Charm Read online

  Charm

  The Elusive Enchantment

  Joseph Epstein

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200

  Lanham, MD 20706

  www.rowman.com

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2018 Joseph Epstein

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  ISBN 978-1-4930-3579-3 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4930-3580-9 (e-book)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Georges Borchardt,

  a charmer on two continents

  “Subtlety, discretion, restraint, finesse, charm, elegance, good manners, talent, and glamour still enchant me.”

  —Noël Coward

  The Noël Coward Diaries

  “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”

  —Oscar Wilde

  Lady Windermere’s Fan

  Contents

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part One

  Chapter I: The Movies Define Charm

  Chapter II: The Standard for Charm

  Chapter III: What Is and Isn’t Charming

  Chapter IV: Who Isn’t Charming?

  Chapter V: Am I Charming?

  Part Two

  Chapter VI: Charmed Lives

  Chapter VII: Charming Rogues

  Chapter VIII: Woman Charmers

  Chapter IX: Vulgar Charmers

  Chapter X: Gay Charmers

  Chapter XI: The Charmingest Generation

  Chapter XII: Now for Someone Completely Charming

  Part Three

  Chapter XIII: Charm in the Age of the Therapeutic

  Chapter XIV: Charmless Politics

  Chapter XV: The New Shabby Chic

  Chapter XVI: Charm—Who Needs It?

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Things can be charming, and animals often seem so, but the question of charm is most interesting in connection with human beings. Is human charm a gift from God—or, if one prefers, from the gods, or of the luck of the draw—or is it a talent that requires development and cultivation? How does it function? Does it have a purpose? Might it be overdone? Can we live without it? Who needs it? Is it among the virtues; and if a virtue it be, is it a trivial or a serious one? Who has had charm? Who among us has it today? Is charm now in notably short supply? And if it is—to ask the question is to assume it is—why and how did this come about?

  One can of course be charmed by landscapes, buildings, artworks, and so much more. I have myself in recent weeks been driving round the city of Chicago listening to songs written and sung by Johnny Mercer—“I’m Old-Fashioned,” “Moon River,” “Satin Doll,” “Summer Wind,” and others—and find myself uplifted by them in the way that only uncomplicated music can raise one’s spirits. I never pass Frank Lloyd Wright’s Roby House on the University of Chicago campus without feeling elevated by its graceful lines; the same applies to the skyscraper known as the Hancock Building on Michigan Avenue. Merely coasting along the city’s Outer Drive, the always changing waters of Lake Michigan to the east, also charms. The darkly comic poems of Philip Larkin and the novels of P. G. Wodehouse unfailingly charm me. For those with an eye for it, charm can be found in many places, but in this book I concentrate on charm in its human aspect, charm as conveyed by human presence, if only to delimit somewhat an already broad and sufficiently complex subject.

  Neither do I take up the matter of charm in non-Western cultures: in China, India, Africa, and elsewhere. The only thing vaster than this aspect of the subject, non-Western charm, is my ignorance of it, and for this sound reason I have not taken it up. Besides, as an immensely charming writer named Max Beerbohm said in one of his essays about the need to take up a history of the 1880s, to give an accurate account of so complex a subject “would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.”

  Almost everyone will recognize when he or she is in the presence of charm. Charm is magic of a kind; it casts a spell. In the presence of charm, the world seems lighter and lovelier. A charming person can cause you to forget your problems and, at least temporarily, to hold the world’s dreariness at bay. Charm is a reminder that the world is filled with jolly prospects and delightful possibilities.

  Charm is a form of pleasure. One is charmed by another person’s looks or personality or general artfulness of presentation. The spell that charm casts takes one out of oneself, lifting one into another, more exalted realm. Watching Fred Astaire dance, or listening to Blossom Dearie sing, or reading the poems of C. P. Cavafy, or merely looking at Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner, one recalls that the world can be a pretty damn fine place. To be charmed is sometimes to be swept up, blown away, enraptured; at others, to be quietly satisfied, left calmly contented.

  Tastes in charm differ vastly. Some are charmed by the merely cute; for others only the exquisite charms. The Three Stooges do it for some, the drawings of Albrecht Dürer for others. A lucky few are charmed by both and much else in between. Ask a person what charms him and you will learn a fair amount about him.

  Charm needs to be distinguished from ecstasy and other, higher-powered conditions and states. In the famous distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, based on the reputed interests of the gods Apollo and Dionysus, the Apollonian is bright, lucid, reasonable, ordered, while the Dionysian is ecstatic, intoxicated, chaotic, reaching for the sublime, bringing on the fires and dancing girls. The Apollonian seeks the light, the Dionysian thrives in the dark. Alexander Pope, Reynaldo Hahn, Paul Valery, the draughtsman Sempré are Apollonian; Wagner, Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Lucian Freud are Dionysian. Charm tends overwhelmingly to be Apollonian.

  That charm seeks the light does not mean that charm itself needs to be light, or, as we should now say, lite. Charm is calm, rarely agitated; cool, almost never hot. Charm is graciousness in action; it is never going too far, pushing too hard, staying too long. Some charm is natural, some artificial, though the two categories are not always as distinct as one might imagine. “I am,” said Maurice Ravel, composer of some of the world’s most charming music, “naturally artificial.” And so he was, and in him it worked, charmingly.

  Charm is elegance made to seem casual. Charm comes across as at ease in the world. It is virtuosity of personality. Charm is a performance art; behind it is the deliberate decision to be pleasing to others, or, in some cases perhaps, to a selected few. Charm is, or at least often can be, a gift, one that its possessors bestow on others.

  Asked to define charm, most people are unable to do so. As I begin to write this book, I am myself less than certain how to define charm. Some might say it is suavity, a kind of confident elegance, and suavity can sometimes be charming, but charm is larger than mere suavity. Others, overestimating charm, say that it is personal charisma. But charisma is much greater than charm; it operates in a much larger arena than charm, while charm tends to operate on a more personal level.

  The definition
of charm, as with the definitions of all magical things, is elusive. Some people confuse charm with simple courtesy, generosity, thoughtfulness. (A person can be immensely likeable without being especially charming.) All these things are good in and of themselves, but they do not constitute charm. Charm has an element of delight beyond mere niceness. Charm can even be dangerous, as in the case of charming seducers, frauds, and tyrannical politicians, men and women who use charm to maneuver, to manipulate people.

  The Oxford English Dictionary defines charm as “the power to give delight, or arouse admiration.” If a motive behind charm is needed, perhaps it can be established by slightly tweaking the OED definition to read “the power to give delight in order to arouse admiration.” “He turned on the charm,” we say. “His charm escapes me,” we also say. Some, of course, might say it about the very same person. For charm is in the eye of the beholder, and the saddest thing, the gravest error in the social realm, is to overestimate one’s own charm, a serious faux pas all would-be charmers are in danger of committing.

  What charms? Wit, for one thing; gentle humor, for another. So, too, can unmotivated kindness and large-hearted generosity charm. Beauty in the form of good, or even interesting, looks; sometimes striking oddity charms as the French, in deriving the phrase belle laide, meaning beautiful-ugly, understood. Eccentricity can charm. Even shyness can charm.

  Charm comes in many varieties. Marcello Mastroianni mastered several of them. He could do charming elegance, charming comic, world-weary charming, even slightly seedy charming. Mastroianni is a reminder that charm also comes in national styles: Italian, French, English. American charm can seem more a problem, German charm perhaps even more so. Irish charm is famous, but not everyone’s dish of tea. No Irishman, it has been said, is ever charmed by Irish charm. During certain historical periods—the courts of the Renaissance, life at Louis XIV’s Versailles—charm had prescribed forms. Charm has always been with us, sometimes in more abundance than others, but perhaps for the first time in its lengthy and complex history, few people today are able to agree on who is charming or even on what constitutes charm.

  I had better say straightaway that this book will not teach its readers how to be charming, though it does offer bits of scattered advice about how to avoid being boring and booring—that is to say, distinctly uncharming. Charm is too complex, too many-faceted, too richly various to permit the simple check-list or ten-step formulations preferred by How-To books. Those who have had charm—Lord Byron, say, or Groucho Marx—are too disparate to be locked into the same small definitional box out of which a formula for achieving charm may be expected to spring.

  I thought to write a book about charm because my own thoughts on the subject were blurry and I wished to set them out to get them into sharper focus. (“How do I know what I think until I see what I say,” wrote E. M. Forster in what as a writer has long been my motto.) I hoped, if I were able to do so, to provide a similar service for anyone who might have a kindred interest and equally inchoate thoughts on the subject. Charm is, after all, a word everyone uses, but most people understand in a vague way. Over the years I have written at book length on Ambition, Snobbery, Envy, Friendship, Gossip, and other loosely defined matters that have fascinated me and, I hoped, would fascinate others. “I write for myself and strangers,” Gertrude Stein said. I do the same, though I hope more clearly than Miss Stein, with the implicit understanding that these strangers are not so different in their interests, confusions, and temperament than I.

  What, then, is charm? Who has it or has had it? Why do we need it? These are the questions this book of modest length immodestly sets out to answer.

  Part One

  Chapter I

  The Movies Define Charm

  Early in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle notes that “our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of; for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts.” Later in the same paragraph Aristotle adds: “It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.” So, too, we must “not look for precision in all things alike, but in each class of things such precision as accords with the subject matter.” Charm, such is its elusive nature, may well be one of those subjects about which much can be elucidated, much adduced by example, but that ultimately eludes absolute precision of definition. Like goodness, happiness, and love—three other such grand subjects—charm manages to carry on quite nicely without the aid of a locked-in, ironclad definition, and so I shall do without such a definition in the pages that follow.

  The notion of charm is in its origin tied to amulets and incantations that were thought to cast spells or to bring good fortune. Charm bracelets, lucky charms, the third time’s a charm, he turned on the charm, she charmed the pants off me, as all these artifacts and idioms attest, charm was thought to be something mysterious, if not ultimately magical. And so, even its human form, it may seem to be touched by magic.

  The power of charm is still considered something of a mystery. What, exactly, is it? Charm implies the ability to make others be pleased by, if not love or adore, those in possession of it. Charm is an aura, which sounds vague, but it can be specific enough in its seductive power. In the presence of charm, we are put into a state of fascination, a mixture of pleasure and admiration, often with a slight but usually not disqualifying touch of envy.

  The general effect of charm is to make the world seem a brighter, grander, lovelier, more amusing, yes charming place. Charm drains life of its monotony, drabness, darkness. Charm is a fine antidepressant, short-lived though its duration may be; it lasts, alas, only as long as its purveyor, the charmer, remains in the room, or on the stage or screen or on a recording one is listening to. One doesn’t think of charm as profound, though it can be acute, penetrating, and very smart. Charm is tact to the highest power: dedicated to pleasing those on whom it is applied. The first intention of charm is to make people happy, however briefly.

  Charm and style are sometimes confused. Charm differs from style in being lighter, less ingrained, more determined to please. One can, after all, have an aggressive, or a rebarbative style. The definitions of style are manifold, including among them the various period styles: classical, renaissance, baroque, and so on. Ironic style, ornamental style, straight style are but a few of the other categories. The best definition of style I know is that of “a way of looking at the world.” In this definition, style derives from a person’s experience and how he has come to understand it and incorporate it into his personality. Le style c’est l’homme même, the style is the man, wrote the eighteenth-century scientist Buffon. Charm in this sense isn’t so intricately the man or woman who purveys it as is style.

  Charm can be learned, perhaps even imitated; style is acquired through experience. Style determines how one reacts to the world, and subsequently how one acts in it. Some styles are much more winning than others, richer, grander, more interesting, and to the extent that they are so, are more likely to contribute to a person’s charm. But, even though some styles are charming and some charm stylish, charm and style remain distinct.

  Many people when asked to define charm bring up the single word charisma. Ask people who haven’t thought much about what charm is, and a surprisingly large number answer that it is “a certain charisma.” They have themselves, I believe, been not so much charmed as mesmerized by a word with a sonorous sound that through sloppy usage long ago lost its original and true meaning. As Virginia Woolf once said about such words, they do not absorb much truth. As defined by the great German sociologist Max Weber, charm meant authority “resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or orde
r revealed or ordained by him.” Charisma defined leadership and domination on the world stage. Jesus Christ had charisma; so, at the other extreme, had Hitler. Napoleon had charisma, Gandhi had charisma; Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and Myrna Loy had charm but no charisma whatsoever.

  Over time, the meaning of the word charisma devolved and descended, so that Marilyn Monroe or Lady Gaga is commonly described as having charisma. An actress in a television series about vampires is named Charisma (Carpenter). Avon still has on the market a perfume called Charisma. Such is the fate of sonorous-sounding words in our time; they go from defining the quality of leadership in Jesus to becoming the name of a perfume. No movie star is likely to have charisma, and neither, sad to report, is Tyler, your nine-year-old child.

  Nor is charm cool. Cool tends to be detached, distant; charm is social, often warm, suggesting, sometimes actually seeking greater intimacy. One can be cool yet less than likable. Miles Davis was cool, so too were John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, but their coolness was there, like a barbed-wire electric fence, to keep others at a distance. Cool doesn’t crave approval. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were more charming than cool. They wished to please. The genuinely cool person may well seek admiration, but gaining approval is not his or her first order of business.

  Charm is not style, not necessarily cool, certainly not charisma. What, then, is it? Perhaps the first thing to be said about it is that it is elusive, evading careful definition. Charm is able to do so because it is so multifaceted, not to say multifaced. “Though defining be thought the proper way to make known the proper signification,” wrote John Locke, “yet there are some words that will not be defined.” Might charm be one of those words? “It is no more possible to convey in writing the constituents of a man’s charm,” wrote S. N. Behrman in People in a Diary, “than it is to convey in writing the effects of music.” Is this, too, so?