Jean Genet

David Bradby, Clare Finburgh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134188260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This book is the only introductory text to Genet in English, offering an overview of this key figure in defining and understanding twentieth-century theatre. The authors provide a comprehensive account of Genet's key plays and productions, his early life and his writing for and beyond the theatre.

Part I

Life, politics and play-texts

1 Life and politics

Jean Genet is an elusive and enigmatic figure. This is partly because he worked to make it so, and enjoyed building legends around his origins. More than most novelists or playwrights, he deliberately undermined everyday assumptions about stable identity, both his own and that of others. When giving interviews, which he did only rarely, he responded to direct questions with oblique answers and would often draw attention to what might lie hidden behind the answers he offered. He also enjoyed challenging his interlocutors with paradoxical statements, like his one-time mentor, the French playwright, film-maker and artist Jean Cocteau. He seldom indulged in self-consciously clever aphorism dear to Cocteau, such as ‘I am the lie that always tells the truth,’ a phrase the latter used recurrently. But Genet liked to mystify his own assertions, and would warn interviewers to treat everything he said with suspicion. To Hubert Fichte, for example, he said:

GENET: … If I’m alone I may speak a little truth. If I’m with someone, what I say is never completely accurate, I lie.

FICHTE: But lies are doubly true.

GENET: Ah yes. Discover the truth that lies within them. Discover what I wanted to hide when I told you some of these things.

(Genet 1991: 176; 2004: 151, translation modified)

Coming from someone who had written a great deal in the confessional style, this statement is, and is intended to be, intriguing. When reading Genet, especially his early works of autobiographical fiction, one has constantly to be alert to what he was seeking to hide and what to reveal: in his life, just as in his fiction, the boundaries between real and imagined events are playfully unstable.

The key events in Genet’s life have been recorded in several different versions, with the result that some uncertainties can never be resolved. No doubt this is fitting, given his resistance to conventional ways of thinking about identity. Throughout his life, Genet worked hard to maintain a distance between himself and conventional society. For example, he took care to avoid accumulating possessions and seldom had a fixed home, living a vagabond existence in various kinds of temporary accommodation. He could not have featured in the Sunday newspaper series which prints a photograph of the author’s study, since he never possessed one. He was always on the move, and tended to gravitate towards cheap hotels close to the railway station of whatever town he found himself in. For Albert Dichy, director of Genet’s archives and editor of many of his late writings, ‘Genet’s entire work is one long declaration of war…. There are two sides, two camps: on the one hand the world; on the other, Genet himself’ (Dichy 1997: 21). In order to maintain his distance from commonly accepted moral codes, Genet made a virtue out of betrayal: he betrayed friends and foes alike and once wrote that it had cost him an effort to betray his friends but that it was worth it (Genet 2002: 888).

The story of Genet’s life is further complicated by the fact that those who have written about him, beginning in 1952 with French Marxist-existentialist philosopher, novelist and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre, have mostly framed their accounts within their own theories of how he came to be who he was. These accounts differ not only from one another but also from Genet’s own version of his life story, and so it is no simple matter to set out the events of his life. These problems were well understood by his biographer Edmund White who, while admitting that ‘there’s something very elusive about a life’, nevertheless succeeded in constructing a plausible and highly readable account (White 1994). The details that follow here are mostly drawn from White’s biography, and the reader is referred to its 820 pages for more expansive elaborations of the facts, as far as they can ever be known, and for judicious accounts of the varying possible interpretations of the elements that are disputed.

Genet’s birth certificate states that he was born in Paris, at the Tarnier Childbirth Clinic at 89, rue d’Assas on 19 December 1910. His mother, Camille Genet, was single, aged 22, and his father unknown; she was to die less than ten years later at the height of the great Spanish influenza epidemic that killed millions in the winter of 1918–19. But she had little influence on the young Jean, since she looked after him only for the first seven months of his life, and then abandoned him to the care of the Hospice des Enfants-Assistés on 28 July 1911. Edmund White points out that Genet himself, in The Thief’s Journal (Journal du voleur), gives a different first name (Gabrielle) for his mother, and a different street number for the hospital in which he was born (White 1994: 9). So from the very beginning, key facts are disputed. The young Genet was officially declared a ward of the Assistance publique (public welfare service) and sent to its fostering agency in Saulieu, which placed him with Eugénie and Charles Régnier in the small rural village of Alligny-en-Morvan (ibid.: 5–11). His foster-father was a carpenter and his foster-mother ran a small tobacconist’s shop. They undertook to bring up the baby boy until he should reach the age of 13, in return for which they received a monthly payment from the State. The family was pious, and the child was brought up as a Catholic: he was baptized in September 1910 and took his first communion in 1922. The Régnier family house was situated between the church and the village school. Genet appears to have responded well to the opportunities for instruction offered by both institutions: ‘Genet was teacher’s pet but also helped the abbé at mass and sang in the choir’ (ibid.: 17).

So a few of the basic facts at least are unambiguous: Genet’s first 13 years were spent in the country, where he was cared for by a foster family, was brought up in the Catholic faith and was a good pupil. At the conclusion of his primary schooling, when his year-group took the standard examination to qualify for the certificate of primary education, he passed out first in his district, the only one to receive the grade of bien (‘good’). But how was this experience received by the growing boy? The various accounts by Genet himself suggest that it was far from being a fulfilled childhood. His status as a foundling meant that he was always stamped as an outsider: the foundlings wore a special uniform which marked them out in the village. Many of the families who took them in treated them as little better than slaves, even though Genet was more fortunate, and seems to have been well cared for by Eugénie Régnier, at least in the early years of his placement with her. Another pointer to an unfulfilled childhood is the fact that he began to steal at an early age, something that is emphasized both in Genet’s own accounts and in the recorded memories of others in the same village.

His early thefts provide a classic example of the contested interpretations of Genet’s childhood. Sartre, his first biographer, painted a vivid scene, much quoted since, in which the boy’s thieving was made the occasion of a public humiliation. At this point, in Sartre’s existentialist interpretation, Genet made the foundational choice which brought into being the character he was to become: he decided that if society chose to brand him as a thief, he would accept the label and would devote himself to pursuing everything that was the opposite of a moral code founded on the sanctity of property (Sartre 1952: 61–88). Edmund White, however, can find no hard evidence that such a public humiliation really took place. In his view, the formative experiences on the development of the young Genet were those of love given and then withdrawn: first, the loss of his mother at seven months, then being cherished by his foster-mother, only to be displaced in her affections in 1918 (still only seven years old) when her own son returned from the trenches suffering from a wounded leg. With hindsight, White sees Genet as ‘eternally suspended between the two systems’, namely the Nietzschean will to self-definition through creating his own value system on the one hand, and the Christian ideal of renunciation, poverty and transcendence of the merely material through spiritual adventure on the other (White 1994: 43).

Genet’s early novels, which all contain a strong autobiographical element, emphasize the possibilities of transcendence as found in the traditions of the Catholic saints’ lives. Their titles make this plain: Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs), Miracle of the Rose (Miracle de la rose); and their focus is on moments when grim or painful physical realities are transformed into ecstatic visions. The concept of sainthood was never absent from Genet’s writings, albeit subverted in many different ways, and he embodied a very Catholic scorn for material security combined with a permanent awareness of death. In his last interview (for the BBC) in 1985, when asked how he spent his days, he answered: ‘Well, I shall reply as St. Augustine did: “I’m waiting for death”’ (Genet 1991: 306; 2004: 265). The evident attraction of saintly renunciation on Genet, which retained its power from childhood to old age, sits curiously with the dominant tone of his early prose writings, in which he was fond of depicting himself as a ‘tough guy’. Doubtless these two apparently contradictory qualities both found their origin in Genet’s abiding sense of the separation between himself and the rest of society, a separation that he sought to emphasize, not to eradicate. This emphasis no doubt explains his appeal to other artists who see themselves as outsiders, and his construction as gay icon in the 1970s and 1980s. From playwright Heiner Müller, whose mix of poetic inventiveness and political engagement rivals that of Genet, to US punk rock singer and poet Patti Smith, and sexually subversive photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Genet has inspired artists the world over.

The quality that all accounts of the young Genet agree on, is his fertile imagination. He was free to borrow books from the school library and became a passionate reader from an early age. He read the French classics as a matter of course, but his great love was for boys’ adventure tales, especially those of Paul Féval, a nineteenth-century author who specialized in cloak-and-dagger stories of daring criminals. His titles include Les Mystères de Londres (The Mysteries of London); Le Roi des gueux (The Vagabond King); Le Mendiant noir (The Black Beggar).¹ All those who knew him in his first 13 years testified to his love of books and to this was added the attractions of popular films when travelling cinemas visited the village, beginning what White calls ‘his life-long infatuation with film’ (White 1994: 26, 27).

It was not only the content and the images of popular fiction that exerted their fascination on the growing Genet. He also experienced an enthralment with the stuff of language itself. White picks out many examples of his delight in word-play and the association of ideas that comes from repeating words in such a way that one slips into another. For example, he transformed his childhood friend Solange Comte into la comtesse Solange (‘Countess Solange’) and loved to play on words, as in the example from The Thief’s Journal: ‘My life must be a legend, in other words, legible, and the reading of it must give birth to a certain new emotion which I call poetry. I am no longer anything, only a pretext’ (Genet 1982: 98). As Edmund White states in the first line of the introduction to his biography, ‘Genet had remarkable powers of self-transformation’ (White 1994: xxxix), and in these two sentences from The Thief’s Journal we see how he enjoyed playing with language in pursuit of self-transformation: he announces his intention to transform his life into something that can be read, a text that will not only be ‘leg-ible’ but will have a ‘leg-endary’ quality, thus making his lived experience into nothing but a ‘pre-text’ – an excuse for, but also the preliminary to, a text directed at readers. Genet’s own versions of his childhood are thus all coloured by his early intention to confabulate his own legend, turning his life into fiction, and any understanding of how Genet experienced his childhood years must take account of the profound link that he saw between childhood and writing. His first books were all semi-autobiographical accounts of young men, sometimes very innocent, sometimes less so, but all facing the harsh facts of life, desire and death and the power struggles that are a part of all human relations at every level of the social hierarchy. In an interview given towards the end of his life he stressed that, for twentieth-century authors at least, to write was always to speak of childhood, citing Proust as the leading example of this (Genet 1991: 277; 2004: 239).

Although he had demonstrated his remarkable intelligence and aptitude for school work, no provision was made for him to attend secondary school. However, his scholastic success did allow him to escape the fate of the other orphans of his year-group, which was to be put to farm work as soon as their primary schooling was complete. Instead, arrangements were made for Genet to begin an apprenticeship as a printer at a residential college near Paris. To be sent to this college was quite a privilege, but after only a couple of weeks he ran away, announcing to his fellow students that he was off to America or to Egypt, where he would get a job in a cinema (Dichy 2002: lxxx). He was picked up by the police a few days later in Nice. In April 1925 the public welfare officers gave Genet a second chance, placing him with René de Buxeuil, a blind composer of popular songs living in Paris, who had asked if they could supply him with a boy to help him get around. Little is known of exactly how Genet reacted to his new position, but it seems that he took the opportunity to learn all he could about writing songs and poetry. In an interview, Buxeuil also stated that the adolescent had already decided to write his memoirs under a false name (Moraly 1988: 28).²

Genet spent longer in the Buxeuil household than he had at the printing college. It was not until six months had elapsed that he stole some money and was sent back to the welfare service. He then underwent psychiatric observation at the Saint-Anne clinic in Paris. The psychiatrist’s report detected ‘a certain degree of weakness and mental instability’ (Dichy 2002: lxxx) and recommended that he be placed with a youth organization. He was confided to a charitable institution whose mission was to assess the youths placed in its care and decide what sort of work they were capable of doing. Genet lasted two months before running away and being picked up by the police in Marseille and returned under police escort to Paris. But he soon ran away again, was picked up on a train heading for Bordeaux, and was imprisoned for three months at La Petite Roquette, a prison for adolescents awaiting trial, in which a rule of absolute silence was enforced. After this, he was given a last chance by the authorities, who placed him as a farm hand with a peasant family near Abbeville in the north of France. But he ran away yet again and was arrested in Meaux in July 1926 for travelling on a train without a ticket. He was sentenced to be detained at the youth penitentiary of Mettray in the Loire Valley until he reached the age of majority, 21.

The life of the boys at Mettray was governed by strict military discipline. Every moment of the day, from when they were woken (at five in the summer and at six in winter) to when they went to bed at nine, was accounted for, mostly with repetitive manual tasks; the punishments handed out for the smallest infringements were so harsh that many of the inmates attempted suicide, some successfully. In his interview with the BBC, Genet remarks that the discipline was so severe that he was surprised that the French authorities found responsible men willing to take on the work (Genet 1991: 299; 2004: 258). Paradoxically, Genet appears to have achieved a kind of happiness there. It was his first experience of living in a closed society in which the rules of normal, heterosexual family life were set aside in favour of a different kind of power structure. Each new inmate was assigned to one of the so-called ‘families’, but these were families in name only. They consisted of dormitory blocks in which 30 boys would sleep, in hammocks, under the supervision of an older inmate singled out for this role and known as the ‘senior brother’ (frère aîné). From nine at night until the following morning, they were shut in and left to their own devices. In this atmosphere, the way to survive was to accept the role of young ‘squire’ to one of the more powerful, older boys. Genet appears to have taken well to this regime and to have enjoyed the rituals of submission and domination that flourished there. Looking back on the experience, he emphasized its theatrical quality: ‘I believe that the relationships between the senior brother (the one placed in authority) and the other boys like me (whose relation was one of submission) produced a performance which the warders viewed with pleasure’ (ibid.; translation modified). This emerges with great clarity in Genet’s first and only completed film Song of Love (Un chant d’amour, 1950) and his play Deathwatch.

White emphasizes the erotic delights that Genet discovered, perhaps for the first time, at Mettray, and believes that it was his two and a half years there that did most to shape his future as a writer. He quotes Genet as saying that it was at Mettray, at the age of 15, that he began to write.³ He then makes the interesting claim that ‘for Genet “writing” was more a habit of mind, a way of sorting out powerful emotions, than of crafting sentences’ (White 1994: 85). White’s emphasis on the way the young Genet’s feelings were shaped in this adolescent prison contains an important insight:

How did he organize his feelings at Mettray? In precisely the same way that he would later animate his novels – ar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Life, politics and play-texts
• Part II Key productions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index