Shyness: a word to be whispered, these days. If the Victorians saw it as an unwavering disposition, a force all but impossible to beat, our own age tends to regard it – rather more dubiously, in my opinion – as a condition to be cured, whether with the platitudes of self help, or with drugs such as Prozac and Zoloft (for this, alas, we may trace some of the blame back to the stricter Freudians, who liked to pathologise those bad at talking). Either way, it has certainly stuck around down the centuries, an evolutionary quirk that serves no purpose whatsoever save to make those who suffer from it anxious and lonely. Among its earliest victims were Zeno, the Greek philosopher, and Cicero, the greatest orator of ancient Rome.
In Shrinking Violets, his fantastic and involving guide to shyness, cultural historian Joe Moran spends relatively little time speculating on its causes. Religion may have encouraged it; early Christianity, for instance, prized modesty and monastic retreat. So, too, may the dividing up of public and private realms, the building of walls behind which people might scoot and hide. Even the weather may be involved, given the preponderance of shyness in chilly places such as Minnesota and Finland.
In the end, though, it’s impossible to say why one person is paralysingly bashful, and another – perhaps even his own sibling or parent – an extrovert who regards a room full of strangers as a delicious challenge. Moran simply gets on with the business of telling the stories of the shy, whether pitiable, inspiriting or funny (sometimes all three), and of how they may or may not have dealt with their social cack-handedness. The result is not only a guide (and the breadth of Moran’s reading is astonishing). It’s a feat of empathy. Every page radiates understanding; every paragraph, its (shy) author’s gentle wit.
Where to begin? So many introverts, and no making a pair – though Siegfried Sassoon is here, and his one-time lover, the aesthete Stephen Tennant, hidden from view in their gloomy houses. So, too, is Schulz, creator of that most exquisite study of midwestern shyness, Peanuts, and the English novelist Elizabeth Taylor (interviewed by Elizabeth Jane Howard for TV, the terrified Taylor answered yes or no to all 30 of her questions). Some deal with their fear of others by building (tunnels, in the case of the fifth Duke of Portland), and others by disappearing to remote places (the Finnish writer Tove Jansson; the English folk singer Vashti Bunyan). Still others are drawn, moths to a flame, to do in life what is most painful: the actor Dirk Bogarde’s stage fright is so bad, he can’t believe it won’t kill him; the famously silent Charles de Gaulle addresses occupied France from London, holding a nation in a way he never could a dinner table. Is this masochism? A perverse kind of desire? Perhaps we crave what we most fear. Certainly, some people become adept at being shy; Morrissey, Moran observes, turned his outmoded bashfulness into a form of cultural dissidence, one much cherished by his fans.
To go back to where we started: can shyness ever be overcome? Moran writes of the psychologist Michael Argyle, who in the 60s established a social skills training programme in Oxford. An evangelist for Scottish dancing – he recommended it as a universal cure for shyness – he was himself outgoing, so may not have fully understood the effect such regimented intimacy has on the heartbeat, the sweat glands, the facial capillaries of a truly shy person. Nonetheless, sometimes it can be beaten, or at any rate, kept at bay. Alan Bennett began by seeing his as a virtue, but as he grew older it came to seem a bore, and he shrugged it off. Performance will shade into reality.
Some years ago, a man told me, very kindly, it was time I outgrew my shyness (and yes: I was drawn, paradoxically, to journalism, that most convivial of trades). So, I tried. Quite soon, the effort was only minimal. It still creeps over me, of course. I can catch it like a contagion from another victim. But most of the time, it’s just a distant unease. “Hello!” I say, aiming for the impervious brightness of that same mentor, now my party-loving husband.
Shrinking Violets is published by Profile (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £12.29
