by Joe Moran
We tend to see shyness as a recoiling or withdrawing, which is why the metaphors we use to describe it often draw on mollusks and crustaceans: “close as an oyster,” “clamlike,” “in one’s shell.” Hermit crabs have a particular reputation for being shy, for scuttling to hide their fleshy, vulnerable bodies in borrowed periwinkle or whelk shells. And yet many are not shy at all. In fact, they are bold enough to dislodge other hermit crabs from bigger and more desirable residences in a brutal eviction process: the aggressor grabs hold of its rival, and the two clack their shells together. The marine biologist Mark Briffa, working in rock pools along the Devon and Cornwall coasts of England, found that hermit crabs offered yet another example of the shy-bold continuum. He upended them and poked them until they tucked their abdomens back into their shells and then timed how long it took them to venture out again. The crabs he caught in Devon turned out to be shyer than those caught in Cornwall, probably owing to local differences in the number of predators and the size of waves.
Nature is messier than the human-inflected metaphors we attach to it, and human shyness is messier still. Hermit crabs do not all hide timidly in their shells, nor is this an especially good way of imagining shyness. It is true that shyness can make us retreat from others, tongue-tied, blushing, and subdued. But it can also make us the opposite of these things: awkwardly loquacious, aloof-seeming, or skillful in wearing social masks.
Another metaphor that has stuck, “shrinking violet,” was first used by the poet, critic, and leading light of the Romantic movement Leigh Hunt in his magazine, The Indicator, in 1820. Long before, though, the Viola odorata, or sweet violet, had been symbolic of shyness because of its bent neck, its small flowers appearing briefly in March and April, and its intense but fleeting smell, which is partly produced by a chemical, ionine, that temporarily anesthetizes the nerve endings in our noses. The Romantics fastened on the violet as the diffident harbinger of spring. The Irish poet Thomas Moore, in his 1817 Oriental romance Lalla Rookh, wrote of a maiden who “steals timidly away, / Shrinking as violets do in summer’s ray.” In an 1818 sonnet John Keats called the violet the “Queen of secrecy.” For the Quaker poet Bernard Barton, writing in 1824, violets were “mutely eloquent . . . / Rejoicing in their own obscure recess.”
Bent neck aside, there is nothing very shrinking about violets. The Edwardian plant collector Reginald Farrer, who traveled the world in search of samples and certainly knew more about violets than any Romantic poet, called them “rampageous” because they spread so vigorously and would “thrive anywhere and make unobtrusive masses in any cool, good soil.”21 The great naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt, in his travels in Latin America in the early 1800s, gathered violets everywhere, from the valleys of the Amazon to the slopes of the Andes. Violets grow in scrub, woodlands, prairies, swamps, and bogs, and in suburban gardens they are as tenacious as any weed. Individual violets may shrink, but collectively they are eye-catching and attention-grabbing, showing up like chunks of amethyst in the undergrowth. The ancient Greek lyric poet Pindar described Athens as “violet-crowned,” a phrase that even today captures the purplish tinge that Mount Hymettus assumes from a distance at sunset because of the violets that grow on it. Goethe used to carry violet seeds in his pockets, scattering them on his walks around Weimar as his own contribution to the beauty of the world.
Perhaps, then, the violet is rather a good metaphor for shyness after all. Shyness is about much more than just shrinking away. Violets “shrink” not in retreating from the world but in evincing nature’s talent for endless variation and for sustaining life in the most varied habitats. Shyness, too, can flourish in many climates and soils and express itself in many ways. It can, like the violet, be accompanied by a surprising resilience, even stubbornness. And its effects may be inconspicuous in individuals but, when viewed en masse, like that violet glow on Mount Hymettus, seem to run like a vein through much human endeavor, from the sublimations of art, music, and writing to the masquerades of social life.
This book tries to think about shyness in this way, as part of common human experience. It is a field guide, a collective biography, and a necessarily elliptical history of the shy. While there may be the odd nugget of memoir smuggled through customs here in the lining of my luggage, the book is not meant to be an apologia for my own diffidentia. Instead, I try to write about my shyness obliquely, hiding behind the human shield of people more interestingly and idiosyncratically shy than I am. For one result of my shyness has been to leave me feeling adrift in our age of oversharing, distrustful of this modern fondness for filtering narrative through cathartic confession—although I can see that holding forth on one’s shyness, however indirectly, within the pages of a book might seem illogical. But that is what shyness so often is.
Out of the bunch of human shrinking violets whose experiences and reflections make up this book, some have dealt with their shyness stoically, others creatively, others self-pityingly, others with such seamless social skill that they hardly seemed shy at all. Shyness breeds reclusives, self-obsessives, brooders, procrastinators, skeptics, nonjoiners, daydreamers, deep thinkers, artists, performers, quiet heroes, defenders of the underdog, and humanitarians who channel their buried sociability into public works. It is, I have come to see, a multilayered and unsummarizable condition, a persistent backbeat of life on top of which we improvise our own riffs and refrains.
Even if it were in my shy nature to cheerlead, which it isn’t, it would be hard to be a cheerleader for a state as awkward to pin down as shyness. But I hope I can also avoid Ormonde Maddock Dalton’s monotonously melancholic perspective and provide some solace for the shy. I want to show my fellow shrinking violets that our condition can sometimes allow us to see fresh angles that others might have missed and to reroute our dormant social impulses into new and creative areas. “Les grands timides,” as the French psychiatrist Ludovic Dugas called the shy in a 1922 book of that name, lead lives of “complicated dissimulation, full of subtleties and detours.”22 Humans are social animals by instinct and by default setting; shyness simply makes us social in peculiar and circuitous ways. It is less a shrinking away from the world than a displacement or redirection of our energies. It can offer us accidental compensations, prodding us into doing what we might not have done if we had found our everyday encounters more congenial. It leads us down stimulating side streets after it has blocked off the main routes; it takes us off on unintended tangents.
Mostly, though, I see shyness as neither a boon nor a burden, but as part of the ineluctable oddness of being human. This makes it a fertile ground for exploring bigger questions about what it means to be a living, breathing, thinking self, aware that it is sharing a planet with billions of other such selves. Perhaps the oddest of many odd things about shyness is that, unlike other anxious states such as fear, shame, and even embarrassment, it never strikes when we are alone. However long it has existed, it must surely have added much to the sum of human loneliness. But it also lays bare how linked we are, how much we matter to each other.
2
This Odd State of Mind
When his eldest daughter, Annie, was a year old, Charles Darwin noted how she fixed her gaze unblinkingly on a stranger’s face as if it were a lifeless object. She could not yet see that faces belonged to other selves who might be looking at and taking note of her. He observed the first inkling of such awareness in his firstborn son, William, when he was two years and three months old. After Darwin had been away from home for ten days, he noticed that his son was uneasy around him and kept his eyes averted from his. The boy’s downward glance, that classic sign of self-consciousness, revealed that locking his gaze with another’s was now an encounter between two minds, each concerned with how the other might view it.1
For Darwin this “odd state of mind,” shyness, was a great puzzle in his theory of evolution, for it held no obvious benefit for our species.2 It seemed like an unplanned by-product of the complexity of human consciousness, of our acqu
iring the ability to imagine how we might be imagined by other minds, but without ever being able to find this out conclusively (“Thank God,” most of us would say).
As an evolutionary biologist, Darwin thought that shyness was a human universal, but he was not alone in thinking that his own countryfolk offered up some especially rich case studies, and indeed he, too, had this “odd state of mind.” All his life he suffered from psychosomatic ailments—stomach cramps, vomiting fits, skin complaints. He worked best alone, hated confrontation, and procrastinated for years over publication of his theory of evolution. Darwin was lucky: his rival in formulating this theory was shy as well. Alfred Russel Wallace writes in his autobiography that he became shy as an adolescent, when he started growing very rapidly—reaching the great height, for a Victorian, of six foot one—and, as one of nine children in a genteelly poor family, had to wear clothes that were often shabby and too small and tight in the crotch. In January 1844, when he turned twenty-one, he made a frank inventory of his inadequacies: “I am shy, clumsy and lack confidence. I have no social sophistication . . . I am an abysmal public speaker . . . I have no wit or sense of humour . . . I can recognize wit in others, which argues for a capacity to develop it in my boring self.”3
Well into his thirties he dreamed of having to go to school as a grown-up, opening his desk, and rummaging inside to hide his face, “suffering over again with increased intensity the shyness and sense of disgrace of my boyhood.” And yet Wallace came to be grateful for what he called his “constitutional shyness,” which he felt had given him long periods of solitary study and a hesitancy over words that led him to avoid the verbosity that marred so many scholarly works.4
But Wallace’s shyness, like Darwin’s, made him delay over publishing his findings. Darwin’s diffidence over the most contentious aspect of On the Origin of Species, meanwhile, led him to include only one sentence on humans, and that in its closing paragraphs: “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” Even after the book appeared, Darwin’s worries about how it would be received left him covered in a nervous rash and suffering from headaches and nausea. He became a virtual recluse and grew a bushy beard, which so transformed his looks that when he reentered public life in 1866, not even his friends recognized him. In the sixth and final edition of Origin, published in 1872, he boldly inserted a single extra word at the start of the by-now-famous sentence on humans: “Much.”
In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) Darwin explored how humans and other animals manifest their feelings. He observed that all our expressions of emotion have equivalents in other animals, except one, which he called “the most peculiar and the most human”: blushing. The consensus on blushing in Darwin’s time was that it revealed the moral and spiritual dimension that separated us from the beasts. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had argued that the transparency of the human skin, unlike the “lifeless sheath” of other animals, allowed both the movement of the blood and the workings of the soul to be seen, so that “we have in this outward manifestation, as it were, the real fount of life made visible.”5
In his book The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing (1839) Thomas Burgess, a physician and expert on acne at the Blenheim Street dispensary in London, turned his attention to this “beautiful and interesting phenomenon,” which he called the “lava of the heart.” He began by dismissing the colonialist prejudice that savage peoples were incapable of blushing and thus naturally shameless. He had observed that one of his black servants had scar tissue on her cheek that went red whenever he told her off, and had seen African albinos exhibited in Paris who had blushed spectacularly, not just on the face but on the ears, neck, and breasts. Blushing, he inferred, was a universal trait, displayed by everyone except very small children and congenital idiots.
Burgess believed that since blushing was universal, it was evidence of intelligent design by our creator. God had invented the blush so that our souls might display our moral lapses on our cheeks. Noting that Charlotte Corday, who murdered the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, was said to have blushed after the guillotine had severed her head—whether she was embarrassed about killing Marat or about being beheaded was unclear—Burgess wondered if this meant that “the stimulus which excites the blush has a higher or more elevated origin than that assigned to the animal or instinctive passions.” The flaw in Burgess’s argument, as he himself conceded, was that timid people often blushed for no reason. Young people could seem abashed simply on entering a room or on being asked a routine question. He sidestepped this problem by inventing a new category, the “False Blush.” Blushes in this category perverted the original intent of blushing and had no cause other than “an extreme state of morbid sensibility.”6
Darwin knew all this was nonsense. Blushing, he wrote, which “makes the blusher to suffer and the beholder uncomfortable, without being of the least service to either of them,” had no moral or any other purpose. He noted cases of young women who had to undress in front of doctors blushing right down to their thighs and found it extraordinary that the assumed opinion of others could excite such emotion and affect something so random as the circulation of the blood. Blushing, he decided, was caused by the strange human capacity for “self-attention.”7
Darwin was fascinated by this weird addendum to evolution, human self-consciousness, which meant that, aside from the involuntary act of blushing, we learned to stifle our most extreme emotional expressions. Although infants routinely screamed for long periods, he observed, adults were taught to suppress these instincts, to different degrees in different parts of the world. Some indigenous peoples wept copiously for trifling reasons. He had read of a New Zealand chief who cried like a baby because some sailors had spilled flour over his favorite cloak and of Maori women proud of being able to voluntarily shed tears and wail theatrically when they met to mourn the dead. In continental Europe men also shed tears fairly freely, but Englishmen “rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief.”8 Darwin put himself in this group. Only one thing, for the rest of his life, reduced him reliably to tears: a photograph of his beloved Annie, who had died at the age of ten, staring unblinkingly at the camera.
At the end of the eighteenth century foreign visitors to England had begun to note that its people were suffering from a queer and incurable condition. In London clubs and coffeehouses, once admired for their urbane talk, patrons sat in silence reading their newspapers, occasionally muttering to their neighbors under their breath. Archbishop Talleyrand called it “une taciturnité toute anglaise.” English reserve was seen as a strange amalgam of shyness, insecurity, and conceit. In the 1820s the French traveler Édouard de Montulé remarked that this English coldness “combined the theatrical hauteur of the Neapolitan with the severe pride of the Prussian.”9
These travelers were unnerved by the silence of English public spaces. On the Continent “une conversation à l’Angloise” became a euphemism for a long silence. A German tourist, Ludwig Wolff, was astonished to hear no more than a hundred words during a journey in a packed stagecoach from York to Leeds in 1833. English drivers rarely talked even to their horses, as their Continental counterparts did. While French gastronomy was seen as a complete art of the table, good food being merely the garnish to conversation and conviviality, the English ate their meals to the unaccompanied sound of scraping cutlery. They had numerous social conventions for dispensing with words, such as placing a teaspoon in their cup to signal that they did not want more tea. Even drawing-room furniture discouraged talk, as the French politician Baron d’Haussez observed in 1833 of the “immense and heavy fauteuils, which appear calculated to produce sleep rather than conversation.”10
Foreign visitors also noted the English talent for privacy and enclosure. Houses were hidden behind iron fences and dense hedges, railway carriages were divided into small compartments, and alehouses had partitions separated by green baize curtains on brass rails. Along the Thames there were “shades,�
� stalls separated by wooden boards, in which men retired after working in the City to drink wine and cogitate alone, never speaking to their shade-abiding neighbors. In The English at Home (1861) the French writer Alphonse Esquiros called this phenomenon “separation in union—the type of English life.”11
Many felt that these behaviors were all symptoms of the same illness: anxiety about social class. When the English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote in 1833 of “the most noticeable trait in our national character, our reserve, and that orgueil [pride] . . . which is the displeasure, the amazement, and the proverb of our continental visitors,” he attributed it to the subtle social gradations in English society, the shifting of class boundaries, and the difficulty in judging social positions, all while aristocratic arrogance remained as strong as ever. English shyness was, he thought, a compound of vanity and anxiety, a reluctance to say anything that might expose one to social disdain. The same quality could be found all over England, and thus slowly, “from the petty droppings of the well of manners, the fossilized incrustations of national character are formed.”12
In 1834, at the age of twenty-five, one such antisocial Englishman, Alexander Kinglake, set out on a journey through Europe and the Ottoman Empire. He had the combination of shyness and coolness that Bulwer-Lytton had just identified and that seemed especially to afflict men taught in the English public schools and universities. After narrowly avoiding the plague in Constantinople, he made his way to the Holy Land and from Gaza began the hardest part of his journey: an eight-day slog across the Sinai desert, with a small entourage of English servants and Bedouin guides.