Word: genetically
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...writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who ushered Genet's novels into print in 1946 in under-the-counter editions, Genet was a singing erection, a poet who cultivated his homosexuality in ways the fastidious Cocteau never permitted himself. Genet's work "disgusts me, repels me, astonishes me," Cocteau wrote. "It poses a thousand problems...
After the war, Genet was taken up by Jean-Paul Sartre and his Left Bank circle. In Saint Genet, an immense one-volume act of homage, Sartre made Genet an existentialist, the utterly free man, even to the point of insisting that his homosexuality was chosen, which Genet found ridiculous. But Sartre certified Genet to a larger readership in postwar France, which was ready, after the upheavals of war and the German Occupation, to inspect, ever so gingerly, the notions of a self-proclaimed outlaw. In a nation still divided between onetime resistance fighters and onetime collaborators, each of them...
White recognizes that thievery really was at the center of Genet's inverted ethic. It was a means of petty rebellion even after literary success brought him enough money for monogrammed shirts -- which required him to match his aliases to the JG stitched on them. "Society hostesses shivered with anticipation," White tells us, "hoping he'd nick something when he came to call." Repeatedly nabbed, Genet spent more than four years in French jails...
...confinement his gifts were set free. Life on the outside unsettled him. He lived in hotels, traveling constantly and falling for good-looking straight ! guys or hustlers who knew an open wallet when they saw one. In the mid-1950s, after a long depression, Genet the confessional novelist re-emerged as a playwright consumed by public issues. In The Balcony and The Blacks he reworked his old obsession with power relations into taunting parables about race, social caste and colonialism. The Paris premiere of The Screens, with its veiled attack on the French suppression of Algeria, set off a week...
Then he tumbled into another trench of depression and Nembutal. Ordinary politics couldn't reconcile Genet's leftist attachment to the dispossessed and his infatuation with a world of muscular order. The civic-minded gay activism he saw emerging in his later years was too middle class for him, one more sign that vice wasn't what it used to be. Implacable tough guys were more to his taste, the Black Panthers and the terrorist Baader Meinhof Group or the Palestinians, a whole nation of the dispossessed. By instinct he submitted moral problems to an aesthetic judgment. He opposed attempts...