Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
"I waited until I’d written a thousand poems before I attempted to publish,” says Emil Stanley Saint Pellicer, sitting in Kaldi’s on DeMun with his biographer and “portable memory,” Linda Dahlheimer. Cafés have become Saint Pellicer’s natural environment of late, at least on Wednesdays, when he reads his work in spots like The Map Room in Benton Park or Stone Spiral Coffeehouse in Maplewood. Last year, during a trip to Paris, he was invited to read at the Club des Poètes on the Left Bank (where he was introduced, to his amusement, as “the American”). He’s read poems on National Public Radio and for the St. Louis Poetry Center, and was one of the last poets Observable Readings founder Aaron Belz booked at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis before moving to Los Angeles in 2008. Belz had been asking Saint Pellicer—who writes under the name Marcel Toussaint—to read for two years, referring to him as “that mysterious man.” Saint Pellicer said he would have read sooner, had he not been recovering from a serious cardiac arrest. (Dahlheimer was there when it happened, making her not just his life-chronicler, but also his lifesaver).
“By now, I am on my second lifetime!” he cackles.
Recently, with Dahlheimer as editor, Saint Pellicer released an autobiography in poems, titled Poetry of a Lifetime. More formal and rhymed than much contemporary poetry, it also offers a fascinating look into long-gone worlds, including high society in midcentury St. Louis. The book is split into sections corresponding to the four seasons. The first 57 pages describe his childhood in Rabat, Morocco; he writes about the whitewashed houses, the smell of the tanneries, and the calls to prayer, as well as his mother’s prescription for a cold (sugar, dissolved in rum) and the loss of a childhood pet, “a white mouse / with red eyes / active and fast: Maman took her / to the bathroom / and we heard a big flush.”
Though Saint Pellicer spoke Spanish and French at home, he fell in love with English at 11, when American troops landed in East Africa in 1943.
“So the first try that I had at writing was at 13, translating American comic strips on a radio station for a show for children,” he says. “I was six years as an actor on Radio-Maroc.”
Because he loved English and didn’t love engineering— a field his father pushed him to pursue—he left Africa at 21 to join his sister Odette in St. Louis, her new husband’s hometown. He’d spent years studying what he calls l’art dramatique at the conservatoire in Rabat and knew how to dance, so when he sought out a job, he knocked on the door of Arthur Murray Studios.
“They took me right away— I was surprised,” he says. “But I always danced...with my cousin in Casablanca, up and down stairs, sidewalks, and playing that American dancer, Gene Kelly.”
A friend of his sister’s introduced Saint Pellicer to society matron Lemoine Skinner, who’d been searching for a place to take her children to learn proper dancing and deportment; St. Louis had been without a proper European dancing instructor since the death of Jacob Mahler, legendary proprietor of the Mahler Ballroom, in the 1920s. Before long, Saint Pellicer—now known simply as Stanley Pellicer—had his own ballroom on Union, complete with chandeliers, mirrors, and a fountain, where he taught waltzes and manners to young Schlaflys, Pulitzers, and Desloges.
“They would roll in with Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs,” he says. “I’m surprised that they didn’t have a carriage with horses. They came and we had classes, where they learned how to bow, how to ask for a dance, how to go through a receiving line.”
A few years later, he’d transform a house on Clayton Road “with pink walls and even pinker carpets” into the Saint Pellicer Conservatoire where he taught fencing. (“They both have rhythm, they have patterns, they’re art forms; I was interested in the arts,” he shrugs.) Saint Pellicer was a maître d’armes, studying under Turkish saber champion Yucel Erden and former U.S. Olympic fencing coach Giorgio Santelli. He and his little family lived upstairs; he was continually in the newspapers, as well as on The Charlotte Peters Show, The Jack Carney Show, and Regis Philbin’s Saturday Night in St. Louis (when Philbin commuted here every weekend to broadcast on KMOX-TV).
But every fairy tale has its dark and dismal forest. On page 109 of Saint Pellicer’s book, there is a poem in French, “Stanley est mort,” (“Stanley is dead”). It describes the nadir of his life, when he acquiesced to his wife’s request that they leave the salle d’armes and move to the suburbs. As the title suggests, it meant giving up his fencing career, as well as his artist’s persona; the fallout included an identity crisis and a divorce.
In fairy tales, battered heroes adopt a new name after they’ve survived the worst. At age 60, when Saint Pellicer decided to start writing poetry, he renamed himself, too: Marcel, after his best childhood friend, and Toussaint for his birthday, November 1, All Saints’ Day (“La Touissant”). And though he found himself even further from the city— in a Wildwood condo—his poetry allied him with a circle of urban artists, including Elsie Parker and the Poor People of Paris (Saint Pellicer wrote the lyrics for “Elle se Souvient” and “La Poule de Pigalle”), nightclub owner Gene Lynn, and Farshid Soltanshahi of Farshid Etniko, as well as Dahlheimer and her husband. Saint Pellicer’s also been reading and translating for Dr. Carlos Pappalardo’s multilingual poetry nights at the Regional Arts Commission, which so far have presented Pablo Neruda and Robert Frost in the three languages he speaks— English, French, and Spanish—and one he doesn’t (Italian). And at 77, Saint Pellicer is embarking on not only his second lifetime, but also his second thousand poems. When asked what language he loves to write in most, his face lights up in amusement.
“All three,” he winks. “Though French is the most precise!”
Poetry of a Lifetime is available online at nacgpress.com and at area bookstores. For more information, go to marceltoussaint.com.
