The Pitfalls of Charm

Brideshead Revisited. By Evelyn Waugh.

Last year, my wife and I drove to visit friends who had just moved to a town called Clarkston, northwest of Detroit. On our way, we drove through the town’s center, which Monica promptly described as a “charm attack.” I’m sure you know what that means: shaded streets, faithfully restored Victorian and Georgian homes, perfect landscaping, boutiques, cute little flags, and, of course, coffeeshops. Yes, it was all very charming — yet I wouldn’t want to live there. If I were to live in a small town, I would prefer the village where I grew up, in the panhandle of Florida. It too has shaded streets and restored homes — but no charm at all. The corner store where I used to buy RC Colas is abandoned and slowly collapsing, there’s too much traffic, and most of the landscaping doesn’t go beyond keeping the grass cut.

To restore my hometown with a veneer of charm certainly would make it more aesthetically pleasing, but that would bring with it charm’s usual companion: environmental sensitivity. I’m not talking about awareness of climate change and melting icecaps (though such awareness would be included). What I mean is sensitivity to one’s physical surroundings and a concomitant need to have a sense of control over one’s surroundings. The house would have to be perfectly painted, the lawn manicured; shoes would need to be removed upon entrance; and, in most cases, there would be dogs, not children (dogs are easier to train). Sadly, as we track further this sort of environmental sensitivity, we find pro-abortion rhetoric on the bumper of the Prius and gay-pride banners floating from the picturesque front porch — both beliefs arising, ultimately, from the desire for control. But control also comes with its own inevitable companion: isolation.

Therefore, though charm is, well, charming, it makes me uneasy. At the same time, though, I remonstrate with myself: Edmund, charm is closely associated with beauty, and Beauty is one of the metaphysical Trinity, up there with Truth and Goodness. But is charm really the offspring of beauty? Or is it a diabolical counterfeit? Again, I ponder this possibility because charm quite relentlessly associates itself with said environmental sensitivity — the desire to have the things of life in their proper place, the desire not to be disturbed, to guard one’s isolation. (By the way, have you ever noticed that most Black Lives Matter signs are in black-less neighborhoods?) We can try to hack out these matters on our own. Or we can go where they have been thoroughly explored — in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945).

The matter of aesthetics — charm being one if its subcategories — is consistently in the background of Brideshead. In the early part of the narrative, the reader learns of Charles Ryder’s refusal to quit his impractically situated ground-floor rooms, principally because there were “gillyflowers growing below the windows which on summer evenings filled them with fragrance.” The novel also details the room’s decorations, including a “reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers” and “a screen, painted by Roger Fry with a Provencal landscape.” After a “beautiful” friend, Sebastian Flyte, comes into his life, we learn how Charles’s tastes graduate beyond the trendy (which, around 1922, van Gogh and Fry were). To illustrate, when Charles returns from a trip with Sebastian to the Oxford Botanic Garden, in his rooms he “detected a jejune air that had not irked [him] before.” He promptly turns the Fry painting against the wall, then later stores it in a custodial closet. Again through Sebastian, Charles is introduced to Brideshead Castle and its many artistic forms. When Sebastian unfolds the shutters opening on the great hall, “the mellow afternoon sun flooded in, over the bare floor, the vast twin fireplaces of sculptured marble, the coved ceiling frescoed with classic deities and heroes, the gilt mirrors and scagliola pilasters…. It was a glimpse only, such as might be had from the top of an omnibus into a lighted ballroom.”