At the University of California-Irvine library is an interesting collection of manuscripts, letters, and writings entitled the Critical Theory Archive. It holds the papers of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, Murray Krieger, and a few other leading literary theorists of the mid-century. I was there today and came across a letter dated 13 Jan 1960 that began, “I feel I must say a word for Paul de Man, if only for the record. Probably it is wise for him to accept the Cornell offer, especially if there is no prospect of an ultimate permanency here.”

The writer was Reuben Brower, legendary teacher of close reading at Harvard, head of Humanities 6. The recipients were Renato Poggioli and Harry Levin, two other famed figures on campus. De Man was a teacher at Harvard without tenure, even though he was 40 years old, and a position at Cornell had come through providing some security and standing. His future at Harvard was uncertain, it is clear, and Brower indicates why: “I, too, regret that he has not completed his book more rapidly.”

Bower would have had little sympathy with de Man’s outlook, and he confesses to being confused now and then by him, but unlike so many humanities professors today, he wasn’t interested in replicating himself. Furthermore, he highlighted for praise something uncommon in our image of the advanced theorist: his undergraduate teaching — “his high standard of performance in Humanities 6 . . . his daily educational impact on undergraduates in Adams House.”

Good undergraduate mentor but can’t finish his book — not a formula for success. The thing is, de Man never wrote that book, or any other. His medium was the essay, and even ten years later, when de Man was at Johns Hopkins and untenured, though fast becoming the leading humanist of his time, he considered his future bleak. In May of 1970, two more opportunities came through (the letters are in the Irvine files), one from Harvard offering the Kenan Professorship of History and Literature and one from Yale offering tenure in Romance Languages and Comparative Literature.

We might wonder whether de Man marks a success story precisely because he didn’t try to make a proper essay into a tenure-able book. How many other young professors couldn’t resist the book demand, however, and for quite understandable reasons? The result can be found in thousands of volumes in the library with call numbers PA to PT and dated 1975 and after. Instead of writing three rich, thoughtful scholarly essays over six years’ time, they produced . . . well, books that carried the imprimatur of a known press, bore all the signs of professionalism, and said a few interesting things.