The Boa Deconstructor

"Always be on the alert wherever you hear 'Discourse', because that's Them..."

- Tarpley on the Post-Modernist Deconstructionist Agenda

"It is always possible to excuse any guilt, because the experience exists simultaneously as fictional discourse and as empirical event and it is never possible to decide which one of the two possibilities is the right one. The indecision makes it possible to excuse the bleakest of crimes."

- Prof. Paul De Man,

(The "Boa De-Constructor")

Yale University English Dept.

Allegories of Reading

"The Memory Cheats."

- John Nathan-Turner

Paul de Man: The Plot Thickens

By David Lehman;

Published: May 24, 1992

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ONE day last fall, a little more than six months after my book "Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man" was published, I received a letter announcing the existence of a cache of documents that flesh out the story of Paul de Man's sojourn at Bard College. De Man -- the deconstructionist guru and Yale University eminence who was revealed in 1987, four years after his death at the age of 64, to have written nearly 200 articles for Nazi-controlled newspapers in his native Belgium during World War II -- taught at Bard from 1949 to 1951. It was at this small progressive college in the Hudson Valley, where de Man held (and lost) his first teaching job in the United States, that he accomplished the crucial final stage in the transformation of his personal history: he abandoned his European past and started a new family -- and a new American identity -- by marrying one of his students without first obtaining a divorce from his wife. "A pity I did not know of your project on de Man and his circle before it was published," wrote Artine Artinian. "I would have provided you with powerful ammunition on his two years at Bard."

Now 84 years old, a longtime resident of Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Artinian had cut a flamboyant figure on the Bard College campus from the time he joined its faculty in 1935 until his retirement 29 years later. A pipe-smoking, cape-wearing, Bulgarian-born Armenian professor of French with a particular interest in Guy de Maupassant, he had been instrumental in hiring de Man at Bard for the academic year beginning September 1949. Mr. Artinian had acted largely on the strength of a recommendation that he received from the novelist Mary McCarthy, who had met de Man at Dwight Macdonald's apartment on East 10th Street in New York City the previous fall.

But relations between Mr. Artinian and de Man soon soured. Mr. Artinian accused de Man of petty thievery and chicanery -- and saw to it that he lost his Bard appointment. "As chairman of the division [ of languages and literature ] , I was primarily responsible for his dismissal on grounds of unscrupulous behavior," Mr. Artinian wrote. Later, I asked him to elaborate. De Man was "an unspeakable cad," Mr. Artinian declared. It should be known that he "got kicked out of his first teaching job." He was "a recidivist of the worst kind," who left behind a trail of bad debts, bouncing checks and landlords left in the lurch. When the heat was on, he "lied about everything."

Mr. Artinian, an inveterate collector, told me he still kept "documents that would make your hair rise on your head." There was an anguished letter from de Man's first wife, Anaide (or Anne) de Man, in Argentina in 1951. There was also a handwritten six-page letter from Mary McCarthy analyzing de Man's character. From these and other pages it would be possible to piece together the whole chronology of de Man's bigamous double life. The story of Paul de Man at Bard College was one of cynical opportunism and old-fashioned villainy. Mr. Artinian had no trouble seeing the connection, the continuity in character, between the erstwhile Belgian collaborator and the grand hierophant of deconstruction.

Mr. Artinian himself seemed to spring from "The Groves of Academe" (1952), Mary McCarthy's sharply satirical novel set in an artsy, hip, experimental college in the early years of the cold war -- a time when such campuses were jittery with McCarthyism (that is, the kind practiced by Senator Joseph McCarthy). Mary McCarthy had taught at Bard a few years before she referred de Man to her former colleagues. She retained, as she put it when speaking to Mr. Artinian, a " tendresse " for the place. Bard College became Jocelyn College in "The Groves of Academe," and Mr. Artinian turned into an entertaining minor character named Aristide (the Just) Poncy, "head of the Languages department of the Literature and Languages Division."

McCarthy describes Aristide as a "good and innocent man." During the course of the novel, Poncy wins a Fulbright fellowship, which requires him to hire a replacement and to let out his house, optimally to the same person. McCarthy also tells us that Aristide was a genial pipe smoker to whom "catastrophic" events occurred with quiet regularity whenever he conducted student groups on summer trips abroad. "As he sat sipping his vermouth and introducing himself to tourists at the Flore or the Deux Magots," writes McCarthy, "the boys and girls under his guidance were being robbed, eloping to Italy, losing their passports, slipping off to Monte Carlo, seeking out an abortionist . . . while he took out his watch and wondered why they were late in meeting him for the expedition to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Returning home, usually minus one student at the very least, he always deprecated what had happened, remarking that there had been 'a little mix-up' or that the Metro was confusing to foreigners."

Mr. Artinian cheerfully verified Mary McCarthy's take on him in "The Groves of Academe." "Aristide is based about 75 percent on my experiences," he told me. I brought up the paragraph about what would happen when Aristide took students to Paris. He shrugged. "Some of the details are true. One student did get lost on the way home."

In June 1949, Mr. Artinian was planning to spend the coming academic year in France on a Fulbright fellowship. The college needed to find someone to take his place, and Mr. Artinian would have a large say on who that someone would be. At this opportune moment came Mary McCarthy's letter recommending a young Belgian intellectual in need of a teaching position. The young man was "very much au courant in literature and also in politics," she wrote to Mr. Artinian on June 9, 1949. He was "sensitive, intelligent, cultivated, modest, straightforward." What was more, he had "a genuine superiority of mind and spirit that should mean a great deal in the Bard teaching system." De Man got the job. He also simultaneously earned a cameo appearance in "The Groves of Academe." In the chapter entitled "Ancient History," McCarthy mentions that Aristide Poncy had a "prejudice (unconscious) against the French of Paris or even that of Marseilles," and she offers a list of non-Frenchmen he has hired as colleagues or assistants. At the top of the list is "a Belgian."

IN the summer of 1949, de Man spent his two-week summer vacation as a guest of McCarthy and her third husband, Bowden Broadwater, in their country house in Portsmouth, R.I. De Man did not conceal his marital status from his hosts. On the contrary, he spoke openly about wanting to bring his wife and children from Buenos Aires, where they had joined relatives after the end of the war, and to settle them somewhere not too far from New York. He made a point of mentioning his young family to Mr. Artinian as well. "We had a six-room house," Mr. Artinian recalled, "and the reason we rented it to de Man when we went to Europe on my Fulbright is that he said he needed a big house, since he expected to be joined by his wife and three sons."

Mr. Artinian said the speed with which de Man discarded that family took his breath away. The academic year began in September. De Man was to teach Mr. Artinian's courses, advise Mr. Artinian's advisees, and move into Mr. Artinian's house. By December, de Man had married one of the advisees, a French major named Patricia Kelley, and when the first Mrs. de Man turned up with her three young boys, Hendrik, Robert and Marc, in the spring of 1950, Patricia de Man was pregnant.

Anne de Man wrote to Mr. Artinian a year later, pleading for his help. She was sorry to disturb him, a stranger, but she was a desperate woman, anxious for information about the fate and whereabouts of her husband. Hers was a "truly tragic" predicament: she was enduring "the destruction of my home and of the happiness of my children."

She told of arriving with her three sons in New York and facing "an unforeseen fait accompli : my husband compelled me to agree to a separation, and forced me to consent to a divorce." She agreed to the terms he proposed, feeling she had no choice in the matter and trusting him to make good on his "financial commitments" for the support of the children; he signed a document to that effect in the presence of a notary.

But the check never came. "For the past 11 months," wrote Anne de Man in May 1951, "I have lived in the most utter despair. I have had no news concerning my divorce. I have received no financial assistance for myself or my children, and no news of my husband. I have no knowledge of the status of my eldest son, who remained with him." Anne de Man was broke in a foreign country, suffering from a respiratory ailment, with her own elderly parents to support in addition to her two youngest sons "abandoned three years ago by their father, who in all this time has sent not a single dollar."

Anne de Man's tale of woe took Mr. Artinian by surprise. "Since your husband remarried one assumed that he had first been divorced," he wrote back. He wished that he could help her, and promised to find out what he could, but at that moment he could not provide the information she wanted. De Man, as guarded and secretive as ever, had volunteered little about his personal life, and there was no compelling reason to credit anything he might now say. "The life of Paul de Man is an impenetrable enigma, his actions incomprehensible and for me personally extremely painful," Mr. Artinian wrote to Anne de Man.

AT this point, Mr. Artinian was prepared to believe the worst. De Man had paid him rent for only two months while owing for 10 -- a considerable annoyance to Mr. Artinian, for "we were poor and needed the money." When the rent checks stopped coming, Mr. Artinian -- in France on his Fulbright -- asked a colleague in the German department to have a word with de Man, who hastily assured him that he had just that day taken care of everything. Still no check arrived. "Either he is telling fibs or he is so absent-minded or unsettled that he doesn't know what he is doing," the colleague remarked.

When Mr. Artinian, his wife, and their three children finally returned from Europe in August 1950, the condition of their house stunned them. De Man and his young bride, in their hurried retreat, had left the Persian rug in the living room "so dirty it was almost unrecognizable." The locked bookcases had been forced, and books were missing, as were a number of other household things, which Mr. Artinian and his wife itemized. They discovered a letter from an aggrieved landlady in Paris that de Man had left behind when he cleared out of the place. The letter-writer implores de Man to "have the decency to pay the rent that you owe." His attitude toward leases and legal obligations seems to have been the same on both sides of the Atlantic.

Mr. Artinian complained to college authorities, and it was enough to cost de Man his job; in December 1950 he was notified that his contract would not be renewed beyond the current academic year. "That was our polite way of saying he was fired," said Mr. Artinian.

Mary McCarthy had been out of touch with her old friend for almost a year when she wrote to Mr. Artinian in January 1951, asking him to recommend her for a Fulbright fellowship. He agreed but felt she ought to know that de Man -- for whom her recommendation had been decisive -- was being fired. He told her that de Man had told lies and had not paid the rent; he did not say what the lies were, and he said nothing at all about de Man's family life. Mr. Artinian's complaint provoked McCarthy to write, by return post, an extraordinarily shrewd assessment of de Man.

"I CAN'T yet think that he's a really bad person, except as an adolescent is bad, e.g., given to lying, evasion, fantasy, greed, possibly even theft -- in short plastic and formless, with an intelligence that's outdistanced his morals," McCarthy wrote. "I still think he expected to pay the rent." She had liked de Man, and could not help feeling sorry for him, "a person who leaves so many points of no return behind him." As her own house guest he had been "very cheerful, adaptive, helpful with the dishes and the scythe." To be sure, "there were one or two little things that seemed odd, discrepancies in his stories -- I always thought there was something funny about the wife and the children. Nothing enough, though, to cause real uneasiness."

Now the rumors of scandal at Bard had made McCarthy "wonder more concretely about him." Pleading for "at least one lurid detail" -- "I should feel at rest if I knew something definite that did happen" -- McCarthy fires off her queries: "Is he remarried, has the girl money, was that the point, what about his first wife, and what were the lies he told?"

For McCarthy de Man was a character notable for his vagueness, for the disconcerting "fluidity" of his social relations. Like a confidence man he had his modus operandi: "So far as I can reconstruct his story now, everyone has had the same experience with him -- that is, he has come more or less sponsored by a first friend, become an intimate or regular guest of the second household, asked finally for a recommendation of some third sort (employer, lawyer, etc.) and then disappeared, leaving an eddy of slight wonder behind him."

This experience was, McCarthy wrote, not only her own but that of her fellow New York intellectuals, Harold Rosenberg and Dwight Macdonald, as well. "Something, rather funny, that Rosenberg and I both noticed, belatedly, was that he always agreed with us, which made us slightly suspicious -- was this why we had thought him intelligent?" In retrospect, she wondered whether de Man had "pinched" the expensive books he brought her as gifts.

De Man's last public act at Bard College was to deliver a lecture in June 1951 entitled "Morality of Literature." Here, from the Bard student newspaper, is one listener's earnest attempt to state the gist of de Man's argument: "Like the esthetic act moral systems are wasteful in that they acquire to spend. Moral systems are by their very nature destructive. They are unserious in that they are liable to change, and in order to certify themselves are forced to travel to their limit expending energy value on the way. Upon arriving at their limit moral systems decay and become stagnant. Therefore, history is not continuous, but a discrete system in that there must be a rejection of the past in order to invent the validity of the different present."

With this valedictory lecture, de Man proceeded with his own rejection of the past and his invention of the present. Ignoring the pleas of Anne de Man, he sent her neither money nor messages for the children. In August 1951 he appeared at the Manhattan offices of a law firm that a surrogate for Anne de Man had retained on her behalf, and told a junior associate of the firm that he had been in an accident, had been hospitalized and had no money. He had, however, landed a job at Columbia University for the fall -- he said -- and would start making payments to Anne immediately thereafter in accordance with the schedule he and she had previously devised.

All lies and broken promises; de Man promptly disappeared. By November 1951, friends of Anne de Man were frantically searching for her wayward husband. One such friend was an ex-G.I. named David Braybrooke, who had met the de Mans in Belgium, where he had been stationed at the end of the war. Mr. Braybrooke, a professor of English at Hobart College and later at Cornell University, was outraged by de Man's behavior. "Unfortunately," he wrote to Mr. Artinian, "there is no money to hire a detective and track de Man down." Still, perhaps there was something he could do to comfort Anne. Perhaps, if he could find out where her eldest son was living, he could encourage the boy to write to her. "It does seem quite an unnecessary cruelty that the boy should either not be allowed or not be encouraged to write to his mother," Mr. Braybrooke wrote.

Hendrik, the eldest son, was 9 years old when he said goodbye to his mother and brothers, not to see them again for many years. He stayed with his father for a few months, and then was shipped off to be raised by Patricia de Man's mother and her second husband, a man named Woods, who lived in Alexandria, Va. In 1953, at the age of 12, Hendrik was formally adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Woods. The boy was told at this time that Paul de Man was not his real father -- a false declaration made to expedite the adoption process. What made it necessary was the fact that Hendrik's birth in 1941 was illegitimate; his birth certificate listed Gilbert Jaeger, Anne de Man's first husband, as the boy's father.

Despite all the confusion about his paternity -- added to the traumas of dislocation and separation -- Hendrik Woods says that he never doubted who his father was. Mr. Woods is a dead ringer for his late papa, only darker of complexion. When I met with him last year he spoke without resentment of his father. "My mother and brothers like to put me in the position of victim, the one who suffered the most, but it wasn't true," he said. The United States represented hope. To come here was the most wonderful thing that could happen -- even if it meant an estrangement from mother and brothers. The paternal abandonment had been much rougher on the others, left behind in South America.

ALONE among the three Belgian-born sons of Paul de Man, Hendrik attended the memorial service for his father at Yale in 1984. He said he admired his father ("a very kindly and gentle man"), but reacted with de Manian skepticism to those disciples who regarded him as a saint. "My father had a way of generating expectations in others, so when he did something untoward, the disillusionment or anger was that much greater. That was the pattern of his life."

I offered to show him Mary McCarthy's letter, but Mr. Woods did not have his reading glasses and asked me to read it aloud. When I finished, he smiled broadly. "My father reminds me sometimes of Felix Krull," said Paul de Man's eldest son. He was referring to the title character of Thomas Mann's novel "The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man." There was one story in that book that he, Hendrik Woods, had always especially liked. It occurs in the opening chapter. The narrator is talking about his father, the maker of a now discontinued brand of champagne. The bottles were magnificent. "Unfortunately," says the narrator, "it appears that the quality of the wine was not entirely commensurate with the splendor of its coiffure." When one had taken notice of the handsome label, the gleaming silver foil and the round seal suspended from the gold cord, the fact remained that the stuff was "simply poison." This essay is adapted from the afterword to the paperback edition of "Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man," to be published next month by Poseidon Press.

Photos: Paul de Man conducting a seminar at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., in 1951. (David Brooks)(pg. 18);Artine Artinian in 1949. (pg. 19)

David Lehman's recent books include "Operation Memory," a book of poems, and the forthcoming "The Line Forms Here," a collection of essays.