Re: Lifting the Legend of 60 Years of Mystery

Date: April 15, 2004

"Burden of legend is lifted from 'Little Prince'
By STACY SCHIFF

For nearly 60 years the legend of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the aviator and author of The Little Prince, has largely eclipsed the life. More substantial and more valuable things have gone missing — Atlantis, the Holy Grail, 18 1/2 minutes of a White House tape — but few have generated the romance enduringly attached to the writer who, borrowing a trick from his best-known creation, neatly vanished into thin air.

At 8:45 a.m. on July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupery took off from Corsica for a reconnaissance mission over occupied France. He was due back at 12:30 p.m. but did not return. At 1 p.m. his commanding officer began biting his nails; at 3:30 Saint-Exupery was officially reported missing. In April 1945, a funeral Mass was finally held for him.

He never exactly died, however. On reading of his disappearance, Anne Morrow Lindbergh put her finger on the special ache it caused. There is a terrible difference, wrote a woman supremely qualified to know, between "lost and dead." There is also a not-so-secret recipe for what becomes a legend most.

Increasingly we live in a world in which objects cannot disappear from view, and last week wreckage of an aircraft hauled up from the Mediterranean was positively identified as Saint-Exupery's. It had been clear for some time that the Lockheed P-38 was probably a few miles off the coast of Marseille, where in 1988 a local fisherman plucked the pilot's silver identity bracelet from his net. The discovery resolves one mystery about Saint-Exupery's end: He was — by no means a given — where he was supposed to be. His instructions that day would have taken him over Lyon, and it was evidently on the return to Corsica that his P-38 dove vertically, at high speed, into the ocean.

The question of why the plane crashed is unlikely to be resolved by the scattered debris; that it crashed could not be said to have been unexpected. Saint-Exupery was his squadron's record-holder of near-disasters. Having waged a campaign to talk his way back into active service, he was piloting a plane into which he did not fit and which he could not comfortably fly. He was unable to communicate with the control tower in English. The operation of hydraulic brakes defied him. Routinely, he confused feet and meters.

The French pilots in Corsica knew Saint-Exupery as a prize-winning author and a pioneer of aviation. The Americans knew him only as an outsized, overage, undertrained wreck of a man, one who only eight weeks into his time with them mangled an $80,000 aircraft. For that mishap he was unceremoniously grounded. He begged for leniency; he was, he protested, willing to die for his country. "I don't give a damn if you die for France or not," Col. Leon Gray informed Saint-Exupery, "but you're not going to do so in one of our airplanes." It was a case of one national treasure against another.

It was also a case in which Saint-Exupery got his way. He had long outlived the era in which he felt comfortable; he could imagine himself nowhere but in the cockpit of a plane. He had all his life dreamed of escape, pined for broader horizons, threatened to change planets. More and more he felt alienated from his own countrymen, whose infighting he had criticized; fiercely anti-Nazi, he supported neither de Gaulle nor the communists. He predicted that liberation would not put France out of its misery. "Many people," he warned in 1944, "are going to be shot next year." In a particularly bleak mood he imagined himself to be one of them.

From his personal frustrations and his inability to make his political positions understood came The Little Prince, the modest volume under which has swelled a great grassy knoll of literature. Published in 1943 but a best-seller only later, the text read eerily as a death foretold, its mystique enhanced by the parallel between author and subject: imperious innocents whose lives consist of equal parts flight and failed love, who fall to Earth, are little impressed with what they find here and ultimately disappear without a trace.

Naturally it is easier to predict your own death if you are willing to commit suicide, and for those inclined to such readings there is the mystical matter of the sunsets. The little prince lives on a planet so small that he is able to watch the sun set precisely 44 times in a day — case-clinchingly, the age of Saint-Exupery at his death. (For some inexplicable reason, the prince witnesses 44 sunsets only in the English translation. In the original, he watches 43.) That Saint-Exupery had no desire to go on living was clear; that he meant to kill himself is not.

With the discovery of his aircraft, however, that theory has been dredged up again in the French news media. It has been to protect him from the indignity of that charge — and to sustain a valuable myth — that Saint-Exupery's family has long opposed all searches for his aircraft. Presumably too they would prefer to avoid appropriating statements like that offered up by the mayor of Marseille. He greeted the news with the pronouncement that "Saint-Exupery's disappearance has become the symbol of the resistance and the liberation of Provence." Saint-Exupery's fate remains constant. It seems the myth will always be cultivated at the expense of the man.

What does change is The Little Prince, restored at last to what it was in its author's lifetime: a work of fiction. It has long carried a heavy load, more than any book should have to; no one ever expected P.L. Travers to be carried off by the west wind. Saint-Exupery's fairy tale is free again to tangle not with its author's enigma, but with the mysteries that so befuddled him: It is lonely among men; language remains the source of misunderstandings; more than ever, we rush around recklessly, recklessly uncertain of what we're looking for. It may be more difficult to lose an aircraft in the Mediterranean than once it was, but some riddles endure.

As do a few truths about Saint-Exupery's end. His was a noble death, made in the name of the greater good to which all of his literature returns. As his widow noted, the exit was custom-made, a meteoric fall at the end of a star-chasing life. (It was also an advantageous death. The French author who dies for France finds his copyrights extended for 30 years beyond the norm.)

The end shows every sign as well of having been the one Saint-Exupery wanted. In the 1930s he was asked if, given an already impressive catalog of close calls, he had come to prefer one death to another. Stipulating that his answer was not for publication until he was "truly dead," he opted for water. "You don't feel yourself dying," he reported, on uncomfortably good authority. "You feel simply as if you're falling asleep and beginning to dream." And there, surely, we can leave him.

Schiff, the author of Saint-Exupery: A Biography, is writing a book about Benjamin Franklin's years in Paris."