The Burning Book: Genet and Cocteau

And yet once again the phoenix was reborn, this time in the guise of a political activist. Whereas most writers who emerge from obscure origins are quick to disown them, Genet became the apostle of the wretched of the earth. From the 1970s until his death in 1986, he defended the rights of prisoners and immigrant workers, but he was especially drawn to the causes of two homeless nations, the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. Except for occasional articles and interviews he maintained a resolute silence, which made the appearance one month after his death of a massive volume of “souvenirs” all the more startling. Prisoner of Love remains, moreover, Genet’s final act of transcendence, since in it he eschews the “fine writing” and self-dramatization of his novels as well as the teasing paradoxes and complex rhetoric of his plays. He adopts a new, ruminative tone of quiet sincerity. He also evinces a new interest in the world around him—in history, architecture, politics, even in women, whom he had avoided in his fiction.

The legend of Genet, which he was at some pains to construct, is of a golden thug, an outcast who had been a thief, prostitute, and vagabond. But a more detailed view of his life reveals that he was widely read and deeply cultured. He tended a bookstall by the Seine. He immersed himself in the ancient Greek drama and longed to write a play worthy of being performed in the theater at Epidaurus. He was befriended by some of the leading minds of his day: the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault; the writers Jean Cocteau, Marcel Jouhandeau, Juan Goytisolo, and Alberto Moravia; the composers Igor Stravinsky and Pierre Boulez; the stage director Roger Blin; the painters Leonor Fini and Christian Bérard; the sculptor Alberto Giacometti; the political leaders Georges Pompidou and François Mitterrand.

Although he was a member of a generation in France marked by its chauvinism, he became increasingly estranged from his fatherland although he remained faithful to his mother tongue. He traveled everywhere in the United States, where he befriended not only the Panthers but also the Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and the movie star Jane Fonda. He knew Germany well and at one point planned to write a book about it. He could muddle along in German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and English. He developed friendships with several Arab writers, including the leading Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun. His last lover was Moroccan and Genet is buried in his town, Larache.

Genet never repeated himself, either as a writer or as a person. He wrote poetry, plays, essays, novels, art criticism, and many film scenarios. After he mastered each form he usually abandoned it. In his personal life he moved from mindless but handsome thugs toward men who were themselves creative. In each of his central relationships, no matter how transitory, he always gave of himself totally.

In constructing his own legend, Genet seemed to have had an uncanny sense of which elements in a biography get simplified by later chroniclers, which heightened, and which assimilated to more glamourous near-truths. Most people hold out for the facts, even when the facts are slightly confusing or negate a more attractive and coherent version of things. But Genet, like a movie star or like much earlier instant literary legends such as Byron, worked with the inevitable power of gossip to distort and cram a life into the sleekest narrative package. He made his foster parents into cruel monsters and his status in the village as a despised orphan unique. Later he magnified his crimes and his betrayals. In emphasizing his suffering he was in part locating an objective correlative to his inner torments, which were exacerbated by his sense that he was a silent genius—undereducated, friendless, and poor. Surely no sting is sharper than the pain of unfulfilled and unrecognized genius, that most powerful drive which longs to realize itself and to win fame. Genet had already decided to be a writer at the age of sixteen, or so he later claimed. His reading and his efforts to establish contact with literary Paris prove that he was steadily nurturing his vocation. But he was still years away from finding the voice and the form that would match his vision. Like Proust before him, he was preparing himself for his vocation by wide reading. Unlike Proust, who enjoyed all the advantages, Genet was stuck in a provincial town and knew no one.

Genet excludes from his legend all trace of his earlier literary or intellectual activities and ambitions. He never mentions his schooling, his reading, or his literary correspondence in The Thief’s Journal. This exclusion serves to highlight a much more exotic picture of the young vagabond, prostitute, and criminal, of course; even the far more rarefied autobiographical narrator of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is always about to begin writing and neglects to mention the books Proust had in fact already written, such as Pleasures and Days, Contre Sainte-Beuve, the translations of Ruskin, and the aborted novel Jean Santeuil. Both Genet and Proust eliminate the overly technical details about the professional formation of a writer, which hold little interest for the general reader. And by suppressing references to their earlier literary achievements they emphasize the brilliance of their mature works, which seem to emerge from a complete vacuum. In Genet’s case, his particular problem is to establish his own abjectness, his credentials as an orphan, Borstal boy, beggar, prostitute, and petty thief—an identity which gives him permission to speak for the others but does not draw attention to his talent, which will soon magically separate him from the tribe of suffering. As he puts it: “Talent is courtesy toward matter; it consists in giving song to that which was dumb. My talent will be the love I bear to what makes up the world of prisoners and penal colonies. Not that I want to transform them or bring them around to your kind of life, or that I grant them indulgence or pity: I recognize in thieves, traitors, and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty—an engraved beauty—which I deny you.”

In April 1942, while tending a bookstall beside the Seine, Genet met two young men who would eventually introduce him to Jean Cocteau, an encounter that would prove decisive in his professional life. The young go-betweens were Jean Turlais and Ronald Laudenbach.

There are several versions of the event. Laudenbach, a right-wing editor of La Table ronde, wrote some years later:

In that same year, while imprisoned at Fresnes for theft, Genet had published at his own expense a thin booklet containing his poem “The Man Condemned to Death,” a work dedicated “to the memory of Maurice Pilorge, a twenty-year-old murderer” who, Genet writes, was executed on 17 March 1939 at Saint-Brieuc (in fact it was on 4 March at Rennes, and Pilorge was twenty-five). The book was thirteen pages long, unbound and unpaginated, and printed on stiff brown paper; it bore a pink or white cover.

No one knows who published the poem. According to Marc Barbezat, Genet had confided the task to a fellow prisoner, a typographer by trade who had been sentenced for forging food-rationing coupons. The typographer left prison before Genet and printed up the hundred or so pamphlets that he had paid for. Some of the covers were white but most were pink. The dedication to “Maurice Pilorge, murderer,” contains a mistake in spelling (“assasin”) retained by the printer. The paper was of differing quality—pilfered from stocks reserved for the use of the German administration, or so the story goes. In any event, the booklet gives neither the location nor the date of its publication, but it is signed “Fresnes, September 1942.” Genet did not put the book on sale but gave copies to friends or circulated them among acquaintances. Perhaps he sold a few at quayside bookstalls along the Seine. Certainly he seems to have needed to see something of his own in print. Up until twenty-eight one is young; at thirty-two one is too old to show poems in manuscript.

Later in his career Genet did not like to admit that he had had to pay to have his first poem published. In the 1960s he told an interviewer that Cocteau had paid the printer. The reason behind this face-saving lie is suggested by an entry in François Sentein’s journal for 16 January 1943: “For some time now in the bars of the Quarter people have been passing Genet’s poems around, and, since this poetry is making its rounds as what is dismissively referred to as ‘published at the author’s expense, a very common occurrence around here, it is no longer able to astonish them. Word is that it is not exceptional.” Sentein concludes that those who scorn Genet now “will write theses on Genet with the same assurance that they now write them on Verlaine.”

Even if “The Man Condemned to Death” is sometimes clumsy, it is for the most part musical and technically sophisticated. Its tone owes much to Cocteau, but Genet is unique in his ambition to make unapologetic homosexual desire and criminal glamour the subject of a long lyrical poem. The pederasty of the poem—the love between brawny men and golden youths—is less an erotic trope than a way of linking the denizens of two of Genet’s favorite erotic sites, Mettray and the penitentiary or penal colony. Equally original is Genet’s introduction of prison and pornographic argot into a traditional blend of alexandrines, rhyme, and an otherwise elevated poetic diction. These subjects and this style, however, were far more successfully handled in the novel Genet was writing at the same time, Our Lady of the Flowers.

Cocteau became the most important reader of Genet’s work. The entry in his wartime journal for 6 February 1943 reads: “Sometimes a miracle happens. For example Jean Genet’s ‘The Man Condemned to Death’ I think only four copies of it exist. He’s torn up the rest. This long poem is splendid. Jean Genet is coming out of Fresnes. (The booklet is dated from the prison, ‘Fresnes. September 1942.) An erotic poem to the glory of Maurice Pilorge, a twenty-year-old murderer executed on 12 March 1939 at Saint-Brieuc. Genet’s eroticism is never shocking. His obscenity is never obscene. A great, magnificent sweep dominates the whole thing. The prose at the end is short, insolent, haughty. Perfect style.”

Cocteau was able to appreciate the poem even after he had been besieged by other unknown young poets all day long. In his journal he noted, “This morning, it was the parade of young poets. They were in all the rooms. Some wanted to read poems, others brought plays. Still others were organizing theater troupes. I tell myself that when we were their age we found the door closed and I leave the door open and I force myself to help them the most I can. (And the telephone that never stops ringing!)” Cocteau prided himself on always being ahead of his time, which was one reason (aside from his natural generosity) that he was so open to the young. He was quick to recognize the genius of Picasso, Diaghilev, Proust, Raymond Radiguet, and Chanel, and was one of the earliest serious French artists to explore the new media of photography and cinema.

A sleek figure cutting through one of the most exciting periods of art, a stylish egotist with a surreal imagination, Cocteau fascinated the geniuses of his age. Like Oscar Wilde, whom he admired, Jean Cocteau put his talent into his work, his genius into his life. He was the epitome of style, starting with his lean, birdlike appearance—or was it marine? Proust compared him to a seahorse. His clothes were original; he had the sleeves of his sports jackets cut so that he could roll them back to show off his beautiful long hands, so often photographed. He rode to the First World War in a Mercedes-Benz, wearing an ambulance corps uniform designed by Paul Poiret. He had his first face-lift (“skin cleaning,” he called it) in 1935, when he was forty-six. Years later, when he was admitted to the august Académie Française, Lanvin created his academic uniform and he carried two swords, one by Picasso, the other by himself, its hilt a profile of Orpheus with his lyre, worked in ivory, rubies, and gold by Cartier.

Cocteau was once dismissed as the “grand couturier des lettres françaises.” At his worst he could seem turbulently frivolous, with his scandalous opening nights, his pipe-cleaner sculpture, his addiction and his book about it (Opium), his sexual adventures among sailors in Toulon and his book about them (Le Livre blanc), his brief return to Catholicism and his book about that (Lettre à Jacques Maritain). He once proudly proclaimed that he had turned his very body into a fountain pen, and surely never was a life so fully (if sometimes falsely) documented by the subject himself. He is the happy egotist.

And yet, if Cocteau was everything that is condemned as “Parisian” (merely fashionable, enslaved to fads, facile, a chatterbox), he was also everything that is praised as “Parisian” (sublimely stylish, alert and generous to what is new, fertile, expressive). He himself was well aware of the difference between fashion and art; he once remarked, “Fashion must be beautiful first and ugly afterwards. Art must be ugly first, then beautiful afterwards.” No observation could better account for why even the most glamourous clothes of the past must be updated for period films if they are to appear attractive to us now; or, conversely, why Cubist paintings, once regarded as shocking, barbaric, ridiculous, now look classic, composed, cerebral.

If Cocteau commanded a strong, distinctive personal style, it never stopped him from observing the people around him. He had a gift for friendship matched by an eye for the telling detail. When Cocteau visited the deathbed of Marcel Proust, he saw the immense stack of copybooks beside Proust: “That pile of paper, on his left side, went on living like the watch on a dead soldier’s wrist.”

Critics make distinctions, insist that high art must not mix with the profane, but genius sees itself reflected in any glittering surface. Cocteau wrote a cabaret act for Edith Piaf and song lyrics for Marianne Oswald. If he worked so well with them, it was because he, too, was a performer. His conversation was nonstop, silvery, sympathetic to the listener, surprising. He thrived on challenges: “Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write a play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second, and in the last would fall backwards down a flight of stairs.” The result was The Eagle Has Two Heads, a romantic melodrama that was made into a successful film. As Auden wrote, “One has the impression that half his work has been done … at the request of his friends.”

At its best, style becomes moral courage, tempered to a bladelike strength and resilience. Because he possessed moral style, Cocteau was able to live on after the deaths of friends, though he was nearly destroyed by Radiguet’s. With heroic gaiety, Cocteau declared: “I have lost my seven best friends. Which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without my realizing it. He lent me a friendship, took it from me, sent me another….Don’t for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels.”

Entropy is the world’s natural direction, its slow collapse, its physical and spiritual unwinding. The function of genius is to contradict for a moment this inevitable sinking, to take pains amidst the universal carelessness. Cocteau’s ceaseless talk, productivity, stylishness become an interval of lucid excitement between eternal slumbers. He remained faithful to Diaghilev’s command, which he had heard when he was young: “Astonish me!”

The meeting with Cocteau would leave a lasting mark on Genet—practically, because Cocteau would launch his public career, but spiritually as well, since it would be Cocteau’s example that Genet would follow and adapt, then finally reject. Genet had already written Our Lady of the Flowers and was a fully formed literary personality, but he still took his cue from Cocteau for the next few years. Cocteau had written an open letter to Jacques Maritain; soon Genet would write similar “letters” to Leonor Fini, the painter, and Jean-Jacques Pauvert, the publisher. Cocteau would write a study of El Greco, Le Mythe du Greco; Genet would write his Studio of Alberto Giacometti (L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti). Cocteau would write and direct a film Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la bête), in 1945; in 1950 Genet would write and direct his A Song of Love (Un Chant d’amour), part of which would be shot in the woods near the Maison du Bailli in Milly-la-Forêt, a house Cocteau had bought in 1947. Cocteau’s play The Infernal Machine (La Machine infernale) had been staged in 1932 with sets by Christian Bérard and directed by Louis Jouvet; the same team would stage Genet’s The Maids in 1947. Cocteau celebrated a Texas-born transvestite named Barbette in an essay he wrote in the 1930s that was a veiled ars poetica for the writer; Genet would write a similar text, The High-Wire Artist (Le Funambule). Cocteau would create a ballet, The Young Man and Death (Le Jeune Homme et la mort), in 1946; two years later Genet’s ballet ’Adame Miroir would be staged and it, like Cocteau’s ballet, would confront a young man with another dancer representing Death.

If Genet had a large conception of his own talent—one that allowed him to write poems, novels, plays, films, essays, and art criticism—he grew to that understanding through Cocteau’s expansive example. Cocteau’s prose, so limpid and witty, had no effect on Genet’s more wrought (and original) style, although the younger writer definitely patterned aspects of his poetry after Cocteau’s. Genet, after an initial fascination, came to abhor Cocteau’s self-promotion and his ubiquity at Paris events, just as he detested Cocteau’s flirtation with the “industrial cinema.” Cocteau was primarily a personality, a sensibility, a presence. Conversely, all of Genet’s works except his poems are of the highest quality, although every one is marred by occasionally turgid sentences and sometimes an almost Elizabethan penchant for rhetorical overkill. Unlike Cocteau, Genet gave only a handful of interviews during his long life; he abhorred fame and preferred to blend in with the crowd rather than to grab the spotlight. Cocteau remained personally elegant to the end, an aging cockatoo, whereas Genet devolved into a molting bantam rooster. Cocteau avoided politics, whereas Genet devoted the last twenty years of his life to extreme left-wing causes.

The first meeting between Genet and Cocteau occurred on 14 February 1943. As Laudenbach recalled it, Genet was “well dressed, he had on gloves of a perfect grey.” Although Cocteau praised Genet, the younger man remained wary (“I thought he was a faker,” he later told Paul Morihien, who was to become Genet’s editor at Cocteau’s suggestion). Cocteau wrote in his journal:

In return for the drawing Genet inscribed a copy of “The Man Condemned to Death”: “The copy that you have is really lousy. I see this printed on a prettier paper. I beg you to accept it as I’ve accepted the drawing. At the end I’ve written ‘The Boxer Asleep? It’s not great but there you are. I’ve done what I could. Your friend, Jean Genet.”

Typical of Genet at this period is his arrogant humility (his stated but implausible fear of the publicity that Cocteau enjoyed and courted) and an edginess that scarcely conceals his aggressiveness (“I beg you to accept it as I’ve accepted the drawing” would not reassure anyone less egotistical than Cocteau). A faint trace of hostility surges forth in the arrogant attack on Jean Giraudoux, the suave sixty-one-year-old playwright, professional diplomat, and elegant man about town, friend of André Gide and Paul Claudel, author of such “poetic” but conventional works as Amphitryon 38, The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, Ondine, and The Madwoman of Chaillot.

Why did Genet think Cocteau was mocking him? Cocteau had such exquisite manners, was so uniformly and unfailingly generous with everyone, and represented so dazzlingly an older, Proustian generation of upper-middle-class refinement that no wonder Genet doubted his sincerity. Paradoxically, this exquisiteness was linked to a gift for instant intimacy; Cocteau never said vous (the formal form of “you”) to anyone he liked and called everyone, from his friends to taxi drivers, “my darling” (“mon chéri”).

The poem that Genet read to Cocteau has not been identified, but it might have been verses that were later incorporated into a long poem called La Parade. Most of La Parade, however, seems to be about Lucien-Guy Noppé, whom Genet met in prison later in 1943 and who was to play a large role in the genesis of his second novel, Miracle of the Rose. Genet’s first biographer, Jean-Bernard Moraly, thinks that the following lines might be the ones Genet read to Cocteau, and Genet’s reference to “The Boxer Asleep” tends to confirm the hypothesis:

The next day Genet arrived at Cocteau’s apartment with the manuscript of Our Lady of the Flowers. A portrait painter who would become well known in the 1950s, Edouard MacAvoy, happened to be present:

Almost instantly Cocteau, as though recognizing he might indeed have been wrong about the book, decided he wanted to read it in its entirety. He sent Jean Turlais to fetch the manuscript and to soothe Genet’s hurt feelings. Could it be Cocteau was jealous? He had never wanted to write about homosexuality (except in the heavily disguised and anonymous Le Livre blanc) because he didn’t want to offend his mother. She had just died after three years of mental wandering. Now that he was completely free to write an honest novel about homosexuality, Genet had beaten him to it. The day after his mother’s death he had dinner with a large fashionable and vapid group which so irritated him he had decided “to stick with people who belonged to my field of work. Whether they understand my work or not doesn’t matter.”

On the same evening of the day when he had heard Genet read, Cocteau wrote in his journal:

Paul Morihien, then Cocteau’s secretary, recalled that Cocteau spent a sleepless night reading Our Lady of the Flowers; it infuriated him but he recognized it as a masterpiece. “He was afraid of his enthusiasm for it, but his enthusiasm never dipped.”

Six days after receiving the full manuscript Cocteau wrote in his journal:

A Freudian might remark that Cocteau’s natural envy, so thoroughly repressed and sublimated into generosity, comes out unconsciously in his next free association, in which he invokes, for no good reason, the story of Goethe’s destructive influence on Kleist. Whereas Cocteau (the Goethe in this example because twenty-one years older and much more famous) does everything to aid his Kleist (Genet), in reality, Goethe rewrote a play by Heinrich von Kleist (twenty-eight years younger than he), thereby destroying it, and threw another of Kleist’s texts into the fire, an assault that may have precipitated Kleist’s suicide. Cocteau, moreover, instantly absolves Goethe by calling him heroic and Olympian, as though above all ordinary human morality.

In the next paragraph he writes, “Last night at dinner I spoke to Valéry about Genet and stupidly I asked him for advice through his layers of senility. ‘Burn it,’ he said. An astonishing remark. Valéry is an idiot. Is that what intelligence is?” Cocteau continues with a full paragraph attacking Valéry, who had had the audacity to give voice to Cocteau’s buried hostility—a hostility not just buried but smothered under floral tributes. As Roger Lannes (who had been present at the same dinner, along with Professor Henri Mondor, Mallarmé’s biographer), wrote in his journal: “Cocteau sickens his listeners completely with his praise for Jean Genet’s genius and tries to draw Mondor’s bibliophilia into his nets.”

Cocteau ends his inner struggles on an ambiguous note: “This book has fallen into my hands because it was meant to. To burn it would be too simple. It burns me. And if I burned it, it would burn me all the more. . . .” “I remain with my first decision. It’s miraculous.”

After having overcome these destructive temptations, Cocteau acted with his usual generosity. He lent the manuscript to the Surrealist poets Paul Eluard and Robert Desnos, to Colette, to Jean Paulhan (who had directed the leading literary magazine, Nouvelle Revue française, until 1940), to the homosexual diarist and novelist Marcel Jouhandeau.

Cocteau wanted Our Lady of the Flowers to be published even though he knew it would have to be sold covertly, and asked François Sentein to correct the manuscript, which had been badly typed by an employee of Roland Laudenbach’s father. Genet, too, was eager for Sentein to work on the manuscript. Cocteau also asked his own assistant, Paul Morihien, to become the book’s publisher and to take on all Genet’s future projects.

Thus Genet signed, on 1 March 1943, his first contract as a writer. The handwritten but notarized agreement gave Morihien the exclusive right to publish the poem “The Man Condemned to Death” (at this point publication of no further long poems was envisaged, perhaps because they had not yet been written or at least finished). The next items are three novels: Our Lady of the Flowers (the hyphens in its French title, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, would later be dropped in some editions), for which he would receive thirty thousand francs, and then two further titles, Children of Unhappiness (Les Enfants du malheur, which was given as a “provisional title”) and—remarkably, for this early date—what would be Genet’s fifth and last novel, The Thief’s Journal (Le Journal du voleur). This “provisional title” was later modified to Journal d’un voleur (A Thief’s Journal).

The third category covered by the contract was the publication of five plays. The first is Castilian Day (Journée castillane), mentioned in the first version of Miracle of the Rose as a finished text, although it has never been seen and no one seems to have read it. Is it possible that it is a foreglimpse of The Balcony, which was originally called Spain and was meant to be a symbolic version of the Spanish Civil War? A second play is Perseus (Persée, also lost). A third is an early version of Deathwatch (Haute Surveillance), called Pour la Belle. (This expression—literally, “For the Beautiful”—in argot refers to escapes from prison, although it may have had a double sense here, as a reference to the beautiful woman, Green Eyes’s girlfriend, to whom a fellow prisoner named Lefranc addresses a letter.) Deathwatch was not published until 1947 and was not staged until 1949, but in 1942 François Sentein visited Genet, who gave him the just-printed “The Man Condemned to Death” and “the play in question—which would become Deathwatch—so that I’d take it to Jean Marais, whose face, he told me, he’d envisioned whenever the hero spoke.” Another play was The Nude Warriors (Les Guerriers nus), a film scenario written in 1942.

Finally, the list mentions Heliogabalus, a play in which Genet hoped Jean Marais would star. In three acts with a large cast, it existed only in manuscript for years. Genet showed it early in 1944 to Marc Barbezat, with another play (which has also disappeared) called Don Juan. This, too, existed only in manuscript. As late as 4 November 1955, a newspaper reported that Genet was in trouble for offering the text of Heliogabalus to several different publishers. Paul Morihien remembers having sold it to a dealer in autograph manuscripts sometime in the 1950s, but since then all trace has been lost, although it is likely to emerge again.

By the middle of March 1943 François Sentein was working hard on Our Lady of the Flowers, preparing it for publication. Sentein was essentially a copy editor, correcting minor mistakes in grammar, spelling, and punctuation, including infelicities that are more shocking in French than similar deviations from standard usage would be in almost any other language. As Cocteau remarks in his journal: “Liver. General malaise. Naturally that spills over into work, the present, the future. Genet’s book doesn’t help things. It sparkles, somber and solitary, in the house. François Sentein shuts himself up in Jeannot’s [Jean Marais’s] room and revises it. The sentences are so odd, so long and the syntax so new that one wonders if something is a mistake in style or a choice. Every time I enter and look over Sentein’s shoulder I chance upon a marvelous sentence. The book exists. It’s a fact. What mustn’t be said is said in it. Is this unpublishable book perhaps proof of such upheavals in the future that it might be able then to shine forth and take its rightful place?” On 23 March Cocteau notes: “François Sentein has nearly finished punctuating Our Lady of the Flowers. Dined yesterday at Denoëls. I spoke to him about the book. He offered to publish it for me under the table. One hundred and fifty or two hundred copies.” Cocteau concludes: “Genet has always lived in prison. Thus he is free.”

Robert Denoël, after being demobilized as an officer in the Belgian army, had returned to Paris and the world of publishing. He was in constant contact with the Germans and after 1941 even worked with a German associate. He published, either under his own name or through another company he controlled, Les Nouvelles Editions Françaises, such anti-Semitic tracts as How to Recognize a Jew by Professor Montaudon and The Tribes of the Cinema and the Theater by Lucien Rebatet, one of the leading anti-Semites in France. On the other hand, Denoël also published Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, both communists (she was also Jewish). After the war Denoël was arrested and his stock of books was seized. He managed to give his supply of Our Lady of the Flowers back to Morihien, who knew how to sell them. Denoël was released temporarily, then mysteriously shot in December 1945, just before his trial as a collaborator was to begin.

Although Cocteau referred to himself without thinking as the person who bought and sold Genet’s books, legally the publisher was Paul Morihien. Morihien was a water-polo player during the war in Paris, and in 1940 or 1941 he had become Jean Marais’s lover. Cocteau, who was in his mid-fifties, “took the couple”—that is, he incorporated Morihien, who would normally have been considered his rival, into his household. Morihien lived in Jean Marais's room in the Palais-Royal apartment. Since Marais was often out of Paris, touring in a play or shooting a film, he kept Cocteau company and, as Cocteau’s diary shows, frequently went to social events with him. At first he knew nothing about paintings or books, but, since he was avid to be educated, little by little he began to pick up an extensive knowledge about art from his daily contact with Cocteau.

Paul Morihien recalls that Genet liked him because he felt he looked like Jean Decarnin. Like other people who knew Genet at the time, he remembers that Genet was very sure of himself, especially of the value of his work, but that he spoke slowly, with difficulty, although always in correct French. “Genet spoke argot badly,” Morihien remarked. “He was not a true Parisian.” He would dress badly, usually in an old pullover and shoes that were too big. He thought he would end up in prison with a life sentence, but this prospect did not appear to upset him. He was always serene, completely natural, obsessed with his own work. He was grateful to Morihien but not particularly intimate with him; they never exchanged confidences. Genet never asked for big sums of money but dribs and drabs here and there, always in cash (a pattern he would follow all his life). At the first refusal of money Genet started insulting Morihien; his sense of friendship was very fluid.

The publication of Our Lady of the Flowers was not a straightforward business transaction. It awakened ambivalent and sometimes tumultuous feelings in Genet. By May 1943 Genet was no longer entirely acquiescent to Cocteau’s publishing plans. Although Denoël had never intended to issue Our Lady of the Flowers under his own imprint, he was still fearful of being compromised and now decided to bring Genet’s book out without even the author’s name. Genet was furious (and wounded) and forbade publication altogether. Denoël shouted that he would lose twenty-five thousand francs, but Genet was obstinate. As Cocteau confided to his journal, “Genet, sick with pride, believes he’s revolting against literature, which he despises. He is revolting against everyone’s attempts to help him.” Whereas Cocteau was willing to compromise (with the Nazis, with the demands of the commercial theater or cinema or according to the expectations of fashionable Paris), Genet announced he was against all compromises. “In short,” Cocteau wrote,

His ambivalence was most likely just a case of jitters. For Genet publication was not a career move but the redemption of his whole life. Until now he had accomplished nothing; he had no friends, no money, no power. Given how much the French revere writers, becoming a respected author could change his status permanently and, practically, afford him prestige and protection. As he said, he wrote to get out of prison and once he was free he stopped. In 1943 he was on the verge of being discovered and, as a consequence, his attitude toward his novels shifted wildly. He was capable of saying of Our Lady of the Flowers a few months later in a letter to Cocteau, “Do you think it would be good to publish that? I assure you that it doesn’t thrill me, when I picture it I see its faults and they’re sizable: overemphasis, childish lyricism, poor construction, easy psychologizing! Finally an unbearable tone, pretentious and showy. It should have been redone. I threw it together too quickly.”

In the spring of 1943 Genet was on the way to being recognized. Although Our Lady of the Flowers was not distributed properly until 1944—because of wartime paper shortages—people were talking about him. Paris, especially artistic wartime Paris, was small and gossipy, and word of Cocteau’s newest genius spread fast. As early as 3 March 1943 Cocteau confided to his diary, “People are beginning to pronounce his name. The terrible speed with which a name circulates. And no one in the whole world knows even a single line by him.” And when Genet was next behind bars word spread quickly that he was once again in prison—a curious celebrity, considering Genet had published nothing but one long poem.

During that spring, Genet was free and was enjoying his new fame. He attended a rehearsal of Cocteau’s play Renaud and Armide, and told the author that the crowd milling around backstage was like the boys in the soup line at Mettray. He and Cocteau dined together, then walked through the silent, sepulchral city to Genet’s hotel room on the Left Bank in the Hôtel de Suède. There Genet read to Cocteau all night from a work in progress. Despite the multiple-book contract he had signed, Genet, even at this early point, was already announcing the end of his writing career. Cocteau remarks: “He seems decided on writing one or two books and then caring for the lepers. I told him: ‘We are the lepers. We are the ones who must be looked after.’”