Charm: An Essay

Stephen Bayley

• Publisher: The Friday Project
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780007514960
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

An informative, fun and rather charming essay on the nature and history of one of life’s most desirable assets, Charm, by renowned culture and design critic, Stephen Bayley.

CHARM

Charm: A Victim’s Guide

‘Oh! How very charming!’ When someone says this, you know things are going well. I doubt, for example, failed burglars hear it often. No-one calls you charming with a view to insulting.

To comment on charm is itself a charming gesture. The person who calls you charming is trying to charm you. And in this mutually enriching reflexiveness, this well-mannered rally of delicate goodwill and fine gestures, lies the fascination inherent in one of the most sophisticated weapons in our battle for attention. If I am charming, I will win. And even if I do not win, I will have lost with style and grace.

Charm is a powerful weapon that is also mysterious, romantic and appealing. It is a subtle, but irresistible, commodity. It beguiles, then overwhelms, but never overwhelms immediately. It only reveals itself slowly. And, continuing its interesting complexities, it is as difficult to define in substance as it is easy to detect in effect.

We know, or soon learn, that charm is a reliably efficient negotiating tool in love or in business. It’s a warm and glowing attribute, a winning characteristic. The charmer feels good about himself and makes others want to share that feeling: to make them feel good about themselves. Charm is a multiplier of good feelings. Is there anything wrong with charm? We will see.

Before that, can we actually learn how to be charming? Shall we go to Charm School? Can charm be acquired, or is it inherited, like blue eyes and good teeth? Maybe it is a bit of each. After all, teeth can be improved by dentistry. ‘Charm School’ is an alternative name for finishing school, those fabled institutions where privileged young women were once (maybe still are) sent to acquire social skills critical to their positive prospects in their inevitable marriage. If we had a modern Charm School, what would be on the curriculum? More follows.

Accident or Design?

The popular philosophe, a sort of Sainsbury’s Voltaire, Alain de Botton says in Essays in Love (1993): ‘We charm by coincidence rather than design.’ De Botton, an impressively effective charmer whose gentle manner camouflages a steely sense of intellectual purpose, believes that charm comes naturally, that you only ever realise that you have discharged a load of it once the results can be assessed.

Those results might be: falling in love with an admiring contact made at a party; a new and even more generous publishing contract, negotiated after expressions of ambition mingled with good-natured humility and a dash of amused condescension; the gratitude of a gratified lover. Overall, charm may let you bask in a penumbra of adulation. Maybe de Botton meant ‘accident’ instead of ‘coincidence’.

But I don’t think this is entirely true. Charm is not always coincidental, nor accidental. A good measure of what we call charm can, like dentistry, be learnt and applied, as if a psychological design. Certainly, some people might congenitally acquire characteristics of behaviour or being – an elegant voice, an open expression, fine posture, a twinkling eye – which may, in one way or another, lend themselves to the display or exercise of charm.

The same people might instinctively, or, at least, without conscious effort, find empathy easy. Empathy is almost always charming. After all, we get the concept from the German Einfühlung which, literally, means getting onto something; in human terms, to be possessed of the kind of insights which allow an imaginative adventure into someone else’s being. Sympathy is much more simple, meaning only feeling along with someone. Some animals display traits that might be thought sympathetic. Empathy belongs to a higher order of being.

All of this might make charm seem effortless. But the aspects of charm which may be consciously learnt rather than accidentally, or coincidentally, acquired require special understanding. It is the attempt to understand what is accident and what is design that makes the study, not to mention the practice, of charm so very interesting.

The idea of charm applies to places and things as well as to people. Because charm exists in animate beings as well as in inanimate objects, it is more influential and complex than, say, humour or ecstasy. It is, for example, possible to talk of a charming house, but not of an ecstatic one. And while there are many examples of ludicrous houses, they are not funny. Follow this line of argument and it soon becomes clear that charm is a commodity of exceptional importance. So why is it so little understood?

The question of accident or design is fundamental. Think first about the character of something manufactured. True, we rarely find over-designed objects charming, and in products and buildings we tend to prefer the whimsical to the over-wrought. A saltwater-corroded beer bottle has more charm than a baroque baldacchino, at least in my view. A battered leather club chair has more charm than the latest plastic extrusion from Philippe Starck.

Distorting the Ordinary

When you detect charm in places and things, it often has a substantial coincidental or accidental component: a tumbledown Varois shepherd’s cabanon is surely more charming, if less impressive, than the over-bearing Central China Television Building in Beijing with its effortful and vertiginous look-at-me torqued posturing. The cabanon has been shaped by time and the weather. Mad King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein – the pompous and kitsch Bavarian Schloss that inspired a Walt Disney bad dream – certainly impresses, but surely no-one could find in its demented turrets and spooky crockets even the slightest residue of delightful charm. Meanwhile, a Regency hunting box in faded brick with amusing ogee details in a Hampshire forest hits the charm reflex immediately.

Neuschwanstein Castle

What the eighteenth-century theorists of landscape declared ‘picturesque’ is what we today call charming. These theorists were much influenced by the early landscapes of Claude Lorrain, dreamy fictions of the Roman campagna as seen by an itinerant Frenchman. So much so that picturesque enthusiasts carried with them a ‘Claude glass’ – a distorting optical glass that turned a modern green English valley into antique Italy. Charm distorts the ordinary in the same way.

In people, the cultural evidence suggests that seven-tenths of charm is often a highly self-conscious, if imperfectly understood, stratagem. Certainly, there are these fortunate people who have congenital charm, or, at least, are born with a generous measure of its attributes. But there are rather more people, I believe, who find that a small natural endowment of goodness might readily be parlayed into better and more competitive social technique by deciding to become … charming. How does this process of becoming charming work?

Let’s first consider our own residue of charm. So, as we look in the mirror with a glum recognition of terrible personal disappointments in genetic inheritance plus failures in grooming and character, what are the next steps towards becoming a more attractive person? We are talking about an attitude – a way of being, an interaction, a line of patter – that is a lubricant, a fuel, a salve. Charm will give you a presence that others find attractive.

The Whiff of Eros

Additionally and very likely, charm will also deliver a slight, but insistent, whiff of erotic possibilities. With charm you can create good situations and extract yourself from bad ones. With charm, you will inspire the envy of men and the interest of women. Or, at least, most of them most of the time. No-one hates a charmer, but, then again, not everyone admires him.

The charmer and the flatterer might not be exactly the same thing, but charm and flattery are certainly related in cause and effect. If I flatter you, I may be considered charming. Although, as we shall now see, literature and history have not admired flatterers.

In The Inferno, Dante has pimps and seducers standing in a ditch where they are distressingly flagellated by horned demons. Pimps and seducers deserve punishment. But so too do flatterers, many of whose characteristics may also belong to the pimp and to the seducer. So low is Dante’s opinion of flatterers that he puts them in the ditch next door, adjacent to the harlot Thais who is, like the pimps and seducers, very disagreeably awash with sewage. Excrement is a significant motif here. Beatrice, observing the scene, says: ‘These wretched souls stewed in human filth suffer for the crime of flattery.’ The river of filth in which they stew is a symbol of the flattering garbage they have spoken.

In which Circle of Hell, I sometimes wonder, would Dante place Steve Jobs. I do not think Apple’s founder suffered from sloth, but he was acquainted with the other Deadly Sins. And he was a flatterer too. Indeed, it now seems clear from a reading of business history that theft and flattery, no less than vision and intolerance, defined the personality of this difficult, but inspired, man. Jobs, according to his biographer Walter Isaacson, was inclined, when it suited him, to give people the impression that he liked them by ‘dishing out insincere flattery to those hungry for it’.

Never mind that this begs the question of exactly what ‘sincere flattery’ might be, in illustration of the problem, perhaps by a flatterer briefly removed from his river of filth, I have been told I am charming. Or, more honestly, that I ‘can be’ so. The ‘can be’ modification is revealing since it confirms the long suspected presence of an off-switch in the charm cabinet. It also confirms that charm is an active and deployable strategy, more useful in some situations than in others.

A Social Weapon

Like everything to do with manners, charm can only be understood in context. It is a social weapon which you can aim at specific targets: you cannot be charming to yourself. For example, while I may feel no impulse to be cruelly rebarbative to my bus driver or postman, I might find little advantage in laying on the charm in circumstances where I am in their company, or at their mercy. There are times when the least effort will do.

Others agree, at least if my own experience of behaviour on London’s 88 bus route is a reliable indicator of a general truth about human motivation. There are circumstances where charm does not work. Hence the off-switch. (I say ‘least effort’ because it is hard work to be charming. And if charm looks easy, it is an ease that is hard-won.)

On the other hand, a woman I find attractive or a ripe business prospect awaiting a different style of seduction might well discover that I can, indeed, be charming. I become switched on. If I am charming, I am better able to get what I want, or, at least, manoeuvre nearer to it with insincere, or even sincere, flattery.

But since bus routes and postal deliveries are not susceptible to change or persuasion, charm may be wasted on bus drivers and postmen. Charmers may wish to save their lubricant or weapon (the metaphors are as various and fugitive as the subject) for when it’s really needed.

In this way, people can be victims of charm as readily as they can be its beneficiaries. To experience someone’s charm is not always to experience benefits. People can fall under charm’s spell – and spells, as all shamans and magicians know, can be bad as well as good. Often, charm is misleading. A well-known charmer, a titled aesthete with a (bright red) public face, was privately described to me as ‘all smarm on the outside, all egotism within’. Smarm can be mistaken for charm, just as stupidity can be confused with malice.

The Psychopath’s Method

At this point it needs to be said that the exercise of charm has something in common with the manipulative stratagems of the psychopath. You can find a good working definition of this catastrophic condition in Hervey M. Cleckley’s 1941 classic of psychiatry, The Mask of Sanity. The motif of the mask immediately suggests disguise and dissimulation in its primary subject matter: the conduct of a good life and its contrast with an aberrant psyche.

Cleckley’s description of the psychopath might, with small modifications, serve in some respects as a description of the charmer. The psychopath is someone at once intelligent, unreliable, dishonest, irresponsible, self-centred, shallow and lacking in empathy. The variance is only at the end: charmers have empathy, but in other respects it’s a good checklist.

Like the charmer, the psychopath has a method. And each may be, at different parts of the conquest process, persuasive and attractive too. The method has three phases: assessment, manipulation and abandonment. With the psychopath, cruelty and criminal activity are the end result. The charmer is less damaging, since the victim will feel no hurt greater than that of a temporary seduction, but the process is similar.

First, the charmer finds his victim, either a target of opportunity at a cocktail party or a premeditated one in a business plan. Second, with witty and engaging exchanges, he then exercises his charm in order to achieve his romantic or his professional goals. Third, he then moves on to his next target and the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• What Exactly is Charm?
• Contents
• Charm
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher