There is no quality I adore more than charm. Except humor. And maybe high intelligence. Obviously you can’t be funny without being intelligent, but you don’t have to be sharp-witted to be charming. I suspect you can even be a bit dimwitted and still be charming, for a while. But once the dimness manifests itself—as it always will, like water from a concealed leak—the charm quickly grows rusty.
Actually, before advancing further into pastures of contradiction, I’m going to have to start this list over. First comes physical beauty—which is itself a form of charm, of physical intelligence. As Italo Svevo points out, “Beautiful women always strike us at first as intelligent. A beautiful complexion or a beautiful line are, in fact, the expression of the highest intelligence.” This can be fleeting but it casts the same spell as charm. In her book Eve’s Hollywood, Eve Babitz (the most charming writer I’ve read in years) quotes Jean Cocteau as saying “the privileges of beauty are enormous.” The same could be said of charm, except that charm is a privilege you can work at and cultivate, as opposed to something you are born with like beauty. Babitz links the two in an elegiac way, in Slow Days, Fast Company, when she says of her friend Mary, “Her nervous charm and beauty had been so easily banished it made you afraid for beauty itself.”
Two further thoughts on charm and physical beauty. People have said that when Harvey Weinstein wasn’t kicking your door down in his bathrobe he could be quite charming. This seems hard to believe, given the huge impediment of his face. And models seem often to have a haughtiness which is the opposite of charming.
You can be charming without a sense of humor, but once the lack of humor becomes obvious, the charm dissolves in its wake. (Charming people can be bores in a way that witty people never are.) So although it can exist, temporarily, without either humor or intelligence, charm cannot be an end in itself. It’s an embellishment that seems, for a while, essential: an adjective that tempts one to believe it has the fixity of a noun. Or, as Alan Hollinghurst puts it in The Sparsholt Affair: “charm—a transient magic hard to convey in a person’s absence.”
In middle-class circles, a person’s charm is regularly remarked on. In my working-class childhood, the qualities to be admired were always honesty, kindness, reliability. I’m tempted to say I never even heard the word charm, unless it came out of the TV, until I went to Oxford, but that might be an exaggeration. (The emphasis on honesty in my family was so huge that charm would have been put in a slightly dubious category, one not far removed from hypocrisy.) Certainly I only encountered it at university, where it was the preserve of public-school boys and girls: something that had been paid for and cultivated. I duly began to cultivate it myself and, just as I became attracted almost exclusively to posh girls, became quite fascinated by it: charmed by the idea of charm. Because it was learned relatively late in life, it’s not part of my nature. To say the same thing slightly differently: it didn’t come naturally to me, and part of charm is that it has to seem natural. When I meet a charming person, I still feel I’m learning.
Charm is a form of attentiveness, never more obviously than when in the service of seduction. Albert Camus’s famous claim about charm in The Fall—“a way of getting the answer yes without having asked a clear question”—holds true even though it is at odds with the current rules of attraction: that verbal consent must be given at each and every step. (Appropriately, this c-word contains within it the potential for harm.) Charm can still work its magic even if you know that the person you’re being charmed by is being charming in order to seduce you, but not if it’s being done in order to sell you something.
I find that I say “he is so charming” far more often than “she is so charming.” I think this is because, although not all women are charming (obviously), they start from a position of enhanced, inherent, or potential charm (from my point of view) because they are women. Charm also tempts or seduces me into the realm of superlatives. I’m always saying of my friend Pico Iyer, for example, that he is the most charming man in the world—that is, the most attentive. Even his emails are charming! Like all true charmers, he is charming all the time, to everyone. I am too judgmental and impatient to manage that—impatient to move on to the cut-and-thrust of banter. As soon as I get a whiff that people are either stupid or, even worse, humorless, I can barely give them the time of day. A charming person would find something nice to ask of a stupid person, whereas the only question in my head is the distinctly uncharming “Tell me, please, I’m really interested: what does it feel like to be such a fucking moron?”
More than charm, I notice its absence, as in “What a charmless oaf!” or “He is a singularly charmless individual.” This suggests that it is on the way to becoming, for me, not an appealing extra but—I warned at the outset that we’d be encountering contradictions—something borderline essential. Its lack pains me, like a coarse garment, something that rubs me the wrong way. Conscious of the faint Barthesian undertow of that last sentence, let me add that in France charm routinely consorts too closely with sophistication. I prefer the low Anglican idea frankly conveyed by the expression “to charm the pants off someone,” or the democratized charm one encounters so frequently in America, especially in the West and Midwest. Good manners and unfailing politeness, we are reminded on a daily basis in these parts, are the codified expression of charm: generalized charm, if such a thing makes sense; charm as civic tradition and inheritance.
Geoff Dyer’s latest book is The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, from the University of Texas Press; his next book, Broadsword Calling Danny Boy, will be published by Pantheon in February 2019.
