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Michael Chabon has some good lines on charisma in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union:

Litvak knew for certain that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave-off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength.

There’s a lot here that is also true of confidence. Its amorality, for one, which is why it seems so ridiculous the way in which education is increasingly geared towards confidence-building. In the first chapter of my book - first draft finally done - I phrase my doubts thus:

Can it really be right that everything comes down to confidence – and that more of it is always the answer? This is what we were told when the economy crashed; it’s what we are told about schooling and education. The problem child is always lacking in confidence, if you believe some people. Assertiveness training and even therapy are now relatively commonplace in schools, all part of the great project to endow children with confidence. I don’t know the detail, and I am sure there is method to these schemes. Yet my memory of school – not so long ago, really – has the confident kids messing about, while the meek and mild sat at the front of the class. Perhaps, a too-soft voice says, those children didn’t have the right kind of confidence. Which begs the question: what is the right kind – your kind or their kind? Another reason to be suspicious. How odd it is that this thing we claim to value and to want is so difficult to define.

But there are also differences between charisma and confidence. Charisma seems to me to be something you either have or you don’t; charismatic people are born, not made. Confidence, in contrast, can be acquired. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it could be instructed, in a classroom, with textbook, exams and so on, but it can definitely be learnt, one way or another.

That is why Chabon is so right to call the charismatic half-fortunate. Those born with a power like that have to come to terms with it and with the effect it has on other people. I often think this about people born with immense beauty, or innate sexiness. Naturally enough, they will see themselves as normal, knowing as they do their faults and flaws. Everyone else will see them as abnormal, and react accordingly. For the beautiful, the sexy and the charismatic, therefore, the world is a strange place, in which the normal social rules of cause and effect do not quite apply. Some may see this as good fortune. It destroys just as many.

Philip Larkin is just the sort of miserable git to see the dangers in being exceptional. In the poem he wrote on the birth of Sally Amis, he made the unusual request:

May you be ordinary;
Have like other women
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not good-looking,
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,
That, unworkable in itself,
Stops all the rest from working.

That sounds about right to me. I wonder what Marilyn would say, if she were still around.

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