Lehman and Brooks Slug it Out Over Paul de Man in the New York Review of Books

Here is David Lehman's response to Peter Brooks' review of The Strange Case of Paul de Man which ran on April 3, 2014. Lehman's letter appears in the May 8, 2014 issue of the NYRB.

To the Editors:

Evelyn Barish’s biography of Paul de Man has its faults, but she deserves a better—and more nearly disinterested—review than the despicable treatment she suffers at the hands of de Man’s old crony Peter Brooks [“The Strange Case of Paul de Man,” NYR, April 3].

Brooks insinuates that Barish’s book found its inspiration in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, a novel (later adapted into a movie) about an amoral confidence man. He lays this conceit at Barish’s door, but Barish is writing not about a fictional character but about a flesh-and-blood personage. As she shows (and as others of us have pointed out and documented over the years), de Man was a cheat, a liar, a forger, a thief, a bigamist, a cad, a swindler, a moocher, not to mention an enthusiastic Nazi propagandist, whether out of conviction or opportunism. Barish is writing about Paul de Man; by substituting “Mr. Ripley”—e.g., “but to Barish, it is all Mr. Ripley” and “she is stuck with her Mr. Ripley conceit”—Brooks is undertaking a sleight of hand that should fool no one.

At one point Brooks remarks that “one could do a review of Barish’s footnotes.” Yes, that is the deconstructive way: ignore the body of the text in favor of a peripheral element. But if Barish is vulnerable on some of her sources, what are we to make of Brooks’s belated introduction of himself into his review?

He tells us that when the de Man scandal broke in the late 1980s, he—an admitted friend and admirer of the deceased de Man—heard from his former Harvard professor, Harry Levin, to the effect that de Man “had made a ‘clean breast’ to him and [his colleague] Professor Renato Poggioli concerning his [de Man’s] past” when, in 1955, a letter arrived from Belgium denouncing de Man for his disgraceful activities.

Why has Brooks not revealed this information before? Could it be that the “clean breast” was the letter to Harvard de Man crafted that has been quoted and analyzed and that is aptly characterized as a tissue of lies, evasions, half-truths, and ambiguous locutions? Why should we credit what Brooks says Levin wrote to him? Does he not realize that it is in Levin’s interest to claim that de Man had cleaned his breast? After all, the stunning disclosures reflected very badly on Levin and his associates, who overlooked the collaborationism, anti-Semitism, and all the rest, and let de Man assume his place in that most elite of intellectual clubs, the Harvard Society of Fellows?

Barish gives de Man the benefit of the doubt wherever she can and risks the opinion that de Man was not a vehement anti-Semite but rather “one of the lukewarm, whom Dante condemned to sit eternally at the gates of Hell, men without principles or convictions who compromised with evil.” Brooks’s conclusion: “It would seem a general principle of the biographical art that one should avoid assigning positions in Hell to one’s subjects.”

To this typically haughty ex cathedra pronouncement I would respond: it would seem a general principle of the book reviewer’s craft to summarize accurately the contents of the book under review and not to use the occasion as the pretext for an apologia. Readers of Brooks’s review may well come away with the opinion that the biographer is the criminal for not recognizing that de Man’s is, in Brooks’s words, “a story of remarkable survival and success following the chaos of war, occupation, postwar migration, and moments of financial desperation.”

Those of us who lost family in the Holocaust have the right to insist that actions freely undertaken have consequences; that unquestioned brilliance of intellect does not justify misdeeds of the magnitude of de Man’s; and that special pleading in the face of overwhelming evidence is a species of dishonesty. No one forced de Man to write anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi articles—he did it on his own, and whether out of conviction or opportunism is beside the point.

David Lehman
Author, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man
New York City

Continue reading the May 8, 2014 Issue of the NYRB.

Comments

[Anne Caston]

Thank you, thank you, David Lehman, for calling out the reviewer (Brooks) and the review and the particular "species of dishonesty" employed therein. I applaud you for still being able to say, with certainty, that there are consequences to actions undertaken by writers, brilliant or otherwise, for what they write "out of conviction or opportunism."

[Amanda J. Bradley]

I'm really glad your letter is making its way to publication in NYRB! We discussed "Howl" in American Lit yesterday, and Ginsberg's NAMBLA affiliation came up, which led to a very long discussion of the art versus the artist and the importance of holding people accountable for egregious ethical violations no matter what they wrote. I'm glad you are not allowing Brooks to get by with his troubling review without a consequence.

[Julie]

Bravo, David--for weighing in not only on de Man's questionable allegiances, but also Brooks's. Although your definition of the reviewer's craft, "to summarize accurately the contents of the book under review and not to use the occasion as the pretext for an apologia," probably ought to prevail, it often doesn't in NYRB, a feature I rather enjoy, not least because it moves people like you to write letters like this.

[lally]

well put David...thank you...