A FAREWELL TO RED

PART TWO

So—to recap. Buxom old ladies stopping me in the street. Getting sunburned even on snowy days in December. A fiery temper, or at least being saddled with its reputation. Kids ready to tease. Being a redhead isn’t necessarily a prescription for bliss, and may even tip you over into dark self-loathing.

Anne Shirley, the eponymous heroine of Anne of Green Gables, said it for us all.

“You’ll find it easier to be bad than good if you have red hair,” said Anne reproachfully. “People who haven’t red hair don’t know what trouble it is. Mrs. Thomas told me God made my hair red on purpose, and I’ve never cared about him since.”

A lifelong sorrow, she calls it. No one with red hair can be truly happy—and she prays that her beautiful tresses will darken into auburn.

I’d advise Anne, to improve her attitude, to go find people in history who shared our hair color; it can reconcile you, even inspire you, to discover you’re not alone.

George Washington for starters, at least under the wig. Erik the Red from Viking days. Artists like Van Gogh and Da Vinci; writers from Mark Twain to James Joyce to Sinclair Lewis; entertainers ranging from Danny Kaye to Nicole Kidman. Even Malcom X apparently had reddish hair, hence his street moniker, “Detroit Red.” And Willie Nelson, whose cool nickname, “The Redheaded Stranger,” I wouldn’t mind having myself.

I was always reading books as a kid—I assumed I’d find plenty of literary redheads—but the pickings are pretty slim. Hugh Walpole, that deservedly forgotten Brit novelist, had a novel called Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, but, having come upon it in a dusty used bookstore, I never managed to get past page eleven.

There is a redhead classic though: Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red Headed League,” which was surely the first Sherlock Holmes mystery I read, and the one that turned me into his lifelong fan.

It’s an intriguing premise. Holmes takes on a client named Jabez Wilson, a pawnbroker with a small London shop, whose only remarkable feature is his “blazing red hair.”

Jabez has answered an odd advertisement in the London Times.

“TO THE REDHEADED LEAGUE

ON ACCOUNT OF THE BEQUEST of the late Ezekiah Hopkins of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., there is now another vacancy open which entitles a member of the League to a salary of 4 pounds a week for purely nominal service. All redheaded men who are sound of body and mind are eligible. Apply in person on Monday at eleven o’clock at the offices of the league, 7 Pope’s Court, Fleet Street.”

Jabez’s shop assistant, a shady character named Spaulding, urges him to apply.

“I wish to the. Lord, Mr. Wilson, that I was a redheaded man. The League was founded by an American millionaire who was himself redheaded and had great sympathy for all redheaded men. When he died, he left his fortune in the hands of trustees, with instructions to apply the interest to providing easy berths to men who have that hair color. There’s no use applying if your hair is light red, or dark red, or anything but real bright, blazing, fiery red.”

Jabez, convinced, heads off to the League’s office, and soon learns he’s not the only redheaded Londoner interested in such a sinecure.

“I never hope to see such a sight as that again, Mr. Holmes. From north, south, east, and west every man who had a shade of red in his hair had tramped into Fleet Street to answer that advertisement. Every shade of color they were—straw, lemon, orange, brick, Irish-setter, liver, clay, but there were not many who had my vivid flame-colored tint.”

(“Irish-setter red?” My color exactly!)

Jabez gets the job, which consists of sitting in a windowless office copying out by hand the Encyclopedia Britannica. Of course, this turns out to be an elaborate ruse designed to get Jabez out of his shop so Spaulding and his minions can tunnel through the basement to an adjacent bank. Sherlock figures this out easily enough, and is waiting there with Dr. Watson to apprehend them as they’re about to make off with a fortune in French gold.

***

As any quick search will demonstrate, there’s an entire genre of non-fiction books celebrating red hair. Most are coffee-table books, most feature women, with tomboys boasting lots of freckles and Pre-Raphaelite beauties with alabaster skin.

The titles say it all. Red; a History of the Redhead. How to Be a Redhead. Ginger Pride; a Redheaded History of the World. The Best Ever Book of Redhead Jokes. (Wait—there are redhead jokes?) Seeing Red; a Rapture of Redheads.

My friend Joel Meyerowtiz, having established his reputation with beautifully minimalist photo books of Tuscany and Cape Cod, published a widely-praised book of portraits in l991 called Redheads.

“For more than ten years,” Joel writes in the introduction, “I have been captivated by redheads’ aesthetic allure, as if I were a fisherman finding rare tropical fish. I’m intrigued by the shared genetic features of redheads, and their common spiritual bond.”

Wow. A lot to unpack there. Let’s start with “aesthetic allure.”

And we won’t mince words. Aesthetic allure, if you’re talking about people, not porcelain, usually ends up meaning sexual allure, so let’s pose the real question: Are redheads hot?

I’m the last person to ask. I’ve never had a crush on a redhead, perhaps because those “shared genetic features” are a little too shared to have made me consider redheads as potential mates. Sadly, I’ve always been a little wary of even hanging around with them, the women who all look like they could be my twin.

And as for working the other way around, red hair as chick magnet, I can only reference the example of my wife Celeste, she of the beautifully brown French hair. She’s never been shy about testifying that, when it came to finding someone to spend her life with, redheads were on her radar early, and stayed there long enough to say yes when I first asked her out.

“Common spiritual bond?”

I’d like to think so—a bond of empathy, and not just for fellow redheads. Having hair our color might just be enough of a quirk to make us relate to people who are struggling with more troublesome differences; it gives us a fellow feeling for the underdog, the outsider, the mavericks who don’t fit in. Not a bad trait for an aspiring novelist to have—and so I think being redheaded help kick-start my vocation.

And more than that. Having red hair, for all the teasing, all the sunburn, always made me feel, right from those sidewalk days back in Hempstead, that I was cut out for something different in life, something unique, something unattainable by mere blonds or brunettes.

I’m exaggerating, but not by much. Being redheaded helped me decide I wasn’t going to work in an office or factory or commute every day to the city. What was the use of being a redhead if you were going to squander it by going with the flow and conforming?

And perhaps it got the message across to others, who, if they bothered glancing at me, might realize, at second glance, that they were confronting someone different. Staid most of me looked, stolid, conservative, not a man with many surprises…until you got to the hair, that red, rebellious, arty hair—hair capable of anything.

Geezus! I was good at it, being a redhead! I can admit that now that the color’s all but gone. In the attic I still have the baby-book my mother kept when I was little; toward the back, in a cellophane envelope, is a lock of hair she cut off and saved when I was four years old.

Talk about red. It’s the very definition of red, irresistible red, flaming red, rapturous red. Staring down at it, I find myself forgiving all those dowagers who stopped me on the sidewalk to gush. I’d do the same, if I encountered such redness now.

Cyrano de Bergerac, that brave sword-fighting poet, finds his heroic identity in his nose, his plume, his panache, and in exactly the same manner I’ve always worn my unruly red hair with a sense of pride, tough-love pride. Redhead isn’t always the easiest thing to be in the world, but in its defense I’ll say this: in stumbling through this dark and mysterious life of ours, it gave me a torch to brighten the way.