The Godfather: Peter Corris on beards
I’m growing a beard, again. The first thing I had to do was seek Jean’s agreement. Some women dislike beards. Others prefer them. I’ve known several men who, on shaving off their beards, have their wives or partners request them to grown them again.
Jean offered no objection, so the electric shaver has stayed in the drawer and I’ve persisted. Growing a beard is one of the few ways to achieve a positive result with no effort at all.
I grew my first beard in my early 20s when I was a tutor at Monash University. My father maintained that only men with weak chins grew beards. I have all the chin anyone would need, but I suspect he held to his opinion on the ‘one exception doesn’t alter the rule’ principle.
In the mid-60s beards were popular among university staff and students alike. Very fresh-faced in those days, I hoped it would make me look older. Also I was under the spell of charismatic Associate Professor Ian Turner. Ian, who was supervising my MA thesis, instructed me on how to remove all identification at anti-Vietnam demonstrations, spot police badges and stay out of unnecessary trouble. I first heard Bob Dylan in Turner’s room at the university. Ian sported a magnificent beard.
I kept the beard – it was brownish with a touch of red – throughout my time at Monash and retained it for a while when I went to the ANU in Canberra to do a PhD. Then it came off – I forget why.
I grew it again when I did fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and Fiji. Tramping through steamy jungles and travelling by canoe and patrol boat, sometimes in choppy waters, the last thing I needed to do was shave.
I was clean-shaven then for a year or two until I went to England on a travelling post-doctoral fellowship. I was invited to a four-day rock festival (Donovan, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin etc) near Bath by a friend. We huddled in sleeping bags on a hillside for the four, often wet, days, smoked dope and did not wash or shave. The beard sprouted and I kept it for the rest of my time in England and Europe. It was useful protection against the cold.
In the following decades my beards were deciduous: they came and went according to my whim. Still young-looking in my 30s, I remember a friend saying, when seeing me clean-shaven for the first time, ‘That’s not a man, that’s a youth’. I immediately stopped shaving.
The styles varied from neatly trimmed to rather shaggy. Unwisely, I once shaped the beard into a goatee. You have to be as good looking as Brad Pitt (see Killing Them Softly) to get away with that. A photograph in an anthology I contributed to at the time shows me looking baleful and shifty in the goatee.
The present growth comes after being clean-shaven for 20 years. Again it was just a whim – a desire for a change and being tired of shaving. There is a good deal of white in it – a Hemingway-esque look perhaps. My six-year-old grandson declared it ‘awesome’ which I take to be an endorsement.
