Epic Maker

SEAMARKS (363 pp.)--St.-John Perse --Pantheon ($6).

One day in 1925, French Premier Aristide Briand faced his brilliant Secretary-General for Foreign Affairs and asked him, flat out, if there was any truth to the rumor that he was a poet on the side. Replied Marie Rene Auguste Alexis Saint-Leger Leger imperturbably: "It is an imposture." In a sense it was, for nothing could be more different from the sleight-of-hand diplomacy which Leger practiced at the Quai d'Orsay than the sweeping, exotic poems appearing over the pseudonym St.-John Perse (after one of Leger's favorite ancient authors, Persius). Poet-Diplomat Leger proceeded to make a remarkable though austerely unpublicized success of both sides of his double life.

A diplomat's diplomat, Leger briefed the passing parade of French Premiers, helped mastermind the Locarno and Kellogg-Briand Pacts. Refusing the post of Ambassador to the U.S. in 1940, Leger fled France ahead-of the Nazis who seized and probably burned Leger's unpublished work of 23 years (1916-39), including five books of poetry, a drama, a book of essays and enough raw material for three or four more books. Settling down in Washington, D.C., Leger calmly proceeded to repair the damage done the career of St.-John Perse.

Seamarks is the capstone of that career. Like the four slim volumes that preceded it, it is at once difficult and excitingly readable, frustrating and revealing.

Autumnal Work. The overall meaning of Seamarks has to be pried open like a clam, and part of the problem is translation: even the nonlinguist will sense that the opening words, "And you. Seas ..." have a brusque, peremptory sound in English that lacks the water-laved caress of "Et vous, Mers ..." A further difficulty is that Perse writes a kind of intricate shorthand of cryptic allusions, which the reader himself must translate as best he can. Perhaps the most rewarding approach to a poem like Seamarks is to see it in the context of Perse's entire work.

That work is a kind of autumnal epic, a chronicle of mankind having found all gods dead, having stomached the rise and fall of civilizations to the point of surfeit, buoyed up only by the hope of new beginnings. The tone is frequently elegiac as in Exile (1942):

I have built upon the abyss and the spindrift and the sand-smoke. I shall lie down in cistern and hollow

vessel,

In all stale and empty places where lies the taste of greatness.

But Perse never allows the hope of purification and renewal to gutter out. In Anabasis (1924), his best-known work, partly thanks to an excellent translation by T.S. Eliot, Perse tells of the seedtime of history. Man, the nomad, ranges out over the deserts of the East, "Ploughland of dream." He raises and then razes a city. In Winds (1946), great storms sweep across Europe, "leaving us in their wake, Men of straw in the year of straw." The restless hero finds himself in the West as Perse conjures up the discovery and dynamism of America--"the great expresses . . . with their supply of ice for five days .. . running against the wind, strapped with white metal, like aging athletes." The implication is that America represents energy without order. Where is the eternal fountain of youth, Perse seems to be asking all along, the origin of life, the innocence and worider of childhood recaptured? At 71, St.-John Perse finds the answer in the inexhaustible symbol of the sea.

Beyond Time. As Seamarks opens with majestic waves of imagery, the poet celebrates the sea as the ever-renewing source and symbol of life. In endless variations on this theme, Perse evokes man's grandest and loneliest moments, his immemorial past, his intimations of a nobler future. With its Invocation. Strophe, Chorus and Dedication--and its sensuous neopagan salute to raw nature--Seamarks reads a little like a drama put on for the approval of the gods on Olympus. A long section symbolizing union with the sea might pass for impassioned love poetry. The final evocation is one of renascence: "The javelins of Noon quiver in the gates of joy! The drums of nothingness yield to the fifes of light."

A vigorous septuagenarian, Perse calls Seamarks "my last song." Yet he still intends to write his memoirs ("I have been trusted with many secrets which not even the Foreign Ministers knew about"), and he would like to do a book about the U.S., drawing on the notebooks he kept in travels from Maine to Arizona. Reserved, aristocratic, a grey eminence both in diplomacy and letters, St.-John Perse has always cherished what was "beyond time, not of it." His poetry reflects this quality of timelessness and universality.

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