by Joe Moran
This was Erving Goffman’s theory of social embarrassment proven on a national scale. Everyone was conspiring to conceal an awkward situation that did not in fact need to be concealed, for they were all well aware of it. The king’s stammer was the nation’s open secret. The press hardly mentioned it—when they did, they said it was a small handicap that happily had now been surmounted—and the archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, caused huge offense before the king’s coronation by mentioning it in the mildest terms. Newsreel films of the king’s speeches were often censored to spare everyone’s discomfort. Yet Mass Observation, a social research organization that specialized in unearthing unspoken public sentiment, found it was at the forefront of people’s minds when they listened to him, making them feel both anxious and protective. Many, like Bill’s dad in Hope and Glory, told themselves his stutter was getting better.
When the king addressed the nation on Victory in Europe day, his longest ever broadcast at thirteen minutes, Mass Observation found many listeners worrying about his stammer and finding his halting delivery both painful and touching. One woman interviewed said she felt, like most people she knew, “admiration for the way he faces his difficulties, fear that he shall trip up, and a kind of personal embarrassment when he seems likely to do so.” A Mass Observation investigator heard the VE day broadcast in a Chelsea pub with the room hushed like a church. Whenever the king halted over a hard word, her young Marxist neighbor tutted loudly and was the “centre of looks of intense malevolence from all corners of the room.”34
The king’s task, which was to pretend that he didn’t have a stammer when everyone knew he did, was far from being the most heroic sacrifice of the war. But there was still a kind of valor in his so unfailingly doing the homework set by Logue—gargling with warm water and standing at open windows intoning tongue twisters like “She sifted seven thick-stalked thistles through strong thick sieves” and “Let’s go gathering healthy heather with the gay brigade of grand dragoons”—just so he could do his bit to sustain this collective fiction. It is an obligation to others to which even the shy and the stammering have to sign up: an agreement to use the tongues in our heads to make sense of the world together with words, to ensure that the silence between us is not too deadly.
Those who are tragically deprived of the ability to speak, like the character of George VI in The King’s Speech, tend to receive our automatic sympathy in a way not always granted to those who are merely unwilling or incoherent speakers. Being able to speak has become the sine qua non of modern life. In the postwar years an increasingly secular society adopted a new article of faith: better communication. The war effort had put a high value on teamwork and encouraged psychologists to study group dynamics. Human relations management theorists argued that workers were more productive when they felt consulted in decisions. Educational research stressed that groups learned more by talking than by passive listening. Workplaces discarded their formal hierarchies in favor of collaboration and talking things out. Just as surely as church spires were built to reach heavenwards in hope, so the architecture of modern life supported this article of faith: that if we carried on talking, a point would come when all would be understood. The open-plan office, although its real purpose was to reduce rent costs by getting rid of redundant square footage taken up by linking corridors and partition walls, was justified with evangelical invocations of the creativity of chance conversations.
More recently, universities have been consumed by the same rhetoric that talk is an unalloyed good. Their libraries are no longer silent cathedrals but social hubs divided into “quiet zones” and “social learning zones.” Having conducted unofficial fieldwork in these zones over a number of years, my provisional research findings are that “quiet zones” rarely are and that the merits of “social learning” over the dully traditional arts of reading and contemplation remain at best unconfirmed.
In Speaking into the Air the philosopher John Durham Peters claims that we now live by a dialogic ideal, a belief in the possibility and desirability of humans attaining a pure meeting of minds through better communication. He traces this ideal as far back as Saint Augustine, for whom the model of perfect communion was the angel, whose name comes from the Greek angelos, meaning “messenger.” Angels, Augustine said, could commune instantly and telepathically without the obstacle of distance or the imperfections of language. The new media of the Victorian era revived this long-held dream of angelic contact. A romantic aura surrounded new inventions like telegraphy and the telephone, which were linked in the public mind with fads like mesmerism and telepathy and with the ideal of empathetic connection developing within psychology, as part of a single dream: communicating with others perfectly.35
For Peters this search for perfect communication is a fool’s errand, for not everything important can be put into words or shared with others. Much that is meaningful in our lives is beyond the reach of language, he writes, such as “the dreams I forget on waking; the conversations children have with their ‘air friends’ when they are alone; the sound of the heartbeat in my ears as I lie upon the pillow.” The dialogic ideal has no respect for the inaccessibility of other people and is “a pogrom against the distinctness of human beings.” The failure of communication, with its attendant awareness that we can never truly know anyone else, teaches us the humility to accept the otherness of others and allows for the “bursting open of pity, generosity, and love.”36
Like Peters, I find it hard to sign up to the modern shibboleth that it is always good to talk. In an age that seems to be driven by the dubious belief that pouring one’s heart out is the best way of purging oneself of anxiety or disappointment, I wonder if there is something to be said for the lost art of bottling things up. A problem shared may be a problem halved, but it is also a problem made real, brought into the world of concrete and communal meaning. Something you thought about saying, but didn’t, can be forgotten when the mood passes, dismissed as the ignis fatuus it perhaps was. But something you said out loud, and that someone else answered and echoed with the reassuring nods and hums that feel like empathy, is harder to put back in the box and forget about.
In a culture that values talk as an end in itself, the risk is that we will unburden ourselves to each other, in ever louder voices, without stopping to think about how much sense we are making or if anyone is really listening. Once, in a seminar, I spotted one of my students deploying a graceful gesture that involved extending his arm at ninety degrees, slowly unclenching the fist and gazing upward, as if he had released a helium-filled balloon and it was escaping into the air. I asked him what this meant, and it turned out to be a youth-culture meme, the “awkward balloon,” the release of which signifies that an uneasy silence has fallen. I wasn’t clear whether the gesture was meant to exacerbate or dissipate the awkwardness, but the meaning was the same: silence is awkward and to be avoided. I did not say to him—for, naturally, being tongue-tied, I couldn’t think of a reply until later—that, in small doses, awkward silences might be useful. In a world of constant babble, such hiatuses, however discomfiting, might inspire a thoughtfulness about how much we can ever really know one another.
The cry “no one understands me,” often voiced by the shy, if only in their own heads, rarely sounds appealing to any listener. But the shy and tongue-tied can also be more aware than most that no one really understands anyone. They have a salutary sense of the limits of language and are not afflicted by the hubristic delusion that we can ever make ourselves truly understood. Speech is an extraordinarily sophisticated human skill, requiring brain, breath, tongue, and teeth to work in unison to bring the amorphous workings of the mind into verbal coherence. Such a demanding trick can never be pulled off perfectly. The inarticulate know that language is an evolutionary make-do, aimed at reaching fleetingly across the unbridgeable mental divide between us all. In that sense we are all tongue-tied; some of us are just more tongue-tied than others.
I am often told I am a good listener, but I am i
nclined to think that the standard of human listening is so low that to earn this accolade—particularly among my own largely benign but verbose tribe, Homo academicus—requires you simply to allow your conversational partner to speak while you deliver the odd raised eyebrow or noncommittal grunt. As I nod sagely and wonder once again how to disentangle myself from someone else’s monologue, Malinowski’s words spring to mind: “The hearer listens under some restraint and with slightly veiled impatience . . . For in this use of speech the bonds created between hearer and speaker are not quite symmetrical, the man linguistically active receiving the greater share of social pleasure and self-enhancement.”37
There is something we cling to in any unhappy situation that stops us from escaping it. I suspect that what sustains the shyness of many people is that conceited part of us that finds much social conversation to be an empty ritual, a mere filling in of awkward silence. The socially confident can seem to us not to be listening to each other at all, just playing a game of conversational catch, exchanging words like tossing balls. The shy are not just bad at small talk; we are against it on principle. We feel we have some special flair for avoiding platitudinous conversations, or what Cyril Connolly called that “ceremony of self-wastage” that takes place whenever fluent talkers assemble and dispense their energies in “noises upon the air.”38
We are wrong in despising small talk, of course—or at least we are searching for an unattainable truth. Not all conversation can be momentous or profound, because our inner lives will always be richer than our ability to articulate them, and talk is about creating common ground out of words, a shared reality that is, like all shared realities, fuzzy and flawed. Just as Malinowski found in Melanesia, some kinds of talk are nothing more than their pleasing surfaces and are no less real for that. All of us, including the shy, might as well seek meaning and take delight in those surfaces—because looking for depth in them is like trying to walk through a looking glass into a world that doesn’t exist.
5
Stage Fright
Dirk Bogarde blamed his shyness on the fateful moment when, aged thirteen, he acquired a baby brother. To lighten the domestic load after this unforeseen arrival, and to knock some sense into a boy doing badly at school, Bogarde’s father sent him to live with his aunt and her husband in Bishopbriggs, near Glasgow. He had been at his new school just a few days when his classmates, affronted by his posh English accent, stuffed his head down a toilet. Bogarde always claimed that his three Bishopbriggs years were the formative ones that made him accept loneliness as his natural state. He began building a wall round himself, learning to speak cryptically and cry discreetly without moving a facial muscle. He likened himself to a hermit crab, tight in his scavenged shell. “Like the ones I had scrabbled about for in rock-pools at Cuckmere Haven in the happier days, I was safe from predators,” he wrote, “and by predators I meant everyone I met.”1
When Bogarde became an actor, he realized too late that his shyness was unconquerable and that acting was the “wrong profession for such a malady; for malady it was which crippled me before I walked into a crowded room, theatre, restaurant or bar.”2 In 1955 he began touring in Ugo Betti’s light comedy Summertime. His starring role in the hit film Doctor in the House had turned him overnight into a matinee idol, his every entrance and exit in the play greeted with screams from young female fans. He had special trousers made with a side zip because if these women ever got near him, they were apt to rip open his flies. None of this did much for his already suffocating stage fright.
In November, Summertime opened at the Apollo on Shaftesbury Avenue in London’s West End. It was the year before Look Back in Anger transformed the postwar theatrical landscape, and this avenue still dominated British theater, first nights there being an occasion for tuxedos, furs, and tiaras. A West End theater was a daunting venue for actors who arrived there from the large provincial Alhambras and were struck by how intimate the auditoriums were, with audiences close enough to the stage that you could see their faces even in the dark. Every night, before the curtain went up, Bogarde would throw up in a dressing-room bucket.
“You can’t be as frightened as I am now and still be alive,” he told one reporter. “This is as near death, execution and everything else that I’ve ever come across . . . That terror releases a million things in your brain, titchy things in the soul, which come flooding in as a kind of antidote to the poison of terror.”3 It would be easy to dismiss this reaction as self-indulgent were it not that Bogarde had known more respectable kinds of fear, having fought on D-day and in the battle for Normandy, witnessed the bloody aftermath of bombing raids in France, and helped liberate Bergen-Belsen. All of these he endured, but after three weeks in the West End he was ill and had to be replaced.
Meanwhile, the seventeen-year-old Anna Massey was making a more successful West End debut at the Cambridge Theatre in another light comedy, William Douglas-Home’s The Reluctant Debutante. Massey also suffered from stage fright, which became so severe that the skin on her hands started peeling off. It did not help that while she was appearing in The Reluctant Debutante she was a reluctant deb for real, participant in that soon-to-be-defunct tradition in which young women had to curtsey to the queen at court and then spend the social season attending balls and parties. A perennial wallflower, she suffered stage fright in these settings as well. At one party, hosted by the duchess of Argyll, she waited by the front door to be collected an hour early, so mortified was she to be sitting on the sidelines while the prettier girls were whisked on to the dance floor.4
Although The Reluctant Debutante was a huge hit, running for two years in the West End and then transferring to Broadway, and her own performance as the spirited ingenue was much praised, it did little to boost her confidence. She tried all manner of cures, from beta blockers to hypnotherapy, but nothing shifted her stage fright, which she blamed for her hair turning prematurely white. Only one thing helped a little: turning off her dressing-room speaker so as not to hear the expectant buzz in the auditorium.
Bogarde was quite wrong to see his stage fright as evidence that he had entered the wrong profession. Far from being the preserve of the shy, stage fright is the shyness everyone gets, the common cold of self-consciousness. The most assured can suddenly succumb. Laurence Olivier had a first-time attack while appearing in The Master Builder at the National Theatre at the age of fifty-seven. Convinced that he would forget the next line, he felt his throat closing up, his teeth clenching and his head spinning. Soon after, playing Othello, he dreaded being on the stage alone and begged Frank Finlay, playing Iago, to stay in the wings during his soliloquies.5 Olivier’s stage fright afflicted him like a rare, inexplicable virus. As a charismatic extrovert, he could find no parallel in anything he had felt before, on or off stage. The fear took him five years to shake off. Whereas Massey tried to forget the audience was there, Olivier found that it helped to peek from behind the curtain before the play began and curse the “bastards” making their way to their seats, using this confected anger to conquer his nerves.
Bogarde fixed on a more radical solution. After appearing on stage once more, in Jean Anouilh’s Jezebel, he was diagnosed with pleurisy and double pneumonia and nearly died, so decided to cut his losses and abandon the theater for good. Always ambivalent about the profession, at the end of the 1960s he retired to Clermont, a farmhouse on a hill in Provence, and began to think of himself more as a writer than an actor. From there he wrote long, gossipy letters to hundreds of people, tapped out on his old Adler typewriter. In these epistolary friendships his well-hidden desire to be noticed and needed could at last emerge. As one of his correspondents, Penelope Mortimer, told him in a letter, he was “a great believer in long distance and remote devotion.”6
In 1983 he was due to return to Britain to perform in a TV adaptation of Arnold Bennett’s Buried Alive, a novella about a famous painter, Priam Farll, who out of shyness assumes the identity of his valet, Henry Leek, on the latter’s death. While Leek is
being buried in Westminster Abbey under Farll’s name, Farll melts into the Putney streets to live out Leek’s shadowy life. Bogarde was perfectly cast for the part, but he pulled out, and the project fell through. He never got over his stage fright.
Although the ancient Athenians knew all about stage fright, the phrase itself is a late Victorian invention. Over the previous century and a half there had arisen a series of theatrical conventions which, in the pursuit of a sense of drama and occasion, increased the feeling of separation between audience and performer and thus increased the potential for anxiety in the latter. Only in the mid-eighteenth century, for instance, did audiences begin to listen to a play in reverential silence, when David Garrick, during his tenure at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, trained them to stop talking and bombarding the stage with fruit and banned them from sitting on the stage. It was during this era that the thrusting forestage, which immersed actors in the audience, began to recede until the main acting space had withdrawn behind the barrier of a proscenium arch.
Improved lighting widened still further the gulf between audience and actor. The arrival of gas lighting in the early nineteenth century allowed auditorium lights to be extinguished at once without a team of candle snuffers, although the blackout was not total, because pilot lights had to stay on. By the 1820s most London theaters had limelights, which burned quicklime in an oxyhydrogen flame to illuminate star actors with an incandescent white beam. Then, in 1881, Richard D’Oyly Carte installed electric lighting in his new Savoy Theatre, and others soon followed. The auditorium could now be plunged into complete darkness, and stage lighting was more penetrating, with spotlights creating narrower, sharper beams cut off from surrounding shadows.7 As the heroic loneliness of the actor intensified in this light, so did the potential for Lampenfieber, the illuminating name that Germans give to stage fright.