With a novel, you can make things up. But when you’re doing non-fiction, you suddenly realize, ‘not only do I not know, but I can’t know.’
British author Barnes finds artistic entry into world of 19th-century French decadence
Author Julian Barnes on writing The Man in the Red Coat
Language changes with the centuries. So what was then a ‘Don Juan’ can now become a ‘sex addict.’ But if you look at the time, and tried to certify him as such, you might find that he was a romantic. Julian Barnes
The Man in the Red Coat
Julian Barnes Random House
JAMIE PORTMAN
His presence leaps out at you from the portrait. He’s handsome, bearded, eyes aglow with an assured awareness of his own charisma. There’s swagger in his demeanour — not surprising, given that he agreed to pose, perhaps impudently, for this portrait in a scarlet ankle-length dressing gown. It’s almost as though he’s extending a seductive invitation to the viewer.
When John Singer Sargent’s 1881 masterpiece Dr. Pozzi at Home showed up at London’s National Portrait Gallery a few years ago, one female critic confessed that it made her blush uncontrollably.
Bestselling British author Julian Barnes considers this response “a wonderful tribute to the portrait.” It also helps explain why he decided to write a book about the mysterious figure in the painting and the volatile world he inhabited.
“I thought if he was having such an effect on someone a hundred years after his death, we shouldn’t be surprised that he was having a powerful effect on women at the time,” Barnes tells Postmedia.
The Booker-winning novelist is chatting from London about The Man in the Red Coat, a non-fiction work that not only delivers a fascinating portrait of an elusive figure from late 19th-century French history but also burrows under the glitter of France’s Belle Époque to reveal a time of public and private turbulence with unsettling relevance to our present.
This sumptuously produced volume arrived in Britain last fall to universal acclaim and is now available in Canada. The critic for The Spectator called it “a brilliant, defiantly unconventional book” — an apt description for a volume that is as much a work of meditation as it is of history.
Indeed, its 74-year-old author begins mischievously by offering the reader a choice of appropriate opening paragraphs. For example: “We could begin with a bullet, and the gun which fired it. That usually works: a sturdy rule of theatre declares that if you show a gun in the first act, it will assuredly be fired in the last. But which gun, and which bullet? There were so many of them around at the time.”
And certainly, bullets do figure in the life of Dr. Samuel Pozzi, a Paris gynecologist who was not only a pioneering figure in medical research but also a compulsive philanderer. But, again, don’t expect a conventional biography — not from an author who goes out of his way to acknowledge the perils he faced venturing into this genre. Indeed, near the end of the book, Barnes detours into a six-page list of “things we cannot know” about Pozzi and his life. “With a novel, you can make things up,” Barnes says with a laugh. He’s done so in his fiction with real-life characters including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and composer Dmitri Shostakovich. “But when you’re doing non-fiction, you suddenly realize, ‘not only do I not know, but I can’t know.’”
This book wouldn’t have happened if Sargent’s great painting had not made its way across the Atlantic to be part of a London exhibition.
“I thought it was an astonishing portrait when I saw it,” Barnes says. “I also thought I knew France at the end of the 19th century — yet I had never come across him.”
Barnes was drawn to “the paradox of a man who helps women surgically but perhaps doesn’t help them emotionally or sexually. The idea of a famous gynecologist who was also a Don Juan — that’s something that would be perhaps unlikely in my country or yours.”
But Barnes hesitates to endorse the verdict of another writer that Pozzi was not only the father of French gynecology, but also a confirmed sex addict who routinely attempted to seduce his female patients.
“Language changes with the centuries,” he says. “So what was then a ‘Don Juan’ can now become a ‘sex addict.’ But if you look at the time, and tried to certify him as such, you might find that he was a romantic.”
Marital infidelity was scarcely unique to Pozzi in an era when, in Barnes’s view, “the requirements of money, class, family and sex” contributed to its character. Yes, Pozzi married an heiress who brought him status and security. Yes, he would continue to have numerous affairs (including with French stage actress Sarah Bernhardt) and he would even persuade “an elderly Armenian monk” to bless an extramarital union with one of his mistresses.
“He was, thankfully, not without faults,” Barnes says enigmatically, “and I would put him forward as a sort of hero.” Pozzi was the “most important and pioneering gynecologist of his age” — a man “who saved many women from lives of constant pain and from procedures that were forms of torture rather than forms of curing” and whose medical writings were still in use in training institutions in the 1930s.
As for the less-creditable aspects of Pozzi’s life: “I think you have to leave aside the private lives of a lot of heroes — probably.”
Pozzi shares the stage with a marvellous gallery of other colourful characters — homosexual dandies Count Robert de Montesquiou-fézensac and Prince Edmond de Polignac, playwright Oscar Wilde, notorious novelist Joris-karl Huysmans, Bernhardt, and the aggressively decadent Jean Lorrain, who once dubbed himself “the ambassador from Sodom.”
Barnes says it’s easy to see La Belle Epoque as a gilded age — “a time of peace and pleasure, glamour with more than a brush of decadence.” But he has tried to administer a corrective. “There was also hysterical violence and paranoia, and nefarious developments that proceeded into the 20th century … increasing nativism, increasing anti-semitism, increasing brute nationalism, intolerance and so on.”
And yes, he could be talking about the current mood in his own country. In an author’s note at the end of the book, Barnes takes aim at Britain’s “deluded masochistic departure” from the European Union.
“I think we’re in for a long and cheerless time.” he says now. “I think it’s one of the stupidest things we’ve done.”