Airman's Odyssey
Authors: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
IX. Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
Copyright 1939 by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Copyright renewed 1967 by Lewis Galantière
Copyright 1942, 1932 by Harcourt, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 1984 by Harcourt, Inc.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 1900â1944.
Airman's odyssey
Translation of 3 stories from French.
Reprint. Originally published: New York:
Reynal & Hitchcock, [1943]
Contents: IntroductionâWind, sand and starsâ
Night flightâFlight to Arras.
1. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 1900â1944âTranslations, English. 2. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 1900â1944âBiography. 3. Authors, Frenchâ20th centuryâBiography. 4. Air pilotsâFranceâBiography. 5. World War, 1939â1945âPersonal narratives, French. I. Title.
PQ2637.A274A2 1984 848'.91209 84-10497
ISBN 978-0-15-603733-4 (pbk.)
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eISBN 978-0-544-12808-8
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He was expecting that his death would be the end of him. “The individual is a mere path,” he had written in
Flight to Arras.
“What matters is Man, who takes that path.” Had he stood clear and watched the Focke-Wulf fighter slide behind his unarmed reconnaissance plane that last day of July, had he seen the gunfire and the flames and his crash into the sea, he might have said, “Poor old Saint-Ex. Not a bad life, but now it's done.”
Given a chance, he might have told us what it felt like, those last moments; his words shaped and timed and brushed to match the colors of the sky and the sea and the fire rolling and pouring around him, his plane a comet trailing a scarf of night to meet a larger night, waiting. He didn't have the chance, though, and the words never made it to print. As far as he knew, he was dead.
***
Buffing alone in the airport sun ten years later, coaxing a gray aluminum Luscombe 8E training plane into mirrors and flying lessons, I was swept in wonderment. This wing, this very metal under my cloth, it's been
above the clouds!
This whole entire airplane, it's flown so high it's been
out of sight
from earth ... a person could look straight up and
never see it,
it's been so high, so free, so unlocked from the world! Nobody else thought such things, I'd bet, except me and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
The stories you can tell, I whispered to the engine cowling, to the rudder. The far places, the storms and rains and winds, the world you've seen beyond the fence of my horizons! Tell me, airplane, will I one day learn to fly? Will my love of freedom and control conquer my fear of heights and spins?
Those questions I could ask the Luscombe, but since it would be years before I'd know how to listen to her answers, I heard only silence, the muffled rasp of terry cloth on smoothing mirror.
No one else could I ask. The few aviators I had met were as frosty and unspeaking as they had been in Saint-Exupéry's day, wrapped in an intimidating cloak of knowledge and flight time. They spoke little, even to each other. Nobody said a word about above the clouds or unlocking from the world. A brief nod, perhaps, on the way to their aircraft, then they'd close themselves in a cockpit, an engine would start in a whirl of wind and fire, and moments later they'd be golden specks dwindling north, disappearing east, vanishing west in sunny haze.
The only pilot who spoke much to me then was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the one who would have sworn he was dead. Home at night, I turned the pages of
Airman's Odyssey,
savoring the acquaintance of this man turned intimate instead of intimidating by what he had learned. Better than standing beside him, I stood inside his mind while he watched the weather, studied the routes that he would fly. When this one pilot started his engine and flew over his horizons, he didn't disappear; he came closer to me.
I was there, unsure and nervous before that first flight with the mails from Toulouse to Alicante, listening to our friend Guillamet: “Think of those who went through it before you, and say to yourself, âWhat they could do, I can do.'” Of course, I nodded, looking up from the page. Of course I can do it! And with that I joined every other person who has become an airplane pilot: I put my fears aside and learned.
I had Saint-Exupéry's map to follow of what to expect flying might be ... a fairy-tale world of sunlight on an ocean of clouds; of sheep dashing down distant hillsides, attacking airplane wheels; instruments glowing in soft-night cockpits; stars like beacons set afire for pilots to steer by; gazelles unfolded from seaside deserts; monster winds gnashing airplanes like croissants for breakfast. He told me that I wasn't alone, that it was all right for me to be touched and changed by the glory of flight.
In his day, aviation was a risky job for the none-too-well educated, work for the not-too-thoughtful who fancied early violent death at the controls of large crashable machines. People of reflective mind did not become heavy-equipment drivers in those times, even if the heavy equipment had wings and flew. His books were read with the same startled bafflement as we would have reading a tractor driver's books today ... what insight and humor and humanity, found on the blade of a bulldozer!
In writing what he saw and learned from aviation, Saint-Exupéry shattered a stereotype. Out of the pieces came a model for something new: the thoughtful airplane pilot, the articulate flyer. Living and writing as he does in these three books of
Airman's Odyssey,
he gave permission for others to become more than robots pushing the controls of a machine.
When I was a pilot with an American air force fighter squadron in France, stationed two hundred miles north of Toulouse, 37 years north of 1926, I turned again to the ideas that I had read when I was the kid with airplane polish in his hands.
Sleep blown away by the siren just outside our window, bolted through the dark to airplanes fueled and loaded for war, scrambled into our machines and slammed high-speed through checklists, we were set to start engines and launch into the night. One coded word on the radio from the general and we'd be fired like missiles against our secret targets to the east. Without that word, it wasn't war, it was just another practice alert. We waited in our dim-glowing cockpits.
France, I thought. I'm here tonight in the homeland of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry! I remembered my old friend and teacher, thought about the way he had chosen to live and die. If I could squeeze his books until just two words remained, I asked myself, what two words would they be? There must be one idea that mattered more....
Affirm Life.
It mattered more to him than his own living.
The bombs clung dark as the night to my wings, leeches anxious to suck the life from a city whose crime it was to have been built in the wrong half of Germany. I shook my head, ever so slightly, listened to empty static on the radio. No word yet to launch.
Saint-Ex, I thought, if the code came in your earphones, would you fly to the target and turn midnight to noon, would you cremate living people because some general told you to?
Dark. Moonless starless darkful night.
I don't know jet planes or computers or nuclear weapons, he said. What I know is that long before you die, Richard, you'll begin answering to yourself for every life-denying choice you've made.
Never once had the air force, for all its fixation on classrooms, taught pilots a course in Individual Responsibility for the Murder of Cities. I needed teaching, fast. In all my training, I had never thought, that's not the general's thumb on the bomb release, it's mine!
Antoine, old friend, can a line pilot, can a first lieutenant waiting ready in the cockpit, can he decide by himself to follow other laws than military? Can I choose a different future than sudden noon for my city, can I choose not to arm the bombs, can I fly low and lay the things down cold in some pasture outside city limits?
A lightning answer. Before you turned fighter pilot, he said, you turned human being. Before you gave allegiance to the military you gave allegiance to life.
The other pilots out past my wings in the dark, I thought, Jim Roudabush and Pat Flanagan and Ed Carpinello, are they thinking too? We never talked about it, not once a word about what our life might be like after we had murdered a city. Roudy and Pat, Carp and I, were here not because we wanted to kill people but because every one of us loved to fly airplanes, and the highest-performance airplanes happen to be owned by the military forces of every country in the world. Air forces seduce pilots by shouting,
Fly!
If instead they shouted
Kill!
would there be young men and women in military cockpits today?
“
If you are to be,”
his words echoed that night, “
you must begin by assuming responsibility.
“ And you alone are responsible for every moment of your life, for every one of your acts. Not the general. You.
What would be the penalty, I thought suddenly, if one of us, or three or twelve ... what sentence if every pilot of every nation just happened to drop bombs that didn't detonate? Could it be worse than the penalty we'd pay if we dropped bombs that did?
I listened, waiting in my airplane for the war to start. I'll never know what I would have done had the order come to incinerate that city. But I was hearing his words, I was watching myself, and I was thinking about it.
In
Wind, Sand and Stars,
in
Flight to Arras,
how carefully he watched, with such calm judgment Saint-Exupéry measured his own choices, his own humanity. Whether he lived or died didn't seem to make much difference to himâtime and again he set off on adventures that placed human values over personal survival. His books are plays of light around a person who cared most of all for the community of humankind, who loved most of all to be part of that community, fashioning its destiny on our little planet.