SAINT GENET by Jean-Paul Sartre 625 pages. Braziller. $8.50.
OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS by Jean Genet. 318 pages. Grove. $6.50.
"Jean Genet is an artist," proclaimed the President of the French Republic in 1948, pardoning him from a life sentence for repeated burglaries. "Jean Genet is a criminal and a pornographer," shrilled all the proper Parisiens, promptly seeing to it that even in Paris Genet's writings for years could be sold only under the counter. "Jean Genet is a saint," declares Jean-Paul
Sartre, high priest of French existentialism. "I am a pederast. I am a thief," says Jean Genet.
Is everyone right? Is anyone? More than a decade ago, when these questions caused a thunderous cafe clash on the Left Bank, they seemed unlikely ever to cross the waters to trouble puritanical American ears. But times change. That hoary pornographic classic, Fanny Hill, sits cheek by drool with The Joy of Cooking in the local bookstore. Of all long-forbidden literary fruits, Jean Genet was always the darkest and most dangerous. U.S. audiences have already been teased by exposure to a pair of Genet plays. And now for the first time, U.S. readers are to be plunged into unadulterated Genet prose in the form of his first novel. Appearing almost simultaneously is Sartre's 625-page preface to Genet's collected works, in which, among other things, Sartre correctly describes Genet's book as "an epic of masturbation."
Unholy Trinity. In an age increasingly forced to distinguish between scatology, pornography and the legitimate study of evil, the story of Genet's progress to literary prominence exerts a monstrous fascination. For Genet is a matchless, unholy trinity of all three.
Beside him, Henry Miller is but a cheerfully smutty college sophomore, Sade a dilettant aristocrat of eccentric habits, Gide a genteel old lady sedately cultivating nightshade in her little kitchen garden.
Pieced together by Sartre, Genet's life at first appears to be just one more example of a child gone wrong. Abandoned by his mother and taken into public charge at birth in 1910, he innocently filched small articles in the home of his peasant foster parents, who kept him for the fee paid them by the state. When he was ten years old, they turned on him and publicly branded him a thief. From there on until 1948, he was in and out of prison. Wandering Europe, he became by turns a dope smuggler, a beggar, a Foreign Legionnaire (he took the enlistment bonus and deserted) and a male prostitute.
No Escape Hatch. For centuries, says Sartre, despite the Christian doctrine that man is born with the capacity for evil, men have tended to protect themselves from facing the fact by pretending that evil is mainly outside them. If a man does anything wrong, he prefers to believe that it is the result of the Devil's temptations or the corrupting power of society around him. Evil is always "the Other."