The Little Prince

                                                                The Little Prince

(Some months ago, on my new Kindle, I started reading Stacy Shiff's Bio of St. Exupery. (At the same time I reread The Little Prince.) During that time I went a little crazy and downloaded way too many books, too much ahead of my reading speed capacity for comfort. On that account, lately, I've put myself on a book-buying ban and am trying to catch up, concentrating on reading said Bio, and the horse book, to which I'll refer down the line; Raulff, Farewell to The Horse.)

I first became aware of The Little Prince sometime in 1961, when I saw it lying on a coffee table in the apartment of a friend. Perhaps it was when it first came out in English, in paperback. Was it a children's book? That wasn't clear to me, or perhaps to anyone. But my friend's girlfriend had bought it as a gift for him. She understood, I now know, that it was a poetic myth about love, disguised as a children's book.   

My friend, who happened to look a bit like an adult version of the book's main character, had orange-gold curly hair and blue eyes, and he had a somewhat princely demeanor. We were both about eighteen at the time. Einar, that was my friend's name, wove the book into his myth about himself, which he created every day, and which changed through the years, but which had to do with Life-Style, Mysticism, getting stoned, getting hip, and being part of a new form of Bohemianism. The book became part of the literary canon of my particular microcosmic social set as we went through the sixties in hipster mode.(The better educated hipster, particularly in 1961, had the French version of the book.)

Perhaps I should insert a book list here, but let me suffice to say that  for my small group it was the gospel according to Salinger, Kerouac, Wm. Goldman's The Temple of Gold, other books of varying import, and eventually, The Whole Earth Catalogue. ( One book in particular, though, that was noticeably absent in our clique, but present in many of the more egg-headed households and crash-pads that we visited as we slowly branched out socially, was that scary tome,Godel, Escher and Bach. I still feel bad about not being able to wrap my head around that one. )      

[Time lapse..]

 ......I've finished the St. Exupery Bio now, having begun to read it with more focus and intensity, what with all the pressure on myself, from myself, and I am perversely pleased, (I have a past), to find that St. Ex, which his friends called him, had a mistress, (well didn't everybody?), who happened to be very rich, and married, and in the 1930s had an apartment on Beekman Place, in NYC, where the great Me was conceived though not born. (My parents moved when my mother was expecting, out of respect for the other tenants who didn't want a crying baby in the building). The parents had been living there for a few years and had many friends in the neighborhood including the great "Wild Bill" Donovan, who a few years later became head of the O.S.S.

The mistress, who was married, beautiful, and rich, and, like St. Ex., an official French aristocrat, was, in the Bio, given the discrete name Mrs. B. Before going on about Mrs. B. though, I should say that St. Ex also had a wife, and in fact she was the kind of woman every cult figure that I've ever identified with over the years always seems to have been; that woman who was Henry Miller's June, Frank Sinatra's Ava Gardner, Anais Nin's, well, June, Dali's Gala, and Ad "Femme Fatale" Infinitum. In short, a Hero's Wife, as Joseph Campbell would have had it. Saint Ex's wife was named Consuela, and by halfway through the Bio I was in love with her.   

Mrs. B.'s real name was Helene, and in 1927 she had married Count Jean de Vogue, a friend of St. Ex. and fellow French Aristocrat, and thus Helene had become one of the richest women in France. Word of mouth has it that she and St. Ex. started hooking up around 1934.  

   He called her Nelly. It didn't take Consuela too long to find out about Nelly because St. Ex foolishly left some of her perfume scented love letters lying around.This led to tempestuousness on the part of the Latin Vixen, but that's sexist.Well, St. Ex. was sexist. Anyway, Consuela fooled around quite a bit too, particularly when St. Ex. was flying all over the hell-and-gone for Aeropostal and later the French Air Force.

St. Ex's circle paid little or no attention, it seems, to the ease with which Nelly crossed Nazi, Vichy, and other European borders, but in retrospect it began to seem that she might have been some sort of spy. That would have made it handy for her to have a Beekman Place Apartment and to be chummy with Wild Bill. Anyway, when I find out who's side she was really on, I'll make it a P.S.  

  

How I got into the clutches of Nelly de Vogue and Consuela de St. Exupery goes something like this.

I read Emigre New York, by Jeffrey Mehlman, which was about the French community in NYC during the Second World War.  How I came to that book was that I had been reading several books about Structuralism;  Foucault, Lacan, et. al, and at the same time a book about Surrealism, and was intrigued to find that Max Ernst had befriended Levi-Strauss during that expatriate period. I find the interest that the two shared in American Indian artifacts, among other things, interesting, and also the the ties between Structuralism and Surrealism.