Night Flight

de Saint-Exupery Antoine

Description

Under the pressure of his boss, the intransigent Riviere, the airmail pilot Fabien attempts a perilous flight during a heavy night-time thunderstorm in Argentina. As conditions get worse and the radio communication with Fabien becomes increasingly difficult, Riviere begins to question his uncompromising methods, and his distress turns to guilt when the pilot's wife comes to find him in search of answers.Based on Saint-Exupery's own experiences as a commercial pilot, Night Flight is a haunting and lyrical examination of duty, destiny and the individual, as well as an authentic and tragic portrayal of the intrepid early days of human air travel.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714546568
• Langue: English

Extrait

Night Flight


Night Flight
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


Translated by David Carter

ALMA CLASSICS


Alma Classics Ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
Night Flight first published in French in 1931 This edition first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2016
Translation and Introduction © David Carter, 2016
Cover design: Jem Butcher
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-589-1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Night Flight
Introduction
Night Flight


Introduction
Mention the name Saint-Exupéry almost anywhere in the world where there are books, in shops, libraries or homes, then, when the vagaries of pronunciation have been identified, the first association will almost i nevitably be with the classic tale, for young and old, of The Little Prince . It is indeed an exquisite gem of poetic prose, and represents the culmination of the process of constant refinement of the author’s style. Many who have been captivated by it have sought out other works by the same author. Most celebrated are the collection of reflections and meditations occasioned by his experiences, published in 1939 under the title Terre des hommes (usually translated into English as Wind, Sand and Stars ), and the present work, Vol de nuit ( Night Flight ), published earlier, in 1931. Before this the author had only published one short story, L’Aviateur ( The Aviator ) in 1926, and Courier sud ( Southern Mail ), in 1929. It was Night Flight that established his literary reputation.
Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon in 1900 into an old noble family, as the third of five children. His father, the Viscount Jean de Saint-Exupéry, an insurance broker, died before Antoine was four years old. Not a very brilliant student, he obtained his baccalauréat in 1917, and after failing at naval school he turned to studying architecture. He joined the French air force in 1921 and trained as a pilot. He flew in both France and Morocco before he was employed as a pilot by what was then the Compagnie Latécoère (a company known later simply as Aéropostale). He flew mail from Toulouse to Senegal. In 1929 he was appointed area director for Aéropostale in Argentina, and when he returned to Paris in 1931 he published Night Flight , based on his experiences in South America.
He maintained his adventurous spirit throughout his short life. While attempting to break the flying record from Paris to Saigon in 1935, he, together with his mechanic, crashed in the Libyan Desert. After wandering around for four days, they almost died of thirst, before they were rescued by an Arab (the experience is described in Terre des hommes ). The experience undoubtedly provided inspiration for the plight of the pilot stranded in the desert in The Little Prince . When France fell in 1940, he fled to America, and also spent some time in Quebec. The manuscript of The Little Prince was completed in the latter part of 1942. In 1943 he returned to North Africa as a reconnaissance pilot for the American forces. His final assignment was to gather intelligence about German troop movements around the Rhône Valley. On the evening of 31st July 1944, he departed from an airbase in Corsica and was never seen again. The mystery of his disappearance has generated claims and counterclaims: Was it suicide? Was he shot down by a German pilot? In 1998 a fisherman found a bracelet with his name on it in the sea near Marseille, and in 2000 parts of his plane were found in the same area. But the mystery of the circumstances of his death remains.
Inspired by Saint-Exupéry’s flying experiences, the plot line of Night Flight is simple: the pilot Fabien has to deliver the Patagonian mail during a bad storm. His boss, Rivière, is concerned to prove that night mail flights are possible and desirable. Rivière is in direct radio contact with him for some time as he is with the stopover stations on the route. Events are described from the points of view of the main characters, including some members of Rivière’s staff. Their thoughts about the situation, reflections on life in general and their sense of responsibility, as well as their duties are explored, partly though interior monologue. The background to it all is the implacable night storm, and it is clear that this was Saint-Exupéry’s focus from the conception of the work.
In a letter to his mother in January 1930, the author explained the project: “Now I am writing a novel about night flight. But in its innermost sense it is a book about the night.” The keynote for the poetic symbolism of the work is thus given in Saint-Exupéry’s choice of title, as clear in the French original as in the English translation. The narrative is not only about the challenges of flight but more specifically about confronting the dangers of the night: its mystery, its impenetrability and its associations with death. But night not only threatens to engulf the individual, it also manifests an awesome beauty, which, it is true, can only be enjoyed when the individual feels safe in contemplation of it. Thus, at the end of Chapter 6, it is only when the plane has safely taken off that Rivière can appreciate the beauty of the night: “But as soon as the plane took off, the night became moving and beautiful again for Rivière. It came to life again, and it was Rivière’s task to take care of it.” Such beauty inspires reflection and a poetic susceptibility to the wonders of the Earth, the sea, the sky, of the universe itself.
The central characters are loosely based on people that Saint-Exupéry came to know in the course of his work as a pilot in South America. It was a time when long-distance flight was still an especially risky business. The Compagnie Générale Aéropostale, (formerly Compagnie Latécoère) , known simply as Aéropostale, was founded in April 1927. It had become both economically and politically advantageous for European countries to establish aerial links with the major continents. There was particularly strong competition in the field between France and Germany. Responsible for employing pilots, crews and other staff at Aéropostale was a man called Didier Daudat, who imposed high ideals of punctuality and precision. He insisted that all his pilots learn how to maintain their aircraft, thus enabling them to bond well with the mechanics and to share a sense of responsibility with all the ground crews. He also instigated night mail flights, and was the clearly the model for the character of Rivière in the novel. He wrote his own memoir of the period, entitled Dans le vent des helices ( In the Wind of the Propellers ), published in 1956. In 1954 he had also published a memoir of Saint-Exupéry: Saint-Exupéry tel que je l’ai connu ( Saint-Exupéry as I Knew Him ).
The depiction of the struggles between the pilot and the dangers of the night transcends, in the course of the novel, the fate of one individual and attains characteristics of the epic. In his preface to the first edition, André Gide, a friend of Saint-Exupéry, noted this:
…for aviation, as for the exploration of unknown lands, there was a first heroic period, and Night Flight , which depicts for us the tragic adventure of one of its pioneers of the air, takes on naturally an epic quality.
As Gide points out, the epic is concerned with absolutes: heroism, virtue, etc. The virtue that Rivière demands of his pilots is that of courage to fulfill one’s duty even at the risk of losing one’s life. Of Rivière Gide writes: “He does not take action himself: he causes others to act, he instills in his pilots his own sense of virtue…” He “drives them to perform acts of prowess”. Saint-Exupéry’s own concept of courage, the willingness of a man to risk his life constantly for the sake of an idea of duty, has little in common with the crude popular notion of courage, which he analysed in a letter to Gide as consisting of “a little bit of rage, a little vanity, a lot of stubbornness and vulgar enjoyment of it all as a kind of sport”.
These heroic aspects of the novel naturally made it attractive to Hollywood producers, and a film with the same title was released in 1933, directed by Clarence Brown, and starring Clark Gable, Helen Hayes, Myrna Loy, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore and Robert Montgomery. Considerable liberties were taken with the plotline, including the invention of a polio outbreak in Rio de Janeiro, to eliminate which a serum has to be flown from Santiago. The novel was also the basis of an opera, Volo di notte , by Luigi Dallapiccola, first performed in 1940.
Night Flight won the 1931 Prix Femina (awarded by an all-woman jury), a major literary prize in France. This helped to establish its worldwide reputation.
– David Carter


Night Flight


1
B elow the aircraft the shadowy wake of the hills was already sinking into the gold of the evening. The plains were becoming luminous, but with an indestructible light: in this country they do not completely yield up their gold, just as, after winter, they do not completely yield up their snow.
And the pilot Fabien, who was bringing back to Buenos Aires from the far south the mail from Patagonia, could recognize the approach of evening by the same signs that enable one to identify the sea around a port: by the calm, by the light ripples that were only faintly