Julian Barnes, Playing Against Character, Writes About a Character of Action and Appetite

“He is virile, yet slender, and gradually, after the picture’s first impact, when we might well think that ‘it’s all about the coat,’ we realize that it isn’t. It’s more about the hands,” Barnes writes. “The fingers are the most expressive part of the portrait. Each is articulated differently: fully extended, half bent, fully bent. If asked to guess the man’s profession blind, we might think him a virtuoso pianist.”

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Not quite. Pozzi was a surgeon, and something of a celebrity gynecologist, who transformed his field, wrote an influential treatise and designed an innovative hospital. “Disgustingly handsome,” in the words of the Princess of Monaco, he was a roué of some renown (“a moral wreck,” in his daughter’s view) and a lover of Sarah Bernhardt. An aesthete and a cosmopolitan, he was a “kind of hero,” according to Barnes, and a new character in the author’s work — a figure of action and appetite, beloved for his energy, curiosity and radiant cheerfulness.

“The Man in the Red Coat” comes with no guiding description. It is not a pure biography or history, but an ever-widening gyre of the scandals, art, theory and fashions of the time. The narrative travels alongside Pozzi at moments, and then forgets him entirely to take up the history of the duel and the dandy, Oscar Wilde’s trial and the mysterious fate of Bernhardt’s amputated right leg. There are portraits of Pozzi’s friends and rivals — including Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, who became, much to his displeasure, the basis for Proust’s Baron de Charlus; and Prince Edmond de Polignac, “a discreet but known homosexual” who took up with the heiress to the Singer fortune, herself “a discreet but known lesbian.” Much to their friends’ irritation, theirs was a marriage of abiding warmth and happiness. Wilde shimmers through these pages, as does his bête noire, the critic Jean Lorrain, the self-professed “Ambassador from Sodom,” notorious for his sharp pen, taste for revenge and rough trade — what Wilde called “feasting with the panthers.”

In “Flaubert’s Parrot,” Barnes’s narrator draws a distinction between two kinds of people in relationships: “Those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love, I maintain.” In “The Man in the Red Coat,” this taxonomy is refined, and a third type introduced: those who understand that not everything can be known — especially about figures of the past. In this sense, Barnes’s latest is a sharp commentary on biography — the phrase “we cannot know” echoes not as a statement of failure but an ethic. In one section of the book Barnes lists his questions that must go unanswered — some whimsical (Sarah Bernhardt, just what did happen to that leg of yours?), and others that go to the heart of Barnes’s fascination with Pozzi.