Eryn Green writes this week at Esquire about research regarding stem cells and male pattern baldness, pointing to a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine that provides hope for men keen on keeping hair on their heads. Experimenting with mice, scientists determined that “dormant follicular stem cells can be stimulated to cause the regeneration of hair,” Green writes. Luis Garza, an author of the study, tells Green:
I think it’s very likely that by the end of your lifetime, there will be a pill or a cream, kind of like there is for Viagra, which your insurance [might not] cover and you might have to apply repeatedly—but yeah, it’ll keep your hair growing.
High anxiety about baldness—and crazy chemical and cosmetic gymnastics to avoid it—seems to be a thing of the past, a staple of nineties infomercials and Rogaine ads. Yet it’s likely that a true cure—rather than a gimmicky stopgap—would spark widespread enthusiasm.
Science may soon be able to save our hair, but consider the greater loss to literature. Readers and writers of the future would be denied new versions of the likes of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, whose bald head—along with his stately barrel chest—becomes a central image of his personality. We meet Timofey Pnin:
Ideally bald, sun-tanned, and clean-shaven, he began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his, tortoise-shell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrows), apish upper lip, thick neck, and strong-man torso in a tight-ish tweed coat, but ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair of spindly legs (now flanneled and crossed) and frail-looking, almost feminine feet.
And later, a weekending Pnin struggles with the particulars of American locomotion:
The color of his green sport shirt was undone; his party unzipped windbreaker seemed too tight for his impressive torso; his bronzed bald head, with the puckered brow and conspicuous vermicular vein on the temple, bent low as he wrestled with the door handle and finally dived out of the car.
Imagine Pnin, perfectly ridiculous as a kind of diminutive, professorial Yul Brenner, topped with a mess of hair. Would he have the neat and short collegiate cut of the era? Or perhaps he’d let his hair grow long, aping the youth movement? Pnin’s various scrapes and other escapades might be made even more amusing if they left him with hair tousled and spiked out of place. But he’d be robbed of his idiosyncratic dignity. And his head would lose its attractive power for insects, one of Nabokov’s pet interests. Gone would be this fine moment of slapstick:
A horsefly applied itself, blind fool, to Pnin’s bald head, and was stunned by a smack of his meaty palm.
Or this luminous celestial image:
A quiet, lacy-winged little green insect circled in the glare of a strong naked lamp above Pnin’s glossy bald head.
Fiction thrives on physical particularities. As cosmetic medicine thinks of new ways to make us all look the same, we should cling to the notable differences, lest the great characters of our literature come to seem quaintly deformed to readers in the future. Here’s to the “ideally bald” characters of the past and present. Who are your favorites?