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 own dealers, 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 friends, Perec was of Jewish heritage, and in the Sartrean atmosphere of the Left Bank in the 1950s, the issue of authenticity was not just a philosophical matter. Perec’s struggle with fakery in his first novel isn’t just about the history of European art.
But it is also about art, and draws on extensive learning. Perec read Alexandre Ziloty’s classic study of the origins of oil painting, and quotes verbatim in Italian from Vasari’s Lives of the Painters (though mostly from the parts that Ziloty also quotes). He certainly had access to the catalogue of the 1955 exhibition, and he obtained other knowledge from the Yugoslav art historians he had befriended in Paris, one of whom studied the Roman treasures unearthed in 1953 at Gamzigrad (Felix Romuliana, now a World Heritage Site). These more or less well absorbed snippets of art history enabled him to integrate an imaginary character, Gaspard Winckler, into what was then known of the contemporary art forgery business, and to patchwork a plausible scam out of elements copied from real ones, in a process of composition uncannily similar to the way van Meegeren had patchworked features of existing masterpieces to produce new ones for sale. Perec would later transpose this technique from thematic material to literary composition, reproducing (and sometimes modifying) actual fragments of sentences already written by Flaubert in Things, and then, more ambitiously, snippets of Melville, Kafka, Duras, Le Clézio and many others in A Man Asleep, and finally, in Life A User’s Manual, constructing a vast programmatic insertion of hidden quotations from a score of authors in prose that remained indisputably his own.
I have translated the text of the novel as it was published in French in 2012, thirty years after Perec’s death. In some places where the typescript has a different and more acceptable reading, I have relied on Perec’s original words. I’ve also restored the division into parts, which the French editors decided to suppress. For the title, I have adopted the name by which Antonello’s panel is known to art historians in English rather than reproduce Perec’s original Condottière, with its anomalous grave accent, since it is not a French work. That choice also points the reader to the book’s effective subject. What Winckler discovers is that a portrait of a man is always a portrait of the artist; what Perec told his editor Maurice Nadeau at a crucial juncture in his writing career ten years after abandoning this novel was that autobiography “is the only kind of writing possible”.
The greatest difficulty this text sets for translation into English is the distinction that we make between “conscience” – the moral faculty of discriminating between right and wrong – and “consciousness”, the faculty or state of being aware. These two different things are represented by only one word of French, la conscience. This regular mismatch between the two languages produces numerous forks in a novel whose narrator often asks himself: “What use is a conscience?” The problem can hardly be evaded, especially as in Perec’s own stated view Portrait of a Man is l’histoire d’une conscience. In many cases it’s clear which of the two meanings is dominant, and the appropriate translation relates to “being aware” (of oneself, of the world). However, there are a sufficient number of undecidable cases to make any English-language translation of Perec’s first novel an interpretation as well as a reproduction of Gaspard Winckler’s silent and spoken struggle.
The text also contains some extremely long sentences. I’ve done my best to respect the complex syntax of these bravura passages, but despite its renowned flexibility, English can’t quite manage all the soaring flights of Perec’s intellectual rhetoric. In some cases all that’s needed is a slight change in the order of the clauses; but in others, I felt I had to take the sentence apart and put it back together in a different shape. Later on, Perec got a better grip on the art of the multiply nested sentence: his investigation of all the things you can do with an X in W or The Memory of Childhood (p. 72), like the 17-line description of the background of the 439th puzzle that Bartlebooth has just failed to complete in the last chapter of Life A User’s Manual (p. 494) – require careful attention for translation into English, but don’t need to be recast. The convoluted multi-clause sentences of Portrait of a Man are more like exercises preparing Perec for greater exploits to come.
What’s disconcerting is the rejection of a single narrative voice. Winckler “talks” in Part I in the first, second and third persons, alternating between them according to no perceptible plan or logic. This intentional instability may be what Gallimard’s rejection letter meant to refer to when it cited “excessive clumsiness and chatter” in the text, but there’s no doubt that some members of its distinguished panel of readers really didn’t like Perec’s taste for puns in a serious novel about an art forger’s crisis of conscience.
In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo described puns as la fiente de l’esprit, “the guano of the mind”. Most people think he meant to deride word games as intellectual waste, but a few who respect the esteem in which the great author held human excrement (Valjean’s famous escape through the sewers is preceded by a serious proposal to recycle the shit of Paris as fertiliser) believe that he really meant to say that puns enrich the mind’s loam. Perec was of the second persuasion, without any doubt. In daily life and in his literary work, Perec was an incessant player of word games, and he coined some of the most memorable puns in the French language. In Portrait of A Man, he drops in a few that oblige the translator to compete. What they’re doing here is in one respect quite obvious. Bewildering though the
y may have been to his first readers, Perec’s verbal quips have become the most recognisable part of his first finished portrait of himself.
David Bellos
Princeton, December 2013
For Jacques Lederer
Like many men, I have made my descent into Hell, and, like some, I have more or less returned from it.
MICHEL LEIRIS, Manhood
And, in the first place, I will recall to my mind the things I have hitherto held as true, because perceived by the senses, and the foundations upon which my belief in their truth rested; I will, in the second place, examine the reasons that afterward constrained me to doubt of them; and, finally, I will consider what of them I ought now to believe.
DESCARTES, Meditations
I
Madera was heavy. I grabbed him by the armpits and went backwards down the stairs to the laboratory. His feet bounced from tread to tread in a staccato rhythm that matched my own unsteady descent, thumping and banging around the narrow stairwell. Our shadows danced on the walls. Blood was still flowing, all sticky, seeping from the soaking wet towel, rapidly forming drips on the silk lapels, then disappearing into the folds of the jacket, like trails of slightly glinting snot side-tracked by the slightest roughness in the fabric, sometimes accumulating into drops that fell to the floor and exploded into star-shaped stains. I let him slump at the bottom of the stairs, right next to the laboratory door, and then went back up to fetch the razor and to mop up the bloodstains before Otto returned. But Otto came in by the other door at almost the same time as I did. He looked at me uncomprehendingly. I beat a retreat, ran down the stairs, and shut myself in the laboratory. I padlocked the door and jammed the wardrobe up against it. He came down a few minutes later, tried to force the door open, to no avail, then went back upstairs, dragging Madera behind him. I reinforced the door with the easel. He called out to me. He fired at the door twice with his revolver.
You see, maybe you told yourself it would be easy. Nobody in the house, no-one round and about. If Otto hadn’t come back so soon, where would you be? You don’t know, you’re here. In the same laboratory as ever, and nothing’s changed, or almost nothing. Madera is dead. So what? You are still in the same underground studio, it’s just a bit less tidy and bit less clean. The same light of day seeps through the basement window. The Condottiere, crucified on his easel …
He had looked all around. It was the same office – the same glass table-top, the same telephone, the same calendar on its chromeplated steel base. It still had the stark orderliness and uncluttered iciness of an intentionally cold style, with strictly matching colours – dark green carpet, mauve leather armchairs, light brown wall covering – giving a sense of discreet impersonality with its large metal filing cabinets … But all of a sudden the flabby mass of Madera’s body seemed grotesque, like a wrong note, something incoherent, anachronistic … He’d slipped off his chair and was lying on his back with his eyes half closed and his slightly parted lips stuck in an expression of idiotic stupor enhanced by the dull gleam of a gold tooth. Blood streamed from his cut throat in thick spurts and trickled onto the floor, gradually soaking into the carpet, making an ill-defined, blackish stain that grew ever larger around his head, around his face whose whiteness had long seemed rather fishy, a warm, living, animal stain slowly taking possession of the room, as if the walls were already soaked through with it, as if the orderliness and strictness had already been overturned, abolished, pillaged, as if nothing more existed beyond the radiating stain and the obscene and ridiculous heap on the floor, the corpse, fulfilled, multiplied, made infinite …
Why? Why had he said that sentence: “I don’t think that’ll be a problem”? He tries to recall the precise tone of Madera’s voice, the timbre that had taken him by surprise the first time he’d heard it, that slight lisp, its faintly hesitant intonation, the almost imperceptible limp in his words, as if he were stumbling – almost tripping – as if he were permanently afraid of making a mistake. I don’t think. What nationality? Spanish? South American? Accent? Put on? Tricky. No. Simpler than that: he rolled his rs in the back of his throat. Or perhaps he was just a bit hoarse? He can see him coming towards him with outstretched hand: “Gaspard – that’s what I should call you, isn’t it? – I’m truly delighted to make your acquaintance.” So what? It didn’t mean much to him. What was he doing here? What did the man want of him? Rufus hadn’t warned him …
People always make mistakes. They think things will work out, will go on as per normal. But you never can tell. It’s so easy to delude yourself. What do you want, then? An oil painting? You want a top-of-the-range Renaissance piece? Can do. Why not a Portrait of a Young Man, for instance …
A flabby, slightly over-handsome face. His tie. “Rufus has told me a lot about you.” So what? Big deal! You should have paid attention, you should have been wary … A man you didn’t know from Adam or Eve … But you rushed headlong to accept the opportunity. It was too easy. And now. Well, now …
This is where it had got him. He did the sums in his head: all that had been spent setting up the laboratory, including the cost of materials and reproductions – photographs, enlargements, X-ray images, images seen through Wood’s lamp and with side-illumination – and the spotlights, the tour of European art galleries, upkeep … a fantastic outlay for a farcical conclusion … But what was comical about his idiotic incarceration? He was at his desk as if nothing had happened … That was yesterday … But upstairs there was Madera’s corpse in a puddle of blood … and Otto’s heavy footsteps as he paced up and down keeping guard. All that to get to this! Where would he be now if … He thinks of the sunny Balearic Islands – it would have taken just a wave of his hand a year and half before – Geneviève would be at his side … the beach, the setting sun … a picture postcard scene … Is this where it all comes to a full stop?
Now he recalled every move he’d made. He’d just lit a cigarette, he was standing with one hand on the table, with his weight on one hip. He was looking at the Portrait of a Man. Then he’d stubbed out his cigarette quickly and his left hand had swept over the table, stopped, gripped a piece of cloth, and crumpled it tight – an old handkerchief used as a brush-rag. Everything was hazy. He was putting ever more of his weight onto the table without letting the Condottiere out of his sight. Days and days of useless effort? It was as if his weariness had given way to the anger rising in him, step by certain step. He was crushing the fabric in his hand and his nails had scored the wooden table-top. He had pulled himself up, gone to his work bench, rummaged among his tools …
A black sheath made of hardened leather. An ebony handle. A shining blade. He had raised it to the light and checked the cutting edge. What had he been thinking of? He’d felt as if there was nothing in the world apart from that anger and that weariness … He’d flopped into the armchair, put his head in his hands, with the razor scarcely a few inches from his eyes, set off clearly and sharply by the dangerously smooth surface of the Condottiere’s doublet. A single movement and then curtains … One thrust would be enough … His arm raised, the glint of the blade … a single movement … he would approach slowly and the carpet would muffle the sound of his steps, he would steal up on Madera from behind …
A quarter of an hour had gone by, maybe. Why did he have an impression of distant gestures? Had he forgotten? Where was he? He’d been upstairs. He’d come back down. Madera was dead. Otto was keeping guard. What now? Otto was going to phone Rufus, Rufus would come. And then? What if Otto couldn’t get hold of Rufus? Where was Rufus? That’s what it all hung on. On this stupid what-if. If Rufus came, he would die, and if Otto didn’t get hold of Rufus, he would live. How much longer? Otto had a weapon. The skylight was too high and too small. Would Otto fall asleep? Does a man on guard need to sleep? …
He was going to die. The thought of it comforted him like a promise. He was alive, he was going to be dead. Then what? Leonardo is dead, Antonello is dead, and I’m not feeling too well myself. A stupid death. A victim of
circumstance. Struck down by bad luck, a wrong move, a mistake. Convicted in absentia. By unanimous decision with one abstention – which one? – he was sentenced to die like a rat in a cellar, under a dozen unfeeling eyes – the side lights and X-ray lamps purchased at outrageous prices from the laboratory at the Louvre – sentenced to death for murder by virtue of that good old moral legend of the eye, the tooth and the turn of the wheel – Achilles’ wheel – death is the beginning of the life of the mind – sentenced to die because of a combination of circumstances, an incoherent conjunction of trivial events … Across the globe there were wires and submarine cables … Hello, Paris, this is Dreux, hold the line, we’re connecting to Dampierre. Hello, Dampierre, Paris calling. You can talk now. Who could have imagined those peaceable operators with their earpieces becoming implacable executioners? … Hello, Monsieur Koenig, Otto speaking, Madera has just died …
In the dark of night the Porsche will leap forward with its headlights spitting fire like dragons. There will be no accident. In the middle of the night they will come and get him …
And then? What the hell does it matter to you? They’ll come and get you. Next? Slump into an armchair and stare long and hard until death overtakes into the eyes of the tall joker with the shiv, the ineffable Condottiere. Responsible or not responsible? Guilty or not guilty? I’m not guilty, you’ll scream when they drag you up to the guillotine. We’ll soon see about that, says the executioner. And down the blade comes with a clunk. Curtains. Self-evident justice. Isn’t that obvious? Isn’t it normal? Why should there be any other way out?