Artists shine in either prose or drama, but rarely both. A rare exception was French novelist-playwright Jean Genet, one of the more captivating and controversial artists of the 20th Century.
His autobiographical novels-“Our Lady of the Flowers,” “The Miracle of the Rose” and “Querelle”-are brilliant. With “The Balcony,” “The Blacks,” “The Screens” and “The Maids,” Genet joined the ranks of theatrical experimentalists Samuel Beckett and Ionesco.
But there are even more reasons that Genet, who died in 1986, is one of the most fascinating figures of the century. He was also a convict who was brought up in a rural foster home and sent to a juvenile reform school by age 16.
A chronic thief and deserter from the French army, he wrote much of his work in prison and was only pardoned because the likes of filmmaker-playwright Jean Cocteau and philospher Jean-Paul Sartre fought for his freedom.
Genet was also an avowed homosexual who embraced both crime and sexual deviation, and his work lushly celebrates both. His string of five novels, all written in a brief burst of creativity between 1942 and ’47, weren’t even published in the U.S. until the 1960s because of their salacious gay content and militancy.
Even before New York’s Stonewall riots gave birth to the American gay political movement in the late ’60s, there was Genet, a confessed criminal, rhapsodizing on gay sex and transvestism in novels.
Now Edmund White, another accomplished gay writer whose works include the fictional “Nocturnes for the King of Naples” and the non-fictional “States of Desire: Travels in Gay America,” has written the first full-scale biography of this remarkable, complex, challenging figure.
White’s 600-page study, “Genet: A Biography” (Knopf), is exhaustive, the culmination of seven years of scholarship that marries the more typical literary documentation with police records and interviews with surviving thieves and prostitutes.
“He was hell for a biographer,” White said. “He changed the facts of his life constantly, including his name, dating from the time when he had to do so to evade authorities. He continued to do that on some levels all of his life. As he said many times, he was a foundling, a jailbird and a vagabond. For all his later success, he never escaped that past.”
There are many Genets, in that sense, but two of them are Genet the novelist and Genet the playwright. The 1940s novels are autobiographical, but unreliable. Genet used the facts of his life as an imaginary springboard, liberally playing with dates and events, though many of the characters are real people out of Genet’s life.
After his success and pardon, Genet went through a period of depression and silence, including a suicide attempt. But by the mid-’50s, he re-emerged and in only a two-year period wrote three of his dramatic classics, only to throw away his pen once more after the death of a lover and never write again.
Biographer White, who spent some of his early years in Chicago and Evanston, said in an interview that Genet’s contributions to drama may seem more dated than the novels because drama itself doesn’t hold up as well as other forms.
“As a novelist, I rank him as the greatest French novelist after Proust,” White said. “As a dramatist, he’s an extraordinarily original thinker, up there with Brecht and Ionesco, though his language, like Elizabethan theater, is too talky for our taste today.”
However, “The Balcony” was an acclaimed hit by New Crimes Productions here last season, while “The Maids” is constantly in revival. “His contribution is that he, along with others, realized that just as photography had erased the need for realism in painting, cinematography erased the need for realism on the stage,” White said.
Though he abandoned writing, Genet had an interesting later life, too, befriending the Black Panthers, covering the 1968 Chicago riots for Esquire and battling what he saw as racism and colonialism in Africa and elsewhere. “It’s as if he transposed his own oppression as a homosexual and foundling to other victims,” White said.
White was honored earlier this year by the French government, which made him a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Artes and Letters, the French equivalent of knighthood.
Of that, he said with self-mocking contentment, “Other U.S. recipients include Elizabeth Taylor, Sylvester Stallone and Jerry Lewis.”
– “Catskills on Broadway,” a revue that’s also a tribute to the area that spawned so much of American comedy, will play seven performances beginning Dec. 27 at the Shubert Theatre, 22 W. Monroe St.
The title refers to the Catskill Mountains in New York, where 300 resort hotels were host to the likes of Mel Brooks, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Alan King, Jackie Mason, Joey Bishop and many others during their ’50s and ’60s heyday.
The show, a hit on Broadway for a year and a half, features four contemporary comics: Freddie Roman (who created the show), Mal Z. Lawrence and Dick Capri (who both played in the Broadway version) and Louise DuArt, a comic and impressionist.
Tickets go on sale Friday: phone 312-902-1500.
