The Winged Life. A Portrait of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Poet
and Airman. By Richard Rumbold and Lady Margaret
Stewart. (Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 16s.) PERHAPS nothing has changed man's attitude to the world so much during this century as his conquest of the air; yet the literature of that conquest is largely limited to the ephemeral. With such a dearth it is odd how casually Saint-Exupery has been treated in this country. The translations of his work have been shabby, and on occasions down- right misleading; and the work tinder review is the first biography to be published in England. On this account alone it should reach a wide audience; but it falls far behind such studies as those of Pierre Chevrier or Daniel Anet.
In one sense it cannot possibly fail; the bare facts speak for themselves. Saint- Exupery:s life and death outstrip the wildest romances: he is a Renaissance figure born out of his time, who makes the New Eliza- bethan Age look mere pasteboard. Battling against cyclones in the Andes, surviving death in the desert, evolving his concept of the Pascalian homme cotnplet, he is always a little larger than life. And this drama was played out against a background of wildly romantic marriage, of bewildering versatility. Like da Vinci, he was more than an amateur as .mathematician, nuclear physicist, bio- logist, inventor, and engineer: nihil tetigit (mod non ornarit.
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