Wednesday, November 6, 2019

The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes review / A belle epoque womaniser

The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes review - a belle epoque womaniser

A virtuoso gynaecologist is placed skilfully at the centre of a web of connections in an era of Parisian decadence

Tessa Hadley
Wednesday 6 November 2019

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mong all the divinely swaggering paintings in the John Singer Sargent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2015, one in particular seemed to sing out from the wall. In Dr Pozzi at Home a man in his prime, assured and desirable, with a fine intelligent face and trimmed dark beard and moustache, stands at ease in a full length scarlet robe; the robe gives him a Renaissance magnificence but doesn’t look like fancy dress – he’s a man of the late 19th century to his fingertips. And as Julian Barnes says, the fingers are “the most expressive part of the portrait”, tapering and sensitive: “we might think him a virtuoso pianist”. Samuel-Jean Pozzi wasn’t a pianist, though, but a virtuoso gynaecologist, a brilliant and humane innovator in women’s medicine. Judging from contemporary photographs of the doctor, Sargent has purged in painting him a hint of complacency, jolliness, eagerness to please – he may have been less dreamy than his portrait and more affable.

Dr Pozzi at Home by John Singer Sargeant

Starting out from the painting, Barnes sets out to discover more about Pozzi, and then builds around him, through a dense web of connections and relations, an involving study of a slice of the French past. The story opens in 1885 when the doctor, aged 38, arrives in London with two improbable travelling companions, for what they call “intellectual and decorative shopping”: meaning they go to Liberty’s (where Pozzi will order 30 rolls of “seaweed-coloured curtain material”), and to the Grosvenor Gallery to see the Edward Burne-Jones (French aesthetes often preferred the faux-medievalism of English painting to impressionist experiments going on at home). Henry James takes them to dinner at the Reform Club. Pozzi’s two friends are the Prince de Polignac and Count de Montesquiou-Fezensac; they are improbable because, however inspired and successful the doctor, and however princely Sargent has made him look, he is by his birth and profession irremediably bourgeois. His grandfather was a patissier, his father a Protestant pastor, and Pozzi has risen through good fortune, along with his own efforts and his wife’s money, into the upper tiers of French society, which, despite several revolutions and much turbulence, is still cut fiercely across by caste distinctions.

In his portrait the doctor’s swagger is unmistakably sexual, too – Barnes says the scarlet gown’s tassels look like a “bull’s pizzle”. To the lifelong chagrin of his wife Thérèse and his adoring, jealous daughter, Pozzi is incorrigibly a womaniser; another difference between him and his two companions in London, in that they are both homosexual – Montesquiou is supposed to be the model for Marcel Proust’s Baron de Charlus, as well as for Jean des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebors. Yet they like him, and long after the tetchy and contemptuous Montesquiou has broken off friendships with many others – including with de Polignac, whose mariage blanc with an American lesbian is much too happy for Montesquiou’s liking – his fondness for Pozzi seems to endure. So how does Pozzi carry off this social adventure, his success? Because success it is: apart from in his domestic life, there’s no social reckoning, no downfall – that is, until the last, shocking hours of his existence, the unforeseeable denouement. Pozzi knew everyone and was visible everywhere in French progressive society and politics, a committed Dreyfusard; in his late 60s, stouter and greyer, he is still handsome in his lieutenant-colonel’s uniform in the first world war, capably managing a military hospital – 50 beds for wounded, 25 for syphilitics. No doubt he is genial, “an adroit social tactician”, with “the bourgeois pleasure of pleasing” – as opposed to Baudelaire’s “aristocratic pleasure of displeasing”. But it has to be more than that: even an incorrigible nostalgic such as Montesquiou, scornful of what is contemporary, must be drawn partly to Pozzi’s energy, his indefatigable work ethic and his air of belonging to the future; his cheerful rationality and commitment to science.

Julian Barnes

Women, apart from the ones in his immediate family, have reason to be grateful to him. He translates Joseph Lister’s work on antiseptic surgery into French and introduces new standards of antisepsis, leading the way in making an incision into the abdominal cavity a relatively benign operation. He removes innumerable ovarian cysts: these cysts can weigh more than several babies, and contain litres of fluid: “the streets had been largely cleared of women tottering painfully along behind grotesquely inflated stomachs”. He visits and learns from the innovative Mayo Clinic in America, and is among the innovators using clamps for compressing blood vessels, and “thin rods of soluble caramel to hold the artery in place while suturing with the finest of embroidery stitches”. Best of all, he is not knife-happy: wisely he warns that surgery should only be used as a last resort – at a time when other doctors are merrily removing ovaries to cure nervous troubles. Pozzi has frescoes painted on the walls of his clean, airy hospitals, to aid patients’ recovery; and although he has many private patients in high society – the women he mingled with at parties trust him with their intimate sufferings – he works primarily in state-run hospitals for the general population.

Does Pozzi perform abortions? Barnes does not discuss the possibility, but it’s not unthinkable that this agnostic Darwinist might have helped women needing that particular procedure. He gives his friend Montesquiou a jokey written pledge, in return for a copy of a book, promising to keep Bed No 1 at his hospital at the disposal of any woman Montesquiou sends him; it’s tempting to read this as joshing between one man of the world and another, offering assistance for a lover’s awkward problems with his mistresses – and conveniently keeping afloat a fiction of Montesquiou’s heterosexuality. Who knows? Barnes insists time and again that there is so much “we cannot know”; that biography “is a collection of holes tied together with string”. We perceive these days an uneasy contradiction between Pozzi the doctor transforming women’s lives through medicine and Pozzi the womaniser, making his wife miserable with his succession of lovers – including probably Sarah Bernhardt, Bizet’s widow, the poet Judith Gautier, several actresses and, finally, cultured, music-loving Emma Fischoff, who becomes his life companion after his eventual separation from Thérèse. At a Medical Students’ Ball, senior doctor Pozzi hoists a naked girl up on to the stage, kisses her on the mouth, and then, turning to the rioting crowd, makes “a gesture as if to say, ‘Do as I do.’” Perhaps there is no contradiction: both careers exuberantly express male energy, male power and achievement, at a time when these could appear unproblematically progressive, and when critique was most likely to come from the forces of social conservatism, and the church.

Barnes tells us that he immersed himself in these past French lives partly as a respite from “Britain’s deluded, masochistic departure from the European Union”, and as a gesture against insularity. And indeed it is salutary to be so thoroughly submerged – even sometimes to the point of drowning – in abundant detail from the “distant, decadent, hectic, violent, narcissistic and neurotic Belle Epoque”, with all its fascination and its difference from us. The past liberates us from the shallowness of our absorption in the present, and reminds us that we always know less than we think about what we’re doing.

• The Man in the Red Coat is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99).

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