A Diplomatic Poet

...Letters from Exile" (1940-1964) chronicles the reemergence of Perse after a hiatus of almost 20 years At Inst he suffered intensely from loneliness in an alien country, from anxiety for his family, and from the anguish of seeing all he had worked for instance destroyed by the Nazis Al the same lime, with the publication in 1951 of "Exit" in poetry, St - John Potse became an internationally recognized poet and entered his greatest period of creativity Archibald MacLeish obtained for him a post in the Library of Congress Leger formed close friendships with Francis Biddle, FDR's attorney general, and his wife, poet and critic Katherine Garrison Chapman, who wrote many articles on Perse's work He corresponded with his first English translator, T S Eliot, with W H Auden, E E Cummings, Allen Tate, MacLeish, and Dag Hammarskjold In 1958, shortly after the death of his mother, he married for the first time From then on, until his death in 1975, Leger and his American wife divided their time between Washington and the south of France...

...An intensely private man, Leger would probably have adopted a pen name under any circumstances to keep his art and his life separate As it was, since the greater part of his literary activity took place during World War II when he was prominent on the Nazi blacklist, the persona of Perse became necessary to protect those members of the Leger family still in occupied France Yet once the need for secrecy was past, the writer continued to deny most emphatically that any traces of Leger's public career could be discerned in his imaginative writings He insisted that his poems were "bound to no special time or place, and always conceived, on their ideal or absolute plane, as a violent reaction against any notion (even of the most indirect sort) of 'committed' literature " His comments on the relation between critical reading and biography were characteristically laconic "The poet's personality m itself is none of the reader's concern, he has a right only to the completed work, severed like a fruit from its tree ". No artist can hope to dictate how his works should be scrutinized, however And by authorizing the French publication of his letters in the Pleiade edition of his Oeuvres completes, Leger himself relaxed his own principles Now, Arthur J Knodel has translated and edited St -John Perse Letters (Princeton, 719 pp, $20 00) so that English readers can see for themselves that the observations and preoccupations of Leger s life were the raw material of Perse's grand epics...

...The "Early Letters" roughly cover the period 1906-26, when Leger was studying for a diplomatic career In them, he discussed music and literature, especially his interest in the Latin poet, Persius, from whose name Leger concocted his nom-de-plume, "Perse " The young man seems to have identified with the ancient Roman, "who was too protectively brought up by a woman " Leger's father's sudden death had made him responsible for a mother and three sisters, and though the strong family bond lasted all his life, the letters indicate that it was an emotional strain "But do you have any idea what a burden the mute suffering of women can be9 " he wrote despondently to a former classmate Family obligations, plus his desperately cramming for the exams requisite to getting a government post, kept him isolated from the outside world for several years This pressure probably contributed to the impersonal quality of his verse, where the solitary figure of the poet confronts large natural forces that are often couched in maternal imagery Many of Leger's early letters contain reminiscences of his childhood in the Leeward islands of the Caribbean Above all, he seemed obsessed with memories of the vivid colors, exotic sea birds and marine life, all of which contributed to the impressions in his poem about childhood, "Elonges" (1911), his first mature work...

...Perse's poetry is difficult, especially for a non-French reader Certainly there are adequate, in some cases inspired, translations, but they are best used as ponies and will convey little to someone only used to the traditions of English verse Neither the latinate vocabulary of a Romance language, nor the grammatical structure of French are idiomatic to us Perse eschews rhyme in favor of irregularly stressed cadances, and tries to convey sense more through sound than through ideas "Even if I were not an essentially French animal,' he told MacLeish, "the French language would still be for me my only home the only 'geometrical locus' in the world where I can station myself in order to understand, desire, or renounce anything ". In their eagerness to resolve the paradox of this "essentially French animal,' who nevertheless found inspiration primarily in the foreign, and produced most of his literary work in the United States, critics have stressed the "cosmic,' "universal" and "mysterious' elements of the poems As a result, they have constructed a myth of the artist in solitude, creating works so transcendent that they ought not to be comprehended-only respectfully adored These letters show that Perse need not be read in a vacuum They reveal a complex, human poet who was as concerned with his reputation as the next writer, and perfectly capable of exercising his diplomatic talents on the literary world he affected to ignore They also reveal how Leger's public desire to build political bridges between cultures sprang from the same impulse as Perse's desire to bridge cultures through the universal medium of art...

...Not all of Leger's observations were esthetic There is a wonderfully funny dispatch to a superior in France about an abortive uprising in Peking, written in mock Mandarin style And in January 1917, he announced "The ideas of Karl Marx and of Engels already exert their subtle attraction on all the young Chinese intellectuals, and in the long run nothing will stop the march of the Chinese community towards a collectivism very close to the most orthodox Leninist communism '. The "Letters from Asia" make it clear that Leger was deeply moved by an elemental primitiveness in the giant country...

...Writers & Writing A DIPLOMATIC POET BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL POETS MAY BE "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," but few have been among its statesmen as well An exception is Alexis St -Leger, for many years a brilliant French diplomat and later Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Cabinet of Aristide Briand When, in 1940, he resigned from the collaborationist Vichy government and fled into self-imposed exile in the United States, he resumed his vocation as a poet, which he had more or less abandoned in his youth Twenty years later, at the age of 73, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature under his pen name of St -John Perse...

...He admitted to being continually fascinated "by this play of great natural forces floods, typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic erruptions, great epidemics, and various other upheaval-they all cause a breakdown of equilibrium that tends to renew the vital thrust of the great, continuing movement throughout the world " The theme that runs throughout his later poetry-of the effect of vast natural powers and their influence on the development of human institutions-doubtless arises horn his sojourn in Asia A correspondence with Joseph Com ad demonstrates the affinity both writers felt for this boundless quality of the East...

...The chief interest of the "Early Letters,' though, is the correspondence with Leger's literary contemporaries poets Paul Claudel and Paul Valery, critics Jacques Riviere and Valery Larbaud, novelists Alain-Fournier and Andre Gide The last, then editor of Nouvelle Revue Francois, was Leger's first patron, publishing his earliest poems When Gide graciously humored the oversensitive poet by agreeing to withdraw a work already set in type, Leger responded gratefully with the "gift" of a tree on the West Indian plantation of St -Leger, to be named after Gide-a "present" the recipient never had a chance to see In a similar vein, Leger once "presented" Valery with a description of a small crystal skull in the Aztec room of the British Museum These intangible favors were characteristic of this aloof young man, who, while keeping himself pure from the usual intrigues of literary journals and societies, continued to maintain a connection with them, despite frequent assertions that he had finished with writing poetry...

...The "Letters from Asia" (1917-1921), covering the period of his diplomatic mission to China, form the most fascinating part of this collection "Against a backdrop of age-old attrition,' he wrote to his mother, "China, at first sight, seems nothing but dust A soil overworked and worn down since time immemorial, which the slightest gust could transform into a 'fifth element "' He added, "I've always wanted to write a book about dust " That projected work turned out to be the poem, "Anabase" (1924), with its invocation, "Hommes, gens de poussiere" ("Men, people of dust...

...and a late Romantic who believes that the artist, by bringing into being something new, reorders civilization-just as for Wallace Stevens (who was greatly influenced by the same French tradition that molded Perse) a jar in Tennessee reordered the whole landscape Above all, the subject of Perse s poetry is the rcconcihation between things that seem to be very different Perhaps he ultimately recognized how his letters prove Mexis Si -I egei, diplomat and private citizen,' and St -john Perse were one and the same...

...At his best, St -John Perse affirms the role of the poet as a commander of those vast, natural forces he describes time and time again, a student of their relation to human society...