Evelyn Barish begins her impressively researched biography by flatly stating that “Paul de Man no longer seems to exist.” This may be an exaggerated expression of frustration by a biographer whose long- incubated work now appears after what might have been the optimal time for it. Yet there is considerable truth in what she says. De Man is now scarcely remembered by the general public, though he was the center of a widely publicized scandal in 1988, five years after his death at the age of 64. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a central figure, an inevitable figure, in American literary studies, in which doctoral dissertations, the great barometer of academic fashion, could scarcely be found without dozens of citations from his writings. But the meteor has long since faded: over the past decade and more, I have only rarely encountered references to de Man in students’ work, committed as they generally are to marching with the zeitgeist.

Paul de Man arrived in the United States from his native Belgium in the spring of 1948. He would remain in this country illegally after the expiration of his temporary visa, on occasion finding ways to elude the Immigration and Naturalization Service. But that, as Barish’s account makes clear, was the least of his infractions of the law. Eventually he would be admitted, with a considerable amount of falsification on his part, to the doctoral program in comparative literature at Harvard, from which he would receive a degree, in somewhat compromised circumstances, in 1960. He then went on to teach at Cornell, briefly at Johns Hopkins, and most significantly at Yale, where he became a “seminal” scholar and an altogether revered figure.

The revelation after de Man’s death that, in 1941, he had published an anti-Semitic article in Le Soir, a Belgian collaborationist newspaper, understandably came as a bombshell. Although some of his academic intimates vehemently dissociated themselves from him, others—including Jacques Derrida and (sad to say, in the pages of this journal) Geoffrey Hartman—found ways to exculpate him, or at least to write off this hateful act as a youthful indiscretion. Meanwhile information began to surface about certain financial improprieties in Belgium shortly after the war as well as in the early years of de Man’s residence in the United States.

The full picture is actually far worse than any of these initial condemnatory reports, as Barish demonstrates in carefully documented detail. What she shows is that from the beginning, de Man was a person who flagrantly disregarded rules and obligations, shamelessly and repeatedly lied about himself, and had a criminal past. A Belgian cousin reports that the young de Man once said to him, “Principles are what the idiots substitute for intelligence.” One should add that he was an extraordinarily gifted con man, persuading the most discerning intellectuals that he had credentials he did not possess and a heroic personal history, rather than a scandalous one, while he worked his charm on generations of students.

In all that pertains to the facts of de Man’s life, Barish seems entirely reliable, and for this readers should be grateful to her. Unearthing buried facts and sifting through others about which contradictory views have been proposed are Barish’s long suit. Her psychological interpretation of her subject is less impressive. She writes, for example, about the effect on de Man of his chronically depressed mother: “In a way, Paul was not fully Paul for his mother, but someone else, and the aporia he later talked about, the abyss, was his early recognition of the gulf between who he was in fact and the ghostly infant she may sometimes have imagined him to be.” (Besides the shaky etiology of his ideas proposed here, the equation between aporia and abyss is quite wrong.) Elsewhere she plugs in formulas from Freud, Erikson, and Winnicott to explain her subject. This procedure conveys a distinct sense of painting by the numbers, but fortunately it is not very frequent in the book.