Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“PILOTE DE GUERRE” by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
(first published in 1942; English language translation by Louis Galantiere
called “FLIGHT TO ARRAS”)
When
I was an undergraduate 40-plus years ago, doing a double major in English and French
at the University of Auckland, I was sometimes exasperated by the poor choice
of modern novels and other prose that were set as part of our French course. I
would have been happy to study in detail the poetry of Paul Valery, with which
I was able to catch up only years later; but instead we had foisted on us the
tired surrealism of Paul Eluard and the dated Marxist versifying of Louis
Aragon. I didn’t mind reading Anatole France’s Les Dieux ont Soif and La
Revolte des Anges, because at least the latter was kind of funny and the
former neatly cynical in a Voltairean sort of way. But how come we had a
middle-range non-classic yarn like Henri Troyat’s La Tete sur les Epaules thrust on us when we could have been reading
some Francois Mauriac or even Andre Malraux? I guess Camus’ L’Etranger was inevitable (it’s short
and simple enough to be read by freshers), but why did we have to put up with
Simone de Beauvoir’s incredibly tedious first volume of autobiography Memoires d’une Jeune Fille Rangee? And
what sheer insult to give us Boris Vian’s beatnik effort L’Ecume des Jours!
My
final impression was that, while the French Department’s range of older authors
was solid enough (Corneille, Racine, Moliere, l’Abbe Prevost, Voltaire,
Rousseau, Balzac, Flaubert etc.), the modern novels seemed to have been chosen haphazardly
and at the whim of French Department lecturers, and did not give us a good
range of what 20th century French literature had to offer.
But there was
one set 20th century French author I didn’t mind having to read, for
the same reason that I enjoyed reading Joseph Conrad. He intellectualised
physical action, and so for a weedy would-be intellectual like me, he became a
good substitute for physical action. This was the aviator author Antoine de Saint-Exupery
(1900-44). We were marched through his early novel Vol de Nuit (Night Flight),
and then in more detail his Terre des
Hommes (fancifully translated as Wind,
Sand and Stars).
I may be wrong,
but I’m fairly sure that Saint-Ex’s literary reputation has suffered a bit of
an eclipse in the last few decades. Of course there is still a huge audience
for his children’s book Le Petit Prince,
and sentimentalists from the 1960s can still burst out with the chorus
“L’important c’est la rose”. But perhaps Saint-Ex. was too much the man of his own
times. Like so many French authors of the mid-20th century (Malraux,
Camus, Sartre etc.), he was more-or-less existentialist in his views, but it
was a self-devised existentialism, not drawn from textbooks and café
discussions.
As a pioneer
aviator, mail-pilot (in South America), setter of international speed records
within the old French Empire (Paris to Saigon in record time), French Air Force
reconnaissance pilot and later pilot for the Free French – in which role he
went missing in his final sortie – Saint-Exupery was the man of action first
and the author second. But this was to lead to the accusation that his
existentialism was too masculinist, glorying in male athleticism, the courage
of the warrior and so forth. Some saw a crypto-fascist in him, even if his war
record was one of honourable resistance to Hitler.
I replayed all
these impressions in my mind recently when I read one of Saint-Exupery’s works,
which I did not get around to as a student.
Pilote de Guerre had a
difficult publication history. Saint-Exupery left France after the capitulation
in 1940 and went to America where he lived in New York for two years, spending
much of his time propagandising for American intervention against Hitler. It
was in America that he wrote Pilote de
Guerre. It was originally published in censored form in Occupied France in
1942. All negative references to Hitler and Germans were removed, making it a
straight account of reconnaissance sorties. Later it was banned outright in Vichy
France, although there were clandestine printings of it. Only after the Liberation
in 1944 was an uncensored version released in France. This was two years after the
complete version had become known in translation to English-speakers under the
title Flight to Arras.
Pilote de Guerre is not a novel but a
memoir with philosophical asides.
Saint-Exupery
gives his account of his reconnaissance missions with the French Air Force
during the Battle of France in mid-1940. As a pilot, accompanied by a navigator
and a gunner, he was asked to fly over and photograph the embattled town of
Arras. Defeat was already in the air. As Saint-Exupery repeatedly reminds us,
France’s smaller and largely agrarian population was pitted against Germany’s
larger, and largely industrialised population, and French forces were
outnumbered three-to-one.
The
reconnaissance mission seems pointless.
There are many
suggestions that at this point, French ground forces were simply “playing a
game” or going through the motions of fighting a war. Much of the book is
concerned with the psychology of defeat. There are vivid accounts of villages
deserted and left defenceless for no strategic reason, and even more vivid
descriptions of roads in northern France clogged with refugees to the point
where both their own movement and military manoeuvres are impossible.
There is also
the “sensual” description of the reconnaissance flight itself. The colour of
tracer bullets rising in rosary-like streams. The smoky blue murk rising from
destroyed villages. The movement of the ‘plane. This is intermixed with memories
of other actions by Saint-Exupery’s comrades in other sorties (17 of the 23
crews in his air-group had already been wiped out before Saint-Ex. took his
flight to Arras). And the hospitality of village billets recalls for him
childhood memories.
Significantly
the book opens with memories of his being in a classroom. Saint-Exupery is the
grown schoolboy going out to do his duty and undertaking a reconnaissance
mission like a homework assignment.
The mission
returns safely to base.
The last 20 or
so pages of Pilote de Guerre are a
philosophical essay, in which Saint-Exupery renews his humanism in the face of
military defeat. France is not defeated so long as it retains human beings who
accept their common humanity with others and look to the future. Saint-Exupery
implicitly rejects mere individualism (=anarchy), fascism (=the state) and
Marxism (=the collective). His faith is in an open society underpinned by a
sense of responsibility to all human beings. That is what he means by the term
“Man”. He likens this to, but does not identify it with, the traditional
Christian teaching of charity. What God once was, Man should now be – the
factor that unites us. As always, the difficulty of this concept of human
solidarity (as expressed, for example, in Mazzini’s Duties of Man) is how to teach or enforce it.
Pilote de Guerre is said
to have boosted respect for the French in wartime America by showing that some
of them had shown a warrior spirit and that they did fight a real campaign in
earnest before they were defeated.
Even so, from
this distance it reads mainly as an apologia for defeat – a sad and melancholy
book by a man who regretted that his compatriots did not have the same stomach
for the fight that he had.
Another memorial
of France’s greatest humiliation in the 20th century.
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