An Interview with Jean Genet

Abstract

I interviewed Jean Genet in Paris in the Summer of 1983, a few years before his death, for a book I was working on a biography I sadly never finished about Barney Rosset and Grove Press.' Genet consented to talk to me because he liked Barney a lot and deeply respected what that brave publisher had achieved in the hot and heavy battles for freedom of expression, sexual and political, during the '60's. Like Genet, Barney had a hankering to incite revolution, that's why Genet liked him. It wasn't easy for me to find Genet who rarely gave interviews, was said to be constantly shifting his abode, and had no fixed address much less a telephone. His French editor told me not to worry, however, because from time to time the author came by to pick up messages, etc; and that once Genet learned that I wanted to speak to him about Barney Rosset, he would surely agree to meet with me he liked Barney that much. And so he did. A couple of days after my phone call to his editor, Genet climbed out of a taxi that pulled up before my door. He looked like a sweet-faced bum, someone who'd just been let out of prison, who was wearing the same clothes he'd slept in, including shoes and socks. There was nothing gay about him a point I mention here because of the misleading caricature of Genet, in that respect, which appeared in The New York Review of Books on October 21, 1993, for Tony Judt's review of Edmund White's biography, Genet.2 I think Genet did not much like my looks and wasn't impressed when I introduced myself as a professor of law and First Amendment lawyer. But when I reminded him that I was Barney Rosset's lawyer, his legal eagle during the '60's I'd taken on all of