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This essay examines Jean Cocteau's influence on Jean Genet's career as a dramatist. After initially meeting Genet in 1943, Cocteau encouraged his young acolyte to experiment with various genres, including film and theatre. Cocteau was also influential in establishing Genet's reputation among the Parisian literati, many of whom provided Genet with publishing opportunities and favorably reviewed his early plays in the press.
One of the enigmas of twentieth-century theatre history is Jean Cocteau's discovery of Jean Genet, which ultimately led to the advent of Genet's theatre. With Cocteau as Genet's mentor, Genet experimented with various art forms, eventually finding his niche in the theatre. How the Genet-Cocteau relationship evolved has been speculated upon for nearly fifty years. Genet, in his efforts to deceive the public by creating his own legend that defied truth, has done little to clarify his relationship with Cocteau.1 This essay separates fact from fiction and incorporates new information about Genet's life in the 1940s to establish how he penetrated Cocteau's coterie and how their rapport was responsible for Genet's theatrical ventures.
There have been several misleading anecdotes with regard to how Genet's literary talents became known to Cocteau. One persistent story claims that Olga Barbezat, née Kéchélievitch, imprisoned by the Nazis for her activities in the French Resistance, met Genet in La Santé prison, where Genet was incarcerated, and, impressed with his writing, showed it to her fiancé, L'Arbalète publisher Marc Barbezat. However, Genet's Lettres à Olga et Marc Barbezat clearly refutes the tale, documenting that he knew Marc Barbezat in 1943, before Olga was arrested by the Gestapo on 10 February 1944 (7-10). Even noted Genet scholar Richard N. Coe had postulated that Olga may have met Genet in La Santé, for she "used to do prison-visiting" (Vision 103). Furthermore, the story is spurious because Harry E. Stewart and Rob Roy McGregor, who perused official French prison records, have concluded that Genet was not in La Santé prison in 1944 but was instead transferred to the Camp des Tourelles at the end of December 1943 and was not released until March 1944 (138). This fact is corroborated by Albert Dichy and Pascal Fouché, who scrutinized archives at the Bibliothèque de Littérature Française Contemporaine to verify Genet's internment at...