Inspiring Older Readers
Southern Mail by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Saint-Exupery’s first novel might well be short, barely above the length of a novella, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for an easy read. The style is at times florid and opaque and I don’t think that’s just a function of the translation which in my edition was done by Curtis Cate in 1971. The author is clearly trying to find the voice that will emerge in his later work and isn’t always in control of his tendency to slip into a romantic verbosity. Saint-Exupery is also experimenting with the point of view and the position of the narrator and I’d be a bit surprised if when you read this you were always clear whose voice or memory is taking the story forward.
In essence the story is relatively straightforward: a pilot in the air mail service that operated between Europe and North Africa in the inter-war years tells the tale of his friend and colleague, Jacques Bernis and his doomed love affair with Genevieve, a married woman two years his senior. Bernis will not only lose his relationship with Genevieve but also lose his life in the desert, his plane bought down my bullets fired in a tribal war in the Sahara.
Although the description of the affair in Paris takes up a central portion of the book and is the section that has the most straightforward narrative, it is not the central topic of the novel. What Saint-Exupery uses the affair between Bernis and Genevieve for is to deepen and round-out Berrnis as a man and to give substance to the heroic myth of the pioneer pilot. Both the opening and final sections focus on the mystical nature of the pilot’s relationship with his aeroplane and with the landscape over which he flies. The prose here is at its most lyrical and impressionistic – but I have to admit, it’s not a style that will be to everyone’s taste:
“A sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out. And then night fell. Dune by dune the Sahara unfolded itself beneath the moon. Its light, falling on our foreheads with the pallor of a lamp which blends the softened forms, enveloped every object in its velvet sheen. Under our soundless footsteps the sand had the richness of a carpet. And a bare-headed we walked, freed of the cruel weight of the sun. In that dwelling place — the night . . .”
Life and death, the pilot and the plane, the plane and the landscape are all linked as if an single organic whole:
“Hugged by the wind, the plane droned on. Port-Etienne, the first port-of-call, was not inscribed in space but time. Bernis glanced at his watch. Still six hours of immobility and silence, and then he would climb down from the plane, as from a chrysalis, into a brand-new world.
Bernis gazed at the watch which made this miracle possible. Then he looked at the motionless needle of his r. p. m. gauge. If the needle quit its dial figure, if the engine broke down and yield him up to the mercy of the sand, then these times and distances would take on a new meaning he now could scarcely imagine. He was traveling in the fourth dimension.”
I think you might be hard pushed to be able to claim that overall the novel is a total success but there are undoubtedly moments of insight and beauty that will keep you going when you’re thinking you might just have had enough. The first twenty pages or so are critical because you have to re-orientate yourself to the Saint-Exupery’s voice and how he sets that out on the page but once you’re past that point you’ll find yourself inside something rather strange and exotic. Always, in my opinion, a place worth being.
Terry Potter
November 2018