Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
The sumptuary laws, which prevented appren- tices and servingmen disguising themselves as gentlemen and gentlemen togging up as nobles, were expected to apply to flesh as well as cloth- ing. Despite the assertion of that rather reaction- ary old GP in Macbeth, the Elizabethans pre- ferred to believe that there must be an art to find the mind's construction in the face. The Queen plastered on make-up to distract attention from
her red nose but for anyone else to mask his appearance was distinctly a subversive act. (It was thought particularly unsporting of the Spanish assassin to get within shooting range of Elizabeth by concealing his pistol in his cod- piece.) But, for some reason, the almost universal beard (confusingly referred to by Shakespeare as 'excrement') was not regarded as a fraud on your fellows.
In Shakespeare's age, as in ours, the beard remains the only socially permissible way in which a man may improve his features. God gave us one face but we can grow ourselves another. There are, it is true, some barbers' shops where effete businessmen and decadent telly-celebrities are buffed and prinked and weeded until they look and smell like odalisques from the harem of a queer sultan. But most of us lack the nerve to risk such prettification. Only once, on leave from the RAF in Cambridge, did I ever fall into the soft obstetric hands of these embalmers of the living. Under the influence of a hangover which followed me around like a small, black, personal thunder-cloud, I had faded into un- consciousness in the warm, almost horizontal chair. When I came round, I was coroneted with a hair net, my coarse grey nails had been replaced by plastic pink talons and a grinning crook was shining up my cheeks with an electric vibrator until they glistened like the waxen peel of a Canadian apple. I sneaked out feeling as con- spicuous as a Belisha, beacon winking at midnight and was horrified to discover, as I caught sight of myself in a shop window, that my face was actually reflecting the passers-by like a mirror.
It must be admitted, however, that the unim- proved male face is not one of the more attrac- tive sights around town. Men do not ever look closely at the naked skin of other men ... and, in the privacy of our bathrooms, we have got into the habit of seeing in the glass the same fresh, young, healthy ellipse that topped our neck at twenty-one. But if we ever do scrutinise our friends and colleagues with a critical eye, we get the same kind of shock that the tiny Gulliver received when he came too close to the giants in Brobdingnag. There is certainly more to loolc at in a man's face than in a woman's.
Even the plainest woman aims to make her face a single entity, a simple, uncluttered pattern stamped from one mould. It is a sculpted imago seen through a telescope. Even the handsome man looks a kind of chaos, mosaic of odds and ends accidentally scooped together. His face is random sample seen through a microscope. The volcanic surface is often pricked by holes like a dartboard, even sometimes honeycombed with small caves like a muffin. Here and there lurk thickets of steely hairs, missed by the razor which scraped off the top soil at the morning ploughing. The hillocks usually aspire to be mistaken for over-ripe strawberries, the dales have been grooved and bulldozed from pumice. Scattered about the wasteland are wriggling rivers and blotchy pools of purple where the blood vessels have broken through from underground. The lips are scored and jointed like an armadillo's back and hedge- hogs camp in the nostril tunnels. I suppose women do have dandruff in the eyebrows some- times, but it never hangs on the verges like snout on the eaves. No wonder men are only able to gather together in the intimacy of all-male com- pany when there, is• an unconscious agreement that they will recognise each other simply by the silhouette.
The beard is the simplest and cheapest means of covering up this dust-bowl expanse. It is a natural frame in which to hang eyes, nose and mouth, a living surround for the front we shove the world. The beardless face, like the topless dress, is a sexual gimmick which may be alienat- ing more admirers than it attracts. It is as artificial for men to shave the cheeks and chin as it is for women to shave the head. Almost every objee- tion made by the barefaced can be traced to prejudice rather than reason. The bearded Man is alleged to be subversive and unpatriotic-but what of George V or Sir Francis Drake? He is
rumoured to be effeminate—like Charles Dickens and most of the other Eminent Victorians? Beards are said to be dirty—but they have to be washed every time the face is, and how many women shampoo their hair two or three times a day? There are almost as many kinds of beard as there are kinds of men—the beard patriarchal, the beard naval, the beard BBC, the beard roguish, ille beard scholarly, the beard Christ-like and the beard satyr-like.
I should have thought every man would have an urge to grow a beard once as every woman has to grow her hair to her waist. I have had my beard--a shaggy, red, piratical bush—and I must confess that beards have their drawbacks in a non-beard society. Looking for a job with one,
I experienced in a small way the kind of em- barrassed discrimination experienced by Negroes looking for lodgings. The enthusiasm displayed On paper by the employer oozed away every time when he saw me bristling in person. It also has the odd effect of making the wearer both noticeable and yet anonymous. Fifteen years ago, anyway, my beard stopped conversation in any small pub and drew heads turning in a restaurant. 13t11: equally no one bothered to remember whether
I was short or tall, blue-eyed or false-teethed--I had become just 'a man with a beard.' Shaving it off was almost as radical a change as growing I even arranged to be re-introduced under a false name to friends who had never seen me Shaven and took great pleasure from listening to the uneasy small talk they employed to dis- cover who was this stranger who seemed some- now so familiar. Beards are coming back. And as. along-unshaven friend of mine pointed out— they cover a multitude of chins. Looking at my growing jowl and tiring epidermis, I wonder.
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