Saint Genet

Fontveraud's other famous inmate, when the abbey was turned into a prison, was the petty criminal and writer Jean Genet, whom Sartre "canonized" in his 1950s Saint Genet. I read Saint Genet in my senior year in high school, and Our Lady of the Flowers, and probably others works by Genet such as were in translation in 1965. And probably understood very little. My senior thesis in English was going to be on Genet, but I never wrote it. Miss Dunning generously let me pass senior English anyway, and I graduated and later did write some other things. I never thought about Genet in later years and have no clue now--except for the usual adolescent rebelliousness or ostentatiousness--of why I was interested in the first place. Anyway, I think the folks at Fontveraud have taken Sartre way too literally. There are references to Genet all over, his books are all in the gift shoppe, and there is a major shrine to Genet in the prison exhibit in the abbey. French intellectual life is a continuing source of amazement. Perhaps it's because he was so flamboyantly gay, which might not be regarded as so outrageous nowadays...