The Man Who Befriended the Little Prince : SAINT-EXUPERY: A Biography, <i> By Stacy Schiff (Alfred A. Knopf: $30; 544 pp.)</i>

In France you must never directly ask another person’s profession, but must pretend instead that work is a veneer, beneath which lies the uncompromised soul. If this seems like a wishful conceit, nonetheless it fits nicely into a society that elevates the young intellect, then traps it in a lifetime of hierarchies. The entrapment has effects more corrosive than those of bad education. Unemployment statistics can only hint at the problem: Beyond the glory of its civilization, beyond the achievements of its elites, everyday France suffers a secret denial of life. Now there is talk of a four-day workweek. The problem lies not with idleness but with work that can so easily be left behind. By necessity more than choice, the French have become a people abandoned to vacation.

But Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the heroic French pilot and writer, was all the opposite--a man abandoned to vocation. He was neither a man of our times, nor sadly, of his own. Stacy Schiff makes this clear in her thoughtful and compelling account of his life. Saint-Exupery was born to impoverished aristocrats in 1900, and he died 44 years later while flying hopeless missions against the Germans over occupied France. Best known as the author of “The Little Prince,” he wrote other successful books, notably “Night Flight” and, in nonfiction, “The Wind, the Sand and the Stars.” As Schiff sketches him, he was a brilliant bear of a man, moody, enthusiastic, childlike, as contradictory as he was uncontrolled. When he conjured up youth, he did not dwell on formal schooling but remembered instead the days of imagination and discovery. When he considered manhood, he did not dwell on Parisian pastimes but reveled in the brutal, faraway work of the early airmail pilot. These apparently exclusive strains twisted uneasily through his life and writings. Saint-Exupery refused to submit to classification.

Partly as a result, his political thinking has been called naive. His overwrought musings, his respect for strong leadership, his glorification of “mission,” have opened him to accusations of early fascism. It’s true that the Nazis embraced his books before later banning them. But the man Schiff describes was no ideologue. He was a disfranchised nobleman, a humanitarian, a wanderer dreaming impractically of a home. If he seemed gullible, it was because in the cockpit and on the page he so powerfully sought purpose. Even when he appeared to advocate self-sacrifice, he was in fact promoting something more personal, work for work’s sake, as the definition of his own existence. It is entirely appropriate that many of his sales, as Schiff admits, are now to vocational schools. In “Night Flight,” Saint-Exupery wrote about an old mechanic named Leroux, who “had forty years of work behind him. All his energies were for his work. When at ten o’clock or midnight Leroux went home it certainly was not to find a change of scene, escape into another world.” I don’t know how that sounded in 1931, but for the French of today, Saint-Exupery must be a hard read.

He is not an easy read for today’s Americans either. Schiff writes about the artistry of French expression, the Anglo-Saxon preference for precision, and the difficulties of translation. “What sounds lush in French--from Chateaubriand to Proust--will in a poor translation turn purple in English.” She believes Saint-Exupery was lucky to have been well served by his translators. Indeed the translations have enjoyed great success in the United States. But that begs the point: Even in French, his prose can seem too florid for modern American tastes. Never mind. He is worth reading anyway, if for no other reason than his humanity. He is also worth reading about.

Stacy Schiff must agree. This is her first book. She was born after Saint-Exupery’s death, but writes about him with the fondness and nuance of a longtime lover. And in love she is wise. She keeps her language clear, and neither apologizes for Saint-Exupery’s weaknesses nor joins loudly into arguments for his cause. Instead, she expresses her dedication through the uncompromising quality of her own work. The result is a biography like a call from the past.

She starts the story during Saint-Exupery’s years as an airmail pilot on the pioneering route from France to Dakar. In 1927 he was posted to the desolate Spanish fort and airfield at Cape Juby, 600 miles south of Casablanca, on the Sahara’s wild Atlantic coast. It was there, under difficult conditions, that young Saint-Exupery won the respect of the more seasoned pilots for his courage and austerity. He spent time among Moors, some of whom, then as now, were more inclined to murder Europeans than to submit to them. Saint-Exupery believed in European superiority.

Unlike other writers about the Sahara, he did not romanticize the natives. But he was willing to listen to them. About a man named el Mammun, who massacred the French officers traveling in his caravan, Saint-Exupery later wrote lines that still stand as the most concise description of Islamic revolt: “He grew old. Growing old, one begins to ponder. Pondering thus, el Mammun discovered one night that he had betrayed the God of Islam and had sullied his hand by sealing in the hand of the Christians a pact in which he had been stripped of everything.”

The pact that Saint-Exupery signed was with publishers. His first novel, “Southern Mail,” came out in 1929, and was enthusiastically received. Saint-Exupery paid a heavy price: His arrival as a writer marked the start of an early decline as a pilot. In the small world of French aviation, he had already developed a reputation for vagueness, which now seemed confirmed. Pilots are pragmatists, suspicious of abstraction. They are technicians, uncomfortable with expression. Saint-Exupery was giving away secrets they did not know they had. They began to exclude him from their fraternity--as most still do.

And they were not wrong. Saint-Exupery was excluding himself. He had begun to dream beyond the cockpit, often while flying. He had foolish accidents. Nonetheless, he was sent off to organize an airmail route in Argentina, where he stayed for two years. He met his wife there, a wild Salvadoran who for the rest of his life caused him no end of pain. He continued to write. Upon his return he carried with him the manuscript of “Night Flight.” The novel was published in October, 1931, and was a hit. Within six months his old friends would hardly talk to him, and he had been frozen out of the flying profession. Soon afterward the airmail company folded.

Saint-Exupery spent the rest of his years trying to return to the simplicity of a pilot’s life and failing brilliantly. He had indeed become a pilot to be distrusted. Late in 1935 he attempted with a mechanic to make a record flight from Paris to Saigon, and crashed into the Libyan desert. The accident was due to navigational negligence, the worst sort of piloting stupidity. Not by chance, it led to his strongest work as a writer--the chapter in “The Wind, the Sand and the Stars” describing the sensations of thirst in the desert, and the thoughts of dying men. “I was perfectly ready to fall asleep, whether for a night or for eternity. If I did fall asleep, I could not even know whether it was for the one or for the other. And the peace of sleep! But that cry that would be sent up at home, that great wail of desolation--that was what I could not bear.”

Schiff reports another pilot’s belief that Saint-Exupery lived only in order to have something to say. The same accusation could be leveled against most writers--it is a view from the outside, but not entirely unfair. Still, the accident that followed was so shameful that Saint-Exupery never mentioned it in print; in 1938 during a publicity flight through the Americas, Saint-Exupery crashed on takeoff from Guatemala City. His error was one no student pilot would make: He had forgotten to check the airplane’s loading. He and his faithful mechanic were seriously injured.

World War II saved him for a while. He begged his way into a reconnaissance squadron at the outset but after the occupation of France, found himself grounded in New York for several years. He wrote two books there, including his famous lament for life and childhood, “The Little Prince.” His sadness was not new. Schiff writes, “What Baudelaire described as genius--childhood recovered at will--could prove as much a curse as a blessing. For Saint-Exupery it proved a constant occasion for regret. It was telling that he thought of adulthood as an exile, by far a more painful one than the long desolate months at Cape Juby. . . . A happy childhood, too, takes its hostages.”

After the Allied invasion of North Africa, Saint-Exupery returned to the fray and, despite his reputation, managed to talk his way back into the cockpit. He was assigned to his old reconnaissance squadron, now flying unarmed P-38s. The other pilots tried to protect him from himself, finding excuses to keep him from combat. But he insisted on flying, and during his seventh mission, on July 31, 1944, he disappeared without a trace. It was not an act of suicide but of submission. The French, too, become what they do. Saint-Exupery must have known he was no longer a pilot. As a writer he finally abstracted life.