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Photo by Roger Parry
December 19, 1910– Jean Genet:
“I’m homosexual… ‘how & why’ are idle questions. It’s a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.”
If you need an introduction to the life of Genet try Edmund White‘s hefty , yet absorbing Jean Genet: A Biography, a highly readable tour of Genet’s brilliant, brutal mind.
Abandoned, arrested, & repeatedly jailed most of his life, Genet led a life that could be described as a tour of the 20th century underworld. Check out the 1982 Fassbinder directed film of his novel Querelle starring Brad Davis. This film was my introduction to this major artist figure.
Genet’s work is marked by a nearly obsessive & usually savage treatment of recurring themes: Desire, Death, & Domination. These ideas, central to Genet’s artistic voice, came directly from the his travels, imprisonments, sexual & emotional relationships, & political entanglements & protests. Genet’s works have been hugely influential for a vast array of writers, filmmakers, choreographers, & directors. The life that he led is not only the source for his own work but also the inspiration of many important artists from the past 100 years.
Genet was born in Paris 105 years ago. Abandoned by his teenage mother when he was just 7 months old, & he was raised in government institutions. He was charged with his first crime when he was just 10 years old. After spending his teenage years in jail, Genet joined the French Foreign Legion & was sent to Beirut & Damascus. This was his first witness to French colonialism, & what he experienced in the Middle East immediately resonated with the oppression he associated with being in prison. It was the only time in his life he acted as a representative of the French society that he despised. He later deserted, & turned to a life of theft & prostitution that resulted in more jail sentences, & eventually, a sentence of life in prison.
While incarcerated, Genet started to write poems & prose that combined pornography & an open celebration of the life of a scoundrel, written in an extraordinary baroque, high literary style. On the strength of this writings, Genet was acclaimed by French literary luminaries like Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, & Simone de Beauvoir, who advocated for him to receive a Presidential pardon in 1948. Cocteau brought Genet’s works to the public & Sartre celebrated him. Genet was an odd hybrid: half criminal & half literary celebrity. He was the talk of Paris, but his books had to be published underground. He moved freely from Cocteau’s fashionable Right Bank circles to Sartre’s Left Bank existentialist friends. In 1952 Sartre published his book Saint Genet: Actor & Martyr, making Genet a sort of saint.
In the 5 years before the pardon Genet wrote 4 novels: Our Lady Of The Flowers, Miracle Of The Rose, Funeral Rites, & Querelle, plus his scandalizing memoir, A Thief’s Journal. In the 1950s, he devoted himself to theater, writing boldly experimental, politically charged plays: The Balcony, The Blacks, & The Screens where he explored identity & difference, illusion & authenticity, revealing the workings of those in power of a system he despised.
In the 1950s, Genet fell in love for a young circus acrobat, Abdallah Bentaga. In 1964, Betenga committed suicide, & in 1967, a still despondent Genet tried to kill himself.
At the end of the 1960s, Genet threw himself into political activism. He refused to address his own works, only writing & speaking out in support of the Black Panthers & the plight of the Palestinians. But, Genet always held that when a revolution was accomplished, the new leaders would imitate their predecessors, & he stated that if the Palestinians gained their homeland he would no longer be taking their side. During that time he wrote political essays, & traveled to the Middle East, staying in Palestinian camps.
He was almost always attracted to young straight dark-skinned guys, often financially supporting the men, their wives & children.
Genet began his last book Prisoner Of Love in 1983. It was completed just before he put down his pen for good in 1986, in Paris, taken by cancer, just a few months after his play The Balcony had been staged at the Comedie Francaise, a sort of national theatre for the French.
His plays have been adapted to unlikely film versions, including The Maids (1974) with the great Glenda Jackson & Susannah York, & The Balcony (1963), starring Shelley Winters, Peter Falk, Lee Grant & Leonard Nimoy.
In the summer of 2014, Cate Blanchett & Isabelle Huppert played the murderous sisters in a Broadway revival Genet’s The Maids in a production from Blanchett’s Sydney Theatre Company. The production received rave reviews & sold-out crowds, proving Genet’s words still had power into the 21st century.
“To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.”
Genet is buried in the Spanish cemetery outside Larache, Morocco.
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