The Mandarin and the Thief

By Otto Friedrich

During the last months of the German Occupation in 1944, the young man who was to become France's most controversial contemporary philosopher and the woman who was to become its most controversial feminist met the professional criminal who was to become its most controversial playwright. "The conversation was most agreeable," said Jean-Paul Sartre. Last week, nearly six years after Sartre's death, his longtime companion Simone de Beauvoir, 78, died of a lung ailment. The next day Jean Genet, 75, succumbed to throat ! cancer. Said Premier Jacques Chirac, inarguably: "The end of an era."

It was a trio of soloists. De Beauvoir epitomized the French bourgeoisie. Her father was a lawyer and a non-believer, but her mother insisted on a stern Roman Catholic education. It did not have the desired effect. At twelve the child decided, "I no longer believe in God," and resolved to study philosophy at the Sorbonne.

Genet was born illegitimate, reared in a state orphanage and sent at seven to foster parents on a farm in central France. He became an altar boy, and the priest thought he had "a religious nature," but his foster mother caught him stealing from her purse. "You little thief!" she cried. Genet took that as his creed: "I answered 'Yes' to every accusation made against me, no matter how unjust . . .Yes, I had to become whatever they said I was . . . I was a coward, thief, traitor, queer, whatever they saw in me."

De Beauvoir was 21 and Sartre 23 when the fellow philosophy students met and began arguing (they both planned to become teachers). "It was the first time in my life that I had felt intellectually inferior to anyone else," De Beauvoir recalled in her five-volume memoirs. Sartre halfheartedly proposed marriage, but instead they worked out a deal: complete equality between them, complete freedom to have affairs with others, complete honesty about everything. And so, without ever actually sharing an apartment, they lived together for the rest of their lives, always addressing each other with the formal "vous."

Genet spent most of his 20s in jail on charges of theft, prostitution and related crimes. There, on strips of brown wrapping paper, he composed a long poem about a homosexual murderer, then a novel about a male prostitute, Our Lady of the Flowers (1943). Scandalized, the eminent critic Paul Valery declared, "This must be burned." Others strongly disagreed. In 1948, when Genet faced a life term as a repeat offender, Sartre, Andre Gide, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau and other literati circulated a petition protesting the sentence. It won Genet a presidential pardon.

By then Sartre was famous as the leading exponent of the creed known as existentialism (Being and Nothingness, 1943) and the chief guru to the postwar denizens of St. Germain des Pres. De Beauvoir was not far behind. She won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for her fourth novel, The Mandarins, an astringent survey of the Paris literary life as well as a memoir of her own affair with ^ Chicago Novelist Nelson Algren. More enduring fame came from her monumental manifesto The Second Sex (1949), one of the cornerstones of modern feminism.

Around 1944, Genet had asked Sartre to write a preface to one of his novels. The philosopher responded with a voluminous book oddly entitled Saint Genet (1952). He argued that Genet's flowery novels about homosexual criminals reflected "a black ethic . . . a Jansenism of Evil." Genet was dismayed. "I gave him the manuscript," Sartre recalled. "He got up and went over to the fireplace with the intention of burning it. I believe he did throw some pages in and then plucked them out." Sartre's unkindest cut was making the poete maudit respectable. Genet developed a writer's block that lasted five years.

Sartre's other friend, by contrast, was becoming scandalous. In The Second Sex, she argued not only that women lead thwarted lives but that society defines their very identity. "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman," she wrote bitterly. "It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch." (This in the land of vive la difference.) One of the book's million-plus American readers, Betty Friedan, was so depressed that she took to her bed for three days, then got up and started work on The Feminine Mystique.

When Genet went back to writing, it was mainly as a playwright, of wild language and wilder imagination. His first hit in New York City was The Balcony (1960), in which a series of ruling-class figures act out their sexual yearnings in a bordello. Then came The Blacks (1961), a fantasy of racial revenge played partly in whiteface by such then obscure actors as James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson. And though Genet wrote very little during his last decade, his plays kept being revived--even, last year, at the Comedie Francaise--making him not only respectable but comparatively prosperous.

Originally, De Beauvoir distrusted feminism--socialism alone could change the world, she argued. But she gradually altered her beliefs, and when the women's liberation movement formally began in France in 1970, she enthusiastically joined it. When 343 well-known women published an advertisement to announce that they had all had illegal abortions, De Beauvoir was one of the signers. When 4,000 women marched for abortion rights, she marched. And when a tribunal gathered to condemn "crimes against women," she was one of the organizers. "More than any other figure," Gloria Steinem said last week, "she was responsible for the international women's movement."

In her 60s, De Beauvoir discovered her last grande passion, the impoverishment and degradation of old age, her own and everyone else's. "It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life," she wrote in The Coming of Age (1970), her last important book. "Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny." When death transformed Sartre's life into a destiny in 1980, she wrote of him, "His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are." Genet, who rarely agreed with anyone about anything, would no doubt have agreed with that.