Men who disrespect their beards are beginning to annoy me. On this all-important subject, I have a prejudiced perspective. Facial hair has swirled around my jaw (and upper lip) for almost 35 years. Granted, my look hasn’t been consistent. Lately, a lot of salt has spilled into the pepper. My fuzzy friend’s length has varied considerably, as have its various encroachments—up my cheeks and down my throat. But I’ve always treated my prognathic frontispiece seriously. I comb and groom it with an eye toward decorousness, determined to put forth my best possible bristles. True, this particular beard is not especially imaginative; I suppose it’s something of a dull industry standard. Still, it is respectable and presentable.
Such is not the case with certain specimens now being disported by any number of hirsute miscreants. I think mainly of professional athletes who don’t scrape their faces during postseason competitions. Somehow, their “playoff beards” are deployed to court good luck. (Precisely how this weird belief arose is grist for a dissertation, not an essay.) At first, the practice was largely restricted to Neanderthals in the National Hockey League amid the Stanley Cup playoffs. But now, any number of players in Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and the National Football League are forgoing lather and razor come crunch time.
Unfortunately, many of these guys aren’t rendering proper attention to what stares back at them in the mirror each morning. Rather, they’re just going wild and woolly. “The shaggier, the better” is their apparent motto. Witness certain incarnations of Mike Napoli of the Texas Rangers and Sean Doolittle of the Oakland Athletics. What erupts from their mandibles constitutes a creeping growth. And the infestation is spreading: Fans of playoff teams are sprouting equally ill-kempt beards as they cheer on their idols. Are these men so utterly devoid of imagination that they can’t beard themselves in a time and place of their own choosing—and in a manner of their own preference?
The latest beard outrage is not to be believed. Since 2011, the Italian high jumper Gianmarco Tamberi has worn only half a beard. You read that correctly: A beard, and a mustache, adorn the left side of his face, but not the right. (“I like to be on stage and to entertain the audience,” he said recently.) Mr. Tamberi is not alone. A few months ago, a performance artist named Adrian Alarcon shaved off the right half of his beard so he could pose for a series of photographs whereby his bare patch was adorned with chocolate sprinkles, jigsaw puzzle pieces, tiny plastic dinosaurs, thumbtacks, and other items. “[It’s] just a fun way to talk about two recurrent issues: selfies and beards,” he said.
Now we have the “achievement beard,” a designation that the New Yorker has just applied to the brillo lately espied on the previously clean-shaven David Letterman, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart. After stepping down from their high-profile posts, it seems that these television worthies have begun going scraggly as “a marker of triumphant lassitude, the victory lap after a long job well done.” The author Nathan Heller even reached back to the post-007 Sean Connery following Zardoz, as well as the postelectable Al Gore.
God—the owner of the longest white beard in the cosmos, by the way—help us.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by beard zaniness. We’ve witnessed the goatee and soul patch crazes. There was, and still is, that youthful preference for the sliver-thin contour that might be called the “Pencil.” But don’t get me wrong: Beard culture welcomes all legitimate comers. Van Dykes, Imperials, Balbos, Amish, and other retro, offbeat, even affected, entries are wholly worthy. And more power to those who assume signature looks that are aesthetically memorable. Henry David Thoreau had the greatest neck-beard in history; somehow, it fit his self-reliant, quasi-Mountain Man persona. The utterly unruly beard of Joe Gould perfectly evinced his bohemian ways and sheer fabulism. Even Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz’s bizarre, walrus-tusked outcropping was commendable. Its two-pronged, port-and-starboard cultivation reflected his double-barreled, twin-screwed approach to the Imperial German Navy.
But these were individual quirks, born of unique personalities. A beard ceases to command approbation when it becomes a mindless trend statement. One recalls those who, in the 1980s, slavishly aped the five o’clock shadow of Crockett and Tubbs on Miami Vice. At one point, Wahl marketed a particular brand of electric trimmer called “The Miami Device.” Designed to achieve stubbly conformity, the gizmo quickly flopped, thereby proving the unworthiness of hoary imitation.
There is nothing wrong with a man going through beard phases according to the dictates of his conscience. “I grew the beard originally because I had been restless and dissatisfied with myself,” the essayist Phillip Lopate once wrote. “I shaved it for the same reason.” Fair enough. One of these days I may do the same. But beards are not masscult phenomena to be treated lightly. They are individual statements of persona. They should be coaxed into organic life and worn accordingly. Their lovely lines are not to be emulated without reason. That way lies redundancy at best and mortification at worst.
Allan Peterkin put it well in One Thousand Beards: “Once your dentist has a goatee, it’s time to change your look.” For my part, I will, by my own hand, skin any man who says otherwise, and by the hair of his chinny chin chin.
Thomas Vinciguerra is the author, most recently, of Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E.B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of The New Yorker.
