Famous Writers

This precocious Parisian youth, born in 1903 was adopted by Cocteau as his temperamental protégé and lover. He wrote his first French masterpiece 'The Devil in the Flesh' at the age of fifteen, his second novel 'Count d'Orgel's Ball' at nineteen and died from typhoid at twenty. Raymond Radiguet was cynical, pretentious and brilliant.

' Raymond Radiguet was born on June 18th, 1903; he died, without knowing it, on December 12th, 1923, after a miraculous life. The literary tribunal has found his heart arid. Raymond Radiguet's heart was hard, and like a diamond it did not react to the least touch. It needed fire and other diamonds, and ignored the rest. Do not accuse fate. Do not speak of injustice. He belonged to the solemn race of men whose lives unfold too quickly to their close. "True presentiments," he wrote at the end of The Devil In The Flesh, "are formed at a depth that the mind does not reach. Thus they sometimes make us do things that we misinterpret....A disorderly man who is going to die and does not know it suddenly put his affairs in order. His life changes. He sorts his papers. He rises and goes to bed early. He gives up his vices. His friends are pleased. Then his brutal death seems all the more unjust to them. He would have lived happily." For four months Raymond Radiguet became meticulous; he slept, he sorted, he revised. I was stupid enough to be glad of it; I had mistaken for a nervous disorder the intricacies of a machine that cuts crystal.

"Listen," he said to me on December 9th, "listen to something terrible. In three days I am going to be shot by the soldiers of God." While tears choked me, as I invented other explanations: "Your explanations," he continued, "are not so good as mine. The order has been given. I heard the order." Later, he said: "There is a colour that moves and people hidden in the colour." I asked if he wanted them sent away. He answered: "You cannot send them away as you cannot see the colour." Then, he sank. He moved his mouth, he called us by name, he looked with surprise at his mother, at his father, at his hands.

Raymond Radiguet left three volumes. A collection of unpublished poems, The Devil In The Flesh, a masterpiece of promise, and the promise fulfilled : Count d'Orgel. One is frightened by a child of twenty who publishes a book that cannot be written at that age. The dead of yesterday are eternal. The author of Count d'Orgel was the ageless writer of a dateless book. He received the proofs in the hotel room where his fever consumed him. He intended to make no alteration to them. His death robs us of memoirs of his development; three short stories; a long appendix to The Devil In The Flesh; Ile de France; and Charles d'Orleans, an historical picture, imaginary in the same way as the false autobiography of his first novel.

The only honour that I claim is to have given to Raymond Radiguet in his life the illustrious place won for him by his death.

Raymond Radiguet was born in Saint-Maur, a Parisian suburb, in 1903. He read much and began writing poetry in his mid teens, He abandoned his studies in favour of journalism and to leap into the Parisian literary circles where he mixed with Picasso, Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau who became his mentor and lover although their relationship was always difficult. In 1921 he completed 'The Devil in the Flesh' and also published a collection of poems. The first version of 'Count d'Orgel's Ball' was finished in 1922 and revised in 1923, just a few months after the publication of The Devil in the Flesh and before he died of Typhoid at twenty, on the 12th December 1923 and was interred at Le Pere Lachaise in Paris.

Raymond Radiguet was a prodigy. The precocious boy wrote as if he had the experience of a much older man. However he said of himself:

"These premature prodigies of intelligence who become prodigies of stupidity after just a few years! Which family does not have its own prodigy? They have invented the word. Of course, child prodigies exist, just as there are extraordinary men. But they are rarely the same. Age means nothing. What astounds me is Rimbaud's work, not the age at which he wrote it. All great poets have written by seventeen. The greatest are the ones who manage to make us forget it.

When posed the question "Why do you write?" in a recent survey, Paul Valery answered "Out of weakness."

On the contrary, I believe that it would be weak not to write. Did Rimbaud stop writing because he doubted himself and wanted to take care of his memory? I do not think so. One can always do better. Timid writers who do not dare show their work until they have done better should not find in this an excuse for their weakness. For, in a subtler way, one can never do better and one can never do worse."

Rimbaud, the poet was a seer, who must force the derangement of all the senses. A precursor to surrealism, Rimbaud is also considered to have been one of the creators of the free verse style and his literary style has influenced almost all modern forms of literature, including the Beats. He was an inspiration to songwriters like Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. Many of his works were considered obscene; so much so, that after his death, his sister attempted to stop the publishing of many of his more risqué works. However, thanks to Paul Verlaine , the majority of his works remained intact.

'Did I not have once upon a time a delightful childhood, heroic, fabulous, to be written on sheets of gold - too lucky! Through what crime, through what error, have I deserved my present weakness? You who say that animals sob from grief, that the sick despair, that the dead have bad dreams, try to relate my fall and my sleep. I can explain myself no better than the vagrant with his incessant Pater and Ave Maria. I do not know how to speak!'

Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud was born on October 20, 1854 at Charleville in France. His family (two sisters and a brother) was abandoned by their father Frederic, an army officer, when the boy was six and they were forced into poverty. His mother, Vitalie a hard, possessive and snobbish woman, showed little affection to her children. Forbidden to play with other boys, Rimbaud immersed himself in his studies, including Latin and Greek, and was, until his 15th year, a precocious, well-behaved, religious child, and model student however at age ten, Rimbaud wrote:

'You have to pass an exam, and the jobs that you get are either to shine shoes, or to herd cows, or to tend pigs. Thank God, I don't want any of that! Damn it! And besides that they smack you for a reward; they call you an animal…..'

At age 13, he sent a poem to the Prince Imperial on 8 May 1868 and was publicly thanked. Teachers began regarding him as a prodigy, and he won several awards, becoming a bit of a scholarly legend in his school.

To Theodore de Banville

Dear Maitre,
    We are now in the months of love; I am seventeen. The hopeful, dreamy age, as they say - and I have begun, a child touched by the Muse - excuse this if it is a platitude - to express my beliefs, my hopes, my feelings, all those things proper to poets - this is called Spring.
    And if I send you some of these verses - and this through Alph. Lemerre, the good publisher - it is because I love all poets, all good Parnassiens - since a poet is a Parnassien - in love with ideal beauty; it is because I admire you, very naively (of course), a descendant of Ronsard, a brother of our masters of 1830, a real romantic, a real poet. That is why. - All this foolish, I fear; but still?...
    In two years, in one year perhaps, I shall be in Paris.- Anch'io, gentlemen of the Press, I too shall be a Parnassien.- I do not know what is inside me... that wishes to come out... - I swear, cher maitre , that I shall always worship the two goddesses, the Muse and Freedom. Do not frown too much when you read these verses: ... You would send me mad with joy and hope, cher maitre, if you would arrange to make room for 'Credo in Unam' among the Parnassiens ... I should be in the latest number of Parnasse : it would become the Credo of the poets!... - O mad ambition!

ARTHUR RIMBAUD   Charleville , 24 May 1970

At age 15, his first poem was published in La Revue pour Tous. It was called The Orphans’ New Years Gift. and then in July 1970 he headed for Paris where he was arrested for not having a train ticket and was forced to return home. Within a year he had run away two more times, had changed into a bitter, arrogant, dishevelled, foul-talking adolescent, and had written some of the poems that would one day place him among the greatest names of modern poetry. He lived on the city streets. He denounced women and the church and lived willingly in squalid conditions, studying "immoral" poets like Baudelaire and reading everything from occult to philosophy.

He had sent some of his poems to Paul Verlaine, and in 1871 the older poet invited him to Paris. The Parisian literati rejected him as an arrogant and boorish drunken youth, but he and Verlaine became lovers.....See following page

Before his twentieth birthday, Arthur Rimbaud quit writing. After learning German, Arabic, Hindustani and Russian, he set off on a series of adventures that included crossing the Alps on foot, enlisting in and then deserting the Dutch army, joining a German circus bound for Scandinavia, travelling to Egypt and working as a labourer in Cyprus. At each step, he suffered setbacks of illness and hardship. During a battle with typhoid fever in 1879, Rimbaud decided to abandon his wanderings and settle down. In the employ of a coffee trader from Aden, he became the first white man to journey into the Ogaden region of Ethiopia and eventually became involved in arms-trading. While in Ethiopia, Rimbaud lived with a native woman and the home they shared became a mecca for travelling Europeans.

He returned to Marseilles in June of 1891. His right leg was amputated, probably due to the complications of syphilis, and he was nursed for a time by his tender sister Isabelle who claimed that in his last days he again accepted the Catholic faith of his childhood. He died in Marseille on November 10, 1891.

' I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age...The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder...I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.' Wilde

'The most striking thing about the poet's appearance is his height, which is several inches over six feet, and the next thing to attract attention is his hair, which is of a dark brown colour, and falls down upon his shoulders...When he laughs his lips part widely and show a shining row of upper teeth, which are superlatively white. The complexion, instead of being the rosy hue so common in Englishmen, is so utterly devoid of colour that it can only be described as resembling putty. His eyes are blue, or a light grey, and instead of being 'dreamy', as some of his admirers have imagined them to be, they are bright and quick--not at all like those of one given to perpetual musing on the ineffably beautiful and true. Instead of having a small delicate hand, only fit to caress a lily, his fingers are long and when doubled up would form a fist that would hit a hard knock, should an occasion arise for the owner to descend to that kind of argument...One of the peculiarities of his speech is that he accents almost at regular intervals without regard to the sense, perhaps as a result of an effort to be rhythmic in conversation as well as in verse.' New York Tribune, 3 January 1883

Oscar Wilde was born in Ireland in 1854. His mother was a poet who wrote under the pen name Speranza and his father was a famous physician. At Oxford he won a poetry award and discovered the notion of "art for art's sake". From 1878 to 1881 Oscar Wilde became famous for being famous, without having any substantial achievements. He became part of "the beautiful people", wore outrageous clothes, passed himself off as an art critic and aesthete, and built a reputation for saying shocking and amusing things. Known for his velvet coat, knee breeches, silk stockings, pale green tie, cane, shoulder-length hair and loose silk shirts and the lily he carried.. In 1882 he went to New York and toured North America for a year giving lectures. When a customs inspector asked him if he had anything to declare he replied, "Nothing but my genius." One of his first stops was to the poet Walt Whitman at his home in Camden. They drank homemade elderberry wine milk punch and talked for two hours... "He is the grandest man I have ever seen, the simplest, most natural, and strongest character I have ever met in my life..." said Wilde and later revealing "the kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips..."

When he returned to England he adopted conventional dress, toured, wrote two unsuccessful plays and a collection of children's fairy tales, married, fathered two sons and wrote literary criticism for a magazine Woman's World. Two years later he resumed his life of parties, friends and lovers. From 1890 to 1895 Oscar Wilde reached his peak as poet-playwright and social star. His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray shocked with its thinly veiled allusions to homosexuality. In the same year he came out with The House of Pomegranates and the great plays Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and The Importance of Being Ernest, the first modern comedy in English. Wilde's plays forced Victorian society to re-examine its hypocrisies. In 1895 the mad Eigth Marquess of Queensberry, culminated his public harassment of Wilde for his relationship with his son Lord Alfred Douglas. When Wilde sued him for the misspelled note ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite’ it backfired; the Marquess was acquitted and Wilde's got two years of hard labour. While in prison he wrote a 30,000 word letter to Bosie, published after his death as De Profundis, that is regarded as possibly being his most important and mature statement on life and art in general and his own life and art in particular. In concluding, he tells Douglas, You came to me to learn the Pleasures of Life and the Pleasures of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.

For two years, Wilde's primary love-interest was Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas. Bosie's father was severely repressed and repressive and remembered as the originator of the "Marquess of Queensbury rules" in boxing. The Marquess was livid over his son's relationship with Wilde, and determined to bring Wilde down. He tried to disrupt the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest, but Wilde had the Marquess denied entrance. So a few days later, on February 18, he left the calling card at Wilde's club which began the saga leading to his cruel fall.

'The 'Love that dare not speak its name' in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made as the very basis for his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michaelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michaelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the 'Love that dare not speak its name', and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.' Oscar Wilde, at his first trial, 26 April 1895.

'It is no use for me to address you. People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame, and one cannot hope to produce any effect upon them. It is the worst case that I have ever tried... That you, Wilde have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men, it is equally impossible to doubt. I Shall, under such circumstances, be expected to pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgement it is totally inadequate for such a case as this. SHALL, The Sentence of the court is that you be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for two years.' Mr. Justice Wills, pronouncing sentence after Wilde's second trial, 25 May 1895.'And I? May I say nothing, my Lord?'

Oscar Wilde's last words of his second trial, 25 May 1895. 25 May 1895. A hundred years later the British Government overturned this ruling.

In Pentonville prison had to walk a treadmill for six hours every day, and to sleep on a bare board. He was allowed no communication with the outside world for three months. He lost twenty pounds in the first month. A chaplain wrote:

'When he first came down here from Pentonville he was in an excited flurried condition, and seemed as if he wished to face his punishment without flinching. But all this has passed away. As soon as the excitement aroused by the trial subsided and he had to encounter the daily routine of prison life his fortitude began to give way and rapidly collapsed altogether. He is now quite crushed and broken. This is unfortunate, as a prisoner who breaks down in one direction generally breaks down in several, and I fear from what I hear and see that perverse sexual practices [masturbation] are again getting the mastery over him. This is a common occurrence among prisoners of his class and is of course favoured by constant cellular isolation. The odour of his cell is now so bad that the officer in charge of him has to use carbolic acid in it every day.... I need hardly tell you that he is a man of decidedly morbid disposition.... In fact some of our most experienced officers openly say that they don't think he will be able to go through the two years. '

He was moved to Reading, the subject of his "Ballad of Reading Gaol", where he wrote his De Profundis. Released finally on May 18, 1897, Wilde moved to France.

After his release from prison, he wandered around Europe for three years.. He sank deeper into a life of sex and absinthe. His wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a gripping account of prison brutality, with a plea for prison reform.

On 30 November 1900, in Hotel d'Alsace in Paris, he died of cerebral meningitis.

His remains were originally buried in quicklime in the insignificant Bagneaux Cemetery. This was done to reduce the corpse to bone, but when unearthed his body he was well preserved and his hair and beard had grown longer. His body was moved to Père Lachaise on July 19, 1909. Not until 1914 was the tomb (above) erected. I visited his tomb in 1975. Originally thought indecent a plaque served as a fig leaf but was hacked away in 1922 (possibly by students). They removed a little more than just the plaque. On the back of the tomb there's a quote from The Ballad of Reading Gaol:
'And alien tears will fill for him Pity's long broken urn For his mourners will be outcast men And outcasts always mourn'

Bobby,
Bosie has insisted on dropping here for sandwiches. He is quite like a narcissus -- so white and gold. I will either come Wednesday or Thursday night to your rooms. Send me a line. Bosie is so tired; he lies like a hyacinth on the sofa, and I worship him.

Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days. Why are you alone in London, and when do you go to Salisbury? Do go there to cool your hands in the grey twilight of Gothic things, and come here whenever you like. It is a lovely place and lacks only you; but go to Salisbury first.

Dearest of all Boys,
Your letter was delightful, red and yellow wine to me; but I am sad and out of sorts. Bosie, you must not make scenes with me. They kill me, they wreck the loveliness of life. I cannot see you, so Greek and gracious, distorted with passion. I cannot listen to your curved lips saying hideous things to me. I would sooner be blackmailed by every rent-boy in London than to have you bitter, unjust, hating. You are the divine thing I want, the thing of grace and beauty; but I don't know how to do it. Shall I come to Salisbury? My bill here is 49 pounds for a week. I have also got a new sitting-room over the Thames. Why are you not here, my dear, my wonderful boy? I fear I must leave; no money, no credit, and a heart of lead.

Alfred,
Your intimacy with this man Wilde. It must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not going to try and analyse this intimacy, and i make no charge: but to my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it...

Dearest Boy,
Your father is on the rampage again -- been to Cafe Royal to enquire for us, with threats etc. I think now it would have been better for me to have had him bound over to keep the peace, but what a scandal! Still, it is intolerable to be dogged by a maniac. What purple valleys of despair one goes through! Fortunately there is one person in the world to love.

My Dear Robbie,
This is my first day alone, and of course a very unhappy one. I begin to realize the terrible position of isolation, and I have been rebellious and bitter of heart all day. Is it not sad? I thought I was accepting everything so well and so simply, and I have had moods of rage passing over my nature, like gusts of bitter wind or storm spoiling the sweet corn, or blasting the young shoots... I had hardly any sleep last night. Bosie's revolting letter was in the room, and foolishly I had read it again and left it by my bedside. My dream was that my mother was speaking to me with some sternness, and that she was in trouble. I quite see that whenever I am in danger she will somehow warn me. I have a real terror now of that unfortunate ungrateful young man with his unimaginative selfishness and his entire lack of all sensitiveness to what in others is good or kind or trying to be so. I feel him as an evil influence, poor fellow. To be with him would be to return from the hell which I do think I have been released. I hope never to see him again...
I want some pens, and some red ties. The latter for literary purposes, of course...
With all love and affection,

I got your telegram half an hour ago, and just send a line to say that I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you. It was not so in the old days, but now it is different, and you can really recreate in me that energy and sense of joyous power on which art depends. Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don't understand us. I feel that it is only with you that I can do anything at all. Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world.

I wish that when we met at Rouen we had not parted at all. There are such wide abysses now of space and land between us. But we love each other.

I dreamed I stood upon a little hill,
And at my feet there lay a ground, that seemed
Like a waste garden, flowering at its will
With buds and blossoms. There were pools that dreamed
Black and unruffled; there were white lilies
A few, and crocuses, and violets
Purple or pale, snake-like fritillaries
Scarce seen for the rank grass, and through green nets
Blue eyes of shy peryenche winked in the sun.
And there were curious flowers, before unknown,
Flowers that were stained with moonlight, or with shades
Of Nature's wilful moods; and here a one
That had drunk in the transitory tone
Of one brief moment in a sunset; blades
Of grass that in an hundred springs had been
Slowly but exquisitely nurtured by the stars,
And watered with the scented dew long cupped
In lilies, that for rays of sun had seen
Only God's glory, for never a sunrise mars
The luminous air of Heaven. Beyond, abrupt,
A grey stone wall. o'ergrown with velvet moss
Uprose; and gazing I stood long, all mazed
To see a place so strange, so sweet, so fair.
And as I stood and marvelled, lo! across
The garden came a youth; one hand he raised
To shield him from the sun, his wind-tossed hair
Was twined with flowers, and in his hand he bore
A purple bunch of bursting grapes, his eyes
Were clear as crystal, naked all was he,
White as the snow on pathless mountains fore,
Red were his lips as red wine-spilt that dyes
A marble floor, his brow chalcedony.
And he carne near me, with his lips uncurled
And kind, and caught my hand and kissed my mouth,
And gave me grapes to eat, and said, 'Sweet friend,
Come I will show thee shadows of the world
And images of life. See from the South
Comes the pale pageant that hath never an end.'
And lo! within the garden of my dream
I saw two walking on a shining plain
Of golden light. The one did joyous seem
And fair and blooming, and a sweet refrain
Came from his lips; he sang of pretty maids
And joyous love of comely girl and boy,
His eyes were bright, and 'mid the dancing blades
Of golden grass his feet did trip for joy;
And in his hand he held an ivory lute
With strings of gold that were as maidens' hair,
And sang with voice as tuneful as a flute,
And round his neck three chains of roses were.
But he that was his comrade walked aside;
He was full sad and sweet, and his large eyes
Were strange with wondrous brightness, staring wide
With gazing; and he sighed with many sighs
That moved me, and his cheeks were wan and white
Like pallid lilies, and his lips were red
Like poppies, and his hands he clenched tight,
And yet again unclenched, and his head
Was wreathed with moon-flowers pale as lips of death.
A purple robe he wore, o'erwrought in gold
With the device of a great snake, whose breath
Was fiery flame: which when I did behold
I fell a-weeping, and I cried, 'Sweet youth,
Tell me why, sad and sighing, thou dost rove
These pleasant realms? 1 pray thee speak me sooth
What is thy name?' He said, 'My name is Love.'
Then straight the first did turn himself to me
And cried, 'He lieth, for his name is Shame,
But I am Love, and was wont to be
Alone in this fair garden, till he came
Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill
The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.'
Then sighing, said the other, 'Have thy will,
I am the love that dare not speak its name.'

'I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamoured of danger.'

Jean Genet was born on December 19, 1910, the illegitimate son of a Parisian prostitute, and orphaned seven months later. At the age of ten, he was accused of stealing. Although innocent but having been described as a thief, the young boy resolved to be a thief. "Thus," wrote Genet, "I decisively repudiated a world that had repudiated me." At the age of thirteen, after being a ward of the state, he began a life of crime and adventure. From 15 to 18 Genet was in the Mettray penitentiary, a place of hard labour, where a code of love, honour, gesture and justice was enforced by the inmates, and where his sexual awakening occurred. He then joined the French Foreign Legion in Syria. He deserted and spent more periods in prison living by petty theft, begging, and homosexual prostitution. By the age of 23, Genet was living in Spain, sleeping with a one-armed pimp, lice-ridden and begging - a period which became the basis for The Thief's Journal, his record of a journey, in which no aspect of suffering, sordidness, and degradation was spared him.

Between 1930 and 1940, he wandered throughout Europe and he eventually, he found himself in Hitler's Germany where he felt strangely out of place. "I had a feeling of being in a camp of organized bandits. This is a nation of thieves, I felt. If I steal here, I accomplish no special act that could help me to realize myself. I merely obey the habitual order of things. I do not destroy it."

At age 32, while in prison, he started writing his first manuscript, Our Lady of the Flowers. It was discovered and destroyed. Genet rewrote it from memory. This handwritten manuscript was smuggled out of his cell and eventually came to the attention of Cocteau and Sartre, who lobbied vigorously for a pardon from a life-sentence. More than forty intellectuals and artists petitioned the French government on Genet's behalf. Ignoring traditional plot and psychology, Genet's work relies heavily on ritual, transformation, illusion and interchangeable identities. The homosexuals, prostitutes, thieves and outcasts are trapped in self-destructive circles. They express the despair and loneliness of a man caught in a maze of mirrors, trapped by an endless progression of images that are, in reality, merely his own distorted reflection. Genet's stature as an original and important writer was cemented with Sartre's study of him in the book 'Saint Genet'

After five novels, and then silence for several years, Genet re-emerged as a playwright. He wrote a number of theatrical pieces which further established his success, beginning with the production of The Maids, and followed by the other classic plays: The Blacks, The Balcony, and The Screens. Genet, believed the theatre should be an incendiary event, and was precise about how his works should be produced.

Genet wrote of the gay world, without apology or explanation, revealing beauty in the harsh world in which his characters lived loved and died. He deeply felt a sense of solidarity with thieves, and society's dispossessed. In later life, Genet championed the causes of the Black Panthers in the United States and Palestinian soldiers in Jordan and Lebanon. His final work, Prisoner of Love, is a record of his years spent with these two groups. He died death on April 15th 1986.

'But now I am afraid. The signs pursue me and I pursue them patiently. They are bent on destroying me. Didn't I see, on my way to court, seven sailors on the terrace of a cafe, questioning the stars through seven mugs of light beer as they sat around a table that perhaps turned; then, a messenger boy on a bicycle who was carrying a message from god to god, holding between his teeth, by the metal handle, a round, lighted lantern, the flame of which, as it reddened his face, also heated it? So pure a marvel that he was unaware of being a marvel. Circles and globes haunt me: oranges, Japanese billiard balls, Venetian lanterns, jugglers' hoops, the round ball of the goalkeeper who wears a jersey. I shall have to establish, to regulate, a whole internal astronomy.' --from 'Our Lady of the Flowers'

Written and directed by Jean Genet in 1950, the short (28 minutes) film is the only example of Genet's own ideas put into images. This 'film poem' is an avant -garde erotic work and its lyrical evocation of Gay passion and romance is regarded as one of the most intensely physical films made. It is now available on DVD and is said to be the most famous gay short film in European history.

Approaching a prison, a warder's eye is caught by the strange sight of a bouquet of blossom being repeatedly swung from one barred cell window to another, each time failing to be grasped by an emerging hand. He goes to investigate, and peeping into a series of cells sees in each one a male prisoner masturbating. The warder's excited eye fixed on the mute dialogue between an agitated North African prisoner and his neighbour, a young, disinterested, tattooed convict. They communicate via the constraining cell wall, which in itself becomes the object of desire, tattooed and tearful, to be caressed, kissed, punched and pierced. The two men erotically exchange cigarette smoke through a straw in a hole in the wall. This sight fires the warder's chiaroscuro-lit fantasies of fucking another man, signalled by a hand reaching for a swinging blossom. Disturbed, the warder enters the older prisoner's cell and brutally thrashes him, initiating the prisoner's own daydream of a woodland romance with the young convict, who holds blossom in front of his fly. The warder leaves the cell, but returns to insert his gun into the mouth of the older prisoner. The warder leaves the prison, but looking back over his shoulder once again, sees the relentlessly swinging bouquet of blossom. He walks away and so doesn't see that the flowers are finally caught.

'Genet's imagination is essentialist, as is his homosexuality. In real life, he seeks the Seaman in every sailor, the Eternal in every pimp. In his reverie he bends his mind to justifying his quest. He generates each of his characters out of a higher Essence; he reduces the episode to being merely the manifest illustration of an eternal truth.'

Genet died in a hotel room of the same working class district in Paris where he'd been abandoned 75 years earlier. He is buried in Morocco.

``To be grateful for all life's blessings, . . . is the best condition for a happy life. A joke, a good meal, a fine spring day, a work of art, a human personality, a voice, a glance -- but this is not all. For there is another kind of gratitude . . . the feeling that makes us thankful for suffering, for the hard and heavy things of life, for the deepening of our natures which perhaps only suffering can bring.''

Thomas Mann was born to a merchant family in Lubeck, Germany. His father inherited a large family firm and was twice Mayor of the city. He had five brothers and sisters. His brother Heinrich Mann also became a playwright and novelist. Heinrich's novel 'Professor Unrath' was turned into the legendary Josef von Sternberg film 'The Blue Angel' with Marlene Dietrich. Soon after his birth, Mann's father died and the family then moved to Munich. At nineteen he worked for a insurance firm as a clerk and secretly wrote his first Novel 'Fallen'. He Went to Munich University to study art and literature and also worked for a German journal called "Simplicissimus". After living in Rome for a year he devoted his talents to writing. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 and left Germany in 1933 when Hitler rose to power. After five years in Switzerland he was encouraged by friends to move to Princeton, USA for two and a half years 1938-1941. He lectured in the University and gave public lectures on Goethe, Wagner, and Freud as well as courses on the German romantic movement and the European novel. He and Albert Einstein, who had been a friend in Germany, met frequently in each other's homes. Eventually Mann moved to California, where he remained until 1953 when he returned to Zurich in Switzerland where he lived until his death in 1955.

Thomas Mann was one of the most important novelists of the early 20th century. His books often pointed to the clash between the extrovert life of the bourgeois and that of the intellectual and the artist. He believed that genius led to decay and a fascination with death, just as Ashenbach sought true beauty through austere intellectual labour he is described as hitting sterile 'rock bottom' and once he realises his futility, death consumes him.

Mann's erotic attraction to the male sex is revealed in much of his work. In 1911, Thomas Mann vacationed in Venice and became very attracted to a fourteen-year-old Polish boy whom he saw and this became the novella 'Death in Venice'. In Tonio Kröger (1903), the homoerotic feelings of the young Tonio has for his friend Hans Hansen is used as a metaphor for being an outsider to the normal bourgeois life, yearning to belong to the 'blond and blue-eyed, the brightly living, the happy, those worthy of love, the ordinary people.' His diaries and letters, along with several essays and prose works, show the author's erotic attraction to handsome young men. In an essay Mann had defended homosexual poet August von Platen, claiming that he channelled his sexual desires into his art but admits that Platen may have bestowed some sensual love on 'unworthy boys.'. He also spoke of an affinity with the homosexual poet Walt Whitman and the 'spiritual love of comrades'. and 'the queerly sympathetic response one feels upon touching with one's own hand the naked flesh of the body,' but Mann himself withdrew from writing about obvious encounters of the flesh. He had however formed strong male relationship's. One such was the 'passionate love' for Paul Ehrenburg (who was 23 and Mann was 25) from around 1899 to 1903 and reportedly the last with Klaus Heuser the son of a family acquaintance in 1927 when Heuser was sixteen and this lasted for a few years. He had admitted to kissing the boy and it was obvious to his family that he was regularly noticed spying on the boy out of the corner of his eye and even had him stay with him. As usual many critics had denied this sexual attraction but publication of his diaries have now made such denials impossible.

Thomas's daughter Erika (1905-1969) was an actress and author and married Gustaf Grundgens an actor/director. Her second marriage was to W.H.Auden, although they never lived together as she only wanted an foreign passport. Mann's son Klaus (1906-49) was also a novelist/playwright and outwardly gay. He and his sister had a very strong love for each other. His novel 'Mephisto' 1936 was based on his sister's first husband's accommodation with the Nazis. This became a well known film in 1981. Klaus Mann's first novel 'The Pious Dance' 1925 describes the impoverished life of sexually ambiguous and lost youth in the gay underworld of the Weimar republic; an obvious challenge to the image of homosexuality and aestheticism as described in Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice'. He became a US citizen and committed suicide in 1949. Thomas Mann's second son Golo (1909-94) became a historian teacher and writer.

'Buddenbrooke' 1901, 'Death in Venice' 1912, 'Tristan' 1913, 'Tonio Kroger' 1914, 'Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man' 1916, 'The Magic Mountain' 1924, 'Children and Fools' 1928, 'Mario and the Magician' 1930, 'Joseph and his Brothers' 1934-44, 'Doctor Faustus' 1948, 'The Holy Sinner', 'The Black Swan' 1955, 'The Confessions of Felix Krull' Published after his death.

In my late teens I discovered Thomas Mann. Death in Venice, the movie, was released around this time and could have been the spark. However I soon read and re-read all of his novels. The Holy Sinner and Confessions of Felix Krull being my favourites.

If anything should be made into a film or an opera, it is .Thomas Mann's 'The Holy Sinner' Roughly it is his epic story of arch-sinfulness ending in triumph. A brother and sister of noble birth sleep together one evening. She has a child and enters a convent while he goes off to the crusades and is killed. The child is abandoned and then brought up in a monastery. He then sets off to prove his nobility, rescues a woman against invaders and sleeps with her - His Mother. Now he goes off to do penance on a rock. After some visions in Rome the Cardinals set off discover this hairy shape on the rock and he now becomes Pope. Eventually mother sets off to Rome to seek forgiveness for her exceptional sins. And hence the climactic greeting - "Father, husband and son!"

Born Tokyo 1925; Committed ritual suicide in 1970. I assume I have read everything this genius wrote (translated that is). Mishima was one of the writers of great beauty. Passages of perhaps the most dreadful events are clothed in such grace and style that one can do no more than weep. Amongst my particular favourites are 'Forbidden Colours' (the misogynistic masterpiece) and the epic four part 'The Sea of Fertility' The last manuscript of which he finished just before acting out the dreadful events with which he finished the novel. Life as art or art as life - I am not sure but he carried his extreme views to a climactic end. If you have never read this man, please explore the complete works and mirrored life of a great writer. The beautiful film 'Mishima, a life in four chapters' directed by Paul Schrader is a piece of art worth seeing for an overview of his life and work.

Born Brussels 1903; Died 1987. Her most well known novel 'Memoirs of Hadrian' is the love story of the Emperor Hadrian for the youth Antinous (who has a page on my history site). I have also been enthralled by 'Coup de Grace', 'That Mighty Sculptor, Time', 'Fires', 'The Abyss', 'Alexis', 'Two lives and a Dream', and her exceptional autobiography 'Dear Departed'. Yourcenar was no man's fool. She is one of the most intelligent writers I have read. In interviews she showed intolerance towards stupidity and the mundane and a steadiness of thought and opinion. Her prose possesses such great beauty in it's detail, strength and honesty, and can carry one into a world where nothing else exists. After his death she also wrote about one of her admirers 'Mishima' whom she only became aware of and admired, like most of us after his death. She called Death a friend.

Born Paris 1924. I discovered him about fifteen years ago, and he struck me as yet another writer of exceptional beauty and fascination. Apart from his novels, 'Four Wise men', 'The Golden Droplet', 'The Midnight Love Feast', 'Gemini' and 'The Fetishist' I found 'The Erl-King' Tournier's most extraordinary. A monster, around whose life the horrors of the rise and fall of Nazism revolved. From the voyeuristic photographer to the animal who kidnapped children to reinforce the dwindling numbers of the Hitler youth. A surreal novel of grand proportions - disturbing, compelling and award winning. It has been made into a stunning and gripping film 'The Ogre directed by Volker Schlondorff.

Born in London, where her father was a doctor. She was educated at Clifton High School Bristol. She went to Oxford to be a teacher, trained for three years as a nurse, and wrote her first published novel, Promise of Love. She wrote during off-duty time in World War II. Return to Night, received the MGM award. She moved to South Africa and travelled much in Africa. It was her travels in Greece that produced her great historical reconstructions of ancient Greece. The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die, The Bull from the Sea, The Mask of Apollo, Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, and The Praise Singer. Apart from her trilogy on Alexander she has also written a biography of Alexander the Great, The Nature of Alexander. She died in 1983

Shaw once said 'I've posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin's Thinker, but I merely looked constipated'

Shaw's sexuality, has been a topic of speculation and although purporting to be a feminist he has been accused of being a hypocrite He did have a close relationship with the actor and playwright Harley Granville Barker.

'Leaves of Grass' is one of the most extraordinary and beautiful things I have read.

Dear son, how I wish you could come in now, even if but for an hour & take off your coat, & sit on my lap--"