The Man in the Red Coat
by Julian Barnes
Alfred Knopf. 288 pages, $26.95
THE MAN in the Red Coat is a book about the subject of John Singer Sargent’s portrait of a Parisian doctor named Samuel Pozzi. It’s also about two novels—Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À Rebours and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; two trials—those of Alfred Dreyfus and Oscar Wilde; two homosexuals—Robert de Montesquiou (the model for Proust’s character the Baron de Charlus) and Jean Lorrain, a Parisian journalist; and various socialites, assassins, artists, and scientists who all lived during the Belle Époque, a cultural period which lasted from roughly 1876 to 1914, and which, by the time you’ve finished Julian Barnes’ book, fully justifies the adjectives he gives it: “decadent, hectic, violent, narcissistic and neurotic.”
It is not, strictly speaking, a biography of Pozzi. That appeared in 1992 courtesy of Claude Vanderpooten (Samuel Pozzi—l’ami des femmes). In Barnes’ version of Pozzi’s life, the society doctor shares the stage with other people, primarily Montesquiou and Wilde. Pozzi knew both Proust and his brother Robert, but Marcel remains in the wings, although we do hear the story of the duel Proust fought after Jean Lorrain insinuated, in a review of Proust’s first book, Pleasures and Days, that Proust was homosexual.
Pozzi “was everywhere,” Barnes says, like some Parisian Zelig. A brilliant surgeon and pioneering gynecologist, he had a following in Parisian society, not to mention affairs with some of his patients, including, probably, his lifelong friend Sarah Bernhardt (who called him “Doctor Dieu”). It was this reputation that drew Barnes to Pozzi when he first encountered his portrait on loan in London several years ago. (After being kept in the family until 1967, it now resides at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.) The idea of a gynecologist having affairs with his patients may have appealed to Barnes for its sexual aspects alone. But Pozzi was much more than a Don Juan. It was Samuel Pozzi who persuaded the French to accept gynecology as a separate field, who brought back to France improvements in surgery and patient care gleaned on his travels to England and North and South America, who introduced improvements in the care of the mentally ill (via ideas brought back from a trip to Argentina), established antiseptic practices learned from Joseph Lister while visiting England, and wrote the first textbook on gynecology. He was an avid art and book collector to boot, the husband of an heiress, the father of three children, and in the words of Princess Alice of Monaco, “disgustingly handsome.”
Photographs attest to that judgment, though Sargent’s portrait (given a full-page reproduction in this handsomely produced book) is something more. In the painting, Pozzi has an almost ethereal beauty: long, tapered fingers, a ghostly pallor, and large, beautiful eyes. There’s something so dreamy about him that he looks like a movie star. In real life, judging from the black-and-white photographs in Barnes’ book, he was merely … disgustingly handsome.
The book opens with a visit Pozzi makes to London with his friends Comte Robert de Montesquiou and Prince Edmond de Polignac (another homosexual, who ended up marrying the American lesbian Winnaretta Singer and having perhaps the only happy marriage in the book). Sargent has asked his friend Henry James (who would advise Sargent to move to England after the scandal produced by another of Sargent’s portraits, Madame X) to show Sargent’s three French friends around, which James does. He introduces them to Whistler and Burne-Jones, arranges a visit to the Peacock Room, takes them to lunch at his club, finds Pozzi “charming” and Montesquiou “curious but slight.” The three men return to Paris—with the fabrics, the bespoke suits, the paintings they went there to buy—and the rest of the book is about their lives in Paris during one of the most extraordinarily fertile—nay, fermented—times in European cultural history.
“The Belle Époque,” Barnes writes, “was a time of vast wealth for the wealthy, of social power for the aristocracy, of uncontrolled and intricate snobbery, of headlong colonial ambition, of artistic patronage, and of duels whose scale of violence often reflected personal irascibility more than offended honour. There wasn’t much to be said for the First World War, but at least it swept a lot of this away.”
One of the things it swept away was the prevailing view of homosexuals at the time, when, Barnes writes, “medical science tried to tabulate reliable indicators of homosexuality: a mincing walk, an inability to whistle, a funnel-shaped anus, fatty deposits on the buttocks and thighs, the shape of the hand, a supposedly higher skin temperature … and ‘a predilection for the colour green.’ … Hence the green carnation in the buttonhole; the frogged and furry green overcoat Wilde had specially made for his American tour; and Montesquiou’s myrtle-green overcoat, which provoked Jean Lorrain to refer to him as ‘Monsieur Take-Your-Lute’ and ‘Monsieur Haricot Vert.’”
Barnes worries that the outrageous Jean Lorrain will run away with his book, but it’s Montesquiou’s, without a contest. Both Barnes’ and Proust’s book would have been impossible without the outrageously stylish and snobbish Count. Montesquiou was a dandy. The dandy was a key figure in the Belle Époque, and the degree to which Montesquiou relished the role is evident in the portraits of him by Whistler and Boldini. For Whistler, calling something a portrait was too mundane: the one he did of the Count was titled An Arrangement in Black and Gold. When Whistler was painting him, according to Montesquiou, he shouted “the most beautiful of all the sayings that ever came from a painter’s mouth”—which was: “Look at me again for a moment and you will look at yourself for ever.” In other words, Barnes writes, “as long as my Arrangement in Black and Gold endures, you will not die, and neither will I. The Count was so pleased with his portrait that he would stand beside it and lecture on its virtues to small groups of aspirant æsthetes—women more than men, usually.”
Montesquiou named himself the Prince of Beauty. (Gabriel Yturri, his secretary-companion, was the Chancellor of Flowers). People thought Montesquiou was Des Esseintes, the decadent protagonist of À Rebours, a novel that was cited by the prosecutor to persuade the jury of Wilde’s own decadence. One reason is that Huysmans used details gleaned from Montesquiou’s home, including a tortoise encrusted with gold and jewels. When Proust published his novel, it was assumed that the Baron de Charlus was Montesquiou too, a linkage so popular that the count said he might as well call himself Montes-proust. And just as in À Rebours and À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, it’s the character modeled on the Prince of Beauty (“I am the sovereign of transitory things,” one of his poems began) who steals the show, not Jean Lorrain, much less Pozzi.
Pozzi was anything but flamboyant. Diplomatic, modest, considerate of his patients, a scientist and public servant who defended Dreyfus (and even operated on his hand after Dreyfus was struck by bullets during a public apology for his unjust incarceration), he was, in Barnes’ words, “a sane man in a demented world.” He remained calm, imperturbable, and charming throughout a period that was, in Barnes’ retelling, hysterically bitchy. It was also much darker than the image we equate with Offenbach and the cancan. After a while one realizes that The Man in the Red Coat is really about death—death by guns.
We begin with the duels that were still being fought in the late 1800s for the most absurd reasons. In 1886, the novelist Robert Caze fought a duel with a journalist named Charles Vignier over a spat caused by an article implying that Caze had taken his mistress to Lourdes by a special train. Why this was an insult is not explained. But to show us the incredible mix of ambition and narcissism in these circles, Barnes goes on to describe a visit that Huysmans and the diarist Edmond de Goncourt make to Caze on the last day of his life. Huysmans is allowed only a few seconds, during which Caze, as he lies dying, summons up the strength to ask his visitor, “Have you read my book?” And then there were the assassinations—of doctors in their offices, of politicians in public places, of a newspaper editor (to whom Proust had dedicated one of his volumes) at his desk. Barnes’ book closes with the funeral of Dr. Pozzi, who died a few days after being shot by a disgruntled patient—not one of the women with whom he’d had an affair, as a rumor popular at the time had it, but a plain man from the provinces who was paying him in installments for an operation on varicose veins in his scrotum.
Before we reach the inevitable climax of The Man in the Red Coat, Barnes, with a realism that brings to mind his hero Gustave Flaubert, makes a point to enumerate the precise number and location of the bullet wounds of all these duels and assassinations and the often gruesome medical procedures to save the victim’s life that Pozzi himself was sometimes called upon to perform. It’s an attempt to ground the Belle Époque in the reality of blood and guts, of reckless ambition and selfishness. (The journalist Leon Daudet, when accused of telling lies, replied: “Of course I do. If I never lied, I would be a mere railway timetable.”) The picture is one of a society with insane resentments and notions of honor. Though England had long since outlawed dueling, France did not enact gun control legislation until 1916, in the middle of that orgy of violence called World War I. Up to that time, there were a lot of crazies taking revenge for perceived slights—a bit like the present situation in the United States.
Wilde’s years in Paris were not happy ones either. “When Wilde appeared in Paris in 1898 after his release from prison,” we learn in one of the concatenation of anecdotes that make up this book: “Wilde’s spirits were often low, and he admitted … that he had been tempted by suicide and had gone down to the Seine with that intention. On the Pont Neuf he had encountered a strange-looking man gazing down into the water. Judging him equally desperate, Wilde asked, ‘Are you also a candidate for suicide?’ ‘No,’ the man replied, ‘I’m a hairdresser!’” According to the art critic Félix Fénéon, Barnes writes: “this non sequitur convinced Wilde that life was still comical enough to be endured.”
FOR ALL the sensational theatrics of this period in French history, such as the one just cited, Barnes’ book is decidedly not a narrative. One is never able to lose oneself in the story, the way one is in Caroline Weber’s Proust’s Duchess, for example, another book about the underside of the fin de siècle with something red on the cover (a pair of red shoes that recall Proust’s famous scene, “The Red Shoes of the Duchess”). Barnes chooses to write in a forensic manner, like a detective submitting pieces of evidence or a connoisseur showing you the curiosities he’s collected. Sometimes the book is like a series of Wikipedia entries, juxtaposed with no apparent design. The anecdotes and vignettes come in no particular order. But that’s because Barnes wants to stress the unreliability of our attempt to capture Dr. Pozzi. Biography, he writes, “is a series of holes connected by a string.” What, for instance, did Sargent and Pozzi talk about at the lunch Pozzi’s wife Therese served them each day after their sitting was over? “We cannot know.” What was Pozzi’s sex life exactly? “We cannot know.” Why did Montesquiou prefer Whistler to Sargent, whom he said had no taste? We can only guess. The scrupulous devotion to fact is admirable, but its effect is distancing. On the other hand, everything in this book will fascinate those who love this period.
Within this crust of sometimes heterodox vignettes from the belle époque is a sad family drama. After the accretion of all the period detail, what we come back to in the end is Dr. Pozzi; and while Pozzi was enormously successful in life, his own marriage was something of a catastrophe. The French view of matrimony at the time only demanded that spouses respect one another; not a word was said about love. But the Pozzis’ marriage seemed to go wrong very soon after the wedding, for a reason “we cannot know”—an infidelity? The wife’s closeness to her mother? Whatever it was, it was so bad that Therese considered asking for a separation. But being a Catholic, she did not—until their thirtieth wedding anniversary, when she moved out of the big house they’d built near the Arc de Triomphe and demanded that Pozzi pay rent when he remained there.
By now Pozzi had a mistress who was so much his soulmate that each time they went to Venice he tried to marry her in the Armenian rite. Even to the modern observer accustomed to the permutations of sexual and romantic partnerships, Pozzi’s summer travels with Emma Fischof, a cultured Austrian who had her own husband, seems cruel—or at least disrespectful to Therese, who was mocked in Parisian society as “the Silent Pozzi” for not complaining about this treatment. And then there was his relationship with his children. Pozzi’s daughter Catherine left behind not only a diary but an autobiographical novel. (History is written with whoever’s papers survived; Pozzi’s correspondence with his lovers was burned.) At sixteen, before having her appendix removed—a still-perilous operation—she wrote in one of several farewell messages to her family: “My Father, You haven’t loved me very much, and I felt it cruelly, but perhaps it wasn’t your fault, and I was clumsy in trying to find the way to your heart. … The sentimental (!) memory you will hold of me will be worth more, I am sure, than the cold little disdainful friendship which is all that I have known from you.” Pozzi performed the operation and she survived to write at eighteen: “I could have loved Papa. … Well, now I detest him just in thinking what we could have been to one another, and what, thanks for him, we have not been.” And at age 22: “And yet, I did love him, this moral wreck of a father … this incomplete and phony being” who “suffers from a plague of lying. … Oh, the inexpressible moral poverty of this man whom all of Paris admires or envies!”
This resentment may have merely been a case of a young daughter (and a wife) who didn’t want to share their husband and father with so many other people. And there were many others. Writes Barnes:
What is surprising, given the frenetic, rancorous, bitchy nature of the age, is how comparatively few enemies he [Pozzi] made for much of his career. It helped, of course, that he was a doctor (you never know when you might need one); that he was hospitable, generous, rich by marriage, clubbable, inquisitive, cultured and well travelled. But it wasn’t just easy private charm behind closed doors. Pozzi was a public figure, a senator, a mayor … a scientific atheist at a time when the church was fighting hard against the state; a public Dreyfusard in a country split down the middle; a surgical innovator in a profession known for its conservatism; and a Don Juan in a society where not all husbands were complaisant.
The complexity of the feelings he engendered is best reflected in what Therese Pozzi wrote about her husband and his mistress to her elder son the day after his father’s murder: “Jean, this is an atrocious misfortune. I no longer loved him but I am nonetheless torn apart. … I try to forget all the dreadful years and remember only the beginning, when we were happy.” In a subsequent letter: “He was so afraid of death, and his final agony—all alone—especially without her—must have been atrocious. As for me, who still loved him so deeply, I feel that I shall always suffer; his presence, even when far away, was indispensable to me.” And then the most apt observation of all: “And he so loved to be loved.” Perhaps that was the secret to these lives in the belle époque: the desire for something (love) that Proust felt was essentially unobtainable.
The Man in the Red Coat has no index, bibliography, or footnotes, but it does have full-page reproductions of portraits by Ingres, Sargent, Boldini, Whistler, and others; many black-and-white photographs; and, scattered throughout the text, reproductions of the little cards that came with Felix Potin’s candy bars (like the prizes one used to find at the bottom of Cracker Jacks), each card bearing the photograph of a Parisian celebrity, from Sarah Bernhardt to the man she called Doctor Dieu. Another touch is the thread that binds the pages, which is a brilliant, lustrous scarlet—an homage to Pozzi’s dressing gown as Sargent painted it, no doubt, but also a reminder of the little spot of color that the Baron de Charlus would allow in his otherwise all-black ensembles, revealing, to the eye of Proust’s narrator, the voluptuous homosexual self the baron hid behind his gruff, macho exterior.
Andrew Holleran is the author of the novelsDancer from the Dance, Nights in Aruba, The Beauty of Men, andGrief.
