Genet: A Biography
By Edmund White
Knopf, 848 pages, $35
The Selected Writings of Jean Genet
Edited and with an introduction by Edmund White
The Ecco Press, 456 pages, $27.50
The sinister and legendary figures of Jean Genet and Charles Manson squat in the imagination of anyone who endured the so-called ’60s. In actuality both men were nearly typical products of the social welfare systems in their respective countries. Both grew up as wards of the state, as adopted children; both fell into crime and the forming experience of prison; both became prisoners of a fame that bore little resemblance to the actual events of their lives.
For Manson there would be just the sordidness of murder and life in prison, but eventually for Genet there would be a true and genuine fame based on two bursts of manic literary activity. Between 1943 and 1949 he wrote five novels: “Our Lady of the Flowers,” “Funeral Rites,” “The Miracle of the Rose,” “Querelle” and “A Thief’s Journal.” And 10 years later, within two years, 1955-57, he wrote “The Blacks,” “The Balcony” and “The Screens,” which join two earlier plays, “The Maids” and “Deathwatch.” These works of art would survive the triviality of Genet’s life.
The novelist and critic Edmund White has written a wonderfully readable account of a thoroughly repulsive individual. As literary biography, it ranks with Richard Ellmann’s great work on James Joyce. White brings to bear on the life of Genet a grand literary sensibility-first acknowledged by Vladimir Nabokov-and a subtle, convincing ability to describe the process of writing; he also authoritatively marshals the remains of Genet’s life into a mostly coherent story.
In more ways than one, White’s biography mirrors the intent of the novels of Genet: the creation of beautiful literary objects utilizing the full range of language but all designed to satisfy a particular end: the self-immortalization of their God-obsessed author.
Of course at the center of this biography, as at the center of any writer’s life, there is the final mystery of where Genet’s books came from. White wonders, more than once, how someone who left school at age 12 found the ability, the verbal and mental agility, to write books that in style if not in content found favor with writers as different as Gide, Cocteau, Mauriac, Claudel and Sartre and that continue to fascinate readers today. Indeed, a case can be made that Genet and Celine are the only French writers who will likely find enthusiastic readers into the next century.
Genet was born in Paris on Dec. 19, 1910, and abandoned by his mother when he was 30 weeks old. Becoming a ward of the state, he was placed with a rural family who would take care of him until he was 13.
“To create is always to speak about childhood,” Genet said in 1981. “It’s always nostalgic. . . . When I was very young I quickly understood that everything in life was blocked to me. . . . The most I could hope for was to become an accountant or a petty official. So I put myself in a position not to become an accountant, not to become a writer-I didn’t know what I was doing then-but to observe the world. I created in myself, at the age of thirteen or fifteen, the observer that I would be, and thus the writer that I would become. And this work that I did on myself then remains, it’s there.”
Part of Genet’s work was to create a legend of the awfulness of his childhood that White, as biographer, confronts with the truth: a gentle carpenter stepfather and devout, sympathetic mother who provided an atmosphere in which Genet was allowed to read, dream and play at saying Mass. (He baptized his stepsister’s dog 10 times.)
In his first book, “Our Lady of the Flowers,” Genet compared himself to St. Catherine. In his last published book, “Prisoner of Love,” he compared himself to another saint with a similar fate:
“(God) offered a gift to Saint Elizabeth, Queen of Hungary, who was forced by her position as sovereign to mingle with the luxury of the royal court. He gave her a gift, constructed just for her, to her height, to her measure-an invisible monastic cell, invisible to her husband, courtiers, ministers, ladies-in-waiting, a cell that was at last personal and secret, which moved in accordance with the movements of the sainted queen, its inner walls visible only to four eyes, the queen’s and God’s, the four making just one eye.”
It is this confusion (some would say mingling) of the religious with the secular that gives Genet’s writing its great force. Ironically, this force is available only to a believer, as is the case with Sade: thus Genet’s constant, knowing assertion that his best and most-desired reader would be a conservative, believing, heterosexual male.
From an early age Genet is a thief, and his stealing continues into his 30s. He is never successful, and the objects stolen are almost laughable in their pathos: a dozen handkerchiefs, a bolt of cloth, a suitcase, a wallet and then books, more and more books. He will be convicted 13 times and serve 44 months in prison.
Genet’s original notoriety derived from two poles-his criminality and his homosexuality. His version of homosexuality is delightfully honest:
“Yes, I am homosexual as everyone knows. But I am one with rigour and logic. What is a homosexual? A man for whom, first of all, the entire female sex, half of humanity, doesn’t exist. Then a man who by his very nature is out of step with the world, who refuses to enter into the system that organizes the entire world. The homosexual rejects that, denies that, shatters that whether he wants to or not. For him romance is only a kind of stupidity or deception-for him only pleasure exists.”
Once the last of Genet’s novels, “A Thief’s Journal,” is published in late 1948, it is as if the rest of his life is lived merely in the world of publicity and in its perverse mirror, fleeing from that publicity. Genet would become available for every popular leftist cause-protests against the Algerian war, protests against the Vietnam war. He would write and speak out in defense of the Black Panthers in America. The last years of his life would be devoted to the Palestinian struggle, the subject of his last book, “Prisoner of Love.”
Of course there are the plays (“The Blacks” ran in New York for over four years), but they are unwatchable now and will be so for the foreseeable future-buried, unlike the novels, by obvious contemporary political and philosophical cliche.
Incidentally, Genet was in Chicago for the Democratic convention in 1968. His report, published to much scandal in Esquire, survives its moment because of Genet’s obsessions and not his politics:
“This policeman is also a boxer, a wrestler. . . . I can guess that these superb thighs extend on up into . . . a muscled torso, made firmer every day by his police training in the cops’ gymnasium. . . . America has a magnificent, divine, athletic police force. . . .”
“The Selected Writing of Jean Genet” is the necessary counterpoint to the biography. It is, in effect, Genet’s answer to it, composed of selections from the books and plays, a new translation by White of a long poem, “The Fisherman of Suquet,” notes on film and a wonderful essay on Giacometti. My only quibble is that White did not included the essay on the tightrope walker that he refers to more than once as essential to understanding Genet’s art.
Nevertheless, the selections give the reader Genet’s version of his own life. And in spite of White’s hard work in the biography and in his introduction to this book, that is the version that will live on. The legend that Genet wrote is simply more poetic and more convincing and it escapes the dreariness of fact that we are all heir to: Genet, the man, died in a hotel room in Paris, alone, on April 15, 1986.
