Lament of the Unmasked
As a kid I often was counseled by my dad not to “stand around with your bare face hanging out.” Perhaps this saying was something he picked up in the Navy. Perhaps it was a Fresno-ism. In any case, I never had the foggiest idea what he meant. Until today.
Today, as the careful reader--no, picture-looker--already has observed, I come to my accustomed corner of this page as a study in columnist with bare face hanging out. This is as painful for me as I imagine it will be for you. The temptation is to let this dubious adornment pass without comment, hoping no one will notice.
Certainly from the perspective of the eternities, a newspaper’s decision to scatter about portraits of its columnists must be wholly unremarkable. Nonetheless, it seems almost rude somehow not to mention the intrusion. For more than five years, twice a week, we have been meeting here. And now, on a fine Sunday morning and without warning, phwap! There it is, my mug, in your newspaper.
So let me explain.
It wasn’t my idea.
The editors did it.
*
It is fashionable for newspapers to publish photographs of columnists. This is done, I suppose, in an attempt to add personality and pizazz, to create still-life talking heads for competition with television. In this matter, I run with the dinosaurs. My objections were lodged and, alas, found lacking. Admittedly, the central complaint was a bit fuzzy. It’s simply a notion, a hunch, that these pictures inevitably get in the way.
Nobody knows how writing works. There is a magic to it, an ethereal transfer of thought and imagery, with words as the clumsy, but essential, medium. William Saroyan put it this way: “There’s no other way for writing to happen than with words, but at the same time it’s got to happen in spite of them. The thing that gets you in writing is the story the words themselves don’t tell but make you know. It’s something like that.”
In this transaction, some things are better left to the imagination. With the curtain pulled back, the Wizard of Oz is revealed to be a cornball Kansas quack. I prefer to let the readers create their own mental image of what I might look like or, better still, not to wonder about it at all. The fear is that the picture can become the cover by which the book is judged.
I remember stumbling upon a sports column in another California newspaper a few years back. The writer was holding forth about how Mike Tyson had let down all African Americans. The writer, judging by his columnar picture, appeared to be about 17, with buckteeth and a white face pocked with pimples. This fellow, I said to myself--naturally enough, but no doubt unfairly--has little to bring to this topic, and so the page was turned. I wonder: Will my range and credibility now be hamstrung in a similar fashion? In a state with so much public discourse caroming across the racial divide, it is no small question.
*
Now about my face. I have no major complaints. I consider it sort of neutral, neither flashy nor offensive. If I was an actor, I suspect, my best shot at roles would be dandruff commercials; it’s that kind of face. It is not, unfortunately, what I’d call a Lion of Letters face. Mark Twain had one of those faces. Norman Mailer has one, so does our own Al Martinez. They all look like Writers and--in an inexplicable way--write like their faces. I never have felt that I write like my face. A problem now.
A. J. Liebling, the great New Yorker press critic, used to mock the published portraits of New York columnists, analyzing with comic gravity their grimaces and grins, finding ideological clues in their hair parts, necktie knots and even head shape. “Each of the columns,” he wrote of the Journal-American’s George Sokolsky and Westbrook Pegler, in a typical swipe, “is accompanied by a photograph of its dour author--brachycephalic Sokolsky frowning on page two, dolichocephalic Pegler scowling on page three--and this gives the whole spread an appearance of balanced ferocity. . . . “ And so on.
A half century later--nothing new in newspapers is ever truly new--the echoes of Liebling made it difficult to pose for the above picture. Smile, or no? Jacket, or no? I asked the photographer for something that would suit columns about a murdered boy in Beaumont, and also the foibles of Disney, about wondrous L.A. weather and also Polly Klaas, about the Humboldt Crabs and also the ambush of Pasadena trick-or-treaters. Needless to say, his camera and my face were not up to the task. As anyone can see.
