by John Hough
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery of any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted age and robustness. His whole high, broad, form seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among the grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded . . . So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little bit of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he stood.
Frederic Henry gets his first look at Catherine Barkley on page 18 of A Farewell to Arms:
Miss Barkley was quite tall. She wore what seemed to me to be a nurse’s uniform, was blond and had tawny skin and gray eyes. I thought she was very beautiful.
Two great novels, two very different approaches to the physical description of a major character. Hemingway gives us a little help, then lets our imagination do the rest. Melville paints Ahab down to the last wrinkle. How much physical description to write, if any, is a decision you make every time a character walks into your novel. How much of the portrait do you want to leave to the reader’s imagination, and how does that work? How, with little or no physical description, do you create a character’s image in the reader’s mind’s eye?
VOICE AS PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Huckleberry Finn is one of the most enduringly vivid characters in all of literature, and yet there isn’t a word of description of him anywhere in the novel. In all of Moby Dick, Ishmael never tells us what he looks like. Few first-person narrators do. Scour what is perhaps Faulkner’s greatest novel, The Sound and the Fury, for a physical description of any member of the Compson family, and, amazingly, you won’t find it. Why, then, do we see Huck, Ishmael, and the Compsons so clearly?
Benjy Compson, the idiot, is the narrator of the unforgettable first section of the novel:
I listened to the water.
I couldn’t hear the water, and Caddy opened the door.
“Why, Benjy,” she said. She looked at me and I went and she put her arms around me. “Did you find Caddy again,” she said. “Did you think Caddy had run away.” Caddy smelled like trees.
We went to Caddy’s room. She sat down at the mirror. She stopped her hands and looked at me.
“Why, Benjy. What is it,” she said. “You mustn’t cry. Caddy’s not going away. See here,” she said. She took up the bottle and took the stopper out and held it to my nose. “Sweet. Smell. Good.”
I went away and I didn’t hush, and she held the bottle in her hand, looking at me.
“Oh,” she said. She put the bottle down and came and put her arms around me. “So that was it. And you were trying to tell Caddy and you couldn’t tell her. You wanted to, but you couldn’t, could you. Of course Caddy won’t. Just wait till I dress.”
Benjy’s simple-mindedness and confusion—he doesn’t hear questions as questions—are captured in his narrative voice, and so are the hurt and sensitivity that no one but Caddy perceives, or even tries to perceive. Bewilderment, anguish, muddled longing: with this welter of emotions comes the visible person. Faulkner has tripped our imagination. We see the pain in Benjy’s eyes, a tragic confusion of loss and fright.
Caddy’s dialogue in this scene brims with compassion, and we also hear her fearlessness in displaying it. There’s love in her words to her pathetic brother. Earlier in the novel—the action in the first two sections of The Sound and the Fury shifts erratically here and there in time—a younger Caddy reveals her venturesome side. Benjy is remembering:
We were playing in the branch and Caddy squatted down and got her dress wet and Versh said,
“Your mommer going to whip you for getting your dress wet.”
“She’s not going to do any such thing,” Caddy said.
“How do you know,” Quentin said.
“That’s all right how I know,” Caddy said. “How do you know.”
“She said she was,” Quentin said. “Besides, I’m older than you.”
“I’m seven years old,” Caddy said. “I guess I know.”
“I’m older than that,” Quentin said. “I go to school. Don’t I, Versh.”
“I’m going to school next year,” Caddy said.
“You know she whip you when you get your dress wet,” Versh said.
“It’s not wet,” Caddy said. She stood up in the water and looked at her dress. “I’ll take it off,” she said. “Then it’ll dry.”
“I bet you won’t,” Quentin said.
“I bet I will,” Caddy said.
“I bet you better not,” Quentin said.
Caddy came to Versh and me and turned her back.
“Unbutton it, Versh,” she said.
There’s high spirit in Caddy’s every line here, the headstrong quality that we can only admire, but which will lead to so much grief later on. Faulkner never tells us she’s pretty, but we know she is, from her airy boldness, her self-assurance. This is a girl who’s comfortable in her own skin, knows admiration will come her way and is indifferent when it doesn’t. She’s obviously smart. Her dialogue is so alive that we can’t help but see her without ever reading a word of physical description.
In the fourth and final section of the novel, when the Compsons’ doughty and long-suffering servant, Dilsey, takes her family and Benjy to the Easter service at her ramshackle Baptist church, Faulkner describes the two ministers, who appear nowhere else in the novel—their size, complexions, physiognomies, attire. Why describe minor characters and not major ones? Faulkner, clearly, prefers to let his greatest characters come alive in the wide world of the reader’s imagination.
McCarthy, Higgins, and Didion work this way. Higgins tells us that Eddie Coyle is “stocky,” and our imagination takes over from there. Higgins never tells us what Foley and Jackie Brown look like. We know Maria Wyeth is pretty because she’s an actress, but her face and figure are evoked entirely in her dialogue.
• • •
In his acclaimed short story, A Small, Good Thing, Raymond Carver gives us the baker’s small eyes and “bristly flesh around his cheeks” and lets the his dialogue fill out the picture:
“You want to pick up your three-day old cake? That it? I don’t want to argue with you, lady. There it sits over there, getting stale. I’ll give it to you for half of what I quoted you. No. You want it? You can have it. It’s no good to me, no good to anyone now. It cost me time and money to make that cake. If you want it, okay, if you don’t, that’s okay, too. I have to get back to work.”
The baker doesn’t know that the woman and her husband didn’t pick up their little boy’s cake because the boy was run over and killed. The baker, in a malicious pique, has been telephoning Ann and Howard at all hours, harassing them, and they’ve come to the bakery in the middle of the night to confront him. Their news, and their grief, leaves him thunderstruck and, after a moment, a changed man:
“God alone knows how sorry I am. Listen to me. I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was different kind of human being. I’ve forgotten, I don’t know for sure. But I’m not any longer, if I ever was. Now I’m just a baker. That don’t excuse my doing what I did, I know. But I’m deeply sorry. I’m sorry for your son, and I’m sorry for my part in this,” the baker said. He spread his hands on the table and turned them over to reveal his palms . . . “You understand what it comes down to is I don’t know how to act anymore, it would seem. P
lease,” the man said, “let me ask you if you can find it in your hearts to forgive me?”
These are the words, ill-humored and vindictive in the first speech, stricken with remorse and self-loathing in the second, of a sad, failed, lonely man. An image comes to mind—a face, a physiognomy. To hear this man is to see him.
EVOKING FACIAL EXPRESSION
There are only so many ways to write facial expression. There’s smiling, grinning, smirking, glowering, glaring. There are raised eyebrows, widened eyes, a wrinkled or furrowed forehead. Eyes can bug out, though I’d be careful with that one. There’s the quizzical look. There’s the frown.
All of these ways of showing the reader your characters’ faces at important moments have their limitations. They’re generic; they lack specificity and nuance. Yes, your characters are going to have to smile and grin, but too many smiles can wear the verb out, till one smile becomes just like any other. As for smirks, I would limit myself to one or two per novel. It’s a good verb but a conspicuous one, and you reduce its effect when you overuse it, as you do with smiles. And how many times can characters glare or glower at one another before the action becomes trite? The nature of a frown depends on the character—Ahab’s frown is screwed permanently into his lowering, weathered face; Daisy Buchanan’s is fleeting, quickly wiped away by her natural verve and radiance.
There’s a way around the limited vocabulary of facial expressions: dialogue. There isn’t much nuance in a frown, a raised eyebrow, or widened eyes, but dialogue can be infinitely nuanced and supple. It can express any mood, any emotion, subtle or blatant, and make it visible in the landscape of the human face.
Lee Smith is very good at freighting her dialogue with sly sexual tension, and she writes lively first encounters between men and women. Her heroines are regularly bewitched by smooth-talking charmers, some of them scoundrels, some not. Molly Petree, the protagonist of On Agate Hill, is smitten by the banjo player, Jacky Jarvis, one night at a log cabin dance in the North Carolina hill country. Smith gives us a good look at Jacky when he enters the dance, and the novel. The year is 1883. Molly is narrating:
He appeared to have no bones at all in his body. He was tall and skinny with yellow-red hair that fell forward into his eyes and a big nose and a wide crooked reckless grin, the kind of a face that you couldn’t quit looking at . . . He was the kind of man that made everybody feel better just because he had walked into the room.
Jackie’s physiognomy is pronounced and suggestive, but it is his dialogue that captures his appeal and animates the odd, plain face:
I stood back in the trees away from the fire and sipped at the cup. My hair was falling all down my back and my blouse was wet clear through from dancing.
“My name is Jacky Jarvis,” he said into my ear, “and I’ve been looking for you all my life.”
I whirled around. “That’s a lie,” I cried. “You never even heard of me before.” His breath on my neck gave me the shivers.
“But I been dreaming about you every night,” he said. “So I knowed you right off. Maybe I just dreamed you up.” His face was real close to mine, he was grinning such a wide devil-may-care grin that he made me dizzy.
“Oh, is that a fact?” I said, stepping back from him. “Well, too bad, you’re too late.” I held up my hand and my ring caught the firelight, winking at him.
He gave a long low whistle through his teeth. “Mighty fine ring,” he said. “Who is the lucky feller?”
“Nobody you know.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” he said, looking at me.
“Molly!” Martha called, peering across the fire. “Come on, honey, we’ve got to go.”
He touched my elbow. “Listen. I’m coming to see you tomorrow.”
“You are not,” I said. “You haven’t been invited. You don’t know where I live. You don’t even know who I am.”
He smiled out from under the brim of his hat. “I’ll find out. I’ll give you your own private music show.”
“Molly,” Martha was calling.
I turned to go, then turned back. “Don’t come tomorrow,” I said. “Come Sunday.”
Jacky’s sincerity is suspect at this point, but in his seduction of Molly his face comes alive in the reader’s mind’s eye. Jacky’s grinning, but the verb is hardly necessary: you can see the grin in his dialogue. And it’s not a generic grin—the dialogue clarifies, distinguishes it, makes it Jacky’s own.
And don’t miss Molly’s obviously feigned disinterest, which gives the exchange its wonderful tension. Molly doesn’t describe her own face, of course, but we can see, in her dialogue, the prim mouth, the upturned chin, and something more—in the eyes, perhaps, which tell us, and tell Jacky Jarvis, that Molly’s coolness is an act. Her exit line is spoken low and hastily—the dialogue can be read no other way—and Molly shoots Jacky a glance stripped of all coyness and pretense. She doesn’t tell us that, but it’s there, visible, in five words of dialogue.
The more blatant emotions—dislike, anger, disgust—are easy. “I despise you,” Ellen said—no need to tell us she glared at Mike when she said it; the glare is in the dialogue. I despise you: the face is set, eyes narrowed. Suppose we dress the line up a little, give it a more distinctive flavor: I despise everything you stand for. The voice comes down, it’s quieter but no less adamant, and Ellen’s expression hardens, turns steely, judgmental. It’s all in her dialogue.
Ahab’s madness has a firmer grip on him when he addresses the crew again on the deck of the Pequod:
“Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin over. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now?”
Melville’s dialogue, by any modern standard, is baroque and overwrought, which makes it tailor-made for Ahab. In this speech we see the wildness in his eyes, the feverish animation flaring in the face. There’s no way to make a face this expressive except with dialogue.
Mark Twain, speaking to us in the voice of Huckleberry Finn, puts the camera on Huck’s vagabond father when he enters the novel early on. He has sneaked into Huck’s bedroom in the Widow Douglas’s house late at night, and Huck finds him waiting for him:
He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl—a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes—just rags, that was all.
No other character in the novel is described at such length; it isn’t close. Why? We can only assume Twain thought that Huck’s “Pap” is filthy, ragged, and dissipated beyond our capacity to imagine him. Twain burns his image onto our mind’s eye and, from here on, lets Pap’s dialogue show us the face in all its tortured moods. In this first appearance he lights into Huck without preamble:
“Starchy clothes—very. You think you’re a good deal of a big-bug, don’t you?”
“Maybe I am, maybe I ain’t,” I says.
“Don’t give me none o’ your lip,” says he. “You’ve put on considerable many frills since I been away. I’ll take you down a peg before I get done with you. You’re educated, too, they say—can read and write. You think you’re better’n your father, now, don’t you, because he can’t? I’ll take it out of you. Who told you might meddle with such hifalut’n foolishness, hey?—who told you could?”
Pap’s rant is a snarl; to hear the snarl is to see it on the ravaged face.
It would be hard to think of a character more different from Huck’s depraved father than Atticus Finch, whose image comes entirely from his dialogue. Atticus is so vivid that o
ne can read all of To Kill a Mockingbird without realizing that Harper Lee never tells us what he looks like. As a loving father and courageous courtroom defender of Tom Robinson, Atticus is subject to moods and emotions of the most profound sort, and we see them all in his face, which is somber, gentle, and strong, all at once. The novel is narrated by Atticus’s twelve-year-old daughter, Jean Louise, who goes by “Scout.” Early in the book Scout asks Atticus why the poor and disreputable Bob Ewell is allowed to hunt out of season:
“It’s against the law, all right,” said my father, “and it’s certainly bad, but when a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains. I don’t know of any landowner around here who begrudges those children any game their father can hit.”
“Mr. Ewell shouldn’t do that—”
“Of course he shouldn’t, but he’ll never change his ways. Are you going to take out your disapproval on his children?”
This is the compassionate Atticus, proponent of simple, bedrock morals. He’s wise. He’s patient. We see the facial expression in the dialogue.
And there is this line near the end of the novel, after Boo Radley has saved Jem and Scout from being murdered, committing murder himself on the dark path through the woods on Halloween night:
Before he went inside the house, he stopped in front of Boo Radley. “Thank you for my children, Arthur,” he said.
It’s one of the most powerful moments in the novel, and one of the most vivid. Atticus’s six words are a close-up: a good man, shaken but collected, deeply grateful. The line survives intact in the movie; we see Gregory Peck’s expressive face close up as he speaks it, but if you’ve read the book, you’ve been here already.
FILM DIALOGUE VS. DIALOGUE ON THE PAGE
Take two novels that were written first as screenplays: On the Waterfront, by Budd Schulberg (the novel is Waterfront), and McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men. In both cases, particularly No Country For Old Men, much of the dialogue was moved straight from script to novel.