From “My Genet”
by Edmund White

I had already lived in France four years when my editor Bill Whitehead back in New York asked me if I knew anyone who could write a biography of Jean Genet, the great novelist-thief-homosexual who’d died only the year before, in 1986. I was astonished that there was no proper biography of him already.

Of course there was Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet, which was termed an “existential psychoanalysis.” Eventually I realized that the hard biographical facts in this book could be reduced to a thirty-page summary. All of its hundreds of other pages were filled with speculation, brilliant but controvertible.

I proposed myself as Genet’s biographer and Bill accepted me instantly. What I didn’t know was that Bill was already ill with AIDS and would be dead within two years. He certainly seemed at the height of health and fitness; he stayed with me in Paris and when I tried to keep up with his daily aerobics exercises I was left crippled.

I myself had been diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1985 and I kept imagining that in another year or two I’d be dead. Doing the Genet biography was my way of shaking my fist at fate. I figured it would take at least three years to research and write. And it wasn’t the sort of farewell, personal elegy readers might expect but an objective study of someone I had never known.

I decided that Genet deserved a scrupulous, highly detailed, strictly chronological biography in which the biographer himself would never intrude as a voice or character. Maybe because I was an autobiographical novelist and tired of the word “I,” I longed for the “otherness” of traditional biography. Nor did I believe “Monsieur Genet, c’est moi,” since I knew that Genet had despised fellow homosexuals, most whites, all white Americans, fellow writers, all middle-class people—on five counts I was out. Whereas I’d been sent to private schools and psychiatrists and had never gone to bed cold or hungry, Genet had been “un enfant abandonné” and had entered into a life of crime (petty thefts in order to eat) in his early adolescence and had known years of deprivation and imprisonment.

In the end the biography took seven years of my life and like George Eliot, who said when she finished Romola, “I started it as a young woman and finished it as an old one,” I, too, felt that the book divided my youth from old age. Bill Whitehead died early on but my own health remained stable. Throughout the seven years of researching and writing Genet, however, such a possibility was not yet envisioned.

The only hitch was that I didn’t know how to write a biography. Certainly not this one. Most literary biographies are about middle-class men and women who have spent their lives in an intellectual and artistic milieu. Their juvenilia are carefully preserved by a doting mother. Their success is often early, their friends are fellow-scribblers who generate and put into archives their journals and letters, whose movements are documented by cultural journalists and whose manuscripts are sold to libraries.

Genet was the opposite. His first thirty years were spent as a foster child, runaway, delinquent, soldier, prostitute and thief, and only his extraordinary intelligence and imagination saved him—and especially his ability to transcend himself. He was brought up by peasants in the Morvan (the equivalent to Tennessee in the States) in a narrow-minded world, but he ended up as a friend to the Palestinians and Black Panthers. He established a reputation by writing five autobiographical novels in five years, books that reversed all the conventional views of homosexuality and did so in an eloquent, sometimes arch literary manner, and then he moved on to write three of the key plays of the twentieth century (The Balcony,The Blacks and The Screens) which in no way touched on the homosexual experience but dealt with the inner workings of political power, colonialism, race and the fate of those who remain marginal and excluded even after a popular revolution. If I’d changed as a writer and person over the years my development had been much more modest. I began as more privileged and I ended up as less radical than Genet.

His life was difficult to document. Over the years he’d dropped most of his friends and whenever I met one I first had to soothe wounded feelings. And then some of his friends had been jailbirds who didn’t live long, who if they survived were hard to find, who if found wouldn’t talk, or if they talked had to be paid and weren’t to be believed. During a period of just seven years Genet had mixed with Parisian artistic folk, everyone from Simone de Beauvoir to the sculptor Giacometti. Of his artistic friends only Leonor Fini was still alive (she has since died) when I began my research and she wouldn’t respond until the last few minutes before the book went to press. Then she talked to me briefly on the phone. All those who had remained loyal to Genet didn’t want to give me an interview; Genet had never wanted a biography written about him, possibly because he didn’t want a set of facts that would compete with what he called, in medieval tones, his “golden legend.”…

Ontario Review #63