Portrait of a Man (Le Condottière) Read online

  GEORGES PEREC

  PORTRAIT OF A MAN

  (LE CONDOTTIÉRE)

  Translated from the French and with an introduction by David Bellos

  First published in the French language as Le Condottière

  by Éditions de Seuil, Paris, 2012

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  MacLehose Press

  An imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © Éditions du Seuil, 2012

  Collection La Librairie du XXIe siècle, sous la direction de Maurice Olender

  English translation copyright © 2014 by David Bellos

  Introduction © David Bellos 2014

  Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la Culture – Centre national du livre

  The moral right of Georges Perec to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  David Bellos asserts his moral right to be identified as the translator of the work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB) 978 0 85705 238 4

  ISBN (Ebook) 978 1 78206 095 6

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk and

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  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  II

  Also by Georges Perec in English translation

  Life A User’s Manual (1987)

  Wor The Memory of Childhood (1988)

  Things: A Story of the Sixties (1990)

  A Man Asleep (1990)

  “53 Days” (1992)

  Three (1993)

  A Void (1994)

  Ellis Island (with Robert Bober) (1995)

  Species of Space and Other Pieces (1997)

  Thoughts of Sorts (2011)

  The art & craft of approaching your head of department

  to submit a request for a raise (2011)

  INTRODUCTION

  From a passage in his disturbing autobiographical fiction, W or The Memory of Childhood, first published in 1975, readers have long known that Georges Perec’s “first more or less completed novel” dealt with a famous painting by the fifteenth-century Italian artist Antonello da Messina, the Portrait of a Man known as Il Condottiere (1475). However, no such novel was published in Perec’s lifetime. When I started to gather material for a biography of the writer a few years after he died in 1982, there was no trace of it in his surviving papers. Like other early titles listed in the “autobibliography” that Perec compiled in 1989 for the literary magazine L’Arc, the “Antonello novel” was missing.

  Old friends of the writer and the letters they’d kept and allowed me to read soon told me what had happened to these unfindable works. Georges Perec, born 1936, published his breakthrough novel, Things, in 1965. Partly through word of mouth and partly through the award of the Renaudot Prize, it flew off the shelves, and was hailed as the mirror of the rising generation. Perec, who had a poorly paid day job as librarian in a medical research laboratory, suddenly found himself a literary celebrity, and in a position to leave his thirty-five-square-metre perch in Rue de Quatrefages (reimagined and just slightly displaced in Things) for a larger home in Rue du Bac. Preparing for the move in spring 1966, he stuffed redundant paperwork into a cardboard suitcase intended for the dump, and put his literary papers in a different case of similar appearance. In the move, the wrong case got junked. All of Perec’s manuscripts and typescripts prior to the writing of Things disappeared.

  The story led me to expect I would never get to read those lost works. What I set out to do as Perec’s first biographer was to talk to as many people as I could who had known the writer during his tragically short life. My pursuit of biographical information led me to Belgrade, just before the collapse of Yugoslavia, to meet several Serbian artists and scholars who had befriended Perec during their time as graduate students in Paris in the 1950s. Two of them had hung on to carbon copies of some of those lost works, including a short story, Manderre, and a novel entitled L’Attentat de Sarajevo, that remain unpublished. However, the Yugoslavs had all left Paris in 1956 or 1957 on the expiry of their scholarships. They hadn’t heard of anything like an “Antonello novel”.

  The following year, when I’d already drafted the first part of Georges Perec. A Life in Words, there were only a few names left on my list of people to see, and I didn’t expect that they would add much to the wealth of information that Perec’s many other friends had already shared with me. Following up the remaining leads that I had, I went to dine with a former journalist who’d met Perec at the Moulin d’Andé, the writer’s retreat in Normandy that was Perec’s second home in the later 1960s. Towards the end of the evening, as I was looking for an opportunity to make my escape, Alain Guérin let it out that someone had once given him one of Perec’s pieces to look at. He didn’t know if it was of any interest. Could I perhaps tell him what it was? Guérin went to a wardrobe, pulled out a manila envelope and handed it to me. There it was: 157 carbon copy sheets of flimsy paper beginning: georges perec le condottiere roman (ee cummingsstyle lower-case was fashionable among the French avant-garde in those days). I told Guérin it was immensely precious – but could I please take it away to read? With great generosity he allowed me to do just that, and I stayed up all night reading Perec’s “first more or less completed novel” in bed. It was really hard to follow – I put it down to the late hour, the smudgy carbon and the dim hotel lighting. But before my bleary eyes finally shut, I knew that I had in my hands the unhoped-for revelation of the tangled roots of Perec’s later creation and of the masterwork that crowns it. However, I have to admit that even after a good night’s sleep, in good light and clear print, Portrait of a Man remains hard to follow. It is connected by a hundred threads to every part of the literary universe that Perec went on to create – but it’s not like anything else that he wrote.

  The story isn’t particularly elaborate. Gaspard Winckler, born around 1930, is dispatched by his well-to-do French parents to a boarding school in Switzerland during the war. A young and wealthy idler with a good eye and outstanding manual skills, he falls in with a painter called Jérôme, who trains him to become a high-class forger of artworks of every kind. Winckler breaks off relations with his family, acquires qualifications in art restoration and a dummy job in a museum to cover his tracks, and then spends twelve years in well-remunerated employment faking coins, jewellery and oil paintings ranging from Renaissance Madonnas to Impressionist landscapes. Anatole Madera, the head of the international gang of dealers that trades Winckler’s output, then asks him to use a wooden panel painted by a minor Renaissance figure to forge a new masterpiece by someone sufficiently famous to command a very high price. Winckler selects Antonello da Messina as his target, for financial, art-historical and personal reasons. However, he conceives of the commission as the ultimate challenge. He aims not to pastiche an existing portrait, but to make an entirely new one that would be a
ccepted as an Antonello by buyers and experts and would also be a work of art in its own right. A work devoid of artistic merit could hardly be seen as an Antonello, of course; but Winckler’s ambition is to create something that is simultaneously Antonello’s and his own authentic creation. Predictably, the result falls short of such a high mark. Rebelling against a failure he’d set up himself, Winckler cuts Madera’s throat. Perec’s account begins at this point when, having murdered his paymaster, Winckler finds himself trapped in a basement studio. He tunnels his way out, and returns to Yugoslavia to tell his story once again to Streten, an old (and apparently older) friend. That’s it. We never learn what happened next.

  The story is told twice: first, as an internal monologue, in a bewildering variety of stream-of-consciousness techniques, while Winckler digs himself out of Madera’s house at Dampierre, in the countryside near Dreux (Eure-et-Loir), about an hour from Paris; then in speech, in a Q. & A. session halfway between police interrogation and psychotherapy. Perec often returned to the formal idea of the two-part work: W or The Memory of Childhood has alternating chapters that tell apparently different stories, and his unfinished detective novel, “53 Days”, was designed to have a second part that would undo everything set up in the first. In both narrations of the first Gaspard Winckler’s plight, murder is presented as the key to liberation. It’s the means by which Winckler can cease to be a fake artist in both senses of the phrase – as a maker of fakes, and as a false artist. Mortal violence is what he needs to begin to be himself.

  Gaspard Winckler is also the name of the craftsman in Life A User’s Manual who cuts Percival Bartlebooth’s five hundred watercolours into increasingly difficult jigsaw puzzles. Chapter One of that great novel is located on the stairs of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. An estate agent is on her way to inspect Winckler’s now vacant apartment. “Gaspard Winckler is dead, but the long and meticulous, patiently laid plot of his revenge is not finished yet.” Though we may never quite be sure what the real end or purpose of that plot is, we now know what set it in train: the anger provoked by an artist’s failure to create an authentic Portrait of a Man.

  Perec would have liked to be a painter, but he was all fingers and thumbs. He had an outstandingly good eye all the same, and his works often revolve around painting in one form or another. Things begins with a meticulous description of a stylishly decorated dreamhome; A Gallery Portrait, Perec’s last completed work, deals with a painting that represents a collection of paintings, all of which turn out to be fakes. Perec’s painterly imagination reaches its apex in Life A User’s Manual which is, simultaneously and undecidably, a portrait of all the rooms in a Parisian apartment house that a painter called Serge Valène would like to put on canvas, and a description of the painting that Valène has barely begun to sketch out.

  Perec’s education in visual art began among the Yugoslav group he attached himself to in Paris around 1955, of which the most striking trace is a portrait of Perec by the Serbian artist Mladen Srbinović. It continued apace among the young intellectuals who formed Perec’s second circle in the later 1950s and with whom he sought to launch a new cultural periodical under the title The General Line (which never appeared). Alone and with friends, Perec visited exhibitions and galleries in Paris and made a trip to Berne to see a large collection of works by Paul Klee. But the Antonello portrait that hangs in the seven-metre gallery in the Louvre was a special favourite, for a quite peculiar reason. Like his hero Gaspard, Perec had been at a boarding school in the Alps during the war, where he was taught to ski. Around the age of eight or nine, he had an accident in the changing room:

  One of my skis slipped from my hand and accidentally grazed the face of the boy putting his skis away next to me and he, in a mad fury, picked up one of his ski sticks and hit me with it on the face … cutting open my upper lip … The scar that resulted from this attack is still perfectly visible today … It became a personal mark … It is this scar also which gave me a particular preference … for Antonello da Messina’s Portrait of a Man known as Il Condottiere. (p. 108)

  The scar on the ancient canvas is not much like the graze on Perec’s upper lip (one is dead centre above the lip, the other to the left and bisects the lip itself). I suspect that the reason given by Perec covers another and perhaps more important one. Most postcard reproductions of the Antonello portrait show only the face of the unknown sitter (whether he really was a condottiere, a leader or warlord, or just an accountant or a chum is a matter of conjecture). However, Antonello also painted a false frame at the base (but not on the three other sides), and on it he depicted a strip of folded paper bearing the Latin inscription Antonellus Messaneus me pinxit: “Antonella of Messina painted me”. The cartellino or caption panel also says without saying that Antonello also painted “Antonello painted me”: a self-confirming loop that indirectly but no less clearly asserts the artist’s ownership of his work.

  Perec was a modest and unassuming man in real life, but in his art he was at least as self-assertive as his Renaissance model.

  He would be in the painting himself in the manner of those Renaissance painters who reserved for themselves a tiny place in the crowd of vassals, soldiers, bishops and burghers; not a central place … but an apparently inoffensive place … as if it were only supposed to be a signature to be read by initiates, something like a mark which the commissioning buyer would only just tolerate the painter signing his work with … (Life A User’s Manual, p. 226)

  Gaspard’s dilemma is this. An authentic work of art expresses its creator’s grasp of the world and of himself, by definition; whereas a successful fake of an artwork seems to express the world-view of someone other than its creator, namely, of the artist whose work is being imitated. Therefore, however perfect it is from a technical point of view, a painting cannot be a forgery and an authentic work of art at the same time. Winckler, who doesn’t have Perec’s taste for logical exegesis (or the benefit of dialectical debate with Marxist friends) learns this only slowly, from experience. He sets out to achieve the impossible feat of creating a real masterpiece that will be recognised (and therefore purchased) as a genuine Antonello. But by the very fact of his success in “painting like Antonello”, Winckler, like Antonello before him, produces an authentic image of his own true self – an evasive, indeterminate fraud of no fixed identity. The more “like” the process is, the less “like” the product can be. He’s cooked. He’s done for. He’s finished. Perec doesn’t explain the argument of his novel half so clearly because he wants to take his readers through the process by which a false artist comes face to face with the truth of art. This is a novel, not an essay. Almost.

  Superficially, Portrait of a Man isn’t like any of Perec’s later works, but just as significantly it isn’t much like any other French fiction of the 1950s either. It seems as unrelated in its manner to the “new novels” of Alain Robbe-Grillet (The Erasers, 1953; Jealousy, 1957) as it is to the politically committed fiction that Sartre and Beauvoir had launched in the 1940s (The Roads to Freedom, 1945–1949; The Mandarins, 1954). Because its first part consists of internal monologue in a basement room, it may owe something to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, but the comparison doesn’t lead very far. The fact that it adopts (and adapts) stream-of-consciousness technique doesn’t mean Perec was thinking of Virginia Woolf (or that he had read her work, which I doubt). The nearest though still distant analogue to it is Michel Butor’s Modification (1957), which uses the second-person form of address to recreate the process by which a man becomes aware of where his future path lies. All Perec’s later work is in constant and intense dialogue with literary tradition; but Portrait of a Man engages with the matter of writing indirectly, through the tangled concepts of authenticity and the real as they can be articulated in pictorial art.

  After adding a chapter about the first Gaspard Winckler to my biography of Perec, I returned the precious typescript to Alain Guérin, who later placed it in a public collection. A second carbon copy was then found a
mong the papers of another one of Perec’s friends of the 1950s. With the discovery of other texts believed lost in the move from Rue de Quatrefages and the publication of substantial parts of Perec’s correspondence from the 1950s, a fuller, richer picture of “Perec before Perec” began to emerge. But there was understandable reluctance to publish his juvenilia. That’s what happens to writers thoroughly dead and gone. Perec may have passed away in 1982, but his work and his personality remained a living part of contemporary literature for many decades after that. And still today.

  In this respect Portrait of a Man is an exceptional text. It’s true it was rejected and then lost, but it certainly doesn’t belong to the category of “teenage experiment” or “youthful folly”. It wasn’t dashed off in a burst like L’Attentat de Sarajevo, nor was it left incomplete. It’s the result of a process of drafting and revision that lasted around three years, before, during and after Perec’s military service in a parachute regiment. In 1958 a version called Gaspard pas mort (“Gaspard Not Dead”) was submitted to a publishing house that turned it down, but an editor at France’s most prestigious literary publisher, Gallimard, got to hear of it. He was sufficiently impressed to issue a contract in 1959 – with an advance on royalties, to boot! But he thought it not quite ready for publication, and asked Perec to revise it. On his release from the military in December 1959, Perec set to work, and when he’d finished rewriting it one more time eight months later, he was so thoroughly exhausted with his condottière that he wrote ENDENDENDEND across a whole line on the last page, followed by a warning in uppercase:

  YOU’LL HAVE TO PAY ME LOADS IF YOU WANT ME TO START IT OVER AGAIN. Thursday, 25 August, 1960.

  He was in a hurry to finish because he was about to leave for Sfax, in Tunisia, where his wife Paulette had got a job as a teacher under a cultural co-operation scheme between France and its former protectorate. The dreadful news came in a letter from Gallimard just a few days before they left Paris. Having read the new version, they preferred not to proceed with the contract. Perec did not need to return the advance.