Jean Genet was a French novelist and playwright, obsessed with the illusory, perverse, and grotesque elements of human experience. His works present the world of the isolated and despairing outcast.
Background
Jean Genet was born in 1920 in Paris, France. Genet's mother was a prostitute who raised him for the first seven months of his life before putting him up for adoption. Thereafter Genet was raised in the provincial town of Alligny-en-Morvan, in the Nièvre department of central France. His foster family was headed by a carpenter and, according to Edmund White's biography, was loving and attentive. At the age of 10 he began pilfering articles from his benefactors and their neighbors, perhaps to arouse the parental concern he knew to be absent in his life.
Education
At the age of 16 Genet was sent to the Mettray Reformatory.
Career
Escaping from his confinement after five years, Genet contracted for an extended enlistment in the Foreign Legion, collected his bonus and a few days later deserted.
During the next decade Genet wandered across Europe, immersing himself in the underworld and surviving as a beggar, thief, narcotics smuggler, forger, and male prostitute.
Arrested several times, Genet spent most of World War II in prison, where he began to write. Genet, however, often lied about his past, and Edmund White took about the task of dispelling many of the clouds surrounding Genet and propagated by Sartre.
As even Sartre himself acknowledged, Genet practiced certain economies when it came to self-revelatory truth so White relentlessly seeks out corroboration.
Many of the documents, it turns out, refuse to corroborate.
White first shows how thoroughly Genet's own version of his childhood—drawn in sharp lines of poverty and abuse—was a myth, an affectation given credibility by Sartre.
Raised in a farming village, he was not made to work, prospered in school, had plenty of books, and scored high on examinations.
Contrary to his later claim, he did not have to steal to survive.
The effect of White's first chapters is to suggest Genet largely fabricated a grim childhood to fit his chosen persona as a renegade.
And so he escaped from every apprenticeship, opting to become a petty thief.
Our Lady of the Flowers, composed under almost impossible conditions in Fresnes prison, was published in Lyons in 1943.
Death-watch (1949) describes the sadomasochistic relationship of three prisoners, ending in nightmarish death.
Genet's ritualistic theater continued to explore the deceptive relationship between illusion and reality in The Balcony (1957), The Blacks (1959), and The Screens (1961).
Prisoner of Love, his book-length memoir of the Palestinian fedayeen, appeared a month after his death in 1986.
His confrontation with the world has both deeply stirred and repulsed his readers and audiences.