Word: cocteau
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who ushered Genet's novels into print in 1946 in under-the-counter editions, Genet was a singing erection, a poet who cultivated his homosexuality in ways the fastidious Cocteau never permitted himself. Genet's work "disgusts me, repels me, astonishes me," Cocteau wrote. "It poses a thousand problems...
...keeps it bubbling is a melodic succession of wheezy parlor waltzes, barroom blues, moon-June pop and ersatz Kurt Weill. What gives it fizz is gallows humor, antiwar mockery, sweet sentiment and an inventiveness that more than honors the imperative laid down years ago by Sergei Diaghilev to Jean Cocteau: "Astonish...
...originality. His novels dealt with subjects most French readers of his day found seedy at best: drag queens, hustlers, thieves, sailors having sex with each another. But he wrote these stories in a highly ornamental prose which dazzled readers and made him a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and Alberto Giacommetti. As the usually modest Genet put it in a moment of pride, "There was the French language and then there...
...first part of the book interweaves Genet's early years with excerpts from his highly autobiographical novels, creating a rich fabric of the facts and the fiction they gave rise to. The biography tracks Genet to Paris, where he became Cocteau's literary find, his "golden thug," and later, Sartre's "pet queer." White imbues even the most frequently told stories with a novel charm. His recreation of the De Beauvoir-Sartre headquarters at the Cafe Deux Magots is sardonic and affectionate, and the deliciously lengthy and opinionated portrait of Cocteau could stand on its own as a study...
...point when Genet the little-known outlaw became Genet the national treasure (who then had trouble finding anything to write about). White places the beginning of this dry spell in 1949. That was the year the French president, in response to a letter written by Sartre and Cocteau and signed by a slew of intellectuals, issued Genet a pardon for a possible life sentence. The pardon represented an official endorsement by the French government, its reigning man of letters and its most famous philosopher; it was a terrible blow to Genet the outsider, one that kept him from writing seriously...