Jean Genet: Playboy Interview

In any competition for the one least likely to succeed as a man of letters, Jean Genet would almost certainly be the runaway favorite. A balding, 53-year-old homosexual, onetime male prostitute and unregenerate ex-convict with a lengthy record of convictions for burglary, counterfeiting, bootlegging, dope smuggling and desertion, he is the author of prose no less emphatically antisocial. His works have been reviled as "acts of vengeance"; he himself has been called "the most depraved author now writing for the stage." His highly publicized private life notwithstanding, he has been hailed as "the most important writer to have appeared in France since the end of World War II," and proclaimed as "probably the greatest living playwright."
Genet's theatrical credentials are impressive: "The Balcony," which suggests, as one reviewer put it, that "the world is a brothel patronized by fetishists with illusions of grandeur," was named the best off-Broadway production of 1960, and has since been made into a movie. Another Genet award winner, "The Blacks," features an all-Negro cast savagely enacting the ritual rape of a white woman. Both plays have racked up record-breaking runs from London to Los Angeles. His first novel, "Our Lady of the Flowers," recently published without expurgation in the U.S., is an explicit and exhaustive depiction of depravity and despair among society's untouchables. It has been acclaimed as "a work of prismatic brilliance."

Genet's documents of social disintegration have been a-borning through a life that reads like an embroidery on Gorky's "The Lower Depths." Abandoned at birth by his unwed mother, Genet spent his childhood years in the stern charge of peasant foster parents who tolerated his presence only for the fee paid them by the government. Unloved and unschooled, he began to steal trinkets from neighbors, perhaps in an unconscious bid for parental attention. He got it: They caught him in the act and cast him out of their home—at the age of ten. The twice-abandoned bastard—now branded publicly as a thief, and faced with the necessity of fending entirely for himself—found that he could survive only by continuing to steal. Since he could not escape the stigma of the outlaw, he devoted all his energies to a life "beyond the social pale." Trafficking in stolen goods, narcotics and homosexuality, he spent the next 28 years—seven of them in prison—as a defiant exile from society.

It was while serving time in 1942 that Genet began to chronicle the autoerotic fantasies which eventually became "Our Lady of the Flowers." He was stirred by the sense of power he discovered he was able to inject into and derive from the written word. Forthwith he vowed to forsake the religion of vice for the art of prose.

The five plays he's written since then have been electrifying Grand Guignols on man's inhumanity to man. Two of the plays were written behind bars: "The Maids," in which a pair of female servants express and finally act out their hostilities against the lady of the house; and "Deathwatch," in which three imprisoned criminals wallow in wish-fulfillment fantasies of atrocity which suddenly become real. The remaining three—"The Balcony," "The Blacks" and his latest play, "The Screens" (on the relationship between the Algerian Arabs and the French colons), have been written since his release from prison in 1948, brought about by a presidential pardon at the behest of such eminent fellow literati as Cocteau, Gide and Sartre.

Despite freedom, fame and fortune, Genet remains a spiritual castaway, a man outside the mainstream: officially cut off from his criminal past, yet still violently anti-establishment. He has few possessions and no permanent address, rarely sees friends or circulates socially, and—we were warned—refuses to be interviewed by anyone. But we decided to try anyway, and were delighted to learn that he had been prevailed upon by a persuasive confrere to grant his first interview to Playboy.

A ruddy, round-faced man with a balding pate and a deceptively cherubic smile, he received our interviewer in the small, sparsely furnished hotel room which he currently occupies in one of Paris' least fashionable neighborhoods. In five sessions, he spoke to us with disarming candor about his life of crime, his reconciliation with society, his creative works, censorship—and oblivion.