18 The New York Review
understands that connecting putative
originals to characters might be an im-
pediment to reading:
It ought to be the case that the
greater the novelist, the more pow-
erful the characters he or she cre-
ates, the more real and vivid they
stand in our imagination and mem-
ory, the less we ought to be inter-
ested in the paler figures who once
trod the earth and from whom
these enduring characters might in
some way have sprung.Barnes is right; we ought not to do
this, despite the temptations. One of
these, I should say, hangs ripe from the
tree in his own book when he quotes a
letter from Montesquiou to a young man
called Delafosse whom he wishes to
drop, sounding uncannily like Charlus:
All the houses that have been
opened to you by my sovereign
protection will be shut to you and
you will be reduced to strumming
some Moldavian or Bessarabian
clavichord for a pittance. You have
only ever been an instrument of
my thought, you will never be more
than a musical mechanic.The idea that Wilde used models for
his characters is a way of suggesting
that he took the London world he in-
habited seriously. While he knew Lord
Ronald Gower, he actually invented
Lord Henry Wotton, and, having in-
vented him, recreated him in the guise
of Viscount Goring in An Ideal Hus-
band, Lord Illingworth in A Woman
of No Importance, and Lord Darling-
ton in Lady Windermere’s Fan, all men
whose aphorisms often gatecrash the
party of Wilde’s plays, adding a weary,
louche, and cynical tone to the efforts
at earnestness, or indeed drama, going
on all around.
The opening two sections of The
Picture of Dorian Gray, in which Lord
Henry and the painter Basil Hallward
and Dorian meet, do not need to be
based on anything. The characters can
be read as three versions of Wilde him-
self at play, each outdoing the other. (It
is only Parker the butler who has to be
imagined.) Or perhaps more fruitfully
these scenes can be taken as Wilde’s
effort to do in fiction what he later
claimed to have done in drama: “I took
the drama, the most objective form
known to art, and made it as personal a
mode of expression as the lyric or son-
net.” In other words, Wilde’s emphasis
in the novel on character and inner life
was less than his emphasis on surface
and scene. He wanted to make fable
and fantasy and comedy. If he based
his characters on anything, it was on his
own wit and his own glittering dreams.
His flair at containing multitudes was
greatly augmented by his wavering in-
terest in other people.
Barnes is withering at the thought of
people approaching a novelist with a
story on which to base a work of fiction:
There is nothing more useless
than someone else’s already highly
worked- up anecdote... nor does
a novelist “study” a real- life per-
son with any deliberate intent to
copy and paste them into a novel.
The whole process is usually much
more passive, sponge- like and hap-
hazard than that.Even novels that have as protagonist
a so- called real person, someone who
lived in history, can never claim, with
any seriousness, to be an actual por-
trait of that person. The facts of that
person’s life—where they went, whom
they loved, what letters they wrote—
might be useful as a way of structuring
a book, but the levels of feeling and
the shaping of experience come from
sources more mysterious than the facts,
and have an aim that stretches beyond
the urge to inform or reflect or be true
to a life that was lived long ago.
Part of the problem, as Wilde knew,
was that nonfiction, as it is called, or
history, is often made up of events
that are highly unlikely. Or as Barnes
writes, “Nonfiction is where we have to
allow things to happen—because they
did—which are glib and implausible
and moralistic.” It is only in fiction that
the facts have to be plausible.
In his Something to Declare: Essays
on France and French Culture (2002),
Barnes does not suffer biographers
gladly: “After the morticians, along
come the biographers.” He quotes
Flaubert: “I have no biography” and
“I... believe that a writer should leave
behind nothing but his works.” Barnes
does not heap praise on those brave
enough to attempt a biography of Flau-
bert. Sartre, for example, “seared the
novelist with a terrifying theoretical
grid—like an imperious chef branding
false scorch- marks on to a steak after
it’s been cooked.”
In The Man in the Red Coat, Barnes
returns to the subject: “‘We cannot
know.’... Biography is a collection of
holes tied together with string, and
nowhere more so than with the sexual
and amatory life.” Although we are led
to believe that Dr. Pozzi was a seducer
and that Montesquiou was “a flamboy-
ant homosexual,” Barnes makes clear
how little real evidence we have for
either of these: “We may speculate as
long as we also admit that our specula-
tions are novelistic, and that the novel
has almost as many forms as there are
forms of love and sex.”
Fiction has a way of making things
seem true. For example, Huysmans
wrote in À Rebours about Des Esseintes
acquiring a tortoise and decorating
its shell with jewels. This “bedizened
tortoise was,” Barnes writes, “sup-
posedly part of the information pack
about Montesquiou which Mallarmé
passed to Huysmans.” But Huysmans’s
biographer says that all Mallarmé saw
was “the remains of an unfortunate
tortoise whose shell had been coated
with gold paint.” And Montesquiou’s
biographer, in turn, says that the whole
story of the tortoise was “an invention
of [the poet] Judith Gautier.” However,
in his own book Montesquiou attests to
the existence of “that magnificent and
misfortunate amphibian whose truth
I do not in the least deny.” The only
way to the truth is to ask the tortoise,
and the tortoise may not have ever
existed.“There is gossip,” Barnes writes,
and then there is sexual gossip.
The thing about sexual gossip is
that more or less everyone believes
it (even when they pretend not to)
because it always seems plausi-
ble.... The sexual habits of human
beings are a mystery, yet one which
when “solved,” appears to solvethe wider mystery of the human
personality.Barnes read in an art magazine that
Pozzi was “not only the father of French
gynaecology but also a confirmed sex
addict who routinely attempted to se-
duce his female patients,” yet finds that
“there is not a single recorded note of
female complaint against him.” He ac-
cepts that this may be an example of the
sort of power Pozzi wielded. However,
“Pozzi never emerges from documents
of the time as the kind of ruthless liber-
tine—indeed ‘sex addict’—into which
he is being transformed by a twenty-
first century coarsening of language
and memory.”Barnes has a good time writing about
the ways in which Sarah Bernhardt’s
sexuality was described. She was, it
seemed, both insatiable and frigid. It
was not perhaps she herself as much as
the public’s interest in her private life
that could not be satisfied. In 1892 Ed-
mond de Goncourt recorded the rumor
that she had undergone surgery that
would allow her to have an orgasm, but
Barnes has his doubts.
Goncourt also noted in his diary
that Montesquiou’s first heterosexual
encounter was with a female ventrilo-
quist who “threw her voice to make it
sound as if a drunken pimp had come
in, and was threatening her aristocratic
client.” Barnes has two problems with
this. One, there is no other source. Two,
it contradicts a better story in which the
count’s first such encounter was with
none other than Sarah Bernhardt:And this story comes in two dif-
ferent versions. In one they rolled
around on cushions together for a
while, after which the Count vom-
ited solidly (or liquidly) for twenty-
four hours. In the second, they
actually went to bed together, after
which Montesquiou vomited for an
entire week. We cannot know.Bernard Berenson even cast doubt on
Montesquiou’s homosexual activities:
“In my long acquaintance with Mon-
tesquiou, I never noticed the side for
which Charlus is famous: sodomy. And
Lord knows, at that time, young as I was,
I made homosexuals’ mouths water.”
He does not mention any vomiting.
Ba r ne s i s fa s c i nate d by fac t s t hat t u r n
out to be untrue and by unlikely but
provable connections between people
and things. Early in the book, he notesthat Léon Daudet, who wrote many vol-
umes of memoirs, remembered being
given a curated tour by Montesquiou of
items in his famous collection. One of
them was “the bullet that killed Push-
kin.” Later in the book, Barnes looks at
the list in which this item was included
and decides that it is all too unlikely.
Perhaps, he concludes, Daudet made
it up, and it was only “a sly and mock-
ing fantasy.” Moreover, after being re-
buked once for telling lies, Daudet, the
son of the novelist Alphonse Daudet,
replied, “If I never lied, I would be a
mere railway timetable.”
While Barnes is concerned in this
book to find things that don’t add up,
he also relishes the moments when a
clear, connecting line can be drawn.
For example, Wilde bought À Rebours
on his honeymoon. In The Picture of
Dorian Gray, he allowed the book to
corrupt his protagonist. In his trial,
when Edward Carson asked Wilde if À
Rebours was an immoral book, Wilde
replied, “Not very well written, but I
would not call it an immoral book. It
is not well written.” Carson continued
slowly and forensically to tease out
the question, asking, “A well- written
book putting forth sodomitical views
might be a good book?” And thus the
book Wilde bought on his honeymoon
helped to cause his downfall.
Wilde and Pozzi, and perhaps even
Montesquiou, admired Bernhardt;
Pozzi and James were both painted by
Sargent; Wilde and Montesquiou had
the same response to the interior décor
at the Prousts. Barnes enjoys these
connections. But in ways that are sub-
tle and sharp, he seeks to puncture easy
associations, doubtful assertions, lazy
assumptions. He is interested in the
space between what can be presumed
and what can be checked.
Within that space, however, interpre-
tation, even surmise, are often claimed
as necessary but are always suspect. As
a way of introducing Morton Fuller-
ton’s turning down Wilde’s request for
money in 1899, Ellmann wrote, “A let-
ter from the journalist Morton Fuller-
ton, a friend of Henry James, suggests
the kind of nastiness to which Wilde
exposed himself by his importunities.”
The idea of blackmail does not occur
to Ellmann. Nonetheless, a belief that
Wilde’s letter contained veiled black-
mail may be given further traction
because Fullerton was indeed black-
mailed by a former female lover while
he had his affair with Edith Wharton.
But this happened later, after Wilde’s
death. And there may be a simpler ex-
planation for the “nastiness” of Ful-
lerton’s letter, one that would satisfy
Barnes’s wish that we should only con-
nect when we have enough evidence,
or else we should write novels. There
is a famous letter written by James to
Fullerton in September 1900: “I want
in fact more of you.... You are daz-
zling... you are beautiful; you are more
than tactful, you are tenderly, magically
tactile. But you are not kind. There it
is. You are not kind.” Looking at this
letter beside the one Fullerton wrote to
Wilde nine months earlier, it is tempting
to conclude that Fullerton’s letter was
not from a man who was being threat-
ened with blackmail but from a man
who was not kind. But as Barnes would
point out, who can say what James actu-
ally meant when he wrote, “You are not
kind”? Being James, he might not have
meant quite the opposite, but many sug-
gestive things in between. QRobert de Montesquiou; portrait by
Giovanni Boldoni, 1897Muséed’Orsay,^ Paris