THE LITTLE PRINCE & WHO MADE HIM
ONE SEES WELL ONLY WITH THE HEART.
European intellectuals reacted to the German invasion of 1940 in a variety of ways. Some, like Jean Paul Sartre and Louis Aragon, elected to stay in France and, in Aragon’s case, work for the Resistance, while others, including André Breton, Jean Renoir, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, fled to the United States, .
Among these exiles was Antoine de St Exupéry, who, although he spoke no English, felt he could do more there to persuade America to enter the war.
“St Ex”, as his friends called him, was then in his early forties, with a haphazard history as both author/philosopher and man of action - vocations which, as in the case of such contemporaries as T.E. Lawrence/Lawrence of Arabia, were intimately entwined. His mystical reflections in Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars made him famous and won many prizes, including the American National Book Award, while such aphorisms as "Aimer, ce n'est pas regarder l'un l'autre, c'est regarder ensemble dans la même direction" - “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction” – entered the language.
Antoine de St Exupery
St Ex was as skilled as Lawrence in, as one biographer put it, “backing into the limelight.” Celebrity automatically sought him out. He fell in love early with flying, but didn’t let it impede his reading; he once infuriated air traffic controllers by circling for an hour over an airport, explaining that he wanted to finish the book he was reading.
He became one of the pilots who, in primitive aircraft of wood and canvas, pioneered the first air mail routes across the Mediterranean to Africa and, later, over the Andes in South America. Intrepid but not notably expert, he survived a number of crashes. In 1935, he and a co-pilot came down in the Sahara while trying to break the Paris-Saigon record. Typically, they carried no food or water; just some grapes, two oranges, a madeleine, half a litre of coffee and some white wine. They set out in search of help, but, not expecting to survive, wrote last messages on the fabric of their plane. Four days later, close to death, they were rescued by Bedouins and taken to Cairo. But the hallucinating experience of those days in the desert provided the inspiration for The Little Prince.
In New York, St Ex did what he could for the French cause, although his efforts were complicated by a rivalry with Charles de Gaulle, self-appointed head of the Free French forces, whom St Ex regarded as dangerously right-wing. His injuries also limited the use of one arm and made it painful to turn his head. His translator introduced him to young journalist Sylvia Hamilton, with whom, though she spoke no French, he embarked on an affair. They spent afternoons in her apartment, where she cooked for him while he worked on The Little Prince. She shrugged off the communication problem. "One sees well only with the heart,” she told him, a line that found its way into the book.
He itched to get back to the war, having come to believe, as he told her in a letter, that it was “wrong is to live in New York when my people are at war and dying. Why am I not allowed on board a warplane to live a pure life?” He finally returned in the spring of 1943. His parting gifts to her were his camera and the manuscript of The Little Prince. She had a gold bracelet made for him as a souvenir. He wore it always. After the possibly suicidal 1944 crash into the Mediterranean that ended his life, it was all of him that survived - except, that is, The Little Prince, which has sold an estimated 140 million copies worldwide and been translated into over 505 languages, making it the second most translated work, after the Bible.
The Little Prince is the first book Samuél Lopez-Barrantes and I will be discussing in our next Paris Writers’ Salon, commencing on 19th February. As many of you will know, this is an on-line Zoom forum dealing with books and personalities connected with Paris and the literary life there. You can find more details here.
https://www.johnbaxterparis.com/paris-writers-salon
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The Little Prince draws on St Ex’s hallucinating experiences - “six years ago,” he writes, “when I broke down over the Sahara Desert….” , but also includes his relationship with Sylvia Hamilton. I met Sylvia Hamilton and discussed St Ex and the writing of The Little Prince with her. I also learned more about St Ex’s desert adventures and a surrealistic, not to say comic postscript to his rescue. I’ve incorporated these into a separate Substack posting, reserved for paying subscribers.