Adult Fairy Tale

THE LITTLE PRINCE--Antoine de Saint-Exupery--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2).

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, most metaphysical of aviators (Night Flight; Wind, Sand and Stars; Flight to Arras), has written a fairy tale for grownups. The symbolism is delicate and tenuous. It challenges man the adult, and deplores the loss of the child in man.

Saint-Exupery begins by saying that when he was six he drew a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an elephant. Says lie: "I showed my masterpiece to the grownups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them.

"But they answered: 'Frighten? Why should anyone be frightened by a hat?'

"My drawing was not a picture of a hat. . . . But since the grownups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so that the grownups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained."

Saint-Exupery then proceeds to explain numerous other things to grownups. Grounded in the Sahara, he is awakened by a little prince--"a most extraordinary small person," with "an odd little voice." Pipes the prince: "If you please--draw me a sheep!" Saint-Exupery instinctively complies (his naive little sketches are part of the book) and the little prince's autobiography unfolds:

On a tiny planet with three volcanoes and one rose, the contented prince watched the sunset 44 times in one day, tended his rose (served her breakfast, protected her from drafts). Tormented by the rose's awakened vanity, he departed, visited neighboring planets, talked with a king, businessman, lamplighter, geographer (each revealing his occupational foible), at last descended to earth.

Dumfounded when he saw a whole garden of roses, he wept bitterly. But a fox taught him wisdom and the nature of love, formulating a Saint-Exupery belief: "Tame me," the fox begged. "To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world. . . . You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose." The little prince returned to the garden of roses, was able to say: "You are not at all like my rose. As yet you are nothing." He realized that things become unique because of the time devoted to them.

Restored to love and responsibility, the prince must return to his rose. He proposes to take Saint-Exupery's sketch of the sheep (which will grow into flesh and bone). But sheep eat bushes--and the little prince demands a sketch of a muzzle.

Only after the prince has departed does the preoccupied Saint-Exupery remember he has neglected to draw a strap to hold the muzzle in place. Says he: "Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: Is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes. ..."

If the reader, staring at the sky after finishing this fairy tale, does care whether the sheep has eaten the flower, then, believes Saint-Exupery, the tale will have served its purpose. The reader will have been "tamed." And for Moralist Saint-Exupery, man's capacity to be tamed is the test of his goodness.

The Author. Antoine de Saint-Exupery served as pilot in a French reconnaissance squadron in 1940, last fortnight left the U.S. for active service against the Axis in Africa.

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