Saint-John Perse & Jean Paulhan, 1925-1966
Saint-John PerseJean PaulhanEverything had to bring Alexis Leger/Saint-John Perse and Jean Paulhan together; mutual friends, a taste for the unusual and even the same passion for pétanque. Neither exile nor illness nor worries of any kind broke the bond that united them. On the contrary, it only grew in this long correspondence. If behind the public figures, the men modestly allow themselves to be glimpsed, it is nevertheless literature which is the big business, “There is no history except of the soul” wrote Saint-John Perse in Exil, and it is not this correspondence that could argue against this assertion because events, public and private, are judged in the light of their resentment on literary life.
There is no solution of continuity between letters, creation and life. And it is “in esteem”, and “like a pure commerce of the soul”, that this endearing correspondence is established.
Publisher : Gallimard