In 1969, I said farewell to French literature, having become a critic of its critics.

Abandoning my PhD studies at Johns Hopkins University had nothing to do with the fact that one of the professors who encouraged me to enroll there was a Nazi collaborator, embezzler, bigamist, serial deadbeat, and fugitive from justice in Belgium — credentials that should have made him ineligible to enter the United States or anywhere in academia after World War II.

Instead, my exit had more to do with deconstructionism — the incomprehensible school of literary criticism that my one-time mentor helped pioneer. Paul de Man was an esteemed professor of comparative literature at Cornell and Yale Universities as well as at the University of Zurich, but is now a fallen idol, whose “double life” is the subject of a new biography by Evelyn Barish.