{"id":553,"date":"2025-10-13T15:16:22","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T20:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/robertbarsky\/?p=553"},"modified":"2025-10-13T15:16:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-13T20:16:22","slug":"their-favorite-thief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/robertbarsky\/2025\/10\/their-favorite-thief\/","title":{"rendered":"Their Favorite Thief"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n
Tony Judt<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
<\/div>\n
\n

October 21, 1993 issue<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Visit us on Facebook! Opens External Webpage<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n
<\/div>\n

Visit us on Twitter! Opens External Webpage<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Mail to<\/span><\/a>Print page<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

Submit a letter:<\/p>\n

Email us\u00a0letters@nybooks.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

Reviewed:<\/p>\n

\n

Genet: A Biography<\/p>\n

by Edmund White<\/div>\n
Knopf, 820 pp., $35.00<\/div>\n<\/article>\n
\n

The Selected Writings of Jean Genet<\/p>\n

edited and with an introduction by Edmund White<\/div>\n
Ecco Press, 456 pp., $27.50<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

1.<\/h3>\n

From Baudelaire to Simone de Beauvoir there has been something unmistakably bourgeois about even the most\u00a0outr\u00e9<\/i>\u00a0Parisian intellectuals, not least in a common sentiment of vengeful anger felt toward their privileged origins. Symbolists,\u00a0D\u00e9cadents<\/i>, Surrealists, and Existentialists were at home in the world they scorned; they traveled comfortably back and forth across the permeable frontier separating middle-class convention from Bohemian revolt. To this pattern there has been, in this century, one outstanding exception. Jean Genet\u2014bastard, thief, homosexual, prostitute, novelist, playwright, and radical political activist\u2014was as aggressively anti-conventional in his life as he was in his writings. Indeed he took pride in this correspondence between his life and his work and cultivated it with care; the invention and re-invention of his own asocial identity, through his writings and his actions alike, was crucial to his continuing (il)legitimacy. Genet never stopped writing his life.<\/p>\n

This does nothing to facilitate the task of his biographer, and Edmund White deserves unstinting praise for his painstaking efforts to unravel the threads that Genet so assiduously knotted and crossed in his various writings and interviews. It is not so much that he lied about his earlier life as that he attached misleading emphases to selected elements within it, the better to present himself in later years as the ultimate outsider without family, love, or formal education. In this guise, unconnected to the conventional world of sentimental ties and moral sensibilities, he presented himself and was understood by his admirers as a sort of\u00a0idiot savant<\/i>, a force of nature loose in a world of hyper-civilized scribblers, a self-created counterpart and negation of conventional values and mores, Sartre\u2019s \u201cSaint Genet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jean Genet was born in Paris in 1910. Abandoned by his mother (his father is unknown) he became a ward of the French state and was placed with foster parents in a village some one hundred and fifty miles southeast of the capital. There he passed a fairly uneventful Catholic childhood, apparently the object of much affectionate attention from his foster mother and other women in the family (until he was nine most of the adult men in the village were serving in the army on the Western Front). Although he committed a few petty thefts in these years he was generally a model child and outperformed the other village children in the primary-school leaving examinations when he was twelve. At that point, and like most other rural children of his era, his schooling came to an end and he was apprenticed to a printing shop near Paris (his outstanding school record excused him from the fate of most foster children, who ended up as agricultural laborers in the region to which they had been assigned as babies).<\/p>\n

Genet ran away from his new home ten days after arriving there. This was the first of many such attempts to escape, nearly all of them taking the form of an unticketed train journey to exotic ports (Nice, Bordeaux, Marseilles), followed by ignominious return journeys in the company of a gendarme or Welfare official. Finally, in 1926, following forty-five days in the town jail at Meaux, his first extended stint in prison (he would eventually spend a total of forty-four and one half months in adult prisons), Genet was sent to the agricultural reform school for boys at Mettray. Although he also attempted unsuccessfully to escape from this institution it clearly had a central role in his life; he spent two and a half years there, and the martial, penal, and exclusively male characteristics of the place are treated at some length and with a degree of nostalgic affection in his later writings.<\/p>\n

The reform school at Mettray, established in 1840 as an agricultural colony, was run on principles derived from Pestalozzi; it combined a paternalist notion of moral reform, the boys grouped in \u201cfamily houses\u201d run by a resident adult and subject to a rigorous regime of study, prayer, and manual labor, with the disciplinary, hierarchical, and homosexual ambiance of a minor English public school. Older boys controlled, disciplined, and \u201cprotected\u201d younger inmates. Escape was close to impossible: even though the settlement lacked walls and had the outward appearance of a collective farm, youths who wandered into the woods and fields surrounding it were almost invariably found and reported by local farmers and returned to their warders. Despite all this, and the panopticon-like surveillance techniques of the guardians, Genet came to feel at home in this, the only family he ever acknowledged.<\/p>\n

He describes the cruel and humiliating system of punishments in\u00a0Miracle of the Rose<\/i>, and in later years he decried the literally colonial nature of the institution and its purposes. But it was at Mettray that he first experienced the confusion of sentiments and observations which he would later collect and shape into novels. In his own words, \u201cIf to write means that you feel emotions or feelings so strong that your whole life is shaped by them, if they\u2019re so strong that only by describing them or evoking or analyzing them can you understand them\u2014if so, then it was at Mettray that I started, when I was fifteen\u2014it was then I started to write.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Advertisement<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

From 1929, when he left Mettray to enroll in the army, Genet\u2019s adult life falls into four distinct episodes. Until 1942 he did various periods of service in the French army in Syria and Morocco, interspersed with attempts at desertion, penniless travels through Spain and Eastern Europe, and a steady sequence of arrests and brief incarcerations for crimes varying from theft to vagrancy. It was in these years that he accumulated the experiences and the associations, notably with criminals, prisoners, and homosexual prostitutes, which would figure so prominently in his early novels and with which he would forever be linked. By 1941 he was back in Paris and habitually stealing books from stores and bookstalls. He does not seem to have been a very good thief\u2014he was nearly always caught and spent about twenty-one months of the Occupation in prison on a variety of counts\u2014but his growing fascination with books is wellattested; after his release from jail in March 1942 he sought and found work as a bookstall-keeper\u2019s assistant.<\/p>\n

By then, however, his imprisonments were being put to good use.\u00a0Our Lady of the Flowers<\/i>, his first novel, was largely written during his 1942 stays in Fresnes prison. Through a chance contact at the bookstall where he worked (and stole) Genet met Jean Cocteau and entered a new stage in his life. At their first encounter Genet read to him an unpublished poem, \u201cThe Sleeping Boxer.\u201d Even by his own standards, Cocteau\u2019s reaction was enthusiastic: \u201cThere are lines so beautiful that B\u00e9rard and I burst out laughing\u2026. Elegance, balance, wisdom, that\u2019s what emanates from this maniac and prodigy. For me his poems are the only great event of the period.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

From 1943 Genet\u2019s career took off. Thanks to Cocteau he obtained his first contract; in the spring of 1944 he was \u201cdiscovered\u201d by Jean-Paul Sartre, who read an excerpt of\u00a0Our Lady<\/i>\u00a0published in an obscure literary journal. Thenceforward, and increasingly so with the completion between 1942 and 1947 of five novels,<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\u00a0Genet became the fashionable darling of various Parisian circles, first the smart homosexual literati around Cocteau, Marcel Jouhandeau, and Boris Kochno, then the Saint-Germain group led by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, whom he met in May 1944. His relations with de Beauvoir in particular were not always easy: she was to describe him as a \u201cbitchy queen, fairy, gossip,\u201d surrounded by a \u201csilly fairy entourage,\u201d and she held it against him that he was (probably in ascending order of unacceptability) a \u201cthief, juvenile delinquent, bastard, and prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Sartre.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\u00a0But she and her friends were sufficiently impressed by their new friend to sign, together with Cocteau and others, a petition to President Vincent Auriol to pardon him for his accumulated and continuing criminal offenses on the uniquely French grounds that he was a literary genius.<\/p>\n

The pardon was granted in August 1949. By 1951 the prestigious publishing house Gallimard was preparing to put out Genet\u2019s \u201cCollected Works.\u201d The introduction was to be written by Sartre and would eventually grow into a six-hundred-page analytical essay,\u00a0Saint Genet: com\u00e9dien et martyr<\/i>. This triple success\u2014a presidential pardon, the publication of his collected works, and sanctification by France\u2019s leading intellectual\u2014seems to have led to an understandable period of self-questioning and inactivity which lasted until the mid-1950s; in his own words, he feared he might have emptied himself and have nothing left to say: \u201cEvery authentic writer discovers not only a new style, but a form of narrative which belongs to him alone, and which generally he exhausts, that is, he draws from it all possible effects.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreover, Genet was no longer the attractive Parisian dandy, trading on his youthful looks and scabrous reputation, an image he cultivated during his \u201cCocteau\u201d period and through the completion of his novels. By 1955, when he started writing again, he was a small, bald, middle-aged man with bad teeth and a taste for featureless provincial towns, where he stayed in cheap railway hotels (he never lost his early passion for travel and escape). In Paris his new image would be that of the ascetic, dressed in dirty old clothes, associating with \u201cpure\u201d artists like Giacometti and abjuring all material comforts.<\/p>\n

In this new guise Genet turned to theater and wrote, in the years 1955\u20131957, his three best-known plays:\u00a0Le Balcon, Les N\u00e8gres<\/i>, and\u00a0Les Paravents (The Screens). Les Bonnes (The Maids)<\/i>, which had its Paris premiere in 1947, belongs to an earlier period, although it anticipates some of the later works in its concern with inversion, betrayal, and murder. The three new plays were in a distinctively different key\u2014they abandoned the realist and relatively conventional shape of\u00a0Les Bonnes<\/i>\u00a0and introduced a distinctly denser stagecraft and dialogue\u2014and when performed they further enhanced Genet\u2019s reputation; the underworld aura was now overlaid by a new and broader subject matter, at once more political and more emotionally complex.<\/p>\n

\n

Advertisement<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

By 1965 (when he was refused a visa to visit the US) his active interest in the theatre was declining and he was to enter another fallow period, in part as the result of the suicide of his young friend Abdallah. This personal tragedy\u2014Abdallah Bentaga was one of a small number of young men with whom Genet formed close relationships in later life\u2014can in retrospect be seen to have come at a time when Genet was already preparing the way for the final, enduring concerns of his adult life, a shift away from writing and toward political activism, associating himself first with the Black Panthers and then, with even more wholehearted enthusiasm, aligning himself with the Palestinians, whom he first encountered in 1970 during a visit to Jordan in the aftermath of Black September. These experiences would provide material for his final work,\u00a0Prisoner of Love<\/i>, a perceptive narrative of his political involvements from the late Sixties until his death\u2014it was published within a month of the discovery of Genet\u2019s body in a Paris hotel room in April 1986.<\/p>\n

2.<\/h3>\n

The first turning-point in Genet\u2019s progress, the hinge on which both his life and his reputation has swung, was Sartre\u2019s study of him. Until then his early career, as recounted in the novels (notably\u00a0A Thief\u2019s Journal<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0The Miracle of the Rose<\/i>) had a certain troubled coherence. As White summarizes it, \u201cGenet\u2019s is a world of beautiful, violent, treacherous criminals; pampered, cowardly, not very intelligent pimps; and valiant if hysterical transvestites,\u201d with no \u201cdull normals\u201d and a Dostoevskian concern with crime, prison, penal colonies, and revolt. To the extent that the novels provide a faithful image of the youth which Genet perennially recycled in his fiction, the experience of the prison life of Mettray was crucial. The \u201cColony,\u201d as remembered and imagined in Genet\u2019s writings, provided a model and example of the hierarchical, masculine community, with innocent youths entering and traversing a dark adult universe of violence and virility, the setting in which Genet was most comfortable. It was also a metaphor for such communities, an \u201cidealized\u201d version of the life of prisons, armies, penal colonies, and \u201crough trade\u201d as Genet knew and imagined it.<\/p>\n

A fascination with death\u2014through murder, suicide, or execution\u2014and an atmosphere of thick social detail compensate for the interchangeable and underdeveloped characterizations, as does the language Genet employs\u2014rich, ripe (a bit \u201cinflated,\u201d according to Gide), extreme, metaphorical, and aggressively, scabrously, slangily homoerotic. It is a language whose originality and appeal is not easily captured in translation, though its shock value to his first readers may be imagined. It is quite well conveyed in the excerpt from\u00a0Our Lady of the Flowers<\/i>\u00a0included in the\u00a0Selected Writings<\/i>, where the character Mimosa is introduced to the reader:<\/p>\n

The two queens were chirping away. Their talk was dull compared to the play of their eyes. The eyelids did not flutter, nor did the temples crinkle. Their eyeballs flowed from right to left, left to right, rotated, and their glances were manipulated by a system of ball bearings. Let us listen now as they whisper so that Darling may draw near and, standing beside them, pachyderm that he is, make titanic efforts to understand. Mimosa whispers:<\/p>\n

\u201cMy dear, it\u2019s when the Cuties still have their pants on that I like them. You just look at them and they get all stiff. It drives you mad, simply mad! It starts a crease that goes on and on and on, all the way down to their feet. When you touch it, you keep following the crease, without pressing on it, right to the toes. My love, you\u2019d think that the Beaut was going straight down. For that, I recommend sailors especially.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the words of Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre\u2019s\u00a0Saint Genet<\/i>\u00a0was \u201cnearly a rape.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

(Genet would have appreciated the metaphor.) In this work, which then became Volume One of Genet\u2019s Collected Works\u2014surely a unique case of reverse literary appropriation!\u2014Sartre accepted all of Genet\u2019s exaggerations and distortions of his past\u2014that he had been unloved, uneducated, that he joined the Foreign Legion\u2014and then used them to invent a Genet who would confirm not only Sartre\u2019s own narcissistic need to subvert all bourgeois values, but also the existentialist conception of the \u201cself-made\u201d man. For Sartre, Genet \u201cchose\u201d to become a thief and \u201cchose\u201d to become a homosexual, in both cases in order to shape his own life and work as an inversion and rejection of all normal values. Above all, Genet was a \u201ctraitor,\u201d who owed no loyalty, acknowledged no debts, and who assiduously practiced treachery in all its forms. He stole from his friends, for example (as indeed he did\u2014Sartre was not misled here) because that is the highest form of betrayal. This coherence of his personality, his life, and his writings gave to Genet, in Sartre\u2019s eyes, a special place in the Pantheon of inversion: \u201cTrahir, c\u2019est, par des mots, faire na\u00eetre un Destin<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Genet was not amused. He denied that he \u201cdecided to become what crime made of me,\u201d as Sartre would have it. For his own reasons he needed to believe that he was a product of his fate, and that his misfortunes, among which he counted his homosexuality, were not of his own making. Only thus could he invest in his account of that fate the curious tone, at once mordant and self-aggrandizing, moralistic and self-pitying, which gives his novels their unique flavor. As a result of Sartre\u2019s \u201creal freak of a book\u201d (Simone de Beauvoir), Genet was in danger of becoming, as he rightly noted, little more than \u201can illustration of his [Sartre\u2019s] theories about freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sartre did not always miss the mark, however; far from it. He is characteristically acute about Genet\u2019s literary style, and perceptive in his emphasis upon the theme of betrayal, which looms as large in Genet\u2019s\u00a0oeuvre<\/i>\u00a0as it does in that of Sartre. Genet betrayed personal acquaintances by using their names in his fiction to near slanderous effect, he betrayed his foster parents in his denial of their feelings for him, and he was always drawn to artists and works of art which, in his sense, contradicted themselves; his admiration for Giacometti especially seems to have derived in part from his feeling that the sculptor had come closer than most to seeing the beauty in a wound and the glory of deathly solitude. This shared obsession with \u201ctreason\u201d in all its forms, together with Sartre\u2019s voyeuristic fascination with the sordid details of Genet\u2019s private life, was after all what accounted for much of the mutual attraction. (Simone de Beauvoir, no less a voyeur when it suited her, was repelled by the erotic, violent, and fecal obsessions in his novels and gossip.) It is also worth recording that the destructive impact upon Genet of Sartre\u2019s adoption of him as a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and a projection of his own ideas has a later parallel in Genet\u2019s own Pygmalion-like efforts to adopt various young discoveries of his own, and shape their future careers as virile young sportsmen or circus performers.<\/p>\n

Genet is reported to have protested to Cocteau that \u201cyou and Sartre have turned me into a monument. I am somebody else and this somebody else must find something to say.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

As it turned out, he did not so much find something new to say but rather a distinctively different way of saying it. Genet\u2019s novels deal with power, violence, betrayal, and exploitation through the medium of a community of social and sexual outcasts, prostitutes, transvestites, prisoners, or sailors whose tragedies and affections are confined to a restricted social and dramatic landscape. His plays, in contrast, work the same themes through a dramatization of contemporary Manichaean pairings: Blacks and Whites, Masters and Slaves, Colonizers and Natives, Rulers and Revolutionaries. There is a continuing concern with the sufferings of outcasts and victims, of course, and an unbroken fascination with extremes, but these are now spread over a broader canvas, and it is through social and political victims and violators that Genet speaks, rather than through the behavioral excesses of marginal characters. But death, murder, betrayal remained central to Genet\u2019s attentions, and the paradoxes of transvestite sexuality\u2014two competing identities collapsing into a third, which exists only in ephemeral, illusory moments\u2014have their analogues in the masks and misrepresentations of blacks playing whites, or policemen masquerading as revolutionaries.<\/p>\n

Genet\u2019s plays aroused strong feelings in their early audiences, and not only because of their novelty and their power to shock. When\u00a0The Screens<\/i>\u00a0was first performed in Paris, in April 1966, the Od\u00e9on theatre was the scene of huge demonstrations and violent assaults on the stage. In a Paris still recovering from the Algerian war, its angry mockery of European colonists and its sympathetic portrayal of their victims caused a political crisis and gave conservative politicians an occasion to denounce the theatre and its government subsidies. Like\u00a0Les N\u00e8gres<\/i>\u00a0and (to a lesser extent)\u00a0Le Balcon<\/i>, Genet\u2019s play was a \u201clyric outburst of stylized hatred\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\u00a0that placed Genet along with Beckett and Ionesco in the forefront of postwar theatre. Genet\u2019s theatrical works were at least as difficult, even for a sophisticated audience, as those of Beckett, perhaps more so. Like his novels they were very long; they were technically difficult to perform; and while undoubtedly inflammatory they were not violent enough in their political message for those, like Sartre, who favored an \u201cengaged\u201d theatre.<\/p>\n

It is hard not to wonder whether they will all still have appeal in years to come. Certainly\u00a0The Balcony<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0The Maids<\/i>\u00a0seem sure of their place in the modern dramatic canon; in the latter case because it is more readily recognizable as a contemporary transcription of classical themes, in the case of\u00a0Le Balcon<\/i>\u00a0because it lends itself well and flexibly to a broad range of theatrical and interpretative readings. For me,\u00a0The Blacks<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0The Screens<\/i>\u00a0have begun to acquire a period flavor. This makes some sense, for in the two later plays their author\u2019s growing political preoccupations can already be seen at work; this gives them a didactic aura curiously analogous to that now surrounding the plays of George Bernard Shaw, and with Genet as with Shaw this may make it harder for future audiences to understand their initial impact and importance.<\/p>\n

Genet hated France\u2014you must \u201cvomit it up,\u201d as he put it. He never missed an occasion to deny his affiliation to the country and its values\u2014by traveling abroad, by writing of a France unknown to his readers and calculated to shock them, by identifying himself with everything and anything antisocial or antinational. Yet there had been nothing in his past that was explicitly political; certainly he tried in retrospect to present his prison years as a form of unarticulated political protest, but this was done largely in order to match the mood of the hour and to capture the imagination of his new friends. In his plays, however, he had moved on to broader issues, associating France and its ruling elites with a universe of white oppressors, a hypocritical civilization at odds with its own claims and the experience of its victims.<\/p>\n

He had initially shared some of the illusions of his contemporaries about the aspirations and possibilities of the Sixties in general and May 1968 in particular, although characteristically he denied this in later years, never wishing to be identified with any moment or movement of faith or optimism. But he found his true calling in the violent alienation and opposition of American blacks and landless Palestinian Arabs. In this respect he had more in common with Sartre than he might have cared to admit, seeking as he did elective affinities with the wretched of the earth in their \u201cauthenticity\u201d and their rejection of a white, European West, and abandoning his art in favor of a life of political activism.<\/p>\n

Of course Genet remained Genet. He managed to shock his US readers by beginning an article attacking the Chicago police with a paean of praise for the erotic appeal of their thighs, and he was predictably scornful of the academic and other radicals who sought his company; at one Bay Area party he was asked by a professor, \u201cWhat can\u00a0we<\/i>\u00a0do to fight racism in America? We\u2019re helpless,\u201d and replied dismissively: \u201cI\u2019m a foreigner and you have the nerve to ask\u00a0me<\/i>\u00a0that question?\u201d He was also icily contemptuous of idiotic interviewers who wondered why he persisted in writing such elegant French\u2014the \u201clanguage of the oppressor.\u201d He admired the Panthers at least as much for their machismo as for their political radicalism, and he is quite instructive on the reasons for their decline. In\u00a0Prisoner of Love<\/i>\u00a0he noted that, swept along by the momentum of its own power,<\/p>\n

the movement overshot the goal it had set itself\u2026. It grew weak through its rainbow fringe, its fund-raising methods, the quantity and inevitable evanescence of its TV images, its use of a rough yet moving rhetoric not backed up by rigorous thought, its empty theatricality\u2014or theatricality\u00a0tout court<\/i>!\u2014and its rapidly exhausted symbolism.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With the Panthers as with the Palestinians he never completely submerged his identity; they spoke for the world\u2019s losers, which was part of their appeal to him, but he recognized that they were doomed to strive for that very political success which, if they won it, would oblige him to betray them. He had an Orwellian instinct for the ease with which the powerless can acquire power and become like their oppressors. And of course, as he admitted in a 1982 interview, he would be the first to abandon the Palestinians should they ever get their land back. In his own words, his identification with them as with everyone and everything else was never total: \u201cmy faith never complete and myself never undivided.\u201d<\/p>\n

It seems clear in retrospect that anticolonialism was Genet\u2019s salvation. He had run out of autobiographical material, and his deep need to find nothing but ill in the world had led him to occasionally absurd outbursts, as in a 1949 statement opposing prison reform on the grounds that the old, unreformed regime had the virtue of making hardened criminals of little children.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\u00a0Naturally there was an element of mischief in such propositions (which Edmund White takes perhaps a little too much at face value), but they are indicative of the dilemma Genet would have faced had he not sought and found political outlets for his emotions.<\/p>\n

3.<\/h3>\n

Through almost all of the complex thickets of Genet\u2019s life and work his latest biographer is a sure-footed and astonishingly well-informed guide. Indeed, Edmund White is becoming something of a one-man Genet industry: in addition to the biography he wrote an introduction to the English translation of\u00a0Prisoner of Love<\/i>, published last year by Wesleyan University Press<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

and h writings put out by the Ecco Press. He has unearthed much information on Genet\u2019s reading, which was voluminous and mostly conventional, in a classic French sense, ranging from Rousseau to Proust and taking in Ronsard and Stendhal along the way. He is informative on the subject of Genet\u2019s generosity; Genet was unstinting in the support he gave to young men whom he had befriended, buying them cars, houses, and professional equipment at great expense, an attribute which contrasts tellingly with his lifelong desire to believe ill of himself and others. White also describes in an entertaining manner Genet\u2019s cultivated vagabond asceticism\u2014he cadged mercilessly from friends and acquaintances, and would sometimes just walk out of the dowdy hotels where he snt most of his life, leaving the management to send his pajamas and bill to Gallimard. The portrait that emerges is of a man for whom authentic existence consisted of playing out his chosen roles with admirable if annoying consistency.<\/p>\n

Certainly, there was much that was unappealing about Genet, and White makes no attempt to conceal the fact. He was ungrateful to those who displeased him for any reason, however minor\u2014his later cold-shouldering of Bernard Frechtman, the English-language translator of much of his early work (including most of the material in the Selected Works) was shameful. He saw the world in two dimensions\u2014good and evil, rich and poor, victim and aggressor, criminal and martyr\u2014which was an advantage in his characterizations of social and personal extremes but deprived him of any sustained insight into human frailty or moral ambiguity, much less psychological complexity.<\/p>\n

He was also a creature of prejudice, not least concerning Jews. Genet was suspicious of Jews, associated them with money, and on more than one occasion expressed admiration for the achievements of Hitler. But as White notes, this has less to do with anti-Semitism than with Genet\u2019s fascination with things military and with the general air of virility associated with the Nazis (who had, in his eyes, the exemplary virtue of having\u00a0humiliated<\/i>\u00a0France). Sartre speculated that Genet\u2019s proclaimed refusal ever to have sex with a Jew derived from the Jews\u2019 status as victims. In that capacity Genet found them unerotic\u2014and threatening competitors.<\/p>\n

We come here to some aspects of Genet\u2019s personality with which White seems uncomfortable, and to which he does perhaps less than full justice. Jean Genet was not pleased to be a homosexual, particularly once he lost his looks, and White claims that he was largely unsuccessful in his efforts to make the move from \u201cfemme\u201d to \u201cbutch\u201d status. He was not attracted to homosexuals, but preferred to seduce attractive heterosexual men\u2014usually without success. Other homosexuals he mostly treated as objects of scorn, ripe for mugging. His solidarity, such as it was, lay with the thief. He had virtually no interest in Gay Liberation, and tartly informed a 1972 interviewer that \u201cone is not a revolutionary just because one is a homosexual.\u201d White is too honest a biographer to ignore this, but he occasionally writes against it, driven as it sometimes seems by surges of conventional rightmindedness.<\/p>\n

In addition to a curiously portentous and clumsy outburst against heterosexual marriage, accompanied by a lyrical hymn to just those qualities of homosexual love which on White\u2019s own evidence Genet rarely experienced,<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

White allows himself a pompous attack on \u201cprosperous white men\u201d who favor the study of \u201cuniversals\u201d and who persecute \u201cfeminist, Black and gay\u201d writers who write of minority experience. It is hard to see what this has to do with Genet, whose plays at least were surely built around a discussion of just such universals\u2014injustice, ignorance, fear, power prejudice, beauty\u2014and it leads one to wonder whether Edmund White has fully grasped the nature of his subject.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

White notes that Fran\u00e7ois Mauriac admired Genet\u2019s work, after an initially negative reaction, and hints that this might be related to the fact that after Mauriac\u2019s death evidence surfaced which suggested latent homosexual sympathies. Here White has fallen victim to his own anachronistic concern with sexual preference as a key to aesthetic appreciation, and he displays a tin ear for the nuances of French culture. Mauriac had no illusions about Genet\u2019s standing\u2014as White notes, he thought him a lesser writer than Proust and Gide, and classed him as a follower of Cocteau: \u201cPoet of the penitentiary, Orpheus of the underworld, he is an inspired masturbator: his morose pleasure feeds off images whose mechanism is derived from Jean Cocteau\u2019s clockwork.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

But what Mauriac the Catholic moralist heard and found fascinating in Genet was not the brassy noise of sado-masochistic homoeroticism, but rather the seductive sounds of pure evil. White dutifully records Mauriac\u2019s fascination with Evil but underestimates its implications for an appreciation of Genet. As a consequence he seems unsure when it comes to locating his subject and ends up Americanizing him. His Genet is \u201ca weird sort of political radical,\u201d whose particular combination of traits and prejudices conforms to no familiar model of protest or doctrine. When Genet published in 1977 a stupid and nearcaricatural article in support of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists, White is at a loss to account for it; here as elsewhere he oscillates between taking seriously Genet\u2019s political pronouncements (but refusing to hold him accountable for them),<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

or else relegating them to exercises in self-promotion but in that case attaching altogether too much weight to them as biographically indicative.<\/p>\n

Genet is not a \u201cweird radical,\u201d nor is his life an appropriate occasion for ruminations on missed opportunities for sexual liberation. His friendship with Jacques Verg\u00e8s (the maverick lawyer who defended Klaus Barbie), his admiration for aggression and terrorism, his affection for the brutal wartime Milice (\u201cthe ideal point where the thief and the policeman meet and merge\u201d which is indeed a good characterization, but ideal only for Genet), all point to a different set of references of which White seems but dimly aware.<\/p>\n

The clue is Louis-Ferdinand C\u00e9line. Genet admired C\u00e9line very much, and the object of his respect returned the compliment with enthusiasm; Genet respected C\u00e9line for his brilliant use of language\u2014\u201cit takes a physician, a doctor to the poor, to dare to write in\u00a0argot<\/i>\u201c\u2014while C\u00e9line once described Genet as \u201crotten with genius.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Edmund White notes this but misses its significance. C\u00e9line was persona non grata in postwar France, thanks to his identification with fascism and anti-Semitism before and during the war. Had this not been so his standing as a significant and original figure in modern French intellectual and literary life would be better appreciated.<\/p>\n

The impact upon the interwar generation of his novel\u00a0Voyage au bout de la nuit<\/i>\u00a0(published in 1932), and to a lesser extent the scabrous 1937 pamphlet\u00a0Bagatelles pour un massacre<\/i>, was tremendous. His invisibility after the war left an empty space which was promptly filled by a new generation, that of Sartre and his friends, who thereby acquired a monopoly of the cultural terrain; but it is a mistake to suppose that Genet somehow therefore fits into\u00a0their<\/i>\u00a0world.<\/p>\n

Before the war a significant number of writers\u2014novelists like Marcel Arland and Drieu la Rochelle, social critics like Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, essayists like Robert Brasillach and Georges Bernanos\u2014some of them Genet\u2019s near contemporaries, had toyed with the themes of decadence, degeneracy, and evil. This was not a generation marked, in White\u2019s revealingly inappropriate phrase, \u201cby its chauvinism,\u201d but by something much more interesting and sinister. Genet undoubtedly outdid most of them in talent and in the sheer audacity of the stories he told, but he belongs with them and through them with the dark side of French cultural uncertainty which so marked the Thirties and Forties, in literature, movies, and politics. His links with the political fashions of the postwar decades are in large measure fortuitous. Mauriac understood this\u2014and so in his way did Genet himself, who refused to be squeezed into any category except that of pure negation.<\/p>\n

That is one side of the man. The other is his curiously immature quality, as though he were permanently stuck in the mood swings and obsessions of late adolescence. Edmund White, who is rigorous in recounting the oddities of Genet\u2019s personality, seems reluctant to draw conclusions from it, maintaining a psychological distance which gives his book a strange dual quality, sometimes intrusively judgmental, at other times distractedly disengaged.<\/p>\n

Yet White\u2019s sources, both oral and documentary, all point in a single direction. Jean Genet was hypersensitive to rejection or disapproval. He was insecure in the presence of the educated or the influential, his self-doubt taking the form of aggression and deliberate rudeness. He engaged in quarrels, spats, and bitchy gossip with and about everyone, and tried hard to shock\u2014first with his criminal tales, later through his affiliations, and always through the (unfulfilled) threat to destroy his manuscripts. He was a trying house guest\u2014waking his hosts at 6 AM and demanding \u201cmy coffee,\u201d or slipping uninvited into bed between\u2014heterosexual\u2014couples and reading them his latest work. A January 1943 court psychiatrist\u2019s report seems to have come close to the truth: \u201cGenet is a boy thirty-two years old\u2026he moves a bit through life as if he were a savage possessed by a freedom in search of goods which have not been forbidden to him according to certain instructions.\u201d<\/p>\n

This striking combination of adolescent emotional drives and a sophisticated nihilist aesthetic is what makes Genet an intrinsically interesting personality, and it is what has maintained about him an aura of fascination even after the language of his novels or the dramatic complexity and stylistic originality of his plays have ceased to shock or enthrall. It also provides rich material for irony\u2014not so much in the image of a fifty-year-old man hopping into bed with a married couple as in their earnest strivings to accommodate his whims without protest. But Edmund White has managed to write a very long book without emitting a single humorous line\u2014except by inadvertence: his introduction contains the sententiously inappropriate observation that \u201cFew people may think a sexual and social deviate\u2026can provide an example to others, but this biography shows how such a transformation can be wrought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Genet, whose own taste in rolemodels ran to the Marquis de Sade, would doubtless have found something suitably corrosive to offer by way of a retort. To suggest seriously that he might \u201cprovide an example to others\u201d would be to travesty his art and life alike; it is hard to see how his career offers any sort of a lesson, or why it should. This, after all, is a man who made it very clear that he meant it when he said, \u201cI would like the world not to change, so that I can be against the world.\u201d To conscript him posthumously as a political or sexual exemplar, to make of him a spokesman for a cause or the occasion for any social or moral lesson, is to betray everything he refused to stand for. On the other hand, it is exactly what Genet feared would happen to his beloved Palestinians should they ever succeed, and we may therefore suppose that such a \u201cnormalization\u201d was something he would have understood all too well.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tony Judt October 21, 1993 issue Visit us on Facebook! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Twitter! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Threads! Opens External Webpage Visit us on Bluesky! Opens External Webpage Mail toPrint page Submit a letter: … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2446,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/robertbarsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/robertbarsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/robertbarsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/robertbarsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2446"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/robertbarsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/robertbarsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":554,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/robertbarsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions\/554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/robertbarsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/robertbarsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/robertbarsky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}