by Joe Moran
While the modern theater built up these physical and mental divides, music was acquiring its own equally daunting performing conventions. “The audience intimidates me,” a young Frédéric Chopin told Franz Liszt in 1835. “I feel asphyxiated by its breath, paralysed by its curious glances, struck dumb by all those strange faces.”8 It was Liszt who, in 1839, greatly increased the potential for anxiety by inventing the form of the “recital,” with the pianist striding out from the wings to take his seat and play for a whole evening, sitting in profile so the audience could see both his dazzling fingerwork and his face.
Clara Schumann had begun playing scoreless as a child prodigy in 1828, but Liszt turned memorizing into a theatrical performance, as if the piece were the virtuoso’s own spontaneous creation. Like a rock star, he would sometimes fling his score into the audience along with his gloves. Many thought that playing by rote was conceited and disrespectful to the composers. In 1861, performing Beethoven sonatas in London, the pianist Sir Charles Hallé had to revert to using a score (or pretending to) after being criticized for playing from memory. By the end of the century, though, scoreless playing had become the unwritten and nerve-racking convention.
Around the same time the new discipline of sociology was identifying the fear of being on public display as a feature of modern city life. In a 1903 essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Georg Simmel argued that the city combined intimidating anonymity with enforced proximity to the strangers with whom we shared its spaces. On streetcars, omnibuses and underground trains, people looked blankly at each other without exchanging a word. Being seen and silently assessed by one’s fellow citizens was the inevitable lot of the modern metropolitan, who developed a “blasé attitude” as a defense mechanism. The inner boundary of reserve among city dwellers was so strong that they often did not know their neighbors of many years by sight, and it led small-town people to dismiss them as cold and uncongenial. But without this reserve, cultivated in the eternal stage set of the modern city, Simmel believed that the urbanite would be “completely atomized internally and come to an unimaginable psychic state.”9
Another new field of inquiry, psychoanalysis, recognized the fear of performing in public as one of the most common forms of shame in modern social life. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Sigmund Freud identified a common embarrassment dream: the dreamer was naked in public, unable to move and escape this distressing situation, and surrounded by indifferent strangers. The embarrassment at being naked was somehow made worse by its being played out in front of an anonymous crowd who, far from being scandalized by one’s nakedness, could not care less.10
The first psychiatric investigations of shyness tended to conflate it with stage fright. In a 1901 book, Les Timides et la timidité, the Parisian psychiatrist Paul Hartenberg wrote that for a young man “it is a big deal just to enter a salon,” for “he dies of the fear that there might be something in his outfit that is not absolutely impeccable.” In 1903 his fellow Frenchman Pierre Janet gave a name, phobie des situations sociales, to the fear of being watched while doing routine things such as writing, talking, or playing the piano. One of Janet’s patients was a fifty-two-year-old man who was afraid of walking across Parisian squares. In their vicinity he started shaking, could not breathe, and heard a voice telling him: “You’re going to die.”11
Stage fright is as much a physical as a mental malady. In 1907 the American psychologist Josiah Morse listed the somatic symptoms: abdominal constrictions, palpitations, cold sweats, trembling, chills, rising gorge, and occasional vomiting. For its sufferers stage fright seemed to be a spontaneous and unstoppable emotional reaction, “like the vertigo which is produced by looking off great heights and precipices.” Other sufferers compared it to seasickness. In extreme cases the parasympathetic nervous system shut down the metabolism and increased gastric activity, and the truly stage-frightened suffered that loosening of the sphincters that is presumably the origin of the phrase about having “no guts.” Morse believed that stage fright was part of the more general condition of timidity, which expressed itself in “various degrees of stupidity or mental confusion” and as “a chaos of feelings or stupor.” Its only real difference from timidity, he argued, was that “there is no element of shame in stage-fright, for there is no blushing. One blushes before a single person, never before a thousand.”12
The violinist Eugene Gruenberg was well acquainted with stage fright, for he performed with the Leipzig Opera Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, both of whose audiences had a reputation for being demanding. In an essay on stage fright written in 1919 he blamed it on the architecture of modern theaters and concert halls, which made the performer skulk in subterranean green rooms “like a culprit, waiting for his decapitation.” But he also thought that anyone could be struck by this “stage-fright bacillus”: a surgeon before an operation, a young woman entering a ballroom, a waiter serving at tables.13 For Gruenberg theatrical or concert-hall stage fright was simply an acute instance of the dramaturgical nature of modern life, which forced us to become social performers and brought us into contact with unknown and often-hostile others.
What would you do if your consuming ambition was to be a concert pianist and yet you suffered from crippling stage fright? It is a surprisingly common predicament. In 1905 a fifteen-year-old English girl called Agatha Miller boarded at a Paris pension, where she was taught piano. Slated to perform in the endof-term concert, she was seized by fear and plagued by anxiety dreams in which she arrived late or the keys of the piano stuck together or the piano itself turned into a church organ, which she could not play. In the end she became so ill that she was forbidden from performing. Even when she was allowed to play in public, her nerves defeated her.14
Young women of Agatha Miller’s generation and class had to perform their genteel social roles flawlessly and unfailingly. Many found it so draining that they had to retire for a couple of hours in the afternoon to recuperate. The intensely shy Agatha found this kind of role play especially exhausting. For her first season as a debutante, her mother took her to Cairo. One officer returned her after a dance, telling her mother that she danced well, but “you had better try and teach her to talk now.”15 She found it impossible to keep up her end of a conversation and feared drying up, just like an actor forgetting lines. She had the bad luck not to like either alcohol or tobacco, those near-universal props for feigning self-possession. At cocktail parties she looked for somewhere to hide her full glass of wine and envied those women nonchalantly flipping away cigarette ash as they talked.
According to Erving Goffman, the unending performance that is social life breaks down only in an extreme crisis. At this critical moment, he writes, “the flustered individual gives up trying to conceal or play down his uneasiness.” He collapses into tears or fits of laughter, faints, flees from the scene, or becomes rigidly immobile. Once this Rubicon is crossed, “it is very difficult for him to recover composure. He answers to a new set of rhythms.”16 This is what happened to Agatha late one Friday night in England in December 1926, when she suffered a severe attack of stage fright that overshadowed the rest of her life. Her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd had appeared earlier that year and made her famous under her married name, Agatha Christie. But she was still grieving from her mother’s death, and her husband had just confessed that he was having an affair. At their house in Surrey she packed a case, got into the two-seater Morris she had bought with her royalties, and drove off into the dark. The car was found abandoned next morning near Guildford. She had taken a train north to Harrogate and, under a pseudonym, booked into the Hydropathic Hotel.
By withdrawing so dramatically from the world Christie had succeeded only in attracting its attention. Her abandoned car became a tourist attraction, with ice-cream vans parked around it. The police dragged nearby lakes and rivers and scoured the North Downs with tracker dogs. When she was finally spotted by the Hydropathic Hotel’s bandsmen, the press turned from suspecting her husband o
f murder to accusing Christie of being a self-publicist. In fact, she was horrified at the attention. The brief reference to it in her memoirs is to feeling “like a fox, hunted, my earths dug up and yelping hounds following me everywhere.” Her biographer Laura Thompson suggests that her loathing of publicity began here and was an attempt to refute the idea that her vanishing had been a canny career move.17
During a happy second marriage, to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, her shyness abated, but even he noticed in her “an inbuilt armour off which any questionnaire was liable to glance like a spent arrow.” Accompanying Mallowan on digs in Syria and Iraq in the 1930s, she commended herself on overcoming her debility, until an encounter with a curt male colleague of her husband’s once again made her, she wrote, “completely imbecile with shyness.”18
Christie was not the first or the last writer to overcompensate for her inarticulacy in the flesh with fluency and prolificacy on the printed page. But she was unusual in creating a central character so starkly her opposite. The woman who conceived the hyperconfident Poirot, an actor manqué who treated the apprehending of the villain as an opportunity for bravura intellectual display, was the same one who took over from Dorothy L. Sayers as chair of the Detective Club with the proviso that she would never have to make a speech. “If you are doubly burdened, first by acute shyness, and secondly by only seeing the right thing to do or say twenty-four hours later, what can you do?,” she wrote in the Daily Mail. “Only write about quick-witted men and resourceful girls whose reactions are like greased lightning.” To her diary Christie confided that she thought Poirot “an egocentric creep.”19
It is odd, given her stage fright, that after the war she should turn to writing plays for Shaftesbury Avenue theaters. Her ebullient producer, Peter Saunders, nursed her through what she called her “shy fits” on first nights. In April 1958, when The Mousetrap became the longest-running production in British theater history, with 2,239 performances, Saunders invited nearly a thousand people to a party at the Savoy Hotel. Ever since her grandmothers had taken her to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at the Savoy as a girl, she had seen it as the essence of glamour. Poirot and his sidekick Hastings dine often in the Savoy Grill, and she reported once seeing a man who was Poirot having lunch there. These associations only made her more anxious about attending the party. “See you at ‘Hell at the Savoy’ on Sunday,” she wrote to her agent.20
Saunders asked her to arrive early so she could have photographs taken with a birthday cake and the play’s cast—another ordeal, for she was phobic of cameras and self-conscious about having become very overweight. Arriving alone in her best bottle-green chiffon dress and elbow-length white gloves, she tried to enter the room where the party was, but the doorman, not recognizing her, refused her entry. The best-selling author in history, paralyzed by her “miserable, horrible, inevitable shyness,” meekly turned away and had to be rescued later from the lounge. “I still have that overlag of feeling that I am pretending to be an author,” she wrote in mitigation. “Perhaps I am a little like my grandson, young Mathew, at two years old, coming down the stairs and reassuring himself by saying: ‘This is Mathew coming downstairs!’”21
Christie found a means of sidestepping her stage fright. A fast writer, she had learned to touch-type to keep up with her flow of ideas, but by her early sixties she found it tiring to sit at a desk all day. Dictating her words to someone, even to her trusted secretary Charlotte Fisher, made her self-conscious, and she kept stumbling and losing her rhythm. So she became an early adopter of a new invention: the portable tape recorder.
Speaking into a machine can be awkward for a shy person, because at some point you will hit the playback button and hear your own voice—your voice as others hear you, through the air rather than through the bones of your skull, which is why it sounds so high-pitched and odd. But a tape recorder, whirring and wheezing away, is at least a respectful audience. It never scowls, folds its arms, or heckles. If you lose your thread, you can click the pause button, as Christie often did, and gather your thoughts.
A few years ago Christie’s grandson Mathew Prichard—the one who talked to himself while coming downstairs—found a cardboard box of twenty-seven unlabeled tapes, thirteen hours of recorded notes for her autobiography. He feared her old Grundig Memorette machine had been ruined by leaking battery acid. But a technical friend fiddled with it, and her voice came through loud and clear, talking gaily about her prewar travels in the Middle East. “I must have behaved rather as dogs do when they retire with a bone,” Christie was saying of her habit of writing furtively. “They depart in a rather secretive manner and you do not see them again for around a half-hour. They return self-consciously with mud on their nose. I think I must have done much the same.”22
With only a machine for an audience, Christie’s voice did not sound as though it belonged to someone shy at all. It was clear, unhurried, and slightly grand, rolling its r’s and clipping its consonants with relish, rather like Margaret Rutherford, who played Miss Marple on film. Christie’s only nervous tic was a slight cough in mid-sentence. She sounded like an old-school headmistress addressing her girls with just the right blend of warmth and firmness. It was the sort of voice you never hear any more, right out of deepest England.
While Agatha Christie was conversing with her trusty reel-to-reel tape recorder, another failed concert pianist was embracing similar remedies for stage fright. One of the great virtuosos of the twentieth century, the Canadian Glenn Gould, had come to feel that concert halls were circuses, “a comfortably upholstered extension of the Roman Colosseum,” where the audience was subconsciously overcome by bloodlust and wanted to see the soloist fail.23 But he longed to abolish applause as well, thinking it lured pianists into show-off rubatos and glissandos. For concerts, Gould dressed in an ill-fitting lounge suit instead of the usual black tie, loped onto the stage with his hands in his pockets, conducted himself with a spare hand, and hummed along with the music. These apparently attention-seeking tics were really about immersing himself in his playing and shutting out the audience. On the rare occasions when he looked right into the auditorium while performing, he seemed momentarily shocked to see people there.
Gould was not alone among his peers in showing this combination of anxiety and obduracy in front of an audience. Many pianists of his generation also loathed giving concerts and battled with stage fright or shyness or succumbed to mysterious illnesses. In 1964, aged thirty-six, the brilliant American pianist Leon Fleisher had his career curtailed by a strange condition that shaped his right hand into a claw. After contemplating suicide, he managed to forge a second career playing repertoire for the left hand only. His condition was diagnosed much later as a neurological disorder called dystonia, eventually cured by a pioneering course of Botox. He feared it had been caused by his lifelong search for perfection, which brought him “great despair, self-pity and unhappiness allied with commensurate ecstasies.” Another celebrated American pianist, Gary Graffman, who suffered from dystonia and other involuntary jerks and contortions, wrote that “instrumentalists’ hand problems—somewhat like social diseases—are unmentionable . . . Admitting difficulties is like jumping, bleeding, into piranha-filled waters.”24
A rotund powerhouse of a man who played as if possessed, the British pianist John Ogdon was shy and withdrawn away from the recital hall. His friend Brian Masters described him as a “shambling shell” whose trick when conversing with someone was to nod and smile sweetly. He chain-smoked but barely inhaled, deploying the cigarette mainly as a device to ward off conversation, and his voice on the rare occasions he used it was “marshmallic and mild.”25 In 1973, perhaps owing to the pressure of performing two hundred concerts a year around the world, he suffered from a manic-depressive psychosis, became angry and violent with his wife, and tried to kill himself. He received electric shock treatment, which ruined his playing technique forever.
Set against this roll call of illness and failure, Gould’s point about the toxic n
ature of these performing rituals seems less eccentric. In 1964, Gould himself retired from performing, aged thirty-two, and retreated into the safe, windowless cocoon of the recording studio. The microphone, he felt, had a clarity and richness with which the concert hall’s blunt-edged acoustics could not compete, and the long-playing record granted a new power to listeners, liberating them from the audience-conquering pomposity of the great concertos and the virtuoso’s pointless splashing around of notes.
In the new age of the mixing desk, Gould predicted, concertgoing would be “as dormant in the twenty-first century as, with luck, will Tristan da Cunha’s volcano.”26 His stage fright had turned him, ex post facto, into an evangelistic media futurologist in the Marshall McLuhan mode. He began to lead a nocturnal existence, waking up in mid-afternoon and confining his social life to rambling, dead-of-night phone calls with long-suffering friends—he believed you could have more rewarding relationships if you filtered out the visual interference—before settling down to work until dawn on his tape recorders and splicing machines.
Gould was very taken with the Canadian thinker Jean Le Moyne’s idea of the “charity of the machine.” Le Moyne thought that in the future all machines—radios, televisions, telephones, cars, trains—would form part of a network, a single organism that functioned as a “second nature.”27 While Le Moyne’s contemporaries worried about the alienating robotic impersonality of machines, he believed instead that they might create a space for collective humanity to express itself without the distracting noise of egotism and self-consciousness. People show their better natures, he felt, when they are not in close proximity to one another. His theories about an integrated network of machines are now seen to have anticipated the Internet, although even Le Moyne might have struggled to argue that people’s better natures are displayed there.