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. Besides, no one ever bagged anything while standing with one hand on his hips.
If Djuna Barnes is the most distinguished and T.E. Lawrence the most plebeian, then 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 a further fourteen 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 are what 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.
Melville is, to be honest, something of a disappointment: he looks like a caricature of himself, that is, of the man whom one would guarantee to have been the author of Moby Dick, although less so of Bartleby or Billy Budd. His torso is in shadow or, rather, shaded off, as if to emphasise still more the one thing that really counts in that face, the very long, patriarchal, overly patriarchal beard. This venerable gentleman, whose portrait is exactly contemporary with the two of Wilde, is his polar opposite, his condemnation and his negation, with his short, grey, crimped hair, the undisguised space between his eyes where his eyebrows meet and where the hair is less grey, and that misty look in his left eye and the authoritarian look in his right, as diffuse, in short, as the modest jacket of which one can make out only one button, a very high button. Melville is, in this photo, a grandfather, or a Quaker, or a pilgrim, or a national treasure, or, which is worse, a symbolic character out of one of his own books.
Despite the fierce look, Mayakovsky does not look authoritarian, he appears, instead, defenceless. It is like a still from an American movie rather than a Russian one, a major criminal caught in the lens of the law. He is pictured against a wall, as if he were Public Enemy Number One, or, rather, the enemy cornered just before his perfectly legal street execution, with no trial. He is holding not a weapon, but some sheets of paper, and that is the only thing that seems out of keeping with his otherwise harmonious figure, unless the sheets of paper are not, as one fears and regrets, poems, but pamphlets he was reading to a crowd from a platform. He is an ill-tempered or perhaps a hounded man, but, as revealed by that determinedly wide stance, unwilling to give in or surrender even if they riddle him with bullets. The most striking and most resolute thing of all, however, are his shoes, so remarkable that they slightly invade the turn-ups of his beautifully pressed trousers: one could not give up such shoes even at the moment of death.
They are the main object in the photo of Beckett too, except that their owner, seated almost on the floor and in a corner, seems slightly terrified of them. He is another hounded man, but at least he is not surprised by the hounding: he’s ready for it; he is holding a cigarette in his right hand and his left hand seems to be adorned, incongruously for someone so sober, with a bracelet rather than a wristwatch. His clothes are nothing out of the ordinary, although his cufflinks look like handcuffs. If it weren’t for those large shoes, the only thing that would matter, as in any portrait of Beckett, would be his head and those eagle eyes, which stare straight out with a truly animal expression, as if they did not understand the need for this moment of eternity, or why anyone should want to photograph it. Beckett’s is a recent death, and that is why, I think, his eyes seem more alive than those of the others.
Thomas Bernhard’s death is almost as recent, and there are no postcards of him, although this photo may perhaps look like a postcard and is one of the most moving in the whole collection. Despite his not particularly attractive, slightly coarse features (they became more refined with age), and the over-long sideburns that betray the date when the photo must have been taken, his face, because of his eyes, is one of the kindest, most humorous, intelligent and sympathetic in the gallery. The left hand stroking his face seems, at first, to have adopted an excessively artificial pose, but that initial effect is cancelled out when you notice that his little finger, which is about to push itself in between his lips, underlines the authenticity of this peaceful meditation. That gaze is not of wonderment, but of learning, and is so clear that it erases everything else, the broad bald head and the large nose. “So that’s how it is,” his alert gaze seems to be thinking.
The deadest of all, though, is William Blake, who 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 actually died. Just as others pretended to be writing or thinking in order 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.
“Written Lives”: William Faulkner, 1958, photo by Ralph Thompson; Joseph Conrad, 1916; Isak Dinesen, photo by Rie Ni
ssen; James Joyce, 1926, photo by Berenice Abbott; Tomasi di Lampedusa and his wife, c. 1930, photo by Giuseppe Biancheri; Henry James, c. 1898; Arthur Conan Doyle, 1928; Robert Louis Stevenson, c. 1892; Ivan Turgenev, 1879; Thomas Mann, photo by Alfred A. Knopf; Vladimir Nabokov, 1929; Rainer Maria Rilke, 1900; Malcolm Lowry, 1932; Mme du Deffand; Rudyard Kipling, 1882, photo by Bourne & Shepherd; Arthur Rimbaud, painting by Jef Robson; Djuna Barnes, 1933, photo by Carl van Vechten; Oscar Wilde, 1897, courtesy of William Andrews Clark Library; Yukio Mishima; Laurence Sterne, aquarelle by Louis Carmontelle. “Fugitive Women”: Lady Hester Stanhope, lithograph by Day & Haghe; Vernon Lee, 1889, drawing by John Singer Sargent; Adah Isaacs Menken, 1866, photo by Sarony; Violet Hunt, c. 1910, photo by E.O. Hoppé; Julie de Lespinasse; Emily Brontë, painting by Patrick Branwell Brontë.
“Perfect Artists”: Charles Dickens: photographer unknown; Dickens reading to his daughters (National Portrait Gallery); photo by Herbert Watkins, 1859 (National Portrait Gallery). Stéphane Mallarmé: photo by Nadar; oil painting by Edouard Manet, 1876 (Réunion des musées nationaux). Oscar Wilde: both photos by Napoleon Sarony, 1882. Charles Baudelaire: photographer unknown; photo by Etienne Carjat, c. 1863. (Arch. Phot. Paris/S.P.A.D.E.M.). Henry James: Henry and William James, photographer unknown; oil painting by John Singer Sargent, 1913 (National Portrait Gallery); Laurence Sterne: oil painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1760 (National Portrait Gallery); marble bust by J. Nollekens, 1766 (National Portrait Gallery). André Gide: photographer unknown; Doc. Roger-Viollet. Joseph Conrad: photo by Malcolm Arbuthnot, 1924. William Faulkner: photos by Hy Peskin, 1953 and 1962, Time Inc.; photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1947. Jorge Luis Borges: photo by Grete Stern, 1951. Rainer Maria Rilke: photographer unknown. Friedrich Nietzsche: the author and his mother, photographer unknown. Edgar Allen Poe: photographer unknown. T.E. Lawrence: photographer unknown (National Portrait Gallery); photographer unknown, 1927 (J.M. Wilson); photographer unknown, c. 1928. (National Portrait Gallery). Djuna Barnes: photo by Berenice Abbott, 1985 (Parasol Press). Mark Twain: photo by Underwood & Underwood. Vladimir Nabokov: photo by Philippe Halsman (Hastings Galleries Collection). Thomas Hardy: photogravure by Emil Otto Hoppé, c. 1913–1914 (National Portrait Gallery); William Butler Yeats : photo by Howard Coster, 1935 (National Portrait Gallery). T.S. Eliot: photo by Emil Otto Hoppé, 1919. Herman Melville: photo by Rockwood, c. 1885. Samuel Beckett: photo by Jerry Bauer, 1964. Thomas Bernhard: photographer unknown. William Blake: plaster mask by J.S. Deville, 1823 (National Portrait Gallery).
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