Barber - Jean Genet

Jean Genets life describes an astonishingly unpredictable arc, to which none of the usual biographical approaches is adequate. A foundling, Genet was placed as an infant with a family in the small town of Alligny in the heart of the Morvan, one of the poorest areas of France. There he was raised among peasants who spoke a dialect incomprehensible to Parisians, though Genet himself insisted unaccountably on speaking the correct French he was taught in school. He was a brilliant scholar and won the top local academic prize. But soon enough he ran away from the trade school where the state had placed him at age twelve and from then on he was heading for a life of marginality and sometimes petty crime.

He was confined to an infamous reform school, Mettray, where he learned to love rough boys. Afterwards he joined the army and was shipped out to Damascus, where he first came into contact with the Arab world that would figure large in his writings and in his political sympathies. He was a beggar and vagabond in Spain at the heart of the Depression. He was arrested frequently for crimes that seldom amounted to more than stealing fabric samples or doctoring a train ticket. He made a hegira across Central Europe during the rise of Nazism and was in Berlin soon after Hitler came to power. He was in prison several times in Paris during the Occupation, and only the intervention of Cocteau kept him from being given a life sentence as a multiple offender.

Genet was largely self-taught, but he was someone who haunted the bookstores (and often stole from them) and even sold books himself along the quay not far from Notre-Dame. He wrote screenplays, novels, poems and highly personal essays. His fiction is so explicitly homosexual and erotic and transgressive that it had to be published under the counter throughout the war years. When he finally emerged after the war as a playwright of a popular, commercially successful hit, The Maids, and as the novelist who had penned five extraordinarily rich and densely imagined books in just five years, he was widely acclaimed by the leading minds of the day. In fact, Genet had the rare privilege (or curse) of having a huge tome devoted to him while he was still in his forties Jean-Paul Sartres Saint Genet. Later, another philosopher, Derrida, would devote a thick volume to him, Glas. And in the 1970s Genet was befriended by Michel Foucault, who wrote Discipline and Punish while in regular contact with Genet (the end of the book is about Genets old reform school, Mettray).

But Genet did not become assimilated into ordinary society. He continued to live among and to champion marginal people everywhere, especially those people who were despised and rejected by even the downtrodden. In his novels he had written about the homosexual subculture (and in Our Lady of the Flowers he had invented the drag queen for literature). In his subsequent plays he took up the emerging African nations, for example in The Blacks (written before those ex-colonies had gained their independence); he espoused the cause of the Algerian revolution in The Screens and explored the curious political interactions between the Palace and the Bordello in The Balcony, his greatest study of the manipulation of power through imagery.

After he wrote his plays Genet fell into a silence of two decades but he emerged from it to participate in the violent political struggles of the Palestinians and the Black Panthers. In his last book, which Stephen Barber calls A Loving Captive, Genet celebrated these twin causes in his strangely personal, circular and oblique manner. This book was published shortly after his death in 1986.

The various developments in such a life obviously do not flow one from another and a biographer would have to do violence to his personal legend in order to suggest a logical evolution. Genet was undoubtedly a genius to whom the usual rules of consistency do not apply. In Stephen Barber he has found a biographer who is able to slice into the flow of his complex experience in short, thematic chapters. We are not given a record of daily life and the to-ings and fro-ings of the usual minutely circumstantial American-style mammoth biography. No, what Barber brings to this task is a magisterial overview of the key episodes in Genets existence, a profound understanding of his main artistic experiments and a lively sympathy for his political loyalties. Barber, as someone who has written extensively about avant-garde artists and about the troubled life of cities in the postwar years, brings a wide general culture as well as a sense of crisis and ambiguity to the life of Genet, which from the very beginning struck observers as being as much allegory as narrative a big life, yet the life of the only giant of the twentieth century whose work was not universal but instead extreme, idiosyncratic, unique. I relished reading this book, the conjunction of two compatible sensibilities.

Jean Genet died in the early morning hours of 15 April 1986, alone, in a room at Jacks Hotel in the avenue Stphen Pichon: a silent, tree-lined street of no importance in Paris, suddenly cast into glory as the final site of Genets life in the city he had endlessly transformed and reviled. All of Genets work had been saturated in a vast obsession with death, with provoking and inventing and glorilying and dismissing death with assembling languages and images of death, into a unique book of death. Genets own death, intimately anticipated, still caught him violently by surprise. And that surprise of death struck Genets readers too, since almost all had assumed him already dead after a silence of many years: Genets death contrarily resuscitated him.

Genet had travelled to Paris earlier that month, after a journey through Spain and Morocco with his companion, Jacky Maglia. For years, he had suffered from throat cancer that weakened his body, dissolving the form of his face into a dense network of lines and void spaces which the artist Alberto Giacometti had already captured in his paintings of Genet, thirty years before. In the final photographs of Genet, his body had collapsed in on itself, reduced to an absence clothed in thick sweaters and scarves, surmounted by a head still lividly or wryly animated, but blurred by its movement into death. On his arrival in Paris, in April 1986, Genet headed for the hotel in which he habitually stayed: the Hotel Rubens, an anonymous cheap hotel in the rue du Banquier a street that ran from nowhere to nowhere in the Place dItalie district of the city. But the hotel was full, and the receptionist castigated Genet for not reserving a room in advance. Jacky Maglia had to scour the surrounding streets for another hotel room for Genet. After he had located a room at the nearby Jacks Hotel, the exhausted Genet made his last journey on foot through the streets of Paris. He ascended the rue Rubens, with its vast concrete tenement blocks that housed the citys detritus: its poverty-stricken inhabitants, many of them from Frances former colonial possessions. After crossing the busy boulevard de lHpital, which ran down into the centre of the city, Genet had to rest on the benches outside the School of Arts and Crafts an institution similar to the Ecole Alembert, where Genet had been sent as a thirteen-year-old boy to learn the skills of typography and from where he fled on the first of the wild excursions that would lead to his incarcerations in the childrens prison of the Petite-Roquette and at the reformatory of Mettray. Genet then continued along the rue Edouard Manet, one side of which held the vaulted workshops of the School of Arts and Crafts, while the other housed the offices of the National Federation of Former Soldiers in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco the colonial conflicts that had seen Frances national power disintegrate into the spectacles of uproar and massacre which Genet had visualized in his play