On the wall at home is a framed photograph of T.E. Lawrence taken in his chunky forties. The photo, a postcard advertising an exhibition of historical artefacts, is a close-up of his face. Knowing what we do about his pathological aversion to most human contact, the camera’s nearness is startling. And the thing is, in spite of all those biographies telling us what a sensitive aesthete Lawrence was, the face confronting the onlooker is that of a thug. The Desperate Dan-sized chin, the eyes too close together, the cruel mouth: it’s the kind of face one saw frequently in the away ends of football grounds in the 1970s, especially among the police. The impression of thuggishness is here emphasised by a surly gaze. He’d shoot you as soon as look at you. The photo makes me laugh inwardly every time I notice it.
I remember attending a lecture 20 years ago, during which a few sensitive souls ostentatiously walked out in protest because the lecturer casually referred to the San people’s buttocks as being distinctive. Racism, apparently. One no longer notices biological or physical difference. Poor San people! I thought. Extermination isn’t enough. Now we must even turn a blind eye to their marvellous buttocks. But as the Enlightenment flame burns ever brighter, doubtless the practice of inferring character from the facial features of individuals is now also due for a mopping-up operation by the thought police, after which there will be more talk of ‘strong’ chins, ‘sensuous’ mouths or — heaven forbid — ‘coarse’ faces.
On my mother’s side of the family, we have an inherited nose, a monstrous great thing, known as ‘the Brice bugle’. I would argue that the Brice bugle is similar to a San person’s buttocks, in that it in no way delineates racial or individual character. It is not, for example, as so many people imagine, a precursor to the famous Sir Alex Ferguson drinker’s raspberry, and therefore a sign of a weak or obsessive personality. It is a purely genetic inheritance, providing the advantage, perhaps, if looked at from an evolutionary biology perspective, that we are more easily able to spot one another if we are separated while shopping in Asda on Saturday morning. I look forward to the day when the ancient science of physiognomy has been proscribed by European law and I can start suing.
But I do think that the physiognomy must contain at least a grain of truth, and here’s why. I once had my face read by a professional face-reader. Before we got down to business, I handed her a postcard portrait of the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton. Now here was a man who wouldn’t have had any truck with today’s political correctness. When asked by a fellow guest at a dinner party whether it was true that he had once killed a man, he thundered back, ‘Sir, I have committed every sin in the Decalogue.’
In the postcard portrait I handed her, Burton’s face, as portrayed by the artist, is a marriage of Satan and Count Dracula. ‘What did he do for a living, then?’ I said. The professional face reader was a highly sensitive American lady of marked New Age outlook. She was previously unacquainted with our celebrated linguist, who first achieved notice with his official and painstaking survey of the homosexual brothels of Karachi. She studied the image closely, and with quickening interest. Then she said that she couldn’t be certain, of course, but was this man an explorer perhaps? Blow me down, I said.
It was the ears, apparently. Sir Richard Burton had very marked explorer’s lugholes. The outside rim of the one visible was vertical and perfectly straight. This is typical. They’ve all got them. Sir Ranulph Fiennes, if he has any vestiges of ear left at all, once had this straight, vertical edge. The ear had been the first clue. Add to those explorer’s ears, she said, those high and protruding ‘adventurous’ cheekbones, and those flaring ‘self-reliant’ nostrils, and there you have it. The poor man could hardly have been anything else.
She proceeded to cover my face intricately with thin chalk dividing lines; symmetry and proportion of the whole are as tell-tale as the characteristics of the parts. I’ve lost her report. I remember her drawing attention to my large hooter, a very ‘powerful’ one, she said. Otherwise my face, and the character it described, was neither one thing nor the other. If she had to put a label on what my face told her, it would be ‘methodical’, she said.
Afterwards I went ten stops on the Jubilee line before I realised why it was that people were looking at me as though I was mad. My face was still covered by her chalk lines, Maori style, which I’d forgotten she’d put there.
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