Playboy Interview: Jean Genet

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 twenty-eight 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.

[Q] Playboy: After years of anonymity and alienation from society as a criminal, how does it feel to be both a success and a celebrity?

[A] Genet: If I am either, then I'm certainly an odd one.

[Q] Playboy: Odd or not, your success has been remarkable -- particularly in the United States, where The Balcony and The Blacks have become the biggest commercial hits in off-Broadway history. How do you feel about this reception?

[A] Genet: I can't get over it. I'm quite amazed. Perhaps the United states isn't what I imagined it to be. Anything can happen in America. Even a little humanity can appear there.

[Q] Playboy: Has this happy discovery inspired you to consider a visit?

[A] Genet: I have a visa to enter the United states, a visa that's good for four years, but I think the consul gave it to me by accident. I was refused the right to use it when it became know who -- and what -- I am.

[Q] Playboy: If you're referring to your self-advertised identity as a homosexual, traitor, thief and coward, it can hardly be said that you've made a secret of your character. As a matter of fact, you've been accused of turning this admission into a public boast for purposes of self-promotion. Do you think there may be some truth in the accusation?

[A] Genet: It's true that in my autobiographical writings -- bear in mind that they were written twenty years ago -- I've emphasized the qualities you've just mentioned, and I did so for reasons that were not always very pure; I mean that they were not always of a poetic nature. so there was, I suppose, an element of publicity. Without being consciously aware of the fact, I was building myself up, but nevertheless I chose dangerous ways of practicing this publicity; I mean ways that put me in danger. The act of revealing myself to be a homosexual, thief, traitor and coward put me in a situation that wasn't exactly safe, a situation that made it impossible for me to write works that society could easily digest. In short, by seeming to show off, I put myself at the very beginning in a situation of such a kind that I was immediately out of reach; I put myself beyond the pale.

[Q] Playboy: Did you set out deliberately to become a homosexual, traitor, thief and coward -- in the same way that you decided to publicize yourself as such?

[A] Genet: I didn't "set out to." I made no decision. If I began to steal, it was because I was hungry. Then I had to justify my act, I had to accept it. As for being homosexual, I can't tell you why I am. I know nothing about it. Does anyone know why one is a homosexual? Does anyone know how a man chooses a certain position in bed for making love? Homosexuality was, so to speak, thrust upon me, like the color of my eyes, the number of my feet. As a child, I was aware that I was attracted by boys. It's only after experiencing that attraction that I "decided," that I freely chose my homosexuality, in the Sartrian sense of the word "choose." To put it more simply: I had to put up with it, to come to terms with it, even though I knew that it was damned by society.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever been interested in women?

[A] Genet: Yes. four women have interested me: the Holy Virgin, Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette and Madame Curie.

[Q] Playboy: We mean sexually.

[A] Genet: No, never.

[Q] Playboy: Do you mind discussing this?

[A] Genet: No, I'm perfectly willing. I like the subject. I'm aware that homosexuality is looked upon favorably at the present time in pseudoartistic circles. But it's still reproved by the bourgeoisie. I personally owe a great deal to it. If you want to regard it as a curse, that's your, but I regard it as a blessing.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Genet: It made a writer of me and enabled me to understand human beings. I don't mean to say it was entirely that, but perhaps if I hadn't gone to bed with Algerians I might not have been in favor of the F.L.N. That's not so; I probably would have sided with them anyway. But perhaps it was homosexuality that made me realize Algerians are no different from other men.

[Q] Playboy: What role does homosexuality play in your life at the present time?

[A] Genet: I'd like to say something about its pedagogic aspect. I need hardly say I've been to bed with all the boys I've looked after for any length of time. But I haven't been concerned only with sex. I've tried to relive with them the adventure I lived alone -- of which the symbols are bastardy, betrayal, the rejection of society, and lastly writing; that is, the return to society, but by other means. Homosexuality puts the homosexual beyond the pale, and for that reason obliges him to challenge social values. If he decides to look after a young boy, he won't do it in a trivial way. He'll make him aware of the incoherence of both the reason and the emotion that are inherent in normal society. The femininity contained in homosexuality envelops the boy and perhaps makes for greater kindness. When the Ecumenical Council was meeting in Rome, I watched a television program from the Vatican. A few cardinals were presented. Two or three were sexless and insignificant. Those who liked women were dull and avid. Only one of them. who looked like a homosexual, seemed kind and intelligent.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that homosexuality is contributing to the well-publicized drift toward and asexual society?

[A] Genet: Even if virility were in a state of crisis, that wouldn't disturb me very much. Manliness is always a game. American actors play at being manly. I also think of Camus, who adopted manly poses. As I see it, manliness is a quality for protecting the female and not for deflowring her. But I'm obviously in a bad position to judge. In rejecting the usual pose, the man breaks his shell and can reveal a delicacy which otherwise would not be apparent. It may be that the emancipation of the modern woman obliges the man to give up old attitudes and find a new one more in keeping with the less submissive woman.

[Q] Playboy: In the sixteen years since you were pardoned from a life sentence for repeated burglaries and released from prison for the last time, have you gone straight -- or are you still a thief?

[A] Genet: Are you?

[Q] Playboy: We'd prefer to ask the questions, if we may.

[A] Genet: All right. I don't steal the same way the average person does. In any case, I don't steal the way I used to. I receive big royalties from my books and plays -- at least they seem big to me -- and the royalties are the result of my early thefts. I continue to steal, in the sense that I continue to be dishonest with regard to society, which pretends that I'm not.

[Q] Playboy: For your actual crimes you spent seven years behind bars. Did you consider yourself skillful at your trade?

[A] Genet: I wasn't unskillful. There's an element of hypocrisy in the operation of stealing.... But I'm bothered by your microphone. It interferes with my thinking. I see the reels moving, and I feel I ought to be courteous toward the tape that's unrolling silently, all by itself. But I was saying -- the act of stealing obliges you to hide. If you hide, you conceal part of your act, you can't avow it. It's even more dangerous to avow it to judges. You have to deny it to judges. You have to deny it by hiding it. When you hide what you do, you always do it ineptly. I mean that all one's abilities aren't used. There are necessarily some of them that are directed toward negating the act one undertakes.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any feeling of kinship with fellow criminals?

[A] Genet: No, none at all, for the very simple reason that if I did I'd be heading for morality, hence toward good. If, for example, there was loyalty between two or three criminals, it would mean the beginning of a moral convention, hence the beginning of good.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about crimes such as that of which Lee Harvey Oswald has been accused? Did you find him boring -- or subtle and sensitive?

[A] Genet: I have a feeling of fellowship with Oswald. Not that I was hostile to President Kennedy. I simply wasn't interested in him. But I feel that I'm with the lone individual who opposes such a highly organized society as American society or Western society or any society in the world that damns evil. I sympathize with him -- just as I do with a great artist who takes a stand against a whole society: neither more nor less. I'm with any line man. But even though I'm -- how shall I put it? -- morally with a man who is alone, men who are alone remain alone. Even though I may be with Oswald when he commits his crime -- if he did commit it -- he was alone. Even though I'm with Rembrandt when he paints his pictures, he, too, is alone.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you find, when you began to write in prison, that that solitude of creativity was preferable to the loneliness of your previous alienation from society as a thief?

[A] Genet: No, because what I was writing made me even lonelier.

[Q] Playboy: What was it, then, that made you begin to write?

[A] Genet: I don't know. I don't know what the deeper reasons were. The first time I became aware of the power of writing was when I sent a postcard to a German friend who was in America at the time. The side of the card on which I was to write was white and crinkly, somewhat like snow, and it was that surface which made me evoke snow and Christmas. Instead of writing some commonplace sentiment, I wrote about the quality of the paper. That was what got me started. This doesn't explain my motive, but it did give me my first taste of freedom.

[Q] Playboy: It was in prison that you wrote Our Lady of the Flowers, your first novel. How did the authorities feel about literary efforts by inmates? Did they supply you with writing materials?

[A] Genet: Certainly not. We were given paper with which to make paper bags. It was on that brown paper that I wrote the beginning of the book. I never thought it would be read. I thought I'd never get out of prison. I wrote sincerely, with fire and rage, and all the more freely because I was certain the book would never be read. One day we went from the Santé Prison to the Paris Law Court. When I got back to my cell, the manuscript was gone. I was called down to the warden's office and was punished: three days in solitary confinement, and bread and water for having used paper "that wasn't intended for literary masterpieces." I felt belittled by the warden's robbery. I ordered some notebooks at the canteen, got into bed, pulled the covers over my head and tried to remember, word for word, the fifty pages I had written. I think I succeeded.

[Q] Playboy: Although a few have hailed it as an erotic masterpiece, many critics have refused to concede that Our Lady of the Flowers is a literary achievement. Were you gratified that its publication was greeted by such a storm of praise and protest?

[A] Genet: Yes, but I'd have liked the publisher to bring the book out with a very innocent-looking cover and in a very small edition, about three or four hundred copies, and to have made sure that it fell into the hands of Catholic bankers and people like that.

[Q] Playboy: Are you as indifferent to acceptance by the literati as you seem to be to critical and public approval?

[A] Genet: I never tried to be part of French literature. To say nothing of the fact that French literature would hardly have welcomed me.

[Q] Playboy: Now that you've achieved international eminence as an author, however, haven't you become, at least, a sought-after guest at literary teas?

[A] Genet: Not at all! Society knows what it's doing. People don't invite me, because they sense very quickly that I'm not one of them. But the truth of the matter is that I don't like to go out.

[Q] Playboy: You say you're "not one of them." Do you mingle socially, then with ex-cellmates and criminal associates?

[A] Genet: Certainly not. Consider the situation. I receive royalties from all over the world. You come to interview me for Playboy. Whereas they're still in prison. How do you expect us to maintain relations? For them I'm simply a man who has betrayed. I had to betray theft, which is an individual action, in the interest of a more universal operation, namely poetry. I had to betray the thief that I was in order to become the poet that I hope I've become. But this "legality" hasn't made me more cheerful.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to feel that you are regarded as a pariah both by society and by the underworld. How do you feel about living in this state of general reprobation?

[A] Genet: I don't mind, but it's a matter of temperament. I like being an outcast just as, with all due respect, Lucifer liked being cast out by God. But it's out of pride, and that's not my good side. It's a bit stupid. It's a naïve romantic attitude. I oughtn't to stop there.

[Q] Playboy: There are those who say you don't stop there. Sartre, in fact, has quoted you as saying that you intend to "live evil to the very end." What did you mean by that?

[A] Genet: I meant living evil in such a way that you're not salvaged by the social forces that symbolize good. I don't mean to live evil until my own death, but to live it in such a way that I'll be led to take refuge, if ever I have to, only in evil -- never in good.

[Q] Playboy: Some critics have branded Sartre a blasphemer for dubbing you "Saint Genet" in his six-hundred-page appraisal of you and your work. How do you feel about this literary canonization?

[A] Genet: My detractors wouldn't protest against a Saint Camus. Why do they object to a Saint Genet? When I was a child, it was hard for me in my reveries -- unless there was an element of will, of determination -- to see myself as president of the republic or as general or anything else of that kind. I was an illegitimate child. I was outside the social order. What could I wish for, if not for a special destiny? If I wanted to make the fullest use of my freedom, my possibilities, my gifts -- I was not yet aware of my literary talent -- the only thing left for me was to want to be a saint, just that; in other words, a negation of man.

[Q] Playboy: You have written of "the eternal couple of the criminal and the saint." What is the connection?

[A] Genet: They both live in solitude. Don't you have the impression, if you examine the matter closely, that the greatest saints resemble criminals? There's no visible link between society and the saint. Saintliness is frightening.

[Q] Playboy: Several critics have taken you to task for not only viewing saintliness as you do, but for presuming even to use the word. How would you reply?

[A] Genet: My detractors shudder at my using any word, even a comma. François Mauriac once wrote an article about me in which he asked that I stop writing. Good Christians, and particularly my detractors, are proprietors of the word "saintliness" and won't allow me to use it.

[Q] Playboy: You once wrote that poetry is "the art of using excrement and making the reader eat it." Did you mean this definition to justify your celebrated penchant for socially unacceptable language in your books and plays?

[A] Genet: As for the so-called obscene words, the fact is that these words exist. If they exist, they have to be used. Otherwise, they shouldn't have been invented. If I didn't use them, these words would exist in a state of apathy. The role of an artist is to impart value to words. You referred to the definition I once gave of poetry. I would no longer define it in that way. If one wants to gain even a slight understanding of the world, one has to get rid of resentment. I still feel some resentment toward society, but less and less, and I hope that before long it'll all be gone. At bottom, I don't give a damn. But when I wrote those words I was in a state of resentment, and poetry consisted in transforming, by means of language, reputedly base matter into what was regarded as noble matter. The problem is now quite different. You -- that is, society -- no longer interest me as an enemy. Ten or fifteen years ago I was against you. At the present time I'm neither for nor against you. We both exist at the same time, and my problem is no longer to propose you, but to do something in which we're involved together, you and I like. I now think that if my books arouse readers sexually. In so far as my books are pornographic, I don't reject them. I simply say that I lacked grace.

[Q] Playboy: Erotically speaking, what do you think of the works of D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov?

[A] Genet: I've never read either of them.

[Q] Playboy: How about Henry Miller?

[A] Genet: I don't know much about Miller's work, but what I do know doesn't interest me. It's chatter. He's a man who never stops talking.

[Q] Playboy: How would you appraise sartre?

[A] Genet: Sartre repeats himself. He has a few major ideas and has exploited them in various forms. When I read him, I go faster than he. But I was surprised by his recent autobiography, in which he shows his will to free himself from the bourgeois world. In a world where everyone is trying to be a respectful prostitute, it's nice to meet someone who knows he's a bit whorish but doesn't want to be respectful. I like Sartre personally because he's amusing to be with and because he understands everything laughingly and without passing judgment. He doesn't accept everything about me, but he enjoys it when we don't agree. He's an extremely sensitive man.

[Q] Playboy: Were you pleased with his unique literary psychoanalysis of you?

[A] Genet: It filled me with a kind of disgust, because I saw myself stripped naked -- by someone other than myself. I strip myself in all my books, but at the same time I disguise myself with words, with attitudes, with certain choices, by means of a certain magic. I manage not to get too damaged. But I was stripped by Sartre unceremoniously. My first impulse was to burn the book; Sartre had given me the manuscript to read. I let him publish it because my chief concern has always been to be responsible for my acts. It took me some time to get over my reading of his book. I was almost unable to continue writing. I could have continued turning out a certain type of novel mechanically. I could have tried to write pornographic books mechanically. Sartre's book created a void which made for a kind of psychological deterioration.

[Q] Playboy: How long did you remain in this void?

[A] Genet: I remained in that awful state for six years, six years of the imbecility that's the basic stuff of life: opening a door, lighting a cigarette. There are only a few gleams in a man's life. All the rest is grayness. But this period of deterioration made for a meditation that led me finally to the theater.

[Q] Playboy: But weren't Deathwatch and The Maids written and produced before Sartre's book was published?

[A] Genet: That's right. But Sartre's book made for the exploitation of something that was already familiar.

[Q] Playboy: That familiar something, in the opinion of some reviewers, is the plight of those minority groups about whom your plays are written, and with whose alienation from society you identify personally as a homosexual and onetime thief. Are they right?

[A] Genet: I write plays in order to crystallize a theatrical, a dramatic emotion. I'm not concerned about whether, for example, The Blacks serves the Negroes. Besides. I don't think it does. I think that direct action, the fight against colonialism, does more for the Negroes than any play. I tried in these plays to give voice to something deeply buried, something that Negroes and other alienated people were unable to express. Speaking of The Maids, a critic once said that maids "don't talk like that." Well, they do -- but only to me, alone, at midnight. If anyone said to me that Negroes don't talk like that, I'd answer that if he put his ear against their heart, that's pretty much what he'd hear. You've got to be able to hear what's unformulated.

[Q] Playboy: Then your sympathy is with the downtrodden and underprivileged classes in your plays?

[A] Genet: It may be that I've written these plays against myself. It may be that I'm the Whites, the Employer, the Clergy, -- and that I'm trying to isolate the idiotic elements in those qualities.

[Q] Playboy: Your critics have accused you of attempting not merely to isolate but to exterminate these "Idiotic elements," as you call them; they assert that you advocate the violent overthrow of society's ruling classes and conventions. Are they exaggerating your intention?

[A] Genet: I certainly would like to free myself from conventional morality, the kind that has crystallized, that prevents development, that prevents life. But an artist is never completely destructive. The very concern with shaping a fine phrase, a harmonious sentence, presupposes an ethic -- that is, a relationship between the author and a possible reader. Every aesthetic contains an ethic. But I have the impression that your notion of me is based on work written twenty years ago. These days I'm not trying to give a disgusting or fascinating or acceptable image of myself. I'm simply hard at work.

[Q] Playboy: Writing?

[A] Genet: From time to time I work on my plays -- not every day, but in spurts. Soon, for example, I may do an opera with the great musician Pierre Boulez, who directed Alban Berg's admirable Wozzeck at the Paris Opera this winter. The rest of the time I live in a state of semi-imbecility, like anyone else.

[Q] Playboy: Do you continue writing because you want to, or has it become simply a way to make a living?

[A] Genet: I feel responsible for the time accorded me. I want to do something with it, and the best thing I can do with it is to write. It's not that I'm responsible to others. I'm not even responsible to myself. Perhaps I'm responsible to God, about Whom I can't speak, since I don't know much about Him.

[Q] Playboy: Then despite the fact that you've consecrated your life to "evil," you believe in God?

[A] Genet: I believe that I believe in Him. I don't much believe in the mythology of the catechism. But why do I feel I must account for the time I live by affirming what appears to me most precious? Nothing obliges me to do it; nothing visible forces me. Then why do I feel so strongly that I have to? In the past, the question was resolved by the act of writing. My childhood rebellion, my adolescent rebellion, was a revolt against my state of humiliation, an attack against my deepest faith -- but my faith in what?

[Q] Playboy: Some of your friends feel that you're still rebelling -- but now against the blandishments of your late success rather than the humiliation of your early deprivation. You tell us you have substantial royalties coming in from all over the world; yet you appear to be, and are said to be, nearly penniless. What do you do with all your income?

[A] Genet: That's none of your business.

[Q] Playboy: Well, here in this sparse room, apart from a few pieces of secondhand furniture, we see only seven books, an alarm clock, a valise, a suit and three shirts -- in addition to the clothes on your back. Is this all you own?

[A] Genet: Yes. Why should I have more? Mine is the poverty of the angels. I just don't give a damn about possessions and the like. When I go to London, my agent sometimes reserves a room for me at the Ritz. But what need have I for objects and luxury? I write, and that's enough.

[Q] Playboy: Toward what end, if any, are you directing your life?

[A] Genet: Toward oblivion. Most of our activities have the vagueness and vacantness of a tramp's existence. We very rarely make a conscious effort to transcend that state. I transcend it by writing.