'Not Plethorically Abounding in Cash'

“If I am correct in my claims that we live in a time where there is a paucity of charm, what is one to do? Those of us who get high on, groove on, one might say are even addicted to charm find ourselves falling back on the charm of the past . . .”

Charm impresses me as an increasingly attractive and even necessary quality. Not so when I was young. I sought “intensity,” which in retrospect translates into quasi-sociopathic tendencies. I liked provocation, contrariness, a gratuitous streak of vulgarity and an absence of conscience when it came to insulting those I found displeasing. I even favored some aggressively charmless writers including the anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Growing up and thinking straight has been a long, labored process.

The passage at the top is from Joseph Epstein’s Charm: The Elusive Enchantment (2018). For the rest of the paragraph (p. 175), he catalogs some of the charmers of the past. It’s an impressive list drawn from all the arts and heavily overlapping with my own. The writers come last:

“The essays of Charles Lamb and Max Beerbohm, the novels of P.G. Woodhouse and Evelyn Waugh, the poems of Philip Larkin and Ogden Nash all provide charm in its literary division. If all this seems rather light fare, that is because it ought to be, for light, in the most approbative sense, is what charm indubitably is.”

An example: Lamb is writing to Wordsworth on this date, Oct. 13, in 1804:

“I have not found your commissions. But the truth is, and why should I not confess it? I am not plethorically abounding in Cash at this present. Merit, God knows, is very little rewarded; but it does not become me to speak of myself. My motto is ‘Contented with little, yet wishing for more.’”

Imagine promising a acquaintance you would purchase something (in this case, books) for him, than having to admit you’re a little hard up this month. Some of us would lie. Others would abjectly bow and scrape and behave like sycophants. Not Lamb. Without qualification, he admits he’s flat and says so charmingly: “not plethorically abounding in Cash.” Then he proposes an alternative solution.

True charm is never smarmy. Neither can it be fully dishonest. Charm is not a mask for something else. This is how Lamb closes his letter to Wordsworth:

“Let me know your will and pleasure soon: For I have observed, next to the pleasure of buying a bargain for one’s self is the pleasure of persuading a friend to buy it. It tickles one with the image of an imprudency without the penalty usually annex’d.”

That’s charming.