The Double Life of Paul De Man

November 18, 2013
Paul de Man, a highly respected comparative literature professor whose critical theories laid the foundations for deconstructionism, fell from grace five years after his death in 1983 when it was discovered that he collaborated with the Nazis during WWII and wrote an anti-Semitic article for the Belgian newspaper Le Soir (volé). In this engrossing, meticulously researched biography, Barish (Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy) reconstructs the events of de Man’s life, contextualizing his duplicity. Two major influences were his closed-lip family and his uncle, Henri de Man, a prominent socialist who, following the Nazi occupation of Belgium in 1940, openly advocated collaboration. Without justifying his behavior, Barish, in her vivid recreation of life in war-time Brussels, shows how de Man and many of his colleagues saw writing propaganda as an opportunity for literary advancement, with Germany’s triumph a foregone conclusion. The picture that emerges is that of a charismatic and dishonest opportunist who, after embezzling funds from a publishing house he founded, fled to America and reinvented himself as an academic. Barish lets the facts speak for themselves, but leaves no doubt that a “philosophy of language” built on the innate instability of words and futility of communication provided de Man with an appropriate means for obscuring his past. 8 pages of photos. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Inc.

January 1, 2014
A riveting biography of master confidence man Paul de Man (1919-1983), manipulator of the facts and influential literary instructor--a character both preposterous and irresistible. Barish (English/City Univ. of New York Graduate Center; Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy, 1989) leaves de Man's deconstructionist contradictions mostly off to the side and concentrates on the wildly chameleonic personality and the upbringing of this charismatic character who eluded justice from Nazi-occupied Belgium and later fabricated his academic reputation at Harvard and elsewhere by wily connections and sheer boldness. The tale of de Man is not only the tangled trajectory of a psychically scarred young man from a deeply problematic family who saw an opportunity to advance himself through Nazi collaboration, but also the story of the striking gullibility of an American elitist intellectual milieu that never questioned his credentials due to its own postwar sense of inferiority compared to European literature. Barish gets underneath the objectionable journalistic pieces de Man wrote during the war and his skein of publishing embezzlements in Brussels by exploring the pattern of secrecy and shame in his own upper-middle-class Antwerp family: a depressed mother who hanged herself; a troubled older brother who was killed by an oncoming train; an uncle who was a high-ranking minister in Belgian government, advocating appeasement and anti-Semitism and whom Paul highly revered and passed off later as his father. De Man became an "intellectual entrepreneur," autodidact, university dropout and superb bluffer who saw his chance to "take a place" in the new Nazi order. While his collaborationist colleagues were imprisoned after the war, de Man fled to the United States. His entry into intellectual circles, thanks to Mary McCarthy and Henry Kissinger, among others, allowed him immunity and a disguise as he forged a brilliant academic career. An extraordinary story of a complex personality presented with a wise dose of irony and respect.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2014

Paul de Man (1919-83), a Belgian journalist who had worked for the Nazis, found himself in May 1948 in New York working in a bookshop. He made influential friends, including Mary McCarthy, took a job at Bard College, entered graduate school at Harvard (although he lacked an undergraduate degree), took a job at Cornell, and won a chair in literature at Yale. With Jacques Derrida, he became known as the inventor of "deconstruction." The intellectual world shuddered when de Man's wartime journalism first emerged. Now Barish (English, CUNY Graduate Ctr., Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy) reports a history of criminal financial fraud in Belgium and raises deeply troubling questions about the American academic world. She even speculates about Harvard doctoral examinations. De Man came from a Europe weary from two world wars, where it seemed to some that history could not be made to make sense and that the great narratives like those of the believers in progress were finished. Some, such as de Man, decided that the best understanding of language undermined claims to universal moral truth and that the Platonic eternal form of the good was the ultimate delusion. VERDICT A gripping, careful--and terrifying--narrative.--Leslie Armour, Dominican Univ. Coll., Ottawa

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 15, 2013
When Mary McCarthy recommended the young Paul de Man for a position at Bard College in 1949, she characterized him as intelligent, cultivated, modest, and straightforward. In this stunning biography, Barish exposes a man who devoted his remarkable intelligence and cultural knowledge to constructing a reputation so deviously deceptive that it completely fooled McCarthy and many others. With its posthumous 1988 discovery, an anti-Semitic wartime article by de Man scandalized the academic world. Barish probes beyond that article, adducing evidence that de Man served as an executive in Nazi publishing, then exploited his postwar circumstances to embezzle from his own company, violate immigration laws, falsify his academic record, contract a bigamous marriage, and abandon his children. In the indictment Barish proffers, de Man also bent, even flouted, the policies of the prestigious universities where he made his degree. Readers will marvel at how successfully de Man hid his misdeeds behind the luminous persona of a brilliant critical theorist, repeatedly using the plausibility of past lies to leverage yet larger new prevarications. Barish indeed raises unsettling questions about the self-serving congruence between de Man's egregious duplicity and his influential literary theory of deconstruction, premised on radical skepticism about the very possibility of truth. An astonishing expos'.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)