How Georges Perec’s lost first novel has finally come to be published
Discovered in a wardrobe, Perec’s previously unpublished Portrait of a Man is as infuriating as it is brilliant
David Bellos
Friday 7 November 2014
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When I was tracking down everyone who had known Perec during his tragically short life, I called on a journalist who had met him at a writer’s retreat in Normandy. He mentioned that someone had once given him one of Perec’s pieces to look at. He went to a wardrobe and pulled out a manuscript. There it was, a carbon-copy typescript beginning: “georges perec le condottière roman”. I stayed up that night reading Perec’s lost novel. It was really hard to follow – maybe the late hour, the smudgy carbon and the dim hotel lighting were to blame. But even after a night’s sleep, in good light and clear print, Portrait of a Man is quite strange. It is connected by a hundred threads to every part of Perec’s later oeuvre, but it’s not like anything else he wrote.
Gaspard Winckler is sent to a boarding school in Switzerland during the war. A wealthy idler with a good eye and good hands, he falls in with a painter who trains him to become an art forger. He breaks off relations with his family, acquires dummy qualifications to cover his tracks and becomes a master forger of artworks of all kinds. His dealer, Anatole Madera, asks him to use a period panel to fake something really expensive. Winckler chooses Antonello da Messina as his target, aiming this time round not to pastiche an existing portrait, but to make something that would be an Antonello and also his own. At the end of this meticulously planned undertaking, he realises he has been wasting his time. So he cuts Madera’s throat. Perec’s novel begins after the fact, with the art-forger turned assassin tunnelling his way out of a basement studio. Then he turns up in Yugoslavia and tells the same story to a Serbian friend.
Winckler’s plight is told first as internal monologue during the tunnelling, and then in a Q&A session with his friend Streten. Perec went on to write other works in two parts: W or The Memory of Childhood is the best-known example, but there’s also the unfinished “53 Days”, which was to have a Part II that would undo everything set up in the first. What happens in Portrait of a Man alone, however, is that murder is presented as a key to liberation. Mortal violence is needed for Winckler to begin to be himself.
The narrator of W or the Memory of Childhood and the craftsman who cuts Percival Bartlebooth’s watercolours into jigsaw puzzles in Life: A User’s Manual are also called Gaspard Winckler. Are they the same person? A tantalising clue comes at the end of the first chapter of Life when we learn that “Gaspard Winckler is dead, but the long and meticulous, patiently laid plot of his revenge is not finished yet.” Revenge for what? Maybe the answer is to be found in Portrait of a Man.
Perec was an intensely visual writer. It’s no coincidence that the first words of Things are “the eye, first of all”. Life: A User’s Manual is a word-picture of all the rooms in a Parisian apartment house that a painter called Serge Valène would like to put on canvas, and also a description of the painting that Valène has barely begun to sketch out. But Perec’s engagement with painting is clearest in his first, brilliant and also infuriating novel, Portrait of a Man.
Perec learned about painting from Yugoslav students in Paris around 1955. Art history was also a major concern among Perec’s second circle with whom he sought to launch a periodical, the General Line. Perec went to galleries in Paris and London, and to Berne to see the Klee collection. But the Antonello portrait in the Louvre obsessed him especially because the sitter has a scar on his upper lip just like his own.
The forger’s problem is that a real work of art expresses its creator, whereas a successful fake necessarily expresses the world view of someone else. That is why a painting cannot be a forgery and an authentic work of art at the same time. Winckler, who doesn’t have Perec’s advantage of debates with Marxist friends, learns this from experience. Having set out to create a masterpiece that will be taken for an Antonello by using all of Antonello’s materials, methods and techniques, he ends up painting the image of an indeterminate fraud that can’t possibly be taken for a Renaissance warlord. He has indeed expressed himself. It’s repulsive, because he is.
Portrait of a Man isn’t a typical novel of its time – it’s not a “new novel” or a piece of “committed literature”. What ties it to its period is the topic of forgery. In 1945, Han van Meegeren was arrested for selling old masters to German officers. He pleaded not guilty because the works he had sold to Nazis were his own: he had forged them all. To prove it he painted a Vermeer in his prison cell. The affair revived interest in earlier art scams by Dossena and Icilio, who had hoodwinked Berenson. Paris was abuzz with talk about the difference between art and imitation. In 1955, a major exhibition of fakes was put on at the Grand Palais, where Perec saw some of the forgeries mentioned in Portrait of a Man.
Perec’s first novel took three years to write, before, during and after his time as a conscript in a parachute regiment. An early version was turned down by one publisher in 1958, but Gallimard picked it up in the following year on the priviso that it was shortened and revised. On his discharge, Perec set to work, and when he’d finished rewriting it one last time, he typed out: “YOU’LL HAVE TO PAY ME LOADS IF YOU WANT ME TO START IT OVER AGAIN. Thursday, August 25, 1960.”
The bad news came just a few days before he left Paris for Tunisia, where his wife had got a job. Having read the new version, the publisher preferred not to proceed with the contract. Downcast, Perec dropped the project. “Best of luck to anyone who reads it,” Perec wrote to a friend. “I’ll go back to it in 10 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.”
Mission accomplished.
Georges Perec’s Portrait of Man is published this week by MacLehose Press.
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