Charm Page 19
Two of the most successful sitcoms of recent decades, Seinfeld and Friends, were about the refusal of their characters to grow up. Both were very amusing—Seinfeld was the last television sitcom I looked forward to watching—but none of them contained characters in the least charming. Quite the reverse. Seinfeld’’s continuing theme was the selfishness of people refusing to grow up—a theme that, in its egregiousness, was of course played for laughs. No one on Friends had a serious job, or seemed likely to get one soon. The characters on both shows were somewhere roughly between their late twenties and mid-thirties. Adulthood for any of them was nowhere in sight.
Nor apparently is it in sight for many of the aging young today. Although I have tried not to include so-called “studies” in this book, I cannot resist quoting a recent Pew Research study that found that “for the first time in more than 130 years adults age 18 to 34 were slightly more than likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were living with a spouse or partner in their own home.” Something on the order of a quarter of all Americans between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine lived with parents. One could, I suppose, blame this on the sluggish economy, but I strongly suspect the blame is owing to the culture of youth, which holds that one really needn’t consider oneself on one’s own till well past thirty. As the Jerry Seinfeld character on Seinfeld might say, “Not that there is anything wrong with it.” Except of course that, given the wasted years of possible accomplishment in life, there is.
Tom Wolfe has remarked that the current stages of growth in America are from juvenility to senility, with no stops in between. One sees one of the victories of the youth culture in the clothes people wear, myself included. As I tap away at these sentences I am wearing chino pants, a white polo shirt under a blue V-neck sweater, and penny loafers—an outfit closely resembling those I went off in to Nicholas Senn High School in Chicago sixty-three and more years ago. I think here of my mother, who never left the house without full makeup, an elegant dress, heels. Or of my father, who until the last years of his life, had no clothes for leisure—only business suits—and never left the house without his fedora and shined shoes. “No one except lawyers buy suits anymore,” a haberdasher of my acquaintance told me a few years ago. “Lawyers still buy them, but only because they need them for courtroom appearances and to impress clients with their ostensible seriousness.”
Before the 1960s, California, with its spirit of informality, had a fair amount to do with loosening up the standard adult dress code. Suits and ties for men, dresses and heels for women, were replaced by open collars, slacks, shorts, and sandals. But more than a loosening up has taken place since. For decades now, putative grown-ups have been dressing down, as in dumbing down. This is commonplace in universities, where professors with distinguished titles after their names—the Benjamin and Bessie Nurishkeit Professor of Sociology—walk into classes tieless, wearing baseball caps (some worn backward), shod in Air Jordans, toting backpacks. And not in universities alone. (One of my favorite scenes from The Sopranos has Tony Soprano dining with his family in a restaurant, when he spots a man at another table eating his dinner wearing a baseball cap. Unable to bear what he takes to be the disrespect of someone not bothering to remove a childish hat in a good restaurant, Tony goes up to the man’s table and in a quiet but unmistakably menacing voice instructs the man to remove his cap forthwith, which, getting the unmistakable message, he quickly does.) Everywhere one sees men and women in their fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties in what I think of as one form or another of youth drag.
A standard youth drag outfit for men features a baseball cap, gym shoes, shirt worn untucked into pants, usually jeans. (When the definitive history of the decline of the West comes to be written, a substantial chapter will be devoted to jeans.) For women, who on balance seem to go in for youth drag in lesser numbers than do men, jeans and baseball caps may also be part of the getup; black tights currently often replace jeans, without regard for the absence of the svelte figure that such tights require. Older men wear cargo shorts in warm weather; women who no longer have the skin for it don tank tops. Along with this dressing down, a high degree of simple schlepperosity has set in. I see older men, unshaven, in shorts, shirt out, baseball cap atop their gray heads, out on the street in a state that fifty or so years ago their fathers wouldn’t have worn to take out the garbage, lest neighbors see them in such a state of deshabille. “It does not become a man of years,” said Goethe, no dope, “to follow the fashion either in ideas or dress.”
This new schlepperosity is apparently not a purely American phenomenon. In an article in the London Daily Mail about the English playwright Tom Stoppard’s eightieth birthday party, photographs of famous English actors who attended the party show a similar deshabille look. There is Michael Gambon, who seems to have forgotten to brush his hair; Iain Glen in flip-flops; Sir Tim Rice in jeans; Damien Leigh with his shirt untucked and a handkerchief sticking out of his pocket; Jeremy Irons in an unpressed suit and red sneakers; Michael Kitchen with his shirt not quite tucked in and hair not quite combed; Jude Law in a wife-beater undershirt exposed under an unbuttoned shirt; and the birthday celebrant himself unkempt and wearing an emphatically rumpled chambray work shirt. Are we at the presence here of a new mode of dress, let us call it “shabby-chic,” the unmade-bed look.
Capitalism, clever dog, is rarely thrown by revolution, and never by changes in social mores. The new styles in clothing are available for the rich and famous in designer labels at top prices. Prada sells prewashed jeans for $365, Yves Saint-Laurent offers a chambray work shirt for $900, fake fatigue jackets go for as much as $1,000. Only under capitalism can one dress badly but still expensively.
In my own neighborhood, the middle-to-upper-middle-class one of downtown Evanston, Illinois, no one who looks distinctive, let alone distinguished, seems to pass on the thoroughfare before our apartment building for days at a time. A dreary sameness of the relentlessly casual is on parade: backpacks, baseball caps, jeans, gym shoes, worn by people of all ages, college students and habitués of retirement homes alike. The old innovation of Casual Friday has been turned into Casual Every Day. Viewing the parade of contemporary humanity, the word drab comes to mind, and stays there. So drab is the apparel worn by the people who pass through the neighborhood that the other day two young women, Chinese, doubtless students at nearby Northwestern University, passed the busy corner across from my building on their way perhaps to a party, possibly a wedding. They had artfully applied makeup. They were in modestly high heels. One had on a dress of blue chiffon, the other was in black. They dazzled, not just me, but, it was plain, all those who passed them on the street. Amid the others walking by in the dull standard getups of the day, they shone with a glamour akin to that of movie stars.
Men, as I say, seem worse offenders than women in the realm of dreary dress, although often, viewed from my sixth-floor apartment, true enough, I cannot tell the difference between men and women from their clothes. Here the popularity of the hooded sweatshirt—the hoodie—comes into play. Nobody’s looks are improved by a hoodie. The same holds for beards, scruffy or carefully cut. I know no way of more quickly adding a decade to one’s appearance than by the growth of a white beard. “All beards grown after my father’s generation are fake,” said the great choreographer George Balanchine (1904–1983).
But perhaps the most serious male error of all is the perpetual three- or four-day growth-of-beard, known as double-stubble or permastubble. The provenance of this error is a now-forgotten actor named Don Johnson, who played the leading role with permastubble on a 1980s television show called Miami Vice. Johnson was extremely handsome, and probably would have looked good wearing only half a mustache and one sideburn. Every other man sporting it, though, would do well to shave his permastubble instanter; it doesn’t work; it chiefly makes those who adopt it look scruffy, grubby, unclean.
While on the subject of hair, the current day has turned up more tha
n its share of misbegotten hairdos. Young—and sometimes not so young—women’s penchant for day-glow hair dyes is up there near the top. For men, consider the mullet, short in the front and on the sides, long in the back, a sad spin off on the old and regrettably not yet forgotten tomahawk. Or think of the various moussed-up hairdos, or for that matter of mousse itself. Or of what I think of as the Kim Jong-un look, after the haircut of the current dictator of North Korea, shaved on the sides, moussed up topsides. Let us not forget the vogue for wearing shirts outside of pants, so convenient for men with ample front footage as I have heard vast bellies described. About neck and face tattoos, or the aesthetic of the tattoo generally, let us not speak.
The evidence that clothes can unmake the man and woman and strip both of their charm is vividly on display in the movies of the 1970s. Although women in those years made the mistake of wearing wide-shouldered jackets, men beat them out with such hopeless items as leisure suits, Nehru jackets, long pointed shirt collars, bellbottom trousers, over-the-ears hairdos, sideburns that stopped just short of being muttonchops. (“Damn your sideburns!” says a character in a V. S. Naipaul novel.) So egregious were the clothes and hairstyles worn by actors in the 1970s that the clothes alone make nearly unwatchable even the better movies made during a decade rich in good movies. If the clothes of the 1970s were garish, those of today tend to be sadly dingy.
Clothes in themselves are not charming, but they can be distinctive, elegant, even witty. They can also provide a nice backdrop for charm. Cary Grant wore clothes that qualified on all three counts. So, too, did Fred Astaire. A decade ago I wrote a little book about Fred Astaire, in which, after remarking on how good he looked in all his carefully chosen clothes, I added: “But think of all the outfits it is impossible to imagine him wearing: visualize him in a football uniform, a Nehru jacket, a tank top, Spandex shorts, a Speedo, a baseball cap turned backward, a backpack, a ponytail, jeans stonewashed, relaxed fit, or any other kind. Not possible!” Fred Astaire, in no small measure owing to his wardrobe, achieved the ideal of the classless aristocrat—the aristocracy, that is, of the talented and the charming. A closed club, this aristocracy, and those in youth drag need not apply for membership.
The pianist Arthur Gold is quoted, in Megan Marshall’s recent biography of the poet Elizabeth Bishop, on Ms. Bishop’s clothes, and how these contributed to her personality. “There was something physically graceful and very elegant about Elizabeth,” Gold writes. “She had what I call genius hair (vibrant, very alive hair); a delightful smile, when she was familiar with you; and a very warm, rather sad, half-shy and half-loving air. She was very, very soignée, always going to the hairdresser, always looking terribly neat, extremely put together, and her clothes were very, very thought out. Elizabeth loved clothes,” Gold continues. “They weren’t distinguished clothes but always suggested a tiny bit of elegance—not American jazzy elegance.”
Santayana thought it a great sin, the greatest, to set out to strangle human nature. The attempt to stay perpetually young is, in our day, the most notable and common way of doing so. The same attempt is perhaps also among the most efficient ways to divest oneself of charm. It is also to miss the bitter joke, the withering irony, that the quickest way to grow old is in the hopeless attempt to stay young. How much more graceful to end up resembling the character Gabriel Varden in Barnaby Rudge, of whom Dickens wrote:
He was past the prime of life, but Father Time is not always a hard parent, and though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well, making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigor. With such people the gray head is but the impression of the old fellow’s hand in giving them his blessing and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.
Clothes may not make the man and woman, as the old adage had it, but being badly dressed figures to detract from what charm men and women might have to begin with. A charming person, if he or she can help it, shouldn’t be a schlepper. Consider Audrey Hepburn in low-slung jeans and a tramp-stamp tattoo showing above her bottom; or Cary Grant in prewashed, leisure-cut jeans and a sad gray ponytail. Bang!—in both cases their charm disappears. Does this mean that charm is not merely skin-deep but, more superficial still, no deeper than the clothes that cover that skin? Not at all. What it means is that charm is a combination of verbal skills, physical attributes, dress, psychological insight—all these taken together and more, still more.
Chapter XVI
Charm—Who Needs It?
After reading my last three chapters on the toll taken on charm that the psychotherapeutic spirit, divisive politics, and the rise of youth culture with its accompanying schlepperosity of dress, one might conclude that, if one can avoid these substantial potholes in contemporary life, one has a respectable chance of achieving charm. Would that it were so! Charm is more elusive, more complex, perhaps even more mysterious, than mere avoidance of some of its major contemporary pitfalls would suggest.
Charm may also seem of secondary, if not tertiary, importance in the larger scheme of life. After all, few people have it, most people appear to get on quite nicely without it, some may never have been touched by it, and a small number of others wouldn’t know it if they did encounter it. Who, really, needs it?
Charm will not feed the hungry, end wars, fight evil, yet I happen to believe that the lives of almost all of us are the better for encountering charm. Charm provides, among other things, a form of necessary relief—relief from the doldrums, the drab everydayness of life. Sydney Smith, whose own charm I have recounted earlier, wrote that “man could direct his ways by plain reason and support his life by tasteless food; but God has given us wit, and flavour, and brightness, and laughter, and perfumes, to enliven the days of man’s pilgrimage and to charm his pained steps over the burning marle.” If your vocabulary is as limited as mine, you will have to look up the word marle. I’ll save you the effort, having just done so myself, to discover that marle is “unconsolidated sedimentary rock or soil consisting of clay and lime, formerly used typically as fertilizer.” What Sydney Smith was too charming to say straight out, though I am not, is that charm helps us to get over the crap in life, which, as anyone who lived a respectable number of years will know, can at times be abundant.
In his Notebooks, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott posited an ideal character. The form and content of this ideal character, he held, was composed of integrity, the inheritance of civilization known as culture, and charm, the three joined together by piety, which for Oakeshott doubtless meant reverence for life. As for charm, which one might not have thought such a central quality of the ideal character, Oakeshott wrote: “Charm compensates for the lack of everything else: charm that comes from a sincere and generous spirit. Those who ignore charm & fix their appreciation upon what they consider more solid virtues are, in fact, ignoring mortality. Mortality is the rationale of the primacy of charm.”
What do you suppose Oakeshott meant by that last sentence: “Mortality is the rationale of the primacy of charm”? Oakeshott himself, in his Notebooks, where I discovered the sentence, doesn’t elaborate. I believe he meant that, since we all die, are merely mortal, guests here only briefly on Earth, we have an obligation to get the most of our limited time on the planet. Those who ignore charm, then, are ignoring one of life’s genuine pleasures, while those who dispense it are adding to the richness of life. So long as we are mortal, charm, in other words, is far from, can never be, negligible.
Some would say that the charming are among the blessed of the world. The English poet and novelist Laurie Lee, in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, one of his three autobiographical works, said as much, writing of charm: “It was the ultimate weapon, the supreme seduction . . . If you’ve got it you need almost nothing else, neither money, nor looks, nor pedigree. It’s a gift only to give way . . . an aura, an invisible musk in the
air.” The simple disinterestedness of charm, its fine motivelessness, is part of its—well, of its charm.
Charm reminds one of life’s lovely possibilities. Even if many of these possibilities are not truly available to us—to sing splendidly, to dance divinely, to compete at sports like a god, to dress elegantly, to display wit casually—it is nevertheless reassuring to know that there are men and women in the world who can and have done these things. Reminding us of life’s possibilities, charm elevates the spirit. Life holds the rewards of achievement, acquisition, love of family and friends, but without occasional infusions of charm the enterprise is, somehow, flat, less than complete.
If I am correct in my claims that we live in a time where there is a paucity of charm, what is one to do? Those of us who get high on, groove on, one might say are even addicted to charm find ourselves falling back on the charm of the past: on the movies directed by Leo McCarey and Preston Sturges, acted in by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant and Barbara Stanwyck and William Powell and Myrna Loy and Laurel and Hardy. Add the silent films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Toss in the songs of Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, the Brothers Gershwin, Harold Arlen, and Jerome Kern; the singing of Louis Armstrong, Alberta Hunter, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Blossom Dearie; the saxophone of Lester Young; the clarinet of Artie Shaw; the big bands of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, the Brothers Dorsey. The essays of Charles Lamb and Max Beerbohm, the novels of P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, the poems of Philip Larkin and Ogden Nash all provide charm in its literary division. If all this seems rather light fare, that is because it ought to be, for light, in the most approbative sense, is what charm indubitably is.