BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

In view of the recent gushings about the writings of Jean Genet prompted by the Grove Press translation of Our Lady of the Flowers, the following essay on Jean Genet by Edmond Barnard from Der Kreis, though written in 1956, seemed more timely today than ever.

THE 'COMPLETE WORKS" OF JEAN GENET:

FOR PERSONS STRONGLY PERVERTED

Among the post-war authors who have treated of our sphere of life, Jean Genet has taken a particular place since his first book. From the time of its appearance, some years ago, he has awakened a lively echo even if somewhat confused in public opinion. In his "Complete Works" the background upon which his obscure characters almost exclusively pictured as homosexuals operate is clearly limited. It may well be that he intends by the plain phrase, "For highly inverted persons" on the one hand to classify in advance his unfavorable critics as imbeciles and on the other to gratify the self-love of his literary disciples and others in order to lend them a doubtful semblance of modern intellectuality. This tendency to stimulate the vanity of his readers was certainly a profitable idea. Equally profitable has proved to be the immoderate and literally dragged in by the hair of the head preface in which a philosopher as

one

Ed.

doubtful as J. P. Sartre has desired at any price to prove the right of the man of letters, Genet, to exist.

However in these pictures of a defective humanism, which reveal morbid symptoms whose origin has been carefully left in obscurity-and with reason, for this fact only permits the expression of the strange ideas of Genet-in these picture, I say. which shock and certainly are intended to shock by content as well as form, one perceives in this case a disgusting trace of real talent as a writer, which can be the only explanation for the tolerance of certain homosexual media. Thus a short' time ago a critic who had fallen into an ecstasy upon reading "Querelle de Brest" and who was transported. wrote: "The magnificent sound-bursts of Jean Genet", "Archangel of crime", "radiant beauty", "pure diamond", "Querelle is, as Orestes, a quintessence of humanity. . ."!

To those persons sensitive to these accents in the manner of Mimi-Pinson, the works of Genet certainly do not carry any deception. The expected pornographic sections embody an in-

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