How to tell you’re shy — you’d cross a desert to avoid making small talk!
MANy writers would describe themselves as shy, and I am one of them. Why else would I have spent most of the past 30 years in a room by myself with a computer, wondering what to write next?
Joe Moran would also consider himself a shy person. Although he is professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University, he still cannot dial a new phone number without first having written down what he is going to say when the person he is ringing picks it up.
He keeps a notebook of things to say to people if he runs out of small talk. At parties, he no longer studies bookshelves or fridge magnets as intensely as he used to. No, he has cultivated a cryptic smile which, he hopes, suggests he is benignly amused by the human comedy unfolding before him. My guess is that the fridge magnets were probably a better bet.
His book — his fourth and, I would say, best — is subtitled A Field Guide To Shyness, which suggests that it’s some variety of self-help book, but it’s not. A Cultural History Of Shyness might have been better, because Moran has no real advice to give, or cures to sell. He is here to discuss the importance of shyness and shy people in our lives and our history, and, along the way, counter the great extrovert hegemony that seems to have taken over the world.
Like any self-respecting introvert, he does this slowly and surely, with mounting evidence and a splendidly dry humour: ‘I want to see if I can write about my shyness obliquely, by hiding behind the human shield of people more interestingly and idiosyncratically shy than me.’
Fantastic stories abound. In 1834 an anti-social but intrepid Englishman named Alexander Kinglake travelled east, and embarked on an eight-day slog across the Sinai desert, with a small entourage of English servants and Bedouin guides.
For several days they rode their camels through sand dunes and wadis without meeting a soul. Then one day they noticed a shimmering speck on the horizon. Three camels were approaching, two of them with riders. Eventually he identified an English gentleman in a shooting jacket, accompanied by his servants.
As they approached, Kinglake realised he felt ‘shy and indolent’ and had no wish ‘to stop and talk like a morning visitor, in the midst of those broad solitudes’. His compatriot clearly felt similarly, so they just touched their hats and carried on ‘as if they had passed in Bond Street’.
THIS may be the single most British story I have ever heard. English reserve, by the end of the 18th century, was ‘seen as a strange amalgam of shyness, insecurity and conceit’.
The Duke of Portland inherited the vast Welbeck estate and completed his disappearance from the world, building a huge, 15-mile network of tunnels in which to conceal himself.
He built the largest ballroom in the country underground: it held 2,000 people, who could be lowered 20 at a time in a lift. But they never were, because he was too shy to hold a ball there.
There’s more to this book than eccentricity, though. Of W.H.R. Rivers, the psychiatrist who treated Siegfried Sassoon for shell shock, he writes: ‘[His] shyness had given birth to a calmness and stoicism that few who knew him forgot, even long after he had died.’
He made Sassoon, also painfully diffident, see that ‘shyness did not have to be an inadequacy but could be a positive quality — something you were rather than something that stopped you being who you were.’
If there is any message in this book, this is it.
Nor is it just us Brits who are afflicted. Minnesotan writer Garrison Keillor was too embarrassed to say he was having a stroke. Tove Jansson, author of the Moomin books, moved to ever smaller islands to avoid people.
Moran is a wonderful, witty writer, and here he surpasses himself.
‘Far from being the preserve of the shy, stage fright is the shyness everyone gets, the common cold of self-consciousness.’
But paradox is at the heart of it. ‘I have long felt more at ease speaking in public than talking to a stranger.’
So have I. To a shy person, this book is incredibly cheering. It shows us we are not alone in our desire for solitude. It’s a fellowship of sorts, though I don’t think I’ll be wearing the club tie any time soon.