Earth & Air

SAINT-EXUPERY (330 pp.) -- Marcel Migeo--McGraw-Hill ($5.95).

For grouchy skeptics who asked whether the machine age had given the human race anything except autos and creeping concrete, air conditioning and smog. Antoine de Saint-Exupery had an impassioned answer. Man's great new gift was the earth, seen from the air. "Saint-Ex" despised the age, but accepted its gift with a mystical joy. He reacted to flight as Coleridge did to opium, with occasionally calamitous results, and wrote of the air--in Night Flight, Flight to Arras and Wind, Sand and Stars--better than anyone since.

Saint-Ex was born in 1900, and so was too young for combat flying during World War I. It was the only omission of a flamboyant career, and the flyer made up for it by his death in 1944, when, overage and stiff from crash wounds, he disappeared over the Mediterranean at the controls of a U.S. reconnaissance plane. The legend he left is a rare compound of literary brilliance and high gallantry; no biographer, including the present one, has been wholly successful in dealing with it.

Perilous Release. Author Migeo's reaction to the legend is an irritating grandiloquence and an equally bothersome coyness about his subject's personal life. Saint-Ex's mistress, for instance, is chivalrously called "Madame X," and her long and intense affair with him is left vague. Still, the biography has its value; the author, a pilot himself, knew Saint-Ex when they were both in flying school. Although, with typical exuberance, he calls his subject "a genius among the great men of his era," he is no hero-worshiper where Saint-Ex's flying is concerned.

The tall, shambling French aristocrat was a good pilot, in Migeo's estimation, but not a great one, despite great skill and daring. Saint-Ex's grievous flaw, one that involved him in a dozen crashes and near-crashes, was his absentmindedness. He flew for release, if not escape, and once released, his thoughts did not linger on altimeter or compass. His magnificent Flight to Arras is as much a meditation as it is the log of a dangerous reconnaissance mission into German-occupied French territory. With German fighters closing in, the aviator muses for paragraphs about the country home in which he spent his boyhood; flying through murderous anti-aircraft fire, he recalls dreamily a childhood game of running through raindrops. Unbelieving readers may take these passages as literary inventions after the fact; Biographer Migeo suggests convincingly that they probably occurred to Saint-Ex just as he said they did.

Wild Chances. As a boy in Burgundy, Antoine was a loving, charming bully to his widowed mother and the rest of the Saint-Exupery children, but only acute hindsight could find anything extraordinary in the child. Even flying did not capture him immediately. He learned to pilot a plane to while away his period of army service, liked it despite a training crash that cracked his skull. For three years after he was demobilized. Saint-Ex clerked for a tile firm.

In 1926, tired of tile and unable to finish a novel. Saint-Ex got the job that shaped his life--piloting for what, in aviation history, is known simply as "The Line." The Latecoere airline (a forerunner of Air France) ran from Toulouse to Dakar and later to Buenos Aires. Much of the route was mountainous and motors were asthmatic; when a connecting rod shattered over the Pyrenees, Saint-Ex wrote, "one would simply throw in one's hand.'' To the young flyer, the danger seemed glorious. He idolized the old pilots and the tyrannical manager of the line. Didier Daurat. whom he made the model for the hero of his novel Night Flight. It was not long before Saint-Ex himself was a legend of The Line; he took wild chances in the air, spent his money even more wildly on the ground. (Once he bought a slave from some Moorish tribesmen and set him free.)

Pointless Gallantry. Saint-Ex never piloted regularly for The Line after Night Flight was published in 1931. But a successful literary career was not enough and in the late '30s he made two attempts at long-distance flights. Both voyages ended in crashes, one in Guatemala and the other in the Sahara. Characteristically, while waiting to be rescued in the desert, he kept himself company with his musings, later spun the incident into his delightful children's tale. The Little Prince.

After World War II broke out. Saint-Ex flew reconnaissance missions against the advancing German army. As he and the other pilots knew well, the gallantry was pointless; French forces were too disorganized to have any use for photos of racing tank columns. He fled to New York when France surrendered, and in 1943, after two years of trying, he persuaded the U.S. brass to waive the age limit and let him fly with a reconnaissance squadron based in Italy. Biographer Migeo offers some new evidence to support the theory that he was shot down by a German pilot on his last mission. A pilot's remark, set down in Wind, Sand and Stars, makes his epitaph: "It's worth it, it's worth the final smashup."

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