Books: The Petty Demon

THE THIEF’S JOURNAL by Jean Genet. 268 pages. Grove. $6.

It was Jean-Paul Sartre who canonized Jean Genet. But it was Genet himself—sodomist, petty criminal, playwright (The Blacks)—who thought up the notion that purified evil could be a kind of sainthood. His self-nomination is announced and ritually celebrated in The Thief’s Journal, written in the ’40s, which is just now translated and published in the U.S. By his own lights, Genet is indeed a saint. But he is a watch-charm saint, a petty demon whose villainy is on so small a scale that its very earnestness is laughable. The crimes that this Narcissus drops like blossoms in the pool of his own image are no worse than sneak thievery and queer rolling.

The journal covers the years from 1932 to 1940 when Genet, a lazy young homosexual, ran with pimps, thieves and Foreign Legion deserters (Genet had been a legionnaire long enough to collect the enlistment money). It is a confession, but not the kind in which remorse is pretended. Genet’s self-revelation is mischievous, unrepentant, and not to be trusted. Genet strokes his central paradox—that total degradation can produce spiritual exaltation—as if it were a pet cat. Speaking of his beggar’s lice, he says: “Having become —as useful for the knowledge of our decline as jewels for the knowledge of what is called triumph, the lice were precious.”

This mechanical trick of pretending that dirt is desirable and that revulsion is attraction is repeated until it is tiresome. Then Genet smiles like an urchin trying to charm a cop and admits that describing vileness “with words that usually designate what is noble was perhaps childish and somewhat facile.” In such a way, being allowed to see that such honest admission of fraud is itself fraudulent, the reader is led through the shallows of Genet’s soul. “I keep no place in my heart where the feeling of my innocence might take shelter,” he writes at one point, seeming oddly innocent.

A reader who knows Genet as an author of power and glittering malice, as he appears provocatively in The Balcony and shatteringly in The Blacks, sees him here as a lesser and more engaging writer—a strangely amiable, seedy, not-to-be-trusted guide for a morning’s excursion through the cooler outer regions of hell.