Writing Facial/Body/Clothing Descriptions, A Study of PD James and a Few Other Literary Giants

 

Upon reading PD James’ The Children of Men, I could not resist doing a little study on facial/body/clothing descriptions, how good writers both use description to reveal the narrator’s (the observer’s) character as well as the character being observed. James writes in a literary style, so instead of poking around my science fiction, I wanted to reach further back into my education to my English major readings for the Stanford Creative Writing Program and recently gave a short workshop with a few writer friends to compare how a few masters handled physical character descriptions. One thing I notice about young writers is their reticence to give a good paragraph to describing a character, instead, the temptation is to put little bits here and there, including in quotation tags.

“George is not my REAL father,” Buddy said, furrowing his dark brow and smirking.

These facial tics in quotation tags are very tempting. Unpracticed writers often use them to do the heavy lifting of filling out character description, even thinking them economical. I would argue that one good paragraph is a better way to go at it, and ultimately more satisfying for the reader. Below will be a number of examples. First, PD James, then Faulkner, Joyce and Trevor. All the examples come from the books above.

Click if you’re looking to read a review of PD James’ The Children of Men.

PD James was a great and popular writer. She was fluent in a particularly upper crusty British style, but could also write gritty stuff (one has to when writing about murder). She also knew how to tell a great story. She used facial descriptions in The Children of Men to transport the reader into her created dystopian world, relying heavily on them to reveal character. Descriptions carried two loads in the novel.

First load carried, character description gives a visual of the character being described. A description of a new character aids the reader as he/she enters the scene and tries to make sense of person being drawn. The reader needs to see the people and the place. Second load carried, character descriptions give the reader a sense of the narrator’s personality. The reader makes judgments about a narrator’s reliability, his/her fairness or prejudices because what details are notable to one person, are not necessarily notable to another. We all know this instinctively. You and I can sit on a park bench and observe the same person for three minutes, go on to describe completely different details about that person. By far, the best way to think about this in writing is to look at how the masters do it.

I took this project on because PD James caught my attention with her colorful and interesting character descriptions. 

These are just a handful of examples. All James’ examples are from The Children of Men, the final four will be from Faulkner, Joyce and Trevor.

Theo is the narrator, also the main character in James’ novel, The Children of Men. 

After each example, see if you can answer the question:

1. What do you learn about this character being described?
2. What do you learn about Theo?

Jasper (minor character, one of Theo’s older colleagues, a mentor of sorts): He was the caricature of the popular idea of an Oxford don: high forehead, receding hairline, thin, slightly hooked nose, tight-lipped. He walked with his chin jutting forward as if confronting a strong gale, shoulders hunched, his faded gown billowing. One expected to see him pictured, high-collared as a Vanity Fair creation, holding one of his own books with slender-tipped fingers.

Sir George (minor character, Theo’s uncle and father to the current leader of Britian): But Sir George puzzled my mother. I can still hear her peevish complaint: “He doesn’t look like a baronet to me.” He was the only baronet either of us had met and I wondered what private image she was conjuring up—a pale romantic Van Dyck portrait stepping down from its frame; sulky Byronic arrogance, a red-faced swashbuckling squire, loud of voice, hard rider to hounds. But I knew what she meant; he didn’t look like a baronet to me either. Certainly he didn’t look like the owner of Woolcombe. He had a spade-shaped face, mottled red, with a small, moist mouth under the moustache which looked both ridiculous and artificial, the ruddy hair which Xan had inherited, faded to the drab colour of dried straw, and eyes which gazed over his acres with an expression of puzzled sadness. But he was a good shot—my mother would have approved of that.

Julian (major character and love interest): But at the end of the row was a figure he suddenly recognized. She was sitting motionless, her head thrown back, her eyes fixed on the rib vaulting of the roof, so that all he could see was the candle-lit curve of her neck.

Her hair, dark and luscious, a rich brown with flecks of gold, was brushed back and disciplined into a short, thick pleat. A fringe fell over a high, freckled forehead. She was light-skinned for someone so dark-haired, a honey-colored woman, long-necked with high cheekbones, wide-set eyes whose colour he couldn’t determine under strong straight brows, a long narrow nose, slightly humped, and a wide, beautifully shaped mouth. It was a pre-Raphaelite face. Rossetti would have liked to have painted her.

Old Martindale (minor character/colleague of Theo’s): who had been an English fellow on the eve of retirement when he himself was in his first year. Now he sat perfectly still, his old face uplifted, the candlelight glinting on the tears which ran down his cheeks in a stream so that the deep furrows looked as if they were hung with pearls.

The old priest at St. Frideswide (minor character): He came close and glared at Theo with fierce paranoid eyes. Theo thought that he had never seen anyone so old, the skull stretching the paper-thin, mottled skin of his face as if death couldn’t wait to claim him.

Rolf (major character, Julian’s husband): He had no doubt which one was Julian’s husband and their leader even before he came forward and, it seemed, deliberately confronted him. They stood facing each other like two adversaries weighing each other up. Neither smiled nor put out a hand.

He was dark, with a handsome, rather sulky face, the restless suspicious eyes bright and deep-set, the brows strong and straight as brush strokes accentuating the jutting cheekbones. The heavy eyelids were spiked with a few black hairs so that the lashes and eyebrows looked joined. The ears were large and prominent, the lobes pointed, pixie ears at odds with the uncompromising set of the mouth and the strong clenched jaw. It was not the face of a man at peace with himself or his world, but why should he be, missing by only a few years the distinction and privileges of being an Omega? His generation, like theirs had been observed, studied, cosseted, indulged, preserved for that moment when they would be male adults and produce the hoped-for fertile sperm. It was a generation programmed for failure, the ultimate disappointment to the parents who had bred them and the race which had invested in them so much careful nurturing and so much hope.

When he spoke his voice was higher than Theo had expected, harsh-toned and with a trace of an accent which he couldn’t identify.

Miriam (major character, the midwife): The woman was the only one to come forward and grasp Theo’s hand. She was black, probably Jamaican, and the oldest of the group, older than himself, Theo guessed, perhaps in her mid- or late fifties. Her high bush of short, tightly curled hair was dusted with white. The contrast between the black and white was so stark that the head looked powdered, giving her a look both hieratic and decorative. She was tall and gracefully built with a long, fine-featured face, the coffee-coloured face hardly lined, denying the whiteness of the hair. She was wearing trousers tucked into boots, a high-necked brown jersey and sheepskin jerkin, an elegant, almost exotic contrast to the rough serviceable country clothes of the three men. She greeted Theo with a firm handshake and a speculative, half-humorous colluding glance, as if they were already conspirators.

Gascoigne (minor character): At first sight there was nothing remarkable about the boy—he looked like a boy although he couldn’t be younger than thirty-one—whom they called Gascoigne. He was short, almost tubby, crop-haired and with a round, amiable face, wide-eyed, snub-nosed—a child’s face which had grown with age but not essentially altered since he had first looked out of his pram at a world which his air of puzzled innocence suggested he still found odd but not unfriendly.

Luke (major character, father to the child):The man called Luke, whom he remembered Julian too had described as a priest, was older than Gascoigne, probably over forty. He was tall with a pale, sensitive face and atiolated body, the large knobbled hands drooping from delicate wrists, as if in childhood he had outgrown his strength and had never managed to achieve robust adulthood. He fair hair lay like a silk fringe on the high forehead; his grey eyes were widely spaced and gentle. He looked an unlikely conspirator, his obvious frailty in stark contrast to Rolf’s dark masculinity. He gave Theo a brief smile which transformed his slightly melancholy face, but did not speak.

The old innkeeper (minor character): She was older than he expected, with a round, windburned face, gently creased like a balloon from which the air has been expelled, bright beady eyes and a small mouth, delicately shaped and once pretty but now, as he looked down on her, restlessly munching as if still relishing the after-taste of her last meal.

Carl Inglebach (minor character): He looked—was probably tired of being told so—like a benign edition of Lenin, with his domed polished head and black bright eyes. He disliked the constriction of ties and collars and the resemblance was accentuated by the fawn linen suit he always wore, beautifully tailored, high-nicked and buttoned on the left shoulder. But now he was dreadfully different. Theo had seen at first glance that he was mortally ill, perhaps even close to death. The head was a skull with a membrane of skin stretched taut over the jutting bones, the scrawny neck stuck out tortoise-like from his shirt and his mottled skin was jaundiced. Theo had seen that look before. Only the eyes were unchanged, blazing from the sockets with small pinpoints of light. But when he spoke his voice was as strong as ever. It was as if all the strength left to him was concentrated in his mind and in the voice, beautiful and resonant, which gave that mind its utterance.

Officer Rawlings (minor character): Rawlings, thick-set, a little clumsy in his movements, had a disciplined thatch of thick grey-white hair, which looked as if it had been expensively cut to emphasize the crimped waves at the side and back. His face was strong-featured with narrow eyes, so deep-set that the irises were invisible, and a long mouth with the upper lip arrow-shaped, sharp as a beak.

 

Aren’t these descriptions delicious? Some might feel PD James goes overboard, but I found myself drawn in and fascinated by the language and the visuals. Each person held a unique place in my mind as the story grew toward its climax.

Just to get a small taste of a few other masters…consider Faulkner, Joyce and Trevor

 

A Rose for Emily from Collected Stories by William Faulkner

“They rose when she entered—a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.”

Lo! From Collected Stories by William Faulkner

“And now the President and the Secretary sat behind the cleared table and looked at the man who stood as though framed by the opened doors through which he had entered, holding his nephew by the hand like an uncle conducting for the first time a youthful provincial kinsman into a metropolitan museum of wax figures.

Immobile, they contemplated the soft, paunchy man facing them with his soft, bland inscrutable face—the long, monk-like nose, the slumbrous lids, the flabby, café-au-lait-colored jowls above a froth of soiled lace of an elegance fifty years outmoded and vanished; the mouth was full, small, and very red. Yet somewhere behind the face’s expression of flaccid and weary disillusion, as behind the bland voice and the almost feminine mannerisms, there lurked something else: something willful, shrewd, unpredictable and despotic.”

Two Gallants, in James Joyce’s Dubliners, a short story collection.

“Corley was the son of an inspector of police and had inherited his father’s frame and gait. He walked with his hands by his sides, holding himself erect and swaying his head from side to side. His head was large, globular and oily; it sweated in all weathers; and his large round hat, set upon it sideways, looked like a bulb which had grown out of another. He always stared straight before him as if he were on parade and, when he wished to gaze after someone in the street, it was necessary for him to move his body from the hips.”

Kinkies, from William Trevor: The Collected Stories.

“In the police station the colours were harsh and ugly, not at all like the colours there’d been in Mr Belhatchet’s flat. And the faces of the desk sergeant and the policewoman were unpleasant also: the pores of their skin were large, like the cells of a honeycomb. There was something the matter with their mouths and their hands, and the uniforms they wore, and the book in front of the desk sergeant were torn and grubby, the air stank of stale cigarette smoke. The man and the woman were regarding her as skeletons might, their teeth bared at her, their fingers predatory, like animals’ claws. She hated their eyes. She couldn’t drink the tea they’d given her because it caused nausea in her stomach.”

There is no perfect way to describe a character, but one learns from the greats. In the case of Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily, one gets a sense of the character being observed, but also a certain judgment by the narrator, a disdain for Emily. And physically, the reader can “see” Emily…her age, weight and height, the fact she is (or was) a person of means.

In the story Lo, one sees the shabbily dressed visitor to the President, but he is a man not to be pitied, as the description closes with the more sinister. This story is fiction, but based in history. George Washington and his aide are the narrators. The quirky man they are describing is Native American, who is requesting a trial for his nephew for the murder of a white man on Chickasaw land. It’s an interesting story, not what you might expect. 

In Two Gallants, one sees Joyce’s fluency with language and characterization. To describe any human as having a large, oily and globular head is startling. In fact, it’s almost inhumane the way he continues to describe the hat looking like a bulb growing out of a bulb. This narrator either holds Corly in utter disdain, or the details are meant to hint to the reader that Corly is an unkempt, yet arrogant (given his tendency to “parade”) loser. 

In William Trevor’s story Kinkies, can you tell this character has been drugged? There is a sharp paranoia in her descriptions of everything and everyone she sees. Clearly, she is not well and potentially needing help, but the reader can’t imagine her receiving that help in her state of mind. 

As a writing exercise, take an image of someone you do not know…an online image is fine…and pen a paragraph about this person. Use these words to steer your description and see how different the observations flow from your pen.

Arrogant:

Grieving:

Insecure:

Cagey:

Expectant: