Let us turn away, at the start of this wonderful New Year, from all the things that make us despair because we don’t know what to do about them, to something we can do something about. Teeth. Anyone young enough to have never given their teeth a thought can stop reading, now. Anyone of the real old school, when Irish women got all their teeth extracted before marriage so as to assure the oul’ fella that they’d never cost him a penny, can also stop reading.
They solved one problem that way, though I daresay they landed themselves with another. In my childhood, if you howled with a toothache for long enough to extract a grudged half-a-crown from your mother, you went into O’Connell Street and climbed the stairs over the Kylemore Dairy, and they put some rubber bondage stuff on your head and the gas machine panted like a dragon and next thing you woke up, sans tooth, in a daze. I have a feeling child dentistry is a bit more sophisticated now, though who can say that such experiences didn’t toughen us all up and turn us into survivors?
New York dentists can and do advertise, and they more or less promise these days that you need never lose a tooth. You need never have teeth that stick out or teeth that recede. Above all, you need never have discolored teeth. The practice I go to in Manhattan is a sight to see every day at lunchtime. There is a long corridor with kind of open cells on each side, and in each cell, reclining and watching television during lunch hour, is a man or a woman with a tray attached to their face. They have dropped in for an hour of bleaching. Bleached teeth are a near-necessity when it comes to looking like a winner. Anyway, Americans love that dazzling white. It is the end result of technology mastered, of effort chosen, of money expended, of actions taken. It is a visible sign of having acted in the face of destiny: not just lain down and fatalistically accepted the hand that nature dealt you.
I got teeth capped and veneered in that luxury place. Talk about coming full circle from O’Connell Street. The dentist phones a prescription for a few Valium to my local pharmacy and I take one or two an hour before my appointment and wobble in, full of goodwill. The assistant lies me down and wraps me in a soft, heated blanket. He asks me which of the CDs they keep for me, personally, I’d like to listen to today. I don’t really know what happens next except that the dentist breeds canaries and we often talk about canaries and, indeed, he lent me a canary at one point but all it did was kick birdseed at my bed. I leave the office, feeling wonderful. There is some serious business with my Visa card on the way out but I barely notice.
Then I come home to Ireland, and every time I open my mouth someone starts staring at my new teeth. A too-candid friend said, “In the name of God, where’d you get the teeth?” Other people just laughed. See, I’d forgotten. You’re not supposed to improve yourself, here. You’re supposed to assert your gritty authenticity by a display of yellowing, crooked, brownish bits and pieces of teeth that have the amazing merit of being untouched by the twentieth century.
Well, believe me, my dears, you get no thanks in the United States of America for fidelity to natural decay. You see someone shudder about someone and say, “Ugh! Did you see those British teeth?” It is out of the question that you could have any career in the entertainment or commercial world, not to mention any erotic career, with the kind of teeth that walk around Dublin.
The philosophical difference is interesting. Does our attitude to our corporeal selves derive from our past as an oppressed and pauperized population, indifferent to our bodies except as they will be transfigured on the Last Day, and placing hope of perfection in the next world and not in this one? Does the American attitude have to do with Protestant self-respect in the here and now? With individualism? With materialism at its best? Is it all to do with money? What would English novelist Martin Amis (whose gnashers were well-publicized) have done if he’d had no money? What would I have done if I hadn’t unexpectedly made the price of my bits of porcelain?
All I know is that the whole world is in the debt of the American drive to control what of our natural selves can be controlled. The contraceptive pill has been a boon to the human race of such importance that I’m convinced we have what is known as God to thank for it. The present Pope doesn’t believe that, of course, but he might if he were a woman who’d had two children instead of twelve, and consequently had teeth in her head instead of pustulant gums.
Because I need hardly say that our deepest self-image, as well as our physical well-being, is connected with our teeth. We judge our time of life by our teeth. Some day I will give in and admit that I am old and that I must retire from the human race and share my bed with mongrels and cats. When I do, it will be because there’s nothing more I can do about my teeth.
The Irish Times Magazine, January 6, 2001