ARCHIVES 2014 / La Chaste Vie de Jean Genet

The title of the long poem Lydie Dattas devotes to her friend is a play on the image that is often attributed to the author of The Miracle of the Rose. Used by some to comment on the entirety of Jean Genet's life and work, this too simplistic reputation deprives him of his complexity. The poetess Lydie Dattas chooses to show that complexity, and thus the intricate beauty of the man she knew. Under the name of Rosalie, she appears at the end of a life she tells with light and poetry. The beginnings in the snow, the flights through the fields, the rocks of the Mettray Penal Colony, the roses, too, everywhere; everything is revisited through her eyes, she who knows the influence of a mother, the importance of a child. If this book is written with the precision and exactitude of a biography, the friendship that Jean Genet and Lydie Dattas shared shows through not through indulgence or nostalgia, but through secrecy. False friends say everything, use everything they know to prove that they loved, that they were there. True friends don't need to pretend. So Lydie Dattas, in addition to hiding behind a fake name, keeps her affection for Genet to herself, freeing him of the weight of her gaze. The portrait appears like unsigned and all the more remarkable for it. Without appearing to guide them, Lydie Dattas leads her reader in a voyage of discovery, closer to a simple truth, without any demands.

Lydie Dattas is twenty when her poems are discovered by the poet Jean Grosjean, who works as a reader for Gallimard. The letters they start exchanging eventually lead to the publication in 1970 by Mercure de France of a first book, Noone. It is only in 1999 that Lydie Dattas relates her first meeting with poetry and light when, only three years old, having fallen sick, she was entrusted to the care of a nun whose kindness saved her (The Experience of Kindness). The daughter of a virtuoso organist, she starts wondering very early about the absence of women in the history of art. She does, however, have a very clear vision of what a great actress is, as her mother is a tragedian. In La Foudre (Lightning), published in 2011, she paints the portrait of her first family, that of her childhood, and of the adoptive gipsy family she chose for herself, the family of the lion tamer Alexandre Romanès, with whom she founded the Lyida Romanès circus. After their break-up, she published Les Amants lumineux (The Luminous Lovers) and Le Livre des anges (The Book of Angels), before starting work on La Chaste vie de Jean Genet. Published in 2006, this isn't the first book the famous author prompted her to write. At the very start of their long friendship, in 1977, his taunts led to her writing a cutting and deep poem, La Nuit spirituelle (The Spiritual Night), a powerful response which started as a letter to Genet and ended up being its own book.

Marion Canelas, April 2014