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Alexis Leger in Peking to Joseph Conrad in Canterbury on Shanghai, 1921

Posted: March 24th, 2015 | No Comments »

I think I’m right in saying that Joseph Conrad never actually set foot in Shanghai, though the city/port does crop up in several of his books (Lord Jim, Typhoon and a couple of others I think). Not sure what he would of made of it? One of his occasional correspondents, Saint-John Perse (also known, and born, Alexis Leger, did write to Conrad in England in 1921 about Shanghai. Leger was a French poet-diplomat (a once quite common breed now largely extinct as diplomats come with career plans and MBAs rather than learning) and Press Attache at the French Legation in Peking during World War One. In February 1921 Leger wrote to Conrad (in Canterbury) from the French Legation in Peking regarding Shanghai…

“I really can’t imagine what I could offer you of interest here, unless it might be, from among the cosmopolitan fauna of Shanghai, a few specimens of the European adventurer; and beautiful adventuresses as well, transplanted from America or White Russia, arrogantly flaunting the respectability they have won. I might also throw in the astonishing corps of estuary pilots, comfortably supplied with bank accounts and extensive maritime connections, all of them from Europe, recruited among the Scots. And finally, in the Shanghai Club, where the bar is the longest specimen of the cabinet maker’s art in the world (“long as an ocean-front”), you might casually pick up many a salty tale, and the confirmation of many tales already heard. You might even run into a few of your old shipmates. For sooner or later they all end up in Shanghai; and Shanghai is the only place between Java Head and Vladivostok that is still the prodigious crossroads of adventurers, an inexhaustible haunt of tough men, untamed and carved in one piece out of that rare material we call energy.”

Sadly this letter is contained in Saint-John Perse/Alexis Leger’s collected Letters (Princeton University Press, 1979) – which only go one way, so I have no idea what Conrad wrote back to him?

Saint-John_Perse_1960



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