(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
What are you reading? February 14, 2025 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-14
Genet: A Biography by Edmund White - So this reading took me through all of the complications of the publishing of Genet’s first book, Our Lady of the Flowers, in 1942. Jean Cocteau takes over the bio, necessarily, as Cocteau was the first person to read what was to become Genet’s first novel and because of the Cocteau material, I learned about people like Panama Al Brown.
I also read about Genet’s lost play, Héliogabale, a treatment of the “infamous” (and apparently trans?) 3rd century AD Roman emperor Elagabalus only...the play is no longer lost and it was published in France last year by Gallimard.
A lost play by Jean Genet that was found and published in France in April 2024.
Translated from the French:
Here is, more than eighty years later, the staging of the last hours of Heliogabalus, a murdered young Roman prince, as Genet dreamed and meditated on them. Through this solar figure, highly transgressive and sacrificial, to which Antonin Artaud had devoted a flamboyant essay in 1934, Genet addresses the themes that are dear to him, in the rules of the art but by letting a well-kept lyricism surface: transvestism and homosexuality, holiness through decay, beauty through abjection. A reverse of the social world where the author, an apprentice playwright, already intends to find his truths, situate his future work and invent his own legend.
Oh. My. Gawwwwwwwwwwwwwd! A lost play by one of my favorite authors about the last days of the Roman Emperor Elagabalus has been found and published?!?!!!!!!
I could find no hint of an English translation being done. I found a book review at TLS ($$$$$$$$$...and I am out of free articles). I also found a description at some sort of French site that I was able to translate.
www.francetvinfo.fr/…
On the other hand, previously unknown, the four-act drama Heliogabal was mainly written at Fresnes prison in 1942, at the same time, among others, as his first novel, Notre-Dame des Fleurs. Incarcerated for stealing books, Genet, 31, then experienced the most long period of his life as a writer, which was just beginning. Once released, he had the play read to a few relatives and Jean Marais, "who had been offered the title role", but who "was hardly enthusiastic", according to the introduction signed by François Rouget, professor at Queen's University in Kingston (Canada). Jean Cocteau read it too. Jean Genet never managed to find him a publisher. He left the manuscript to Cocteau's secretary, who sold it to a specialized bookseller in the 1950s. Then a Harvard University library, the Houghton Library, bought it in 1983, three years before Genet's death. That's where François Rouget found him. Heliogabalus stages the last days of the Roman emperor so nicknamed, who was murdered around the age of 19, in the year 222.
Are there a few places in Chicago that might have this? I might have to make a few calls.
I am now obsessed with finding that book.
The Afro-American Press and Its Editors. Compiled by I. Garland Penn -
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/14/2303588/-What-are-you-reading-February-14-2025?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=community_groups_Readers+and+Book+Lovers&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
