Portrait of a Man Read Free

prestigious literary publisher, Gallimard, got to hear of it. He was sufficiently impressed to issue a contract in 1959 – with an advance on royalties, to boot! But he thought it not quite ready for publication, and asked Perec to revise it. On his release from the military in December 1959, Perec set to work, and when he’d finished rewriting it one more time eight months later, he was so thoroughly exhausted with his
condottière
that he wrote ENDENDENDEND across a whole line on the last page, followed by a warning in uppercase:
    YOU’LL HAVE TO PAY ME LOADS IF YOU WANT ME TO START IT OVER AGAIN. Thursday, 25 August, 1960.
    He was in a hurry to finish because he was about to leave for Sfax, in Tunisia, where his wife Paulette had got a job as a teacher under a cultural co-operation scheme between France and its formerprotectorate. The dreadful news came in a letter from Gallimard just a few days before they left Paris. Having read the new version, they preferred not to proceed with the contract. Perec did not need to return the advance.
    The blow nearly knocked the young writer off his perch. The months that followed were among the gloomiest in all Perec’s adult life. But he picked himself up, and began several new projects before alighting on the path that would lead him to
Things
. As he wrote to a friend in 1960, “Best of luck to anyone who reads [my novel]. I’ll go back to it in ten years when it’ll turn into a masterpiece, or else I’ll wait in my grave until one of my faithful exegetes comes across it in an old trunk you once owned and brings it out.”
Perec me pinxit
, I suppose.
    What ties Perec’s first novel to its period most visibly is the topic of forgery. In 1945, a Dutch art dealer called Han van Meegeren was arrested for having sold extremely important Dutch paintings, including several Vermeers, to Nazi occupiers during the war. His defence at trial was quite flabbergasting: he denied selling any national treasures, because the works he admitted selling to Nazi top brass were his own. He’d forged everything! Far from being a collaborator, he’d succeeded in hoodwinking the enemy. To prove he was a forger he even painted a new Vermeer in his cell, under the eyes of experts and guards.
    The van Meegeren affair revived discussion of earlier art scams by Alceo Dossena, the “man with the magic hands”, who’d come clean in 1928 because he reckoned he’d been duped by his owndealers, and by Joni Federico Icilio, who’d hoodwinked Bernard Berenson as well as many major museums before revealing himself in a book released in 1937. What exactly was the difference between an authentic work of art and its perfect imitation? Books and articles flowed from learned and opinionated pens on this issue in the 1950s. In 1955, an exhibition of fake art was held at the Grand Palais in Paris, where Perec no doubt saw some of the works by Icilio, Dossena, and van Meegeren that he mentions in
Portrait of a Man
. It was sponsored by the Paris Prefecture of Police – probably the only police force in the world that puts on art shows!
    The police had their own reason for being interested in fakes, but arguments over the difference between
fake
and
authentic
had other resonances for Perec and his circle. “Authentic” is a central term in the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, who was then at the height of his prestige. Sartre’s epochal pamphlet of 1945,
Réflexions sur la question juive
(translated as
Anti-Semite and Jew
), makes a firm distinction between the “authentic Jew” and the “inauthentic” one. The “inauthentic Jew” was constructed as a Jew solely by the gaze of other people; inauthenticity consisted in accepting a given role as “the Other”. “Authenticity”, in Sartre’s terminology, means the full assumption of an identity by an act of will and choice. Like many of his