Charm Read online

  Charming people tend not only to be charming in their behavior but often to have charming stories told about them. Oscar Levant, again, qualifies here. The playwright S. N. Behrman, who knew Greta Garbo, tells of Levant’s sorely wanting to meet her. Behrman told Levant that he could arrange it, but it would take time, for he had carefully to prepare the way. So each time he was with Greta Garbo, Behrman would manage to bring up the name of Oscar Levant, always remarking that he was a wonderfully amusing man, a legendary wit, legendary. Finally, the evening for the meeting arrives. Greta Garbo is to be at a dinner party at the Behrman’s apartment to which Levant has also been invited. Not long after Miss Garbo arrives, Behrman brings Levant up to introduce him to her. “Greta Garbo,” Behrman says, “I should like you to meet my friend Oscar Levant.” Levant, so flustered by at last meeting this glamorous woman, says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch your name.” To which Greta Garbo, turning to Behrman, in her heavy Swedish accent, says, “Better he should remain a legend.”

  Charm, as I hope the case of Oscar Levant demonstrates, is too complex to be proven through a checklist of qualities. Not that everyone found Levant charming. Some people found him, with his many tics and his hypochondria, painful to watch, even on television. One had to be in on the joke—a man whose charm derives from his self-admitted, in fact highly self-advertised, neuroses—to fall under the spell of his charm.

  By one criterion I can think of, Oscar Levant was distinctly not charming. A truly charming person makes you wish, however distantly, you were he or she; or if the charming person is not of your sex, that you were his or her lover or wife or husband, or in some way part of his or her life. What man of any sophistication watching the movies of Jean Arthur, or Irene Dunne, or Myrna Loy doesn’t wish he had once had a love affair with her—and this no matter how much he loves his wife. Charm, as mentioned earlier, might even incur a mild form of envy. The ease of charm, the absence of strain in it, can give rise to a tinge of sadness in those who find themselves eclipsed by its light. Bringing out such a tincture of envy might even be one of the telltale signs of the charming man or woman.

  Our models, which is to say our basic notions, about what constitutes charm, sometimes derive from people we are lucky enough to know, or whom we run into on our social round. More frequently they derive from literature and, in the modern era, more likely and most emphatically as I set out in my previous chapter, from the movies.

  History of course provides many models of charm and so does religion. Perhaps the world’s first recorded charming person was Joseph, the Biblical Joseph, the eleventh of Jacob’s twelve sons. When we first encounter Joseph, his delight in his own beauty and in his confident sense of being his father’s favorite fills him with overweening pride, which exhibits itself in a heedless and disagreeable braggadocio. So offensive is his vain presentation of himself that his older brothers, half out of envy and half out of simple distaste, fall on him, beat him badly, and throw him down a well, leaving him for dead. When a passing traveling merchant recovers Joseph and brings him to his brothers, they sell him into slavery to the merchant who will in turn sell him into the household of Potiphar, one of Pharaoh’s chief lieutenants and a man of great power in Egypt.

  At the court of Potiphar, Joseph’s charm, as we should say today, kicks in. He learns to insinuate himself with the powerful. First he does so with the servant who runs Potiphar’s household, eventually making himself indispensable to him and, when this servant dies, to Potiphar himself. Such is Joseph’s natural charm, a charm that for women includes his good looks, that Potiphar’s wife sets out to seduce him. She is unable to do so, but Joseph’s enemies in Potiphar’s household, supported by Potiphar’s wife’s vengefulness at being spurned, succeed in having him dragged off to prison.

  In prison Joseph charms his jailer, and while there makes a prophesy about two of Pharaoh’s leading servants, also consigned to prison, that gives him a reputation for accurate divination. Through a complicated web of incident, this power of Joseph’s will bring him directly to the attention of Pharaoh, for whom he prophesies Egypt will be visited with seven fat and seven lean years. Pharaoh, whom he also charms, makes Joseph his principal administrator in planning for the seven lean years, harvesting and harboring sufficient wheat to get Egypt through them, which he does successfully. Joseph turns out to be a magnificent administrator, efficient and evenhanded, but without his charm this talent would never have emerged, nor been recognized, nor would he have become one of the heroic figures of the Old Testament.

  Christianity does not feature charm as one of its important qualities. In the New Testament, charity, kindness, forgiveness reign supreme. Not that there aren’t charming Christian figures among the saints. One thinks of St. Francis of Assisi, whose gentle ways charmed even the animals into trusting and loving him. Or in modern times one thinks of the Abbé Mugnier (1853–1944), the Jesuit priest admired by Marcel Proust and Paul Valery and J-K Huysmans and Jean Cocteau, and known for his sweetness of character and charming witticisms. When once asked how he, kindly and gentle man that he was, could believe in hell, the Abbé responded that he believed in hell because his church required him to believe in it, but he also believed that there was nobody in it.

  Or consider Evelyn Waugh, a man who set himself up to be as comically uncharming as possible. When a woman he had offended upbraided him by saying that he was one of the rudest and most inconsiderate men she had ever met and, being so, how could he consider himself a Christian, Waugh responded: “Ah, yes, Madame, but just think what I might be like if I weren’t a Christian.” Waugh said many charming things, but most of these were in the nature of put-downs, nicely laced with malice, more amusing to read or hear about than to witness firsthand and not at all amusing to be the target of. Evelyn Waugh was many things, but charming wasn’t among them.

  During the Renaissance an attempt was made in a work called The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) to catalog the qualities and traits that constitute charm. A diplomatist and friend of Raphael, who painted a dazzling portrait of him, Castiglione’s book was an international best-seller in its day, and was used for centuries afterward for the training of noblemen. Set out as a series of conversations between various men and women at the court of the Duke of Urbino, the most elegant court of its day among the city-states of Italy, the book asks what makes for the perfect gentleman and sets out the attributes and special talents required. The word charm never comes up, but is nonetheless there, the unspoken goal behind much of Castiglione’s advice.

  Until Castiglione’s time, the perfect courtier was essentially a warrior, with bravery being the first requisite of the successful nobleman. Without degrading bravery, Castiglione wrote to suggest that a great deal more was entailed. Charm, he felt, was also needed—the kind of charm that derives from self-cultivation. Because it is self-cultivated, and not an inborn quality, the possession of charm, for Castiglione, was not restricted to the well-born. Charm of the kind Castiglione establishes and then vaunts in The Book of the Courtier is thus, theoretically, available to all who seek it.

  Perhaps this is the place to add that charm tends to be classless, and not restricted to the rich (alas, some of the most charmless people going), or highly educated (ditto) or the otherwise well-born. In its various aspects, charm shows up across class lines—Groucho Marx was the son of a tailor, Barbara Stanwyck was raised in foster homes—ignoring sexual orientation, race, and all other social divisions. Charm turns up in unlikely places, distributed with no known bias across class or any other socially drawn lines.

  To return to the perfect courtier—let us henceforth call him “the charming man”—he is, according to Castiglione, “genial and discreet,” also “full of grace in all he says and does.” He has good judgment in utterance, always knowing to whom he is speaking, aware of how far he can and cannot go. He outstrips others in general talent, but only by a little, lest he make them feel
abashed. He never lapses into affectation, nor on the other hand does he play the jolly good fellow. He is witty, but his witticisms are without malice. In his conversation he is never predictable. He has knowledge of foreign languages, of literature and visual art, and in an amateur way, he plays musical instruments. He has a fund of amusing anecdotes, and is the source of laughter among his auditors. He is, in short, skillful at everything he does, but never pushes his skill to the point of establishing too great expertise. Castiglione underlines this point nicely with the following paragraph on chess, which one of his courtiers describes as being “certainly a pleasing and ingenious amusement,” but that has one defect, which is

  . . . that it is possible to have too much knowledge of it, so that whoever would excel in the game must give a great deal of time to it, as I believe, and as much study as if he would learn some noble science or perform well anything of importance; and yet in the end, for all his pains, he only knows how to play a game.

  The larger point here for Castiglione is that the charming man or woman always wants to seem casual in his attainments—to hide any signs of effort that have gone into his acquiring them and the art behind them. The notion the charming man wishes to convey is that his charm derives more from nature and inherent genius than from art. His bywords are sprezzatura and disinvoltura, the nonchalance and ease that “conceals all art and makes whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” In his conversation, in his calm and casual performance of his skills, in all that he does, he strives (quietly, subtly) never to “produce tedium or satiety,” so that he may “continually give pleasure.” Never to produce tedium or satiety, continually to give pleasure—that is a definition of charm that holds up nicely in our day.

  Centuries later, in The Idea of the University (1852), John Henry Newman describes the gentleman, who sounds a fair amount like Castiglione’s courtier. Perfect courtier or true gentleman, both, in the passage below, sound like the charming man.

  Hence it is that it is almost a definition of a gentleman to say that he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature; like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them. The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast—all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make everyone at his ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favors while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort; he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp saying for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain, because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny.

  If not always in life, one comes upon accounts of charming people in the memoirs, autobiographies, and essays of other people. Sometimes these accounts are not firsthand; all in any case have to be taken on faith. The nineteenth-century literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, writing about Madame de Caylus, who flourished at the Versailles court of Louis XIV, notes that she was born with natural curiosity and great wit and a perfect sense of the proprieties. “She spread about her a joy that was so gentle and so vivid, a taste for pleasure so noble and so elegant, that all characters seemed loveable and happy, so surprising is the power or rather the magic of a woman who possesses true charm.”

  Such claims have been made for many French women in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, especially in the period between 1750 and the Revolution of 1789, when many of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment gathered in the Parisian salons of aristocratic French women. Madame du Deffand, who counted Voltaire and Horace Walpole among her admirers and the guests in whose salon included Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, and Edward Gibbon; Madame d’Epinay, whose salon was regularly attended by Rousseau; Julie de Lespinasse, who attracted the interest of Jean le Rond D’Alembert and David Hume—such women were connoisseurs of charm, often dazzling practitioners of wit and intellectual penetration in their own right. The magnet of their charm is what drew in the important writers and thinkers of the age to their salons. Some had intellectual charm, some emotional charm, but charm was the sine qua non possessed by all.

  Writers of the past offer examples of charm, sometimes in their works, sometimes in their letters, not infrequently in anecdotes about them. Often they are writers whom the world has decided are minor, but whose power of conveying pleasure is nonetheless major. Sydney Smith (1771–1845) is such a writer. A clergyman, one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, a man of towering common sense, Sydney Smith seems to have charmed all whom he encountered. Through his writings he charmed, among others, Queen Victoria, Charles Dickens, and Abraham Lincoln. “I sat next to Sydney Smith,” Benjamin Disraeli wrote in his diary of an evening out in London, “who was delightful . . . I don’t remember a more agreeable party.” This seems to have been a standard reaction to this portly, unpretentious English clergyman.

  After Sydney Smith’s death, his wife, writing about her husband for the memory of their grandchildren, noted: “I do not believe that anyone filing only a subordinate rank in life ever past thro’ it more universally beloved, more sought after for his brilliancy and wit, his honorable bearing, his masterly talents, his truth, his honesty [than your grandfather].”

  Mrs. Smith’s reference to “subordinate rank in life” refers to her husband’s never rising very high in the clergy, which wasn’t possible for a man of his strongly Whiggish views and mischievous wit. (A series of satirical compositions called The Peter Plymley Letters, in favor of a Catholic emancipation, were said to have kept Sydney Smith from acquiring a bishopric.) Whether he found himself, amidst the “odious smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers” of Edinburgh, or buried in the remote fastness of a country parish, Sydney Smith found happiness. “In short,” he wrote to his friend Lady Holland, “if my lot be to crawl, I will crawl contentedly; if to fly, I will fly with alacrity; but as long as I can possibly avoid it I will never be unhappy.”

  Not that Sydney Smith could ever be taken for one of those “cockeyed optimists,” in the Rodgers and Hammerstein sense, for he had a most precise sense of the world’s imperfection. On the subject of education, for example, he believed that “the honest and orthodox method is to prepare young people for the world, as it actually exists; to tell them that they will often find vice perfectly successful, virtue exposed to a long train of afflictions; that they bear this patiently, and to look to another world for its rectification.”

  Sydney Smith’s reputation derives as much, perhaps more, from his conversation as from his writing. Conversation is wr
iting on sand, destined to disappear, yet so sparking was his that people seemed unable to forget it. “The fanciful and inexhaustible humorous drollery of his conversation among his intimates can never be adequately rendered,” the actress Fanny Kemble said of Sydney Smith’s dazzling talk. People averred that after a session with him you remembered not so much what he said but how hard you laughed. As a conversationalist, he never sought to dominate, though with him in the room others naturally tended to be a touch diffident. Walking out one day with a friend, he noted two women arguing, each from her apartment across a narrow Glasgow alley. “They can never agree,” he noted, “for they are arguing from different premises.” His tendency was to get on what we should today call “a roll”: an anecdote leading to a pun, the pun to an aphorism, the aphorism to an amusing non sequitur, thence on to another anecdote. No one is reported ever to have had his fill of Sydney Smith’s talk.

  If the best comedians are thought to operate out of a fund of buried melancholy, this was also partially true of Sydney Smith. In a letter to his friend Lady Georgiana Morpeth, that begins “No one has suffered more from low spirits than I have done,” he offered what he took to be his own program for combatting melancholy. This included living “as well as you dare”; taking baths with water at a low enough temperature to give a slight sensation of cold; making “no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely—they are always the worse for dignified concealment”; not being “too severe on yourself or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice”; and, finally, taking “short views of human life—not further than dinner or tea.”

  Sydney Smith also felt that “pleasure is very reflective, and if you give it you will feel it.” The ultimate source of his charm was his unstintingly amused response to the richness and variety and comedy inherent in life. Within his own circle of friends, no one gave more pleasure than this charming man.