Shyness seems an obvious theme for a writer. Writers are often natural introverts and onlookers, and the printed word allows them to convey meaning to others independently of their bodily presence.
For Sigmund Freud , writing was “in its origin the voice of an absent person”: it let us transcend the limitations of our mumbling, blushing selves. And yet, as I have found when trying to write about my own shyness, as a subject it poses problems. It is a low-level, lingering, nebulous feeling, hard to turn into a story or drama. It has none of the pathos or narrative momentum of major life events like love, loss, illness and grief.
Shy characters are not born protagonists; they are too passive to propel stories along. And shyness is tricky to write about autobiographically without succumbing to the hectoring self-pity that is the death of good prose.
Shyness, often seen merely as a wish to withdraw from others, can also amount to an undue interest in them, a desire for human closeness, which defeats itself through fear and doubt. For me, it has less to do with simple timidity than a kind of social deafness, a tin ear for non-verbal cues, a sense that I have failed to grasp some invisible thread that holds communal life together.
The shy author often overcompensates for this problem by becoming a field biologist of humanity, a close reader of the semiotics of thesocial world.
The English fiction writer Elizabeth Taylor certainly fits this profile. She would spend days on end just walking around Buckinghamshire market towns, sitting on her own in the Tudor tearooms, public gardens and pubs, listening in. And then she would pour into her novels and stories all her interest in social ineptitude and her hatred of fake sociability. Awkwardness and embarrassment are, Meg and Patrick in The Soul of Kindness (1964) agree, “underrated forms of suffering”.
“I never think embarrassment is a trivial emotion,” says Beatrice in Taylor’s story “Hester Lilly” (1954). Taylor’s characters live lives of stockbrokerish comfort and silent anguish, baking sponges for coffee mornings, hosting bridge evenings and enduring formula luncheons that always start with sherry and end with fool.
One of her opening sentences beautifully condenses the way that people steel themselves to join in with these rituals: “In the morning, Charles went down the garden to practise calling for three cheers.”
The New Zealand writer Janet Frame also nails perfectly these unseen dramas of shyness. Her narrators are full of hidden fire and verve, the opposite of the fearful self they present to others. As a child, Frame’s innate introversion was aggravated by her embarrassment at her wild frizz of red hair and her rotten teeth, which led her to cover her mouth when talking. She began to invest everything in her writing, retreating into a parallel world she called the “Mirror City”.
This city came to seem more real to her than the real world she floated through like a silent, timorous ghost. She was loath to spend the one currency of hers that might have any worth in this real world - talking about her life in the Mirror City - for fear its magic would be disenchanted. She would not even divulge the titles of her books to people she met. What she called her “primitive shyness” about her writing made her unwilling “to reduce or drain into speech the power supply of the named”.
All writers have this sense of a split between their literary and actual selves; for Frame, the split was full-blown and blighted her life.
“In conversation I am bedevilled,” she wrote in 1955. “In written expression an angel will visit.”
Her muteness or incoherence in the flesh meant that many who met her took her for a fool. She had channelled all the clever and lucid parts of her character into the self that sat alone at a writing desk, waiting for an angel to appear.
Frame’s fictional alter egos are tongue-tied women who think that the babble and prattle of the spoken word can never match the depth and nuance of writing.
“What is the use of speech?” the unspeaking Erlene reflects in Frame’s novel Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963). “On and on, saying nothing, the tattered bargain-price words, the great red-flagged sale of trivialities, the shutdown sellout of the mind?”
In another Frame novel, Towards Another Summer, Grace Cleave, an excruciatingly shy writer, has rashly accepted Philip Thirkettle’s invitation to spend the weekend with him and his young family. (The book was published posthumously because it is based on a real weekend that Frame spent at the home of the Guardian writer Geoffrey Moorhouse.)
For Grace, the weekend is hell. She rehearses platitudinous lines in her head - “I do like cheese on toast”, “I’ve so enjoyed your cooking” - and sometimes manages to say them. But mostly her words “scuttle to the sheltering foliage of incoherence”. She longs to sit in her London bedsit at her Olivetti typewriter, with the warm light of the Anglepoise shining over the keys, “sending out noisy signals to herself”.
Frame, like many shy writers, has a sobering sense that language always, in the end, sells us short. Words are a compromise, aimed at reaching fleetingly across the unbridgeable divide between us all. We are all tongue-tied; some of us are just more aware of it than others.
Agatha Christie, like Frame, avoided social gatherings for fear of seeming, as she put it, “imbecile with shyness”. She, too, made amends for her inarticulacy in the flesh with fluency on the page. In her case this resulted in almost 100 books, millions of words to act as counter-ballast to her real-life reticence. But Christie’s solution was quite different to Frame’s. It was to create characters who were starkly her opposite - like the nosy and fearless Miss Marple, or the hyper-confident Hercule Poirot, an actor manque who sees the apprehending of the villain as an occasion for bravura intellectual display.
“If you are doubly burdened, first by acute shyness, and secondly by only seeing the right thing to do or say 24 hours later, what can you do?” Christie wrote in the Daily Mail in 1938. “Only write about quick-witted men and resourceful girls whose reactions are like greased lightning.”
She confided to her diary that she thought Poirot “an egocentric creep”.
Writers find all kinds of indirect ways of writing about their shyness. Another of these oblique strategies is to conjure up an imaginary world in which shyness is a common feeling - one that, rather than just alienating people from each other, unites them in their fears and vulnerabilities.
For Garrison Keillor, who grew up a gangly, awkward boy with “a powerful wish to be invisible”, the fictional prairie town of Lake Wobegon serves this role. Here, in a shyness-cultivating part of the world somewhere north-west of Minneapolis, even close friends stand an arm’s length apart, romantic passion is voiced as mild interest and the Norwegian bachelor farmers all eat shy-busting Powdermilk biscuits.
Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip, of which Keillor is a lifelong fan, taps into the same mood of upper-midwest diffidence. Charlie Brown is Schulz’s own shyness in cartoon form. With his anonymous round head, Charlie suffers that familiar seesawing between feeling horribly invisible most of the time and horribly visible some of the time. Schulz’s virtuosic twist is to give him a dog, Snoopy, who is a brilliant wordless communicator, and whose role is tomakehis master feel even more inadequate.
When it appeared on a page of noisy comic strips all jostling for attention, Peanuts drew the eye with its clean lines and white spaces, the boldness with which it said so little. The mood music of Minnesotan weather - the softly falling snowflakes, the frozen ponds on which the characters skate silently and the stone-faced snowmen they build and befriend, only for them to melt away - adds to the general ambience of stillness and quiet. In Peanuts, problems remain unresolved and words unspoken. Its signature note is the bathetic non-ending, a final panel with Charlie Brown exhaling a *sigh*, smiling wonkily with sweat beads shooting off his face or blushing in a way that fills his face with diagonal lines.
Schulz knew that shyness has no narrative arc: the shy just have to carry on being shy. A daily comic strip was his way of dealing with this, communicating with the world remotely by creating his own world with a few bold pen strokes, and signing his name at the end.
Schulz came to believe, with classically midwest self-deprecation, that his own inhibitions were just inverted narcissism. “Shyness,” he wrote, “is the overtly self-conscious thinking that you are the only person in the world; that how you look and what you do is of any importance.” But the lesson of Peanuts is quite the reverse. Who, after all, is a better model of humanity: Lucy van Pelt, who shouts at the world with bone-shuddering and misplaced conviction, or Charlie Brown, a gentle, fair-minded stoic?
Tove Jansson’s Moomins books are also full of introverts, shrewish animals who hide under sinks or wander around the world in search of the horizon, never saying a word. Jansson’s scraperboard illustrations scratch these characters out of a background of black India ink, as if they are emerging warily out of the gloom.
With only the thinnest pen line - a tiny widening of the eye pupil, a downturned eyebrow or the sole of a foot treading charily through snow - she conveys their fear. But the Moomins themselves are more successful role models for the shy. They like to wander in the forest alone, enjoying its silence and stillness, or to burrow into warm, private spaces. But they sulk and skulk only fleetingly. Mostly they retreat so as to think deeply and make something - a painting, a poem or a boat carved out of bark - as a way of whittling meaning out of a frightening world.
Jansson’s lesson is not that shy people should come out of their shells; it is that they should embrace that shyness and put it to artful use.
Freud saw writing as one of the “prosthetic Gods” that humans have created, partly to shield themselves from the world. By rendering us temporarily invisible and disembodied, the written word allows us to communicate with other people at one remove. Shy writers can use the technologies of writing in the same way, as both a buffer against and a conduit to others.
Janet Frame loved her typewriter as if it were an extra limb that connected her with the world, and felt as orphaned without it as today’s teenagers when unglued from their phones. The most assertive she ever became was when fighting to keep her typewriter while confined in New Zealand’s mental hospitals.
Agatha Christie, meanwhile, was an early adopter of the portable tape recorder. Dictating her words to a secretary made her self-conscious, and she would stumble and lose her rhythm. A tape machine, whirring and wheezing away, was a friendly audience, and it let her click the pause button and gather up her thoughts.
For Garrison Keillor, the radio microphone did the trick. By mastering radio’s synthetic spontaneity, dropping well-timed “y’knows” and “kindas” into his sentences, he managed to turn himself into someone else, someone who could speak freely without worrying about people yawning or looking at their watches.
Almost all shy people, I have found, have the same fear as Keillor and me: boring others. Writing, like all kinds of performance, is a chance for the shy to acquire a veneer of confidence and ease. When people first saw Morrissey fronting the Smiths - yodelling his wild falsetto, rotating gladioli above his head, writhing on the floor - could any of them have guessed that he was escaping from what he called “the huddled shyness of my life”?
And yet many of his songs, like “Half a Person” and “Never Had No One Ever”, are about loneliness, unrequited feeling, climbing into empty beds, feeling ugly and unwanted. His lyrics veer cagily between the first and second person, a teasing mix of the earnest and the evasive.
The Smiths song “Ask” seems to be coaxing someone, perhaps Morrissey’s younger self, out of his shyness, but it can’t decide whether “shyness is nice” or not. Morrissey manages paradoxically to appear secure, to bare his soul without ever seeming needy or inadequate. His odd mix of shyness and confidence is a neat trick to pull off - and perhaps, today, a necessary one. For in our confessional culture, with its cult of therapeutic openness, shyness seems to be increasingly looked on with confusion and suspicion.
A colleague of mine told me that he had given Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to a friend, who had come back to him thoroughly affronted by the narrator’s shyness, which he dismissed as “arrogance in low heels”. Shyness now often inspires such impatience, my colleague reflected; it has “lost its virtuous glow in a tell-all age”.
Alan Bennett, who became friends with Morrissey when they lived near each other in Camden in the 1990s, maps this cultural shift in his work. Bennett inherited from his mother a sense that shyness stood for sensitivity and refinement. For her, it was a burdensome virtue - one you might prefer not to have, but which did at least save you from being “common”, an antithetical state to shyness with “a degree of groundless pushing yourself forward”. Bennett eventually decided that this was rubbish, that shy people could be “a bit of a bore” and that “social ease can and should be faked”. But for Bennett’s characters, shyness is not so easily shaken off.
Andy in Getting On (1971) is a virginal youth untouched by the 60s counterculture, whose father mistakenly believes he is living in a “haze of pot and cheap fellowship”. Trevor Hopkins, the polytechnic lecturer in the TV play Me - I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1978), always takes a book on buses so he has somewhere to look. Life, impatient of their fears and hesitancies, is leaving these characters behind.
“Have you ever thought what’s happened to all the shy people?” Andy asks in Getting On. “Whatever happened to reserve, Dad, and self-consciousness? Was it your government that got rid of guilt?”
Unlike his father, Andy has already learned that shyness is as resilient as all the other things that the youth cult of the 60s was meant to have swept away, like snobbery, hypocrisy and middle-aged complacency. Bennett’s characters have entered an era in which shyness is no longer the equivocal virtue it had been to his mother, but a disability it is one’s duty to defeat.
Personal growth is one of today’s growth industries. Its guiding principle is that your personality is plastic and pliable, a skillset you can learn and develop. Our self-help culture trades on stories of people who have transformed themselves from depressed solitaries into social butterflies, the psychological equivalent of those slimmers of the year who pose in their old and now outsized pants. But what Bennett and all these other writers tell us is that shyness cannot simply be “busted” or “conquered”. It is a stubborn disposition: we can learn to hide it, channel it, finesse it or work around it, but we can never quite defeat it.
Even the vicarious communication of print proves an anticlimax. The neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks grappled with this problem for years, wanting to be noticed for his writing but unsure if this was allowed. When his first book was reviewed in the newspapers, his father, also a doctor, was appalled, for at the time one could be struck off the medical register for advertising. Sacks half-agreed with him, and for years misread the word “publish” as “punish”.
On reaching old age, he declared himself “sorry to be as agonisingly shy at 80 as I was at 20”. Diagnosed with ocular cancer, he would go off on his own to cry, but found that even when alone he was too shy to scream.
If they cannot offer me the solace that my shyness might be overcome, have these shy writers taught me anything more useful? Perhaps this: by taking shyness as a subject, they have made it real. All my life I have thought of shyness as a debility, an inadequacy, an absence. But for these writers it is a definite, if painful, quality - something you are, not something that stops you being who you are. It is less a shrinking away from the world than a redirection of our energies.
Rather than smother our sociable impulses, it just makes us social in convoluted ways. Shyness is simply part of being a human, this more or less communal species which happens to be lumbered with a strange gift for turning in and reflecting on itself. There will always be a tension between our gregarious instincts and our desire to creep away from the tribe and be alone with our thoughts. In all of us that tension is differently strung, but surely it was ever thus.
It can feel especially hard to be shy in the age of the selfie, when social networks and the smartphone have emboldened people to bring their personal lives into the open in ways that would have seemed bizarre just a few years ago and still seem bizarre to me. Ours is the era of the open-plan office, the library as “social learning zone”, the meeting as creative “sandpit”, the tweet as self-praise: an age of nonstop networking, humblebragging and oversharing. But then I remember that these same technologies have created their own forms of shy art, ones that let us relate to each other in amounts we can control, like a saline drip.
Texting, introduced by Nokia in the 90s as an afterthought, took off unexpectedly among shy Finnish teenagers, because it gave those more dexterous with their thumbs than their tongues the chance to be more intrepid than in real life. Texts, tweets and social media updates allow us to blend intimacy with artifice.
We can hide behind avatars and emojis, and say the things that embarrass us face-to-face, or experiment with suaver versions of ourselves. Perhaps human ingenuity has conjured up the text message for the same reason it invented the alphabet a few thousand years ago. We want to say what we feel, to open our hearts to others. But we can’t - not without something to help us do it from afar.
So we are all shy authors now. We compose our words carefully with our thumbs, editing and deleting as we go. And then, with a little wince, we press send.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd.
