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EIGHT

Flights of Fancy

WHEN I TOOK A JOB TEACHING ANTHROPOLOGY at a provincial New Zealand University, some of my Cambridge friends warned that I would starve for want of intellectual stimulation and slowly go to seed. I didn’t need to be reminded; I knew that my future depended on publishing abroad and reaching an audience beyond my native shores.

At the University, I generally avoided the faculty club, preferring to buy a sandwich in the student cafeteria, find a quiet spot on the campus, and eat alone. It was a pattern I’d slipped into during my school days, though now it wasn’t shyness that made me keep my own company but the exigencies of writing. I wrote at home every morning before driving to the campus and needed an hour to myself in the middle of the day to take my mind off Africa. But there was always a time lag when I walked about in a daze, jotting down thoughts and images that related to what I had written that morning or planned to write next day. Often I would be startled to realize that I was staring vacantly into space, with only the haziest notion of where I was. I would snap out of my trance to see students walking along the gravel paths, descending the stone steps in the shadow of the great cedars, griping about boring lecturers and onerous assignments, or exchanging gossip about girlfriends, pop songs, and parties. I realized I was living a shadow life, absorbed in Africa, trying to recapture in words the sound and smell and sight of things I might not experience again for many years.

Sometimes it was my colleagues who brought me to my senses. Like the day I was running late for my two o’clock class on the Comparative Study of Myth, and parked my Citroën in a loading zone outside the main building. A week later I received a letter from a “Parking Committee” made up of faculty members, reprimanding me for persistently parking my vehicle in restricted zones. I was asked what gave me the right to act as though I were a law unto myself.

After that I went to the staff club a few times, to put in an appearance and meet people outside my own department. Mostly people talked about television programs or the best wines you could buy locally or the intrigues of various committees they were on. I felt out of place. I was too close to the laterite roads of northern Sierra Leone or too preoccupied by the lecture I had to give on myth. Besides, I didn’t watch television, have much interest in local wines, or sit on committees.

One day, a lecturer from the English Department noticed that I had borrowed Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things from the library. He snidely invited me to explain what it was about. Not realizing that I was expected to dismiss it as bullshit and thereby relieve him of having to read it, I naïvely summarized the argument—that Renaissance thought was characterized by a compulsive search for similitudes and correspondences, but in the early seventeenth century there was a sudden turn from the quest for synthetic resemblances to analytical methods for establishing identity and difference. I then said that I disagreed with Foucault’s view that the earlier paradigm was fully eclipsed by the rise of Enlightenment rationality. In my experience, the work of the imagination, including writing, is always driven by this search for signs, syntheses, auguries, blazons, analogies, and figures. “Ask anyone you know to recall the most memorable moment in his life and I’ll bet he’ll tell you a story about some fateful coincidence, some uncanny and inexplicable event, something that revealed a hidden connection between his life and the life beyond his immediate horizons.”

I can’t recall whether it was on this occasion or another that the talk got round to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Perhaps someone had seen a documentary on television or broached the subject of French wines. In any event, Peter Alcock, who had disapproved of Foucault, now declared that apart from Le Petit Prince, Saint-Exupéry had written nothing that excited real interest. I was struck by that phrase, “excited real interest,” because Peter looked as if nothing had excited him for a very long time.

I said I didn’t think Saint-Exupéry should be dismissed lightly, and that Saint-Exupéry had once been my favorite writer. In my late teens I had read everything by him and about him. I still remembered the revelatory impact of Saint-Exupéry’s view that the visible rests in the invisible and that an author’s task is to reveal unseen connections beneath the surfaces of our familiar world. Then, for some reason I still cannot fathom, I launched into an account of Saint-Exupéry’s last years.¹

When war was declared in 1939, Saint-Exupéry received orders to report for duty as a flying instructor at Toulouse-Montaudran. When he demanded to be assigned to active duty, he was reluctantly allowed to fly several reconnaissance missions over Germany, and won the Croix de Guerre for his flight to Arras in Belgium in 1940.

After the fall of France, Saint-Exupéry was demobbed. Knowing he could never live in France while it remained occupied, he made his way to America, where he endured two and a half years of isolation and inactivity. In early 1943, he joined a group of Free French sailing with the Americans to North Africa. At Oujda, the French were attached to the American Third Photo Group of the Seventh Army. The squadron was equipped with new P-38 Lightnings—fast, long-range aircraft adapted for strategic photographic reconnaissance. According to regulations, pilots had to be no more than thirty years of age, but an old friend of Saint-Exupéry’s in the French Command persuaded the Americans to allow the forty-three year old Saint-Exupéry to fly.

After one successful reconnaissance mission over France he was grounded—the result of a crash-landing. He was to spend almost a year in Algiers before he was permitted to fly again. Some of his friends put pressure on him to accept desk jobs or diplomatic assignments. Others agreed that he should be permitted to rejoin his group.

“The only thing that remained were the war missions,” he wrote, “a few hours spent flying over France—something of the dignity of an icy scaff old. It suited me fine. But being unemployed I have nothing to look forward to that means anything to me. Sickening discussions, polemics, slander—I’m bored by the morass I’m entering.... Everything is mediocre, I can’t stand it. At 35,000 feet I was beyond mediocrity. Now I no longer have that outlet.”

Finally, the Americans approved five more reconnaissance missions from a base at Alghero in Sardinia. Saint-Exupéry felt rejuvenated. He flew his five missions, surviving engine failure, fire on board, fainting due to lack of oxygen, and pursuit by German fighters.

In July 1944, the group was moved to Corsica in preparation for the final thrust to liberate France. Saint-Exupéry asked to be assigned further flying missions. His close friends were now desperately concerned for his safety and conspired to have him grounded.

He was permitted one final flight.

It was his tenth reconnaissance mission. Sortie No: XX 335 176. Date: July 31, 1944. Time out: 0845.

At 1 p.m. he had not returned. At 2.30 p.m., after numerous phone calls and radar and radio searches, his comrades and commanding officer knew there was no longer any hope of his still being airborne. At 3.30 an American liaison officer signed the interrogation report: “Pilot did not return and is presumed lost.”

For over fifty years, no trace of Saint-Exupéry or his aircraft would be found. What came to light, however, was that the Messerschmitt pilot who shot Saint-Exupéry down over the Mediterranean unwittingly killed his hero and role model. The young German not only owned all the French author’s works in translation; he knew everything that was to be known about him, and had enlisted in the Luftwaffe on the strength of his admiration of St-Exupéry’s pioneering flights across the Andes and the Sahara.

I have no idea how my colleagues responded to these details, but I do remember vividly running into Peter Alcock a few days later and being taken to task for the unsubstantiated story I had told. “Where did you get all stuff about Saint-Exupéry being shot down by someone who’d read all his books?” Peter asked. “I’ve been through all the critical biographies in the library and I’m damned if I can find any reference to any German airman who shot Saint-Exupéry down. You sure you got your facts right?”

I told Peter I had read the story in an introduction to one of Saint-Exupéry’s books. It had been an English translation. I couldn’t remember the title. I said I’d try to remember more details and get back to him.

Peter phoned me at home. He’d been doing some more checking and had come up with nothing. Was I sure of my source?

“Now you’ve got me mystified,” I said. I told him I would go through all the Saint-Exupéry books in the university library and see if I could find the one I had in mind. “It’s going back a few years, though,” I said. I could tell that Peter was beginning to suspect that I was putting him on.