Writing and Books: Saint-Exupéry and waterspouts
Monday, July 20th, 2009But the man led an over-the-top life. He worked during the 1920’s as a pilot for Aéropostale, flying mail routes over Europe, Africa and, eventually South America. He flew during a time when pilots flew largely by line-of-sight. When something went wrong with their craft, they landed, pulled out tools, fixed them, and took off again. In 1935, Saint-Exupery and his navigator crashed their Caudron C-630 Simoun in the Libyan Sahara while attempting to set a new Paris-to-Saigon speed record. They’d been in the air for 20 hours. They had no idea where they were, and no rations or water. Yet they survived for four days, before a miraculous rescue by a Bedouin on camelback.
“Part of the fascination is the Frenchman’s Hemingwayesque identity as a man of action”, wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Benjamin Ivry in 2004. “Saint-Exupéry was never a flawless pilot, and he survived a number of serious crashes. Nevertheless, he flew mail planes in South America in the 1920s, including a mountain route from Buenos Aires to Patagonia that inspired his 1931 novel “Night Flight” as well as a 1938 essay collection, “Wind, Sand and Stars.”
My personal attraction to Saint-Exupery has little to do with desktop-calendar-ready “essential wisdom”, of which he produced plenty. In fact, I’ve never even found much magic in the “Little Prince”.
What amazes me is the mystery and adventure that flows around his story to this day, and the ability he had to capture vivid snippets of that life in prose.
Saint-Exupery died in a apparent plane crash over the English Channel during World War II, and nobody really knows whether he crashed or was shot down. But in 1998, a fisherman pulled up the author’s silver bracelet from the ocean floor, and two years later, a diver found the remains of Saint-Exupery’s P-38 Lightning off Marseilles.
Here’s an excerpt from Wind, Sand and Stars, in which the author describes part of the trans-South-Atlantic flight of his colleague Jean Mermoz:
… when Mermoz first crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane, as day was dying he ran foul of the Black Hole region, off Africa. Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising as a wall is built; and then the night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up; and when, an hour later, he slipped [back beneath] the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom.
Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling around those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight …
