der of his life has consisted of a strange odyssey in and out of prisons in various countries. Associated almost exclusively with pimps, thieves, murderers, and criminals of every type, he seemingly never knew a form of society where people lived normal, decently moral lives, outwardly respectable if not always consistent with less obvious realities. After innumerable convictions and prison terms he was finally incarcerated for life in 1948 when a group of prominent writers including Sartre, Gide, Cocteau, Claudel, and others petitioned the president of France for his release. This petition was granted, but he has not written anything new since that time.

In 1942 Genêt was spending a long term in the prison of Fresnes in France when, as an outgrowth of his loneliness and solitude, he started writing and produced his first book, Notre-Dame des Fleurs, translated into English as The Gutter in the Sky. With no sustained plot, the book is almost a revery built around a group of young men who lived in a small attic apartment in Paris. They gave each other ironic and pseudopoetic nicknames which fact accounts for the title, Our Lady of the Flowers, one of the youths. The leading character is "Divine" whose life story forms the only thread of continuity in the book which closes with his death from tuberculosis at the advanced age of forty, a most unusual event since violence and the guillotine were the usual occasiones of demise at their level of society. And among them maturity covered the years fourteen to twenty, old age at thirty, and decreptitude occurred at forty. Membership in the group was conditioned only upon youth and physical attractiveness. The apartment was furnished wholly from the booty of their thievery in department stores, parked cars, and other

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accessible places and the occupation of each was shoplifting, burglary, picking of pockets, fagging, and occasionally murder for gain. This last, finally landing Notre-Dame des Fleurs under the guillotine. Rare attendance at the moving pictures and mass in a neighboring church offered some aesthetic satisfaction. The most striking fact about the group was that all were homosexuals and centered their lives around their romantic attachments, the most powerful dominating force in their lives and the source of the only semblance of ethics which they seemed to be aware of. Each one owed a measure of loyalty to his companion for the time being and emotional involvements had a degree of permanance which one would not have expected, associations being recalled with feeling sometimes after long periods of separation. Genêt's revery recalls the episodes and characters alternately with his own immediate experience in order to people his loneliness and physical frustration with beings whose imagined presence gave him a measure of satisfaction. His literary style is poetical and even mystical, the words gushing forth with the impetuousness of a mountain. spring. One wonders how so limited. a range of content can fill so many pages with flowering prose. Of course much of the language is the argot of the streets of Paris, but vivid and picturesque in its very lack of any inhibition.

The Miracle of the Rose, a long novel, returns to Genêt's earlier experience in the reformatories when, as a growing boy, he was getting the only education he was ever to know. He mentions very casually the shops where the boys worked and an occasional trip as recreation, but, as in the former book, an extreme poverty of activity physical and mental, left the spiritual life to be filled in almost

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