The Utopian

By Alexander Lee.

A sky signed with honour: remembering Antoine de Saint-Exupery in life, literature and flight.

_______________________________________________________________

Flight - like literature - has long since lost its romance. Inured to the sheer wonder of a mighty craft shaped from metal heaving its way into the sky and beyond, we have reduced the aeroplane to the status of a mere vehicle, just as words themselves have been brought to the level of mere function, means of transporting us from one point to another with the minimum of inconvenience. All sense of magic forgotten, businessmen and tourists jostle with irritation as they board their budget flights and, not even bothering to glance out of the window as the shimmering beast shudders into the air, settle down in uncomfortable seats to read the lurid details of celebrity gossip or leaf through the market news in earnest publications. At best, an unexpected blade of sunlight cutting through the clouds causes the crumpled traveller to squint, close the plastic blind in irritation against the landscape beyond, and return to pages cluttered with uninspiring jumbles of workaday words. There is, I feel, something quietly dead in such an attitude, some sense of withdrawing tacitly from dreams into the secure, unremarkable world of function.

Whenever I step out onto the tarmac of the local airport, my mind turns to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and wonder, wistfully, with what emotion he would have viewed the dispirited passengers so unmoved by the living wonder of the plane which stares so defiantly, yet reverentially at the Alpine foothills. Having listened with such excitement to my father’s tales of his own life as a pilot, I had adored Saint-Exupéry as a child. Burying myself in his books with more enthusiasm even than I devoted to building model aircraft, I discovered the mystery and wonder of flight laid out in words pulsing with the immense freedom he had enjoyed, lashed by Peruvian winds high above the Andes, scorched by the sun which burned relentlessly over the Sahara, and covered always by a dazzling panoply of stars. In those pages, so clearly, so passionately written, I too was caught up in the thrill of searching for safe passage between treacherous mountains shrouded with mist, the exhilarating uncertainty of night landings in the desert, and the almost inexplicable glory of seeing the world laid out far below from the open cockpit of a plane for the first time. Lost in those pages, I learned to dream beyond the earth.

A pioneer of flight, Saint-Exupéry lived to be above the clouds, soaring over the sands and weaving between the mountains. Long before it had become a mundane convention of our material age, flight was an adventure; an adventure for which he seemed to exist from the first moment of encountering its addictive charms. Born in Lyon on 29th June 1900, he eagerly absorbed news of the early, heady days of powered flight and throughout his youth nurtured a fascination for man’s capacity to reach beyond the earth. He dreamed of flying and strove to be among the clouds. Having been called up for military service in the years following the First World War, Saint-Exupéry was attached to one of the early French fighter units stationed at Strasbourg as a mechanic. Undeterred by his ineligibility for officer training, however, he learned to fly privately and, despite early brushes with danger, he was eventually accepted into a squadron at Le Bourget in 1923. He never turned back.

In looking at Saint-Exupéry, one is struck by the continual opposition of earth and sky. His personal life was never anything less than chaotic, but the yearning for flight remained a constant. There is, indeed, a perceptible contrast between the disorder and distress of his earth-bound existence and the unique freedom he found in the air running through his life. In a sense, seated in the open cockpit of an unreliable aeroplane, he found a liberty and a serenity which he never found on the ground. His engagement to Louise de Vilmorin during the early 1920s is an illustration of this dialectic of earth and sky, and a demonstration of the tension between mundane material aspirations and dreams of adventure.

The daughter of a wealthy French seed merchant, Louise was a creature of the world, a child of the all too material environment into which she had been born. Although he had fallen madly in love with her, she was in her character and desires perhaps the antithesis of all that moved Saint-Exupéry’s soul. An enchanting queen of the social world, she was beautiful, captivating and legendarily irascible. Unable - or unwilling - to understand or support his burning passion for dangerous flights over inhospitable lands, and wedded to the whirl of Parisian life, Louise was perhaps never a suitable match. He chaffed against her family’s agitation for him to abandon his obsessive longing for flight; baulking at his demanding nature, she in her turn urged him to embrace a more solid, dependable career that placed his feet firmly on the ground. It was not long before the engagement collapsed and, wounded by the loss, Saint-Exupéry returned to the sky.

The parting from Louise was ultimately a release. It was, in a sense, his second birth; the end of his earth-bound existence and the true beginning of his enchanting romance with the sky. Unfettered by the mundane, he gave himself entirely to the heady dreams of the air and, joining the Latécoère airline company in 1926, instantly found his niche. Later to become Aéropostale, Latécoère was exploring new airmail routes in South American and Africa. Equipped with unreliable aircraft which carried only imperfect navigational tools and frustratingly temperamental radios, Latécoère was undoubtedly a dangerous company for which to work. In seeking out new routes over treacherous lands often populated by hostile peoples, pilots were at constant risk and by 1930, well in excess of one hundred pilots and passengers had died in crashes or attacks following forced landings. Yet, thanks in no small part to the leadership of Didier Daurat, the five years which Saint-Exupéry spent with Latécoère were the most exhilarating of his life. It was, in many ways, an almost Icarian endeavour. The very uncertainty of the flight, the faint doubt that such dreams were - as more practical men may have warned - indeed impossible, proved only a goad. Fearing the sight of deathly cliffs looming out of impenetrable snowstorms, nomadic tribesmen appearing out of the desert in search of loot and sudden unseen downdrafts, every journey was a duel between death and human aspiration. Threatened by engine failures, navigational errors and fuel leaks, it was the sheer power of the dream, the allure of the ideal which drove Saint-Exupéry and his comrades to fly - like Icarus - as close to the sun as they dared. But though there were losses shared with stoical respect in the common memory of these heroic dreamers, Icarus soared triumphant, granted the glory of the skies.

Saint-Exupéry continued flying for many years after leaving Latécoère. In 1932, he dramatically overturned a seaplane and four years later, endured a remarkable crash in the Libyan desert. The adventure of flight never left his blood. But, for Saint-Exupéry, flight was more than just an adventure: it provided a lens through which to view the world. Perhaps, staring down at the earth beneath him from his freezing plane, the ant-like figures which he could pick out on the vast carpet of land seemed truly visible for the first time. Rising above the twittering of neighbours, the petty quarrels over market stalls and the monotonous pace of the weary, as much as above the towering monuments of Morocco and the wild celebrations of mountain villages, he saw humanity as it was and as it could be. This sense of observing benignly with the spirit of an ideal in his heart is inscribed on every page of his writings. Throughout his works, flight is an almost Romantic metaphor for an escape from the mundane and the everyday, a euphemism for the Romantic zeal of an unrepentant dreamer looking out upon creation with a sense of possibility.

In Wind, Sand and Stars, Saint-Exupéry sees human beings through the lens of dreams, as creatures capable of reaching to grasp the ideal, and, just as he despairs of their recalcitrance, so he speaks to their immense capacity for the wonderful. Looking around at businessmen and bureaucrats on a bus journey, he acquires the aura of the prophet, one granted the privilege of seeing beyond to what all men have laid before them in human possibility. This gives expression both to sorrowful reflection and an impassioned lust for the life of dreams. Everyone, he sees, must dream in their way and all men have the capacity for wonder within them. One man may dream of being a poet, another a musician, a third an astronomer. But not all have the courage to follow their dreams, and not all dreams are fostered. The immense capacity for beauty and wonder which men alone possess is left to wither and die. They protect themselves against the dangers which Icarian fancies entail and embrace instead the turgid security of a material life. In ordinary life, men are buffeted by the storms of fortune and the winds of chance and Saint-Exupéry did not blame his fellow travellers on that journey for rolling themselves ‘into [their] ball of bourgeois security, [their] routines, the stifling rituals of [their] provincial existence’ or for building their ‘humble ramparts against winds and tides and stars.’ For such as these do not seek to ‘ponder great questions’ or ‘dwell on a wandering planet’ or ask themselves ‘unanswerable questions’. There was no blame for the life they led as he observed them in the bus, for they had left their dreams far behind. Blame had no part to play, where the die had long ago been cast. ‘No man ever grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time,’ he mourned, ‘Now the clay that formed you has dried and hardened, and no man could now awaken in you the dormant musician, the poet or the astronomer who perhaps once dwelt within you.’ Working merely for material gain, such men had built a prison for themselves. Following this life, Saint-Exupéry wrote later in the book, ‘we enclose ourselves in isolation; our coin turn to ashes and buy nothing worth living for.’

The fact that dreams were sacrificed so readily tormented him. One night, Saint-Exupéry spotted a sleeping child nestled between its parents while on a train journey. Although he was bedded down in clothes that were little more than rags, his face was captivatingly beautiful. Leaning to look closer, Saint-Exupéry said to himself: ‘this is a musician’s face, this is Mozart as a child, this face promises a life filled with beauty. Little princes in legend were just like him: protected, cultivated, what might not he become?’ Using an image which he was later to repeat in Le Petit Prince, Saint-Exupéry reflected that when the fate of nature brings forth a new rose in a garden, ‘all the gardeners are stirred’. Caring and fostering the rose with all their skill, they encourage its growth and delight in its flower. ‘But,’ he observed, ‘for men there is no gardener.’ Succoured by a material world scornful of dreams, fearful of flying close to the sun, the Mozart in the child is condemned. The dreaming gardener in Saint-Exupéry rebelled. Although from his plane and on his travels, he had witnessed eastern tribes living in squalor, and privation of every variety, he was troubled not ‘by these hollows nor by these humps, nor this ugliness,’ but by the oppression of a grinding reality, the imprint of a wilful mediocrity, the suppression of what could be: what troubled him was ‘a part of the murder of Mozart in every one of these men.’

But yet still his faith remained. Still, behind this sorrowful reflection lay a profound, humanistic optimism. This capacity to pursue dreams, to embrace the ideal in defiance of the material world, to soar above the mundane mediocrity of coin and function, was the very essence of humanity for Saint-Exupéry. As Daedalus had built the wings so that he and his son might escape Crete, it was for Icarus to fly beyond their function merely for the sake of flying. So, for men to be human, it is for them to transcend their animal functionality, to embrace the burning spirit of dreams, dreams which fulfil no function but that they are dreams. Some may fall, burned by the intensity of the ideal which they pursue, but they will fall filled with the spirit of what it is to be human. ‘Only the Spirit, breathing upon the clay,’ Saint-Exupéry wrote, Zarathustra-like, at the very end of Wind, Sand and Stars, ‘can create Man’ and it was this Spirit which he sought to stir. It lay in all and to all fell the gardener’s task of nurturing it. For his own part, he claimed no greatness, no uniqueness, but in his pursuit of flight, his urgent need to rise beyond the earth, he saw to the heart of the human. Locked in solitary battle with the ‘dark dragons and the crests crowned with a mane of blue lightening’ he charted his course by the stars. With danger all around, relying on nothing but the thought to go where some thought it impossible, he lived according to his spirit, and embraced the magic of dreams. On those lonely, brilliant flights, he was alive; he was truly human.

Saint-Exupéry’s writing is, however, more than a philosophical reflection on humanity: it is a window on literature itself, a rallying cry for literature as a humanistic enterprise. Just as his life in flight was an evocation of the Spirit and points towards the power of human dreams, so his writing itself was a manifestation of the ‘inner Mozart’ he extolled and a reflection of the humanism of literature.

In the same way as flying has become the instrument of the material world, literature itself has become mundane and the practice of writing a depressing affirmation of the limitations of the everyday world. For their subjects, many books recently published take for their theme either the iniquities of a grinding reality or the senseless escapism of a crude imagination. The tensions of intercultural societies, the torments of war, the plots of shady religious organisations, and similar themes are the common currency of the literature of the present. No doubt some are worthy subjects and even above reproach to some extent: they are, in many ways, a reflection of the concerns and preoccupations of contemporary society, and as such cannot be called into question according any completely satisfactory standard of judgement, no matter how appealing it is to recommend an entirely idealistic fiction. But it is not subject matter itself which is in question. In his works, Saint-Exupéry himself addressed profoundly real subjects. Flight to Arras, for example, details a reconnaissance mission over Nazi-occupied France in 1940. Southern Mail addresses his time as officer in charge of a calling station at Cap Sud in northern Africa. Le Petit Prince, by contrast, is a work of pure imagination, fantastical and allegorical from beginning to end. The question is rather one of language.

Looking over at the gossip columns, or the market news, or recent novels read by fellow passengers on flights, I am almost inevitably filled with a sense of depression merely by the words themselves. The language is turgid and dry, functional and somehow Anglo-Saxon in its resolute pragmatism. No word is spared. Each word communicates a meaning which corresponds to common usage and the structures employed are clearly accessible to the most undemanding of readers. It trades on the commerce of language, and relies on the public nature of the words. It is, in short, tied to the world. There is no word, no expression, no phrase which does not evoke the conversation of the streets, the discussions of business meetings, or the chatter of friends. The level-headed will perhaps claim that this reflects the function of each form of writing, while the economically-minded will assert that this is simply an example of literature and journalism simply following the demands of the market. Egalitarians may even say that this workaday language is in the spirit of public access to literature and thus above criticism. Whatever their complexion, such attempts at defence can be encapsulated as a desire to bring language, like flight, down to the level of a mere commodity and just as - reading Saint-Exupéry - I cannot but feel a burning sense of grief at the loss of adventure in flying, so I must reject the suppression of humanity in language implied by such an urge.

It is true that language relies on its shared nature for meaning. Words can only be understood if they are commonly comprehensible and for the communication to take place, we rely on the existence of implicit and explicit rules governing their possible combinations. Just as in a game, certain moves can be understood as corresponding to the rules, so in language, a phrase or sentence can be understood in relation to the rules which apply to its component parts. Particular words can only be employed in certain ways, in specific combinations and the ‘meaning’ of words is a function of the totality of their potential uses. By virtue of its being a public means of communication, language demands shared rules that are known to all. In some sense, therefore, language is a functional enterprise. Its existence is at some level bound to the commonplace. It is at root workaday and conventional, and must be so. In this respect, it is like the view of the plane in today’s world: we are able to see it as taking us from one point to another because we treat it as conventional, and do not get sucked into treating it as some means of indulging private fantasies which have no relation to the real world understood by everyone else.

Yet this is only part of the picture, and to think otherwise is to neglect language’s capacity to reflect all that is profoundly human. Although language is indeed workaday and conventional at one level, and meaning is derived from its shared nature, it is capable also of leading us above, beyond, into another world. Like the shaky, unreliable planes that carried Saint-Exupéry above the Sahara and into the Peruvian mountains, it can take us far beyond the mundane if only we are willing to push it further, and go beyond the functional. If, for Saint-Exupéry, the human is bound up with our ability to indulge dreams and transcend the limitations of the everyday world, so in language, the humanistic writer must compel words to reach past their commonplace roles. Language has rules, it is true, and relies on them, but rules can be bent and yet leave it still comprehensible. New meanings can be added with radical inventiveness, while yet still remaining accessible. New moves can be made in this wonderful, infinite game and yet play can continue, enriched and enlivened. While we can understand words through their correspondence to commonly understood rules, the manner in which we are willing to employ them for new uses, to forge new rules, to give new meanings, is an affirmation not of our enslavement to function and norms, but an expression of our own inner selves, a statement of personality, life and spirit. Saint-Exupéry’s style in all his writings is simple and unadorned, but there is a wonderful, childlike innocence is his uncommon lexical practice; each sentence consolidates and restates his Icarian spirit in its very structure. The same, indeed, could be said of Nabokov: delicate wordplay infuses every line with feeling and new horizons of language, never before imagined, are opened up to the reader. Joyce, Faulkner and Woolf, in their different ways, also suggest themselves as examples. In treating language not merely as something static and functional, but as something susceptible to all the imaginative powers of the human mind, the manipulation of words becomes a humanistic enterprise in itself, and writing, pursued for its own sake, is a humanistic experience. Functionless, beautiful, wonderful, magical, real and unreal all at the same time, it may lift us above the mundane world and into the infinite possibilities of the human spirit. In language, as in life and in flight, we may pursue the truly human. It must be a flight of humanity.

Stepping out into the street as a plane flies overhead on its way to Rome, or London, or Frankfurt or a hundred other possible destinations, I cannot but feel Saint-Exupéry’s powerful resonance for the present, even in the very words we speak. In the midst of economic crisis, with headlines daily growing more grindingly depressing, and political crises making the material world ever more grindingly immediate, there is a greater need than for many years past to recall the humanistic implications of Saint-Exupéry’s love of flight and dreams of life above the world. When it is all too easy to become mired in the mundane concerns of everyday life, it is an essential responsibility of humanity to remember itself and its potential, and a particular responsibility of literature to bear this always in mind. In literature, as in life, the force of dreams is the core of what makes us human, and subservience to function alone the antithesis of our very nature. There is a burning need for the reawakening of a living Icarus in all things: a revival of the urge to fly for the sake of flying, to soar close, ever closer to a distant sun. Like Stephen Spender, I feel the urge to think of those, like Saint-Exupéry, ‘[w]hose lovely ambition | was that their lips, still touched with fire, | should tell of the spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.’ For,

‘What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the Spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.’