Complete article at following URL: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1711309,00.html
Aspects of greatness
Dickens had his chair, Oscar Wilde liked dressing up, but there was not much Eliot could do about his ears. Javier Marías on what his collection of portraits can tell us about writers
Saturday February 18, 2006
The Guardian
Dickens had his chair, Oscar Wilde liked dressing up, but there was not much Eliot could do about his ears. Javier Marías on what his collection of portraits can tell us about writers
Saturday February 18, 2006
The Guardian
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.
{....}
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.
{....}
· This is an edited extract from Written Lives by
Javier Marías published by Canongate, price £12.