The “man in the red coat” is, depending on how you look at it, a French doctor named Samuel Pozzi, (1846-1914), a portrait of that doctor by John Singer Sargent now in the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, or a delightful book about that man by the English writer Julian Barnes. The book has been out for a while now, and I was leisurely in my discovery of it, but in my present circumstances it has brought some hours of welcome light-heartedness. The simple title is The Man in the Red Coat. A happy concatenation of factors—the quality of Sargent’s painting, the quality of Barnes’s writing, the quality of life in certain social circles of Paris at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the quality of the person who gave me the book—made for a delightful escape from personal, national, and probably intergalactic anxieties.
A dear friend gave me the book. At least I hope she meant to give me the book, rather than just lend it to me. For I fear I have somewhat dog-eared it by carrying it about. To say that the book is in one sense a biography, while true, will tell you little about it. The central figure is Samuel Pozzi, a Parisian doctor, gynecologist to upper-crust matrons of the capital. He was also free-thinking immoralist, a handsome lothario who seduced a fair number of said matrons. Brilliance of mind joined with beauty of body to render him irresistible to the ladies of the capital’s beau monde. That phrase, beau monde (“beautiful world”, perhaps, or “high society”) was popular in its own day. Historians long since have coalesced around the term belle epoque, “beautiful era” to designate the period between 1871 and 1914. The logic of the terminal date is obvious: the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, generally regarded as the spark that ignited the powder keg of the First World War. The year 1871 was the beginning of France’s cultural revival after the perceived national debacle of the Franco-Prussian War. In fact, it was a period of dramatic flourishing in several countries, including our own; but for French culture it was a particularly stunning age.
Having a good subject does not guarantee the excellence of a book written about it. But it sure helps to have a great subject, and Barnes unquestionably has one. For Dr. Pozzi was very active in Parisian cultural circles, and seems to have known many of the major players personally. So, well-known politicians, artists, writers, singers, painters—they all were within his exalted social sphere. John Singer Sargent didn’t paint just anybody’s portrait. But Barnes is a clever and most intelligent writer, and even a bit of an aphorist in the tradition of Oscar Wilde himself (who naturally features in the book along with Proust and other household literary giants of the beautiful epoch.) The reader interacts with a whole gang of cultural stars and superstars of enduring fame, such as the actress Sarah Bernhardt, as well as a bevy of the once famous.
Illustrative portraiture is handled in a witty way. The marketing tycoon Félix Potin was an early entrepreneur of “collectibles”, some of which, especially ironstone crocks, are now much searched for in antique shops and forgotten attics. He was a pioneer in the five-and-dime sector, well known in our own land (until recent inflation) as dollar stores. Some of his advertising memorabilia is now highly “collectible,” including his line of novelty cards (among the ancestors of American baseball cards, cigarette cards, and the like) featuring photographs of men (and a few women) well known for their political, cultural or athletic prominence. The Man in the Red Coat makes lavish use of these miniature portraits, which are interesting in themselves but also eloquent in demonstrating the cultural Who’s Who constituting Pozzi’s friendship circle.
Parisian life in the belle epoque could be very belle indeed, especially if you were male, rich, and socially prestigious. For women the situation was a bit more complicated, but the spirit of the eighteenth-century salon presided over by some woman of particular intelligence, wit, beauty or simply wealth lived on in various forms. As for Pozzi, he had all the top cards in the deck, including apparently powerful sexual attraction. He was no male chauvinist pig, though, more like a male chauvinist stallion. But the past is to be understood, rather than forced to submit to our own cultural norms, which like all cultural norms are of a particular time and place. We may reasonably hope that some of our most fundamental social arrangements are superior to those of our ancestors, but we must do so with some modesty.
The Frenchness of the French belle époque was in interesting ways Anglophilic. Indeed, there was an interesting kind of cultural mutual admiration society bridging the narrow English Channel (or la Manche, the “sleeve,” as the French call it.) Of course, cultural cosmopolitanism ran both ways. No spirited young Englishman could consider himself sophisticated without becoming familiar with the naughty pleasures of the French capital. The Man in the Red Coat begins with the invocation of a trip that Pozzi made to London with two posh friends in 1885; but Barnes playfully then says it might just as well have begun with an account of Oscar Wilde’s wedding trip to Paris the year earlier. Or think of the Irish novelist George Moore warming his meager meals in his flat in the rue de la Tour des Dames. Throughout the book one hears echoes of the internationalist cosmopolitanism of the culture of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, though always with a marked French accent.
Barnes presents this deeply engaging world with verve and great elegance, and in a way that captures both its unique features and its more general reverberations. He is appropriately abrupt in dealing with Pozzi’s abrupt end. Our own recent experience of bizarre and opaque political violence is hardly new. In 1918 a probably demented and certainly aggrieved former patient shot Pozzi to death. The most eminent medical man in France, though now in his seventies, was still quite the stud; he had evolved from the stallion to the silver fox stage, but he was still fully operative on both the public stage and the private bedrooms of the right bank. But of course even he could not survive being shot in the gut. There was of course a large public outpouring of grief and outrage. The secular “saint” is a well-known character in modern French history. Large, indeed sometimes huge street corteges have marked the funerals of heroes of culture at least since the time of the Revolution. Prominent examples would include Victor Hugo in the nineteenth century or Jean-Paul Satre in the twentieth. But Samuel Pozzi. What a man. What a book
Julian Barnes, The Man in the Red Coat (New York: Knopf, 2020), pp. 263
No comments:
Post a Comment