I had somehow never encountered the word before now. Then, last weekend, I was presented with a framed cartoon of myself at work, by the Cuban artist Brady Izquierdo Rodriguez. And when a friend with a classical education saw the result, she commented with approval that it had given me a very pronounced “philtrum”.
“A what?” I thought, growing worried. But as I now know, the philtrum is not a cause for concern, (usually). It’s just that little indentation on your upper lip, directly below the nose.
The word comes from the Greek philtron, meaning “love potion”, although I have never knowingly drank one of those and their connection with the facial feature is not immediately obvious. Common to many mammals, the sub-nasal groove must have had something to do with smell once. Now it’s just a vestige of evolution, with no apparent function.
Still, there is a charming tradition in Jewish religious folklore for how the philtrum originates. Every embryo, they say, learns all the secrets of the universe while in the womb. But humans are not allowed to know those secrets. So just before birth, an angel taps each baby’s upper lip, wiping all memory and leaving the mark.
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I don’t know if there’s a Christian equivalent, or whether the legend features anywhere in Irish folk tradition. It does, however, turn up occasionally in stories and films. Hence John Huston’s Key Largo (1948), where the Humphrey Bogart character reminds someone of a tale he had once told involving angels sealing the lips of babies with a fingerprint. The other person remembers but dismisses it as a “fairy story”.
As for the physical feature, the ancient Greeks and Chinese found it erotic, in women at least. So did the modern French. Or Victor Hugo anyway.
In Les Miserables, he writes of Fantine, the impoverished heroine forced into prostitution, that “in the very characteristic interval which separates the base of the nose from the upper lip, she had that imperceptible and charming fold, a mysterious sign of chastity, which makes Barberousse fall in love with a Diana found in the treasures of Iconia”.
That may or may not explain mine. But I also wondered if the philtrum, or more likely a lack of it, might be implicated in the phrase “stiff upper lip”, synonymous with English stoicism. In fact, I now know, an underdeveloped philtrum can be a symptom of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
As for the clichéd stiff upper lip, one of the most obvious physical examples of it was on the former British prime minister, John Major. Not only was his philtrum very prominent, so was his upper lip in general. And yet this was not widely considered erotic. On the contrary, it was relentlessly lampooned by cartoonists and the puppet makers of Spitting Image.
The Cuban caricaturist was contrastingly merciful, thank God. Physical features aside, he was also good enough to work in a copy of my recently published memoir, Not Making Hay. On which note, as has occurred to me just now, if I’m not finally invited to the Hay Book Festival next year, I’ll be very disappointed.
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In related vein, I was alarmed to learn last Monday that Books Upstairs, the independent retailer on Dublin’s D’Olier Street, had been the apparent victim of an overnight arson attack. This was only days after the same shop hosted my book launch, when copies sold out. Since then, they had ordered in more. And I knew that some of those had been in the front window, in direct line of the arsonists’ fire (as it were).
There were initial suspicions, at least on social media, that this might have been a far-right attack. So naturally, I was reminded of the fate of my literary hero Flann O’Brien, whose own first book, At Swim-two-birds, was firebombed by the Nazis.
The novel had been published, with unfortunate timing, on the eve of the second World War. And despite good reviews, including a 247-word eulogy from Graham Greene on the cover, it struggled. Eventual sales did not quite match Greene’s word count, totalling 244 of the 1,000 print run.
Then in December 1940, the Luftwaffe firebombed London, concentrating on an area including Paternoster Row, which had been the centre of British publishing for centuries. Five million books went up in flames, including the unsold stock of ASTB, which was stored at Longman’s warehouse, in the middle of ground zero.
Of course, having your book burned by political extremists, however accidental it was in that case, can be a badge of honour. So while feeling sorry for the people in Books Upstairs on Monday, I was more than ready to don the cloak of literary martyrdom. Then it emerged that the fire was probably mere vandalism, started in rubbish bins outside. And no actual books were burned, not even my own, which has a more flammable title than most.
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