Correspondance: 1942–1975 (review)

Unlike most volumes of Saint-John Perse's literary correspondence, this one appears as Alain Bosquet's correspondence with Saint-John Perse and thus outside the Cahiers Saint-John Perse. Since Bosquet's contribution to the correspondence amounts to more than twice that of Saint-John Perse, this is entirely appropriate. However, while the careful editorial input from Roger Little and Michèle Aquien, both well-known Saint-John Perse specialists, has an appropriate lightness of touch, their elegant and incisive Introduction arguably dwells much less on Bosquet than on Saint-John Perse. Bosquet (1919-1998) was born in Odessa but brought up in Belgium and, like the poet with whom he corresponded from 1942 almost right up to Saint-John Perse's death in 1975, used a pseudonym, an anagram of Anatole Bisk. His literary reputation rests not just on his sharp poetry and on his richly ironic novels, but also on his acute autobiographical and critical writings and on his literary memoirs. In the latter genre, La Mémoire ou l'oubli offers, among other things, a particularly lucid portrait of the 1960 Nobel laureate. The sharp perspicacity and wit of that portrait, are — not surprisingly — nowhere in evidence in Bosquet's correspondence with the Great Man, whom he begins by addressing as 'Cher maître', then as 'Cher Maître et ami' and finally as 'Cher ami', the form of address used by the elder poet from the start. The formality of the majority of the letters exchanged testifies to the tenor of what remained, for quite some time, a somewhat asymmetrical relationship. Yet, as early as 1952, Saint-John Perse's literary evaluations and tastes are scarcely more decisive or less indulgent than those of the much younger Bosquet. The tone of the second part of the correspondence testifies to the mellowing of the relationship, however, especially as the two poets began to meet in the company of their respective spouses. Saint-John Perse scholars will probably not learn much that they did not already know about that poet and his literary views. They will scrutinize, none the less, with interest the cosmetic changes that the poet himself made to certain letters to Bosquet before choosing them for inclusion in his literary monument, the Pléiade edition of the Œuvres complètes (1972). They will also be better placed to measure the resonance of those five letters when these are situated in the context of an epistolary dialogue, complete with gaps and silences. In other words, this volume communicates the dynamic of a sustained literary relationship, confirming the control that Saint-John Perse exercised over the (critical) presentation of his work. His comments on the Poètes d'aujourd'hui volume that Bosquet devoted to him (Seghers, 1953) and on the manuscripts supposedly commandeered by the Nazis are points of particular interest in this connection. No doubt those readers particularly interested in Alain Bosquet and his work will focus on other aspects of this correspondence, such as the occasionally brittle timbre of writing that does not at all seem to come from the same pen that elsewhere moved so freely and fluidly, so acutely and so tellingly.