2024-04-09 03:15:40
Almost four decades after the death of the French poet, rioter and writer Jean Genet, two of his previously unknown works have appeared. The never-performed stage play Heliogabalus, long considered lost, and the screenplay from which the 1966 film Miss Teacher was based, have now been published in French by Gallimard.
As AFP writes, the drama in four acts Heliogabalus was written by Genet about the Roman emperor of the same name, who became a symbol of decadence and decay of morals for his contemporaries. The game tells the story of the last days of his life before he was murdered in 222 at the age of 19.
The poet and playwright worked on the text in 1942 in a prison in Fresnes, France, where he was sentenced for forging documents, homelessness, public outrage and theft of books. The barely thirty-year-old provocateur Genet, later sometimes referred to as the last cursed poet, worked on a play about the Roman emperor at the same time as his first work The Virgin Mary. He published this later, unlike Heliogabalus.
Cover of the French edition of Heliogabalus by Jean Genet. | Photo: Gallimard
After his release, Genet read the play to several friends and to the actor Jean Marais, to whom he offered the lead role, but who “wasn’t completely enthusiastic about it,” explains François Rouget, professor of literature at Canada’s Queen’s University at Kingston, in the foreword.
According to him, the poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who admired Genet, also saw the play, yet the poet could not find a publisher for Heliogabalus, so he left the manuscript with Cocteau’s secretary. She sold it in the 1950s, until decades later the Houghton Library of Harvard University acquired the manuscript. It was in her archives that Rouget discovered and prepared for publication a text that had never been staged until now.
On the edge of the law
The French playwright, novelist and poet Genet was born to a Parisian prostitute who abandoned him soon after birth. He never knew his father. He grew up in a shelter, gradually went through a correctional institution, treatment at a neuropsychiatry, prison and a disciplinary camp. Since he was a child, Genet moved on the fringes of society and the edge of the law.
Jean Genet could also defend murder. | Photo: Roger Parry / Gallimard
He was convicted for the first time at the age of fifteen. Before the Second World War, he wandered around Europe and made a living as a thief, beggar or homosexual prostitute. He joined the Foreign Legion, from which he deserted. In 1947, he was to be sentenced to life labor in the French colonies for a recidivism, he was saved only by an intercession addressed to the president by important writers led by Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote a study about him called Saint Genet, Comedian and Martyr.
It was after the war that Genet quickly gained recognition, first with plays and later with highly literary texts that frightened by their unclassibility and tempted social taboos, from violence to crime to homosexuality. As someone who was a product of an environment full of violence, he was able to defend, for example, murder. He was not subject to any currents or conventions, the ČTK agency wrote about him.
He defended himself against society, later he also got involved in politics. He supported the student revolt of 1968, protested against the war in Vietnam, supported the leftist Black Panther Party in the USA or the Palestinians. He gave one of the first literary testimonies about the massacre of Palestinian Arabs in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982. He was significantly influenced by Morocco, where he was also buried in the second half of the 1980s.
Jean Genet summarized part of his stormy life in the autobiographical book Diary of a Thief, which is permeated by provocative themes such as the life of thieves and murderers, brutal erotic scenes, but also tender love, lyrical turns or motifs of sadness, solitude and flowers.
His texts often became the subject of censorship, for example, his debut novel The Virgin Mary Květná was labeled as pornographic and withdrawn from sale almost ten years after its official publication. Later, his books and plays were published by Gallimard in the prestigious La Pléiade edition.
Together with Heliogabalus, the French publishing house has now also published Genet’s script for the film, which was made in 1966 by the British director Tony Richardson under the title Miss Teacher. Star Jeanne Moreau played the main role. The film received a lukewarm reception at the Cannes Film Festival.
Brno footprint
During his wanderings after desertion from the French army, Genet also reached pre-war Czechoslovakia. “Brno is a dark and damp city, eaten away by smoke from factories. When I arrived there, a fight was going on between gangs of young street singers,” he wrote in his diary.
The League for Human Rights provided care for him in the city for about five months. “At the League’s request, he gave French lessons here to Anne Bloch, a married German woman of Jewish origin. It was Genet’s only love for a woman, a platonic one,” French researcher Albert Dichy, who lectured on Genet in Prague, told the Idnes.cz server years ago. Genet’s letters to Bloch were later published as a book.
Partially based on Genet’s Diary of a Thief in 2016, a theatrical performance directed by Jan Nebeský was prepared by the Brno association Masopust, which later presented a collage of the author’s texts called Ženet. Several local scenes, including Prague’s Na zábradlí Theater or Brno’s National Theater staged Genet’s play The Maids, while his Balkon was performed in Plzeň and Querelle from Brest for a change in the Prague Comedy.
In addition to Genet’s texts themselves, Jean Genet’s Book of the Inmate, the author’s literary biography written by the Austrian Büchner Prize winner Josef Winkler, was also published in Czech in 2020. In 2002, the then edition of the Prague Writers’ Festival was dedicated to Genet.