THE GUTTER IN THE SKY.

Andre Levy, Philadelphia

1955

Jean Genet

(With preparatory notes on an unknown sexuality by Jean Cocteau. Translation of the French NOTRE DAME DES FLEURS.)

"This is not the first time that thieves, murderers, pimps, and whores have invested the pages of the novel." With these words begins the publisher's advertisement which prefaces the text of this novel. And it is true that many novelists have peopled their works from the substrata of society, but never in quite the fashion which provides this novel's fascination. For these criminals and degenerates all have one factor in common: homosexuality.

As well, according to the publisher's introductory words, this is one of the best selling pieces of fiction in Europe today, and there can be no difficulty in understanding why. The book would undoubtedly appeal to the sensation-seeker as well as to the avante garde reader, but its lasting interest would arise only in the minds of those who were open enough intellectually to accept its utterly unorthodox cosmology.

There is little here, be it of character development, or of incident, which would strike a common chord in the average reader. Genet, who went from a lifetime of imprisonment to literary fame, writes feelingly and compassionately of his perverts and inverts, his pimps and whores, his psychopaths and neurotics. And it is these who form the complete population of his fictional world, filling it with a strange fascination, the lure of the unspoken. Many readers would call this novel unadulterated pornography and throw it down in disgust, but its unquestioned literary value cannot be readily denied.

Genet writes of his homosexuals with a frankness which has been rarely equalled this side of the Atlantic outside of the works of Nelson Algren. If one were to place Algren's A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE next to this novel, one would find many points of similarity in treatment of theme. They both deal with sex from the animal point of view, and both are concerned with the halfforgotten, half-ignored lower levels of our society, those marginal individuals whose life is neither seen nor understood by the average person who lives and works in comparative normality.

But, oddly enough, the reader who might turn to this novel for a thrill would probably stop reading quickly. Sex is there in frank terms, but never for the mere purpose of sensation. Because Genet deals with individuals whose emotional focus is upon the animal side of life, he treats their sexual behavior with startling openness. His characters have never progressed emotionally beyond the early Freudian stages, and this psychological stunting allows them only to concentrate on their sexuality and its immediate gratification. But this frankness is always expressed in a strangely involuted, impressionistic style which gives the language an esoteric beauty rarely found in writing today. At times the novel seems to dart momentarily into a prose-poetry which evokes vivid emotional imagery in the mind of the reader.

Genet's homosexuals live in a world which all homosexuals know, either through experience or hearsay, but they live it more violently than in any other fictionalized portrayal in my memory. This is the world of the drag queens, the costume ball with its flirtations and jealous tiffs, the gay bars and the one-night stands. But the milieu has been portrayed here with a colour and sensuality which sets it apart in a world of its own, divorced from commonplace reality. Ostensibly it is the gay world of Paris today, or at least a perverted segment of it, but Genet manages to give it a life which shimmers and dances with its own strange fascination, despite the tawdriness and despair which are a large part of it.

Perhaps many homosexuals would find this novel uncomfortable reading. Genet has an uncanny ability to uncover the suppressed desires and needs

25