Wodehouse on Whiskers

The real-life views of P.G. Wodehouse on what he described as “face fungus” in his stories.

From a letter written in 1942 while interned during WWII, as reproduced in Performing Flea:

A lot of us grew beards. Not me. What I felt was that there is surely enough sadness in life without going out of one’s way to increase it by sprouting a spade-shaped beard. I found it a melancholy experience to watch the loved features of some familiar friend becoming day by day less recognizable behind the undergrowth. A few fungus-fanciers looked about as repulsive as it is possible to look, and one felt a gentle pity for the corporal whose duty is was to wake them in the morning. What a way to start one’s day!

O’Brien, one of the sailors, had a long Assyrian beard, falling like a cataract down his chest, and it gave me quite a start when at the beginning of the summer he suddenly shaved, revealing himself as a spruce young fellow in the early twenties. I had been looking on him all the time as about twenty years my senior, and only my natural breeding had kept me from addressing him as ‘Grandpop’.

From a piece that that appeared in The Forum in 1937 (and elsewhere) in which he linked whiskers with “caustic criticism”:

LONG WHISKER – SHORT TEMPER

But let a man omit to shave, even for a single day, and mark the result. He feels hot and scrubby. Within twelve hours his outlook has become jaundiced and captious. If his interests lie in the direction of politics, he goes out and throws a bomb at someone. If he is an employer of labor, he starts a lockout. If he is a critic, he sits down to write his criticism with the determination that the author shall know that he has been in a fight. You have only to look about you to appreciate the truth of this. All whiskered things are short-tempered — pumas, wildcats, Bernard Shaw, and — in the mating season — shrimps.