|
Issue 22 - 2003 : Poet, Pilot, Little Prince
As the search for ever-faster and more technically advanced methods of air travel consumes engineers and designers, the mystery and pure joy of flight sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. French pilot and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry believed in the sheer poetry of flight and preferred the romance and isolation of the open cockpit to the speed and impersonality of modern planes. Aviation has always been about moving forward - developing better technology, faster equipment and more efficient designs. But for one famous pilot, the soul of aviation always lay in the past. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, perhaps best known as the author of The Little Prince, was a rare breed of flyer. His style was irreverent and undisciplined, his passion for flying unparalleled and his talent for writing and storytelling mesmerizing. Saint-Ex, as he was often called, was born in 1900 in Lyons, France. He came of age just as the formative years of aviation history were taking shape. Although the United States lays claim to the Wright Brothers' first flight, in the early 1900s aviation was booming in Europe. According to Saint-Ex biographer Stacy Schiff, "By the end of 1911, Frenchmen held more flying licenses than the United States, England and Germany combined; the world altitude, endurance, and speed records belonged to France." But for someone who witnessed some of the most exciting advancements in aviation, Saint-Ex was remarkably unimpressed by the mechanical aspects of flying. For him, it was more about the mystical than the practical - a personality trait that extended beyond his quirks in the cockpit. Saint-Ex's mother characterized him as a child who was "as dreamy and sensitive as he was turbulent." He was fatherless by the age of four and raised by a mother who believed firmly in the importance of great literature. His predilection for the dramatic, combined with his fascination with aviation, resulted in the development of an adventure-seeking intellectual full of personality quirks. Interpretations of his life and writing often miss the complexities of his persona. "He slips through nets, embraces inconsistencies," writes biographer Schiff. "As a pioneer, he lived in the past; as a man of science, he believed above all in instinct; as a writer, he mistrusted language - and intellectuals." Antoine Jean-Baptiste Marie Roger de Saint-Exupéry Originally, Saint-Ex dreamed of joining the Navy, but he failed the rigorous entrance exam and turned his attentions towards aviation. The industry was at the time highly experimental and full of risk - perfect for a thrill-seeker like Saint-Ex. October 1926 was a turning point in his life. That year he was hired to work for Société d'Aviation Latécoère in Toulouse, where he met Didier Daurat, the general manager of an airmail company called Société Aéropostale. By 1927, Saint-Ex was living out his dream - flying the mail on North African routes. The following year he was assigned to head up Latécoère's landing base in Cape Juby, Africa. It was a remote and brutal landscape trapped between dangerous Saharan sands and the pounding surf of the West African Coast. Tellingly, it was one of Saint-Ex's favorite places to be stationed, and it's not difficult to believe he would have remained in Cape Juby for many more years, had Aéropostale not closed the route in 1932. Saint-Ex at once demonstrated a tremendous desire for solitude as well as a desperate need to be the center of attention. He was revered by his friends and acquaintances for his ability to weave magical stories and entertain with mind-numbing games (that he always had to win). Yet when he was flying, he almost always brought along a book to read and often refused to land until he was finished with a particular chapter or passage. The airplane was his cocoon and his muse. If he wasn't reading in the cockpit, he was writing. His first book, Southern Mail (Courier Sud), was completed when he was at Cape Juby and told the story of an airmail pilot. His brilliance is evident in this simple description of the evening sky: "A sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out." Political Turmoil In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and France declared war on Germany. Saint-Ex was 39 years old - not exactly the youthful fighter pilot the military was seeking. Yet somehow, Saint-Ex managed to convince the higher-ups to assign him to a photo reconnaissance group, the 2/33rd. Saint-Ex was at once noble and selfish. His altruism predisposed him to righteous indignation on behalf of his countrymen during the Occupation. In the case of his desire to be included in the war effort despite his advanced age, he came to certain realizations about the human condition: "When you are in danger," he wrote, "you are responsible for everyone." Yet, the truth of the matter was that much of his desire to fly with the 2/33rd was based on his wish to recapture the adventure of his days on the West African airmail routes. In 1940, the Nazis marched up the Champs Elysées. Saint-Ex was thoroughly demoralized by what he viewed as a failure by his own government to hold the Germans at bay. The anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Vichy government as well as the constant political squabbling between French leaders de Gaulle and Pétain frustrated Saint-Ex even further. His goal now was to publish some of his writing, but he feared he would be forced to collaborate with leaders he would rather avoid. So with his health deteriorating, Saint-Ex made the very difficult decision to leave France and move to the United States. The Private Public Figure Two years of self-imposed exile, from 1941-1943, proved to be a trying time for Saint-Ex, both physically and emotionally. His body was plagued with the aches and pains of past airplane accidents and his spirit tormented by problems both political and personal. His eventual return to Europe was not without its challenges, either. When he was finally mobilized in 1943, he was sent to Algiers and then officially reassigned to the 2/33rd. The P-38 Lightning aircraft to which he was assigned was relatively simple to fly, although it was a sophisticated piece of equipment compared to the airmail planes with which Saint-Ex was familiar. Of the P-38, Saint-Ex said it was "a sort of flying torpedo that has nothing whatever to do with flying and, with all its screens and buttons, makes of its pilot a sort of chief accountant." Not exactly a ringing endorsement. His training missions in the airplane resulted in nothing less than disaster - on one particular flight, he cranked open his window at 30,000 feet, immediately losing his oxygen mask and descending so quickly he damaged the wings of the plane. His second mission started off with engine trouble. On his go-around, he neglected to pump his hydraulic brakes and ended up landing at 100 mph, overrunning the runway and crashing into the trees. The damage rendered the P-38 unflyable. He was temporarily removed from flying status, much to his chagrin, and he became despondent. At a dinner party in January 1944, he raised his glass to his dinner guests with a portentous toast: "This morning I consulted a fortune teller. 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." Le Dernier Vol de Saint-Exupéry Saint-Ex's insatiable need to fly was broadcast to everyone with whom he came in contact. It seemed that nothing would console him more than being back at the controls of an airplane, in the environment that he knew best and that inspired him most. Yet, his various ailments were crippling him from the inside out and he could barely get into his flight suit without help...or pain. His desire to return to the skies was in part a desperate search for inspiration and a renewal of his spirit. His experiences during the war had soured him on humanity and the ideals he once held so dear. "We are preparing a world capable of producing 5,000 perfect assembly-line pianos a day," Saint-Ex said, "but incapable of cultivating a worthy pianist." "Where he was once elegiac he was now bitter," Schiff describes. "Where he was once nostalgic he was now desperately homesick, longing for a time, a place and an ethos that were more remote than Cape Juby or Patagonia had ever been." He was distracted and clumsy in-flight. Every mishap possible befell him - from engine trouble to an on-board fire; from a near-fainting spell in-flight to being pursued by enemy aircraft. By June 1944, his commanding officer, Captain René Gavoille, was doing everything in his power to keep Saint-Ex from flying ever again. Ironically, the morning of Saint-Ex's disappearance, Gavoille was going to ground him permanently. And there are other, equally eerie circumstances that imbue Saint-Ex's last flight with an even deeper aura of mystery - including a passage in The Little Prince, composed by Saint-Ex himself: "One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!" And a little later you added: "You know - one loves the sunset, when one is so sad..." "Were you sad, then?" I asked, "On the day of the forty-four sunsets?" But the little prince made no reply.
Saint-Ex had just celebrated his 44th birthday the summer he flew off into his own sunset. The Creator To those who knew him personally as well as to his scores of admirers, Saint-Ex was larger than life, and many viewed his sudden disappearance as a kind of poetic justice. His long-suffering wife Consuelo commented, "At the end of a star-chasing life, his had been a meteoric fall." His closest friends felt almost as though this moment were inevitable. Saint-Ex's increasingly sour moods and disillusionment with the world exhibited themselves in numerous ways that summer. He spoke of his "breathtaking indifference" to life, and provided Gavoille with a kind of last will and testament, including detailed instructions on what to do with his manuscripts. At one point he even told Gavoille, "I won't make it through the war." His pessimism stemmed from his inability to resolve himself to a rapidly changing society that, in his view, was losing its soul. "[He] had never been a man of his time," Schiff writes in her conclusion, "the hour of history in which he had felt at home lasted only so long as pilots flew without the benefit of instruments. Many men outlive their time, but Saint-Exupéry, stooped and stiff, had grown rigid, unrealistic to the point of gracelessness." He displayed the characteristics of a genius - a creative soul tormented by the mundanity of everyday life. Years later, it would be a character from another novel who would best describe Saint-Ex's complexity. Ayn Rand's idealistic, self-centered hero Howard Roark, in The Fountainhead, says: "Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone." And that is the vision the world will always have of Saint-Ex - a true creator, immortalized by his writing.
Back to top
|
Print Friendly Version