ORWELL AND HUXLEY – DESCRIPTIONS

A) ORWELL

One of the best descriptions of Orwell comes from Canadian author George Woodcock who knew him for his last ten years of his life.

“When I remember GO, I see again the long, lined face that so often reminded me not of a living person, but of a character out of fiction. It was the nearest I had seen in real life to the imagined features of Don Quixote, and the rest of the figure went with the face. For O was a thin, angular man, with worn gothic features accentuated by deep vertical furrows that ran down the cheeks and across the corners of the mouth. The thinness of his lips was emphasized by a very narrow line of dark moustache: it seemed a hard, almost cruel mouth, until he smiled, and then an expression of unexpected kindliness would irradiate his whole face. The general gauntness of his looks was accentuated by the deep sockets from which his eyes looked out, always rather sadly. In contrast to the fragile, worn-down look of the rest of him, his hair grew upward into a kind of brown crest, vigorous and until the end untouched by grey.”

From Peter Lewis's 'George Orwell, the Road to 1984':

“The deep furrows that scored his cheeks, the hard pencil line of his moustache and his upward-bristling hair gave him the look of an ascetic. But the impression of tight-lipped endurance was cancelled out by his eyes and his smile. ‘His eyes were made to glitter with amusement,’ wrote Cyril Conolly. ‘A hard, almost cruel mouth until he smiled,’ wrote another friend, George Woodcock, while V.S. Pritchett remembered how his bleak expression would become suddenly ‘gentle, lazily kind and gleaming with workmanlike humour.’ Although he was convinced that he was unattractive to women, many women friends have testified to the opposite – ‘he looked at you as if inwardly he was roaring with laughter,’ said one. Clearly the photographs do not give us the living man.
    How gloomy was he? ‘Cheerfully gloomy,’ said his publisher, Fredric Warburg. ‘Like gloomy people, he could have moments of great gaiety,’ said his widow, Sonia Orwell, ‘He was much funnier, in person and in print, than people imagine.’ According to his friend, Arthur Koestler, ‘He was a pessimist and so am I, so I found it stimulating, not depressing, to be with him.’
    Orwell was very tall and thin, six foot three with size twelve feet. His head and hands were equally large compared with the gaunt body. His clothes hung on him. Hey seemed chosen for the part of a writer up from the country, leather-patched tweed and corduroy trousers which maintained always the same degree of shabbiness. At the same time he managed to give a hint of being accustomed to patronize French working men’s cafés. His shirts were always dark, of khaki or navy blue, and beneath the French-style moustache would be a crumpled cigarette which he invariably rolled himself. He did not own a dark suit.
    His appearance has been compared to Don Quixote’s. ‘A frayed sahib’ – Pritchett’s description – seems much more apt. It conveys the style of a man used to command, someone who did not give a damn. Those who saw him in disguise as a tramp declared he was incapable of looking the part. He looked, as indeed he was, however faintly, an aristocrat, the descendant of an earl. There was a clumsiness about him too. ‘His sleeves always seemed to be halfway up his arms,’ said Symons, ‘You could not be with him for an hour without being aware that he thought of himself as a member of the awkward squad.’
    He was nearly robbed of his vocal chords by a sniper’s bullet through the throat in Spain, and his voice seemed oddly thin coming out of such a big man. ‘Rusty-edged,’ said Pritchett of his voice. ‘A curious rasp to avoid striking a public school note,’ wrote his friend, Anthony Powell. He spoke monotonously, in a flat, uninflected way.”

Orwell as seen by novelist  and friend Rayner Heppenstall:

“He was ‘a tall, big-headed man, with pale-blue, defensively humorous eyes, a little moustache and a painfully snickering laugh’…..he seemed to Heppenstall a rather old-fashioned, circumspect fellow with a strange taste for useless bits of information on obscure subjects. He had peculiar prejudices and would expound on them at length in Heppenstall’s company, rambling on about the faults of ‘Scotchmen’, as he liked to call them, or English Roman Catholics, never making it very clear why such groups had earned his disfavour. Heppenstall concluded that Orwell was a ‘nice man, but confused’. Talking at any length with him was frustrating, because he often found that once Orwell began ‘his conversation’, the flow of ideas was so strong that interrupting him was not easy.”

“…Orwell’s modesty and his fondness for understatement, but it also reveals more than a little fondness for playing the part of the enigmatic, failed writer.”

B) HUXLEY

“Aldous was born into a particular and self-conscious enclave, a class within a class, the governing upper middle – an elite, an intellectual aristocracy made up of a handful of families – Trevelyans, Macaulays, Arnolds, Wedgwoods, Darwins, Huxleys – who had produced a number of extraordinarily and diversely gifted individuals whose influence, although they never confused themselves with the actual nobility, upon nineteenth-century England had been tremendous. Their common denominator was an intense desire to acquire, to advance and to disseminate knowledge – all of them, it goes without saying were highly though not necessarily expensively educated men and women – a wish to improve the lot as well as the administration of mankind, an assumption of responsibility – l’intelligence oblige – and a passion, no tamer word will do, for truth. It was the values, the habits, the glory, and the limitations, of this aristocracy which informed the spiritual and material background of Aldous’s youth..” (Sybille Bedford, 'Aldous Huxley – A Biography,' pp. 18-19) “Already when he was 13, some of Aldous’ key character traits were well in evidence, A school mate wrote: he was someone whith whom you couldn’t quarrel: he didn’t give way to violent emotions the way most of us did, He met ill-nature or spite with serene integrity and detached unselfishness – there was a shining goodness about Aldous…”

Huxley was 37 at the time of writing Brave New World. “We have a verbal snapshot of him around this time by James Lansdale Hodson: ‘Aldous Huxley is so tall – six feet four inches – and slender that he bends when walking; he has a mop of blackish brown hair, a keen, sensitive face and horn-rims with curved lenses. He preserves at thirty-seven something of the Oxford undergraduate’s appearance – suede leather shoes, negligent collar, protruding soft cuffs . . . He talks well, leaping from topic to topic, changing his chair and his attitudes also at the same time . . . he types everything, tries to do one thousand words a day, and writes poetry only when he must.’” (Nicholas Murray, 'Aldous Huxley,' pp. 261)

“I should like to go on for ever learning. I lust for knowledge, as well theoretic as empirical. Comparing small things with great, I think I am rather like the incomparable John Donne.” (Aldous Huxley in a letter to Julian Huxley 1916, cited in Sybille Bedford's 'Aldous Huxley: A Biography', pp. 64)

“I still have a vivid pictoral recollection of that elongated, stooping, myopic figure, with a face that was far younger than most of our masters’ [he was twenty-three] and yet seemed somehow ageless, and usually hidden by an infinite variety of spectacles, eyes that were almost sightless and yet almost uncomfortably observant. He stood there looking something of a martyr but at the same time extraordinarily distinguished” (Sir Stephen Runciman, Mem. Vol. And from a letter to S. B., cited in Sybille Bedford's 'Aldous Huxley: A Biography', pp 88)

“If one looks at his face one gets first an impression of immense intelligence, but this is not unusual among artists. What is much more remarkable and almost peculiar to him is the radiance of serenity and loving-kindness on his features; one no longer feels ‘what a clever man’ but ‘what a good man,’ a man at peace with himself and plunged as well – indeed fully engaged – in the eternal conflict between good and evil, awareness and stupidity. (Cyril Connolly, interview with Huxley for Picture Post, 1948, from Nicholas Murray, 'Aldous Huxley,' pp. 4)