Flying in the face of convention

ON 31 July 1944, just two weeks before the Allied landings and the liberation of Paris, Antoine de Saint-Exupery took off solo from Bastia in Corsica on what, according to the logbook, was intended to be a mapping mission east of Lyons. He did not return, and his fate has never been discovered. Lost, and finally pronounced dead, he was re- surrected into myth as a hero who championed a particularly mystical version of masculinity. He has even made it on to the 50-franc note. His most popular and enduring book, The Little Prince, sells some 125,000 copies a year in America alone.

But the myths, his newest biographer asserts, disguise him: "Perhaps because he lived so much tangled up in paradox, Saint-Exupery was fated to be misconstrued. He slips through nets, embraces inconsistencies. As a pioneer, he lived in the past; as a manof science, he believed above all in instinct; as a writer, he mistrusted language - and intellectuals. He shied from the trappings and obligations of the aristocratic life while retaining a world view that was entirely seigneurial. He staked his reputation on the fraternity of men and yet was in his heart an el itist and in his life unclubbable, drafting hymns to discipline and duty while routinely pushing the limits of both."

His life certainly makes racy telling. Born into an impoverished aristocratic family which he helped to impoverish further with profligate demands on his beloved mother, he began his professional life as an unsuccessful truck salesman. By 1929 he had distinguished himself as a pilot and published a first novel. Before another five years had passed he was unemployed, living hand-to-mouth. His dare-devil adventures and astonishing escapes from numerous plane crashes, on one occasion surviving four days without water in the desert, passed into legend.

He won a handful of prestigious prizes, among them the Prix Femina, the American bookseller Association's National Book Award and the Academic Francaise's Grand Prix du Roman, for books that remain modern classics, at least in France. He was briefly engaged to Louise de Vilmorin, who went on to number Andre Malraux among her conquests, married a Surrealists' dream of a child-woman who made him very unhappy, and had a stream of love affairs while also sustaining many close friendships.

What emerges insistently from this sympathetic portrait drawn by a biographer unashamed to make an imaginatively affectionate identification with her subject, is the sheer charm and lovability of the man. Deprived of paternal love at the age of only three, when his father died unexpectedly in a railway waiting room of a stroke, the child gave all his adoration to his mother, who was: "unceasingly compassionate, attentive, giving and pious, all qualities her elder son would put to the test... Her husband'sdeath made her presence doubly felt, which had on Antoine an effect that defies the laws of physics; he could not get enough of her." Not surprisingly, surely. Any child with four siblings and a mother he adores will learn early on about jealousy and possessiveness. Any man brave enough to continue into adult life proclaiming his love and need for his mother as vociferously as Antoine did is unusual and interesting. He was demanding, his mother wrote: "He followed me throughout the house like a shadow,his little lacquered chair in hand, so that he might sit down at my hand wherever I was."

He wanted stories from her, and he wrote his own: "He wrote his poems mostly at night, when he prowled the house in search of an audience. Draped in a blanket or a tablecloth, he routinely woke his brother and sisters for dramatic readings of his newly minted verse. His protesting siblings in tow, he then led the way to Madame de Saint-Exupery's room, where he would light a lamp and energetically repeat his performance, often prevailing until 1 am."

It was a habit he maintained all his life - keeping his friends up all hours to listen to his latest draft, prodding them awake when they nodded off, sliding pages under their doors if they escaped him and went to bed.

After a childhood spent mostly in his grandmother's chateau near Lyons, enveloped in maternal warmth and understanding, by turns wild and turbulent, sensitive and dreamy, he was packed off to school in Le Mans. France at this time took the lead in the newly developing science of aviation, and the local airfield hosted such stars as Wilbur Wright. Antoine quickly discovered a passion for flying, much against his mother's wishes, and despite having to fumble his way through various academic courses, managed to train as a mechanic and learn to fly.

He lived through the First World War as a student in Paris, not too much affected by distant brutalities, served his time post-war as a dilettante in search of fun and a cause to believe in, and suddenly found himself when he became a pilot for the new company Aereopostale, which by 1930 had become the most extensive airmail operation in the world. He started off flying the Toulouse-Barcelona-Alicante line, then, as the network expanded into empire, moved into North-West Africa, which would become his place of dream and myth. Living and working in remote places with groups of other men, he developed his marvellous skills as raconteur, wit, magician, friend, a veteran of all-night suppers culminating in perfectly timed comic turns and dazzling displays of card tricks.

He seems effortlessly to have enchanted his colleagues, and all who met him. He did so partly by being simply a good copain, and partly by his own transgressing of restrictive social codes: he was direct and honest and very funny. His paeans to men in groups, to the joys of male bonding probably, as Stacy Schiff asserts, testify to his desire to create a masculine ideal in the absence of his lost father, but they also seem prosaic and utilitarian. Single-sex was just the way it was: there weren't a lot of woman around on French airfields in Africa at the time. As well as attracting women, he may also have felt ambivalent about them, as he certainly did about domesticity as both bower of bliss and entrapment.

He seems to have made the most of the prevailing sexual double standard, in his aristocratic way. Discreet flings with ladies subsequently expected to be cool and sophisticated when he left were one thing; cheerfully open infidelity, such as practised byhis wife Consuelo, was quite another. Trans-cendence was the name of the game: when it all got too much, you simply rose above it, saw life in the abstract and flew. At the level of life as family romance, you could say he kept on ducking and diving, searching for a father in those lonely deserts, constantly returning to a host of mothers, taboo satisfactions.

It is impossible to summarise the extraordinary adventures recounted of this eccentric man with his large figure and shambling gait, his jokes and tenderness, his exile's despair and irritability, his poet's nose for humbug. Perhaps the best compliment to pay his partisan biographer is that she sends you winging back to the books he wrote.