Somebody else who didn’t stop lying was Paul de Man. Following his death (in 1983, shortly after his sixty-fourth birthday), the news broke in two scandalous waves: first that as a journalist in occupied Belgium during World War II de Man had been not a member of the resistance, as he claimed, but a collaborator with the Nazis; then that otherwise, during the war and after, in Belgium and the United States, he was a scoundrel out of nineteenth-century melodrama: a forger, a thief, an exploiter and betrayer of friends and family. In that record, it was little more than a peccadillo that he also didn’t pay his bills.

Many years later, reviewing Evelyn Barish’s biography The Double Life of Paul De Man (Liveright, 2014), Jonathan Friedman recounted the scandal’s prehistory as he observed it from the outside. “I didn’t know Paul de Man —” he wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “and it turns out, no one else really did either. I was a graduate student at Yale at the time of his greatest authority, the late 1970s and early 1980s. All the cool kids went to de Man’s seminars in Comp Lit, adopted his attitude of gnomic superiority, even mimicked his smile — halfway between a Cheshire cat’s and a rictus of suppressed gastrointestinal pain. I stayed away. [. . .] It wasn’t until his illness that I noticed him as anything more than yet another sartorially challenged prof who tromped around in a hideous gray raincoat.”

And then Friedman added:

One summer, he returned from somewhere — a vacation? a stint at the School of Criticism and Theory? — a bright and unnatural orange.

Source: Jonathan Friedman, “Deconstructing De Man in the Digital Age,” LARB, April 12, 2014. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/deconstructing-de-man-digital-age/

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