Book 840: Saint-Exupéry – Stacy Schiff

This one has been in my TBR pile for over a decade. Seriously, it’s been on my shelf since I heard Schiff speak at the first Boston Book Festival back in 2010. The one I really wanted to purchase at the time was her biography of Cleopatra, but couldn’t afford it.

I ended up waiting to read it until I could get a digital copy (don’t want to mess up that signature) and the last dozen or so times the library had one I either didn’t have the time or was feeling meh about reading a biography. This time however, after building up so many advance posts I figured I had the time and wanted to read some nonfiction so here we are.

Let’s start with the positives: Stacy Schiff is masterful in writing a memoir and Saint-Ex (I’m tired of doing the accent AND he was called that by his military compatriots) was a genius and a mess.

I distinctly remember being enthralled by Schiff as she talked about her research methods and how she got into her subject’s head, and it really shows in this book. The detail and scene setting are unparalleled but also totally overwhelming. There were a few occasions after I passed the halfway point where I questioned WHY Schiff needed to write thousands of words about a two-year period that seemed unproductive for Saint-Ex, but in the end, it worked out and I powered through. And I truly enjoyed the parallels Schiff made between Saint-Ex the author/writer/wannabe-philosopher and Saint-Ex the pilot.

Saint-Exupéry was a perfectionist, perhaps a more desirable trait in an aviator than in a writer. He corrected himself incessantly. (Chapter 1)

He procrastinated and procrastinated, hurriedly cobbled together a draft at the last minute, then revised over and over, beyond the point where he could comfortably do so. He played, in short, as fast and loose with the rules of journalism as with those of aviation. (Chapter 13)

And when you throw in her vocabulary again, stunning.

After a thousand tergiversations, it was agreed that the airplane would be ‘pushed to the edge of the airfield’ and that the suspects would be permitted to sit under its wings while awaiting a verdict. (Chapter 13)

Legit had a WTF moment because I had never seen that word and thankfully the Kindle could look up the definition of tergiversations for me.

As for Saint-Ex’s life, what a mess. Seriously, like I’m not sure how he survived through his early 20s let alone to disappear at age 44. You could say he never grew up and make it childlike and fascinating (think Peter Pan), but to me it just came across as elitist and holier-than-though, no matter how hard Schiff tried to both show this and counter it. He left a string of women behind him, he never really stopped depending on his mother, he was an even bigger diva than his wife (who he complained about), and even though he had friends that loved him, he was kind of a dick to them. All of this being said, I couldn’t help but identify with him when Schiff wrote the following.

In Algiers he had been known to read while he shaved and now he read while he flew. On July 6 he appeared immersed in a detective novel when he was meant to take a P-38 to Tunis. He read in the operations rooms as his aircraft was readied and continued to do so when he was called to the field. Ultimately a Jeep arrived to carry him off; he read all the way to the airstrip. ‘He reads on the field while everyone waits for him to deign to get into his aircraft; he reads in the Lightning while someone goes back to fetch his bags, which naturally he has forgotten; he refuses to let go of the book before departure on the pretext that only a few pages remain; and he takes off with the book on his knee,’ reported the logbook. On this or another occasion he circled the Tunis airfield for nearly an hour before landing. He said afterward he could not have approached the runway with a clear head had he done so without having learned the identity of the novel’s culprit. (Chapter 17)

You know those memes of kids or dogs in the mirror recognizing themselves with an overlay of “it me”, yeah.

As much as he annoyed me, Schiff seemed to do a better job writing about Saint-Ex’s personal relationships and personifying the author than she did about his works. At no point was I desperate to read any of the beautiful works she describes  the writing processes of in staggering detail which was a bit sad to me. I do want to read The Little Prince, as I don’t think I have ever actually read the book, so maybe I’ll do that in the near future.

One thing I was incredibly disappointed in was the quality of the Kindle edition of the book. The errors were egregious in the file. I’m not talking like one word here or there, but like legit famous people’s names being screwed up in some places but not others:

John Rarrymore claimed the role of Rivière and Lionel Rarrymore somehow ended up as Robineau; Helen Hayes, Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery, and Myrna Loy filled out the cast.” (Chapter 10)

There were a few other formatting issues, but it was a mess when it came to these types of things. Not only did I cross reference my printed copy of the book, I double checked to see if maybe there was a newer version and the library happened to have an older one but nope, same one currently for sale on Amazon, so it’s not like a one-off problem. I get that when this was released, way back in 2011, it was sort of the wild west when it came to e-books, but this was embarrassing.

Recommendation: To be completely honest, unless you REALLY love Saint-Exupéry or are obsessed with early aviation/world war history you could pass on this one. Schiff is an incredible writer and really brings everyone to life on the page, but it was not an easy read and there were definitely years it felt like Schiff could’ve skipped over and I would’ve been perfectly happy. I’m glad I read it and finally crossed it off my TBR pile, but it was a definite slog.

Opening Line: “The predicament of his birth is summed up by one encyclopedia in two words, “impoverished aristocrat”: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry began his professional life as a truck salesman.”

Closing Line: “From a decidedly earthbound life he culled the loftier moments and the best of these, with much effort, he committed to the page. The work adds up only to an armful, some of it dated, much of it flawed. But it is all of it rich in spirit: it makes us want to overreach ourselves. It makes us dream.” (Not whited out, as this is a work of nonfiction.)

Additional Quotes from Saint Exupéry
“The writer lives with some detachment from experience, which it is his task to recast; a pilot works his trade with a fierce immediacy, perfect presence. One may reshape events, the other must nimbly accommodate them.” (Introduction)

“‘Let me describe my life: It’s morning, it’s noon, it’s evening. Every day repeats itself, without any events more interesting than these. I read a little; I smoke a lot; I take walks of about a quarter-mile.’ It was, he would write time and again, a monk’s life.” (Chapter 1)

“There is one thing that will always sadden me, which is to have grown up.” (Chapter 2)

“With the flying, and with the drawing room of Captain Priou, he was not a long way off from seeing that “greatness comes first—and always—from a goal outside of oneself. As soon as one locks a man within himself, he becomes poor.” (Chapter 5)

“This was the methodical Daurat’s accomplishment; it was the mission he instilled in the bedraggled group of war veterans and young Turks who had assembled, Lord of the Rings-style, in Toulouse, and who were to become France’s first set of post—World War I heroes.” (Chapter 7)

“If indeed there are different kinds of silence, one of the densest in the world hung over these outposts of Patagonia, the southernmost settlements on the globe. The dwellers of this region had not seen their families in years; until the arrival of Aéropostale, they had been connected to the capital only by an unreliable ten-day boat service and Morse code. When the aviators appeared they did so, then, as heaven-sent emissaries. Five minutes after a landing in South America, observed Saint-Exupéry, hands were held out; in Patagonia, whole towns opened their doors.” (Chapter 9)

“Saint-Exupéry had given France something she had not seen since the days of Corneille and La Princesse de Clèves, when duty and honor reigned supreme; here was a tale of heroism, a slim, modern epic, one that might speak to the defeatism that had crept into the French novel since Madame Bovary . . . Night Flight is crisp and lean as well, classic in its proportions, a battle with the elements on a scale with The Old Man and the Sea.” (Chapter 10)

“He would protest always that journalism was beneath him—reporting and screenwriting were, to his mind, the twin vampires of the literary life—but his dispatches from this short trip are among his more successful efforts.” (Chapter 11)

“Between March 1936, when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, and March 1938, when he continued on into Austria, one could practically hear the heavy footfalls in the distance.” (Chapter 13)

“Like many banned books, Pilote de guerre soon became as popular—at least in reputation; copies were not easy to come by—as Gone With the Wind. (Saint-Exupéry was in good company: French collaborators objected as well to the Germans having passed Camus’s L’Étranger, and the Larousse Élémentaire was banned.)” (Chapter 15)