Saint-John Perse

Saint-John Perse (; also Saint-Leger Leger, ; pseudonyms of Alexis Leger) (31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975) was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.
Early life.
Alexis Leger was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. His great-grandfather, 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).
In 1897, Hégésippe Légitimus, the first native Guadeloupan elected president of the Guadeloupe General Council, took office with a vindictive agenda towards colonists. 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. He passed the "baccalauréat" with honours and began studying law at the University of Bordeaux. 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 1911.
Diplomatic service.
In 1914, he joined the French diplomatic service, and spent some of his first years in Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom. When World War I broke out, he was a press corps attaché for the government. From 1916 to 1921, he was secretary to the French embassy in Peking. In 1921 in Washington, DC, while taking part in a world disarmament conference, he was noticed by Aristide Briand, Prime Minister of France, who recruited him as his assistant. In Paris, he got to know the fellow intellectual poet Larbaud, who used his influence to get the poem "Anabase" published, written during Leger's stay in China.
Leger was warm to classical music and knew Igor Stravinsky, Nadia Boulanger, and Les Six.
While in China, Leger had written his first extended poem "Anabase", publishing it in 1924 under the pseudonym "Saint-John Perse", which he employed for the rest of his life. He then published nothing for two decades, not even a re-edition of his debut book, as he believed it inappropriate for a diplomat to publish fiction. After Briand's death in 1932, Leger served as the General Secretary of the French Foreign Office (Quai d'Orsay) until 1940.
Within the Foreign Office he led the optimist faction that believed that Germany was unstable and that if Britain and France stood up to Hitler, he would back down. He accompanied the French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier at the Munich Conference in 1938, where the cession of part of Czechoslovakia to Germany was agreed to. He was dismissed from his post right after the Fall of France in May 1940, as he was a known anti-Nazi. In mid-July 1940, Leger began a long exile in Washington, DC.
Later life.
In 1940, the Vichy government dismissed him from the Légion d'honneur order and revoked his French citizenship (it was reinstated after the war). He was in some financial difficulty as an exile in Washington until Archibald MacLeish, the director of the Library of Congress and himself a poet, raised enough private donations to enable the library to employ him until his official retirement from the French civil service in 1947. He declined a teaching position at Harvard University.
During his American exile, he wrote his long poems "Exil", "Vents", "Pluies", "Neiges", "Amers", and "Chroniques". He remained in the US long after the end of the war. He travelled extensively, observing nature and enjoying the friendship of US Attorney General Francis Biddle and his spouse, philanthropist Beatrice Chanler, and author Katherine Garrison Chapin. He was on good terms with the UN Secretary General and author Dag Hammarskjöld.
In 1957, American friends gave him a villa at Giens, Provence, France. He then split his time between France and the United States. In 1958, he married the American Dorothy Milburn Russell.
In 1960, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. After receiving the Nobel Prize, he wrote the long poems "Chronique", "Oiseaux" and "Chant pour un équinoxe" and the shorter "Nocturne" and "Sécheresse". In 1962, Georges Braque worked with master printmaker Aldo Crommelynck to create a series of etchings and aquatints, "L'Ordre des Oiseaux", which was published with the text of Perse's "Oiseaux" by Au Vent d'Arles.
A few months before he died, Leger donated his library, manuscripts and private papers to Fondation Saint-John Perse, a research centre devoted to his life and work (Cité du Livre, Aix-en-Provence), which remains active to the present day. He died in his villa in Giens and is buried nearby.
Secondary literature in English.
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