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?
I remember the day I walked out of my last office job: June 25, 1988. If I can avoid ever doing that again, I thought, I shall count my life as a success.
Joe Moran would also consider himself a shy person. Although he is professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University — a title no shy person would wish to say out loud in a single breath — 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.’
No extrovert would write those words, but then no extrovert will read them, either. (Imagine Ant or Dec reading this book! Piers Morgan! Jeremy Clarkson!)
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 Kinglake and his party 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 (slightly ruined by the fact their servants insisted they stop and meet — they discussed the plague in Cairo, to avoid giving the impression they had stopped through ‘civilian-like love of vain talk’).
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, and ordering his servants ‘ to pass him as if he were a tree’.
He built the largest ballroom in the country underground: it held 2,000 people, who could be lowered 20 at a time by a hydraulic lift. But they never were, because the Duke 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.
Many of my favourite people turn out to have been horribly shy. The novelist Elizabeth Taylor used to sit in her local pub, by herself, nursing a gin and tonic and listening to people. Every so often she would meet an older and rather grander writer, Ivy Compton-Burnett, for lunch.
She always asked taxi drivers to drop her off a few streets away so she wouldn’t be too early. At the end, Compton-Burnett would whisper, ‘Would you like to . . .?’ and Taylor would say, ‘No’, before hurrying to the Ladies at Harvey Nichols, round the corner.
Nor is it just us Brits who are afflicted. Minnesotan writer Garrison Keillor was too embarrassed to say he was having a stroke. William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, worked at the magazine for 54 years and ensured his name never appeared in it. Tove Jansson, author of the Moomin books, moved to ever smaller islands to avoid people. Part of the fun of reading these tales is imagining my extrovert friends reading them, steam coming out their ears. I’ve never known an extrovert who didn’t think introverts were just slackers, who could be more outgoing if only they pulled their socks up.
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.