Which writers have charm?
And does it matter?
PAUL JOHNSON
Most writers have the egotism of actors with none of the good looks or charm.' I say, I say: is that true? The author of the quote was Raymond Chandler, the date December 1948. I was at Oxford then and had met one or two writers. Evelyn Waugh had come to tell us about Hollywood; a short man, very funny. He had lost his young, elfin looks, and was becoming florid, vinous. snappy. But charm he certainly had. Graham Greene I had met, too: tall, haunted, 'a man of almost distinction', my girlfriend, Ba Belloc, said elliptically. Greene spoke little, the charm locked up; but it was obviously there. The donnish writers I knew were no great shakes in any of these departments. C.S. Lewis looked like a farmer, rather coarse, a bit of a bully. He charmed from the lectern, especially the women who sat at his feet. In conversation he interested you, fascinated you at times, but charm did not come into it. On the contrary, you felt that at any moment he was going to ask you a question you could not answer. Tolkien was gentle, nice, friendly. But he would not have thanked you for calling him charming. The one undoubted charmer was Kenneth Clark, who came down from London to tell us about Rumbrunt and Tintoret, as he called them — he was Slade Professor — bringing with him great waves of metropolitan sophistication and gossip from I Tatti and Rapallo. Charm? No shortage of that, for sure, or good looks either. The effect of both on innumerable women was driving his wife Jane to drink. He shot me one or two careless electric bolts of charm which shivered my timbers. A.J.P. Taylor had neither looks nor charm; plenty of egotism, though.
Later I met many writers — too many. T.S. Eliot was certainly not handsome. As the Queen Mother innocently observed, Ile looks as though he works in a bank.' He had charm in the sense that he was deliberately polite, listened carefully to what you said, commented on it appreciatively and, as he was a great man — you have no conception of how important he seemed then — that was enough; more than enough. If Dylan Thomas had charm, he certainly did not show it to me. He looked repellent too, though not all thought so. Some women wanted to hug him, lend him a fiver, save him from drink, inspire him to write poetry again. C.P. Snow, then a 'leading novelist', was ugly beyond belief and incredibly old-looking for his age, with tiny, white, alarming hands. He was didactic, not charming, but always kind, helpful, anxious to do you a good turn: he stretched his egotism to welcome you under its sheltering umbrella. Anthony Powell, on the other hand, did have charm, and wit; one was not so sure about his friendliness. Hemingway charmed me, at the Coupole, by lining up six martinis and drinking them off; after that, though, the charm skidded off the table. The big charmer, of course, was Kingsley Amis, then strikingly good-looking as well. He certainly did not set out to charm. He was always sharp and quite ready to be pugnacious. He charmed because he made you laugh, endlessly, with his jokes and wonderful comic turns, imitations, fantasies. I still sigh at the memory of them and wish I had some record of their splendour. Was Thackeray like that, perhaps? Or Dickens?
Tennyson was a good-looking man, no doubt about it, whether wearing his tremendous wide-brimmed black hat or letting his long, thinning locks blow in the winds of the Solent. And then he would charm too, by reading Maud, his voice rising and falling rhythmically, sometimes a growl, often a whisper, a slight singsong, a pronounced Lincolnshire burr, echoes of which spin faintly from a scratchy recording. He was always willing to talk too, about big things, like the need for belief, the existence of God, the fate that awaited us after death — pronounced with great emphasis and reverence, as Dr Johnson did. A great man who will thus let you into his deep thoughts cannot lack charm. I can imagine sitting with him at Farringford, outside at a wicker table as the sun went down, while Mrs Cameron was busy immortalising the occasion, and feeling privileged just to be there while the grand voice rolled on. Carlyle was good-looking too, and taller than we think; a fine figure of a man, with whom the fashionable Lady Ashburton fell hopelessly in love. Did he have charm? Some thought so. Tennyson did for one. He liked to smoke with Carlyle, in the back garden of the Seer's Chelsea house, puffing away on long clay pipes. There is a photograph of the two of them at it, taken presumably by Mrs Cameron, sucking in and exhaling, exchanging charm at long intervals. Tennyson rotated his clay pipes, leaving at least a week's interval between smokes. Carlyle's pipes were his one extravagance. He got them sent from Scotland, cheap no doubt, believing good pipes were not to be had in England. He never smoked one twice, but each evening, before going to bed, he would leave his pipe on the doorstep for a poor man to find. They must have been impressive affairs, those joint smokings of the great Victorians, for in those days men took tobacco seriously. Impressed by the rate and enthusiasm with which Charles Lamb smoked, Dr Parr, 'the Whig Dr Johnson', asked him how he did it. Lamb replied, 'I have toiled at it, sir, as some men toil after virtite.'
That Lamb had charm no one will deny, for the verdict in his favour was unanimous. He was good-looking too, in a small, whitefaced way, wearing his neat suit of sables. No girl would marry him, however, because of his commitment to his intermittently mad sister Mary, and the fact that he had been in the bin himself for a short spell; so it clearly ran in the family. But all women loved him, if they had eyes to see and spirits to laugh. I am not so sure about the rest of his gang. Wordsworth was an ugly fellow by most reckonings, with legs made for a 30-mile tramp across the fells rather than for display in the drawing-room, as De Quincey wrote (men's legs were commented on in those days of evening silk breeches and hose). He could be charming when he wished (not that often). Coleridge was not a mere charmer so much as a magician, who wove endless spells with his uninterrupted eloquence, of which Carlyle — who could not get a word in; he was young then — has left a hilarious description. This kind of monologue cannot be charming by definition, but what would we not give to have experienced it? Hazlitt had dark, handsome looks, to judge by the few images we have of him, but he was hangdog, sullen, often silent by choice. He must have had charm too, when he chose to dispense it, or rather sudden, brief, penetrating and intensely original observations, which you remembered all your life and which left you spellbound at the time. Is not this the true charm, in the old sense of the word? That is why Lamb valued him so and refused to quarrel, despite provocation; and Coleridge valued him too, until Hazlitt went for him like a bulldog, and hung on to his flesh with clenched jaws, an ingrate cur. Where are such titans today? Does Rushdie have charm? Is he handsome? Who cares?
Previous page
