HIGH BARBARY

by Lawrence Durrell

But that’s not science fiction?

I have already elaborated on the several ways in which this question can irritate or annoy. Perversely, it was saddening that no one asked it of me about Mr. Reynolds’ story. It would seem we are so thoroughly alienated from the Russians that a simple political yarn, involving no space travel, wonderful invention, time machine, psi power, or oven far-future speculation, but just the simplest extrapolation from the present situation, should seem as imaginatively remote as an analogy set on Mars. (Which raises the question: Is it science fiction if the author has been to Mars? Whether the reader has or not?) This next selection, in any case, is certainly not science fiction—perhaps not even fiction. Mademoiselle called it a short story; I should incline more to “satirical essay.”)

Mr. Durrell is probably the leading exponent of the shifting viewpoint among contemporary mainstream writers. His famous Alexandria Quartet is essentially a view of love through four different persons’ eyes. But before he turned to his examination of love, the author had an unusual opportunity to study some of the less congenial emotions. Like Mr. Reynolds, he was a “traveling man,” but under rather different auspices: Press Officer for the British Foreign Service, and lecturer for the British Council, in Athens, Cairo, Rhodes, Belgrade, among other places.

* * * *

What I very much enjoy on the second Saturday of the month (said Antrobus) is the little walk across to the Strand for a haircut and a spiritual revamping chez the good Fenner. Everything about the operation is reassuring, soothing. As you know, Fenner himself is clearly a mixture of Old Father Time and Dr. Freud. The whole Office has, at one time or another, passed through his purposeful scissors. You know how fanatically faithful to tradition the F.O. is; well, Fenner is a tradition. Why, last week when Toby Featherblow’s wife, Constance, popped number four and the thing was found to be positively covered in hair, it was to Fenner that they rushed to have the features disinterred for the purposes of licensing and registration. Otherwise the registrar might have refused to accept what was, to all intents and purposes, an ape. Yes, you can count on old Fenner. He never flinches before reality.

As for the Emporium—with its potted palms, painted mirrors, its pictures of Eights Week in the nineties, its dominating portrait of Gladstone staring out through (or perhaps round?) a Fenner hairdo—what is one to say? It radiates calm and the soothing smell of bay rum or Fenner’s Scalp Syrup and Follicle Food combined. Nor does one overhear any low conversation there—just a few choice anecdotes about the Dutch Royal Family, carefully phrased. Fenner is strict; once I remember that two military attaches were expelled from their stools for trying to exchange betting slips. Fenner’s scorn was so withering that one of them cried.

But all this one learns to value truly only when one has served abroad—for not the least of the hazards the poor dip has to face is that of foreign barbary. My dear chap, as you walk in, you can scan the row of seated clients and tell at a glance where some of them have been serving. The singular bottlebrush effect of a Siamese haircut, for example, will take ages to grow out and is quite unmistakable. Fenner will shake his head commiseratingly and say, “Bangkok, I take it, sir?” The poor chap will sit with trembling lip and nod sadly. “We will see what can be done to save you, sir,” says Fenner and releases a faintly flocculent blast from a pressurized syringe, which at once brings back the flush of health to the raped scalp. You have experienced it. You will know what I mean.

It varies, too, with every country, as do the habits of the various artists. In Italy your barber is apt to sing—a dangerous habit and excruciating for the tone-deaf; moreover he may add gestures to his little aria of a sudden and lop off an earlobe with a fine air of effortless self-distinction. Personally, I would rather have the stuff grow all the way down my back and into my chair than trust an Italian when overcome with emotion and garlic. I have seen it happen. A cousin of Polk-Mowbray still bears a cropped right ear; indeed, he is lucky to have as much of it left as he has—only a wild swerve prevented its total disappearance. Talk about living dangerously!

In places like Germany, for example, one is lucky to be able to get away without a severed carotid. As for the Balkans, they, too, have their fearsome methods, and I have known cases where people took to beards and shingles rather than face up to reality. Of course, the moment they get leave they fly back to Fenner, who cuts back all the undergrowth and serenely removes whatever may have been picked up by the static electricity. At least that was the excuse that Munnings-Mather gave for all the hairpins and Gramophone needles Fenner found in his beard.

As for the French—they leave me speechless, positively beating the air. They will either do you a style pompier, piling the muck up on the top of your head and pressure-greasing it until you leave marks on the ceiling of every lift you enter, or else they treat you to a razor cut of such topiary ferocity that you come out feeling sculpted. They cut into the stuff as if it were cheese. No. No. You can have Paris. Let me keep my modest tonsure and my Short-Back-and-Sides Outlook. The style Fenner (vintage 1904) is my sort of thing.

Why, in Vulgaria, once, things got so bad that Polk-Mowbray was driven, positively driven, to Take Steps—and you know how much he hated the naked thrust of Action. It was during the Civil War when the country was Communist all the week and Royalist at the weekends. Every Saturday morning the Royalist troops came down from the hills and took the Praesidium; every Monday morning they were driven back with heavy losses. Monday was payday for the Communist forces, Saturday that of the Royalist army. This had a strange effect on the hairdressing business, for during the week you only found heavily nationalized barbers at work, while at the weekend you could borrow the live Royal barbers from the other side. The Communists used an unpretentious pudding-basin cut which had been worked out in terms of the dialectic, lightly driving a harrow across the scalp and then weeding with finger and thumb. They were short of instruments because the Five-Year Plan hadn’t started to work due to lack of foreign capital. Anyway, during the week you were in the hands of some horny peasant, while if you waited till Sunday you could get a sort of Viennese pompadour which fanned away into wings at the back like a tail coat and carried sideburns of a corkscrew pattern which once made Polk-Mowbray look so like Elizabeth Barrett Browning that the British Council man, Gool, suggested … but that is another story.

Yes, the Balkan barber, conditioned by the hirsute nature of his client, has developed a truly distressing style of action—suited to the nature of the terrain I don’t doubt, but nonetheless frightful to those who have been decently brought up. They positively plunge into one’s nostrils, hacking and snipping as if they were clearing a path in the jungle; then before one can say “moustache cup” they crawl into one’s ears, remorselessly pruning at what (to judge by the sound) must be something as intractable as a forest of holm oak. I could tell you grim tales of punctured eardrums, of inhaled hair, but I shall spare you. You know.

But I think you had left before Polk-Mowbray entered his Do-It-Yourself phase; the state of Vulgarian barbary must have touched him off. He saw an advertisement for an instrument called, I think, The Gents Super Hair Regulator, which from the brochure appeared to be an ingenious comb and razor blade in one; you trimmed as you combed, so to speak. Nothing simpler, nothing more calculated to please. Polk-Mowbray, deeply moved by the discovery, ordered a dozen, one for each member of the Chancery. He was beside himself with pride and joy. Speaking from a full heart, he said: “From today our troubles are over. I want each one of you from now on to use his little Regulator and so boycott these heathen barbers of Vulgaria.” Well, I don’t know if you know the Regulator? No? Be warned then. It is not a toy for frolicking amateurs. The keenest professional skill is needed to work it. Otherwise, it takes huge lumps out of your hair in the most awkward places, leaving gaunt patches of white scalp glimmering through. By lunchtime on that fatal day, the whole Chancery looked as if it had been mowed down by ringworm or mange. Worse still, de Mandeville contracted a sort of scalp-rot which turned his whole skull green. A sort of deathly verdigris set in. He had to keep his hair in a green baize bag for over a week while Fenner’s Follicle Food did its healing work— lucky I had brought a bottle with me. But, of course, the sight nearly drove Polk-Mowbray berserk, especially as at that time the two were at daggers drawn. De Mandeville had sworn to try and drive his chief mad by a sort of verbal Chinese torture. To every remark made to him, he would only reply “Charmed, I’m sure,” with a kind of snakelike sibilance. It doesn’t sound much, but I assure you that after a few days of endless repetition of this phrase (accompanied by the fearful sight of the green baize bag on his head), Polk-Mowbray was practically beaten to his knees.

But probably the most horrifying instance of mass barbary that I recall was what befell the little party of guileless Finns who submitted themselves to a Vulgarian perm in preparation for the National Lepers’ Day Ball. That could not be bettered as an illustration of the Things One Is Up Against in the Service. Five of them, including the Ambassadress, were partially electrocuted owing to a faulty fuse. How is it, I ask myself, that they did not know that the light and power arrangements of Vulgaria were so capricious? Yet, they did not. Polk-Mowbray, who was wooing the Communists, had given the Minister for Interior an electric razor which, whenever it was plugged in, fused the lights of the capital. Something of this order must have happened to the innocent Finns. With their crowning glories tied into those sort of pressurized domes attached to the ceiling by a live wire, they were suddenly aware that everything was turning red-hot and beginning to smoke fearfully; the atmosphere was rapidly beginning to resemble that of a Turkish bath that has got out of control. But the Finns are normally an unemotional race and not much given to fruitless ratiocination. It was not until sparks an inch long began to sprout from their fingers that they began to wonder dimly if all was well. By then it was too late.

They were far too hot to hold. The barbers who manfully tried to disengage them retired hastily with burns and shock. In fact they might have been there to this day, fried to a crisp, had not the Diplomatic Corps been passing at that moment in full tenue. We were winding our way across the town to lay a rather limp wreath on the Leper Memorial when we saw the smoke and heard the shrill ululations of the feckless barbers. It was more than lucky, too, that Dovebasket should have a pair of rubberized pliers in his uniform pocket. He darted into the smoke-filled cavern and brought his mechanical genius to bear on the situation, snipping the live wires which attached our poor colleagues to the roof. The Finns rolled moaning to the floor in their golden domes, looking like so much science fiction. “Give them air,” we all cried shrilly, and willing hands carried them out and laid them in a row upon the pavements. All this had the superficial air of being a mass burial, and I personally believe that had it been anyone but the Finns, that would indeed have been the case. But the Finns can take anything with equanimity. Water was carefully poured over them from plastic buckets. They smoked, they smelled like chops frying, but at last they came to their senses.

We did not see them again until the ball that night which closed Leper Week. My dear chap, you have never imagined such hair. It was positively psychoanalytic. Golden wigs of such hellish, blinding, metallic brilliance. The demon barbers had certainly done their work. … Ah I But I see that Fenner is free at last. More of this anon.