Saint-Exupery: A Biography

Insight on the News, Feb 6, 1995 by Bering-Jensen Helle

If you disregard, for a moment, Winnie the Pooh, perhaps the most remarkable introduction in European children's literature goes like this: The pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery has crashed his plane in the Sahara. "The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand a thousand miles from any human habitation. I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Thus one can imagine my amazement at sunrise when I was awakened by an odd little voice. It said: `If you please -- draw me a sheep.'"

As millions of children worldwide know, that odd little voice belongs to le Petit Prince, the remarkable visitor from Asteroid B612, where he owns three volcanoes and a flower in which he takes inordinate pride. The Little Prince is on a search throughout the universe for the true meaning of life.

As readers of Stacy Schiff's Saint-Exupery: A Biography (Knopf, 522 pp) will realize, the creator of the Little Prince was a remarkable fellow too -- an impoverished aristocrat, an award-winning novelist and a pioneering aviator, as well as a stunningly disorganized individual of muddled political views and little ambition -- but all in all, a man of great charm.

Saint-Exupery was born in Lyons in 1900, one of five children. His family was one of the oldest in France. (He could trace his roots back to the Crusades. His father died of a stroke when Saint-Exupery was 4; his mother, Marie, was forced to rely on the kindness of her in-laws.

Little Tonio, a gregarious and tirelessly enterprising child, soon found himself at odds with his rather stern grandfather. Where his indulgent mother saw him as a dreamer, the rest of the family tended to see him as a first-rate devil," as an aunt put it. For his part, Saint-Exupery later had the Little Prince remark, "I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them close. That has not much improved my opinion."

Almost from the start, airplanes were a part of Saint-Exupery's life. One of his own first inventions was a (nearly) flying bicycle. And in 1909, his mother moved the family to Le Mans, where Wilbur Wright had set up shop and made the place famous with his aeronautical exploits. Saint-Exupery received his own baptism by air at the age of 12, in a plane invented by the Polish brothers Wroblewski. The craft looked more like a bat than anything else but stayed in the air long enough to infect the young passenger with a passion for flying.

Later, as a student in Paris, Saint-Exupery found more passions to occupy him: galleries and the literary scene. At 15, he was writing epic poems that alternately impressed and exasperated his teachers. At 21, he entered the army, which sent him to Morocco for the start of his lifelong love affair with the desert, later celebrated in his memoir. It was in the army that he earned his pilot's license.

Saint-Exupery's marriage to Louise de Vilmorin -- slightly handicapped by a hip ailment but an ethereal beauty and a great flirt -- broke his heart. Their divorce plunged him into deep despair and set him on a journey throughout France. Among other things, he worked as a truck salesman, selling by his own count somewhere between one and no trucks at all during an entire year.

In 1926, he signed on with the literary magazine Le Navire d'Argent, which was a rather happier match, as was his connection with France's most ambitious mail airline, the Compagnie Latecoere in Toulouse. Here he began as a mechanic but soon rose to be a test pilot and a mail carrier, helping to establish routes over northwest Africa, South America and the South Atlantic. These were exploits on which he drew for his first novel, Southern Mail, published in 1929. While reviewers were respectful and encouraging of his first effort, they positively gushed over Saint-Exupery's second novel, Night Flight, published in 1931 and set in South America. With its dashing hero, the pilot Riviere, Night Flight would "relegate all novels of earthly chivalry to the nursery," according to Le Matin. Riviere even looked like Saint-Exupery -- big, tan, with "black eyes that looked like radiant stars," as one admirer described him.

Later, as fascism closed in on Europe, Saint-Exupery's idealistic faith in progress and extravagant spirit was expressed in his memoir, Terre des Hommes (retitled Wind, Sand, and Stars in English) another huge hit. The American Booksellers Association voted it the best nonfiction book of 1939. It has been one of Saint-Exupery's problems ever since that everyone, from the existentialists to the Marxists, wanted to claim the book for their own. Tellingly, too, the book was as popular in Germany as it was in France and the United States.

In 1940, Saint-Exupery left German-occupied France for the United States, where he stayed two years in New York, bringing his second wife and his children. His second marriage also was unhappy, and he threw himself into numerous affairs with the fashionable ladies of Manhattan. But it was here that he oversaw the publication of Le Petit Prince just before embarking on the journey in April 1943 to join the Free French in Algiers.