A surgical seduction
Novelist Julian Barnes' biography of amorous physician captures spirit of La Belle Époque.
In his latter years, the French grocer Félix Potin, a pioneer of bulk buying and mail order, began packaging his own brand of chocolate, including a trading card with each wrapped bar. They featured photographic studio portraits of the celebrities of the day (the late 19th century), an age when celebrities were people who had actually done something – artists, scientists, writers and composers – and they continue to fetch good prices on eBay.
The cards from the Collection Félix Potin are scattered through the pages of Julian Barnes’ delightfully discursive and entertaining new book, putting faces to the names of the dozens of people whose stories he tells.
The most important is the title character, Samuel Jean de Pozzi, a gynaecologist who became an early adopter of conservative surgery. This was a time, writes Barnes, when patients were “not so much healed as repeatedly tortured” and Pozzi, who had enthusiastically adopted the findings of Joseph Lister, the Scottish pioneer of antiseptic surgical practice, warned that gynaecology risked becoming “exclusively and radically interventionist”.
That utterance, delivered a full year before the century was out, sounds farsighted and strikingly modern, and Pozzi’s medical achievements are given due weight in the book. But it is much more than a doctor’s story.
Barnes was introduced to Pozzi by the magnificent 2m-tall 1881 portrait by John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home. “Then I saw in an art magazine that he was ‘not only the father of French gynaecology, but also a confirmed sex addict who routinely attempted to seduce his female patients’.
“I was intrigued by such an apparent paradox: the doctor who helps women but also exploits them … Who ‘confirmed’ his condition? And where did that ‘routinely’ come from?” A book was born that, although never ignoring Pozzi’s faults, finds him “a sane man in a demented age”.
Barnes is a Booker Prize-winning novelist ( The Sense of an Ending) and this is his first substantial non-fiction work (apart from essays, two memoirs and journalism). And it’s a wonderful read. He’s a fluent, thoughtful writer, with no fear of the stylish and apt polysyllable (valetudinarian; meliorist; cynosure) and he eschews the ploddingly chronological as he swoops back and forth between decades in the space of a paragraph change.
His evocation of Belle Époque Paris is packed with anecdote and incident, and stimulating asides on the difference between English and French attitudes to marriage (the French see it as “merely a base camp from which the adventurous heart sallied forth”), duelling (“quicker than a lawsuit for slander”) and the law. It’s a fitting preoccupation for a committed Francophile (Barnes is a member of the Légion d’honneur) who rails in an author’s note about the “deluded, masochistic” Brexit vote.
But the book is also a meditation on the unreliability of biography (“a collection of holes tied together with string”). “Nonfiction is where we have to allow things to happen – because they did – [that] are glib and implausible and moralistic.”
This was a time when patients were “not so much healed as repeatedly tortured”.