Bio explores man behind madness

Genet: A Biography

Random House

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It is easy to understand why someone would wish to tell the story of Jean Genet, one of the towering literary figures of the 20th Century. But it is difficult to sympathize with the plight of someone who knew what he was getting himself into.

Certainly, novelist Edmund White, the author of "Genet: A Biography," is someone who could have been expected to know the territory. He is no slouch as a literary figure himself, producing highly acclaimed works such as "The Beautiful Room is Empty" while invigorating the moribund tradition of the expatriate American writer in Paris.

In 1993, White's adopted country bestowed upon him the honor of becoming a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters, even today a noteworthy experience for a foreigner. Perhaps it was this encomium that helped make White brave enough - or reckless enough - to tackle the thickets of the life of Jean Genet, a quintessential Parisian (not that the label would thrill Paris).

Part of the problem, and a big part it is, with becoming Genet's biographer is wading through the enjambments of reality and mythology -most of the mythology being Genet's own creation. Genet's most noteworthy literary achievements, his five novels of the 1940's, were designed to blur the line between fiction and autobiography. Blurry is indeed the choice word for White's use of the novels as biographical sources.

Repeatedly, White tortuously hems and haws over the validity of a biographical conclusion drawn from a scene or character in one of Genet's novels. He also seizes at tiny granules, such as a name shared by one of Genet's kindergarten playmates as well as one of his characters, to include in his larger edifice. But as a representation of Genet's life, it doesn't even make that great of a sand castle.

What was already confirmed knowledge about Genet's life is enough to demand belief. For starters, this brilliant creative artist seems, relative to his accomplishments, to have read scarcely a book in his life. He had only an elementary education before spending most of two-and-a-half decades in (and on the run from) various juvenile detention facilities, army brigades, and prisons. During this time, he worked on and off as a prostitute; after he established his career as a writer, he was a devoted procurer of prostitutes.

Genet never touched alcohol and rarely smoked, but was addicted to barbiturates and other drugs much of his life. He loved to talk with great expertise of art and politics, but found Kafka and Dostoyevsky (and just about every other writer) tedious. He was a kleptomaniac at 10-years-old, and was arrested for theft and possession of stolen goods over a dozen times, not to mention the charges he faced for army desertion and failures to appear in court.

As a writer, Genet experienced two major periods of productivity: on the brink of emerging from his life as a habitual fugitive and prison inmate, when he wrote his novels; and at the end of his next decade of freedom, the '50s, when he wrote most of his plays.

After the suicide of his long-term lover, a Moroccan acrobat, Genet disappeared from the landscape into depression. He reemerged as Genet the political activist. For most of his final two decades, he was most visible as an ardent partisan of the Black Panthers and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

This later part of White's work, at least, is quite well founded in verifiable fact, so that it is much more coherent than the first half. It is the maddening frivolities of the opening chapters, however, that set the tone for White's work, which is admittedly exhaustive in its breadth and research: It checks in at almost 650 pages, plus another 100 of notes and introduction.

Indeed, in view of this book's sheer bulk, and the obstacles the well-meaning reader meets from the very beginning, one wonders who would be possessed to finish the thing. Don't bother thanking me; that's my job.

-Jeff Druchniak

11-12-98