Jean Genet in Conversation

Jean Genet was interviewed by Pierre Vicary for the Australian Broadcasting Commission early last year. This is a transcript of that interview. © JEAN GENET 1982

Pierre Vicary-Jean Genet, you are a very well-known writer: many have read you, many more know your name, and yet you remain a bit of an enigma, a bit of a mystery.

Jean Genet-I'd like to turn the question back to you. What do you think? Because after all, I'm not an enigma or mystery to myself, or if I am, I'm trying to discover myself. It's possible that I appear enigmatic to others, but what I'd be really interested in, is your interpretation of me.

I know your background, a writer who spent most of his early years in jail, who didn't have a family life, who became a writer; a man who one would expect, because of his background, to be fairly bitter.

No, I'm not bitter, but there is something about me which perhaps disconcerts people who know me only by name-and that's the fact that I lead a very solitary life. I have no contact with literary or intellectual circles; I live alone, and as a result, my life casts a sort of shadow around me, which in reality isn't a shadow at all, but appears as such and as a mystery to those who don't know me. In reality my life is very simple.

It's really because you're a solitary man, because you don't need to have a lot of people around you, that people might think about this mystery.

That's exactly right. I live a solitary life broken only a little by contact with my literary agent, at whose house we are recording this interview, by some publishing editors and by those people one is obliged to come into contact with in one's daily life; in the restaurant, buying airline tickets and things like that, where I am of course completely anonymous.

But obviously the many years you spent in jail conditioned that need to be alone?

You may well be right, but it would also be possible to argue the opposite. It's because I never had many people around me in the past that I might need many of them now. The truth, however, is that I really don't need them. But it can't be said that I lead so solitary and distant a life as all that, since I am accepting to be interviewed today.

But the fact that you're alone, surely that doesn't mean that you're not interested in what goes on around you. Do you go to the theatre, the cinema, read newspapers and books?

Never, never at all. The last books I looked at with interest were scientific general knowledge texts on the role of blacks in the universe. As you can see, it's far removed from literature.

You said you were a long way from the French intellectual tradition. Have you any contacts with it at all?

No. I hardly know it at all. I know of its existence, I know Sartre exists, I know many other writers exist, sometimes I know their names, rarely their work.

So you don't read and hardly know them, yet you are-however unwillingly-one of the finest of that tradition.

But I'm not so very sure I am well-known. You say so, probably out of politeness. Twenty or thirty years ago, I was impressed by what one might call the multiplication of my name in foreign language editions of my works. Take a look at that shelf over there, all my books. But nowadays I don't feel a thing. For the last twenty years or so I've been totally indifferent to the multiplication of my name.

But surely in all those books you've put out there were views . . . I know much of it was very personal, but there were views about life that were contained in those books. Don't you want people to read them and take something away from them?

To use a word like 'pleasant' to explain what I think is wrong: it's more than that, a sort of joy, bliss almost, sitting chatting with the few Arabs I know, Arabic-speaking people, sitting with old Moroccan Arabs who work as bootmakers for example; I stay close to them, I talk with them for hours: they say far more things, at least what they say strikes a chord in me, than what any French literary person could have to say. That's how I see it anyway.

How could I try to put it another way . . . During the 22nd Dynasty of the Egyptian Empire, the people had never heard of me or my views. They managed very well and then they died; it's been like that since and was so before. Mankind as a whole can get by very well without knowing what I think or wrote while I was in jail. It's not important.

Given that, why did you initially feel the need to write?

Because while I was in jail, I was bored. When one's in jail, stuck between four walls-six if you like, the four walls, ceiling and floor-what else is there to do but dream? So my first books, my only books in fact were dreams, just slightly better organised than the average dream. I dreamt five books on paper, if you like, while I was in jail. But now that I've been released and released you will tell me because of my books (and you're right), I no longer have the inspiration to write a book, so I don't.

You're saying that the writing you did, all of it, was almost purgative, almost to keep yourself from going mad in jail?

You are right to use the word 'purgative' because I used my writing in a more vulgar way; you could say that expressed literally, my books, I shat them.

And that's surely one of the incredible things about your books, that as a writer, perhaps because you didn't have the intellectual background, you were able to write what you were thinking, without all the fancy words . . .

There is an important reason why I was able to say what I wanted and it's a reason I could probably never find again-it was because I was absolutely certain that no one would ever read my books. As things turned out, they did; people read what I was thinking. But when I wrote them, in the knowledge that they'd never be read, or edited, and certainly not translated, I was faced with the extravagant freedom of being able to say exactly what I wanted; a freedom which I've lost now that I am free. Isn't that strange?

Only when you were in a position where you thought you'd never be read were you able to write something that people would want to read?

That's exactly right.

And that's why you don't want to write any more?

No, not for that reason. It's not because I don't want to write. When you say want, you bring into play the element of choice. The fact that I don't write any more isn't the result of a choice of wanting to write or not; I don't do it because I no longer have the need to write and also because I have nothing further to say. I've said all I had to say and after all, a man can't go on writing all his life. I have other things to do and that's what I'm doing.

You say you don't have anything more to say. What did you have to say when you were writing?

Putting it in a nutshell, nothing more than the agony of life, knowing the life of an insect trapped in a box, from which I was at last able to free myself, surviving in the meantime by inventing for myself a certain erotic paradise. If I wrote while I was in jail, it was-as you put it-purgative. What exactly did I have to say? Nothing, really, except to myself. What really happened was that while I was deprived of my freedom, I was able to write freely and now that I have my freedom, thanks of course to the freedom I made use of in jail to write, I am able to write on any topic, but am unable to write at all. Look at it another way. Thirty years ago, no one could say what I said, except me who was experiencing it. Now, anyone could say what I could say now. So what's the point of me saying it?

So the important thing was partly the timing of what you said, rather than necessarily the things themselves, because others have said them?

I would like you to remember one thing. Much of my time in jail has to be seen historically. I was in jail mainly during the German Occupation, not at all because I was involved in the Resistance, but because I was a burglar, even if a burglar during the Occupation. And times in jail were very tough; for example, instead of being given a loaf of bread a day to live on, we got a quarter loaf. We got one soup a day, but a very runny soup, and we never saw meat. I'm not trying to suggest that it was like a concentration camp-I never had to experience that-but I was somewhat in the position, all of us in the jail were, of being men who above all else hoped to survive. But at the same time there was a contradiction. I was free to write what I wanted, because I knew I would never get out of jail. At my final trial I had been sentenced to life imprisonment so officially I wasn't ever supposed to be released and I knew it, but yet there existed this hope, a hope so persistent and strong, which makes men want to get out. I had the hope that I would get out one day and, almost hidden in my subconscious, the hope that I would get out because of my writings.

You say that because you were in jail you obviously weren't in the Resistance. Do you think that if you had been, you'd have been politically involved?

No. Not at all. You have to understand that I had no reason to be concerned at the military fate of the European countries at war. It was none of my concern. I had been adopted as a ward of the state when I was only a few days old and then brought up by a family of French peasants who treated me with indifference, but an indifference really closer to contempt than anything else. Then I was locked up in a juvenile institution for peccadilloesstealing-and then I went to jail. I couldn't give a shit about France. Why would you have expected me, even in the most modest way, to fight the Germans? I didn't care which country won and yet for four years I experienced a certain joy in seeing, or at least believing, that the French-I'm not saying would be exterminated, that France would be destroyed, but that France would have to pay a very heavy price for having made me pay such a very heavy price. In a way I was avenged by Hitler!

Crudely put, you were enjoying the torture of your torturers?

That's right. But it wasn't as clear-cut as that. What I'm saying is that from the age of a few days' old until I was thirty, I hated that society, both French and German, which had imprisoned me; but at the same time I felt some love for my mother country. After all, I'd been influenced by my education and as a result my hatred of the French was a bit ambiguous. I felt a certain joy that the Germans had occupied all France and yet at the same time a certain shame. But the joy won out.

I can see the hate against France in a war situation, but I'd have expected you to have been a lot more bitter, generally, given what had happened to you.

But you are asking me the question forty years after the events which caused my anger. Look at it like this. If anyone has emerged victorious in the battle between French society and me, it's me.

And that pleases you?

It used to please me until about fifteen years ago, when they first performed Les Paravents (The Screens), a play about the Algerian war, at the state-owned Odeon Theatre. For the whole run of the play the French police had to protect both me and the company from so-called French nationalists who every night held demonstrations against me outside the theatre. I must admit, I found the whole thing rather amusing at the time, but now I couldn't give a shit.

It's as if the enfant terrible gets his own back on the society that in many ways has given him such a hard time?

Yes, but that's all finished now. When I look at the economic mess that most European countries are in, and I include England, when I consider the political situation of the French in general, I am totally indifferent. But, in the past, I would have had an almost Mephistophelian joy watching their plight. I think one could say, that to the extent that one can transcend these things, I've left behind the sorrows of my childhood.

And that's been very much reflected through your different books and perhaps A Thief's Journal. It's a very autobiographical work, isn't it, a very autobiographical novel?

Yes, to the extent that it. . . No, it is exactly the story of my life. But, of course, you have to allow for things like memory, which changes or magnifies certain events and obliterates others completely. There are other factors as well. Also, when I started to write the Journal, I was trying to write a book, a work of art if possible, and so I was forced to highlight certain events and to minimise others. But taken as a whole it is the story of my life.

You talk of the need to make A Thief's Journal into a piece of literature and yet you had so little literary experience . . .

You are quite right to put that question, because even now I ask myself that very thing! In fact, before I went to jail, I had hardly read anything. Detective stories didn't exist at the time. All I had read were popular stories by writers you probably don't know, people like Michel Zevaco, people of that sort, Gaston Lerou and . . . I'm trying to remember the name . . . Fantomas, anyway, things like that. But when you ask me what exactly I am after, are you questioning me on the structure of a book, a work of art, on its composition-no, not just composition but its structure as well-or are you more interested in questions of syntax and grammar and how much knowledge of the French language I could possibly have had at the time? In what sense are you asking the question?

I'm not concerned with questions of syntax and grammar. I'm really only interested in what you were saying before- that there you were in prison, writing a book and trying to work out how to write it. But you had no tradition in which to write it. I just wonder where the ideas came from for the formulation of the book?

To begin with, I wonder if the question you ask . . . the question appears original. What I'm saying is that every writer, I repeat, every writer, doesn't start writing until he has rejected everything he's ever learnt, be it at school or university. I wonder if all writers, to the extent that they write about themselves, about their own experiences, are not self-taught. Take as an example the case that comes to mind-that of Proust. If you take his first literary efforts, his pastiches or even Du coté de chez Swann, the first volume of his great tome A la recherche du temps perdu. Well, Du coté de chez Swann isn't Proust, not yet. Proust as Proust only begins with A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and it continues with Sodome et Gomorrhe and Le Coté des Guermantes. By then Proust is Proust, but by then he no longer writes in anyone's style; in the style he may or may not have been taught in order to pass his exams. He writes differently and I did something similar. I was lucky, if you like, in being able to go to school from 1915 (I was five at the time) till thirteen years later and to meet secular teachers. You have to understand that at that time, teachers in France were mainly what were called War Veterans. As well as teaching in the small villages (I was brought up in a small village) they were also clerks on the local parish council and as such were considered among the important people in the community, of similar importance to the Mayor, the priest or the local councillors. You get the picture. And because I was a ward of the state, I was always top of the class, almost always. You know why? Because the house of the family that was bringing me up was next to the school, bang next door. So there was no way I could avoid school and play truant. On top of that, the Poor Law Administration had an Inspector who came to visit us every month to check that I was going to school every day. There was no way that the people bringing me up could send me out to work, to look after the cows. They did make me do it, as well as barking trees to get tanner for tanning leather, but they could only do it after school. During school hours, I was always in class, sometimes alone, so I was bound to come top. The others in my class were the kids of peasants; they were my age but they could look after the cows, work the soil, things like that, things I couldn't do. But I learnt from those school masters, those secular teachers, at the time of the Third Republic. It's thanks to them that I learnt the subtleties of the French language.

That's language. What about books. Did you read at all before you went to jail?

Not a great deal, because I didn't have the opportunity or the time. I had to eat and to eat I had to steal. I've spoken about it in my books. I was young, I was never very handsome, but I was young and youth is pleasing and can be a source of money. I did some prostitution at the time, but prostitution takes up a certain amount of one's time and it meant one didn't have time to read.

So instead of reading, you were sleeping?

Yes, I was in bed, but I was also out in the street. At any rate, I wasn't financially able to be up to date with the literary styles of the time. For example, it was long after it had faded and died that I became aware of the Surrealist Movement. I found out about it because someone told me; I don't remember who, but I would think it was probably Jean Cocteau. So, as you can see, the Surrealist Movement had already finished by the time I became aware of it.

So you were almost in a vacuum in jail. You suggested that Proust only started to write his best things when he had shed other influences. You didn't have that problem. You were in a vacuum and perhaps could express yourself.

I wasn't in a vacuum. Perhaps if I put it another way. Think carefully on what I am about to say. When you enter for the first time into an empty cell, what first catches your eye is the graffiti on the walls, put there by those who have served time in that cell before you. The most obvious graffiti is that of the previous inmate, but if you look carefully, you can find graffiti from perhaps fifty or sixty years before. So there's a whole lifetime that has gone on there before you and it's impossible to ignore it. If you do, you are either entirely insensitive or blind. But if you are sensitive, you have to realise that a life has been spent in that cell before you, and that similar lives have been spent in adjoining cells. No sooner has the warder bolted shut the cell door, you hear knocking from the cell next door, first the right, then the left. That's how life in jail begins, in a sort of communion with the other inmates.

So it's only a physical shell, not an emotional one?

No, not at all. But there's something else that is also very important. The word ban-B-A-N-means to be banished from society, to be banished means to be rejected. I was banished. . . So a man who does wrong is banished from society, but he is banished not only because he has done wrong. One should say that he's done wrong because he has been banished from society! But my life, or that of the prisoner, every prisoner, every inmate, goes on inside that box, at the same rate as life goes on in the society that's rejected you. But since there is no recourse to that society, except by the will of the magistrates, you have to go on living, so you have to bridge the gap that alienates you from society and from your own true self. Yet there is only one way of bridging that gap and it is something very close to hatred for the society, or at very least the rejection of the value system espoused by the society. So one has to espouse a new value system.

Which is?

Ah. If, for example, society espouses loyalty, it is quite obvious that to disobey that value system, one must espouse treachery. And so it goes on.

Does that work on the sexual plane as well? Heterosexuality gets replaced by homosexuality?

My answer would need to be long, but in any case, it seems to me that Western society has been developed on the basis of the family unit. To achieve this family unit, heterosexuality is essential. Nevertheless, it seems-I say seems, because I'm never completely sure-that this heterosexuality, be it in men or in married women, is mixed with a certain, sometimes slight, sometimes more overt, homosexuality. But since the survival of society, especially western society, is based on the family unit, it is imperative to place these homosexual leanings in parentheses and at certain times to conceal them. Society, needing heterosexuality to survive, has been obliged to conceal homosexuality and in order to conceal it better, has tried to confine it to certain areas, areas where it is not obvious. First, to certain minority groups within the society, like artists of all sorts, for instance, famous or not. Also, it's been protected to a certain extent within the walls of convents, both men and women; and then, too, it's been relegated ever so quietly, in the sure knowledge that it would never become a threat to the family unit, to prisons and institutions for juveniles. That's roughly how I see it.

You've talked in general terms. But what about yourself? How did your sexuality evolve?

I always felt attracted to boys. With the exception of a few little girls or young girls . . . but especially to boys, boys only as a generalisation. As far back as I can remember, that was so. I liked boys and the portrayal of everything that epitomised the sex, be it the sex itself or the muscles, a certain virility if you like. In any case, this portrayal was always a sort of consolation for me in my unhappiness and my homosexuality never caused me any moral problems. I always saw it as quite natural to think of a pretty boy while I masturbated, but I would like to tell you of an experience I had. I was brought up a Catholic. I believed in God, but no more nor less than I might have believed in anything . . . in mythology, in Father Christmas or whatever, in the Virgin Mary. There were flowers on the altar of the Virgin Mary, all that was very pretty. Then, I fell ill, I must have been about fourteen at the time. I fell ill and was taken to the Foundling Hospital in the Rue d'Enfers Rochereau in Paris. And every day, the nurse would bring me a sweet in bed; all the beds were partitioned from one another and she would tell me the sweet was a present from the boy in the adjoining bed and every day I ate the sweet, every day until I was well again. And my first thought was to go and see this boy who gave me a sweet every day. I was fourteen, he must have been sixteen. I saw him and he was so pretty, I fell in love with him. And I can say that from then on, from that very moment, I could almost tell you the hour, God, the Virgin Mary and the rest of it ceased to have any more meaning for me. That's the story.

Are you saying that sexuality became a substitute religion?

Perhaps it's up to you to resolve that for yourself.

So in fact those homosexual views were developed in you before you even went to jail. Did you have homosexual experiences in jail?

Yes, of course, but no more than many men, living in such isolation. You asked me and it's something I've asked myself as well, you suggested that I didn't need to go to jail to become homosexual. I wonder if, in an unconscious way, I didn't go to jail because I suspected that it was the place which afforded the best possible conditions for homosexuals. Don't forget that I am talking about fifty years ago.

If that's true, it makes me wonder about the picture I'm starting to draw of you. I would have thought that your background, the need to eat, caused you to steal which led you to jail. Now you suggest that your homosexuality . . .

But it's because I also needed to eat, clothe myself, not freeze to death, have somewhere to sleep. They are the tangible reasons. But perhaps the intangible reasons . . . I didn't say that I deliberately chose jail because I was homosexual. What I said was that I ask myself whether in an unconscious way I was perhaps led towards prison because I suspected that it was the place which afforded the best possible conditions for homosexuality. But there were also social, sociable reasons if you like, as well-reasons one can't relate in an interview. I was hungry, I was cold, and the rest. Then there were the other reasons.

That one can't say in an interview?

But which have been said.

You say that homosexuality caused you no moral problems. Did it ever cause you social problems? Did you ever feel a misfit because of the values of the day?

Yes, there's no doubt about that. I did experience contempt, but contempt at all levels of society-from fellow-soldiers when I was in the army, my friends in the regiment, the non-commissioned officers, or even my . . . I can't call them workmates, because I've never worked. I at least have this childish pride in being able to boast that I'm happy never to have worked or had a trade. I'm rather pleased about that, because I don't like work. But to come back to your question-I did experience contempt because I was homosexual, both from young men of my age and from the women and men I mixed with socially. You mustn't forget that the contempt was far stronger fifty years ago than it is now. Yet it didn't stop me from being overtly and completely homosexual and from feeling real love.

I wonder whether, because of what you were and because you felt to one side because of your sexual views, because you were in prison, it allowed you to pour out all the emotions, really strong, earthy feelings?

Yes, but only to the extent, as I explained before, that I was quite certain that I would never be published. Jail doesn't automatically guarantee sincerity. There are many inmates in jail who go on trying to conform and adapt to the values of society, who remain very conformist, especially in the domain of sexuality and eroticism. In jail there are many married men with children. They practise homosexuality while they are incarcerated, while condemning it on moral grounds even while they are still inside! I suppose I'm saying that one shouldn't look too hard for sincerity and originality from prisoners. Obviously jail provides better possibilities for revolt, but not always.

Prison was the framework for you to start writing, but I wonder why you wrote. There must have been many people in jail who had similar backgrounds to you. They didn't write, you did. Why?

That's quite a question. I'm inclined to say that the reason they didn't write was because they didn't know how to and if they couldn't write, it was because they could do other things that I couldn't. . . . I am quite obviously hesitant in my reply, because I really don't know the answer. I can't have answers to everything.

Can you remember the first day that you wrote?

Yes, I can and I even recall the type of paper I used. It was just before Christmas in 1941. I was in jail and had to send a Christmas card, a card showing a fir tree and some snow, and I wanted to send some greetings to a friend. Obviously I wasn't supposed to write on the illustrated side but on the blank side and looking more carefully at the blank side, I noticed that it wasn't completely smooth but had some bumps on it. So instead of sending seasonal greetings, I wrote about the quality of the postcard and I suddenly became aware that I could write. Have you-understood what I am saying? Instead of sending the usual New Year or Christmas greeting, I spoke about the card on which I was writing and it was this act which released in me the thought that I might be able to write.

So it was as sudden as that?

Yes. It appeared sudden at the time. Now it's possible that there was an unconscious process that led to it, but if there was, then obviously I can't talk about it. But at the time it really struck me as suddenly as that. I could even call it a sort of revelation, if you like.

I've read that after you'd been writing for a few months one of the jailers came and burnt what you'd written.

That's true. I'll tell you what happened. I was alone in my cell and I was put to work making paper bags. It was a job we did to make a bit of money and consisted of getting pieces of paper, about this big, which were on a table, and gluing them together in a certain way to make bags. And I had filled about fifty of these pieces of paper with what was later to become my first book, Our Lady of the Flowers. And then I was called to appear before the Examining Magistrate. When one is called before the Magistrate, one spends the whole day, one leaves the jail and goes to the law courts. When I got back, the bundle of papers had disappeared and I was called before the prison Governor and asked why I had been using paper that belonged to the Department of Correctional Services. I had nothing to say, except that I had used their paper and he sentenced me to three days of solitary on bread and water. That's the story. When I returned from solitary, I resolved to do something about it and I put in an order at the jail shop for a writing pad. And in my cell at night, I would hide under the bedclothes and do my best to remember what I'd already written. And I rewrote the original fifty pages.

Do you find it easy to write?

Easy? No. I will try to explain something to you which I think is important. One reason I don't write any more is that I am free and anybody else could say what I would have to say. At the same time . . . what's that? It's a biro. As you can see, it's a biro. This biro can neither do upstrokes nor downstrokes when you write. It is not possible to write with this biro, only to take notes. When I was in jail writing Our Lady of the Flowers, there was a whole ceremonial involved. It went like this. I had a nib pen. I dipped the pen in the ink, ensuring that the amount of ink taken was not so heavy as to drop on the paper and then I began writing, taking care over the up and down strokes of the letters. If you like, a relationship was established between the inkpot and me. Between the biro and me, such a relationship could never exist. The time taken to find the right word, the time taken to lift the pen from the paper, place it in the inkpot and then return it to the paper; in that time three or four possible words had come to mind and I could choose the one I wanted. And it was that moment of choice that I loved the most. So, when you ask me 'Did words come easily', 'Did you find writing easy', I answer by saying: Yes, it was easy, but precisely because the words didn't come quickly. Words didn't come easily, but the act of writing was rewarding because . . . ah, because there is something else as well: there was an economy of means. With the biro, I can write as I please, but with the nib pen I couldn't make any inkblotches. I had to be very diligent, sitting with my pen perched, until the right word was chosen and then quickly write it down, as best I could. Can you feel that there was a real physical labour involved in the act of writing, something which no longer happens today, because of the biro and things like it and also because of the typewriter.

So in fact technology has almost destroyed writing?

Only for me. I'm telling you how it was for me. I don't know how you or others feel about it.

How much of your work was written or conceived in jail?

Everything, with the exception of my plays. The five novels including The Thief's Journal were all written in jail.

How did your interest in theatre begin?

None of my novels was written as a result of a commission, either by a publisher or anyone else. They all emerged from within me in either a happy or unhappy form, as I've already said, and I wrote five books. I also wrote five plays and each was the result of a commission. The Maids was commissioned by Louis Jouvet. He didn't know I would write The Maids, he'd simply asked me to write a play for two characters. In the end I managed to make it three characters. The next play, The Blacks, was commissioned for a black theatre company by a director called Raymond Rouleaux, who then refused to perform it and in the end it was Roger Blin who staged it. It's the same with The Balcony. My fourth play, Deathwatch, was commissioned by an actor. He's still alive so I won't say his name. And then The Screens was the result of a bet I made at the start of the Algerian War.

Did you enjoy writing for the theatre?

No, no I didn't. There is no doubt that I got a lot of pleasure from writing my novels while I was in jail. But the plays were commissioned.

Yet they were provoking, you got a lot of reaction to them.

If there was reaction, I can assure you that I didn't go looking for it. I never set out to shock. All I did was describe my view of the world, but it so happened that my view wasn't shared by my contemporaries. When I wrote plays, I attracted some very famous interpreters. But there were many critics, many in what are called fashionable circles, theatrical circles, who didn't like the fact that a man who had come out of jail could have such distinguished people willing to be associated with him. Take for example the reaction to the staging of The Screens at the Odeon. The Odeon is a national theatre. How come, the critics asked, a former convict, homosexual and the rest of it, can put on one of his plays at a national theatre?

But wasn't the whole period quite incredible for you? There you were in jail and almost the whole of the French intellectual community, led I suppose by Jean Cocteau, was fighting to get you out. How did you feel? Did you know what was going on at the time?

Yes and no, because when Cocteau came to my last trial, things hadn't been settled. I still had a two-year term to serve and it took pleas for clemency from many distinguished writers, people like Cocteau, Sartre, Breton to the then French President. And he granted me clemency. But being out of jail was only part of it. I had to make a living and for quite a time after I had been released, and despite the royalties from my books, I was forced to steal. I knew that things would work out in the long term, but in the short term I had to eat, so I stole.

So even after they'd got you out of jail, you were still doing burglaries and things?

Yes, of course. And there's something else, too. You can't expect someone who's been shunned by conventional society for thirty years not to create for himself a small world where he feels at home. I had done just that, surrounding myself with burglars, beggars, transvestites, homosexuals and the rest. It was a hard world to leave behind.

But don't all prisoners find that?

Yes, you're quite right. What's sad about it is that those who have the most original minds run the risk, when they come out of jail, of being contaminated by the values of conventional society and diverted from their sometimes far more poetic destiny.

Have you ever involved yourself in prison reform?

No, not at all. Creating laws, changing laws, those are jobs for the people who run society, not for me. Changing the laws: but in what way? in relation to what? If I found that a burglar or any prisoner had come out and turned into a good Frenchman, I'd say, 'Old man, all is lost, we are stuffed! Better to be a good prisoner than a good Frenchman!' So changing the laws is a job for the Justice Minister, what's his name-but not for me.

But you understand the prisoner and what makes of him what he becomes?

Yes, but I have no sympathy for what society is trying to turn them into . . . a respect for work, a respect for private property, respect in all its forms. What is so seductive about prisoners in general is their total lack of respect. If they are turned into men who respect order, they cease to have any interest for me.

That's very close to anarchy. Is that a philosophy you like?

As soon as there is norm, there is a bourgeoisie. What I'm saying applies as much to the parties of the left as to those of the right. It's quite obvious that what is called the left has the greatest possible contempt for the world of the criminal, the jails. In the same way that the left, like the right, has the greatest possible contempt for the Third World. If I had to serve anyone, I would far rather it was those in the Third World who are in revolt, than the left-wing parties of the western world who respect order and the work ethic and are as prepared to act as contemptibly as the parties of the right. It's after all rather strange when these left-wing parties tell us they want to achieve a revolution within the legal framework. But the legal framework precludes the very revolution they want to make! It is just not possible to have a legal revolution.

If you gave yourself a political label, what might it be?

But it is quite impossible for me to place myself within the political framework, because for a start no one would have me!

I am as much shunned by the left as by the right. But when a movement like the Black Panthers in the United States invited me to go on a lecture tour in support of Bobby Searle, who was in danger of death at the time, I went immediately and spent over two months with them. . . . And there is the PLO. The Palestinians, of course,

So if you have a political position, it's in favour of the oppressed against the oppressors?

Yes, that's quite obvious, because the agents of the oppressors after all are the cops-the cop who beats up a beggar, the cop with a truncheon, a tank, a plane or machine gun. For me it's all the same. They represent law and order.

And you are anti-order?

I think you've understood me.

You said you preferred your novels to your plays. Have you a favourite?

In my opinion there is only one, the first, Our Lady of the Flowers. In the others, the phrases are sometimes better-worded but I said everything I had to say in Our Lady of the Flowers. By writing the other four, I wasted my time and caused readers to waste theirs.

So if someone wants to understand what you were about, Our Lady of the Flowers is really the book to go and read?

Now, that's a different matter. You are asking me to put myself in the shoes of one of my readers. And that's something I've never done. I've never read my books. I've written them.

Do you think the plays are still relevant?

Of them all, The Screens is the most relevant today. I'll tell you something which may help you understand what I mean. There are 105 or 106 characters in The Screens. When I wrote it at the beginning of the Algerian War, I knew no one would be able to stage it. 107 actors would have been impossible, except at the Chatelet, with all that that would have involved. So, the unlikelihood of it ever being performed gave me complete freedom to say what I wanted. And I said it. I was happy writing that play, because I was having fun. As it turned out, it was eventually staged in a national theatre.

You say you don't want to write any more. But if there was another Algerian War, would that provoke you?

No, but it would make me go to Algeria!

To do what?

Probably not much. A man on his own can't do much. When I was with the Black Panthers, what exactly did I do? I gave daily lectures, it's true, but I know very well that it wasn't my lectures that led to Bobby Searle's release. When I spent nine months with the PLO. I didn't do anything. But I was with them and they were pleased, though most of them didn't even know where France was. When I said I lived in Paris they answered, 'Where's that?' I told them it was to the north and they thought it was the North Pole. But I was there with them. Sometimes, that's enough.

How do you look at France today-intellectual France. People like Sartre have written about you. Do you have any contact with them?

Talking of Sartre, I don't think he's written a book about me. His book called St Genet was really about himself. It was a good book, but I can't see anything of me in it. As far as homosexuals . . . That's a rather amusing Freudian slip. I meant to say as far as intellectuals are concerned . . . but they are all homosexuals and all homosexuals are intellectuals . . . As far as intellectuals are concerned, especially men of letters . . . I really am just not interested.

Did you like Sartre?

As a friend, yes, to have a beer with. But his support of the Israeli government against the Palestinians made me very angry.

We've talked of the past. What about Jean Genet now? How do you spend your time?

Well . . . well . . . that's the first question you've asked that I don't want to answer truthfully. I have absolutely no desire to tell you what I'm doing now.

How do you feel in general about something like this, an interview, talking about your life?

I don't give interviews very often or willingly, but it has become the fashion and many get done. Who are you? You are there with your tape recorder. Who do you represent at this moment for me? You represent power, to some small extent. You are going to edit this to suit your needs. And so, despite myself, and I say this in anything but a nasty spirit, there has been a certain irony in my answers. An irony towards what you represent. As soon as I find myself confronted by someone who represents the tiniest morsel of power, I amuse myself a little. And then I should say that the money I get from royalties on my books and from interviews I put to a certain use, a use that I won't tell you about. But I do need money. That's why we are talking.

I get the feeling that you can almost afford to thumb your nose at the society that gave you a hard time.

Thumb my nose. No, not really, because sticking my tongue out was something I might have felt like doing twenty years ago, but not now. I would have had to have it sticking out for twenty years. And there would be no point. As I'm not very pretty, it would have made me even uglier.

Would you like Our Lady still to be read after you're dead?

It can't make me happy if I don't exist.