Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  One might, however, 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, even though his poses seem fairly unstudied and everyday. The author must have posed, but might not have done so. 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. His gaze is self-consciously dreamy, but it also has a look of steel, as if he were witnessing some disagreeable spectacle. The slightly tousled hair, the goatee beard, the not too creased trousers.

  In the second photo 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 this second photo his hair and beard are greyer and more kempt, and you can see his rather small feet, and the clothes he is wearing are more informal. In both portraits, he is sitting very erect, as if he were rather short or, perhaps, nervous. 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. His daughters worship him, adore him, put up with his every whim and tantrum. 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.

  Mallarmé is holding a pen which does not touch the paper, and he, therefore, is pretending to be writing, but he does it very badly, with his folded shawl about his shoulders, the desk before him set against a telltale blank wall. Unlike Dickens, who manages to distance himself from and to dominate the camera, Mallarmé is not only dependent on it, he is fascinated and enslaved. For him that moment is an eternal moment, a self-confessedlyhistoric performance, and his look is that of someone who has already received or is still obligingly awaiting instructions, a look of obedience, gratitude, and childish excitement. The man behind that gaze feels a naïve sense of wonderment at progress, as he might wonder at a sonnet with a rhyme ending in -yx.

  That is why the oil painting by Manet is much more realistic, here a cigar replaces the pen, and the left hand—which, in the photo, merely awaits the coming of the eternal moment and does not quite know what to do—is hidden in his jacket pocket in what has all the appearance of being an habitual gesture. In the painting, Mallarmé is younger and thinner, he leans back easily and is not looking at anything: he does not yet believe in the existence of eternal moments.

  Oscar Wilde, on the other hand, always believed in them and only in them, which is why, one by one, he nurtures them. His 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.

  This is not something that appears to worry Baudelaire, perhaps because he has such noble features that he does not need to. When he is younger and has more hair, he looks shifty, his hands in his pockets, and, when he is older and balder, he looks angry or expectant—impatient. He has a natural elegance, even more so with age, and he has, too, an air of deliberation; and the ear that appears in both photos is quite remarkable, its sharpness underlining the intensity of the whole image, as do the lines that will later become wrinkles.

  The expression is almost identical in both portraits, harder and more disgruntled in the second, like someone who wants to get things over with and who is already thinking about what cannot and will not appear in the image, about what is outside any image. He is, above all, a man in a hurry; even while he is being photographed, he has already disappeared, perhaps because what animates him is not apparent in his face, is not contained by his face.

  The same can be said of Henry James, even when he wore a beard, in his already extremely bald youth. That hirsute image is certainly not the one that has survived, but 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.

  Sterne’s gaze leaves no room for doubt: in a century replete with lively gazes, it is one of the liveliest, and it belongs to a man conscious of his great talent, yet without being vain. In Reynolds’ portrait, he shows his hands with utter naturalness, the index finger of his right hand resting on his forehead, pointing to his intellect, the left resting on one thigh, comfortable, sure of itself and of the rightness of that position, so different from the photograph of Mallarmé. He is blithel
y crushing with his elbow the very pages for which he will be remembered (he will be above them for as long as he lives), and on his lips there is just the beginning of a sweetly malevolent smile, the smile of someone who knows what he is going to say the moment his companion stops speaking, for he seems to be listening courteously (awaiting his turn) to someone less skilled in rhetoric.

  The marble bust, on the other hand, is a failed idealisation: the Roman coiffure and the incongruous nakedness are belied by those eyes like two burning coals and by the enormous nose: he looks the exact opposite of a man in repose, indeed, it looks as if that face could never rest, not even while imprisoned in a block of marble, which, despite everything, is filled by his agitated breathing.

  Gide, like James, has his thumb hooked in his waistcoat pocket, but the gesture here gives off a very different, almost contrary signal. In this young Gide, wearing beard, cape and hat, there is a good deal of swagger and a clear inclination toward aggression; he looks almost like a professional duellist. His eyes are mean, elusive and disdainful, and everything about him (the raised collar, the beard, the determined stance) is sharp and bristling.

  Miraculously, almost all of these qualities have disappeared in the photo taken in his maturity: in it one sees a sad, sympathetic man, any hardness evident only in those thin, clearly outlined lips and contradicted by the generous eyebrows and by the glasses that soften a possibly sorrowful and apparently commiserative gaze. If you look at each photo separately, you will find yourself in both cases before a mysterious man, however much of himself he set down in his diaries. If you look at them both at once, you will find yourself before an enigma.

  Conrad, whom Gide translated, 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.

  Although not Oriental, William Faulkner’s eyes belong to the same family, and, in the photo, he, too, is all dressed up, like the best man at a wedding, thanks to that insolently protuberant handkerchief and his perfectly groomed, very white hair. With his furrowed brow, he gives the impression that he has reluctantly abandoned the idea of shooting the man about to become his son-in-law and has resigned himself to seeing him transformed into precisely that, but this decision is so recent that in his left hand you can still see a trace of the gesture of someone who could quite calmly and determinedly pick up a rifle.

  In the second photo, Faulkner is scratching his shirt-sleeved arm and is surrounded by tiny dogs, but the photo lacks all informality, nor is it in any way idyllic or even peaceful: his profile is as severe as his forehead is in the first photo, the back of his neck neatly shaven, a timid, even unsociable man. In both instances he looks like someone who has just noticed the arrival of some bothersome, inopportune visitors to whom he does not even wish to speak. Faulkner would doubtless prefer to stay with his dogs or go straight to his daughter’s wedding, even if he does have to leave his rifle behind.

  Poor Borges seems so patient and full of regret: he is fifty-three years old and is sitting on a stool and has taken off his glasses, not out of vanity, but to help the work of the photographer, to whom one should always offer an unobstructed face. He is holding them, very provisionally, in his hands. He is some one without guile, almost innocent, apparently helpless. He does not know that sitting on a stool requires either an upright posture or nonchalantly crossed legs, nor that any recently removed spectacles should, at the very least, be hidden from the camera, nor that a buttoned-up jacket (which is, I would say, reddish-brown in colour) is too great a sign of probity. He is smartly dressed, but rather as if he had been photographed on a Sunday. And his eyes, as a result of that suddenly recovered myopia, tell us what we know to have been their fate: without glasses, they cannot see, not, of course, that this stops them looking.

  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 which 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—an excellent tie and excellent cloth—give him some semblance of repose or somewhat mitigate that cruelty. The truth is that he could be a visionary doctor in his laboratory, awaiting the results of some monstrous and forbidden experiment.

  Poor, wretched Poe, on the other hand, seems entirely inoffensive, despite the baleful look, domed forehead and thin, unkempt hair: he has one hand tucked inside his jacket, as if he were Napoleon, but in order to do this, he has had to undo no fewer than four buttons on his waistcoat; he looks like a bum. He may, of course, think he is putting on a good front: an innocent in threadbare clothes, but they are the best he has.

  He doubtless belongs to the same lineage as unkempt Nietzsche, who holds what looks like a coachman’s hat in his left hand and, on his other arm, his mother, whom he has not yet learned to see as a disagreeable woman, and for whom he still feels respect, if not something more. Nietzsche’s hair is as dishevelled as his moustache, and his overcoat looks as if it had been lent to him by some much burlier relative.

  In the other photo, of him alone, he looks more groomed, his overcoat fits better, his moustache is more tamed and his hair less wild. However, his rather damp-looking hair sticks up a little too much, as if he had pushed it back from his forehead for a moment, the moment required for the photo to be taken. His right hand is pressed against his cheek, and his face is that of someone rushing forward at high speed: it is as if his composure were held together with pins.

  T.E. Lawrence does not, on the whole, look very composed when he is not being Lawrence of Arabia, but a soldier in the RAF called Ross or Shaw, so different from the idealised image of him in paintings, wearing his disguise. Without it, he doesn’t know how to stand, his chin on his hand, that hand on his upright arm, that elbow on his other hand, that hand closed, and all this when he is standing up.

  In the first photo, looking rather diminutive and wearing too-short trousers, he reminds one of Stan Laurel, while, in the second, his skinny legs and puny chest inspire our pity, and again we see a hand appear in the strangest of places, to achieve which he has had to twist his arm round behind him. His features are plebeian, the features of the person he wanted to be: a soldier, a proletarian.

  In the third photo, he is lying on his camp bed reading, with the back of his neck exposed, one of those rare moments of non-suffering, those moments which he did not perhaps describe in his book The Mint.

  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 s
eem 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.

  Mark Twain and Nabokov were not modest at all; rather, they were histrionic. The former, in shirt or nightshirt, is writing in bed, and in his case, one can only think that, unlike Mallarmé or Dickens, he is not pretending, but really is diligently writing a word, for he is not a man to waste time. He could not possibly have been unaware that he was being photographed, but that is the impression he gives, that he neither knows nor cares. The bed is tidy, it does not look like the bed of someone ill, for the bed of an invalid is always sunken and untidy, the pillows flat. Thus, the viewer can only wonder if perhaps Mark Twain spent his entire life in bed.