SAINT-JOHN PERSE (1887-1975). L.A.S. "A.S.L.", Pau 21 January 1912, to a "dear friend" [Valery Larbaud] 9 pages in-8. Magnificent, long letter to Larbaud on poetry, about the collection Éloges. [Valery Larbaud devoted an article to Éloges in La Phalange of 20 December 1911; it was the first critical article to appear on Saint-John Perse]. He expressed his belated thanks for "the attentive and all too benevolent study you have devoted to these poems behind me. Friendship has only one price: partiality, and I accept it all; I want to have thanked you 'under the sun of such a moment'. I want to have thanked you 'under the sun of such a moment'. [...] I am very far from keeping a good memory of these poems that you judge favourably. And I also think that the fear of upsetting me in any way will have made you 'reject' from your article all the restrictions it may have initially contained. [...] That's the way it should have been. Criticism is useless. And sadness, for no reason, can make inordinate leaps in us as long as we have not stripped away the absolute of childhood; I mean its conscience. But however unbearable the memory of those poems may be for me, I remember that there was not a single line to be changed there. [...] Above all, I thank you for having thought a little about defending me against exoticism. For I hate nothing so much; and any link is odious to me, in time as well as in place. As much as for the inactual, I have a need to free myself from place, and if I hold only, for a question of light, that is to say of help in living = transfiguring, to a certain degree of latitude as a belt to our whole poor globe (if nothing else!) I cordially hate all longitude. In these poems in particular (which the West Indians would consider less West Indian perhaps than African, or Oceanian, or anything else unprecedented), can I put you at your ease by confessing to you: that 'l'herbe-à-Madame-Lalie', like the bird 'Annaô', and other names too, is pure creation? Not that I don't know the exact names, but you sense as I do that there is in us, just like a taste for going back in time and race, an invincible horror of 'naming'. So, except in places that reduce reality, I've never liked naming things, except for the childish joy of forming names. There is, after all, an extreme difference between the 'word' and the 'name'. (I remember last year when I withdrew from the N.R.F. proofs a poem on seabirds which may have made me seem very fond of ornithology, but in which many of my birds had, of my own free will, been given their names). But all this, I think, this hatred of the relative and the hatred of the link, was much more sensitive in the other series of poems that were not published"... He thanks Larbaud for his final sentence, and "for calling my poems 'the fruits of perfect humility'". He evokes Le Sage's Aventures du chevalier de Beauchêne: "This reading is my delight; I give it the few minutes I have each morning when I open my eyes. I regard Le Sage more and more as one of the secret reserves of the anonymous genius of the French language". Finally, he adds that he is reluctant to accept the position offered by Francis Jammes at "the Société des Banques de province, which is about to embark on various financial and land campaigns in South America and Canada: I haven't accepted yet, terrified by an atavistic inability to multiply anything. In the meantime, I'm working as hard as I can to prepare for the competitive examination for the Consulates, which takes a minimum of 2 years, and I don't have much hope of success. ....