16 The New York Review
Shadow Selves
Colm Tóibín
The Man in the Red Coat
by Julian Barnes.
Knopf, 265 pp., $26.
There is a moment in the life of Oscar
Wilde that is difficult to interpret.
In Paris in 1899, two years after his
release from prison and seventeen
months before his death, he wrote a
short letter to Morton Fullerton, who
worked in Paris for the London Times,
asking for money. Fullerton, known for
his charm and good looks, would later
have an affair with Edith Wharton and
had been the lover of the English writer
and sculptor Lord Ronald Gower,
often identified as the model for the
louche and cynical Lord Henry Wot-
ton in The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is
hard not to wonder why Wilde selected
Fullerton and if Fullerton’s high- toned
reply did not contain something more
than a mere refusal. He ended it with,
“I grope at the hope that meanwhile
the stress has passed, and that you
will not have occasion to put, malgré
vous, either me or anyone else again
into such a position of positive literal
chagrin.”
Like many others, Fullerton may
have felt a distinct chill at the prospect
of being associated with Wilde. Since
the two were never friends, and since
Fullerton, as far as we can make out,
had forsaken his homosexual life when
he left England, one possible expla-
nation for his haughty reply (to which
Wilde responded, “In so slight a mat-
ter, my dear Fullerton, sentiment need
not borrow stilts”) is that there may
have been a faint whiff of blackmail in
the request for money. Wilde wrote as
a voice from Fullerton’s London years,
and Fullerton in Paris had left all that
behind to become an enthusiastic
heterosexual.
When Wilde and his wife, Con-
stance, came to Paris on their honey-
moon fifteen years earlier, he bought a
copy of Huysmans’s À Rebours, which
had just been published, and he saw
Sarah Bernhardt playing Lady Mac-
beth. Wilde would later write Salomé
with Bernhardt in mind, and in The
Picture of Dorian Gray he would have
Dorian read a novel that closely resem-
bled Huysmans’s: “The whole book
seemed to him to contain the story of
his own life, written before he had lived
it.” In his biography of Wilde, Rich-
ard Ellmann writes, “Certain sections
[of À Rebours] had a staggering effect
upon Wilde. One was Huysmans’s de-
scription of Gustave Moreau’s paint-
ings of Salome.” Other sections of the
book “summoned him towards an un-
derground life totally at variance with
his aboveboard role as Constance’s
husband.”
In between the honeymoon and the
letter to Fullerton there is, for Wilde, a
dream visit to Paris, the visit he might
have made in 1895 had he fled instead
of waiting to face trial. The friendships
he might have enjoyed, the work he
might have produced, are subjects best
reserved for fiction. As Julian Barnes
writes in The Man with the Red Coat,
“All these matters could, of course, be
solved in a novel,” and asks:
What would have happened if
Oscar Wilde had taken advice, andthe next boat train, rather than
wait to be arrested? He might have
enjoyed a cheerful French exile,
like so many other scamps and
scoundrels before him. He would
not have been broken in health;
but neither would he have written
“The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”Since The Importance of Being Earnest
had, just months before Wilde’s arrest,
been much improved by the
actor/producer George Alex-
ander, reduced from four acts
to three acts while Wilde was
cavorting in Algeria with Lord
Alfred Douglas and André
Gide, it is possible that Wilde
could have sent him a play every
year from 1895 on. Alexander
could have skillfully wielded
his scissors on each one.
Such speculations almost
come naturally to a reader of
Barnes’s book, which circles
speculatively, indeed rumi-
natively, around the lives of
a number of figures from the
Belle Époque, the same fig-
ures who appear in an intrigu-
ing short section in volume 3
of Leon Edel’s biography of
Henry James. In June 1885,
John Singer Sargent wrote to
James from Paris to say that
he might spare some time for
two friends who were com-
ing to London: Dr. Samuel
Pozzi, whose portrait Sargent
had painted in 1881, and “the
unique extra- human [Count
Robert de] Montesquiou.”
The two were joined by Prince
Edmond de Polignac.
Montesquiou, Edel writes,
“had in some measure fur-
nished Huysmans his char-
acter of Des Esseintes in À
Rebours,” and “was destined
to become the Baron de Char-
lus in À la recherche du temps
perdu.” Elements of Pozzi
went into the making of Dr.
Cottard in Proust’s book, and
“elements of Polignac went
into the fashioning of Ber-
gotte.” Edel writes, “James
spent two days with three of
Proust’s characters.... It was
a case of a great novelist con-
sorting unknowingly with the real- life
material of a novelist of the future.”
James did this again in August 1894
when he went to St. Ives to be near
Leslie Stephen and his family, includ-
ing his daughter, the future Virginia
Woolf, “whose delicate beauty,” Edel
writes, “struck the novelist from the
first.” James’s visit was at the end of
the Stephen family’s stay in Cornwall,
as the summers there were edging their
way into Virginia’s creative memory,
associated with loss. James went for
long walks with Leslie Stephen, who
inspired Mr. Ramsay in To t h e L igh t -
house, and he spent time in Talland
House, which the family rented and
was the basis for the house in which the
Ramsays lived in the novel.
Thus James was, Edel writes, “en-
countering the living substance of
future novels.” He was moving in a
landscape and among characters with-out realizing that they were shadows
waiting for a novelist to make them into
substance, or to put it more plainly, that
they were real people on their way to
becoming fictional.Barnes wrote about Moreau’s paint-
ing of Salomé in his first novel, Met-
roland, published forty years ago. The
Moreau Museum in Paris was one ofhis protagonist’s “favourite haunts.”
Thirty- five years later he saw Sargent’s
portrait of Dr. Pozzi in the National
Portrait Gallery in London, when it
was on loan from the Hammer Mu-
seum in Los Angeles. Pozzi, who was
in his thirties when the picture was
painted, hardly looks like a doctor at
all. His long red dressing gown, his em-
broidered slippers and his fancy white
undershirt, his thin, tapered fingers
and his soft, distant gaze, suggest the
stage rather than the stethoscope.
Instead of a figure out of Proust,
Pozzi, as a doctor, seems more like a
character from George Eliot, a Pari-
sian version perhaps of Dr. Lydgate
from Middlemarch (though Proust’s
brother, Robert, in fact worked as
Pozzi’s assistant). Like Lydgate, he
was handsome and middle- class, but
“not entirely without connections,”
as Barnes says. He was interested inideas and translated Darwin. In 1876,
five years after Middlemarch was pub-
lished, Pozzi went to Edinburgh, just
as Lydgate had gone to France, where
he met Joseph Lister, from whom he
learned systems of hygiene to prevent
wounds from getting infected. Later he
set about transforming, Barnes writes,
“French gynaecology from a mere sub-
division of general medicine into a dis-
cipline in its own right.” His Tre a t i s e
of Gynaecology, stretching to
more than a thousand pages,
was translated into many lan-
guages and “recognised world-
wide as a standard text.”
But Pozzi’s fame went be-
yond his skills as a doctor. In a
time of deep divisions between
French conservatives and cos-
mopolitans, he belonged em-
phatically to the latter group.
He became a representative
of scientific progress; among
his patients were the very
fashionable; his art collection
at the end of his life included
a Tiepolo ceiling, a Géricault,
some Guardis and Corots,
two Delacroixs, Greek coins,
and Persian miniatures. He
sounds like a cross between
Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray,
and Wilde’s father, who was a
famous eye and ear doctor and
an equally famous philanderer.
Pozzi was known to have an
unhappy marriage and a rich
love life. At the age of thirty-
three, he had married a woman
a decade younger, who was de-
scribed as “young, very rich,
and beautiful” (Barnes adds,
“strange how that third adjec-
tive always adheres logically to
the first two”). Soon the Pozzis
moved into grand quarters in
the Place Vendôme, where he
also had his consulting rooms.
Among Pozzi’s lovers, rumor
went, was Sarah Bernhardt,
with whom he remained friends
for half a century. As his fame
grew, he was reviled by the
right and loved by his friends.
“You can see,” Barnes writes,why Pozzi had become a
natural target for the anti-
Dreyfusard, anti- Semitic,
royalist, nativist, Catholic right.
He was, for a start, “not really
French,” as his name admitted.
He was not at all Catholic, being
a Protestant turned atheist.... He
was a committed Dreyfusard....
And this was a man who, on a reg-
ular basis, examined with his bare
hands the naked private parts of
good French Catholic wives and
daughters, some of whom, as ev-
eryone knew, he went on to seduce.In his autobiography, Robert de
Montesquiou did not spare his ene-
mies, but Pozzi was not among them:As the sun rose, this man of rare
good sense and rare good taste...
saw the prospect of operations to
perform, and his hospital to deco-
rate, so that illness might be made
beautiful... ; and as, during theJohn Singer Sargent: Dr. Pozzi at Home, 1881HammerMuseum,^ LosAngeles