From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
From the Murky Depths
Fathoming the lasting appeal of Saint-Exupéry and "The Little Prince."
In 2000, divers off the coast of Marseille discovered the wreck of a Lockheed Lightning P38 plane that crashed into the sea in 1944. Last week the news went round the world that the wreck's serial number had been confirmed as belonging to the plane of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), aviator and author of "The Little Prince." First published in 1943 in French and English, "The Little Prince" is said to be one of the best-selling books in the world, surpassed only by the Bible and "Das Kapital." Sixty years after its first appearance, "The Little Prince" still sells over a million copies each year.
Still, the overwhelming interest in this wreck and its pilot is extraordinary. What motivates the sainted exuberance of Saint-Exupéry's many fans?
Part of the fascination is the Frenchman's Hemingwayesque identity as a man of action. Saint-Exupéry was never a flawless pilot, and he survived a number of serious crashes. Nevertheless, he flew mail planes in South America in the 1920s, including a mountain route from Buenos Aires to Patagonia that inspired his 1931 novel "Night Flight" as well as a 1938 essay collection, "Wind, Sand and Stars." Determinedly active, Saint-Exupéry appealed as an aviator to the great French film director Jean Renoir, who hoped to film his works (he never did). In Renoir's "Rules of the Game" (1939), a heroic French aviator unhappy in love may owe something to Saint-Exupéry, who had a stormy personal life.
Like Renoir, Saint-Exupéry hearkened back to the gallant days of French combat in World War I, an anachronistic attitude in the late 1930s, when France was readying for abject capitulation. Saint-Exupéry had so little grasp of practical political realities that while no fan of the Nazis, he loudly expressed his loathing of Charles de Gaulle, even when de Gaulle was clearly the strongest alternative to Marshall Pétain's collaborationist government.
But then, logic is not what draws Saint-Exupéry's fans to this most un-French of writers, whose books have none of the Gallic virtues of irony, juridical dryness and clarity of prose. In his first novel, "Courrier-Sud" ("Southern Mail," 1929), about a mail flight from France to North Africa, Saint-Exupéry praises "those elemental divinities--night, day, mountain, sea and storm." This literally high-flying prose can seem as clunky as "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," even in the original. Yet his fans do not complain.
Instead, they relish Saint-Exupéry's murky observations, excerpted in "A Guide For Grown-ups: Essential Wisdom from the Collected Works of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry" (Harcourt), edited by Anna M. Burgard. Some gems follow: "love is not thinking, but being"; "in giving you are throwing a bridge across the chasm of your solitude"; and "friendship is born from an identity of spiritual goals--from common navigation toward a star." Being Saint-Exupéry means never having to say you're sorry.
Sampling the readers' opinions of his books on amazon.com, one finds admirers hardly less passionate and devout than readers of the Bible and "Das Kapital." After all, the story of a Little Prince from another planet who enlightens a downed pilot about the real meaning of life is in the domain of spiritual philosophy, however blatantly expressed, belying "The Little Prince's" perplexing reputation as a book for children.
Saint-Exupéry's popularity is based on swimmingly vague musings like the ones above, and most elements of his life remain vague as well. We may never know just why his plane crashed, and theories ranging from suicide to accident remain equally plausible. Even biographical facts are oddly insubstantial, like a broken engagement with the French writer Louise de Vilmorin, described as enchantingly irresistible by biographers. Never mind that Evelyn Waugh, who knew de Vilmorin well, described her in a letter to Nancy Mitford as "an egocentric maniac with the eyes of a witch. She is the spirit of France. How I hate the French." To which Ms. Mitford replied, "Oh how glad I am you feel this about Lulu--I can't sit in a room with her she makes me so nervous."
Amid all the vagueness and uncertainty appears a plush new coffee-table book from Rizzoli, "Saint-Exupéry: Art, Writings, and Musings" by Nathalie des Vallières, the author's great-niece. As firmly devoted to relics as the specialists who identified Saint-Exupéry's plane wreck, the Rizzoli book contains page after page of piously reproduced photos of Saint-Exupéry's boyhood homework assignments and other ephemera, written in an unreadable scrawl. Whether Saint-Exupéry's original prose or its translation is responsible for the ungainly passages is anyone's guess. From a letter: "But the peace lies in the sense in which it is like munching on sausage and country bread on the banks of the Saône together with Léon Werth." From a posthumously published book, "Wisdom of the Sands": "Here, the sun was like this, harsh, hard, and white like the famine. . . . Anybody who had witnessed the secular traditions of that desert would have guessed them to be lasting and fixed for centuries."
But analyzing individual sentences of Saint-Exupéry is a futile task, for he was a writer for whom the big and noble gesture was everything. One of his descendents, a distinguished journalist at Le Figaro, has just done him proud, publishing this month a bold and courageous indictment of French foreign policy in Rwanda: "L'Inavouable: La France au Rwanda" (Les Arènes Publishers). A veteran war reporter, Patrick de Saint-Exupéry suggests that the French armed and trained those guilty of genocide in Rwanda. To publish this inevitably unwelcome news in France takes the kind of courage that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has been celebrated for. It is only fitting that a tiny bit of the long-dead novelist's lasting celebrity and acclaim spill over onto Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, who is just as courageous and enterprising as his esteemed ancestor, and an impressively precise and attentive writer.
