Volume 40, Number 17 · October 21, 1993
Their Favorite Thief
By Tony Judt
Genet: A Biography
by Edmund White
Knopf, 820 pp., $35.00
The Selected Writings of Jean Genet
edited and with an introduction by Edmund White
Ecco Press, 456 pp., $27.50
From Baudelaire to Simone de Beauvoir there has been something unmistakably bourgeois about even the most outré Parisian intellectuals, not least in a common sentiment of vengeful anger felt toward their privileged origins. Symbolists, Décadents, Surrealists, and Existentialists were at home in the world they scorned; they traveled comfortably back and forth across the permeable frontier separating middle-class convention from Bohemian revolt. To this pattern there has been, in this century, one outstanding exception. Jean Genet—bastard, thief, homosexual, prostitute, novelist, playwright, and radical political activist—was as aggressively anti-conventional in his life as he was in his writings. Indeed he took pride in this correspondence between his life and his work and cultivated it with care; the invention and re-invention of his own asocial identity, through his writings and his actions alike, was crucial to his continuing (il)legitimacy. Genet never stopped writing his life.
Review, 6012 words
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