As a gay man of a certain age I have become interested in the earliest and oldest, ummm, '20th century gay icons', people who to be even half confident in their identity and choice of relationships had to claim them by the most indirect and convoluted means humanly possible. My four 'gay icons' are Quentin Crisp (born 1908) Jean Genet (born 1910) William Burroughs (born 1917) and Patricia Highsmith (born 1921). Three of the four of them came from family backgrounds that were at best fractured, of the four only Genet came from a background so broken that it beggars belief.
As I read of his birth and of all the different care systems that somehow proved to be the opposite of what was claimed for them I knew I should have counted each system that failed, but that will be done on my second reading. Needless to say the toughest carelessness of all was joining the army and even there he deserted so vehemently that if he had returned they would have court marshalled him for his desertion among many other insubordinations. By then his life training proved stronger than his army training, as he led a life both literally and figuratively underground, with over-ground figures like Jean Cocteau giving him cover. Reed does not have to work hard to lay a foundation for Genet as a man of opposites and paradox who could never overcome how those opposites negated each other. What the French state and society did to the young Jean laid the foundations of the paradoxical opposites of values he adopted as an adult.
With any character who is built on opposites, the way the character is logically explained should flatten and demystify that character, should make plain who the character is by making a consistent narrative of their life, where who they are becomes less surprising the older they become. The character becomes more or less reliably unreliable. This book proves that Jean Genet is an exception to this law of the sharpness being taken out of the character through detailed explanation. The older Genet gets the more he digs into his opposites and clings to them as if they were life itself.
One surprise to me was that Genet started his writing career with poetry. From the cursory knowledge I had of him I knew about two of the plays 'The Balcony' and 'The Maids' and the several books sold as novels which in the English translations became prose so clotted that the unwary reader reels when confronted with the awkward syntax and wayward sentence construction. With these translations the monoglot English reader could never tell whether the clotted prose was a reflection of the original French manuscript, or it was something distinct that happened in the translation of the French into English, and knew nothing about the translations into other languages where the original French was rendered much more fluently.
I was surprised when Jeremy Reed detailed the pressures of life on the underground writer. How the prison life made him want to give everything he had away, how as a thief he was a fine judge of the books he stole and sold on, how he was easily drawn into relationships and even acted in a fatherly manner to the children of his closest friends, and yet in his own sense of being a child he remained isolated and very negatively detached. I did not expect there to be parallels with the American underground writer William Burroughs, but the parallels were there, the drugs use and the way drugs both stretched time and shrank it. Then there was the inability to complete a course of detox because for Genet drugs were vital for putting energy into him, into his writing.
To find energy and ideas for writing through substances is nothing new. The following link
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2... makes the matter clear enough that. I need not say any more. My only wish was that The Guardian had also put Kierkegaard in the list for the dangerous levels of caffeine he took every morning so that he could scale the heights of philosophy in his writings. I will not list here the drugs Genet took but I will say that his sponsor in literature, Cocteau, was an opium addict and Genet took cheaper drugs than Cocteau which were good for as much as they gave him a start to his writing but bad when they also shorted out his creativity where that matter of finishing a piece of writing was concerned. Burroughs famously said that he broke his addiction to Heroin by himself, in Morocco. What he never said was that after that, and for all of the second half of his life he could not live without methadone. Genet, too, did eventually clear his head of the effects of the cheaper drugs of his relative youth. But then he had the problem of finishing a lot of writing that was only ever half complete, without the energy with which they had been started.
It was Groucho Marx who flippantly said 'I would not be a member of any club that would have me', but it took the deeply paradoxical drive of somebody as driven by childhood neglect as Genet was to live out that maxim to the ultimate degree, particularly when the result went well beyond gallows humour into criminality itself. Genet was gay and knew it, but could not admit it. So he had relationships with male bisexuals, the best of whom saw their attraction to Genet as temporary though without any sense of a fixed term to it. Thus later Genet became 'funny uncle' to the children of his former partners created when they married, and the wife would know Genet as a friend, and that Genet also took care of part of her husband that was never hers to own.
The chapters on his image, and the people who photographed and portrayed him seemed like thin stuff until they proved to be the prelude to descriptions if how physically thin Jean Genet was to become, and how his look became the archetype of 1960's rock rebellion, where the thinness of certain rock stars was due, like Genet's, to the use of recreational drugs. Genet had been there and was still struggling to get out of that cul-de-sac, whilst the young were enjoying their easy small rebellions. The rebellions that Genet went through were much more demanding of him than those of his copyists.
The way he lived and thought became a template for many more people than the young Rolling Stones, he was admired in Japan too. The details of his last creative rally, where he knew he was racing against his declining health to complete a first draft of his final book 'Prisoner of Love' were well written up here. The details of his physical decline astonished me, but I have known how other writers fight illness, to live well enough to complete that last book. Not that many years after Genet did it Patricia Highsmith and William Burroughs would do the same.
In a different context, the story of George Orwell coughing up blood whilst writing '1984', or 'The Last Man in Europe' as it was first titled, on the Isle of Jura in the midst of a harsh 1949 winter is now a well known mental image. Genet may well have been aware of the lineage in which as he was writing, as 'Prisoner of Love' became part of his journey in which he was to become 'The Last Man of (old) Europe' coughing his last words onto the page.
The last chapter details the life of an author's writings after their author has died. With somebody who was made more alive as a writer through the contradictions he lived with, the way Genet was, this chapter had to be written. But what Jeremy Reed declined to comment on was how much writing and the belief in writing as means of transmitting values and ideas practically requires many a writer to be dead for the writing to live, because of the sheer scale of published writing vs the number of present day living writers. Reed made a few salient points about updating translations of works out of their original tongues to generate new readerships for old books, including the old books by Jean Genet. The works of jean Genet need that. What Jeremy Reed does not say (and should have said in my view) is that it is not just new translations of Genet's books that are required, but making space for contradictions of Jean Genet on the internet, in poems that mention him and paintings depicting Genet. Poet, writer and painter Anthony Weir is one of the few to attempt this. Put 'Anthony Weir' and 'Jean Genet' into the search engine and follow the links that appear. I did.
In other words, the paradoxes of Genet need a modern, living, champion for his books and example to gain traction with the public again, however much the living writer who chooses to illustrate the contradictions of Jean Genet is making life difficult for themselves. The contradictions between the life and work of Jean Genet are a difficult act to update, given the bland consistencies of the 21st century.
P.s. there are modern writers who approach Genet through his work online and find something of themselves in his writings follow this link for an example.
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