His new book The Man in the Red Coat may be set in 19th-century Paris, but the Booker prize winner sees clear parallels with our lurid times. He talks nationalism, grief and writing ‘filth’
By Lisa Allardice
England, England, Julian Barnes’s 1998 satire on heritage and nationhood, ends with Britain being thrown out of the EU, having been so troublesome, negotiating “with such obstinate irrationality”, that it is eventually paid to leave. “What remained incontestable was that the long-agreed goals of the nation – economic growth, political influence, military capacity and moral superiority – were now abandoned,” Barnes wrote more than 20 years ago.
“A tiny moment of foresight,” the Booker prize-winning novelist notes drily when we meet to discuss his latest book. Although he allows himself only one direct reference to “Britain’s deluded, masochistic departure from the European Union”, in an author’s note at the end, the publication of The Man in the Red Coat couldn’t be more timely. An elegant mix of biography, history and art, it tells the life story of a now little-known 19th-century Paris doctor, whom he deploys as “a sort of pilot fish” to explore the murky waters beneath the glittering surface of the belle epoque, “an age of neurotic, even hysterical national anxiety, filled with political instability, crises and scandals”.
In fact the germ of the book dates back to 2015, before the referendum, when the author’s curiosity was piqued by a painting in the National Portrait Gallery’s John Singer Sargent exhibition. While most of the portraits were of famous people, the man in the red coat was one Dr Samuel Pozzi, a gynaecologist. He was also, the label informed him, a Don Juan. “When I first saw him I didn’t think he was anything to do with us here now,” Barnes says of that initial encounter with Dr Pozzi at Home, but the more he researched the period, the more unavoidable the parallels became. “Extreme nationalism, nativism, antisemitism, xenophobia: they were very lurid times and we have very lurid times now.”
So why not write a satire, a la England, England, or, more recently, Ian McEwan’s comic Brexit parable Cockroach? “I’m a writer who takes time to discover what he wants to write about,” he replies. “So I’m very glad that my old, dear friend Ian has gone straight for it. I’m not that kind of writer. I write mine in advance, you see, and then reality happens!”
Then why not tell the story of Pozzi and his circle – with its duels, infidelities and “spectacular ending” – as a novel, like the fictionalised biography of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich in Barnes’s 2016 novel The Noise of Time, or the similarly fact-based Arthur and George (2005), or even Flaubert’s Parrot back in 1984? “He is known to us by a real portrait,” Barnes says. “I somehow felt that if I did it as a fiction it might be more ordinary, you might think these melodramatic Technicolor episodes were just invented by the writer. It is good to get back to the rigour of non-fiction occasionally.”
He was intrigued by the idea of an “intellectual and aesthetic shopping trip” to London, on which Pozzi embarked in the summer of 1885, accompanied by Prince Edmond de Polignac and Count Robert de Montesquiou. This “strange trio” – “a famously heterosexual commoner alongside two aristocrats of ‘Hellenic tendencies’” – were given a letter of introduction from Sargent to Henry James. “They were the big five,” he says. The dandy Montesquiou owned a pet tortoise, whose shell was painted gold and studded with precious stones: with its accumulation of discrete yet interconnected narratives and sparkly details, all polished to a high Barnesian sheen, the book might have been called Montesquiou’s Tortoise. “If I had 6p or a euro since Flaubert’s Parrot for every time someone suggested Pushkin’s Button or Tolstoy’s Gerbil … ” Barnes smiles patiently. Or maybe not.
This hybrid form most closely resembles Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Barnes’s 2008 memoir-cum-meditation on mortality, which “moves around in the way that the brain moves around when thinking about death and family and stuff like that,” he explains. “That’s how I think and therefore that’s how I write.” It is also how he talks, his conversation full of ready quotations, answering questions with anecdotes; the wry indirectness of his writing is reflected in his slightly disconcerting habit of seeming to address an invisible third party, before turning to deliver the punchline. He is often described as “urbane” (he winces at “gentlemanly” – “a bit patronising”): genial but gently mocking in manner, crisply dressed and carefully spoken (a self-confessed stickler, he started out as a lexicographer on the OED), he would be well cast in a le Carré adaptation.
Nothing to Be Frightened Of describes “the decent dullness” of his postwar upbringing; his parents, both French teachers, moved from Leicester to Northwood, north-west London, the “Metroland” of his debut, shortly after he was born. Next March, it will be 40 years since the publication of that first book: he has written 13 novels – not including the four crime novels written in the 80s under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh – and been shortlisted for the Booker prize four times, winning it in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending. We have Barnes to thank for the description of the Booker as “posh bingo”, coined back in 1987: to treat it as such is the only way to survive being shortlisted, he says now. “Until such a time as you win … ”
Last Sunday marked the 11th anniversary of the death of Barnes’s wife, the formidable literary agent Pat Kavanagh. “I was 32 when we met, 62 when she died,” he writes in Levels of Life, his devastating 2013 reckoning with grief. “The heart of my life; the life of my heart.” For three decades they were an imposing presence in a London literary scene that included McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie: a British “Big Five” writing at the end of the century, with their own share of spats and scandal. In the 1980s as in the 1880s, “the rich gallimaufry of fame”, as Barnes writes, was predominantly male. Today, although he has good male friends, he says, “I prefer women’s company – there’s no sense of stags head-butting, that sort of stuff.” And nothing makes him cry “like the women’s rowing coxless pair or four or eight winning a gold medal, which I don’t do with male sport.”
He is a fan of football (a lifelong Leicester City supporter), Roger Federer (who lacks “all that strutting male bullshit”), food (he wrote a column called The Pedant in the Kitchen for this paper) – and “the big F” Flaubert, to whom he remains unswervingly devoted. From Metroland onwards, Barnes’s work might be summed up by the title of his 1996 collection of short stories Cross Channel: anchored somewhere, as he puts it, in the sea. And The Man in the Red Coat is no exception: the adverb “Frenchly” popping up cheekily throughout. His fiction is famous for its cool dissection of Englishness combined with a European cerebral playfulness and, as his mother noted, rather a lot of “filth”. “I’ve written about sex in my books before,” he notes drolly. But in France, where he has a loyal following and was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 2017, he is regarded as quintessentially anglais. An early interview with a French journalist reported that he walks his dog in the morning and mows his lawn in the afternoon. He doesn’t have a dog, and mows his lawn “with extreme reluctance”, he laughs.
The French have “always been nice to me”, he says. “They just took Flaubert’s Parrot on board. They were so much more welcoming than if some unheard-of French novelist had written an upside-down, semi-fictional book about Dickens.” And they have been quick to claim last year’s The Only Story, about a love affair between a 19-year-old graduate and a much older woman set in leafy Surrey, as their own. “Aha, c’est comme Madame Macron!”
Barnes feels President Macron has been “held back by Madame Merkel” in his dealings with the British government over Brexit. “I think they would have gone much harder in on us. What do you expect if our prime minister is on record as having referred to the French as turds? Our former foreign secretary [Jeremy Hunt] said the European Union was like the Soviet Union. And the one before that, Johnson, said the EU’s plans for Europe were the same as Hitler’s plans for Europe. Do you expect them to cut us a good deal? So childish. And so stupid,” he says. “We are about to enter a negotiation for a trade deal that might take 10 years. They will get their money one way or another.”
What people got up to in bed, so long as there was no violence or cruelty or lack of consent, 120 years ago – how much does it matter?
He despairs at the insularity of the English political elite, and finds himself in support of “almost all of Jeremy Corbyn’s major policies”: on nuclear disarmament, renationalising the railways, removing charitable status from public schools, taxing the rich.
Barnes has lived in the same house in Tufnell Park, north London, since 1983; writing in the same study and on the same IBM 196c electric typewriter. He reserves his computer for journalism, nothing “more creative”. But while writing Arthur and George, both his typewriter and emergency back-up broke down – his punishment for mocking its hero Conan Doyle’s spiritualism, perhaps. “I thought ‘God – you are doing it!’” he jokes, shaking his fist at the sky. He wrote three chapters on the computer and printed them out, but “it didn’t sound like me”. Instead of a “loose, free-flowing first draft, I got a three-quarters corrected one”. McEwan loves the computer’s ability to cut and paste, which he sees as “a reflection of the human brain. But it’s not a reflection of my human brain. It’s completely silent. It’s inert, whereas the electric typewriter has this lovely hum and then it goes clatter clatter clatter clatter. It hums as if to say: ‘At your leisure, but I’m still here. I’m ready to take dictation.’”
He has similarly strong feelings about listening to music while writing, a sure sign that “you haven’t got any of your own music. How can you hear the rhythm of a sentence?” he asks sternly. He doesn’t invent characters and then ask what will happen to them, but rather: “What should they do?” “Moral questions often show themselves more clearly and more immediately in sexual relationships than elsewhere,” he says. “Some might think that I let Pozzi off,” he says of the doctor’s reputation as an “incorrigible seducer”. “I lay out the evidence such as I can be sure of. But what people got up to in bed, so long as there was no violence or cruelty or lack of consent, 120 years ago – how much does it matter?”
He loves writing as much, if not more than ever, and gets “grumpy” if he doesn’t write for a few days. “I enjoy the solitude of it. I always have.” And it was writing that kept him sane after Kavanagh’s death: “As a writer you have the advantage of being able to express lucidly terrible things that have happened. I don’t say that makes it any easier to bear, but it does mean that you know what you are talking about.”
Barnes has thought about his own death every day since his early teens. “That’s how I am.” His work can be read as a lifelong disquisition on ageing, memory and the inevitability of extinction: “all that stuff”. But at 73 he is in good spirits. Spending time with Pozzi has left him feeling upbeat, and The Man in the Red Coat isn’t written in the melancholy key of many of his books. “Maybe I’ll start writing about being young and cheerful,” he says.
But he is only cautiously optimistic about our current impasse: “I think we have to be very ingenious. And we have to be very concordial and recognise our similarities and our weaknesses,” he says. “But I don’t think we are very good at that.”
Lisa Allardice is the Guardian’s chief books writer
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