Yet de Man escaped prosecution. The interviews with investigators that Barish quotes suggest that he was considered too small a fish to be in serious jeopardy. They also suggest that he was an uncommonly smooth prevaricator. That talent was an asset in his next endeavor, which was the establishment of a new publishing house, called Hermès. The company opened for business in February, 1946. In the next two years, it published, at most, two books. Its sole purpose seems to have been to provide de Man with cash.

De Man raised capital from many sources, including family friends, his father, even his old nurse. Then, Anne told Barish, “he just went in and took out the money.” He wrote contracts for books and translations and pocketed half of the advances. He forged receipts, gave himself money that was supposed to pay the bills, cooked the books, and paid himself a salary right up to the inevitable crash. Although Bob de Man repaid some of the investors his son had swindled, none of the creditors recovered a penny from the company itself. It had been thoroughly looted. Bob was almost ruined. The nurse lost everything.

Seeing a criminal prosecution looming, Bob obtained visas for Paul and Anne (who were now legally married). Anne took the children to South America, where her parents had emigrated. Paul went to New York. In 1951, he was convicted in a Belgian court of multiple acts of forgery, falsifying records, and taking money under false pretenses, and sentenced to five years in prison, plus costs and fines. The court ordered that he be arrested if he ever returned to Belgium. De Man’s father refused to see or speak to him again.

And that’s just the Belgian chapter! Arriving in New York in 1948, de Man charms his way into left-wing intellectual circles, where he meets Mary McCarthy, who finds him cosmopolitan and très chic. She recommends him for a teaching job at Bard College, where she has friends. De Man duly provides a résumé listing an imaginary master’s thesis (“The Bergsonian Conception of Time in the Contemporary Novel”) and an “interrupted” doctoral dissertation (“Introduction to a Phenomenology of Aesthetic Consciousness”). On a separate form, he describes his service in a resistance group during the war. He gets the appointment, but proceeds to default on his rent, which is owed to the professor who helped get him the job, and who is abroad on leave.

Anne unexpectedly shows up with the children, but de Man has fallen in love with a Bard student named Patricia Kelley. He promises Anne financial support. She returns to South America, leaving the oldest child, Rik, with de Man, who quickly places him with Patricia’s mother, in Washington, D.C. De Man never returns phone calls from Rik, and repeatedly reneges on his promise to send Anne money. When she finally receives a check, it bounces. They are not divorced until 1960. In 1950, de Man marries Patricia; they have two children. She doesn’t learn definitively that the marriage is bigamous for ten years.

Along the way, there is a ridiculous number of close calls. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents arrive at Bard looking for de Man. De Man manages to put them off. The absent professor returns and accuses him not only of failing to pay the rent but of damaging his house. De Man is fired from Bard.

De Man makes his way to Boston, and is admitted to the Ph.D. program in comparative literature at Harvard. When his transcript arrives, from the Free University of Brussels, he doctors it to appear that he got his degree. I.N.S. agents show up again, and tell de Man that he can voluntarily leave the country or be deported. At almost the same time, Harvard’s Society of Fellows, where de Man is a Junior Fellow, receives a mysterious letter recounting some of his Belgian activities. De Man explains that he is being persecuted because he is the son of the “controversial” Henri de Man, and his advisers buy the story.

De Man goes back to Europe voluntarily, with his family, but he manages to return to the United States two years later, by freighter. He is without passport or visa, but enters the country unquestioned when agents in New York are distracted by other passengers. He nearly fails his Ph.D. examinations, and never completes one of the chapters of his dissertation, but he is awarded the degree. Through it all, he has been writing criticism. An article called “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image” is published in France, in 1960, and attracts interest. That fall, he is hired at Cornell. And here, regrettably, Barish ends her messy but fascinating book.

Barish doesn’t attempt a psychiatric diagnosis of her subject. She does note that de Man had a habit of staring at his face in the mirror, which she interprets as a sign of narcissism. It may be, but narcissism doesn’t account for such an astonishing run of deceit. That is the record of a sociopath. De Man must have known the difference between right and wrong, but those concepts appear to have had no purchase on his inner life. Writing anti-Semitic articles for pro-Nazi papers, stealing from his nurse, sending his child off to be brought up by virtual strangers, lying his way through Harvard: if those things had not been easy for him to do, they would have been impossible for him to do.

De Man wasn’t loyal to his family or his country, but he wasn’t loyal to the Nazis, either. He sheltered Jewish friends in his apartment, and he helped distribute a journal for the resistance. One reason that no one in the United States suspected there might be something amiss was the sheer magnitude of the risks he took. If you were an émigré trying to hide a criminal past, would you default on your rent pretty much everywhere you lived? Would you claim to hold fictitious academic degrees, and doctor transcripts that could easily be checked? Would you talk your way out of a jam by pretending that you were the son of your uncle?

For that matter, would you become the leader of a high-profile and controversial school of literary criticism? You would not. You would try to fade into the woodwork. De Man didn’t do that. The behavior Barish describes does not seem like the behavior of a man who wants to get caught. It seems like that of a man who lacks a normal superego.

After he took the job at Cornell, de Man got his life under control. At least, aside from financial delinquencies, there seem to be no rumors of further misdeeds. Barish thinks that Paul straightened out, in part, because of Patricia. Women found de Man attractive, and he was not a prude. But he disapproved of open marriages and promiscuity, things he had witnessed in his parents’ circle growing up. When he met Patricia, Barish says, “he fell immediately and completely in love, and he would remain so, possessively and passionately, for the rest of his life.” There was nothing sketchy about Patricia’s past, and she adored him. “It’s very corny,” she told Barish. “He was the love of my life. Except for some stubbornness. [We] shared so much. We enjoyed each other’s company so much. [We] never seemed to have enough time to say what we had to say to each other.”

Barish has put together a story that reads like an academic version of “House of Cards.” But, even if everything she says is true, what does it tell us about de Man’s criticism? She offers only the vaguest speculation. She believes, she says, that “there is a profound connection between the man who secretly fled from Belgium, exiled in 1948 and never publicly to return, and the one we knew for generations later as our intellectual and cultural leader,” but she leaves the task of figuring the connection out to others.

It was the prudent choice. At the time of the original revelations about de Man’s wartime journalism, virtually every attempt to show that his past proved that there are dangerous tendencies in his criticism depended on a caricature of the criticism. It’s remarkable how many people back then who attacked literary theorists for indifference to the concept of getting things right didn’t feel obliged to get the theories right.

De Man may have been a scoundrel who found a career teaching a certain method of reading, but that method of reading does not turn people into scoundrels. Probably ninety-nine per cent of the people who studied with de Man wouldn’t run a red light—forget about altering a transcript or voluntarily collaborating with Nazis. If there is an ethical takeaway from what de Man taught, it would be self-doubt.

Barish’s own attempt to describe de Manian theory is unhelpful: “a stance of ironic ‘undecideability,’ in which reality is an endless hall of mirrors and writing is a necessarily ‘perverse’ enterprise based on human lies, or the inability of language itself to express truth.” De Man never said any of those things. They are pop postmodernist clichés, and they have about as much relation to de Man as social Darwinism has to Darwin.

As a literary critic, de Man was doing what American literature professors had been doing since the nineteen-forties. He was trying to develop insights into the way literary language works. That’s what “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image” is about: how the images in Romantic poems work. De Man found contradictions and paradoxes in the meaning that Romantic images are supposed to have. But that, too, was what literature professors did. Critics in the nineteen-fifties, the era of the New Criticism, thought that poems work by holding multiple, sometimes opposing, meanings in tension. Irony and paradox were essential principles of literary form. If it was a poem, it had paradoxes. The critic’s job was to find them.

When he was a graduate student at Harvard, de Man taught in a course, now semi-legendary, called Humanities 6, and directed by an English professor named Reuben Brower, that was designed to instruct students in exactly this method of close reading. He turned out to have a real genius for it. One of his Harvard students, Peter Brooks, remembered how, in class, de Man would “sit in front of a text and just pluck magical things out of it.” That was the name of the game in literary criticism in 1960, and it was all that de Man ever did. He pulled things out of texts. His criticism was a demonstration of a way of reading. He used to warn his students not to confuse it with life.

Just before “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image” came out, de Man met Geoffrey Hartman at a Modern Language Association convention, where de Man was giving a paper on Yeats. Hartman, also an émigré, was an assistant professor at Yale. They became friends, and when de Man’s article appeared Hartman brought it to the attention of M. H. Abrams, at Cornell. Abrams was the dean of American Romanticists and a dominant figure in literary studies: he was the founding editor of “The Norton Anthology of English Literature,” which appeared in 1962. Abrams got de Man a Cornell appointment, and his career was launched. In 1964, without a book or, for that matter, a college degree, de Man was promoted to full professor.

The transformative event in de Man’s academic life occurred in October, 1966, at a symposium at Johns Hopkins. This was where Jacques Derrida made his American début. In 1966, Derrida was virtually unknown in the United States. He had spent a quiet year in Cambridge, from 1956 to 1957, reading in the Harvard library. (That overlapped with part of the time de Man spent in Europe.) When he arrived at Hopkins, though, he had recently made a splash in France with the publication, in the journal Critique, of a two-part essay called “Writing Before the Letter.” Michel Foucault had called it “the most radical text I have ever read.”

“Writing Before the Letter” is where Derrida first used the term “deconstruction,” and deconstruction is what he introduced to the symposiasts at Hopkins. His paper landed like a bomb. The event had been organized to showcase structuralism, and the intellectual hero of structuralism was the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. On the last day, Derrida delivered a paper that, while appearing to wrap Lévi-Strauss in a warm embrace of attentive admiration, basically left structuralism, as far as literary studies were concerned, for dead.

De Man had already read “Writing Before the Letter” in Critique, and he realized that he and Derrida were trying to do similar things. When Derrida was at Hopkins, they had breakfast together, and when Derrida’s book “Of Grammatology” was published in France, in 1967, de Man wrote him to say how “thrilled and interested” he was, and how he expected it to help in the “clarification and progression of my own thinking.”

De Man was eleven years older than Derrida, and he was, as Barish says, essentially an autodidact. Derrida was a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure. But they had things in common, particularly an interest in the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was a major influence on deconstruction (and on de Man’s “Intentional Structure” essay). Most important, their professional obsessions were beautifully complementary. De Man’s was reading; Derrida’s was writing.

The friendship blossomed. De Man induced Derrida to teach a seminar, in Paris, on the philosophical foundations of literary criticism for specially selected students from Cornell and Hopkins. In 1970, thanks to the exertions of Hartman, de Man moved to Yale. (Hartman dealt with the difficulty that de Man had no book by assisting him in collecting his essays, which were published, in 1971, as “Blindness and Insight,” a classic of twentieth-century criticism.)