Subservience in the Desert

THE WISDOM OF THE SANDS (350 pp.)--Antoine de Saint-Exupery--Harcourt, Brace ($4).

The best writing to be found in the five-inch shelf of flying literature was done by French Airman Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Night Flight, Wind, Sand and Stars, Flight to Arras). He was that rare 20th Century blend, a courageous man of action whose deepest values were spiritual. On his long airmail flights over desert and ocean, and on military missions over doomed France in 1940, his brooding imagination conceived a vision of life in which God, soul and the brotherhood of man shone through and outweighed all commonplace striving.

In 1944 he disappeared without trace during a P-38 reconnaissance flight to Southern France. He was 44. In a letter found later among his papers, he had written: "I hate this century with all my heart."

"He Who Questions . . ." Airman Saint-Exupery left behind him an unpublished testament. Now ably translated into English by British Francophile Stuart Gilbert, The Wisdom of the Sands can be read as a partial blueprint of the moral and ethical world Saint-Ex envisioned. As with most such plottings of mystical patterns, it is a hard one to follow, in this century or any other. In Wisdom, Saint-Ex imagines himself as a desert prince sharing his accumulated wisdom with his subjects (he loved the Sahara and the tradition-ruled life of its people). He is a benevolent despot, brave, warlike, just and unsentimental, the kind of man with whom T. E. Lawrence would have been proud to share a tent.

Prince X (in the book he is nameless) delivers his credo in a singing, quasi-biblical monologue. He warns his tribe against becoming "sedentaries" and cherishing worldly goods, cautions them that man's spirit, not logic and reason, must govern their lives. So far, Prince X sounds almost like a Christian. He is not; he is a Nietzschean. He disdains pity and charity, preaches the importance of the here & now and a disregard for the future. His rule is absolute and his subjects may not question him: "He who questions is seeking, primarily, the abyss."

Parched Heaven. A traditionalist, Prince X does not like the new, either in poetry or in political organization. His followers must be valorous but subservient, and he has little use for democracy: "Freedom leads to equality, and equality to stagnation--which is death . . . The multitude is never free . . ." The happiest men are to be found in "deserts^ monasteries." It soon becomes apparent, in fact, that Saint-Ex wanted the passion for God and love to flourish in a social framework which would shortly make violent rebels of most men of spirit.

Like many another sensitive man, Saint-Ex had become sick of the human greed and selfishness he saw about him. He affirmed that men can be better than they are, and like many another perfectionist, sought a moral and spiritual climate where goodness could flourish. Halfway through this century which he hated, most men can share Saint-Ex's yearning toward God. It is not likely that they would accept life in his parched heaven.

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