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Discovered in a wardrobe, Perec’s previously unpublished Portrait of a Man is as infuriating as it is brilliant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

G

eorges Perec never made a secret of having written an unpublished early novel about Antonello da Messina’s Portrait of a Man, but after his death in 1982, the manuscript of Le Condottière couldn’t be found. On leaving his perch in Paris’s Latin Quarter for a larger apartment in 1966, Perec had stuffed old paperwork into a suitcase for the dump, and put his manuscripts in a similar case. The wrong one got junked, and all Perec’s early writings disappeared. Or so he thought.

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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Georges Perec

 

The best of Georges Perec

La Disparition (1969)
Les Revenentes (1972)
La Vie mode d'emploi (1978)

Joe Dunthorne
Monday 19 January 2019

Here's Perec's best: three texts penned yet fewer letters selected. Every sentence remembers. A lipogram is a text without a given letter. Writing more than a paragraph with this restriction - and still making sense - can be tough. Astonishingly, in La Disparition Perec wrote an entire novel without using the letter "e", the most common vowel in the French language. It is a playful detective story where characters try to solve puzzles and find answers that - often because of the language constraint - are just out of reach. Central to the novel (A Void in Gilbert Adair's virtuoso translation) is the idea of disappearance and, implicitly, the Holocaust.

 

Portrait of a Man by Georges Perec review – his long-lost first novel

Rejected by publishers and then lost for 50 years, this tale of an art forger whose attempt to go beyond imitation ends in murder is awkward but fascinating

Steven Poole
Thursday 11 December 2014

Amaster forger conceives of a fantastic ambition: to go beyond the mere imitation of old painters, and instead “to create an authentic masterwork of the past”. That is the high concept behind the recently rediscovered first novel by the much-loved French experimental writer Georges Perec. Written when he was 24, it was never published in his lifetime, having been rejected by le tout Paris. Is it an authentic masterwork, or was the world not much the poorer after Perec’s typescript was accidentally thrown away in the wrong cardboard box?

Life a User’s Manual by Georges Perec / Review

 

Life a User’s Manual 

by Georges Perec 

(1978, Tr. 1987)

Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual, a marvelous specimen of the Oulipean style itself, is a work which not only confirms that the writing still has it, but also exemplifies the unquenchable thirst for the unknown to burst straight out of it like

September 6, 2017

In a vast realm of anecdotes, being nothing more than just another floor of a multi-story edifice called “Life” (not necessarily the top one, neither the floor per se – it is probably more like an alcove so obvious in its presence, that we no longer pay attention to it, a not-so-heart-stopping crawlspace supplied only with an insignificant ‘cargo’ of chilling mysteries and thrilling miseries, etc.), there is a seemingly dull one about Karl Popper, who once allegedly asked his students during a lecture: “What do scientists do?”. When being answered ”They make observations.”, he replied: “Well then, observe.”. The slightly disoriented students inquired: “What shall we observe?”. This “what” was the focal point of Popper’s argument he wanted to clinch – we cannot get involved in any kind of scientific activity (e.g., assembling a device which is then applied to make our experiment work, developing the most efficient and the least time-consuming data gathering method, choosing the adequate mode of mathematical calculation for the corresponding phenomenon and its hidden, elusive essence we hope to eventually unveil one day, etc.), unless we, for lack of a better expression, ‘obey the rules’ of the theory, which we are struggling to prove with all our scientific actions and machinations. Avoiding further philosophical babble, Austrian-born thinker claims that the theory consisting of hypotheses comes first and it is only afterwards that it ‘tells’ us an approximate way of what we shall do to falsify and reject it or to corroborate and leave it be just for the next ‘cannonade’ of falsifying experiments. Cutting to the chase: cannot do anything without a theory.

 

Le Chat Noir: Yelena Bryksenkova?s 2009 drawing of Georges Perec, whose master work, ?Life: A User?s Manual,? was published in 1978. Click for larger view. Image by YELENA BRYKSENKOVA

A Renaissance for Belleville’s Georges Perec, Master of the Lipogram

Benjamin Ivry
May 12, 2010

One of France’s most daring postwar writers, perhaps best known for writing an entire novel without the letter “e” (a lipogram), French-Jewish author Georges Perec, is coming back into vogue. Two of his books were reprinted by publisher David R. Godine last year, and new interest is being taken in his Polish-Jewish roots.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Top 10 books about great thinkers

From Kant’s routines to Frantz Fanon’s astonishing wartime work and Simone de Beauvoir’s vexed position in history, these books thread together ideas and the lives that animated them

Peter Salmon
Wednesday 18 November 2020

What is the relationship between the thinker and the thought? This is a question that all writers of intellectual biographies grapple with. One must relate the life to the thought without conflating them, without ascribing to every effect a cause, and every argument a reason. As Jacques Derrida warned, “You want me to say things like: ‘I-was-born-in-El-Biar-on-the-outskirts-of-Algiers-in-a-petty-bourgeois-family-of-assimilated-Jews-but …’ Is that really necessary? I can’t do it.”

And yet Derrida also argued that one of the great unacknowledged aspects of all philosophical writing is that it is a type of autobiography. Would Socrates have developed the gift of the gab if he wasn’t so ugly? Would Julia Kristeva have developed her ideas about the symbolic if she wasn’t an outsider by birth in her adopted France? Would Nietzsche have proclaimed the Overman if he was less shy at dinner parties?

The very best intellectual biographies enrich our understanding of great thinkers by situating them in a time and a place, and by exploring how they negotiate the difficult art of living through the products of their minds. Here are 10 wonderful books that thread together the lives and ideas of their thinkers in a way that intensifies our understanding of each.

1. St Augustine by Rebecca West
“I write books,” noted Rebecca West, “to find out about things.” Here my stone-cold favourite writer of all time turns her combination of searing intellect and droll wit on one of the shapers of Christianity. She is particularly moving on Augustine’s final encounter with his mother, Monica: perhaps, writes West, “the most intense experience ever commemorated”. As bold and opinionated as you’d expect from the woman who wrote: “I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk
For anyone studying philosophy, reading Wittgenstein can feel like taking a draught of cool water. Suddenly the deepest problems seem easy, to be mere problems of language, easy to solve. And then, as you read more deeply, that all falls apart as every problem becomes knottier, every question deeper still. Ray Monk’s biography is the gold standard in the genre, revealing a man whose life was as simple and complicated as his work.

3. At Home with André and Simone Weil by Sylvie Weil
Any thinker worth their salt needs to have a Simone Weil obsession at some point. No intellectual of the 20th century was as prepared to take their thinking to its logical conclusion, making her for many a secular saint. And yet sainthood is often better appreciated at a distance, as her niece Sylvie reveals. Sleeping on the floor next to a lovingly made bed at the house of your brother (the revered mathematician André Weil) is noble in the telling, irritating in the execution. A writer herself, Sylvie Weil presents a biography of three minds, working for and against each other.

Thorough … detail from Kant and His Comrades at the Table by Emil Doerstling, 1900. Photograph: Science History Images/Alamy

4. Kant: A Biography by Manfred Kuehn
Very few people read Kant for pleasure. If you know anyone who has, I’d like to have a chat to them. Kuehn’s biography is always promoted as revelatory, in that it shows Kant was occasionally five minutes late in having his breakfast, and sometimes put his shoes on in the wrong order. In fact this biography is everything Kant was – thorough, witty (in the way philosophy lecturers are witty: that is, not very) and goes on just a bit too long. Even the title is suitably dull. But, like The Critique of Pure Reason, it is also magnificent and to read it is to enter into a glorious dialogue with one of the great minds.

5. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman by Toril Moi
“To say that existence is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.” It’s hard to go past Deirdre Bair’s biography of De Beauvoir. But Moi’s telling is also brilliant and affecting. A powerful, critical investigation of De Beauvoir’s thinking, it situates her in a history of female thinkers and the way their thought has been marginalised, or treated reductively as fully explicable by their lives (and loves). In a challenging read, Moi forces you to argue with her, and to be damn sure of your position as you do so.

6. Frantz Fanon: A Biography by David Macey
Derrida’s childhood in Algeria was crucial to his thinking, as he himself noted, and one cannot write about Algeria without reading Fanon’s political works. Macey explores them brilliantly, but it is Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist that is a revelation. During the war of independence, Fanon often attended to patients suffering mental trauma after being tortured, as well as to the mental traumas of the torturers. That he attended to both with equal care is astonishing, and that he did so while writing the tracts that would make him famous is even more so. Macey does him justice, which really is saying something.

7. Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos
One good life option is to just read everything David Bellos has ever written (as well as his translations). His life of Jacques Tati is wonderful, but here he is in his element trying to pin the butterfly that is Perec. Perec is the sort of writer most writers want to be, brilliant, inventive and prolific, managing to combine huge erudition with the ability to tell a really good yarn. A novel without the letter “e” (or a novella that uses only that vowel)? Why not? A novel that does a knight’s tour of an apartment block and seems to cover every aspect of life as it skips around? Sure! We should all be grateful he found Bellos to write his story – no one else would have got it right.

8. At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell
Along with Stuart Jeffries’ Grand Hotel Abyss, this has become the ne plus ultra of group biographies, to the point where any pitch for a book in this area these days has to say: “It’s like At Existentialist Cafe meets The Rest Is Noise.” There’s a reason for this. Bakewell’s ability to connect a thinker’s ideas to their life and personality is impressive. I particularly love her slow, minutely reasoned, takedown of Heidegger the man: displaying Paul Celan’s books in the window of his local bookshop is, she writes, “the single documented example I can find of him actually doing something nice”.

Angela Davis speaks at a street rally in Raleigh, 1974.

9. Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Davis
Note this is “An” autobiography, not “The” – Davis is always in action, and this is just one moment on the way somewhere, politically and intellectually. Writing in her late 20s, Davis had already served time in jail and been instrumental in the civil rights movement, making this an intoxicating trip through an era of incendiary politics and intellectual ferment. That she has maintained the rage and continued to put both body and mind on the line is exhilarating – another autobiography would be no less thrilling.

10. War Diaries by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre is a bad biographer. In forcing Flaubert and Genet through the sausage machine of existentialism he performs the astonishing feat of making you want to avoid reading them. As a man, philosopher and novelist he is also hard to love. And yet love him I do, because of these diaries. They are the story of a mind finding itself, groping about for the theoretical scaffolding on which he would erect his thought. They are also the moving chronicle of a mind recovering from depression, thrown into a world of senseless chaos, before there was a Sartre to theorise absurdity. Of his breakdown, he writes: “I suddenly realised that anyone could become anything.” What he became is astonishing.

 An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida by Peter Salmon is published by Verso.

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