A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

How To Be Charming

An old saw, from some unknown source buried in my sub-conscious, has it that ‘Charm is that personal characteristic which generates the response ‘Yes’ before a request is even made.’ Towles’s Count Rostov is the epitome of a man with this kind of charm. Rostov even charms the KGB into letting him live, in reduced but habitable circumstances, within the confines of the best hotel in Moscow. From there he continues for decades to charm the staff, the guests, and the wider world of smugglers, petty criminals, and exploiters of loopholes in Soviet society. Charm, however much it is a bourgeois virtue, certainly has survival value even in the most ardent of socialisms.

Towles’s literary achievement is the sustained capturing of charm throughout his novel. Rostov’s character is genuinely sensitive, polite, urbanely witty, composed and empathetic. A man of taste and refined judgment, he is able, with the assistance of his raft of friendly natives, to ‘make do’ on his urban island as well as any Robinson Crusoe - to eat well, dress well, and to maintain a modicum of civilised decorum. Charm, it must be said, is an eminently practical virtue which includes a certain degree of instinctive cleverness. Think of a Samurai who has an intimate knowledge of both Montaigne’s essays and the secrets of French haute cuisine.

Charm does not arise from an attempt to be charming. It is clear that Rostov’s Being is enervated by a sort of Leibnizian optimism that the world he inhabits is the best of all possible worlds. He is not a Pollyanna but a realist who, either by training or breeding, appreciates the manifold beauty of things around him and the opportunity provided by changing circumstances. He is, in short, content with himself. This is his strength and the source of his confident attentiveness. Charm, it seems, is also a spiritual quality that allows one to maintain a vision of those things which are essential versus those which are not.

Charm abhors snobbery in any of its forms - based on rank or position, on ideological convention, on education, background, or prospects. Charm admires and is excited by the authentic, that which is satisfying for being precisely what it is - soup, children, birds, bureaucrats, expensive restaurants, as well as less expensive restaurants. The rest is beneath consideration. Charm is an aesthetic that filters the world as well as shaping its possessor. What is seen, heard, and felt is not raw but pre-processed, as it were, to conform with the needs of charm itself. It is a type of positive psychological feedback loop: charm begets charming experience which promotes charm, in a manner described by the virtue ethics of Thomas Aquinas.

Charm is in some sense grounded in proper behaviour. Thus it has a certain reverence for tradition, ritual, and the conventional formalities of life. But when confronted with breaches in expected behaviour, charm does not censure, it considers the reasons and possible benefits of not just an exception to the rule but of the rejecting the rule entirely in order to promote a superior social harmony. Such adaptation is not a symptom of a lack of principle but a recognition, as it were, that the Sabbath was made for man. That is, charm has a profound egalitarian element that seeks to grease all the wheels of social intercourse. Charm has sociological import.

Quite apart from anything else therefore, A Gentleman In Moscow, is an instruction manual on a particular manner in which life can be lived, even if life presents serious adversity, even if there are no allies to provide comfort in that adversity. It is consequently edifying as well as entertaining - in short, charming.

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