Talk:Saint-John Perse

Abreu/Perse
'Lilita' Rosalie Abreu died in 1930 < Rosalie Abreu and the Apes of Havana, International Journal of Primatology 2008 Springer Netherlands > so could not have lived in Washington with Perse since he did not go there until 1939 . 0RyOkan (talk) 13:43, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Volcanic eruption
Just a side note (and no, it's not for the article): Perse must have known of the 1902 Mount Pelée eruption, and no doubt he had been to the island both before and after the cataclysm. It's just across the strait from his home island. Although he was in France (boarding school) at the time it happened, the event - one of the most notorious volcanic eruptions in modern times - must have left a powerful imprint at the back of his mind. It is significant for a poet so concerned with the majesty of nature and with man in face of cataclysm (as in Vents) Strausszek (talk) 15:26, 15 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Good point I've not seen mentioned elsewhere. Had his family not returned to France in 1899, it is likely that some or all of it would have died in the 1902 eruption, which killed tens of thousands of people, because of the large volume of hot poisonous gases emitted. However, I have not read of Perse ever returning to the Antilles after his family left it.111.69.246.116 (talk) 17:36, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Why no biography?
I am very puzzled that no biography of Perse exits in either English or French, much less a scholarly one. Hence the main reference for the details of his life are the chronology and notes he wrote for the Pleiade Oeuvres Completes. Let me conjecture as to the possible reasons for this.

Perse was a high level French civil servant for 26 years, and doing justice to this period in his life would require access to the archives of the French Foreign Ministry. French law stipulates that paperwork bearing on French diplomacy and war is to remain classified for at least 50 years. At any rate, records for this period were probably seized by the German authorities after the fall of France, and perhaps subsequently lost or destroyed. It is known that the German authorities moved some or all of the personal papers in Leger's office to an estate in Pomerania. The contents of that estate were seized by the Red Army in 1945 and their fate is unknown.

When Perse died in 1975, the big French weekly magazine Paris Match said that Perse's reputation in France was seriously compromised by his being at odds with Charles De Gaulle, and that Perse's glory was mainly among foreigners. Paris-Match struck me as assuming that Perse's name meant nothing to the vast majority of its readers, and the tone of its obituary piece was almost apologetic. Yet Perse and De Gaulle had a great deal in common. They had similar minor patrician ancestries and were only 3 years apart in age. They were both splendidly educated and wrote coruscating French prose. Was it the case that there was no room in France for two men with literary egos as big as De Gaulle's and Perse's?

Both were very patriotic Frenchmen and confirmed anti-Nazis who immediately fled to London after the fall of France. But Perse the lawyer and diplomat, and a man very much involved in the politics and international relations of the interwar period, did not like the way De Gaulle declared himself the leader of a French government in London exile. De Gaulle saw Leger as a man tainted by the ineptitude and moral decay of the Third Republic after the victory of 1918. De Gaulle neither liked nor trusted the British and Americans, whom he viewed as patronising and condescending towards France, and as indifferent to the glories of French culture. Perse was an anglophile with excellent English, who had no difficulties with Pax Americana and seems to have adapted well to his 27 year exile in the USA.

Perse returned from China in 1921, aged 34, and began to occupy a series of prestigious and well-paid posts in the French civil service. He was a very eligible bachelor. Hence it is very curious that he did not marry until 36 years later, when he was an old man. His poetry occasionally hints at strong heterosexuality. I suspect that Perse's private life was not always fully respectable. If this is the case, it would be understandable if Perse's widow, as his sole heir, declines to give the assent needed to write a biography. She may still be alive. The widow and Perse's descent via his sisters could also be at loggerheads.

I would welcome anyone adding to or correcting anything I say above.111.69.246.116 (talk) 18:26, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Interesting. With Perse's erotic side, it's very striking to see a man nearing seventy, and who had previously been keeping an (outwardly) celibatary life for decades, writing as staggeringly (and enviable!) erotic poetry as in Etroits sont les Vaisseaux (in Amers). As one critic put it some years after his Nobel award, this is "one of the great cycles of love poetry in world literature, archaic in its majesty, but fully modern in its sensuality". Within its multi-layered rethorical edifices, it is remarkably outspoken. He does come across as a poet both hotblooded and majestic, both lofty and defiant.
 * So it's possible that his private life was less than "clean". But I think his poetic language, splendid as it is, can also be hard to penetrate. It's extremely dense sometimes, as dense and idiosyncratic as Hölderlin, and his powerful metaphors may also have become less fashionable. There is a certain enmity or suspicion towards metaphors and saturated language of this kind in contemporary poetry (I am thinking of the last thirty years or so, roughly coinciding with the time since SJP died) and not least in France. This "flight from visual imagery" is rooted both in postmodern literary theory and in a feeling that this kind of language would be tied to an elevation of man as the Lord of creation (the namer of all things, animals and phenomena), which is seen as no longer viable or desirable. So Perse may have come to be seen as too elevated, too aloof, to be fully part of the contemporary age (anyway aristocrats were definitely not in vogue in France around 1970!) To me, this would be erroneous though; he is one of the truly great poets of 20th century Europe, and at least the first two-thirds of the 20th century was itself an era hard to beat in terms of breadth and literary force.


 * And another thing, biographies don't have quite the same central position in French literary life as they have in Britain or the U.S.. There's a tad less expectation of a big "official biography" of every great person in France. And romantic affairs with (perhaps married?) women have never been seen as that damning in France, there is a chasm vs the attitude in the USA. John F Kennedy has been endlessly lambasted posthumously for his being a womanizer, while Francois Mitterrand had an illegitimate daughter, something well known to French journalists in his lifetime but never mentioned openly: no one bothered. So I doubt this would have been seen as a bar to allowing the writing of a biography. However, Perse plainly outlived many of those who would have known him before 1940.


 * His stated reason for rejecting de Gaulle's leadership in 1940 (they met briefly in London that summer) was that the general had mutinied and had not been given his authority by proper procedure. This sounds odd; it could hardly be the only reason. France had collapsed, moreover Perse must have realized that Churchill, too, had pretty much made his own authority, had rebelled his way, although he had held a cabinet post under Chamberlain during the phoney war. And he wouldn't have had any illusions about the Pétain (Vichy) bunch who were effectively the legal heirs of the third republic.


 * Though there's no major biography that I know of, there have been several editions of Perse's correspondence with select people (Paul Claudel, Dag Hammarskjöld, philosopher Roger Caillois); he was a great and committed epistolar writer.Strausszek (talk) 01:36, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

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