THE MILD SHY CLUB

Morrissey, de Gaulle and Patricia Highsmith are members, as are orang-utans, many murderers and some – but not all – male crickets. Welcome to the...

Shrinking Violets: A Field Guide To Shyness Joe Moran Profile €22.50 ★★★★★

Last summer, I was at Poughkeepsie railway station, an hour or two north of New York, looking for someone to tell me if I was on the right platform for Manhattan. My wife pointed to an exceptionally tall, intelligent-looking man who was standing by himself. As I walked towards him, he looked a little alarmed, then swiftly turned his eyes away from me. At this point, it suddenly struck me that the person I was approaching for directions was none other than the great Garrison Keillor, author of Lake Wobegon Days and presenter of the radio show A Prairie Home Companion.

He answered my question with an abrupt ‘yes, it is’, and then looked down at his feet. Hoping to prolong our conversation, I asked him if the train went to Grand Central or Penn Station. ‘Grand Central,’ he replied. At this point, the train rolled in, and something about his body language – rushing away from me up the platform to a door further away – told me that he was doing everything possible to avoid sitting next to me on the journey.

I mention this episode not just to namedrop my close acquaintance with America’s greatest living humorist, but also because in this delightful book on shyness, Joe Moran devotes four pages to Garrison Keillor.

It turns out that, despite performing in his own weekly radio show for more than 40 years, Keillor remains one of the shyest authors who ever lived.

His parents were members of the Exclusive Brethren, a more extreme sub-sect of the Plymouth Brethren. This meant that he was forbidden from inviting friends into the house, from watching TV or going to parties. Tongue-tied in real life, he learned to communicate by listening to the silver-tongued presenters on the radio. He thus found a way of turning himself into someone else, ‘a man who could speak without being interrupted or worrying about people yawning or looking at their watches’.

For his radio show, Keillor invented the standoffish prairie town of Lake Wobegon, populated by shy people who make a point of keeping at arm’s length from one another. In the words of Moran, ‘The town’s timidest citizens were the Norwegian bachelor farmers, who ate shy-busting Powdermilk biscuits and hung out at one end of the town’s only bar, like “perpetually disgruntled, elderly teenagers leaning against a wall.”’

In his radio show, Keillor would merrily talk and sing about these shy Lake Wobegon natives before a live audience every Saturday at 5pm. But as Moran points out, ‘only those watching in the audience as the show was broadcast would have noticed his habit of staring down at his socks’.

Shyness comes in all shapes and sizes. As Keillor demonstrates, it occasionally hides behind showmanship. In my experience, actors are often shy people who have found some sort of liberation in entering the persona of someone else. Moran, an English professor, is himself almost chronically shy. In company, he dreads what he describes as the ‘fiddly’ business of shaking hands or, worse, hugging, and he can never dial a number without first writing down what he is going to say. But he is happy onstage or in a lecture hall. ‘I have long been more at ease speaking in public than talking to a stranger.’

Shrinking Violets is a nimble, entertaining exploration of shyness in all its manifestations, not all of them virtuous. I recently saw shyness defined as ‘vanity out of its depth’, and that certainly rang a bell. Moran is well aware that it can be the product of self-absorption, misanthropy, or a sense of superiority. But one has only to think of those born without a shy gene – Donald Trump, for example, or his new handmaiden Nigel Farage – to realise that it is one of sanity’s surest safeguards.

On the other hand – and this is a point that Moran overlooks – an eerie number of murderers are shy people who are later recalled by neighbours as having ‘kept themselves to themselves’. He rightly points out that there are few shy people represented in books and films, but fails to mention that the works of Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell are full of them – generally loner sociopaths festering with weird unspoken grudges.

Shyness, it emerges, is not confined to human beings, and may well have an evolutionary purpose. The orang-utan is known as one of the shyest animals, to such an extent that orang-utans were once believed to descend from a single Bornean tribesman who, shamed by some wrongdoing, fled the village for the forest, never to return. But there are in fact sound reasons for orang-utans being loners: the fruit trees they live off are too fragile to bear the weight of more than one ape at a time.

Nor are human beings the only species in which the shy and the brazen are intermixed. Some male field crickets are born loud and bold, others quiet and timid. This is because though those who sing loudest and longest attract the most females, they also attract the most predators.

Shrinking Violets is full of fascinating and amusing anecdotes about a wide range of shy types, ranging from Morrissey to General de Gaulle, whose conversation, Lady Diana Cooper once said, ‘flowed like glue’. Like Garrison Keillor, both Morrissey and de Gaulle came alive on stage, so much so, in Morrissey’s case, that he became that most paradoxical of things, the most prominent shy person of his age.

From Moran’s selection of shy writers and artists, it’s hard not to detect a strong link between shyness and originality. The wonderfully camp and overblown comic novelist Ronald Firbank was a dormouse in real life, preferring to hide beneath a restaurant table rather than engage in conversation with a head waiter. More recently, the singer/song-writer Nick

Think of those born without a shy gene – Donald Trump – to realise it’s one of sanity’s surest safeguards

Drake would often run out of petrol, having been unable to summon up the courage to talk to a petrol-pump attendant.

Moran proves a wonderful guide to these various eccentrics. He is gifted as an anecdotalist and as an acute observer of art and life. Of Nick Drake’s mesmerising, evanescent recordings, he observes, ‘His voice drifts away from the guitar rhythm, each vocal line beginning just after the beat, so his phrasing seems hesitant but natural, as if he is fighting his shyness to get something said.’

Why are some of us shyer than others? Needless to say, childhood traumas are often blamed. Alfred Wainwright’s red hair caused his mother to stuff him in a drawer whenever anyone came to call, in case they questioned his paternity. Cézanne was kicked on the backside by another boy. Dirk Bogarde had his head stuffed down the toilet at school. Morrissey was made to run around a gym while his PE teacher took potshots at him with a ball. General Wavell never got over being brought downstairs by his mother to chat to her dinner guests.

But all these explanations seem a little pat. As a colleague of Wavell’s once pointed out, thousands of children throughout history have been forced to chat to their parents’ friends, and precious few of them have grown up tongue-tied as a result.

Listening to people blathering loudly into their mobile phones on trains – or, worse, watching them lay into each other on The

Jeremy Kyle Show – it would be easy to conclude that shyness is in retreat. Moran is particularly incensed by the endless chatter in university libraries. ‘I wonder if there is something to be said for the lost art of bottling things up?’ he asks.

On the other hand, he finds evidence for shyness in the increasing popularity of texting, a conversation-avoiding practice introduced by Nokia in the mid-Nineties. Nokia is a Finnish firm, and the Finns, who took to texting like ducks to water, are generally considered the shyest people on the planet.