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Saint-John Perse

French poet and diplomat (1887–1975)

  • 66 min read
  • 7 chapters

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Early life

Alexis Leger was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. His great-grandfather, Prosper Louis Léger, a solicitor, had settled in Guadeloupe in 1815. His grandfather and father were also solicitors; his father was also a member of the city council. The Leger family owned two plantations, one of coffee (La Joséphine) and the other of sugar (Bois-Debout). St. Léger described his childhood on Guadeloupe as "the son of a French family as only the colonials are French". Later on, Léger greatly embellished his family origins by changing his surname to the more aristocratic sounding St Léger-Léger and by claiming that his ancestors were an ancienne noblesse family who had settled in Guadeloupe in the 17th century. The Léger family were well off and Léger had a happy boyhood. Léger was closer to his warm and loving mother than his cold and distant father. The French scholar Marie-Noëlle Little wrote: "Growing up surrounded by the luxurious fauna and flora of the West Indies, Alexis perhaps could not but develop an interest in nature...".

After the Spanish-American War that saw the United States annex Puerto Rico and occupy Cuba, rumors were rampant in the French West Indies that the United States would seize the French colonies in the Caribbean. The year 1899, known as the "year of all dangers", was a period of racial tension on Guadeloupe, with both blacks and whites committing arson in the belief that French rule would soon be ending. The Leger family returned to metropolitan France in 1899 and settled in Pau. The young Alexis felt like an expatriate and spent much of his time hiking, fencing, riding horses, and sailing in the Atlantic. His best subjects as a student were the natural sciences. St Léger always felt very close to nature in general, and he had a special interest in ornithology as birds fascinated him.

St. Léger had a strong sense of being an outsider in France and called himself a "man of the Atlantic" who was equally at home on both sides of the Atlantic. Throughout his life, St Léger had a preference for islands and peninsulas over the mainland, which reflected his sense of being an outsider; his sense of a Guadeloupan identity made him feel that he was very different from other French people. He enrolled at Lycée Louis-Barthou, passed the baccalauréat with honours, and began studying law at the University of Bordeaux. As a university student, St Léger worked as the music critic for the Pau-Gazette. When his father died in 1907, the resulting strain on his family's finances led Leger to temporarily interrupt his studies, but he eventually completed his degree in 1910.

In 1904, he met the poet Francis Jammes at Orthez, who became a close friend. He frequented cultural clubs and met Paul Claudel, Odilon Redon, Valery Larbaud, and André Gide. He wrote short poems inspired by the story of Robinson Crusoe (Images à Crusoe) and undertook a translation of Pindar. He published his first book of poetry, Éloges, in 1910. The Éloges (Praises) reflected St. Léger's nostalgia for Guadeloupe. The Éloges concern a quest by the narrator for the "other shores", namely outre-mer (a place beyond the sea) and outre-songe (a place beyond dreams). Much of the Éloges are concerned with the lieux de mémoire ("sites of memory") that capture the memories of a past world that no longer exists. At one point, St Léger asks in the Éloges: "Other than childhood, what was there in those days that is here no longer?" The tone in the Éloges is both dreamy and melancholic as the narrator reflects on his longing for the plantation of his childhood, which is depicted as a paradise lost. The house that St. Léger grew up in is depicted in the Éloges as a decaying ruin as his family's plantation is being reclaimed by the jungle, while all of the books in the family library have rotted away. The autobiographical nature of the Éloges is underscored by a major character in the poems, an authoritarian father who owned the plantation, depicted as having omniscient power over both his family and the plantation.

For St. Léger, only poetry endures and allowed him to recapture the memories of a lost world. The front page of the Éloges features the phrase in capital letters "ÉCRIT SUR LA PORTE" ("Written on the door") and the first poem begins with a description of the door to the plantation house under which the same phrase is written. The door serves literally as an entrance to the house and metaphorically as the entrance to the lost world of St Léger's childhood. The chronotope of the Éloges is one where his family's plantation exists in an idealized world severed from any sense of history, which reflected St Léger's discomfort with the fact that his family owned slaves in the past (slavery was abolished in France in 1848). Several passages in the Éloges imply an incestuous relationship between the father and the sister of the narrator, such as the line "a man is hard, his daughter tender"; the way that the sister displaces her mother as the principal lady of the household; and references to a deeply shameful family secret that the narrator cannot bring himself to name.

The Éloges was almost completely ignored at the time; one of the few writers who paid it any attention was Marcel Proust, who praised St. Léger as a creative young poet. An early success for St Léger occurred in 1912 when he, Larbaud, and Gide were elected to the John Donne Club of London, which sought to encourage innovation in poetry. During a visit to London to celebrate his election to the John Donne Club, St. Léger met the Anglo-Polish writer Joseph Conrad, which greatly encouraged him to pursue a career in poetry. Little wrote about his style: "The poet's task, he thought, like the scientist's, was to capture the universe and human consciousness while remaining outside of the literacy currents of the time".

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