THE COMPOSITES

Alec Leamas, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré

Leamas was a short man with close-cropped, iron gray hair, and the physique of a swimmer. He was very strong. This strength was discernible in his back and shoulders, in his neck, and in the stubby formation of his hands and fingers…He had an attractive face, muscular, and a stubborn line to his thin mouth. His eyes were brown and small; Irish, some said. It was hard to place Leamas. If he were to walk into a London club the porter would certainly not mistake him for a member; in a Berlin night club they usually gave him the best table. He looked like a man who could make trouble, a man who looked after his money; a man who was not quite a gentleman… His brown eyes rested on her for a moment: “I’ll tell you when,” he replied.

Wyatt Gwyon/ Stephan Asche, The Recognitions, William Gaddis

His brows noticeable for being contracted so forcefully that they seemed to have seized the face and held it in this stifling grasp… Janet bent close, studying the thin face, the slightly crooked nose… Mr. Yak finally brought his eyes round to find the two faintly green ones fixed on him… Lines drawn down from the nose holding the jaw up rigid, lines which broke the flat cheeks sinking away from the high-boned lines of the face… Your passport. Stephan Asche… Look at the picture in it, go ahead. It’s just like you, just like I said, that square face all screwed up around the eyes, see?…The square high-boned lines of the face, the jaw set rigid as though held by the lines drawn down from the nose, breaking the flat cheeks, and the eyes, even closed in unconsciousness, held tight as though with effort…Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people, and protect themselves from talented people.

Willie Stark,  All the King’s Men , Robert Penn Warren

“My God, folks, it’s Willie!” The remark was superfluous. One look at the faces rallied around and you knew that if any citizen over the age of three didn’t know that the strong-set man standing there in the Palm Beach suit was Willie Stark, that citizen was a half-wit. In the first place, all he would have to do would be to lift his eyes to the big picture high up there above the soda fountain, a picture about six times life size, which showed the same face, the big eyes, which in the picture had the suggestion of a sleepy and inward look (the eyes of the man in the Palm Beach suit didn’t have that look now, but I’ve seen it), the pouches under the eyes and the jowls beginning to sag off, and the meaty lips, which didn’t sag but if you looked very close were laid one on top of the other like a couple of bricks, and the tousle of hair hanging down on the not very high squarish forehead. Under the picture was the legend:  My study is the heart of the people. In quotation marks, and signed, Willie Stark. I had seen that picture in a thousand places, pool halls to palaces.

Robert Penn Warren: For better or worse, Willie Stark was not Huey Long. Willie was only himself.

Julia, 1984, George Orwell

He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department…She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements…It was the girl from the Fiction Department, the girl with dark hair. The light was failing, but there was no difficulty in recognizing her… ‘Would you believe,’ he said, ‘that till this moment I didn’t know what colour your eyes were?’ They were brown, he noted, a rather light shade of brown, with dark lashes… The youthful body was strained against his own, the mass of dark hair was against his face, and yes! Actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth… With just a few dabs of colour in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above all, far more feminine. Her short hair and boyish overalls merely added to the effect… ‘They can’t get inside you,’ she had said. But they could get inside you…Her face was sallower, and there was a long scar, partly hidden by the hair, across her forehead and temple. (Multiple suggestions)

Cathy Ames, East of Eden, John Steinbeck

She was not like other people, never was from birth…There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil…Her hair was gold and lovely; wide-set hazel eyes with upper lids that drooped made her look mysteriously sleepy. Her nose was delicate and thin, and her cheekbones high and wide, sweeping down to a small chin so that her face was heart-shaped. Her mouth was well shaped and well lipped but abnormally small— what used to be called a rosebud. (Suggested by macaroninichelle ) 

Norman Bates, Psycho, Robert Bloch

The light shone down on his plump face, reflected from his rimless glasses, bathed the pinkness of his scalp beneath the thinning sandy hair as he bent his head to resume reading…”Looking for a room?” Mary made up her mind very quickly, once she saw the fat, bespectacled face and heard the soft, hesitant voice. There wouldn’t be any trouble…The puckered lips were beginning to tremble…The eyes behind the fat man’s glasses seemed vacant.

Aschenbach, Death in Venice, Thomas Mann

Gustav von Aschenbach was not particularly tall, with dark hair, beardless. His head seemed curiously oversized in relation to his almost frail figure. His brushed-back hair, thinning at the cortex, very voluminous at the temples and quite gray, framed a high, furrowed and, so to say, scarred forehead. The frame of golden eyeglasses cut into the root of a somewhat plump yet nobly curved nose. His mouth was large, often limp, sometimes small and tense all of a sudden; his cheeks were narrow and furrowed, the well-formed chin sported a cleft. Important fates seemed to have trespassed over the often sideways-tilted crown, and yet it had been art which had shaped that kind of physiognomy which otherwise is the hallmark of a difficult and troubled life…At noon he departed from the beach, returned to the hotel, and took the elevator to his room. Inside he spent some time in front of the mirror and studied his gray hair, his weary and sharply-cut face…His flaccid lips. (Somewhat suggested by iladvi)

Rachael Rosen, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick

When he landed the police department hovercar on the roof of the Rosen Association Building in Seattle he found a young woman waiting for him. Black-haired and slender, wearing the new huge dust-filtering glasses…She had, on her sharply defined small face, an expression of sullen distaste. She eyed him from beneath long black lashes, probably artificial…Rachael’s proportions, he noticed once again, were odd; with her heavy mass of dark hair her head seemed large, and because of her diminutive breasts her body assumed a lank, almost childlike stance. But her great eyes, with their elaborate lashes, could only be those of a grown woman…Some female androids seemed to him pretty; he had found himself physically attracted by several.

Christian Grey, Fifty Shades of Grey, E.L. James

Holy cow – he’s so young… He’s tall, dressed in a fine gray suit, white shirt, and black tie with unruly dark copper colored hair and intense, bright gray eyes that regard me shrewdly… His gray eyes hooded and speculative, his mouth a hard impassive line… His brow furrows… “Were you a Girl Scout?” he asks, sculptured, sensual lips curled in amusement. Don’t look at his mouth!Don’t look at his mouth!…I drink in his features from beneath my lashes…Straight nose, square jawed – I’d like to run my tongue along his jaw. He hasn’t shaved, and his stubble makes the prospect doubly tempting. (Suggested by daradiana)

Franklin Hoenikker, Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

Next to “Papa’s” portrait was a picture of a narrow-shouldered, fox-faced, immature young man. He wore a snow white military blouse with some sort of jeweled sunburst hanging on it. His eyes were close together; they had circles under them. He had apparently told barbers all his life to shave the sides and back of his head, but to leave the top of his hair alone. He had a wiry pompadour, a sort of cube of hair, marcelled, that arose to an incredible height. This unattractive child was identified as Major General Franklin Hoenikker, Minister of Science and Progress in the Republic of San Lorenzo. He was twenty-six years old. (Suggested by therandomreader )

Mingus Rude, The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem

Crispy-looking hair… Dylan looked at Mingus Rude’s lips and eyes, his exact brownness, took it in. Dylan wanted to read Mingus Rude like a language,…thin pressed lips…Mingus’s thousand-yard stare…His skin was skull-tight…He wore his father’s ridiculous Fu Manchu mustache…His wide grin…his raised eyebrows a thin scar seaming his eyelid… Mingus was only Mingus, the rejected idol of my entire youth, my best friend, my lover. Seated across from him, I knew he’d already grown into a man at some point before the last time I’d seen him, the day of the shooting.

Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

His thick brown curls were rough and uncultivated, his whiskers encroached bearishly over his cheeks…A ray fell on his features; the cheeks were sallow, and half covered with black whiskers; the brows lowering, the eyes deep-set and singular. I remembered the eyes…Do you mark those two lines between your eyes; and those thick brows, that, instead of rising arched, sink in the middle; and that couple of black fiends, so deeply buried, who never open their windows boldly, but lurk glinting under them, like devil’s spies…Compressing his mouth he held a silent combat with his inward agony. (Multiple suggestions)

David Ferrie, Libra, Don DeLillo

He winced all the time in front of mirrors when he pasted on his homemade eyebrows and mohair toupee…She glanced at Ferrie’s faded red toupee, an object that resembled some windblown piece of street debris. She looked at the sloped forehead, the somewhat Roman profile, eagle-beaked, oddly impressive despite the man’s overgrown ears, the clownish aspects of his appearance. In fact she’d seen the profile before she ever met Ferrie. There was a mug shot in Banister’s files. It commemorated two arrests in 1961, in Jefferson Parish, for what were officially described as crimes against nature…His eyebrows and toupee were gone. He was sad and pasty, decolored, moving out of the background glow into the stutter light of TV.