Word: genetic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SAINT GENET, by Jean-Paul Sartre. The eminent existentialist argues that Jean Genet, thief, pederast, poet, pornographer, playwright (The Blacks), is a walking allegory of modern...
...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...
Abel brings in sexual detail when it is necessary, amusing, or relevant in discussing Genet. It often, but the sensation one has even during the most graphic descriptions of homosexuality is that Abel is involved in clean, thoughtful, important discussion. Mailer's subject (despite one very graphic seduction in Miss McCarthy's book) is intrinsically far less sexual than Abel's study of Genet. Mailer manages somehow to be at once less interesting and dirtier...