The Pilot Whose Book Soared

• Miho Nagano
• On 5:36 pm EST, Thursday November 5, 2009

Antoine de Saint-Exupery flew to the top, showing what a dreamer can do with passion and pen.

The French aviator steered planes across the Sahara Desert and South America while carrying mail.

During the 1920s' early days of aviation, planes were shaky, sending many pilots into crash landings.

The next decade, Saint-Exupery almost reached the same fate. When his plane crashed into the Sahara on the way from Paris to Saigon in 1935, he and his navigator had no idea where they were. And their reserve tank of water was destroyed.

While walking for three days in search of help, they had only a thermos of coffee to drink. Dehydrated, Saint-Exupery saw hallucinations in the sand.

On the fourth day, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them. They survived. Eight years later, Saint-Exupery turned the near-death experience into a novel: "The Little Prince."

It became a smash hit -- the most printed fairy tale of the 20th century. The book was translated into close to 200 languages and sold over 80 million copies. Only the Bible, "The Lord of the Rings" and a few other books have sold more.

In the book, a pilot crash-lands in the Sahara and meets a prince from another planet who is trying to find the meaning of life.

A fox, waxing philosophic, tells the little prince: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

The prince talks about a precious rose that grows on his planet. After he finds that roses are common flowers on Earth, he cries because he believes his planet's flower was the only one in the world and special.

It's OK, says the fox, who urges the prince to love his own rose: "You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."

Meanwhile, the crash-landed pilot is rescued from the desert, as Saint-Exupery was.

A Little Emotion

Such messages in the book have touched millions of adults and children. "It is a fairy tale that inspires and stirs every imaginable feeling among readers," said Howard Scherry, who runs New York-based Remembering Saint-Exupery, an outfit dedicated to his memory.

"No one can read 'The Little Prince' without seeing themselves in it," he said.

"Saint-Exupery was a mystic and a dreamer," Stacy Schiff, author of "Saint-Exupery: A Biography" told IBD by e-mail, calling him "a man in constant search of escape; the plane and the page were his refuges."

Saint-Exupery (1900-44) is often tabbed as the French version of Ernest Hemingway. Both covered the Spanish Civil War as newspaper correspondents and traveled the world. The two men then drew on their experiences in their literature.

Yet the Frenchman was no boxer like the American.

"Saint-Exupery was not macho," Scherry said. "This man was scarred by a half-dozen accidents ... but he was not a chest-pounder."

Scherry lauds Saint-Exupery for his sense of responsibility: deliver the mail and fight for your country.

Saint-Exupery was born in Lyon, France. His father, an insurance salesman, died of a stroke before the boy turned 4. His mother, Marie, had to support five children without a steady income.

At 8, Antoine may have heard about the flying craze that reached France in 1908, the year the American aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright flew around Le Mans and thrilled the people on the ground.

Saint-Exupery simply caught the flying bug early. At just 12, he rode in a plane while on vacation in Amberieu, near Lyon. A friendly pilot took him up after spotting him hanging around the hangars.

Saint-Exupery was smitten. He would be obsessed with flying the rest of his life.

While on the ground, he was into poetry. He often went to his mother's bedroom at night, woke her up and insisted on reading his poems to her, according to one biography, "The Winged Life," by Richard Rumbold and Margaret Stewart.

The year Saint-Exupery turned 21, he joined France's air force and went to Strasbourg to study up. He needed the training; he was known as a brave pilot, but a flighty one.

"It was an adventure to fly with Saint-Ex," said a comrade who later served in the same unit with him in World War II, according to "The Winged Life."

The comrade always had to remind Saint-Exupery to lower his landing gear.

Soon enough he was grounded anyway. He set aviation aside for his fiancee, Louise de Vilmorin, because her family opposed her engagement to a poor pilot.

Now he was sitting in an office in Paris. Unable to spread his wings, he grew miserable. That was just with his job. After a year, his fiancee said she no longer loved him.

With a broken heart, he started flying again in 1926. This time he did it on the civilian side, piloting planes for the Aeropostale airmail service.

His job: carry mail from France to Africa, a particularly dangerous route; if the plane crashes in the desert, the pilot is just about doomed from the heat.

Saint-Exupery was on the rise. Soon he was Aeropostale's manager at Cape Juby by the Western Sahara. Then he took over as operations chief in Argentina, where he met his wife, Consuelo Suncin.

All the while, he kept flying. And while in Africa, many of his paths were over deserts, full of hazards.

Pilots faced sandstorms and tribesmen shooting at them from the ground. Even so, Saint-Exupery loved the work. Flying across the Sahara inspired him to write his first novel, "Southern Mail."

He had another inspiration in 1935. Saint-Exupery and his mechanic saw a challenge in the public arena: break a flight time record from Paris to Saigon and win 150,000 francs offered by the French air ministry. Then came the crash and near death.

From that, Saint-Exupery wrote "Wind, Sand and Stars." The book included the desert fox that would color "The Little Prince."

After World War II broke out in 1939, Saint-Exupery leapt back into the French air force for reconnaissance flights.

That didn't last long. Germany conquered his country the next year, so he fled to New York City. While in America he tried to join the fight to free France, but was denied because he was past 40.

He had no wings, but he had a pen. So he started to write "The Little Prince."

The Frenchman was desperate to get his wings back. He got his wish soon after "The Little Prince" came out. Now 43, he was flying an Allied warplane over North Africa.

On July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupery took off from a base on the island of Corsica to collect photo intelligence of German troops.

He never came back.

At Sea

After his plane's remains were found in the Mediterranean in 2003, many pondered what happened. Was he shot down? Did his plane fail? Did he commit suicide? No one could answer definitively.

Saint-Exupery's friend Leon-Paul Fargue, a French poet, once said of his disappearance: "He left permanent wounds in the hearts of those who saw him smile, even once."

While many who knew him described him as an aristocrat, Saint-Exupery felt a strong bond with working-class people. "Those who give themselves to labors of love go straight to my heart," he wrote.

Saint-Exupery was simply a man of action. "He is not a man for a pipe," Scherry said. "There is no Peter Pan in Saint-Exupery. This is a man whose every day was creative -- a man truly focused on the duty at that time."

Buzz up!