Charm

by Joseph Epstein

  One of Max Beerbohm’s first tenets was that to take oneself too seriously was a form of lunacy. “Only the insane take themselves quite seriously,” he said. One had an obligation to recognize one’s limitations. George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence among his contemporaries, may be said to have suffered from what he called “a sublimity of earnestness,” or lack of humor, at least about themselves. “Poor D. H. Lawrence,” he remarked. “He never realized, don’t you know—he never suspected that to be stark, staring mad is something of a handicap to a writer.” Of T. E. Lawrence’s apparently wretched translation of the Odyssey, Max Beerbohm wrote: “I would rather not have been that translator than have driven the Turks out of Arabia.”

  Max Beerbohm suspected genius and was opposed to giantism in the arts; in his eyes all geniuses were guilty until proven innocent, and few were so proven. His own predilection was for the small scale. E. M. Forster wrote that, Goethe apart, all geniuses were in some sense stupid. Even with Goethe Max found fault: “But a man whose career was glorious without intermission, decade after decade, does sorely try our patience,” he wrote. He said of Yeats that in reading him he felt “rather uncomfortable, as though I had submitted myself to a mesmerist who somehow didn’t mesmerise me.” Conversely he noted of the poetry of Robert Graves that his “joy in him is not diminished because he is intelligible.” He mocked the discovery in England through the translations of Constance Garnett of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, and wrote a parody called “Kolniyatsch” about the reception of a Dostoyevsky-like novelist he invented. The name Kolyniyatsch derives from “Colony Hatch,” a once-famous English mental asylum, and my favorite line in the parody is “The promised biography of the murdered grandmother is eagerly awaited by all who take—and which of us does not take—a breathless interest in Kolniyatschiana.” He thought Dante, in the bitterness of his exile, would have made a poor houseguest, and an even worse host. He referred to Tolstoy and Nietzsche as “inspired asses.” In an essay called “A Clergman,” he takes the side of an unnamed clergyman whom Samuel Johnson, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, puts down as one would flick a fly off one’s shoulder. “My heart goes out to the poor dear clergyman exclusively,” he wrote, though in later life he, Max, came round to admire Samuel Johnson.

  Upon meeting Beerbohm, Edmund Wilson, the formidable American literary critic, was much impressed by his self-confidence. “He’s quite sure of himself. He knows the value of what he has done, both as a writer and as an artist.” Yet, Wilson went to note, he also seemed to be quite without ambition or envy of any kind. Nor was there anything the least pretentious about him. Quite the reverse. Max confessed to his inability to read philosophy when it was in the least abstract, but then, he added, “I suffer from a strong suspicion that things in general cannot be accounted for through any formula or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy, howsoever new, is no better than another.” He held that no foreign speaker—himself above all—ever mastered speaking French, and the palm in this hopeless enterprise went to the person who spoke it, displaying the least hesitation, with the greatest confidence.

  Max had a natural detachment. This was a component of his self-sufficiency. He was pleased to be in agreeable company but didn’t require it, solitude and self-enjoyment providing pleasure enough. He drew and wrote as if for himself, but in a way that strangers could nonetheless enjoy. Outwardly social, he was inwardly reflective. “I have the power of getting out of myself,” he said. “That is a very useful power.” Violet Schiff, a friend, noted his respect for women, his kindness to servants; she also concluded that, while he was well aware of what the world valued—money, fame, success of various kinds—he was himself indifferent to them.

  This detachment served his charm well. He never attempted to dominate conversation. He had no need to do so. He had command of an ornate but always precise vocabulary in which such words as agororphobious and pleasaunces turn up. His oblique observations brought laughter. “It is Bertrand Russell’s saving grace that he isn’t a woman,” he said. “As a woman he would have been intolerable.” Just so, even though one isn’t quite certain why that remark is both accurate and funny. “I must read The Golden Bowl—and yet I shan’t,” he wrote. He allows that rich men were often bright and good, yet “I have always felt they would have been brighter and better still on moderate means.” As for intellectual fashions: “It distresses me,” he wrote, “this failure to keep pace with the leaders of thought as they pass into oblivion.” His single-sentence refutation of Freudianism cannot be topped: “They were a tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, weren’t they?”

  Max Beerbohm’s friend Will Rothstein noted his early polish and soundness of judgment. David Cecil, Beerbohm’s biographer, wrote that he seemed to have skipped adolescence, and went directly from childhood to maturity. Oscar Wilde said that he “had the gift of perpetual old age.” The mystical and high-flown, in art and in life, held no interest for him. He was not least amusing about his own gifts. “I have no time to write more,” he noted in a letter to his friend Rothstein, “lest I lapse into brilliancy.” His older brother, the famous-in-his-day actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree once told him “I can stand any amount of flattery—if only it is fulsome enough.” To which Max replied: “Oh, I make no conditions of any sort.”

  “All social life is founded on certain carefully fostered illusions,” Max Beerbohm wrote. “Let us respect them. It is through them alone that men can keep out of mischief.” He also noted that “candor is only good when it reveals good actions and good sentiments and that, when it reveals evil, it is evil itself.” Max himself never showed hostility, never gossiped in a destructive way. He was content to be among life’s onlookers, the nicely turned out fellow there on the sidelines, a glass of wine in hand, enjoying his own ironic observations. G. K. Chesterton said of Max that “he seems to me more modest and realistic about himself than about anything else,” adding that “he does not indulge in the base idolatry of believing in himself.”

  Max Beerbohm considered himself an essayist, in his literary and his non-literary life. Which is another way of saying that he never thought himself a major player, shimmering with significance. He was without egotism, literary or social. “Some people are born to lift heavy weights,” he wrote. “Some people are born to juggle golden balls.” He knew himself to be among the jugglers—that is, among the charmers, at least as a writer and draughtsman. He would never have been so vain as to consider himself socially charming, which he indubitably was.

  So much so that Max began to feel the strain of performing socially, to attend to “the humble, arduous process of making myself agreeable.” David Cecil writes that “the very fact that he had so high a reputation for agreeableness made his life more of an effort: for it meant he felt bound to try to live up to it.” In time this began to wear on him. “I can repay hospitality,” he wrote, “only by strict attention to the humble, arduous process of making myself agreeable. When I go up to dress for dinner, I always have a strong impulse to go to bed and sleep off my fatigue . . .”

  Boredom with social pressure of this kind contributed to Max Beerbohm’s moving, with his wife, the American actress Florence Kahn, to Rapallo in 1910 when he was thirty-eight, taking, in effect, early retirement. He would live there forty-five years longer, returning to England only during the World War Two years, dying at Rapallo at eighty-three. He never bothered to learn Italian, nor left the Villino, as his villa was called, apart from walking down to the sea to bathe in summer. Working at his drawings and occasional essays, he was content within himself. He lived socially off guests passing through. “People come to see me,” he told the English writer Christopher Sykes, “either on the way from [Somerset] Maugham [at Cap Ferrat] to [Bernard] Berenson [at Villa I Tatti, outside Florence], or on the way to Maugham from Berenson. I am a way station.” Ezra Pound also lived in Rapallo, but, obstreperous fellow that he was, not to speak of his later conversion t
o Italian fascism, holding only strong views that he wished to impose on all, Pound, one might say, was the anti-Max, and Beerbohm pretty much steered clear of him.

  If Max Beerbohm suspected genius, and eschewed gigantism generally—when S. N. Behrman suggested his works might fit nicely into a single Modern Library Giant volume, Max replied that, were this to happen, “I should have to change my wardrobe”—if he specialized in the light and amusing, he was nonetheless far from insignificant and trivial. Within his seemingly light essays and presumably tossed-off drawings, a mature and serious vision shone through. This vision is partially captured in a brief essay he wrote, fewer than eight short pages, called “Something Defeasible,” about a small boy building a cottage out of sand and his pleasure in seeing it destroyed by the incoming tide. “It was the boy’s own enthusiasm that made me feel, as never before, how deep-rooted in the human breast the love of destruction, of mere destruction, is.” About to proceed from this observation to dark thoughts about the human psyche and the fate of England, Max Beerbohm pulls back, explaining his decision and ending by writing “for I wished to be happy while I might.”

  “For I wished to be happy while I might”—what a perfect motto for those who find life delightful and through their own charm bring delight to others!

  As for what Dion learned about becoming charming from Plato’s nephew Speusippus, Jacob Burckhardt is silent. It was probably little more than I have learned from Max Beerbohm or you from people who seem to you models of charm. No one finally teaches charm, nor can charm be carefully copied without seeming stale and flat. Fortunately, though, there have been men and women around who can show the rest of us what it looks like, and that is no small thing.

  Part Three

  Chapter XIII

  Charm in the Age of the Therapeutic

  As I mentioned, once I set to work on this book I would occasionally ask friends and acquaintances to name five people currently in public life they thought charming. By public life I meant people in politics, show business, sports, the arts. The results, invariably, were disappointing. No one came up with five names; many failed to come up with any names at all. Those that came up with a name or two did so only with some hesitation. The names that did arise—Steve Martin, Oprah Winfrey, Princess Diana, Bill Murray, Barack Obama—were all disputable, rather easily so. None garnered anything like the same consensus of approval as candidates for charm as the men and women on the scene a generation or two ago. There must, I concluded, be a paucity of charming people about just now. But why?

  No one thought to name any of the plethora of late-night talk-show hosts, whose only claim on the job, one would once have thought, would have been their charm. No news anchormen or anchorwomen were named. No one came up with a movie star or singer. No athletes, no comedians, no writers or painters or musicians, none were named. Did I ask the wrong people? Should I have asked more young (thirty and under) people about their candidates for charming? Somehow, I don’t think it would have mattered. Is it possible that charm itself is not a contemporary ideal? Why should there be so few charming people currently on the American—and I suspect also on the European—scene? If I am correct about there in fact being so few charming people in public life, why is this so, how did it come about, what are its consequences?

  I am a man of d’un âge certain, as the French say, or an alte kocker, as the Jews say, and it could be that I am missing out on more than one generation of charming men and women, whose youth and my own taste put out of my ken. Somehow, though, I rather doubt it. When I think of the Mills Brothers or Nat King Cole and compare them with current-day rappers, Jay-Z, say, or LL Cool J, in the realm of charm there is no contest, with the mature suavity of the former towering about the deliberate abrasiveness and in-your-face profanity and racial anger, of the latter. When I think of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Johnny Mercer and the urbanity they put into the adult lyrics of the songs they sang and compare them with Mick Jagger or Elton John (the former a great-grandfather, both men knighted) and their essentially childish songs and Jagger’s bumps and grinds and John’s banging away on his piano, a Liberace in sunglasses, again, no contest. I don’t care in the least for Madonna, though I find Lady Gaga’s hyper showbiz glitz act mildly amusing, and I enjoy Adele. But without hesitation I’d take Jo Stafford and Ella Fitzgerald over all of them or any other contemporary female singer now performing. I could go on, but you will have got my drift.

  In defense of my belief that this is not mere old guy’s crankiness on my part, I would argue that there is something about the current age that is, if not outright anti-charm, not especially partial to charm as an ideal. In the current day, to be or seem authentic is clearly more important than to be or seem winning; to be or seem honest more important than to be or seem gracious. To do one’s own thing (a phrase from the 1960s) better than to worry about other people’s things, which is to say, their feelings and reactions. Charm operates exclusively in the realm of the social; while charming people are invariably unique, each like no other, authenticity, honesty, doing one’s own thing are all of them individual, or personal, rather than social goals.

  In recent decades, perhaps beginning as early as the early 1960s, the emphasis on life has been more and more on the individual, on the Big First Person, I, Me, Mine Truly. Tom Wolfe called the 1970s “The Me Decade,” though the “Me” part surely didn’t end with the decade itself. When Wolfe first published his “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” article in the August 23, 1976, issue of New York Magazine the blurb for the article read: “The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remarking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, doting on it (Me!) . . .”

  In a powerful and prescient passage, recounting a moment from a session at Esalen, a communal shrink shop in Big Sur, California, part of something then called the Human Potential Movement, Wolfe wrote: “Each soul is concentrated on its own burning item . . . my husband! my wife! my homosexuality! my inability to communicate, my self-hatred, self-destruction, craven fears, puling weaknesses, primordial horrors, premature ejaculation, impotence, frigidity, rigidity, subservience, laziness, alcoholism, major vices, minor vices, grim habits, twisted psyches, tortured souls—and yet each unique item has been raised to a cosmic level and united with every other” in a feast of self-regard.

  A decade earlier than Tom Wolfe’s essay, in 1966, the social scientist Philip Rieff published a book with the title Triumph of the Therapeutic. In the book Rieff offered a theory of culture that is an impressively persuasive explanation for the rise and triumph of what one thinks of as therapeutic culture. In Rieff’s theory, every reigning culture has its interdictory and remissive aspects: The interdicts set out prohibitions, the remissions allow for violating those interdicts. The perfect example, some would say the genius, of Catholic culture is the remissive institution of the confessional allowing release from the Church’s strong interdicts

  Rieff’s theory is itself a theory of history itself, for the argument could be made that history is a continuing, and continuous, chain of changing culture, with sometimes the interdictory becoming too oppressive (as under Soviet Communism), sometimes the remissive, by becoming too antinomian, failing to hold the culture together. “A cultural revolution occurs,” Rieff writes, “when the releasing or remissive symbolic grows more compelling than the controlling one; then it is that the inherent tensions reach a breaking point . . .” Too much freedom, Rieff’s theory holds, the condition in which the remissive, or freedoms, not only contradicts but works against the interdictory, puts the culture in jeopardy. “Such freedoms,” Rieff writes, “were the signatures on the death warrant of previous culture.”

  These cultural changes, unlike revolutions and coups d’états, occur slowly, almost unnoticeably. Rieff holds that ours, the current therapeutic culture, “is the first cultural revolution fought for no other purpose than greater ampl
itude and richness of living itself.”

  The radicalness of the therapeutic revolution lies in more than a simple break with the past moral order but in the attempt to end moral passion itself. Consider the drastically lowered status of sin. “Even now,” Rieff writes, “sin is all but incomprehensible to [modern men and women] inasmuch as the moral demand system no longer generates powerful feelings of guilt when those inclinations are over-ridden by others for which sin is the ancient name.” Besides, as is oft advertised, the assuaging of guilt is one of the things psychotherapy devotes itself to most sedulously.

  How did it come about that the therapeutic has seemed to come to reign above all other idea systems? Other historical forces helped bring this about. The arrival of prosperity, which brought the end of scarcity in advanced societies, made many of the old interdictions lose their force. Former elites—political leaders, clergymen—lost their authority, and no other group has come to the fore. Communism went under; socialism lost its vigor both as an economic system and as a system of belief. The therapeutic became the model, with even Jesus Christ emerging, in some views, as the ultimate therapist. Everywhere everyone holds self-fulfillment as the first order of business; self-esteem is a sine qua non for decent living. “That a sense of well-being has become the end, rather than a by-product of striving after some communal end,” Rieff writes in the closing sentence of his book, “announces a fundamental shift of focus in the entire cast of our culture . . .”

  This shift has come about even though the thought of most of the principal theorists of the therapeutic have by now been disqualified. By which I mean the central ideas of Freud, Jung, and other psychological thinkers are no longer taken seriously by serious people. Those who continue to believe in Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus Complex—“Greek myths covering private parts,” Vladimir Nabokov called Freudianism—or in the efficacy of psychoanalysis in bringing about cure are surely a vast minority. Jung’s belief in the collective unconscious is by no means shared, collectively or otherwise. Karen Horney’s view that breast-feeding was absolutely crucial to full human development may be said, in the argot of the young, to suck. As for Wilhelm Reich’s orgone box, once believed in by such intellectual figures as Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld and others, it now seems pure comedy, material for a good bit by Mel Brooks or Larry David. Yet despite this, the defeat of its discrete ideas, the therapeutic as a mode of thought, as a reigning spirit, has nevertheless prevailed and pervades the social and intellectual atmosphere.