Long after Sartre’s book-length tribute “Saint Genet” and such plays as “The Balcony” made him a star, Genet remained the needy child; as a house guest he crawled into bed between husbands and wives to read them what he’d stayed up writing. But his needs seemed to emanate from an empty center. The thievery for–which he did prison time as a youth and his later compulsion to play Pygmalion with young menan acrobat, a race-car driver–suggest an unfillable void. White acutely remarks that the political causes to which Genet was drawn were “constructed around something that was missing”: Black Panthers and Palestinians both erected shadow governments over lands they didn’t rule. However generous his support, they were actors in his fantasies of rejection and defiance. “If they ever win,” he said of American antiwar activists, “I’ll turn against them.” What White calls Genet’s “abiding belief in the hollowness of experience” was, at bottom, self-portraiture.
So were novels like “Our Lady of the Flowers,” spun out of masturbatory prison fantasies. Genet was a liberating influence in theater and fiction–including the novels of America’s Beats, and of Edmund White himself. White’s fits of poststructuralist jargon won’t persuade skeptics of Genet’s literary merit: he calls the memoir “Prisoner of Love” “a deconstructed, decentered text-polyvalent, polyvocal, freed of temporal and logical restraints,” i.e., a hodgepodge. But Genet no longer needs defenders. He needed a diligent chronicler; as usual, he lucked out.
