Then there is always the hope one will meet a person or two who is a carrier of the lovely charm virus, which fortunately is incurable but not, unfortunately, contagious. I have met such people, though not as often as I would like, finding my spirits, my sense of myself, uplifted in their company. One of the chief things charm does, even if we know we cannot emulate it, is make us feel better about ourselves. Being with charming people can make one feel oneself charming, at least tangentially, at least a little. Those dispensing true charm not only light up rooms but lives.
In 1972, when I was thirty-five, I met a man who asked me what I happened to be reading at the time. “A novel by Alison Lurie,” I said. “About academic screwing, I take it,” he answered. Correct. Later in the evening I mentioned someone I knew who was a political scientist. “With the science,” he added, “understood of course as in Christian Science.” He was older than I, twenty-seven years older. I’m not sure what he saw in me, but we became friends, good friends.
He taught at the University of Chicago and at Cambridge in England. He was cosmopolitan, and had spent a good deal of time in past years in India, Holland, Germany. He savored nationality traits. I once had lunch with him and a famous historian of the French Revolution. After lunch, he asked me what I thought of the historian. “A very nice man, but there was something a touch furtive about him,” I said. “What do you expect?” he replied. “He’s a Corsican.” He was death—and always amusing—on pretension. I once told him about a Czech we both knew who, thinking to establish his family’s haute bourgeois standing, told me that, in Prague, his father never shaved himself, but had a barber come in each morning to shave him. My friend paused, then said, “You know, Joseph, the truth is that his father probably shaved his mother.”
In the twenty-three years of our friendship—and over that time I saw him regularly—he never repeated himself. I had seen him in a wide variety of company—from clerks to clerics to eminences of various kinds—and he was able to get on easily with them all, without changing his manner and yet never seeming to condescend nor wishing to establish his superiority. With his impressively wide outlook, his deep culture, he reminded me by his person of the importance of keeping a high standard. He enlarged my view of the world; he never allowed me to forget that, for people on whom nothing is missed, it was a place of unending interest.
He manipulated language marvelously. I once described an acquaintance we had in common as “rat-faced.” “Yes,” he said, “you are correct: He is quite rodential.” Rodential—it sounds like nothing so much as an insurance company for mice. He had an extensive Yiddish vocabulary, which he wielded chiefly to humorous effect. He read German and French, but in an elaborate metaphor described his knowledge of the latter as resembling the condition of a cabinet filled with delicate glassware in a home hit by a bomb during the German blitz: “Shards, only shards, remain.”
Not a few people described him as curmudgeonly. He was not ill-tempered but tact, especially in the presence of what he might have called “educated ignorance,” was not his primary interest. He once told me that at a dinner party a woman expressed extravagant admiration for the novels of Philip Roth. “Even though married, then,” he said when she had finished, “I take it that, like Roth, you approve of adultery.” Imagine please what this did to the remainder of that evening’s dinner-table conversation. “Funny,” he said after recounting this to me, “but I seem to get invited out less and less.”
One of his graduate students told me that, in a paper he had written for him, he described a work of social science as “an orgy of insight.” Going over the paper with him, my friend said he wondered if his student had really thought much about what an orgy might be like. “Consider the bodies, some less than shapely, a few possibly even grotesque, the smells, the sounds. Having done so, I think you may wish to find a better word than orgy.”
When I was in his company, I felt myself to be wittier. The world seemed a more amusing place. No one who met him ever seems to have forgot him, for the force of his personality left an indelible impress. He lavished the gift of his charm on me and on a small band of friends and promising students. Even today, more than twenty years after his death, when I come upon an odd scene, or read about outrageous behavior on the part of an academic or intellectual, I wish he were still about so that he could bestow his invariably witty and penetrating comment on the matter. His friendship changed my life, making it richer, happier, more exhilarating.
Is it possible that the young, those still under thirty, are unaware of the existence of charm, having grown up without many available models of the charming to consider? Is charm for them found in the rebarbatively abrasiveness of comedians making jokes on Comedy Central about fellatio, menstrual cycles, and masturbation? Can they possibly discover charm in rappers telling us what racist swine we all—but them—are? Or in our current late-night talk-show hosts scoring cheap political points, with smirks added? Has the culture in which they have come to live deadened them to the possibilities of charm? If there are charmless ages, might they, and we with them, be living in one currently?
Those of us who have at various times been under the spell of charm know that without it something is missing from life. What is missing is the prospect of virtuosity of personality, of witnessing or (better) being in the company of people imbued with a magical quality that brings pleasure to others. The absence of charm is a substantial substraction from the roster of life’s pleasures.
Provoke delight, arouse approval, display a good heart, never produce tedium or satiety, continually give pleasure, be the person others want never to leave the room, however you define charm, while in its presence, there is no mistaking its wondrous enlivening quality. Even at the second remove of movies or television, at concerts or in recorded music, charm, when it turns up, lends life luster. Charm widens the lens, heightens the color of life, intensifies and sweetens it. Charm is one of life’s luxuries. We can, of course, all live without it. What a great pity, though, to do so!
About the Author
Joseph Epstein was the editor of the American Scholar between 1974 and 1997 and taught in the English Department at Northwestern University between 1973 and 2002. His essays and short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, and the London Times Literary Supplement. He was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2003.
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