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Around 1944, Genet had asked Sartre to write a preface to one of his novels. The philosopher responded with a voluminous book oddly entitled Saint Genet (1952). He argued that Genet's flowery novels about homosexual criminals reflected "a black ethic . . . a Jansenism of Evil." Genet was dismayed. "I gave him the manuscript," Sartre recalled. "He got up and went over to the fireplace with the intention of burning it. I believe he did throw some pages in and then plucked them out." Sartre's unkindest cut was making the poete maudit respectable. Genet developed a writer's block that lasted five years.
Sartre's other friend, by contrast, was becoming scandalous. In The Second Sex, she argued not only that women lead thwarted lives but that society defines their very identity. "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman," she wrote bitterly. "It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch." (This in the land of vive la difference.) One of the book's million-plus American readers, Betty Friedan, was so depressed that she took to her bed for three days, then got up and started work on The Feminine Mystique.
When Genet went back to writing, it was mainly as a playwright, of wild language and wilder imagination. His first hit in New York City was The Balcony (1960), in which a series of ruling-class figures act out their sexual yearnings in a bordello. Then came The Blacks (1961), a fantasy of racial revenge played partly in whiteface by such then obscure actors as James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson. And though Genet wrote very little during his last decade, his plays kept being revived--even, last year, at the Comedie Francaise--making him not only respectable but comparatively prosperous.
Originally, De Beauvoir distrusted feminism--socialism alone could change the world, she argued. But she gradually altered her beliefs, and when the women's liberation movement formally began in France in 1970, she enthusiastically joined it. When 343 well-known women published an advertisement to announce that they had all had illegal abortions, De Beauvoir was one of the signers. When 4,000 women marched for abortion rights, she marched. And when a tribunal gathered to condemn "crimes against women," she was one of the organizers. "More than any other figure," Gloria Steinem said last week, "she was responsible for the international women's movement."
In her 60s, De Beauvoir discovered her last grande passion, the impoverishment and degradation of old age, her own and everyone else's. "It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life," she wrote in The Coming of Age (1970), her last important book. "Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny." When death transformed Sartre's life into a destiny in 1980, she wrote of him, "His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are." Genet, who rarely agreed with anyone about anything, would no doubt have agreed with that.