August 5th, 1939 – from Anne Lindbergh’s journal
We call Saint-Exupery. He is there, he speaks “pas un mot” of English. I have to talk to him. Heavens! What a prospect! Yes, he would be delighted to come out for dinner and then ight. C. is going to pick him up in town…
At 3, in the middle of my nap, C. calls from upper New York, says he can’t make it, and will I call for St.-Ex. And I had counted on that time to finish the book. [Ed: She was racing through Wind, Sand and Stars] Now what would I talk to him about?
The car is being fixed for flat tires. I tear into town, rather cross to be late — “toujours un petit peu en retard!” [Ha. In this, she quotes St. Ex’s preface to on eof her books, where he characterizes her as the little girl who is “slower” than everyone else, the little girl who is always late.]
M. St-Ex., they say, is in the bar. (Heavens, I think, he is one of those drunken aviators — why did we do this?) He appears, tall and stooped and a little bald, beginning to be not as young as he once was; an inscrutable sort of face, not at all good looking, almost Slavic in its solidity and inscrutability, and his eyes turn up at the corners a little.
Oh — it’s that man, is it? I think, with a confused dream feeling that I have seen him often before — met him before, even. I recognize him immediately. [Message to Anne from Sheila: RUN, ANNE, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE. The second you feel you have “met him before”, warning bells should go off. Ah well, it’s too late though. For you, and for me.]…
I apologize for C. and my lateness and we go across to the car and start out.
We hardly get around the block when the car stalls and will not start again. And all this time we are talking at top speed with a kind of intensity (at least on my part) that precludes my attention to practical details. He is talking about the book [her book, Listen! The Wind], how he had not read the first one, how he intended to write simply a polite page about flight or what the name stood for. How he read the book on the boat coming over, how it astonished him (“You know how rare it is to touch in a book…” he said), how he telegraphed the publisher that he must say something more. I was trying to talk back in French, always an effort, talk to a taxi driver who was pushing us, and explain what was wrong with the car in French and then in English, all at the same time.
“But perhaps you do not like the preface …?”
“Ah oui — mais vous avez si bien vu … trop vu …”
I tell him how I tried to translate it for C. But it was difficult and subtle and how C. did not understand my being always “un peu en retard.” He laughs and says he would have said it slightly differently — “a hesitancy…”
Finally we pull up to a repair shop where a group of taxi drivers decide that it is the pump and that it will take two hours to fix! … We get into a taxi and start for Pennsylvania Station — still talking furiously. He talks about the rhythm in writing, which he thinks is almost the most important thing in a book — as I understand it. That only the conscious gets across in words, the unconscious in the rhythm.
I tell him how much we liked his books and wanted to meet him. How C. read his book and liked it, about his being a spectator and actor at the same time, and how the only other person I could remember having that combination was T.E. Lawrence. He says he felt the separation between action and vision was less than people supposed — a theory I don’t quite believe.
“But life is always pulling you away from the understanding of life,” I said.
“Yes — that is always the troulbe,” he answers.
Then we were at Pennsylvania Station, I almost as much a stranger as he. We had an orangeade at a counter, still talking, like children on those high stools …
“But how do you get on by yourself?”
“Tres bien…” on the theory that when one cannot speak at all one meets on a different level — of human kindness and understanding — which is true. I felt gay, freed and happy. I and this absolute stranger who understood so well everything I said and felt!
Then onto the train …
And we go on talking all the way to Huntington, in French … It was very exciting. Perhaps it was only because it was almost the first time anyone had talked to me purely on my craft. Not because I was a woman to be polite to, to charm with superficials, not because I was my father’s daughter or C’s wife; no, simply because of my book, my mind, my craft. I have a craft. And someone who is master of that craft, who writes beautifully, thinks I know enough about my craft to want to compare notes about it, to want to fence with my mind, steel against steel.
He pulls the preface out of his pocket and we go over the words I didn’t understand. “Mais ca … comme c’est beau!” I say.
“And here — only, you know, it is not my husband, that. C’est moi, ce n’est pas mon mari. Il n’a pas peur. Il n’est pas timide. Il ne pense pas a ca …” He smiles. “Je sais — je sais.” [Ed: She’s cautioning him that the timidness she expresses in the book, her fear, is all her – Charles isn’t timid, he has none of that. St.Ex says he knows.]
My heavens, what a joy it was to talk, to compare, to throw things out, to be understood like that without an effort. Summer lightning.
Of course, I was warmed by the praise and opened to it, as one does. He said there was something classical about the book, something fundamental, like a Greek play. And he was astonished to find it in America.
I said perhaps the reason it appealed to the layman was that aviation was not my world. I was a foreigner to it.
He said that had nothing to do with it whatsoever. That the writer, like the bee, gathers honey from whatever circumstances he happens to be in, and I had done that and it would not have mattered what I had written about.
And somewhere we were talking about aviation — I telling him that C. thinks it is encouraging that the tools of war require more and more intelligence and in that there is hope. But he countered: “Mais je ne suis pas tout a fait de son avis.” (“But I don’t quite share his opinion.”) And I said, desperately, “It seems that nature is always pushing us down onto all fours again. As soon as a nation is civilized.”
“But man has always succeeded in rising again,” St.-Ex said.
I talked about flying, too, how it did not separate you from the elements, but, rather, bathed you in them.
I said, looking up at him, astonished. “But you have said that.”
“Yes, I have said that …”
We talked of Americans and the Puritan backgrond. Perhaps it is that, I said, that gives us our sense of pressure, of hurry, of being late.
Talking in French about ideas that are so deeply rooted in me in English, ideas that are barely communicable in your own language, to say them in a foreign language you are not the master of, was really a kind of anguish. I beat my wings against it in vain. Never have I felt so frustrated by that wall of incommunicability. And yet it was amazing that we could communicate at all.
