To Catch a Thief

By Richard Lacayo

Jean Genet could be hard on his public. "I don't have readers," he once lamented, "but thousands of voyeurs." He might have added that it was he who raised the blinds and staged the spectacle -- a rabbity-looking thief rhapsodizing about transvestites and jailyard toughs. Not even the revered felons of French literary tradition, the poetes maudits from Villon to Rimbaud, had been so devoted to the triumvirate of personal virtues -- thievery, homosexuality and betrayal -- in Genet's great novels. First the French, then the world, couldn't tear their eyes away.

Edmund White's Genet: A Biography (Knopf; 728 pages; $35) faces the problem of any book that would take the measure of a writer who so resoundingly fictionalized his own life. How can mere truth compete? White comes to his subject with the advantages of a gay novelist (A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty) and the author of thoughtful reportage about gay life (States of Desire) -- both roles in which he would have confronted Genet's compelling and problematic example long before he came to him as a biographer. Suitably equipped, White connects the facts of Genet's life with some scrupulous literary and psychological conjecture.

The man who wrote Miracle of the Rose and The Thief's Journal was no sunny gay poet like Walt Whitman. When he celebrated himself, it was a tangle of paradoxes he pointed to. His chief delight was his own abjection. His notion of Utopia was a cellblock of masters and servants, preferably locked in a bear hug. He left little record of how his novels, written mostly in prison, developed. Though White doesn't penetrate all Genet's mysteries -- such as how a foster child who spent much of his adolescence in a reformatory became one of the supreme stylists in French literature -- he lays out clearly how Genet's gifts served each of the circles that took him up.

To the 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 criminals in the other's eyes, the outsider could be anyone.

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.

In 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 of violent protests. Genet was delighted.

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 to humanize French reformatories on the ground that cruel institutions produce great poets.

Then again, that did hold true in his case. By the time he died in 1986 -- of cancer, at the age of 75 -- Genet was revered as one of the greatest 20th century French writers. But White's book reminds us that Cocteau was right when he said Genet was a bad thief. Nothing he stole could compare in value with what he left behind.