Genet: A Biography
Edmund White
Language: English
Pages: 800
ISBN: 0679754792
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A meticulously researched biography of Jean Genet, one of France's most notorious writers. Acclaimed novelist and essayist Edmund White illuminates Genet's experiences in the worlds of crime, homosexuality, politics, and high culture, and gives a compelling analysis of Genet's plays, novels, and essays. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.
pity, since Roditi knew how to make French gay expressions sound idiomatic in English. For instance, when Genet writes, La grande tragedienne qui est en moi, Roditi translates, ‘your beautiful actress mother’, an improvement over ‘the great tragic actress who is in me’. Roditi had the added advantage of moving in the same milieu as Genet. In the 1940s he had seen Genet at all the gay institutions: the Claire de Lune; the Hôtel Madeleine in the Passage de Paris, a boys’ whorehouse run by Saïd, a
Bagne or La Mort. ‘Fragments …’ is exactly what the name suggests, bits and pieces of this major work comprising autobiography, aesthetic reflections and abstract, universal speculations. In Death, Genet intended to discuss his theory of homosexuality, which he saw as a curse—or worse, as a sentence that could not be lifted: ‘The sentence passed against thieves and assassins can be revoked, but not our sentence.’60 Genet had never regarded homosexuality with such bitterness as in ‘Fragments …’
in Morocco and he was working on his film script about Mettray. Soon after that I decided to go to Beirut, since I knew the Israelis were at the very doors of the city. I planned to fly to Damascus, then make my way in a taxi to West Beirut. Suddenly Genet announced, ‘I’m going with you.’ I was reluctant to take him, because I thought he would never survive the trip. But he insisted. He said he was coming in that very tough way that he could have. He ordered me to arrange for him to have a
Jean Genet Corporal Second Company 22nd RTA Meurthe-et-Moselle62 Having failed to evince a reply from Gide, Genet was now going after another well-known author, one perhaps more likely to respond to his admiration. (Incidentally, he refers incorrectly to Editions Stock as ‘Stok’, a mistake no one even on the fringe of literary life would be likely to make, since Stock was extremely well known then as now.) Suarès was a solitary figure isolated from the literary world of Paris by his pure
few months later Genet was caught in Paris trying to steal a shirt and a bit of silk, from a department store, the Magasins du Louvre. His arrest occurred on 16 October and he was locked up the next day in the Paris penitentiary of Fresnes. The following day, 18 October, he was sentenced to two months in prison. For the first time it was mentioned that he was guilty of repeated offences. He remained at Fresnes until 17 December.51 A fortnight after his release Genet was arrested again, this time