Books: Double Life

A five-page poem (in French) signed St. John Perse makes the first issue of Hemispheres* the first U.S.-French literary quarterly, a minor belletristic event.

It also serves to remind Americans that the poet with one of the most notable double lives since Christopher Marlowe is now consultant for French poetry at the Library of Congress. For St. John Perse is the pseudonym of Marie Rene Auguste Alexis Saint-Leger Leger, for years France’s celebrated diplomat and wily Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

For 16 years (1924-40) Léger presided behind the scenes of France’s Foreign Office. He was known as “the Vansittart of the Quai d’Orsay,” “Europe’s greatest living diplomat.” Said one awed foreign observer: “Präsidenten gehen, Aussenminister gehen, aber Alexis Leger bleibt immer da” (“Presidents go, foreign ministers go, but Alexis Leger always remains”).

When he became Secretary, Leger had written two thin books of verse, Eloges (1910) and Anabase (his most talked-about poem, 1924). Most Frenchmen never heard of these symbolistic efforts and most of those who did thought them as tortuous and intangible as Leger’s diplomacy. But they were well read (says Hemispheres Editor Goll) at the superrealistic Wilhelmstrasse.

Father of an Echo. Poet T. S. Eliot read them too. He translated Anabase, rated the poem with the best of James Joyce. Others have called Poet Perse-Leger the father of modern poetry. “Perse,” said Eda Lou Walton, “caught the modern nostalgia for new fields of exploration, the sense of decay in the old, the use of a mythical pageantry to suggest world movements and retardations. He wrote the ‘Anabasis’ and modern poem after modern poem has echoed his theme.”

Poème à l’Etrangere (Poem to a Foreign Lady), Leger’s Hemispheres contribution, is written in blank verse. Through its architectonic symbolism the poet sadly glimpses an alien America, nostalgically compares what he thinks he sees with his memories of a dying France.

Leger’s childhood supplied plenty of background for an elegist of dying civilizations. His family was old French-Colonial stock (his enemies like to call Leger a mulatto), which had lived for two centuries in the West Indies. Alexis was born (1887) on the family’s coral island of Saint-Leger les Feuilles, near Guadeloupe. Once a cyclone picked up little Alexis and left him in a treetop. Once his Hindu nurse, a secret priestess of Siva, took him to a Siva temple, painted him black and stood him in a niche above the worshipers. Then she made him touch the foreheads of Hindu, Malayan, Chinese, Japanese workers. She believed he could cure them.

Beyond Time. In 1914, Poet Leger asked the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a job in a remote country. He was finally made secretary to France’s diplomatic corps in China. The hater of literary exoticism loved Peiping, not because it was exotic, but because it was “beyond time, not of it.” He rented a temple in the hills. When the French Minister needed Leger he had to send a special courier for him.

But even China was too timely for Leger. He explored the South Sea Islands in a boat. He traveled on horseback through the Gobi Desert, looking for the home of Genghis Khan, and the old silk roads from Sinkiang to Persia. He developed “a broadened gauge of space and time” in this “extraplanetary and extra-temporal” existence. When someone translated to him “the beautiful guttural sentence of a migrant lama: Man is born in the house, but he dies in the desert,” Leger pondered over it rapturously for days. Later he was bumped down to earth when told that the saying meant simply that “A dying man must be exposed outside the tent so as not to soil the dwelling place of the living.”

Meanwhile Leger’s superiors enjoyed his brilliant diplomatic reports. Premier Aristide Briand called Leger to Washington to serve as Far Eastern expert at the Disarmament Conference of 1921-22, took him back to Paris with him.

Within two years Leger was Briand’s Chief of Cabinet. For seven years the two men were an inseparable team. They would often talk quietly for hours, Briand puffing at his eternal cigaret, interjecting occasional remarks into his assistant’s reports on international politics. They planned the Briand policy of Anglo-French accord as a basis for European peace, the Briand-Kellogg Pact, the Locarno Treaty.

Passionate Anonymity. After Briand died (1932) Leger was made Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs, a post whose incumbent traditionally had a passion for anonymity and backstairs diplomacy. In Leger’s hands the Secretary became more passionately anonymous than ever. Leger worked in a semisecret office up a backstairs in the Quai d’Orsay. He added infinite threads of oriental circumspection to the already tangled web of French diplomacy. But sometimes there were sensational news leaks, and Leger is believed to have contrived most of them himself. Most famous reputed “leak”: news of the Hoare-Laval plan to partition Ethiopia.

Leger told Briand that he had abandoned poetry, that he had written it in the past as a joke. But in the evenings, France’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs continued to versify. He never published these poems.

Among the few people who ever saw them were the Nazis. When France fell, a flying squad of Germans dashed to Leger’s apartment in the Avenue de Camoëns (Leger had fled to Britain). The Nazis found only a copy of the Treaty of Versailles, and Leger’s five volumes of manuscript poems. On the treaty the Nazis scrawled in bad French: “Grand Bien vous fasse a vous défenseur de la dernier victoire française!” (“A lot of good that does you, defender of France’s last victory!”) They burned the poems.

<footnote>Editor: French Poet Yvon Goll; price 50¢. </footnote>