Ive just finished reading the biography of Jean Genet, the French playwright and poet.
I first heard of Genet from Brother Roger of the Community of the Resurrection, who said in a paper Pilgrims of the Absolute:
I am going to quote an extract from an almost unknown French novel, describing an utterly desolate woman. Her children had died of want. Her husband had been killed. She had been left with nothing, and she wandered from church to church, and to her graves, never begging, but taking quite simply what was offered to her.
Silent as space, she seemed when she did speak to have come back to earth from some blessed land in some unknown universe. It was her voice that made one feel this. Age had made it grave without destroying the gentleness of it, and what she said made it even more likely. “Everything that happens is adorable,” she used to say, and with the look of a creature weighed down with the weight of grace, who knows no other way of explaining what is happening in her heart and mind, and she would have said the same of a plague that was wiping out the world, or at the moment when she herself was to be thrown to the lions. A priest, who happened to be a good one, seeing her crying in church, said “Poor woman, you must be very unhappy”. To which she replied, “I am perfectly happy. You do not go to heaven tomorrow or the day after or in ten years’ time, but you go today of you are poor and crucified.
Then there is the strange case – in reverse – of Jean Genet, the playwright and poet, whose play “Les Negres” is on in London now [in 1961, when he was speaking]. Born in Paris, illegitimate and abandoned, brought up by foster parents in the country. Stole at the age of ten, and sent to a remand home, for the next ten years in and out of gaol, or in the Foreign Legion. In prison he accepted the rigour of his life as a monk accepts his rule.
Jean Paul Sartre, who has written a book about him, calls him liar, thief, pervert, saint and martyr. He is blatantly frank about himself and denies nothing. He hates society and has set himself a resolute courtship of evil, in order that, so some believe, he may know it from within.
He wants to be an outcast, and hates the people who try to reform him. It is perfectly clear that he is deadly serious, and repudiates the idea that there is anything of the saint about him. “Absolute moral perfection,” he says, “means that I would have to betray my friend to the police.”
He lives nowadays in hotels in Greece and Italy – the best ones (his only luxury) – because in their privacy seclusion is easier. He no longer lives in France, because the climate hurts his rheumatism – a legacy of the gaols, and besides, fame hurts his self-protective ego.
He lives austerely, not even owning a copy of his books, only the clothes he stands up in. He gives away much money, his few close friends are completely dominated by him. They say he is the most generous, honest and rigorous man they have ever met. Everyone finds him courteous, lucid, very direct in argument, often very funny, but aggressive if he suspects any insincerity.
He doesn’t care how he dresses; he’s a chain smoker; he looks like a peasant, not like a poet, with the face of a ferocious chimpanzee.
He really seems to be upset by the stage success of his plays, not because he is modest – the very opposite – a sort of inverted conceit and a desire to remain reviled. He usually tries to avoid seeing them. He says he is writing for the dead, whatever that may mean. In one play he says that the dead are those not engaged in the illusion of living.
To understand him, one has to go back to the queer poetic youth of the reformatories and prisons, who shoved morality through the looking glass. Everything he writes is sincere, even when he is trying to shock. Whatever the psychological causes may be, his pursuit of evil and degradation is the by-product of his hatred of society. “Society rejects degradation, so I will cherish it.”
Clearly this ethic does not fit in with his sympathy and love for his fellows, especially for the outcast. Now that he is no longer of the underworld, as it were, he says that his criminal years were a deliberate self-imposed discipline, to complete the break with society, and to reach the solitude necessary to discover his true self.
What have we done to hide from people like this man, the reality of our faith, which we know could answer their longings? Genet’s hatred of society seems so much like the hatred of the world we are urged to. In a queer perverted way he is an ascetic, he knows the necessity for solitude and stillness, and how cluttering possessions can be.
Perhaps he sees the Church as so many outsiders see it – shorn of much that is beautiful. The Church is no longer the opiate of the people, as the communists insist, since there is not even a narcotic kick left in it. It seems that we have nothing of the flavour and excitement of the first years, but everything watered down, until the wine of their spiritual intoxication of the first centuries has become the weak tea of our get-togethers, and what was once the living bread of the Spirit is now only the buns and cakes of our parish organisations. It may well look to outsiders as if we of the divided church spend all our energy on perpetuating our beloved divisions.
But when we know from our own experience that God is a person who cares for us, whose very being is love, which means “caring for”, then we should be able to make other people believe it too – if they want to believe. If we could show by letting everything go, letting everything slip into the hands of God, we should lose nothing, but gain immeasurably.
The biography, Genet, by Edmund White, runs to over 700 pages, and took me seven months to read. Yet it didn’t tell me a great deal more than Brother Roger’s summary, above, does, at least not up to July 1961, when Brother Roger read that paper to a conference of the Anglican Students Federation of South Africa.
The story can be brought up to date, though Genet wrote very little after that: another play, The Screens, and another novel, Prisoner of love. And from the late 1960s until his death in 1986 Genet embraced political causes — the Black Panthers in the USA, and the Palestine liberation movement. But the rest of what Brother Roger wrote still stands.
And Brother Roger was no mean expert. He was able to advise a translator of Genet’s work on the nuances of obscene French slang. If it weren’t for him, I’d never have read any of Genet’s work, and certainly not been motivated to read his biography. I do like reading literary biographies, though, almost more than reading the works of the authors themselves.
I haven’t read any of Genet’s novels, nor have I seen any of his plays performed on the stage. I have seen the film of his play The balcony, though, twice. The first time was in Johannesburg, and I can’t think what the South African censors were doing when they let it through. Perhaps they didn’t understand it. Actually, it was rather funny, because the word had got round that it was set in a brothel, and half the audience was composed of dirty old men. The first time I saw it was exactly 44 years ago today, and I went with my mother. Here’s what I wrote in my journal for 2 May 1964:
We went to see “The balcony”, about a sort of brothel place, where illusions are made to seem real for neurotic men, and outside a revolution is in progress. The chief of police is a friend of the brothel keeper, and he gets three of these neurotic men to pretend they are the judge, the bishop and the general, because the real ones are all dead. And it is really quite obvious that the revolution outside is as phony as the painted scenery in the brothel. It was by Jean Genet — “liar, thief, pervert, saint and martyr”. I thought it was very good — the only honest outlook on life for the godless. Mum didn’t like it, and nor did the majority of the audience. The bloke behind us said at the end, “For God’s sake lets get out of here”, and he sounded like he meant it. I suppose most of them thought it would be pornographic, and couldn’t understand when it wasn’t. But Genet said he was writing for the dead, and he also said that the dead are those who are not engaged in the illusion of living.
Actually until I went to see the film I thought that the stereotype dirty old man was a kind of urban legend, but there were about 30 of them there, in crumpled raincoats, just like the stereotype.
The second time I saw it was three years later, in Durham, England. I went with some college friends, and expected some rather different reactions. And here’s what I wrote in my journal on 10 October 1967:
After supper we had port, and then seven of us went off to see The balcony, by Jean Genet. I had seen it three years ago in Joburg, and enjoyed it just as much the second time. The others also enjoyed it. I discussed it with Graham Mitchell on the way back, and he seemed to shrink a bit from the view of life that the film presented — that there is a real world outside from which the unreal world derived its existence; unreality thrives on reality. I said no, things like the obviously phony backdrop of cheering crowds and so on were to impress that it was phony, and the chief of police telling the three — the judge, archbishop and general that they were imitation fakes showed that they were not even real fakes. The chief of police himself, who came from the “real” world outside, had no power. His gun shot paper bullets, even though he got it from inside. The rebel leader, seeking power, was the first customer who wanted to play the chief of police, and then when the real and the phony confronted each other, they were stripped of their uniforms and sent out into the real world, naked save for bath towels, and their power was an illusion. Graham said, “But power isn’t an illusion, is it?” I said, “No, but in the film it was.” He seemed to want reassurance on the point. We had tea in Hugh’s room, and all started giggling as if we were high on pot.
Yet in a a way the play was about the illusion of power, and that was where I thought the South African censors might have missed the point. In the 1960s South Africa was a police state, and John Vorster was the chief of the police, and sending him out naked into the unreal reality like the chief of police in the film was surely not the message they wanted to hear.
