And another thing

Are famous writers accident-prone? Some are

3 November 2007

Paul Johnson on what one should and should not know about a writer

The truth is, an author and his works are best kept separate. All the same, I like to know what a writer (or any famous historical personage, for that matter) looked like. I don’t want to be told about Jane Austen’s sexual yearnings, if she had any. But I would like a good, truthful portrait of her, full- length if possible. The only one we possess which shows her face, by her sister Cassandra, is feeble and amateurish and does not, I suspect, do her justice. Oh, for a minute or two of videotape, to show her sparkle and her facial expressions, and her smile when she made a wicked joke. (‘Wicked’ was a term she used about herself more than once.) It would be reassuring, too, to have a really lifelike and dependable drawing of Shakespeare. I long to imagine him as he actually looked at his desk, scribbling away, dipping his quill pen into the inkpot, then mending and sharpening it with his dagger.

No such problem with Dickens, painted by accurate portraitists like Daniel Maclise and Ary Scheffer, often drawn and photographed, and described in detail at work. He was five foot nine, slim but not slight, soon very wrinkled and with receding hairline, his thin brown hair turning grey and white in his fifties. Restless, always on the move, emitting sparks of energy. Marcus Stone, the artist, described him as ‘light and spare, his hands somewhat large but fine in form ...His eyes, dark green-grey-hazel, were of unforgettable beauty. A splendid frankness and honesty shone out of them, such a keen perception and observation, and such rare powers of unconscious expression.’ He had a ‘moral glow’. By the time he was 50 he was often compared to a ‘bronzed sea-captain’. Then, under the stress of his frenzied travelling and readings, he began to disintegrate physically. A photo by J. Gurney shows him, at 55, almost completely bald, the beard and moustache grey-white. There is a tragic drawing of him by ‘Spy’ in the year of his death, aged 58, white and exhausted on a sofa, a genius killed by overwork and anxieties, some of his own creation. The visual images of Dickens tell the story of his life.