When the distinguished sociologist Erving Goffman was starting out on his career, he spent 18 months on the Shetland island of Unst doing the groundwork for his doctoral thesis. Unst is the most northerly of Britain’s inhabited islands, and when Goffman reached there from the University of Chicago in the winter of 1949, he found 60 square miles of treeless, low-lying peat occupied by a thousand people, none of them saying very much – either to him as an outsider or, so far as he could tell, among themselves.
Unless liberated by beer, conversations were limited to brief remarks about the fast-changing weather. The immodest pronoun “I” rarely featured. When a woman was complimented on her appearance, she would stare thunderously at her feet. If a stranger entered the school classroom, the children would cover their faces with their hands and view the visitor through their fingers. Women cried occasionally at feature films shown in the darkened village hall; otherwise the islanders, even at funerals, shed no tears.
On what’s known as the shy-bold continuum of human behaviour, Unst stands out as an ultima Thule of shyness (though perhaps only because other northern islands lack a similar sociological study). Few of us now alive can have grown up anywhere as wordless, self-effacing and stoic. Nonetheless, while reading Joe Moran’s account of Unst in his excellent new study of shyness (Shrinking Violets, published this month by Profile Books), I found echoes of it in my own childhood.
I was a shy boy in a shy society – or rather, in a quiet society where shyness went less noticed. It was the confident and articulate who drew attention to themselves and were condemned for it. “He’s got the gift o’ the gab.” “She could talk the hind legs aff a donkey.” “That family is never backward in comin’ forrit.” Forrit – forward – meant pushing ahead to grab what was on offer. Nobody in Fife in 1950 could have imagined The Apprentice.
In his book, Moran describes shyness as “a low-intensity, mundane, chronic, nebulous and hard-to-define condition” that lacks “the pathos of afflictions such as madness or melancholia, and [has] none of the drama of major life experiences like love, loss and grief”. Charles Darwin thought it universal among human beings but never fathomed the point of it. So far as he was concerned, blushing “makes the blusher to suffer and the beholder uncomfortable, without being of the least service to either of them”. I could never understand the point of it either, but I had it, and to some extent still do: an unpredictable onrush of self-consciousness that reddens the cheeks, confuses or even abolishes speech, and turns an assembly of strangers into an ordeal.
An example. In my early teens I developed a passionate interest in Clyde pleasure steamers, and joined an association of like-minded enthusiasts, the Clyde River Steamer Club, which organised annual excursions on little ships to unusual destinations. You might think that such a club would be filled with shy people – “anoraks” as they would now be known – and perhaps it was, but I was from Fife and not Clydeside, and when I boarded the club’s excursion vessel I knew nobody – a state of affairs that hadn’t changed five hours later when we disembarked.
Throughout that time I stood at the rail and hoped that somebody would talk to me, even if only to ask what was in my sandwiches or would I like one of theirs. Nobody did. The changing view of seaside villas and rugged scenery couldn’t compensate for my gathering sense of shame that I neither looked interesting enough to speak to nor could find in myself the everyday courage to speak first. “It was fine,” I said, when my Greenock aunt asked how the day had gone, but it had been a private humiliation.
Where did my shyness come from? It was generally agreed that my mother’s side of the family bore the responsibility, and I gathered fresh evidence of the truth of this a few years ago when I tried to kiss a dear cousin goodbye and she, then aged nearly 80, shrank away with words like “Och, you surely haven’t learned that habit!”, a reference to what Moran calls “the ever-evolving etiquette of tactility” that has crept north through Britain – from Mayfair to Aberdeen and maybe to Unst – to make all of us who started life as non-touchers feel uneasy.
A refuge of sorts lay in writing. As Moran observes, shyness turns the afflicted into onlookers, close readers “of the signs and wonders of the social world”. Retrospective self-analysis of this kind is notoriously dangerous – cause and effect leaves too little to chance – but the fact is that I began to enjoy observing and describing things and decided journalism might offer a career.
The ambition unsettled my parents, who thought, not unreasonably, that their son wouldn’t thrive in a profession that required its practitioners – this was the example that came to their minds – to talk their way across the doorsteps of the recently bereaved. I wondered about this too, and it came as a relief to discover some years later that newspapers had on their staff people who were as shy if not shyer than I was; that reporting and editing could summon a different kind of personality to the sharp-suited figure who made wisecracks in the films.
But it was letter writing as a hobby rather than journalism as a career that provided the most common form of literary salvation for the shy, particularly shy women, many of whom became accomplished, in the words of Frank and Anita Kermode, “in the business of … easy, delicate self-exposure” to correspondents they rarely met. The novelist Elizabeth Taylor, whose shyness intensified after a firework accident left scars on her neck, exchanged letters for more than 25 years with the writer Robert Liddell who lived faraway in Athens.
“Taylor used letter-writing to cathartically dissect her social embarrassments,” Moran writes, but it may also be true that sending letters to people who knew you only from words on paper allowed the writer to confect an epistolary personality, to exaggerate, distort or plain invent herself and the life around her. Taylor wrote a story of what happens when an expatriate novelist returns to England to discover that the version of village life given by his dedicated correspondent, a shy, single woman, is let down by reality. This story, The Letter Writers, was published in 1951, prefiguring by half a century the self-inventing temptations of social media.
Alan Bennett, a shy man whose working-class parents thought of reticence as a mark of sensitivity and refinement, once wrote that he had “clung far too long to the notion that shyness was a virtue, and not, as I came too late to see, a bore”. That seems right. Shyness can make people attractive: Bobby Charlton, Dirk Bogarde, Morrissey. It can lead to lives of “complicated dissimulation, full of subtleties and detours”, as a French psychiatrist, Ludovic Dugas, wrote in a book aptly called Les Grands Timides. But it has no moral quality. Being shy is not the same as being good.
The evidence is there on the web – in Facebook, Twitter, and the comment threads that have liberated shy people from their real identities and face-to-face contact on an unprecedented scale, and which use the written word rather than speech as their medium. Concealed by pseudonyms, individuals express their opinions, desires and hatreds to an audience of strangers with never a blush. We, the shy, have as much of the night about us as anyone else.
