Saint
John Perse (1887-1975), the pseudonym of Marie-René-Auguste-Aléxis
Saint-Léger was born on St Léger des Feuilles
islet of Guadeloupe
in the French Antilles. His father was a lawyer, and his
mother came from plantation owners. On this family-owned
islet, pampered by servants and intoxicated by the natural
world around him, the young
Saint-Léger spent an idyllic childhood, to which
he would return in his later writings. In 1899 the family
moved to
Pau in France, where the young man attended the lycée
and then the University of Bordeaux. At 27 he entered the
diplomatic
service and began a brilliant
career that took him to China,
Washington and to Paris,
where he became Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. An outspoken opponent
of the Nazis, Alexis Léger, as he now called himself,
was dismissed by the Vichy Government in 1940, and fled
to America,
which became his second home. He was found work at the Library
of Congress and later married
Dorothy Milburn Russell. At his death
in 1975, St. John Perse was a celebrated
writer with homes in France and the USA, and honoured by
numerous awards, including the Nobel
Prizefor
Literature in 1960.
Saint John
Perse's poetry
Saint-Léger
is an enigmatic
figure, amply reflected in the impersonal nature of
his literary persona. On his 1916-21 China posting the poet
travelled in the Gobi Desert and vacationed in the South
Seas. Éloges
appeared in 1910, and Anabase
in 1924, but Saint-Léger published nothing further
until arrival in America. He associated with Claudel and
Valéry in the Nouvelle Revue Française,
but mostly kept out of literary affairs. He refused the
many offers
of employment in France after the war, and, at the age of
seventy, with no previous relations with women to speak
of, he married someone much younger in age. His correspondence
suggests a very reserved personality, but
associates report great charm and consideration. Saint
John Perse is often compared to Paul
Claudel, also a distinguished diplomat, but Claudel
was a committed Catholic haunted by a protracted affair
with a married Polish woman. Both writers extended the experiments
of Victor Hugo, however, and created an oracular
prose with rhythmic elements that only broadly approximated
to the alexandrine. Saint John Perse was the more original,
recondite in
diction and sometimes obscure
in meaning. Claudel wrote for the stage and his language
was emotionally charged, sometimes overpoweringly so, but
Saint John Perse was drawn to the power and variety of the
natural
world in which man plays a decided
but subordinate role. Éloges celebrated the
lost paradise of the Antilles, and Anabase drew on
his Gobi Desert experiences, speaking in a disembodied
but hypnotic
voice of a tribal leader with empires to conquer. Exile
(1942) has images of desolate seascapes. Pluies
(1944), Neiges (1945), Vents
(1946) and Amers
(1957) are again impersonal. Oiseaux appeared in
1962 and Pour Dante in 1965:
travel, exile, and the transitory
nature of human existence are again in evidence.
