NEW ORTHODOXIES: VI
BROWNED OFF WITH TANNING
John Casey inveighs against
the ugly and foolish habit of exposing the skin to sunshine
WAUGH'S Gilbert Pinfold abhorred plas- tics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz. In due course plastics will become obsolete, an appreciation of jazz will be confined to antiquarians, and Picasso will be relegated to that very respectable status of a talent who was not a Master. But sunbathing? It is possible that future social historians will find it difficult to convince their readers that such a bizarre practice ever existed. Future generations may find the thought that the numerous ruined structures which they encounter over hundreds of miles of coastline were built purely in order that people could get their skin to turn brown no more intelligible than that the Great Pyramid was built to contain the remains of one Pharaoh.
On the other hand, this may not happen at all. The investment in the modern mass holiday, of which sunbathing is the raison d'être, is so huge that what ought to have been simply an amusing upper-class fad with a natural lifespan of about 20 years, may be with us for ever.
Sea bathing began to be popular in England at the beginning of the Victorian period, or a little before, for reasons of `health'. As one might expect, the evidence for its healthiness was hard to come by. Yet popular health fads are nearly always based on something other than medical facts. What the Victorians really felt was that to plunge into the sea for a few minutes was to go back to Nature. It was because it was so unquestionably natural that the sea was felt to be health-giving. That all the imaginary benefits that used to be attached to taking the waters in the civilised, 'artificial' surroundings of a spa were transferred wholesale to sea bathing was a legacy of the Romantic movement.
Sunbathing was simply the next step. It was invented by Germans early in this century as part of an ideology which included fresh air, tea-drinking, nudism and the international youth movement. In Germany all these ideas were taken very seriously as a 'philosophy' and had an influence on artists, architects and politi- cians. (The jollifications of the Hitler Youth summer camps were the purest expression of it.) The English, with their incapacity for speculative thought, settled for a stolid and faithful belief in the healthy properties of sunbathing. But to call any of these activities 'healthy' is not really to express a serious belief, but to employ one of the most common terms of commenda- tion in the modern world. It is the equiva- lent of Sancho Panza's saying of a wine he had particularly relished, 'Oh whoreson rogue! How Catholic it is!'
But why should an amusing Twenties idea that a tanned skin is chic have transformed the coasts of the world and resulted in millions ' of people spending hours every day grimly acquiring a sun-tan, convinced that they are benefiting from it?
The word has much to do with it. `Sunbathing' was a brilliant coinage, more alluring if less descriptive than the Austra- lian `sunbaking'. It retains the promise of health that the Victorians found in sea bathing and insinuates that ignoble sloth may really be the active pursuit of well- being and beauty. The sun has taken the place of the sea as the mystic source of health. (The sun-mysticism of some of D. H. Lawrence's writings must have had some influence.) After thousands of years during which human beings have regarded direct sunlight as unpleasant and harmful, people now seek it out in the conviction that the 20th century has discovered some- thing new and good in it that had previous- ly been undetected.
A curious thing that I have noticed when I tediously challenge people to name even one benefit to health that comes from exposure to the sun, is that they nearly all say that it cures rickets. Rickets must be remote from the experience of most adult English people under about 70, and yet this folk-belief seems to be at the back of everyone's mind. It is not entirely baseless: but a reasonable diet is incomparably more effective. Tropical Africa is full of children with rickets. What is unfortunately certain is that prolonged sunbathing can cause wrinkles, keratosis and malignant mela- nomas.
It is quite probable that the most effec- tive way of making sunbathing unpopular would be to convince people that it gives you skin cancer. Yet this would be a pity it would just be using one current health obsession to remove another, calling on Satan to drive out Beelzebub. Besides, the mythology of the sun is so deeply rooted that the medical evidence may simply be ignored; or more powerful protective creams will be invented. The real case against sunbathing is not medical but aes- thetic. A tanned skin is not beautiful at all, especially in a woman. A slightly weather- beaten look can suit a man by suggesting that he leads an active, adventurous life. But a deep tan indicates merely an unman- ly narcissism. It is one thing that a woman with a poor skin should welcome the equality that a sun-tan imposes upon beautiful and plain alike for a few weeks each year. It is quite another when the flower of English womanhood — including alas! the Princess of Wales herself should forget that delicacy of skin-tone is part of European female beauty. A sun- tanned skin loses most of its expressiveness and all of its sensuality.
People do not understand this because they have largely forgotten how to see the human body, and respond instead to signs. The sun-tan is a sign of 'sexiness' and so people think that it looks sensual, which it doesn't. It stands for other things as well health, one's money's-worth on a holiday, conspicuous leisure. And sunbathing has its semiotic heroes. President Kennedy made sure of a hideously deep tan all year round as a sign of his youth and vitality. I remember him, as President-elect, moving through thousands of hysterically excited students, who looked as though they were about to crush him to death, across a snow-covered Harvard Yard in mid- winter, looking just like a chocolate- coloured tailor's dummy. Another memor- able sight was Idi Amin — as black as a man could be — determinedly sunning himself by a pool in Jedda while his favourite wife applied the sun-tan lotion.
It might be best to think of it all as yet another secularisation of the religious sense. Like mediaeval peasants longing to go on pilgrimage and gain indulgences, people now gather at the great Mediterra- nean sun-shrines to acquire a merit which will last them through the winter. Even if the grounds of their faith were to dissolve, and everybody realised that, far from being healthy, sunbathing is positively harmful, the devotional practices would probably continue. For the whole idea of the mod- ern mass-holiday depends upon them. It was a brilliant notion to decant millions of workers upon the coasts, persuade them to lie in the sun for two weeks, and then bring them back tanned and happy, convinced that they have been doing themselves good, recharged and ready to face another working year. If they were to realise that all this is merely a ridiculous superstition, that sunbathing is worthless from the point of view of health, and that a sunburnt skin is boring and ugly, that nearly all sea coasts are depressing wastelands which human beings would do well to avoid, then moros- ity and despair might set in. Even worse, they might mend their ways and decide to force their unwelcome company upon the readers of the Spectator — who of course do not sunbathe — in Tuscany and the Dordogne.
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