. He claimed not to be able to sleep at night without a pile by his bedside or on his bed: “He did not actually read them, but the thoughts which kept him company were there, locked in the books like precious medicines in their phials. It was indispensable for him to know they were within arm’s reach, should the need for them arise.” Saint-Exupéry returned to Juby from Casablanca, evidently cured, toward the end of March. He had missed the passage of the first France/South America mail, along with the dramatic search that ensued when the plane carrying it ran out of fuel fifty miles north of Villa Cisneros.

  The first half of 1928 did not go entirely to waste. By the middle of January the six lines Saint-Exupéry had written before Christmas had grown to a hundred pages of a novel, the construction of which was proving difficult, as he was trying to tell his story from several points of view. By July he had completed a manuscript of 170 pages. He claimed not to know quite what to think of it, but hoped to show the manuscript on his return to Paris to André Gide or Ramon Fernandez, two of the literary popes of the decade, whom he had met through a cousin. The novel is Southern Mail (Courrier Sud); it is the story of a failed love affair and of the France/South Africa mail, and is as neatly autobiographical as a novel can be. For one prominent reviewer it was remarkable for the contrast between the brutality of the world of action and the hero’s “interior world of roses and fairies”; for an older Saint-Exupéry it was a work that would better have been left unpublished.

  Southern Mail began a trend for its author, all of whose books were primarily written in exile, and all of which bear the stamp of Cape Juby. It
was a novel written—as importantly in terms of his personal life—before any of his colleagues thought of him as a writer. Few at Juby were more than vaguely aware that he was working on a book, although his office was notoriously awash in paper and he was often observed scribbling and drawing in the cockpit. By the early months of 1928 he had begun to persuade his visitors to sit down for dramatic evening readings that—as imagined by Joseph Kessel, a journalist who knew him and who knew Juby—were delivered from the foot of his audience’s bed, in Saint-Exupéry’s muffled, flat voice, one which soon enough became incantatory. Outside, the far-off cry of “Sentinella!” passed from one Spanish guard post to the next, marking the quarter hour, and the wind rustled through the sands of the Río de Oro. Exhausted from their flights, Saint-Exupéry’s early critics did not manage to stay awake long enough to appreciate many of their host’s pages. In March 1928 he read the novel to Jean-Marie Conty in a Casablanca café at the end of a visit that began with a spirited game of chess and lasted thirteen hours. He told his wakeful colleague that he was the first to hear the work in its entirety.

  Saint-Exupéry was a perfectionist, perhaps a more desirable trait in an aviator than in a writer. He corrected himself incessantly. Mermoz is reported to have interrupted Saint-Exupéry after a reading of his new pages of the novel with an impatient “But you’ve already read me that!” (On another occasion he evidently had to apologize for the transgressions of Lola, his pet monkey, who gulped down several pages of one draft of Southern Mail when no one was looking.) Mermoz may be forgiven his sins: it was he who found the title for Saint-Exupéry, pointing to a Dakarbound mail sack on the barrack floor. The author found a more patient audience in Guillaumet, to whom he read often at Juby, as he would later in Paris and Buenos Aires. It was Guillaumet who encouraged him to keep on with Southern Mail. “Is it good?” Saint-Exupéry would ask, imploringly. “Yes,” answered Guillaumet. “What a shame that I don’t know how to write like you.” He did not need to: Saint-Exupéry would immortalize Guillaumet in Wind, Sand and Stars, as he would the mysteries of the Spanish Sahara, as he would Bark, the venerable black slave.

  It was most likely during this slow spring of 1928 that Saint-Exupéry actively took up the cause of Bark, whose fate he first lamented to his mother in his Christmas Eve letter. During these months the Juby chief took tea almost daily among the Moors. He had made various friends, especially among the Izarguin, the least hostile of the tribes of the northern Río de Oro. He was well used to seeing his tea prepared by black slaves; the Moors made no secret of the fact that they considered the French heathens (“You eat greens like the goat and pork like the pigs.… What good are your airplanes and wireless … if you do not possess the Truth?” Saint-Exupéry had been asked), but the blacks were lower still on the totem pole. For preparing the Moors’ food and tending the camels they received a weekly salary; they were set free only when they were too old to work, at which point they were left to die in the desert. This, too, Saint-Exupéry had seen: “The children play in the vicinity of the dark wreck, running with each dawn to see if it is still stirring, yet without mocking the old servitor.” What struck him was not the unfairness, or the pain, but the hoard of memories that went with a man: “It was then for the first time that it came on me that when a man dies, an unknown world passes away.… The hard bone of his skull was in a sense an old treasure chest; and I could not know what colored stuffs, what images of festivities, what vestiges, obsolete and vain in this desert, had here escaped the shipwreck.”

  Bark was the first slave whom Saint-Exupéry had met who spoke of this hoard of memories. He was called Bark, as were all slaves; his real name was Mohammed ben Lhaoussin. He had lived in Marrakech, where he had a wife and three children; he was a drover, and had not forgotten that he had once “held sway over a nation of ewes.” A Senegalese, Bark had been kidnapped, then bought and sold over the course of three years before ending up the property of a Juby Moor. He had come to work part-time as a waiter in the Frenchmen’s mess, for which he earned 300 francs monthly. Each month his owner appeared to claim his wages, greeted Bark’s request for his salary with a beating, and disappeared from sight until the end of the following month. Insistently Bark pleaded with the Aéropostale pilots to hide him in the Agadir plane; probably no one knew the schedule of the northern mail better than he. The Frenchmen hesitated to help him because they knew the Moors would avenge the theft of a slave; moreover such a reprisal would be directed at the Spanish, further upsetting delicate desert politics. After months of Bark’s protests—and after soliciting funds from home, from a number of charitable organizations—Saint-Exupéry proposed a solution: he would buy the slave his freedom.

  The color of his skin worked against him in attempting his purchase. It was not every day that the Moors met a European in quest of a slave, and they took advantage of this one by opening the negotiation at 20,000 francs, then about eight hundred dollars. Months went by before the nomads relented on their price, and then only after “a week of bargaining, which we spent, fifteen Moors and I, sitting in a circle of sand,” did Bark become his for an undisclosed sum. The transaction was not made entirely in good faith: Saint-Exupéry had bribed two bandits who were friends of Bark’s master to argue his case. One insisted that Bark was in ill health and advised the Moor to sell him while of some value. The second resorted to more convincing logic: “With the money you get from Bark,” argued Raggi in exchange for fifty pesetas, “you will be able to buy camels and rifles and cartridges. Then you can go off on a razzia against these French.” After an official ceremony of manumission, Saint-Exupéry locked Bark up in the French barrack. He knew the Moors well enough to know that anyone involved in the sale “would gladly have cut off Bark’s head within fifty feet of the fort for the pleasure of doing me in the eye.”

  Bark lived in the French barrack for some time—in “comfortable captivity”—dreaming of his return, which he would ask to have described to him twenty times daily. The French mechanics, concerned about how he would reestablish himself in Marrakech, together presented him with 1,000 francs of their savings; it had not escaped their notice that he would be less wealthy as a free man than he had been in the service of the Moors. His departure from Juby was dramatic, not only in the eyes of Saint-Exupéry—now more than a tamer of gazelles or a mother hen—who felt he was sending his “fifty-year-old, newborn babe” out into the world. “Bark took his last look at the immense desolation of Cape Juby. Round the airplane 200 Moors were finding out what a slave looked like when he stood on the threshold of life.… ‘Good-bye, Bark,’ they called. ‘No,’ replied the free man. ‘I am Mohammed ben Lhaoussin.’ ” In Agadir, Mohammed ben Lhaoussin evidently did what could be expected with his thousand francs. He had tea, poured for him by a waiter, and he visited the Berber prostitutes in the Kasbah. Then he spent every remaining franc on gifts, mostly golden babouches, for the children of the town. For Saint-Exupéry the former slave had made a brilliant transaction. He had landed in Agadir with too much freedom and plenty of money and had corrected the situation: “He felt the lack in him of that weight of human relations that trammels a man’s progress; tears, farewells, joys.” One thousand francs later “he felt the pull of his true weight. Bark dragged himself forward, pulling against the pull of a thousand children who had such great need of golden slippers.” For the hermit of Cape Juby, bound to his fellow pilots by the urgency of a bag of letters, this was a working definition of happiness.

  ~

  By the summer of 1928, the days of Saint-Exupéry’s languid teas were over. Not so his protracted negotiations in the sand. On June 29 he was roused from his night’s sleep by something that had never woken him before: the sound of an airplane. He quickly set up a number of runway flares that illuminated a Latécoère 25, almost certainly the first he had seen at Juby. It was less the sight of this impressive monoplane, which could fly 40 percent faster than a Breguet 14, that surprised him, however, than it was an unannounced nighttime arrival
. (Regular night flights would debut the following year.) Out of the plane stepped Marcel Reine, the pilot; Edmond Serre, an engineer newly in charge of establishing radio communications over la Ligne; and a senior inspector. They had not been able to alert Juby to their arrival and the inspector now insisted that Reine and Serre continue on to Cisneros, although radio communication with Cisneros was equally impossible at this hour. Saint-Exupéry discouraged the idea on meteorological grounds; the coast had been socked in with fog for days and had only cleared that evening. He was a young pilot, however, and this was a senior inspector: at 2:30 on Saturday morning, June 30, Reine and Serre took off to the south, leaving the inspector at Juby. Seven hours later Saint-Exupéry radioed Cisneros and Port-Étienne, today the Mauritanian town of Nouadhibou, farther to the south. “We were sending out ship-like signals of distress,” he wrote in Southern Mail. “Request news mail-plane, request …” No one along the line had heard from Reine and Serre.

  Almost immediately, Saint-Exupéry was aloft in a Breguet 14, as he would be for much of the following months. He also sent word to the Moors, asking if they might help with his reconnaissance work. They knew only that Reine and Serre were in the desert or in the ocean; a heavy fog had indeed blanketed much of the coast south of Juby that evening, and a Latécoère 25 possessed only the most rudimentary instruments for flying without visibility. Neither fact augured well. On July 4, an expanded search party gathered at Port-Étienne. Saint-Exupéry flew the first plane, taking as passengers an interpreter and Albert Tête, the head of the airline in Dakar. The second Breguet 14 was piloted by Riguelle, also accompanied by an interpreter; the third by Henri Bourgat, who carried an additional interpreter and Jean-René Lefèbvre, the airline’s ace mechanic, then posted to Villa Cisneros. Their mission was to cover as much of the Río de Oro as possible. The trio took off from Port-Étienne but by Cape Barbas, 115 miles north, Riguelle’s propeller had stopped and he was forced to make an emergency landing. Expertly he guided Bourgat to a nearby spot in the sand where he could land; Saint-Exupéry circled overhead while waiting for a diagnosis, on the lookout for approaching caravans. Lefèbvre ran to the ailing plane, whose connecting rods had ruptured and decomposed into what he sadly termed “a salad.” There was no time for last rites, though they may just as well have been performed. Riguelle was quickly boarded onto Bourgat’s airplane. The addition of an extra passenger meant that someone had to stay behind, and the Breguet took off without its interpreter.