Once upon a time — three or four thousand years ago, to be imprecise — there lived two kings who disliked each other. This has not been uncommon among kings even though their letters have always begun, ‘Royal Brother.’ But in this case there must have been something more. Though they lived a hundred miles apart, which in those days was next to infinity, they could not get along. In the end, one declared war; and when the other asked the reason, the reply he got was: ‘The snorting of the hippopotamus in your ornamental pool keeps me awake at night.’

I have always felt that in those days long before the time of telecommunications, this betokened a truly royal sensitivity. Royalty has always been sensitive beyond the experience of ordinary folk. There was Queen Victoria, who was not amused. There was James I of England and VI of Scotland, who couldn’t bear the sight of a knife. There was that girl too. She was very beautiful, and no matter how many mattresses she slept on, she always woke up black and blue. They were looking for the rightful heir to the throne, you see; and when they inspected this girl’s bruises, they knew they had found the right one, for they had concealed a tiny pea under the bottom mattress. She was probably the daughter of the king who was kept awake by all that snorting.

Even if we commoners are of grosser material, we can each claim our particular irritant. As usual, Shakespeare summarizes for us: 

‘Some men there are love not a gaping pig;

Some that are mad if they behold a cat;

And others, when the bagpipe sings i’ the nose,

Cannot contain their urine.’ 

My first and perhaps my major irritant is the barber.

Until I reached the age of ten or thereabouts, my father or my mother cut my hair. This was the result of comparative poverty, and of some indifference to convention. They had to catch me before they could operate, for even then I was allergic to the clippers. But they had not the professional touch; and an unfounded rumor circulated among my school friends, that my parents inverted a basin over my head and cut off anything that stuck out. Thus the word ‘basin’ was flung at me with that terrible jeering laugh which only small boys can employ effectively.

Later on when my father, who was a schoolmaster, referred in my class to ‘the Bull of Bashan’, there was an immediate howl of laughter which puzzled and disconcerted him. It disconcerted me, too, though it did not puzzle me. I prayed, with all the directness and force I could muster, to become bald straight away, but the prayer was forty years in the answering. When next my parents got out the clippers, I begged to go to the barber’s, without knowing what I was letting myself in for. Since I had avoided the clippers and the kitchen chair for as long as possible, my hair was now long, and to tell the truth, somewhat knotted.

The barber sat me on a high stool and draped a white cloth around me. Then he struggled to reduce my hair to some order. He occasioned me acute discomfort — and he broke the comb. This was before the days of plastics, and the comb was of tortoise shell. In American terms, he still had to earn a quarter and had already lost half a dollar. He used language to which my priggish ears were unaccustomed, even at school. He hurled the useless fragments of the comb into a corner of the hair-strewn parlor. After that he used me ungently in pursuit of his quarter. He shoved me about and twisted my head this way and that, until with an awful pang of terror, I remembered Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Would I and the high stool and the white sheet drop through the floor, to be sold next day as a row of meat pies, piping hot? I got out of there with such a terror of barbers that I begged my parents to resume the contract, but they would not.

Thenceforth, I hovered between going and not going, while my hair grew like a dirty girl’s, and I acquired a whole series of nicknames.

No, the barber’s parlor was not my favorite place. Even when I grew older and passed that curious English barrier, the change from short trousers to long ones, I was never comfortable with barbers. A friend of mine, if he was nearly broke, would spend what he had left luxuriating in an expensive haircutting establishment, where he would be treated like a prince until they saw the size of his tip. But I could not, and cannot, luxuriate. Attention of that sort makes me uneasy or bores me. I regard that half hour in the gimbaled chair as a sheer gap in my life. Why does human hair have to grow in such fatuous clusters? And the victim can do nothing. If he attempts to meditate on the eternal verities — or even the temporal ones — the barber is likely to move his head into an even more uncomfortable position, so that he is aware of nothing but the hairs creeping up his nose or down his neck.

I tried to circumvent the business of barbery by growing a beard, thus avoiding the shaving part. But even this heroic gesture has its nemesis. I found that a beard has to be cut, just like the hair on my head. Moreover, I allow my beard to grow — in an effort to put off the moment when I must meet the now obsequious barber — just as I once did with my head of hair. At last, when remarks have become personal, and my beard is fan-shaped, patriarchal and very warm, I take it to the barber, who does not know what to do with it. We argue. Is it to be rounded or pointed or square or forked? Is it to be long or short or middling? I can never remember what it was like after the last visit and neither can he. It is as much trouble as a woman’s hair without giving any of the same pleasure; but I am stuck with it.

In the end I leave it to the barber, grit my teeth, shut my eyes and lean back. When I open them again, I cannot recognize myself and neither can anybody else. My beard is never cut twice running alike. The contrasts are extraordinary. At the beginning, when I shut my eyes I look like something out of the Far West — a Forty-Niner, perhaps. When I open them, I am anything from a man with a goatee to the prinked and mustachioed conductor of a hotel orchestra.

Not that the barber minds, of course. He always steps back with what Kipling called ‘the triumphant smile of the artist contemplating his finished handiwork’. Only the other day he summed up his joy at being given a free hand: ‘There you are, sir. You came in looking like Moses, and you go out looking like Sir Francis Drake.’

But I do not want to resemble either of these eminent gentlemen. In so far as I desire anything other than immediate escape, I want to look like myself; and I do not know what myself looks like. So I smile a craven smile, give an immense tip and creep away, and as I walk toward my car, my finger is boring and twisting to find the hairs under my collar. Why do I have to do this, I think — and come to that, why do I have to wear a collar? Why am I decent only when half strangled? For though they are a subtler irritant, clothes are another daily cross for me.

Is there anything sillier, or more calculated to drive a man slowly around the bend, than a respectable suit of clothes? If you are built after the fashion of Michelangelo’s Adam, you may be able to carry the burden of a suit with some air. But supposing you are not? Suppose on the contrary your tummy sticks out in one direction and your seat in the other, so that you bear a family likeness to Dickens’ Mr. Pickwick? In that case, sartorially speaking, you are a lost soul. Of course, your tailor can broaden the shoulders of your jacket by inserting in them a sort of permanent coat hanger. But then you look for all the world as though you were expecting to be hung in a closet until wanted; and you don’t look very much wanted.

And even your tailor can do very little about your side view. He can’t build out your chest or take a slice off your back. The most he can achieve is a certain sleekness of outline, so that from the side you look like a perpendicular sea lion. After that, he puts ash catchers around the hem of each leg and provides you with numberless pockets, together with a severe injunction against putting anything in them. Finally, with all the effrontery of the accomplished craftsman, he assures you it takes forty years to learn how to fashion this monstrosity, so that you pay three times a reasonable price for it.

Who wants to see the slightly adjusted outline of an old man whose figure is beginning to ‘go’ like ice cream left in the sun? Society should be more charitable. Once men have started their decline and begun to gather their parcels of fat, they should be allowed to hide themselves under what clothing they choose. Does anyone really believe that decrepitude can be charmed out of sight or obliterated by a tailor’s sleight of hand?

It was not always so. Once, a degree of fantasy was allowable, and it gave old men the chance to preserve a proper dignity for themselves. Male clothes were as varied then as the ones women wear now. You could hide your baldness with velvet or silk or feathers or laurels. You could wear jewels in your beard. You could have shoulders of ermine, and below them a glistening cataract which gave massiveness to your body and hid your reedy legs. You could clothe yourself in the elegance and severity of a toga, so that as you walked, your feet were moving in the folds and flounces of a full skirt. For the young, there was a brave show of leg and thigh, rather than a dun-colored drainpipe. There was the codpiece to proclaim — and if possible exaggerate — your virility. The slimness of your waist was accentuated by a belt, where hung a rapier which was little but a variation on the codpiece. You could expose your chest if you had hair on it. You could wear your hair in long curls, and finish off with a jaunty velvet cap and feather perched over one ear.

The historian will probably object that you stank. But so did everyone else. And you could always wear perfume, an aid which has been defined as ‘one stink covering another’. Young men must have thought a good deal of themselves in those days; and an old one moved among them with all the dignity of a battleship among destroyers. But today we all wear the same uniform, the same livery of servitude to convention. Youth has not its grace, nor age its privilege. An old man exhibits his infirmities in the same clothes that do nothing but hide the graces of his grandson. We have lost both ways.

At public functions there comes a moment when I survey the rows of collar-throttled jowls and dismiss our case as hopeless. For you must be brought up in robes or fur to wear them properly. We require the ease of habit. Technicolor epics fall down on this. Even if the principal characters have some ease in their splendid costumes, there are always some supers who give away the game. There will be at least one man whose knees have the bleached-asparagus look which tells they have only recently seen the sun. Helmets in the back rank do not settle to the head but are stuck on at a variety of angles. The third councilor from the left (a speaking part; he says, ‘Aye, my Lord!’) is not easy in his sandals. Nor are the bared bodies of the slaves at all convincing. They seem not only slaves, but processed, humbled structures, like a cylinder of cooked meat that has been pushed out of a tin. Their proper wear is clearly the uniform drainpipe. There is no hope or help for it. Until man is free of this drab convention and can dress as he likes, and habitually does so dress from one end of life to the other, we shall continue to button and zip and strap ourselves into a structure not much more becoming than a concrete wall, and about as comfortable.

An objector may bring forward the various magnificences of army or navy or air force uniform; and I can only reply testily that the basis of them all is the accursed suit. He may argue that academic persons, with their hoods, gowns and caps do not suffer as much as the public in general from a lack of the bizarre. But despite everything that film, television and stage show us, it is a fact that academics seldom wear academic dress. The hood hangs in a closet from one year’s end to another, cellophaned perhaps, but untouched, until its fibers drag apart under its own weight. Or if it is boxed and laid flat, then the creases become permanent and end by separating the material as by so many cuts.

The academic occasion — usually a yearly one — is unrehearsed as far as costume goes. It becomes an occasion on which the faculty, at once proud and ashamed of its fancy dress, lurches through corridors and aisles in knots and clusters, covering its embarrassment and pride with occasional in-sniggers behind the hand. The less eminent will be in front; walking very slowly so as not to disconcert their seniors; and they are always disconcerted by those same seniors, who have been told to step out and are limping along very fast. There is no movement to be seen anywhere else like it, that rambling, pausing, tottering, sideways uneasy gait that has in it something of the robot and something of the drunk. For we are unrehearsed. We have had our dignity thrust upon us. It is the cross of clothes again, and we cannot bear it with dignity.

For a cross, all this is perhaps too frivolous. Consider one that is more serious: the inability to write poetry. The outsider, the man who has never tried to force words into a pattern, can have no idea of the gigantic pride of the young man who thinks he is a poet. He would not change places with a space hero. He would not change places with anyone, unless it might be another poet. When I was an adolescent, I believed myself to belong to this select company. I remember how my companions were the mighty dead who people anthologies of poetry. I remember how I would walk, or run, rather, borne on by this belief, rapt by a phrase, a concept. I remember the awe with which I contemplated my first finished set of verses and thought it was a poem. A Creative Writing Class would not have helped me; for I had a kind of virginal timidity about confessing that I had set my shoulder to this wheel. Nor, to tell the truth, could I have endured the competition of the living. I was — and now I feel a faint, middle-aged blush at the thought of it — competing with Keats and Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge. They never noticed, of course; which made competition all the more peaceful. When I was twenty-one, a friend sent my verses to a publisher who in a moment of blindness offered to publish them. No young man has the courage to resist an offer like that. I went on writing verse, but as publication day drew near, I cocked my ear for the sound of thunder. I wondered how big my fan mail would be.

Of course, nothing happened at all. The little book was not even reviewed. There are too many little books of verse being published, day by day, and going straight off for pulp.

Well, I went on writing verses — indeed I still do, if the urge is unendurable — though now I take no account of them — and got together another book. But there came the day, and I can only suppose it was the day on which I grew up, when I saw my verses for the poor, thin things they were. Growing up is said to be painful. I cried in a most unmanly fashion and walked where the wind dried the tears on my cheeks. I remember in a kind of valedictory way, and as a kind of epitaph, that during that walk I fashioned verses I thought would be the last I should ever make. 

I need hardly say, the earth refused this spectacular offer. I was left then to live with the knowledge that I was just like other men, and not of the elect. Of course, the cross dwindled as time went on, until now I can wear it on a string around my neck. Only sometimes, when I meet Mr. Ransom or Mr. Eliot or Mr. Auden, I feel it burn a little.

But again, that is too serious. What cross shall I name that is middling? People who unwrap candy in the theater, people who make a noise when they eat, people who beat time to music? Advertisements that begin with a glamorous blonde and end by trying to sell you a plant for making machine tools? People who take offense too easily, people who have had their politics left to them by their grandparents, jazz, detective stories, nationalism, hereditary titles?

Bores?

Yes, bores. Certain people affect me with the same savage frustration as a visit to the barber, people who talk at the wrong moment. There are some things on television — at least on British television — that one simply must see and hear; one would be an oyster if one could resist them. But on the last of those occasions, there was also a program of my own on the radio which I wanted to hear because it would not be repeated. What was I to do? Tape my program? I can never make the tape recorder work. So I had mad thoughts of attending to both at once; or even of piping my own program through the television set, in the hope that a picture would improve it.

Then X and Y appeared unexpectedly: people who would get in the way of both programs and end by attending to neither. They elected television. We sat around, and as the picture came up and I resigned myself to the loss of my own program, my visitors began to talk. They said nothing worth listening to, but they talked and commented right to the end.

‘… getting fat and losing his hair. I wonder he has the face to play this part.’

Immediately the picture contracted to postcard size, to an inane motion of puppets, mouthing like reflections in a window. My skin had goose pimples on it.

‘… say she’s going to leave her husband. But I think she’s going to have a baby.’

Now my skin contracted like the picture. My smile felt pasted on. I had a sudden urge to hurl my visitors into the television set, make them small, mouthing puppets, and switch them off.

‘… of course it may not be his baby.’

There was one psychic refuge left and I took it. This is a public confession. In such circumstances, when I cannot withdraw my mind — and I could not — I use imagination to get even with circumstances. Carefully, and with hideous intention, I fashioned two clubs from the empty air. Presently each one hung over a guest, each knotted and massive, one studded with nails, the other with slivers of obsidian. Meanwhile I smiled my false smile, nodded and shook my head, looked from the screen up into the air where my clubs hung ready, and waited for the moment of truth.

It came when my guests turned down the sound so that they could hear each other speak more clearly. I stood up. I seized a club in either hand. I became a windmill, gathering power and speed. I brought the clubs down — crash, crash! Blood gushed over the carpet.

My pasted smile relaxed a little.

‘Would you both care for another drink?’

Barbers, clothes and bores. The last of these are more terrifying than the others. But it is a small list; and I must remember that one can usually escape from bores, even if one cannot club them. There have been times, however, when there was no escape. I once inspected the complaints of officers aboard some very small ships. Their duty was dangerous and arduous, but they made no comment on it. They made comments on each other. There were only three officers on each ship, but they lived closer together than people do in a marriage. After all, man and wife are usually apart from nine till five or later. These men could not get away. Their unholy marriage was complete and when they had any point of friction, they were like the people in Sartre’s play, Huis Clos, whose hell it is eternally to torture each other, not with crude physical instruments like clubs, but with the sheer pressure of their individual beings. A wardroom can be much like hell, in wartime at least; and the complaints varied from a dislike of a man’s morals to sheer hatred of the noise he made when he brushed his teeth.

It has become a commonplace of this century that a random selection of people can inflict utter cruelty on one another. With the earth growing smaller, we shall need more and more protection against our small crosses. It may be that, in a hundred years, the ambition of every sensitive man will be the tranquillity of a hermit’s cell.