Scavenger of the Grandiose

...However much may be said for homosexuality objectively, as a Malthusian bonanza, or as an indispensable ingredient in the highest and widest creative genius, and so on and so on, it is still a great baffle to the subjectivity of the general reader when it is either the subject matter or the overt mentality of the work...

...Since the Existentialists have not yet worked out an ethic, much less an esthetic, I have no idea what Sartre can mean by beau in this case...

...But, even if this were so, need the style be so prefabricated or so old-fashioned as to seem pedantic and reactionary...

...Considering his career of prison and prostitution and his general disaffection from a society which deserves little or no affection from anybody, the méchanceté is perfectly reasonable morally, but in literature it is a quality which diminishes a poet...

...It was obviously meant to be "beautiful," but it struck me as a rather weak and feverish attempt to revive the high Romantic manner of Chateaubriand for a subject which could not possibly sustain it...

...and of general abjection...

...Read in the light of tradition, the hyperbaton or syntactical dislocation, which might do well in an Alexandrine, is absurd and merely granulates the sentence...

...Allowing that the peculiar rhetorical tones and suggestions of Genet's prose cannot be transferred effectively into intelligible English, the translation loses as little of the substance and manner of the original as I think is humanly possible...

...Singly, the perceptions and the ideas are not, in spite of the very special cases they apply to, remarkable or even fresh in themselves, but they come so thick and fast, in such new juxtapositions, that they perhaps accumulate an energy and excitement equal to those provided by a larger and deeper mind...

...In Existentialist theory, it may work out very nicely, that a style is a fixed mode of Being which can only be assumed as a mask or carapace by the essentially formless consciousness...

...But the form, whether in this case it should be or not...

...So, in a way his style is not superinduced but is quite organic to a pretty rich complex of attitudes and intentions...

...I rather doubt it, but on rereading a certain amount of Genet with an eye to any such habileté, I have had at least to allow that his game is far more intricate and interesting than I saw at first...

...I do not think it is the essential quality even of a great satirist, if there be such a creature, and anyway it is not the essential of Juvenal or Swift...

...And I found the rhetorical movement, which in the tradition should be broad and sustained, however wayward, in Genet's composition too mincing, fussy, and irresolute...

...and if the content is largely alien to one's sympathies, how can one really appreciate the form...

...Similarly the "saintliness" of Genet, which is part of his own explicit intention as well as Sartre's description of him, goes well with the gaudiest possible tastes of Catholicism, and in language he is no worse than Claudel...

...Whether or not Genet has succeeded in creating again what Hugo called a frisson nouveau, he has expressed, no doubt with great accuracy, the moral and emotional qualities of criminal and perverted experience...

...Even supposing the average and perhaps normal case of a person who has completed the whole Freudian curriculum, from polymorphous perversity in babyhood to heterosexual Position One in maturity, or what seems to be becoming the almost average case of a person who maintains in maturity his full libidinal gamut and leads a very well-rounded sex life, still there are ranges and keys of homosexual feeling which inevitably make even this kind of average man gag, or hoot...

...And its theatrical eloquence has apparently come superbly into its own with his plays, where staging and actors can bear it out...

...Aside from his special loves and devotions...

...If Genet continues his disciplines toward saintliness he may perhaps come into the same literary region as Cervantes—or Villon —but so far I make him out as a much smaller figure...

...The specific poignancies of pathos undergone by, say, the very feminine pansy who struggles manfully to be butch must, 1 think, remain very far out...

...When I first read, or tried to read...

...It is commonly said that the prose of Genet is beautiful, and Jean-Paul Sartre in his introduction to this book calls it the most beautiful of Genet's works...

...This is rare and perhaps unique...

...is an intimate and personal expression of the content...

...These moral stances are so to say the sections of the Genet orchestra, and I am rather bothered to discover that 1 do not fully vibrate to any of them: Many more human things than I imagined are alien to me, at least when presented from the inside...

...and if one cannot appreciate it, how can one possibly judge it, as people sometimes say a critic or even a reviewer should...

...I should add that the translation of this book, by Bernard Frechtman, is excellent...

...And I saw no signs of a mental intensity or scope which had allowed Ducasse and then Proust to sustain a like style plausibly enough...

...All the pretentious splendors and miseries of vocabulary I found perfectly cosmetic, or synthetic, mere toe— pasliche and postiche...

...His sumptuous style—"fastueux" —mixed with the crudest slang is far from naif, and it does much more than appropriately mimic the tragicomic affectations of pansy babble: It comes from a desperate will to ennoble his infamous loves and lovers, and celebrates them in what his taste, or rather theirs, feels is a handsome and ritual and consecrating style...

...Genet, it was a similar lack of immediacy and contemporaneity in the style which bothered me most...

...In short, we get a very high degree of what my friend called cleverness, but not, I think, the largeness of the really great poet...

...The original was published in 1949...

...Genet is méchant—not simply wicked in the easy sense but rancorous and malevolent, or "mean" as méchant is translated in classrooms...

...He probably is not referring to style, since the Existentialists, being concerned primarily with revelations and analyses of content, have written quite consistently without style, and when, as in his present infelicitous phase of behaviour, Sartre does suddenly go in for style, the style is an assumed one and singularly "inauthentic," for Les Mots has exactly the light-minded charm of Anatole France or of Daudet...

...One is quite ready to approach it as a Work of Art, which is what Genet intended it to be in the first place...

...Still, in his novels and poems it fails insofar as it requires for its realization a fuller and more active collaboration from too special an imagination or sympathy in its audience...

...Genet refers to a "region" of himself which he calls Spain— meaning, it seems, the absolute of degradation he went through in Barcelona and other more Spanish cities...

...and may have rocked the respectabilities of the French at the time, but since then we have weathered Naked Lunch and even lurider pieces, so one's first impression of this earlier work in translation is as of something almost ladylike...

...Compared to the expressive apathy of de Sade or of Burroughs, Genet does seem to be what Cocteau called him...

...I take Genet for a scavenger amongst the debris of the 17th century and other grandiose epochs of French style, with the taste of a prostitute...

...it may conceivably contain a potential Cervantes, that is, a spirit formed in prisons and miseries and perhaps even theft, but which remained one of the few most magnanimous minds literature has ever known...

...What I first took for an enervating fussiness and irresolution is surely the effect of so rapid and restless a perceptivity dealing in so many qualitative variables that no integral emotion or big idea can maintain itself longer than a short sentence...

...a very great poet...

...But if he has a Spain in him...

...If it is an essential in Baudelaire or Rimbaud, in the Satanic tradition or that of the poètes damnés, to which it is said Genet belongs, I can only say that this is not a major tradition, however useful it is in keeping the greater literature alert to real miseries and evils, and however "beautiful" it may be in a formal or intellectual way...

...In addition, to comprehend the expressive values in Genet's form, one would need more than a rough idea of the erotic appeals of burglary, of betrayal both personal and national, of beggary (with an e...

...In this book, too, one gets such a sentence as: La police française sur moi exerce seule un prestige fabuleux...

...I was saying as much recently to a Frenchman who knows him and the Sartre-de Beauvoir crowd very well, and he stopped me, saying, "That may be, but Genet is the cleverest one of the lot...

...author, "Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work" As homosexual pornography or a documentary on male prostitution, this book comes a little late...

...Genet is certainly large in the sense of abundant, but not in the sense of magnanimity, which, with my classical and no doubt bourgeois prejudices, I ask of a great poet...

...So the following must be taken as would be a review of a symphony by a distinctly tone-deaf person...

...Sartre may have meant the book is "beautiful" in the sense of an intellectual exploit or performance, and there I should have to agree...

...The delicate and quick perceptions of the great poet are certainly there, and so is the unwavering lucidity of intellect turned on those perceptions as well as on their objects...

...Likewise to use the full solemnity of the past definite on a disreputable and trivial subject, thus: nous décidâmes de cambrioler une boutique, is to sound like a schoolboy sporting with the rhetoric of Corneille...