Genet: A Biography [Paperback]

Edmund White (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 4, 1994

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The definitive biography of Jean Genet, the incomparable French novelist whose works echo with themes of violent hierarchies, rituals of power and powerlessness and human identities as roles to be traded and manipulated. From his birth in 1911 to his adoption by foster parents and his tumultuous life as a runaway, thief, beggar and prostitute, Genet had remarkable powers of self-transformation, ultimately turning the pain of his life into writings that attracted the attention of literary trend-setter Jean Cocteau. Genet's work covered an amazing amount of social, political and intellectual territory. By diving into that which was awkward, ugly and painful, he emerged with the truth, transforming himself and others with its beauty. White earned the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography for this fine work. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

The NBCC Award-winning biography of Genet will be released in paperback in conjunction with two of White's novels, The Beautiful Room Is Empty ($11 ISBN -75540-3) and Forgetting Elena ($10 ISBN -75573-X).
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 800 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 4, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679754792
• ISBN-13: 978-0679754794
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #870,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Sensitive Look at a Complex Man September 30, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Jean Genet's major works are considered masterpieces. His plays, The Screen and The Blacks are performed worldwide. During his lifetime, he received the Grand Prix des Arts et Lettres and he is remembered for championing the causes of the oppressed. Yet, surprisingly, for many years, no biography of Genet had been attempted. Writers could have been intimidated by Sartre's huge psychological study, St. Genet, published in 1952, or perhaps by the elusive nature of Genet, himself, and his complex morality.

In 1987 Edmund White began what became a six-year study of Genet's life and works. The result of that work is this book, Genet, a shining and enduring biography that shares much in common with Starkie's excellent biography of Rimbaud and Ellman's Oscar Wilde.

White read Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers for the first time in 1964. He responded to Genet's "deeper, more extravagant prose," and, in doing so, he experienced a self-liberation as the gay world was presented without apology or explanation and gay men were afforded the experience of seeing their world, not as tacky but as glamorous and poetic. In addition, Genet's affectionate rendering of drag queens helped to elevate their view in the eyes of all.

White, who had tested HIV-positive in 1985, was grateful for the chance to work on the biography as it also afforded him the opportunity to reflect on his own homosexuality, art and literature in a world not yet affected by the AIDS virus, for Genet had inhabited a world and culture prior to the outbreak of AIDS.

In this sensitive biography, White takes us on a journey through the French welfare and prison systems; high society led by Cocteau; café society led by Sartre; and revolutionary movements as well.

In Genet: A Biography, White shows us that Genet's work, like Genet, himself, is a terrain of contradictions, and he spells out both the kindnesses and the cruelty with sincere and translucent clarity.

Genet began life in 1911 as a ward of the state. Raised as an outcast, by a young age he was attempting to come to terms with his sensitive and convulsive nature. At the age of thirteen he began lying and stealing; by fourteen, he was branded a thief, something he accepted with arrogance rather than shame. At fifteen, he was arrested and led, in handcuffs, into the Penitentiary Colony of Mettray.

At Mettray, he worked in the fields and performed naval drills on landlocked ships. By night, however, the prisoners lived by their own code. The handsome, sadistic heterosexual was king, and someone, like Genet, passive and adoring, not only served, but blossomed as a princess and a scribe.

As brutal as life was for Genet in Mettray, he cherished his time there, for he experienced many awakenings within its walls. The time in Mettray also afforded Genet a chance to look inward. What he saw caused him tremendous anguish, for he had to face the realization that he did, indeed, possess all the evil that others had attributed to him. His suffering, however, only made him strong.

Destitute, but free at nineteen, Genet began a decade of wandering through Europe and Africa, passing from one prison to another for one petty crime or another. In 1939, in a prison cell in Fresnes, Genet began his masterpiece, Our Lady of the Flowers. Figuratively, he wrote in martyr's blood, for the book represented a reopening of all his adolescent wounds.

As Genet wrote of his early loves in his cell at Mattray, modern literature found society's most marginal men portrayed, for the first time, without shame or remorse. White clearly points out that Genet never used his writing as a political or psychological forum, yet his books sparked furious debates over censorship in the courts of Europe. What Genet did do was open the door for future writers and, most importantly, confer dignity and understanding on society's least understood and most estranged.

Genet had not set out to do so, but he had created a kind of miracle. Social change began to take place, and the president of France, at Sartre's urging, pardoned Genet of all his crimes. However, as White theorizes, this pardon also stripped Genet of his sacred individuality, his uniqueness, and he fell into a deep depression and ceased all writing.

A relationship with the sculptor, Alberto Giacometti, however, conferred on Genet new meaning and purpose and he said, "every man is every other man, as am I."

Resuming his life as a vagabond, Genet discovered untapped inner resources and a wealth of creative ideas. His importance as a poet emerged.

Genet's last years were filled with suffering, when, addicted to drugs and suffering from cancer, he dedicated himself to the plight of the Palestinians; rootless warriors lacking a champion, much like himself. His final work, Prisoner of Love, is dedicated to these people and to life, itself, and the power of the creative imagination. This was Genet's final miracle: the realization that we are all holy, that we all contain, both the whole and the part, of the divine.

Genet died at the age of seventy-five, on 15 April 1986 in a hotel room in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris. He is buried in Larache, Morocco and his grave bears only two sun-washed, sparkling white stones. Although Genet's body may lie beneath the Moroccan sand, his spirit still soars, crowned with the blood of his youth and the thorn-studded roses of old age.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Exemplary portrait of a notoriously bad thief and a fascinatingly notorious writer May 24, 2007

By D. Cloyce Smith TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

Edmund White is perhaps best known as a novelist but this biography of Jean Genet may well be his magnum opus. (And I find it astonishing that it seems to be out of print as of May 2007, since there is no other decent English biography of Genet available.) It's a monster of a book, but it's one of the more readable literary biographies that I've come across--not least because "literary" in Genet's case also means social and political and scandalous. Readers who have never read a word of Genet may question the need for perusing this book, but it was my introduction to the work and, as I work my way through Genet's prose, I appreciate difficult or seemingly unfathomable passages all the more because of White's memorable explication (although I can't share White's enthusiasm for the plays).

Genet's "rebellious" worldview--which often comes across as much a stage-managed affectation as a genuine philosophy--may be unattractive to those of a more traditional ethic (and I include myself among that group), but it's never boring. Much of Genet's writing depicts, glorifies, and justifies his careers as a thief, as an outsider, as an anarchist; he was also a notorious freeloader who forsook the attractions of materialism yet siphoned the wealth of others--and who sapped the remarkably patient generosity of his publishers).

Genet idealizes his years at Mettray (a colony for adolescent delinquents), his life as a thief (which ended in 1944, after he had completed two books and earned the approbation and support of Cocteau), and "the erotic charm of prison" (his many convictions for petty theft earned him sentences totaled nearly four years). And it's a good thing his writing is so remarkable: as White never tires of pointing out, Genet was a famously bad thief who spent so much time in prison because he was most adept at getting caught.

White covers far more than Genet's own life and work and lovers, however; this biography is also a decent introduction to the Parisian literary set that included such luminaries as Cocteau, Beauvoir, Duras, Giacometti, and Sartre. Since I was more interested in the literature, I had feared that the appeal of the biography would flag once I reached Genet's later years, after he had stopped writing and spent his time supporting various political causes (Algerian independence, pro-Palestinian movement, Black Panthers). But these chapters, too, were riveting and essential for an understanding both of his life's ethic and of his posthumously published "Prisoner of Love."

Overall, White makes a convincing case for Genet's importance, arguing "Genet and Celine are the most discussed twentieth-century French writers after Proust." I'm not sure I would go that far (Camus? Sartre? Beauvoir? Ionesco? Beckett? Gide?), although I suppose it depends on who's doing the "discussing." Nevertheless, White has certainly presented a solid case that Genet belongs in the top tier.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Gay rollercoster ride April 25, 2004

By alexander laurence

Format:Paperback

Following the rags to riches life of Jean Genet is an interesting reliving of French literature and history. Edmund White is certainly capable of empathy and psychological understanding for Genet, unlike in his biographies if William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Though White makes the mistake of trying to incorporate some Michel Foucault, the homoseuxal philosopher, into his own penal insights into Jean Genet, the works and the man. Other than that fact, this handsome book is one long guitar solo at the altar of Genet.

Most of Genet's life is well-known, and partly used as the subjects for his novels. Genet was an orphan, had foster parents, and went to reform school. He had a bunch of early gay relationships, and he stole a lot of books. In prison Genet wrote Our Lady of The Flowers, and later shows it to Jean Cocteau, who is pissed off because he didn't write a similiar work first.

Genet wrote five novels and a few plays around and during World War II. They books are originally published anonymously. The books become an overnight sensation. As Genet becomes old and bald, and when the flamboyant Cocteau becomes bored with him, heterosexual Sartre and multisexual Simone de Beauvoir, both sort of yuppies of their time, become enamoured with the idea of hanging out and slumming it with Genet, a real thief.

Sartre saw him as a good example of his existential philosophy, and wrote Saint Genet. This book of his life came out when Genet was in his mid-forties. Genet doesn't write very much during the last years of his life. He does become involved with the Black Panthers and Palestinians.

Genet lived in Tangiers with his young Kiki. He wrote a final book that was banned before his death in 1986.

Genet's life was one long homosexual rollercoster ride. Genet's long life is an achievement which White gives a literary form in this tribute and gentle biography. As far as literary biographies go, this one is up there with the biographies of Oscar Wilde, Sade, and Frank O'Hara.