Book Review : Unfledged Flights of Fancy of Antoine de Saint Exupery

Wartime Writings by Antoine de Saint Exupery (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $12.95)

Lyrical, romantic and accessible to a broad public, the novels and essays of De Saint Exupery remain appealing. His charmingly illustrated fantasy, “Le Petit Prince,” is as popular with children and their parents now as it was when published in 1943. Shot down over France in the last year of the war, De Saint Exupery’s promising literary career was tragically abbreviated--two thinly fictionalized books of his aerial exploits, “Southern Mail” and “Night Flight”; the celebrated “Wind, Sand and Stars,” in which he enlarged his scope to include meditations on the wonders of Earth, and “Flight to Arras,” a dramatic memoir of a wartime mission, expressing the conflict of his humanistic moral philosophy with the demands of combat.

The short list ends with “Letter to a Hostage” and “The Wisdom of the Sands,” the last a miscellany of private philosophical musings.

Never Meant for Print

That was all until the appearance of this collection, a scrapbook of letters to friends, bits and pieces of autobiography, random comments on war, obligation, duty, patriotism and politics; intensely personal and fragmentary material clearly never meant for publication in this haphazard form. Although a few of these pensees have been retrieved from articles in newspapers and magazines, most never appeared in print but, as the French publisher candidly admits, were “drafts, jottings cast aside, radio broadcasts or bulletins to the American press.”

The result is a grab bag in which one finds an occasional small buried treasure in a mass of trivia and confusion. Though the selections have been put in chronological order, explanations are so sketchy that the reader muddles through in a state of chronic bewilderment, wondering at the editor’s capricious choices, eventually doubting there was an editor at all.

Standing alone and naked, the sentence “I felt great pity for people because they are asleep to something, but I don’t know what that is,” adds little to the reader’s appreciation of De Saint Exupery’s philosophy or to the writer’s reputation. Unfortunately, there are scores of such isolated phrases relating neither to the thoughts preceding nor those following. Pages are taken up with descriptions of the author’s injured vertebrae--fractured? Not fractured?--no more interesting because it’s De Saint Exupery’s backache than if it were anyone else’s.

Hardly Worth It

Because so many of the correspondents refused to be identified, the letters on love and war are far less compelling than they might be. For all we know, we could be poring over De Saint Exupery’s communications to his banker or his tailor, but even when the recipient is identified, as in a letter to George Pelissier, the message “I sleep late because I’ve never been able to work at night and I need seven hours sleep on the average” seems hardly worth including.

A speech, delivered to a group of American students on Dec. 8, 1941, encapsulates the author’s philosophy in such simplistic terms that the admirable sentiments seem banal. “It is not what you receive that magnifies you but what you give.” An extended section of correspondence with the translator of “Flight to Arras” is merely peevish, while his preference for Gen. Henri Honore Giraud over Charles de Gaulle, idiosyncratic at the time, now seems entirely inexplicable, the context too vague to supply his reasons for the choice.

A Lisbon Bestiary

A memoir of Lisbon in 1940 conveys more of the spirit of the author’s later work. Watching the titled exiles desperately gambling in the casinos of Estoril, he “felt neither indignation nor irony, but a kind of anguish--the same feeling you experience at a zoo when looking at the survivors of an extinct species. They crowded around the tables, squeezed against an austere croupier, trying to feel hope, despair, fear, envy, excitement--just like living beings. . . . They drew bills of exchange on Sirius . . . tried to believe in the legitimacy of their agitation, the honoring of their checks, the immutability of their conventions.”

When the author reminisces about the Sahara, the prose immediately regains the elemental vigor of “Wind, Sand and Stars”; when he rhapsodizes on the ecstasies of flight, he’s again the preeminent laureate of the air, writing about a modern miracle still experienced only by a privileged few. Though these few passages hint at the pleasure to be found in De Saint Exupery’s major works, this poorly assembled collage is no more than a set of extended footnotes in search of a text.