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.