Low beau
MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
The Vision of Jean Genet Richard Coe (Peter Owen 50s) Fragments of a Journal Eugene Ionesco trans- lated by Jean Stewart (Faber 30s) A Madman's Defence August Strindberg: trans- lation, based on Ellie Schleussner's version, by Evert Sprinchorn (Cape 36s)
Jean Genet was abandoned to the Public Assis- tance at birth; at the age of seven he was placed as a foster-child with a peasant family, with whom he appears to have been happy for a time. But at ten he was caught stealing—or accused of it—and by the time he was fifteen was sentenced to a term in a reformatory, both for theft and for stabbing a boy in the eye with a penknife. Later he joined the Foreign Legion, deserted almost immediately, and spent a num- ber of years wandering about Europe. He lived as a thief and homosexual prostitute (his indo- lence, he said, caused him to prefer the latter means of livelihood—which must in any case provide plenty of opportunities for theft), and was in prison many times. He was back in France by the beginning of the war, and then, while in prison, began writing. In 1948 he was granted an official free pardon for his crimes by President Auriol (who invited him to din- ner), since when he has written little other than plays. In 1952 Sartre's massive study of him, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, appeared, somewhat curiously, as Volume I of his Col- lected Works.
For Sartre, Genet's life exemplified a number of important tenets of existentialism, which, it should be remembered, is a programme as well al a philosophy. But Sartre, like Genet the rhetorician, turned Genet the man into some- thing that he is not. The exercise was perhaps worth while in philosophical or even in pro- grammatic terms. But it wilfully transformed psychological motives into philosophical ones; worse, it rather too solemnly over-ennobled a petty thief and sordid pathic, thus embarrass- ing even the 'Saint' himself.
Genet's novels, written in a dazzling and un- translatable prose, are essentially masturbation- fantasies, exclusively narcissistic explorations of himself in certain stereotyped, resolutely anti- bourgeois situations. But the brilliance of his performance, which really does have affiliations, if only linguistic, with Villon and Rimbaud, should not distract us from recognising the very narrow limits within which Genet writes. This is a recognition that neither Mr Thody nor Dr Coe, although both are shrewd and capable of detachment, has quite been able to achieve.
For Genet to be as important as they— especially Dr Coe, whose book is twice as long and twice as starry-eyed as Mr Thody's—imply, he would have to be truly evil. But petty bur- glary and homosexuality are scarcely evil, even if they are both forms of infantilism. The point that both critics miss is that Genet's novels are classics of nothing except immaturity; that they have great sociological significance, because society is largely composed of immature people suffering from sexual and emotional infantilism, does not mean that they are masterpieces of literature. We are perhaps so shocked by Genet that we mistake his faithful, often linguistically inspired, but ultimately rhetorical account of his total narcissism for an act of the creative imagination.
In fact, sharply unfamiliar and even inno- vatory though this account may be, it is an
affirmation of petit bourgeois values. For when Genet speaks against prison reform, as he does, he is not being ironic, though he is clever enough to allow people to have their doubts:
he means it. No one is more shocked by Genet's homosexuality than Genet himself. In Notre-
Dame-des-Fleurs the mother of the homosexual prostitute, Divine, is hardly taken aback when she discovers her son's profession. Rather, she thinks to herself that he has 'un Credit Lyonnais entre les fesses.' Mr Thody seems to equate her with Genet's own mother; but surely this is his 'honest,' thieving foster-mother, about whom he can afford to be genuinely observant and funny? For his real mother, the whore who abandoned him to the state, he has had revenge- fully to invent a quite false Genet: the serious criminal, the betrayer, the child-killer and 'Saint' that the sordid, petty, inept and mastur- bating Genet of real life so patently is not.
Both these books are highly intelligent, and Mr Thody's in particular gives a sane and criti- cal account of his subject. Dr Coe provides a more than usually readable exercise in Higher Criticism. But both tend to treat Genet as a model-'hero of contemporary criticism rather than as he really is. Both seem content to accept him, in the dull current fashion, as a kind of lifeless landmark, a 'great,' important,"accep- ted' writer. But I think the final analysis will reveal him rather as the pioneer of a certain kind of satire, an earnest humorist (the perfect star for a film on whose script he had been working for four years, he told the Daily Express, would be the Duke of Edinburgh), a reluctant educator in spite of his infantile adherence to bourgeois repressiveness, and a superb stylist.
Ionesco's is another vastly inflated reputa- tion, but this scrapbook of his jottings, memo- ries and dreams will doubtless appear to possess an underlying unity for those who admire him. Here, as usual, he seems over-preoccupied with vast, unanswerable questions (life, death) when he might more profitably, if less pretentiously, concern himself with more local anguishes.
Strindberg wrote A Madman's Defence in French in 1888. It was, he said, 'a terrible book,' and he bitterly regretted having written it. It gives his account of his first marriage : of how his wife slowly drove him mad by mocking his writing and his virility, and finally by leaving him for a lesbian friend. This is not satisfactory as a novel (Evert Sprinchom calls it 'exasper- ating'), but it is of the greatest- importance as a document in Strindberg's biography, and as a guide to the meaning of The Father. The intro- duction is excellent.
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