The Secret Lives of Used Books (Wind, Sand and Stars, by Antoine de Saint Exupéry)
My copy of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars (1939) was previously owned by Eleanor Emerson, of Beulah, Michigan, who not only inscribed (and stamped) her name in the book several times — she also transcribed a small biography of Saint Exupéry on the back pages (see below).
Cribbing it mostly from two issues of Reader’s Digest (November 1939 and December 1957), she covered Saint Exupéry’s flying life, from his humble beginnings going up in a homemade aircraft at the age of eleven to his heroic end, at the age of forty-four, when his Lockheed P-38 Lightning was presumably shot down over the Mediterranean by the Luftwaffe on July 31, 1944, while Saint Exupéry was on a dangerous reconnaissance mission.
Saint Exupéry is in the pantheon of author-pilots, alongside such fellow immortals as Beryl Markham (West with the Night, 1942), Ernest K. Gann (Fate Is the Hunter, 1961), Anne Morrow Lindbergh (North to the Orient, 1935), Cecil Lewis (Sagittarius Rising, 1936), and James Salter (such novels as The Hunters, 1957, and Cassada, 2000, and the first half of his memoir Burning the Days, 1997). To my taste, Gann and Markham are the king and queen of this royal court, but all of these authors are consistently good — usually great — on the subject of flying, whether writing about the thrills and indignities of training, the tensions of aerial combat, the sometimes greater dangers along civilian routes, the solitude of long-distance flying, or the dick-swinging dynamic among fighter pilots.
Two author-pilots I have to mention separately are named Langewiesche, father and son. For several years when I was a young boy, we lived with my widowed maternal grandmother in her small house in Johnston, Iowa. Up in the attic, among collections of musty old clothes, antique shotguns, ancient hockey equipment, and forgotten but not discarded items of every sort, was a box of books in which sat a copy of Wolfgang Langewiesche’s Stick and Rudder (1944). A primer on the art of flying, Stick and Rudder was something of an aerial Strunk and White, a standard text relied on by a whole generation (if not generations) of pilots. It’s possible the copy belonged to my dad, who was a Vietnam-era Marine Corps fighter pilot, but I suspect the copy originally belonged to my maternal grandfather, whom I never met but who was an instructor in the U.S. Army Air Forces in Texas during World War II and after that, for a time, a pilot for Braniff Airways.
Years later I worked as an editor at The Atlantic Monthly, in Boston, and came to know William Langewiesche, Wolfgang’s son, then one of the magazine’s most celebrated writers, tremendous himself on the subject of flying (though not only on that subject). Among the pleasures of getting to know William was the vertiginous connection that wound from Brayton Field near Cuero, Texas, in the old USAAF days (where I picture my grandfather pulling Wolfgang’s Stick and Rudder off the shelf now and again) through that attic in Johnston, Iowa, in the early 1970s (where that same copy sat in a box) to the editorial offices in Boston, in the aughts (where Wolfgang’s son and I would pore over galleys and then, occasionally, go out for drinks with a group of friends from the magazine).
I once asked William what he thought of Wind, Sand and Stars. Knowing that I enjoyed it, he forced himself to say that it was good, but added that Saint Exupéry tended to overwrite and was “too Romantic.” It’s true, and William’s style is certainly more spare. But both styles work, and if you want a purple-ish, Romantic account of flying mail routes over the Andes or across the Sahara, in a primitive plane, while navigating by starlight, Saint Exupéry is your man.
