Bookplanet: Xavier Marias on writers and their faces

Aspects of greatness
Dickens had his chair, Oscar Wilde liked dressing up, but there was not much Eliot could do about his ears. Javier MarÌas on what his collection of portraits can tell us about writers
By Javier MarÌas

No one knows what Cervantes looked like, and no one knows for certain what Shakespeare looked like either, and so Don Quixote and Macbeth are both texts unaccompanied by a personal expression, a definitive face or a gaze which, over time, the eyes of other men have been able to freeze and make their own. Or perhaps only those that posterity has felt the need to bestow on them, with a great deal of hesitation, bad conscience, and unease - an expression, gaze and face that were undoubtedly not those of Shakespeare or of Cervantes.

It is as if the books we still read felt more alien and incomprehensible without some image of the heads that composed them; it is as if our age, in which everything has its corresponding image, felt uncomfortable with something whose authorship cannot be attributed to a face; it is almost as if a writer's features formed part of his or her work. Perhaps the authors of the last two centuries anticipated this and so left behind them numerous portraits, in paintings and in photographs, which may be why, over the years, I have got into the habit of collecting postcards of those portraits. This collection, entirely unmethodical and merely accumulative, now comprises about 150 images.

One might observe that very few of these postcards show the whole figure of the writer; indeed, few of them show much more than the writer's isolated head, as if the words by which we know them had emerged only from there and not also from their hands. Of the few who are shown seated or even lying down or standing - thus revealing, partially or completely, their generally irrelevant bodies - Dickens is perhaps the most extraordinary. On all three occasions he is seated, and in two of the photos, he is seated astride a chair, facing the chair-back. In the first one of him alone, one might think the posture artificial, rehearsed. He is leaning his arms on the back of the chair, with his right arm raised so that his head, gracefully and melancholically inclined, is resting on that hand. In the second he is with his daughters, reading to them from far too slender a tome for it to be one of his own books. Here, too, he is sitting astride the chair, facing the chair-back, and such a coincidence inevitably makes one think that Dickens must, in fact, almost always have sat like that. In both, contrary to one's expectations, he looks serious, he does not seem a jolly man, or even happy, but rather prickly and dapper. There is something of the dandy about him, but he does not deceive us: the man who gave life to Pickwick, Micawber, Weller, Snodgrass and to so many others reveals his true, witty, jocular self in that one detail: he is a man who does not mind posing with his legs unceremoniously akimbo, he is a man who sits astride chairs. He is not doing so in the third photo, in which, nevertheless, he again reveals his intelligence and astuteness, for he is not pretending to be writing, which would be both vulgar and difficult to do, instead, he is pretending to be thinking with his pen in his hand, and with both pen and hand resting on the paper. Dickens has paused to ponder the next sentence, a sentence he will not write, with his eyes abstracted and slightly amused, which is hardly surprising, given that the last thing we could believe of him, or that, doubtless, he could believe of himself, is that he would ever stop to think for that length of time when writing his vast, helter-skelter novels.

Oscar Wilde's capacity for dressing up is so extreme that, in the end, the disguise becomes utterly authentic, the thing we notice least and which is of least importance. What most concerns him is his own face, and in both portraits Wilde yearns to be a handsome man and manages to look as if he really was: the way models in advertisements do now. The expression of the mouth is the same on both occasions, as if its owner knew full well, from looking at himself in the mirror, that it is the only acceptable one, the only flattering one. The odd thing about the two photos is that all Wilde's irony and humour have gone into his clothes and are entirely absent from his face, which takes itself very seriously indeed. The flared nostrils indicate that Wilde is waiting, holding his breath. He is a man who, despite everything, is convinced that beauty can come only from the face and from its expression. He doesn't really care about the ring, the cane, the long hair, the gloves, the furs, the hat, the cape, and the cravat tied in a bow; they are merely the initial and subsequently dispensable lure, the thing that will make the viewer notice his photos, a necessary requisite if the viewer is then to notice what is truly important, the gaze and face of someone who, beyond all the jokes, wishes to achieve, above all, the beauty of seriousness.

The image of Henry James that has survived is the one in Sargent's painting, which is very like that in the photo taken with his older brother William. James's face is a uniform whole, the cheeks and cranium forming the indivisible continuum of a politician or a banker. However, in the Sargent painting, with its opaque gaze, there is one detail that undermines this apparent respectability and precludes him from being either politician or banker: the thumb hooked in his waistcoat pocket, clumsily or timidly, uncomfortable and ill at ease, the whole awkward hand hanging from there. In the photo, on the other hand, only his eyes save him from being passed over, that and the jolly bow tie, an extraordinary concession to fantasy in such an ascetic person. But the gaze is frighteningly intelligent, for it is an intelligence turned outwards, far more inquisitive than that of his philosopher brother, whose face, at first glance, seems, erroneously, to have more personality: you have only to look at their eyes to see this, William looks straight ahead, almost without seeing, Henry is looking to one side, doubtless seeing even what is not there.

Conrad sits, looking very serious, in an armchair, not knowing where to put his hands, which is why one of them is clenched and the other open, covering and concealing the first. He is very concerned about his appearance, as if he were a man who did not normally dress as well as this, that is, not as immaculately as he is here. His portrait is intended to be a monument to respectability, which emigrants and exiles go to such lengths to obtain, for they must, above all, show that they are decent people. His beard is meticulously trimmed, but it could hardly be that of a genuine English citizen, with that tapering, triangular shape and that moustache with its pointed ends. His lashless eyes are very severe, they could be those of a just man nursing his anger, of an innocent man being judged. Or perhaps they are merely the eyes of an Oriental.

Rilke does not have the face one would suppose him to have, so delicate and unbearable was he in his habits and needs as a great poet when he wrote, vanquishing habits and fulfilling needs. His face is frankly dangerous, with those dark circles under deep-set eyes, and the sparse, drooping moustache that gives him a strangely Mongolian appearance; those cold, oblique eyes make him look almost cruel, and only his hands - clasped as they should be, unlike Conrad's indecisive hands - and the quality of his clothes give him some semblance of repose or somewhat mitigate that cruelty. He could be a visionary doctor in his laboratory, awaiting the results of some monstrous and forbidden experiment.

Djuna Barnes, with her coat over her shoulders and her beautiful turban, is the most distinguished figure in the gallery. She is conscientiously posing and has dressed conscientiously, but in her this merely reproduces her daily custom. Unlike Wilde, who tried to be and to seem handsome, she knows she is not pretty and does not believe she can seem so, that is why she makes no attempt to adopt the faraway look that flatters most faces, instead she looks straight ahead, sceptical and mocking, trusting only in her costume (especially that raised coat collar) and in the confidence of the pose. The necklace does not adorn her, it protects her. She is a woman dominated far more by modesty than by esteem for her own image.

As for Nabokov, he is a joker who prefers not to acknowledge this openly, which is why his expression is one of passion and discovery. He does, however, dare to reveal a pair of hideous or perhaps damaged knees and to wear a cap inadmissible in someone who never actually became a real American. He is in his Bermuda shorts, pretending to be hunting a butterfly, but his shirt pocket is full of pens or glasses or something: some object inappropriate for a person out hunting. He is already an old man, but this is evident not so much from his excited face as from the fact that he is wearing a cardigan.

Thomas Hardy is the most rustic-looking member of the collection. James aside (at the other extreme), he is the only one who does not look anything like a writer, not at least in this photo taken in old age, in which the thick, buttoned-up woollen waistcoat and weather-beaten skin (it looks like wood), the lashless eyelids, overgrown eyebrows, and straw-like moustache transform him into a country doctor, whose disgruntled expression could as easily be due to an enforced and unwanted retirement as to having been a witness to far too many gloomy stories, "life's little ironies", as he called them. By this time, Hardy had already abandoned prose for poetry, and yet he looks anything but a poet. When you think that he would live another 14 years, it makes you shudder to imagine what state that lined skin would be in by then. Or perhaps, given that he was a rustic, it had always been like that, ever since youth.

Yeats is undeniably a poet, even though, in the photo, his hair is already white and one does not tend to associate old men with the writing of poetry. When you see that face, you see a fanatic or a visionary, someone with too strong a character, convinced about everything he does or thinks; it is a very authentic face. The dishevelled hair saves him from seeming old and looks almost fair or blond, it lends movement and brio to the whole face - he is a man with a superabundance of energy. The dark eyebrows are also striking; and the invisible gaze that can only be guessed at behind the glasses means that he seems to be looking, in fact, with those firm lips of his, as if he were nothing but voice.

Unlike Yeats, Eliot's face could easily be that of an essayist, not to say - which would be cheating - the face of a bank clerk, since we know that is what he was. He is a man who has spent decades combing his hair in exactly the same way, and he does not care in the least that his slicked-down hair emphasises his jug-handle ears, for he is aware that they lend singularity to his head. He is meticulous, a perfectionist, and he does not find it an effort to remain so immaculate - it is just a question of habit. He has the serene, trusting look of someone who has scarcely any doubts about the world order, because he is basically in agreement with it and will contribute to maintaining it. Nevertheless, his whole face exudes a strange, almost vehement sense of hope, and that is why he could also be an inventor.

William Blake is not even himself, but his own mask. That mask, however, was made not from his corpse, but from life, as the postcard tells us: Plaster-cast from a life-mask 1823, four years before he died. Just as others pretended to be writing or thinking to have their portrait taken, Blake is pretending to be dead. Not that he does it very well, for if you look closely at this mask on a pedestal, those closed eyes could not possibly be those of a dead man, because they are squeezed tight shut, as if they could still see, but did not want to. The nostrils are holding their breath. The forehead is taut, as if full of palpitating veins. The lips do not exist, they are just a long, firm line, drawn in one movement, and there is tension in that line. Blake pretended to be dead while alive, and now that he really is dead, he can still deceive us: he is a man in control of his posterity. He is a mixture of the living and the dead, which is why his portrait is that of the most perfect of artists.

(This is an edited extract from Written Lives by Javier Marías)