Read the transcript – here
The full BBC Arena program can be viewed – here
Genet interviewed, three years earlier, en français, in 1982 – here
see also here
Today, on the anniversary of his death, we salute poète maudit, legendary “Saint”, gay hero – Jean Genet (1910-1986) – poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, political activist
Here’s Allen on Genet – on his “May Day Speech” (from 1970), (written and first published by City Lights in that year):
“May Day 1970 at Yale satisfied the most ancient traditions of Academy when school strike shut down Establishment social classes and 20,000-30,000 youths assembled with black men, church men, bohemian and professor elders to sit under grassy sky before a wooden platform raised under the portentous stone columns of New Haven’s imitation-classic Courthouse – What Blake would have made of that priestly facade! – to hear Jean Genet, most eminent prosateur of Europe and saintly thinker of France, most shy poet of twentieth century slipped criminally into forbidden America through Canada border, standing flanked by clownish tragic reality of revolution of consciousness and body in America – Yippie Saints Rubin Hoffman, peaceful Saint Dellinger, many musical and professorial politic thinkers, black philosopher street theorists and actionaries, and great Big Man leader of New Haven Panthers that day – deliver his historic psychopolitical Commencement Discourse to the Academy and Polis of America, to youthful lovers of all lands’ races, and especially to the tender terrified whites assembled under the eye of metal-armed masked robot national armies and gas-weaponed police – all of us black and white now scholars in Hell! on New Haven’s green – pronouncing the very terms of the desired merciful survival armistice and union between black and white races in America that might bring peace to the entire world.
M. Genet appeared short, round headed, white skull’d, pink faced with energetic cigar, drest in Amerindian style brown leather-thonged jacket, he spoke first into the microphone in French, explaining (as I remember, myself sitting far left of the iron-pole joint-footed platform accepting burning grass reefer stubs from varicolor-shirted youths thick bearded seated round, long haired and short naked-minded newborn scholars of police-state reality, apocalyptic biblical revolution for millennium our mortal lot -) his presence in American and introducing his text, which he explained would be read for him in English by Mr. Big Man (whose Name Genet pronounced happily Beeg Man) – And so after a page, Mr. Big Man bent to the microphone, and straining over the fresh English/American translation read Genet’s sentences in gentle and firm voice. Genet had not been advertised for that first day’s convocation; many newsmen had not yet arrived to the giant crowd nor were aware that Genet’s person and prose were fortunately and intelligently the first offering of the afternoon, and many inattentive folk on the green didn’t know that Big Man’s speech was Genet’s composition.
The exquisite common sense of Genet’s document on racism was immediately apparent – to those of us whose consciousness attended his classic language while we eyed the bannered mass multitude seated on ground, batteries of cameras TV’d in front circle, FBI window-telescopes in high floors of bank department edifices walled over New Haven Green – black flag and red, scroll’d cannabis leaf insignia and 50-starred stripes, helicopter passed roaring overhead – and the Panthers and their righteous cause and the grievous, mean, bitter murderous injustice dealt them by our Government was explained again clearly once for all and established irrevocably in conscience and consciousness in white terms unmistakable, and in language that commanded a new “delicacy of heart” as the next political dimension of white reality, confronted with age old bestiality and desensitization of heart that had shrouded white mind for 400 years of contemptible histrionics.
Genet’s prayer for himself, for ourselves, remarkably included this tender odd affirmation for all: “Personally, I place a certain trust in man’s nature, even the nature of the most limited man.”
Allen was honored to present “The complete text of this class discourse, a true commencement exercise marking the historic graduation of white mentality to a “delicacy of heart” hitherto forbidden in fear and greed by universities and press, church, foundation, unions and advertising freakdoms, and fumbling, conspiring, dangerous, trembling criminal police agents.”
Genet and Allen (and William Burroughs and Terry Southern) were, of course, famously commissioned by Esquire in 1968 to comment on the notorious Chicago Democratic Convention – see here
Genet’s piece, “The Members of the Assembly”, commissioned by editor, John Berendt,
(and so titled because he spends several sentences focusing on the crotches of Chicago’s police force!), a discursive piece, a typically discursive piece, was clearly a surprise for them. One wonders, in retrospect, what exactly did they expect?
Shortly before his departure from New York, Genet got into a bitter disagreement with the magazine’s senior editor, Harold Hayes. Although he had been commissioned to write two articles for the magazine, (at $1,900 a piece), Hayes balked and would only accept one of them. Genet refused to pose for the Esquire cover photograph unless he was compensated for both pieces. He got his remuneration, and the second piece, “A Salute to 100,000 Stars,”
a virulent excoriation and denunciation of American involvement in Vietnam, and of American culture in general, was subsequently published (courtesy of his friends Barney Rosset and Richard Seaver) later that year in the Evergreen Review.
William Burroughs recalls that Hayes calling Genet a thief and Genet pointedly replying, “Mais bien entendu, monsieur“(“but of course, sir”).
Genet’s activities in Chicago marked the beginning of one of a number of major transitions in his life.
Isabelle de Courtivron, in her perceptive review in the New York Times of Edmund White‘s 1993 monumental, and definitive, biography, notes a number of them:
“Jean Cocteau, in the early 40’s, was to inaugurate Genet’s public career just as, a few years later, (Jean Paul) Sartre would consecrate it…( By the end of the ’50’s) Genet had completed five novels, all the poetry he would write and several plays. His works were published under the prestigious Gallimard imprint. He had been pardoned by the president of France.
In 1949, nearing 40, he sank into a deep depression – “Canonized, pardoned, consecrated, assimilated, (he) was no longer society’s scourge. He had become its pet…Only in the mid-’50’s did Genet, who was capable of great regeneration, begin transforming himself from a novelist to a playwright; he changed his image from a dandy to a thug, ceased being a Cocteau fan and became an admirer of the ascetic (Alberto) Giacometti and turned from preoccupations with the self in his writing to obsession with the dispossessed of the world... This productive period also coincided with his love for a young circus acrobat, Abdallah Bentaga. Silence set in again in 1964, at the time of Abdallah’s suicide. In 1967 Genet himself attempted suicide. Genet’s third transformation came in 1968, under the guise of political activism..”
In 1997, Hadrien Laroche published (posthumously) Le dernier Genet (The Last Genet) dealing with the fruits of this “third transformation”
Poet Stan Persky‘s review of the 2010 English-language translation can be read here
In 2003 Stanford University Press published Albert Dichy‘s collection of texts and interviews, The Declared Enemy, also relating to this period. The publishers note:
“This posthumous work brings together articles, interviews, statements, prefaces, manifestos, and speeches dating from 1964 to 1985 (just before Genet’s death in 1986). These texts bear witness to the many political causes and groups with which Genet felt an affinity, including May ’68 and the treatment of immigrants in France, but especially the Black Panthers and the Palestinians.
Yes, America, cursed America, and its treatment of African-Americans (on-going)
and Genet’s long and abiding identification with the Palestinian people and their struggle (likewise on-going)
This is further recounted in Genet’s posthumously-published final book, a memoir, Un captif amoureux (Prisoner of Love) (1986)
The book is a memoir of his first-hand encounters both with the Panthers and with
the Palestinian fighters. Starting in 1970, it should be noted, Genet spent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Visiting Beirut in September 1982, he found himself in the midst of the Israeli invasion of the city. He was one of the first foreigners to enter Shatila refugee camp after the massacre of hundreds of its inhabitants
As Edmund White notes, “For a book about one of the most ideologically heated conflicts of modern times, Prisoner of Love is curiously cool and unpolemical.” Publishers Weekly described it as “part anti-Zionist tract, part memoir and philosophical discourse”, “an uninhibited cascade of images and associations is less a political document than a map of Genet’s mental landscape”
Prisoner of Love remains an important book, worth reading.
Patti Smith on Jean Genet – Holy Disobedience (her introduction to The Thief’s Journal)