OPINION:
THE DOUBLE LIFE OF PAUL DE MAN
By Evelyn Barish
Liveright, $35, 534 pages, illustrated
The posthumous tumble of stellar literary critic Paul de Man, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale at the time of his death in 1983, was a uniquely shocking event in the academy, a personal scandal with immediate ramifications.
In the late 1980s, it became known that far from being the refugee scholar Belgian-born De Man was widely assumed to be, he had spent World War II in his native Nazi-occupied land penning vile screeds, at least one openly anti-Semitic, in collaborating publications. However, what made this even more piquant was the professorial credo that had made him so famous in his reinvented life: deconstruction.
It just somehow seemed so fitting — and so obvious after the fact anyway — that the arbiter of a “philosophy” that denied the very existence of truth, should himself have been such a phony. Once the lid was off, shocking revelations came thick and fast.
Even so, there are new ones revealed in Evelyn Barish’s lengthy, prodigiously researched account of De Man’s life that shows it to be a veritable house of cards, his credentials an elaborately constructed Potemkin village. She presents instance after instance of his chicanery and outright criminality — fraud, forgery, bigamy, thieving — and lying on a scale so massive and habitual that the only thing more remarkable than its extent is its lifelong success.
Much that came his way did so by sleight of hand, achieved by the skin of his teeth. Not just in academe, either: His passport and visa status and how he duped the Immigration and Naturalization Service, among others, are detailed here.
This “brilliant” scholar failed his qualifying exams as a graduate student at Harvard, and when he retook them, passed with mediocre grades. His doctoral dissertation was endlessly delayed.
However, none of this prevented prestigious support and generous stipends. Yale was so keen to recruit him to their Department of Comparative Literature that two of its senior faculty cobbled together a collection of his essays and arranged for them to be published.
The university had a supposedly inflexible requirement that a full professor should have published a book, but this eagerly sought prodigy had never done so; hence, the extraordinary efforts on his behalf.
What makes Ms. Barish’s account of all this so fascinating is not just the unmasking of a high-level confidence trickster, but what it shows about the hothouse academic world. As presented here, all this is not a testament to loyalty, but rather to inflexible stubbornness and egotism directed toward someone anointed one of the elect.
Ms. Barish has rich rifts loaded with ore for her material, and she makes her case with energy and dedication. However, there are problems with her book. It is flabby and repetitive: the story of his Yale appointment is a doozy and a telling climax to his rascally career, but does it really have to recur so much?
She can be sloppy and inaccurate. She repeatedly identifies the Normandie as his favorite ship, captions a photograph of him as taken on it in 1964. Quite a trick since it was destroyed by fire during World War II, before he ever left Europe.
There are lots of footnotes, many of them packed with fascinating material, but sometimes the speculative is bolstered with something more akin to yet more speculation than proof.
A case in point is her highly colored ruminations on whether De Man had an affair, possibly leading to a pregnancy and miscarriage, with novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, who helped him get a position at Bard College early on. The text has far too much of the conditional — and not just in its tense.
Moreover, why, despite those repetitive flashes forward, basically end the biography with the appointment to Cornell nearly a quarter-century before De Man’s death, leaving his meteoric rise to be telescoped into a few pages at the end?
The million-dollar question is, of course, how De Man managed to pull this off, something that clearly intrigues Ms. Barish, who knew him somewhat. Over and over again, she refers to his mesmerizing presence, his commanding presence, his good looks and all around charisma.
Well, not to pat myself overly on the back, on the one occasion in the mid-1970s when I heard him lecture and talked to him for a few minutes afterwards, I came away distinctly unimpressed — both by his intellect, which seemed to me slippery and deliberately obfuscatory, and, although he was very pleasant toward me and about the mutual friends and colleagues we discussed, by the man himself.
There was something furtive and sinister about him, and so, all those years later, when the storm of revelations broke, I was a little less astonished than others. What did amaze and appall me was the dedication with which his cronies continued to defend him and to excuse as much as possible what he had done.
I wish Ms. Barish had not wasted so much of her time on speculation and had been able to deliver better answers to the hard questions posed by the shocking life and career of Paul de Man.
Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.