Word: genet
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...take the Republic's dusty seat. The publication has no letter column -- a prerequisite to discussion. More important, the editors have not learned who their good and bad contributors are. So far they show no signs of learning. Lionel Abel, who has written a lucid critique of Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers in the current issue, is obviously a brilliant reviewer. Norman Mailer who reviews Mary McCarthy's The Group on the front page of the same issue is, on the other hand, a useless and horrid contributor...
...that Mailer's image is a direct steal from Robert Louis Stevenson, who said it much better. The point to be made is that with this the editors of The New York Review of books have chosen to introduce their fourth issue. Inside the same issue is the exquisite Genet review by Lionel Abel which exemplifies everything that the Review can do. One is not convinced that the editors have learned to distinguish between them...
Abel's critique of Our Lady of the Flowers, recently translated into English, is an extraordinary example of how to treat a highly sexual fragment of literature. "Genet's prose is almost always dressed up--often in drag," Abel says of the homosexual writer. "Sartre himself has called attention to the ornateness with which Genet in A Thief's Journal writes of Bulksen's behind: 'Son posterieur etait un reposoir.' ('His behind was an altar...
...other playwright can quite match Genet at holding the audience at bay, taut between open distaste and hypnotic fascination. Even so, Genet as artist is still much smaller in scale than Genet as existentialist hero. Much of his autobiographical writing is so sleazily scabrous that it loses even shock value. On the stage, his imagination sometimes runs to episodes so melodramatically contrived that they miss theatrical effectiveness, as when the revolutionary leader in The Balcony emasculates himself onstage...
...good or ill, Genet has been converted by Sartre into a walking allegory. If he was not born to it, or has yet fully to achieve it, he has had significance thrust upon...