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In confinement his gifts were set free. Life on the outside unsettled him. He lived in hotels, traveling constantly and falling for good-looking straight ! guys or hustlers who knew an open wallet when they saw one. In the mid-1950s, after a long depression, Genet the confessional novelist re-emerged as a playwright consumed by public issues. In The Balcony and The Blacks he reworked his old obsession with power relations into taunting parables about race, social caste and colonialism. The Paris premiere of The Screens, with its veiled attack on the French suppression of Algeria, set off a week of violent protests. Genet was delighted.
Then he tumbled into another trench of depression and Nembutal. Ordinary politics couldn't reconcile Genet's leftist attachment to the dispossessed and his infatuation with a world of muscular order. The civic-minded gay activism he saw emerging in his later years was too middle class for him, one more sign that vice wasn't what it used to be. Implacable tough guys were more to his taste, the Black Panthers and the terrorist Baader Meinhof Group or the Palestinians, a whole nation of the dispossessed. By instinct he submitted moral problems to an aesthetic judgment. He opposed attempts to humanize French reformatories on the ground that cruel institutions produce great poets.
Then again, that did hold true in his case. By the time he died in 1986 -- of cancer, at the age of 75 -- Genet was revered as one of the greatest 20th century French writers. But White's book reminds us that Cocteau was right when he said Genet was a bad thief. Nothing he stole could compare in value with what he left behind.