ROSANNA WARREN is the author of several books, most recently the poetry collection So Forth and Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters.
From early childhood, I used to haunt my parents’ bookshelves, leafing through “grown-up” works that I couldn’t yet understand. By the time I was 15 or so and could read French, I was particularly drawn to the bookcase that held my mother’s French and Italian editions. It was up in what we called the gallery: the old hayloft of the Connecticut barn that my parents—Eleanor Clark and Robert Penn Warren—had converted into our family home. The gallery served partly as a guest room, partly as storage space. One afternoon, we were both up there, my mother and I; she was folding sweaters and tucking them away in a bureau drawer, and I was, as usual, examining her books. It was then that I started pulling several musty volumes off the shelves, all of them by the French poet Saint-John Perse.
I had been puzzled before to find so many of Saint-John Perse’s books in my mother’s collection. In my adolescent bluestocking fashion, I had a vague sense of his being Important. I must have known that he had received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960, and I myself owned, I’m not sure why, the ultramarine paperback of his Anabase, translated by T. S. Eliot (also Important)—I’d even read some of it, awed and not a little mystified by its oracular largesse. Now I began examining the other works, most of them frayed, tattered, yellowing: a journal called Lettres Françaises, published in Buenos Aires in 1943; the Quatre Poémes (1941-1944), also published in Buenos Aires; a second paperback copy of Anabase, published by Brentano’s in New York in 1945; and a copy of Exit suivi de Poéme á l’Étrangère, Pluies, Neiges, but this one, ah, published by Gallimard in Paris in 1945. And there were other relics: slim booklets of individual poems in French and English; the poet’s Nobel Prize lecture, translated by W. H. Auden (1961); copies of the Nouvelle Revue Française from 1953, with his long poem “Amers”; and a majestic hardcover tome in English-Winds, translated by Hugh Chisholm and published by Pantheon for the Bollingen series in 1953.
I weighed in my hand the hefty edition of Perse’s Collected Poems (Princeton, 1971) and the Gallimard paperback of his Oeuvres poétiques, volume one, from 1953. But it was the older books that attracted me. I hadn’t looked closely at them before. And now, turning their pages, I discovered something strange. That 1943 issue of Lettres Françaises, which included Perse’s poem “Pluies” (“Rains”), was inscribed in large, armorial handwriting in blue-black ink, “Pour Jennifer,” from “Diego, Washington, D.C.” The P towered like a palm tree above the line; the J and the f plunged down like fishing spears. The copy of Exil from 1945 was sumptuously inscribed in the same calligraphy, “À Jennifer, Être de très grand luxe, et qui a droit à tout, même à la rime: ‘Juniper’, St. J. P. Washington, 1946, 3120 R Street.” (For Jennifer, a Being of great luxury who deserves everything, even a rhyme: Juniper). Just inside the cover, the same hand had written, “Édition interdite par l’auteur-1946” (“Edition prohibited by the author”). Anabase was offered “À Jennifer, Duchesse de Shepang, St.-J. Perse, Washington 1945.” And in a 1945 translation of Perse’s “Neiges” (“Snows”), Perse had written this mysterious message with his same arborescent flourish: “Pour Jennifer, en souvenir d’un fer à cheval et d’un papillon mécanique” (For Jennifer, in memory of a horseshoe and a mechanical butterfly).
My mother, across the room, was scattering mothballs in the bureau drawer. She wore her usual faded jeans and man’s work shirt. “Ma,” I said. “Who is Jennifer?”
“What?” she replied, turning to me in surprise.
“This Jennifer. All these books inscribed to her. Who is she?”
The oddest look crossed my mother’s face. She stood for a moment, contemplating me. A ghost of a smile hovered on her lips, then vanished. Very quietly, she said, “I
