the Impenitent Thief

The Impenitent Thief

MIRACLE OF THE ROSE by Jean Genet. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. 344 pages. Grove Press. $7.50.

The literature that emerges from prison is as various as Mein Kampf and Pilgrim's Progress. But the authors usually share a common conviction. More often than not they are men who regard themselves as unjustly condemned. In that company, Jailbird Jean Genet is a rarity; he has no complaint against society at large, nor does he whine that he took a bum rap. His latest book, Miracle of the Rose, is neither by an outsider looking in nor an insider look-ing out. Imprisoned for theft, Genet belonged behind bars--not only legally but spiritually. He writes of the tightly controlled little world of Fontevrault State prison as if it were the world.

Prison Peerage. It is, in fact, a prison society dominated by the "toughs": hard cases who exact tribute in the form of sex and tobacco from the rank-and-file riffraff. It is intensely snobbish. "Crashers" (burglars) will not talk to pimps. Prestige is based on length of term, and a prison peerage goes to anyone who has served on Devil's Island or Cayenne (the now extinct French penal colonies).

The master spirit of this society is the convict Harcamone, in solitary confinement, awaiting the guillotine. The execution, described by an inmate as "making two of 'Pretty Boy,' " dominates the book. Harcamone is in everybody's mind, and he is the principal figure in the homosexual love fantasies of the narrator. Much of the force of Miracle of the Rose depends on the authenticity of the prison argot. As a ten-time loser who has spent a good part of his first 35 years in reformatories and jails, Genet doubtless knows the con's language like a native, but when it comes to English equivalents, Translator Frechtman has no luck at all. Genet, who is a practicing pervert and retired male prostitute, presumably knows the camp language exchanged by consenting adults. And it is hard to believe, for example, that a kiss between homosexual males should be described as "a smack"--a word which had some facetious currency about the time of Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell. Criminal Hierarchy. Written in prison in 1943 and first published in France in 1951, the book creates an intense picture of Genet's closed world. France outside the walls practically ceases to exist; only bare intimations of it seep through. A war is going on somewhere. The prisoners are making camouflage nets for the Germans, rather than mailbags. All sorts of people--"politicals" --are arriving in prison who have no business there. The narrator is indignant that the criminal hierarchy is put out of balance by spiritually hostile elements--decent ordinary people.

In his celebrated and interminable essay on Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre philosophizes to the effect that by aligning himself with the forces of evil Genet affirms the existence of the good, which makes him a moralist of a kind. But the Sartrean paradox does not altogether explain the demonic intensity and energy of Genet's writing. The source may be found in another French aphorist, Baudelaire, who said that "Everyman who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul." As a corollary, he who accepts the conditions of life--as Genet accepts the worst life can dish out--presumably finds his soul. The discovery would disconcert most men. Genet indeed suggests that he has fulfilled the Baudelairean aspiration to "inspire universal horror and disgust." Few books are so thoroughly nasty and disquieting as Miracle of the Rose.

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