Will Self: Careless Whiskers
Having let things go over the winter to the extent that I completely forgot what the best a man can get is, I asked the youngest, who’s been left behind to look after the greybeard by his siblings, what I should do, tonsorially speaking. We may no longer be subscribing to the edicts lain down by Leviticus — which, in the King James translation, have a cutting air: “They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard...” —but to live with a father who has a naff one is cruel and unusual punishment. I wouldn’t want my beloved son to fall foul of another Old Testament patriarchal proscription: “Every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death.”
Anyway, he eyed me with all the insouciance of a 22-year-old with little more than a golden peach-fuzz of down on his pert top lip, then idly sketched a handlebar-moustache shape in the air, before drawling, “Must you, Dad? Remember: I spent my entire childhood under the curse of this sign.”
Which seemed pretty thick to me — for reasons that will be exposed in due course, as, with each line of my acuminate prose, I scrape carefully away at the dense pile of beard lore, and reveal the bare facts of the matter. George Orwell said that by the age of 50, every man has the face he deserves. Roald Dahl adjudged that when a man grows hair on his face, it shows he has something to hide. Surely, we’re all guilty as charged, on this basis alone: long before the age of 50, most of us have indeed had bestowed upon our countenances, whether by God or Nature, our just deserts — the glutton, a pair of jowls; the booze-hound, the same but networked with rubious veins; while the satyromaniac bears the starveling expression of ever-unsated lust.
In my case, the weak chin of indecision and the pitted complexion of endlessly prolonged adolescence were always good reasons for a beard, but they’ve long since been maddeningly compounded by the scrawny neck of looming senescence. Round my way — Brixton, Sarf’ London — the Jamaican idiom is often heard: “His tees are up”, a reference to the T-shape the tendons in the neck make in the ageing male. Mine are way up. Oh, and there’s the Will Self horror mask I’ve been wearing for decades now. Quite reasonably, as I angle towards retirement, I’m looking to sport a new one.
What! I hear you cry, have you never heretofore had face-fungus? Well, in my heyday, from the late 1980s through to the mid-2000s, from time-to-time (but by no means all of it), I’d affect great scimitar-shaped sideburns. At once lycanthropic and parenthetic, I felt they ironised my long, and rather too assertive face. But I only succumbed to a full-face beard for about a year, during the peak of the Third Age of Hipsterdom; by which I mean that period in the late 2000s when the tide of moustache wax, single-origin coffee beans and hand-tooled leather satchels, that had turned a decade earlier, became a deluge.
There’s a photograph of me at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2010, taken by Chris Close, that shows me with my then dog — a diminutive and notoriously foul-tempered Jack Russell — under one arm, and a beard on my chin. What strikes me most about this image now that the dog’s gone, while, like some return of the entangling repressed, the beard is back, is how it has this in common with his coat: it was programmed to grow into off-white fur, with tan markings on it that, I always felt, resembled italic handwriting. And when he had to have some shaved for an operation, or stitches following a fight, the invisible finger of genetics would reinscribe him.
As it has me. Fourteen years later, my new beard has exactly the same colouring as it does in Close’s portrait: salt-and-pepper cheek-pieces, grey-white goatee, and reddish-blond moustaches. Indeed, it was this odd variegation that made me shave off the previous one. I mean to say, I was a mere slip of a fellow at the time, rising 48, still basking in the delusion that I was Dorian Gray, not merely greying. But the thing is, I wasn’t greying that much — up top things were still mousy — so why signal the onset of winter, while there was still, so to speak, corn in the fields?
As for the reddish-blond thing, well, when my first wife was pregnant with our eldest child, she asked my uncle if there was anything she should know about the family, in a What-hue-will-Prince-Archie-be sort of a spirit. Without hesitation, he shot back at her: “You have a cousin in Chicago called Red Cohen.” Well, my benighted relative (Jewish and a ginger — that’s two prejudicial characteristics in one) may be long gone, but that long strand of deoxyribonucleic acid still twines us together, and now takes form in the upswept points of my mustachios. While the tip of my white goatee points emphatically down, as I turn first one salt-and-pepper cheek then the other to the assaulting world.
Yes, I confess: I forgot the best a man can get for two or three months. Then I went to the barber. I had thought I could go full-Leviticus, being especially admiring of the men of South Asian heritage one sees who take not rounding or balding to its logical end: endlessness. Ranjan, who works behind the counter in the corner shop — one of Tardis-like dimensions (there’s so much stock in there, my fantasy is I’ll ask him for a ground-to-air missile one day, he’ll reach down and get one) — tells me he’s never shaved, and his beard is suitably bushy, yet also seems to’ve conformed sufficiently that he can still reach his mouth.
I could, as well — but often with a forkful of, um, hair. Hence the rounding and balding alluded to above. Anyway, I feel I’ve outlived the Third Age of Hipsterdom now: I can’t even ride an electric bike anymore, let alone a fixed-gear one — while I don’t think anyone is likely to accuse me of trying to look any older or more anachronistic than I do already, because as I’ve said: I now have the beard of Dorian Gray — or, at any rate, the moustache. As for the youngest, since I had Dyako in the local barbershop have at me with clippers, scissors, a cut-throat razor and some hot towels, I haven’t heard a peep out of him, save the grudging acknowledgement: “Beard looks pretty good, Dad.”
I think so, too. There are a lot of barbers in the ’hood, but I chose the one where Dyako rents a chair, because he and his fellow snippers are Kurds, and they’re a notably hirsute people— indeed, the battle cry of the PKK is “One nation under one eyebrow!” My model — and I showed Dyako the 16th-century equivalent of a headshot — is Montaigne, the great French essayist and epitome of sangfroid, but I suspect I look rather more like the German philosopher Nietzsche, shortly before he went spark-a-loco. Which is not to say you have to be crazy to sport facial hair, but let’s face it, there’s no rhyme or reason why beards and moustaches and side-burns of any particular style, as against being clean-shaven, are in at one time, and in one place, and very much out at another time, and in another place.
Charles MacKay, the great cataloguer of human folly, whose Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is still the go-to volume for understanding the behaviour of sheeple, devotes an entire chapter to the influence of politics on their shearing, eventually concluding it is too arbitrarily tangled to tease out any definitive analysis. What I suspect can be said — and, indeed, is hinted at above — is that bearded eras either coincide with full-blown patriarchy; or, in the case of our own, with considerable anxiety on the part of the male sex with masculinity itself.
Yes, in our mixed-up-world, perhaps the only way there is to announce you’re a penised individual, without actually getting it out, is to affect some sort of beard or moustache. As for the vexing problem of partners, and their response — well, my own, having expressed considerable scepticism, now not only professes to like the look of it, but I often wake from a senescent snooze to find her idly stroking it, back and forth, back and forth, so I feel its pile. It’s a beautifully intimate sensation — I think she must really love me; either that, or she’s really missing the dog.
Esquire editor-at-large Will Self is the author of, most recently, the novel Elaine. This piece appears in the Autumn issue of Esquire, subscribe here.
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