How to Create Characters Through Describing His/her Eyes
Great writers like Saul Bellow know how to create nuanced characters with simple brush strokes. While reading Herzog recently I noticed how Bellow used the eyes as a window into his characters. It is something you might like to do.
The Art of Descriptive Character Development
Creating a character is never easy. To find the right combination of visual details, physical action, and distinctive dialogue to make a character come alive on the page takes practice and discipline. F. Scott Fitzgerald used to jot down observations of people that he saw, cataloguing them by gender, class, and age that, in turn, when he was writing his short stories or novels he would go back and selectively choose which ones might fit one of his characters. Much can be learned by paying attention to people walking down the street, conversing at a café, and mingling at a family gathering. But much can also be learned by noticing how a gifted writer creates characters.
In Saul Bellow’s Herzog, (New York: Penguin Books, 1998) which I recently picked up again and read more carefully, I was struck by how often, and how dexterously, he used the image of an eye to convey some dynamic within a character and between characters. I began to note when he did it and discovered that pretty much anytime he introduced a character he focused on their eyes. It was one of his go-to images. But none of them were exactly the same. The eyes let us in on the hidden aspects of a character. I had seen that in my life, how sometimes by looking at someone’s eye I knew that he was lying or was dangerous or in love. But I never paid that much attention to using the eyes to develop a character. Like Fitzgerald I decided to catalogue Bellow’s use of them, showing how he used them to tease out some hidden quality of a character.
I will quote some of the passages when he introduces characters, highlighting the descriptive parts related to the eyes, showing how, in each case, it illuminates some aspect of the character.
In the beginning of the novel, he introduces Herzog’s wife Madeleine who has left him for another man. He gives us a clear visual image that reveals not only some curious qualities of her appearance but of her personality. For Bellow’s appearance is a window into the character’s inner life.
She wore black stockings, high heels, a lavender dress with Indian brocade from Central America. She had her opal earrings, her bracelets, and she was perfumed; her hair was combed with a new, clean part and her large eyelids shone with a bluish cosmetic. Her eyes were blue but the depth of the color was curiously affected by the variable tinge of the whites. Her nose, which descended in a straight elegant line from her brows, worked slightly when she was peculiarly stirred. (Ibid.,13)
From the description, the eyes have a life of their own. The color is “affected by the variable tinge of the whites.” They stand out, call attention to themselves, the blue being highlighted by the white. As the novel progresses, Madeline’s obsession with appearances, and Herzog’s delight in her appearance, become a source of tension since Herzog is largely unconcerned to his own appearance.
A few pages later, when Herzog describes how the marriage couldn’t last, Madeline’s eyes give clues to the tension.
Her color grew very rich, and her brows, and that Byzantine nose of hers, rose, moved; her blue eyes gain by the flush that kept deepening, using from her chest and her throat. . . .It occurred to Herzog that she had beaten him so badly, her pride was so fully satisfied, that there was overflow of strength into her intelligence. (Ibid. 12)
The repeating of “blue eyes” becomes like a musical chord in music associated with a character. The blue, and the shades of blue, leverage her changing moods. It keeps coming back, sometimes with other adjectives (“her great blue eyes”) to reflect his changing perception of her. We will come to expect, as she becomes more alienated from Herzog, the eyes will tell us, even before she actually tells him, that their relationship is done. Yet, for him, the eyes are still a mystery, something he is trying to figure out.
Another woman, Ramona (who will later become the woman Herzog goes back to after he has mourned the loss of Madeline) is revealed with her eyes telling us that she is one to be trusted. The eyes reveal everything about her character.
Her thighs were short, but deep and white. The skin darkened where it was compressed by the elastic garment. And silky tags hung down, and garter buckles. Her eyes were brown, sensitive and shrewd, erotic and calculating. She knew what she was up to. (Ibid.,20)
In this description, he is able to tell us what the eyes tell him. They are “sensitive and shrewd, erotic and calculating.” As opposed to Madeline, the eyes reveal and don’t hide who she is. But notice in all these depictions of the eyes, they are set in context of other descriptions. The clothing, the skin, and the thighs play an equally prominent role.
When Bellows introduces the man Valentine who will steal Madeline from him, the initial description gives us a picture of him with, again, a focus on the eyes, but he subtly also associates him with Hitler that, at this junction in the novel, doesn’t call attention to his dark side but will later prove to be a true reflection of who he is.
Valentine was a dandy. He had a thick face and heavy jaws; Moses [Herzog] thought he somewhat resembled Putzi Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s own pianist. But Gersbach {Valentine} had a pair of extraordinary eyes for a red-haired man, brown, deep, hot eyes, full of life. The lashes, too, were vital, ruddy-dark, long and childlike. And that hair was bearish thick. Valentine, furthermore, was exquisitely confident of his appearance. You could see it. He knew he was a terribly handsome man. (Ibid. 23)
All the adjectives “hot,” “childlike,” and “bearish” associated with his eyes prove to be emblematic of his character. Instead of saying that he was childlike, Bellows buries that quality in his depiction of the eyes, letting us see it indirectly, allowing it to be muted, but, none the less, hinted at so that, as Valentine’s true character is revealed we remember, “oh, yeah, hot, childlike and bearish—that’s him.”
Even when Bellows isn’t introducing a main character, the eyes figure prominently in his observations of those who chance into a scene.
He saw twenty paces away the white soft face and independent look of awoman in a shining black straw hat which held her head in depth and eyes that even in the signal-dotted obscurity reached him with a force she could never be aware of. Those eyes might be blue, perhaps green, even gray—he would never know. But they were bitch eyes, that was certain. They expressed a sort of female arrogance which had an immediate sexual power over him; he experienced it again that very moment—a round face, the clear gaze of pale bitch eyes, a pair of proud legs. (Ibid. 39)
Although this more reflects the inner state of Herzog who, now facing loss, is awakened to his desire for women, the details, carefully teased out, give us a vivid sense of a woman who both frightens and attracts him.
Sometimes the eyes compliment an encounter, showing how in dialogue, the eyes can reveal the inner workings of a character. In this case, Herzog is talking to a friend, Asphalter.
“Yes, I know—I know, I know,” said Asphalter. His pale round face was freckled, and his eyes, large, fluid dark, and, for Moses’s sake, bitter in their dreaminess. (Ibid, 48)
Asphalter’s eyes reveal his fondness for Herzog. Once a character is established, he will use the eyes as a highlighter to complement what we already know.
For example, later, when meeting with a lawyer, Sandor, who Herzog hoped to have help him negotiate his divorce, Sandor comes to life through dialogue and a quick image of his eyes.
“Now, don’t stand there rubbing your hands like a goddamn fool—Christ, I hate a fool,” Sandor shouted. His green eyes were violently clear, his lips were continually tensing. He must have been convinced that he was cutting the dead weight of deception from Herzog’s soul. . . . (Ibid. 93)
This use of a quick images of the eyes comes to play more often later in the book. When meeting his frail, down-and-out father, Herzog realizes how much power his father exerts over him.
Herzog was stunned to see in full summer light how much disintegration had already taken place. But the remaining elements, incredibly vivid had all their power over Moses—the straight nose, the furrow between the eyes, the brown and green colors in those eyes. (Ibid. 270)
Bellows lets his characters see one another as most of us do through the eyes. Much of communication, it is said, is non-verbal, as much as eighty percent. To a considerable extent, the eyes reveal much of what we need to know about others. Bellow goes to them continually throughout the book, speaking how they are “furious,” “perplexed,” “feverish,” “curious,” “tender, shrewd,” ‘cold,” “heavy and dangerous”—a whole range of emotions revealed in the look. He uses the eyes a shorthand to uncover the inner life of a character without having to say it directly. The eyes tell not only how Herzog feels about the other, but how the other feels about Herzog.
He is a master of description, elaborating on a person’s face, nose, skin color, lips as well as body, clothing, posture, and verbal ticks. Yet his in-depth descriptions of eyes are often the most revealing window into characters. The use of eye color, as with Madeline, to frame a character, and keep coming back to the color, changing it, as he does to “violet” later in the book, tells us much about her. It’s a strategy that can make a character come alive because it’s true to what we all do when observing a new acquaintance. Bellow has masterfully borrowed it for his own devices to mask and unmask his characters in his novels.
