A Shave in the Kitchen?

I just finished reading The Magus by John Fowles, which is a novel written mostly in the 1950s but published in 1965. And the following passage describing the main character, Nicholas Urfe, after he arrives in a small Greek coastal village, struck me as really odd:

I went over the causeway through the gusty wind to the little mainland hamlet, which was where the steamer called. I had a bad meal in the taverna there, and a shave in the kitchen—yes I was a tourist—and questioned the cook-waiter. He knew no more than the other man.

p. 436 of The Magus by John Fowles

Wait. What?!

Couldn’t you wait?! You had to shave, right then?! Who does that?!

You might wonder if he was late for a very important business presentation (he wasn’t) or that he needed to change his appearance to avoid the bad guys (he didn’t; there really aren’t any bad guys in the novel, per se) or that he was going on a date with a woman he was really interested in (nope) or that he had some other compelling reason to ask the taverna’s “cook-waiter” if he could groom himself in the kitchen (I can’t think of one). He was only a short boat ride (the “steamer” he mentions) away from the place he’d been living for the past several months.

By the way, despite how the sentence is constructed, he’s not shaving in the kitchen because he’s a tourist. He tells people that he’s a tourist to avoid having to explain what he’s really doing there: He was kidnapped, drugged, and woke up in a nearby ruined house. It wasn’t a robbery or anything truly malicious. The easiest way to describe his situation is that he’s part of a kind of game or unscripted drama. If Fowles had written the novel in the 21st century instead of the middle of the 20th, he might have placed the narrator in a reality TV show directed by a super-rich weirdo. I’m not spoiling anything—or much—by saying this.

This is kind of a throwaway paragraph when it comes to the book’s plot. It only serves to get the protagonist (he’s not exactly a hero) from point A to point B.

So what’s up with shaving in someone’s kitchen?

I’m sure part of it is meant to demonstrate his lack of consideration, which sometimes crosses the line into outright disdain, for the rural Greeks he meets. He’s an English teacher at a private boarding school on a nearby island, and he’s portrayed as being at times a snobbish jerk, kind of the British equivalent of the Ugly American. (He has issues with women, too, which is more important to the novel, but that aspect of his character has little to do with this scene.)

There’s also a practical element to shaving in the kitchen. At this time in small-town Greece, most buildings might not have bathrooms with hot and cold running water. The taverna’s kitchen would at least have a wood-fired stove for heating a kettle.

But I really don’t think John Fowles had any of this in mind when he wrote this scene. I believe he was just portraying his time period, a time when being unshaven was really looked down upon as being dirty and disreputable.

I would bet that asking a waiter in Greece in 2024, even in a small village, if you could shave in their kitchen would be met with a strong, “hell no!” And in the U.S. today I can imagine that you would have a hard time getting away with shaving in a restaurant restroom, much less a kitchen, except in a rare situation, like, for example, a fast food restaurant long a popular hiking trail.

And that makes me think of how even today, with the acceptance of beards and stubble in just about any context—from the boardroom to the Senate chamber and nearly everywhere else—a guy might still find himself in a situation where he’s desperate for a shave.

I know that after a week without shaving I would be miserable. That early growing-a-beard itch is real, and I particularly suffer with it. After being kidnapped for several day as Nicholas has been, it might be that taking control of your hygiene would be the first order of business as the initial step in taking back control of your life.

But it does give you a sense of the time period, doesn’t it? And it’s interesting how fashions change. I’ve read that the smooth shaven look was not only big in the 1950s, but after the hippie beard and long-hair decades of the ’60s and ’70s, the clean cut look made a comeback in the ’80s and ’90s, although with a little more freedom to experiment. Personally, those first couple of years in college in the mid 1980s were amazing for me as I watched my classmates try out beards and moustaches, shave, and then repeat the process all over again.

And now anything goes, with facial plumage ranging from groomed stubble and neatly cropped whiskers to wild and wooly mountain man beards. Clean-shaven faces seem less common to me now than at any other point in my lifetime.

Midjourney AI Art

As you probably can tell, the images in this post are all AI generated from a prompt I came up with based on the kitchen shaving scene. Some are interesting, I think. The protagonist from The Magus is supposed to be in his mid-20s and good-looking,—a real stud who women find attractive—but these computer-generated guys look a lot prettier than the Nicholas Urfe I had imagined as I read the book.

What the hell is the guy below shaving with?

Who is this man staring at the guy shaving, and more importantly, why isn’t he married to me?

Kitchen Shaving from September 2012

I still love this humorous picture I posted 12 years ago (see Kiss the Cook!) of a handsome chef shaving in a bustling kitchen. I think he’s using an iPad for a mirror. It makes me nostalgic. Twelve years ago I would actually see real, live, hot young men shaving at my gym. What a thrill that was! But that’s a thing of the past. Now, no one seems to get ready for work at the gym anymore, and those few who do, don’t shave.