by Joe Moran
In the Mussolini years many Italian writers had good reason to be reserved and to adopt oblique means of expression to hide their views from the censors. Some, like Pavese, preferred to remain silent rather than have their material butchered. Jews, meanwhile, were not allowed to publish books or even have their names listed in the telephone directory. “I have never seriously tried to analyse this shyness of mine,” the Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi told Philip Roth, “but no doubt Mussolini’s racial laws played an important role.”14 Shyness has many local and particular reasons to exist, but writers and artists everywhere understand it. Whether they are censored by others or silenced by their own fears and neuroses, their work is their way of making themselves heard.
Morandi’s wavering line and unconcealed retouchings suggest hesitancy, but his pursuit of excellence within a narrow range betrayed an inner core of confidence. His self-effacement was sharp-edged. He rarely allowed buyers of his paintings to choose one, deciding for himself which to surrender. When he finished a painting, he would hang it on the wall over his bed with others in the same sequence. After a decent interval, he wrote the fortunate new owner’s name on the canvas’s stretcher bars but kept the painting on his wall until ready to relinquish it.15 He undercharged for his work and gave much of it away, but he was angry if he learned that the owner of one of his paintings had disposed of it for a profit, for he saw giving up his pictures as a cutting off of part of himself. His final act of control freakery emerged thirteen years after his death, when the catalogue raisonné of his work appeared. He had given the impression that he finished only about a dozen works a year, but it was now clear how prolific he had been: he had produced more than fourteen hundred oil paintings and drawings too numerous to count.
Like Mr. Lowry, Signor Morandi was a pedestrian in both the broader and the more literal senses: he was a creature of habit committed to long periods of prosaic and solitary work, and he was someone who spent much of his time walking. His six-foot four-inch frame, striking in a town where most men were a foot shorter, was a familiar sight around Bologna. He was always smoking a heavy-duty Nazionali cigarette and dressed in the same charcoal gray suit and black tie. Each weekday he walked to the shops to buy coffee and fresh fish and to the city’s Academy of Fine Arts, where he taught etching and engraving, preferring to impart technique rather than teach “art.” And several times a week he walked to mass at Santa Maria dei Servi, the plain, porticoed church where the city’s poor went to worship.
The critic Leo Longanesi makes Morandi’s ambulatory style sound as odd as Lowry’s. “When he walks, he seems like an old schooner, viewed prow-first; his soft felt hat perched on top of his head is a perfect top-gallant sail, touching the clouds,” Longanesi wrote in 1928. “He dawdles, brushing against the walls, dragging his feet, with the air of someone wearing long pants for the first time.” Like Lowry’s shyness, Morandi’s bred a life of lone, observant walking, and this naturally filtered into his work. The muddied reds and ochers of his paintings are those of any Bolognan street, and the subtle chiaroscuro is of the kind seen by anyone walking through the town’s endless porticoes. Umberto Eco, speaking at the Museo Morandi in Bologna in 1993, said that his work “can truly be understood only after you have traversed the streets and the arcades of this city and have understood that an apparently uniform reddish colour can differentiate house from house and street from street.”16
The psychoanalyst and writer Darian Leader has suggested that Morandi’s work be viewed through Sigmund Freud’s ideas on mourning and melancholia. Just as mourning, for Freud, involves “reshuffling and rearranging,” imagining our lost love “time and time again, in different situations . . . and different contexts,” Morandi’s serial reordering of similar materials might indicate “an arrest or stagnation of the mourning process.” Leader, like other keepers of the Freudian flame, believes that modern ways of treating mental illness, such as drugs and cognitive behavioral therapy, have replaced Freud’s “exploration of human interiority” with “a fixed idea of mental hygiene.” Depression, for instance, is now understood and diagnosed by its manifest and fairly uniform symptoms—low mood, dull vocal tone, disturbed sleep, and loss of appetite—instead of its manifold causes. Shyness, similarly, is now often seen as a clinical category in itself, as “social phobia” or “social anxiety,” rather than as “the symptom of an underlying clinical category to be discovered.”17 Morandi’s shyness, for Leader, would simply be the external symptom of deeper and more specific neuroses, which he worked through in his work.
Freud’s classic theory of art is that it seeks to sublimate unresolved neurotic conflicts into an act of higher social value. Compared to other defense mechanisms, such as repression, denial, and projection, he believed sublimation to be quite healthy, allowing “higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life.” But in a sense he also saw all forms of art as compensations for the failure to communicate in more direct ways and to act on our desires. Writing, for instance, was “in its origin the voice of an absent person.” By allowing us to make premeditated marks on a page that could stand in for our bodily selves, it let us transcend the imperfections of spur-of-the-moment speech. But writing was always, for Freud, an inferior substitute for such spontaneous communication. When he remarked on the magical power of words to “make another blissfully happy or drive him to despair,” he meant the spoken word—the precious coinage that the teacher uses to impart knowledge or that the orator deploys to enthrall an audience.18
It is not surprising, perhaps, that a discipline founded on the “talking cure” tended to value talk and pathologize those who were bad at it. Strict Freudians saw shyness as displaced aggression or narcissism, as a retreat into an initially consoling but ultimately unfulfilling internal life as compensation for the pain of dealing with others. “The shy individual seems to behave like an impotent child, longing to be admitted to the group of potent adults (fathers) being at the same time afraid of being too inferior and fearing to be snubbed for his presumptuous wishes,” wrote Hilde Lewinsky in the British Journal of Psychology in 1941. “This fear of being snubbed represents in a figurative sense castration fear.”19 The shy had suppressed their vital instincts, Freudians thought, and were too afraid of the hostility of others to be fully realized human beings.
So when, on September 4, 1958, in a tiny consulting room at the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in Denmark Hill, London, the agonizingly shy New Zealand writer Janet Frame had her first appointment with Dr. Robert Cawley, she was right to be wary. Freudianism now dominated postwar psychiatry, with its belief that intimate attachments with others were vital to mental health and that shyness, which stopped us from achieving this, derived from egotism and insecurity.
The meeting had been hastily arranged after Frame rang the hospital from a phone box near Waterloo Bridge and said she was going to jump into the river. Frame’s first impressions of Cawley—clipped English accent, forbidding black-rimmed glasses, beautifully pressed suit, polished shoes—were not reassuring. Here, she thought, was another of the cold, confident, professional men ready to box her off as crazy. But she was soon won over by his mild manner and self-protective smile and began to see that he was shy like her—“a clever, uncertain man whose sole triumph in our interviews was the accuracy of his recording the content.”20 She answered his questions, in a just audible voice, with gently mocking skepticism and evasiveness. She liked to play language games and enjoyed the sound and shape of words regardless of their meaning, which Cawley diagnosed as a conflicted desire and disinclination to talk. Slowly he pieced together her story.
As a child, Frame’s natural shyness had been aggravated by her embarrassment at her wild frizz of red hair and teeth so rotten that she covered her mouth when talking. In 1943, aged nineteen, she entered teacher training college at Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island, lodging with her Aunt Isy, whose husband, George, was slowly dying in an upstair
s room. Too shy to sit with her aunt at the dinner table, Frame told her she would prefer to have a snack on the scullery sink-bench because she had little appetite and liked to study while she ate. This arrangement meant that she was permanently ravenous, assuaging her hunger by eating shilling-a-bar Caramello chocolate in her room and filching gristly bits of boiled beef from her aunt’s dirty plate when she wasn’t looking.
In the women’s toilets at college she was too embarrassed to walk from the cubicles across the echoing tiles to the incinerator for used sanitary napkins. So for a whole two years, she carried her soiled napkins home to put them in the trash bin when her aunt was out or to hide them among the tombstones in the nearby cemetery. She later learned of other young women of her generation driven similarly mad by timidity, making detours into the town’s surrounding bushland to dispose of their used napkins. She heard of another of her peers who spent her first week in a student hostel in the dark because she was too shy to ask for the lightbulb to be replaced.
At the end of her two years’ training, an inspector came to observe a class she was teaching, and speechless with fear, she walked out, never to return. Soon afterward she tried to kill herself by overdosing on aspirin, and her enigmatic manner with the doctors led them to diagnose her as schizophrenic. The next seven years she spent in psychiatric institutions, undergoing two hundred sessions of electro-convulsive therapy with no anesthetic. She would have had a prefrontal lobotomy, had a doctor not found out that she had won a prize for her first book, The Lagoon, and cancelled her appointment. She escaped to Ibiza and then London, where a Maudsley psychiatrist told her she was not schizophrenic after all. She felt bereft without the condition that had come to define her, and it was shortly thereafter that she threatened to throw herself into the Thames.
Ever since a teacher had identified her to the rest of the class as shy, she had seized on it as a glamour-giving quality, the special preserve of artists and poets. She began to invest everything in her writing, retreating into a parallel world she called the Mirror City, which came to seem as if it had more purchase than the real world that she floated through like a silent, timorous ghost. She was loath to spend the only currency of hers that might have any worth in this real world—talking about her life in the Mirror City—for fear that its magic would be disenchanted. On the boat to England she would not even divulge the titles of her books to a stranger, because of what she called her “primitive shyness” about her writing and her “reluctance to reduce or drain into speech the power supply of the named.”21
All writers have this split between their literary and real selves; for Frame the contrast defined her life. “In conversation I am bedevilled,” she wrote in 1955. “In written expression an angel will visit.”22 Her muteness or inarticulacy in the flesh meant that many took her for an imbecile. She had channeled all the intelligent, lucid elements of her character into the self that sat alone at a writing desk waiting for an angel to appear. It is common enough for writers to use a pseudonym, but Frame took the rarer step of publishing under her own name and living pseudonymously. In May 1958, a few months before she met Cawley, she changed her name by deed poll to Janet Clutha (after Dunedin’s river) and carried on writing as Janet Frame.
If Cawley had been a strict Freudian, he would have found rich pickings there. But he wasn’t, and he instead arrived at a highly unusual diagnosis. All her life Frame had been urged to come out of her shell and meet more people. Cawley’s course of treatment was that she should live alone and write. As her first dose of medicine, he suggested that she write about her time in mental hospitals. Frame did what the doctor ordered and produced her novel Faces in the Water. It tells the story of the withdrawn and lonely Istina, misdiagnosed as mad and forced into institutions where, almost as punishment for her shyness, daily life is humiliatingly public. Patients have to use doorless lavatories under the stern supervision of a nurse, are made to dress up in party clothes, and have scarves tied in bows round their heads to cover their shaven, lobotomized skulls. Frame delivered the manuscript to Cawley, like a baby, nine months after he discharged her. “It’s not brilliant,” he told her, “but it will do.”23
When Cawley suggested that Frame should simply learn to live with her shyness, he was flouting the psychiatric consensus and taking a risk with a suicidal patient. His maverick thinking evolved naturally out of his personality, at which Frame had already guessed. When they met, he was thirty-four, like her, but still only a trainee. A bout of near-fatal anemia and other serious illnesses in adolescence had set him back years in his education, and the ensuing indignities—such as standing naked in front of several doctors with whiskey breath who staggered around him and passed him unfit for National Service—had eaten up his confidence. When he first met Frame, he was recovering from a partial gastrectomy and feeling fragile.
The psychiatrist Anthony Storr identified a typical profile of a therapist into which Cawley fits: the “watchful, over-anxious child” who becomes “a listener to whom others turn, but who does not make reciprocal relationships on equal terms of mutual self-revelation.”24 A shy therapist and a shy patient could find the analytical relationship especially fruitful because the consulting room gave them a space and a structure in which to talk to and listen to each other.
Storr, like Cawley a shy, friendless child plagued by near-fatal illnesses (asthma and septicemia), also matched the profile. Growing up at Westminster Abbey, where his father was subdean, he had found consolation in music and would take his gramophone up to the organ loft at night so that his favorite Bach and Handel would ring out around the nave. Like Cawley, Storr came to feel that solitariness had its uses and that salvation did not always lie in others. Unlike Freud, who thought that the creative arts were a second-best substitute for the sex drive, Storr came to believe that an imaginative life was part of our evolutionary inheritance. The naturally solitary could find meaning in their lives by embracing this inheritance rather than simply, as Freud advocated, trying to cure make-believe with cold reason.
Cawley’s sessions with Frame helped him see that we could never know someone else entirely and that complete cures were often elusive. Although Freud aspired to turn psychoanalysis into an exact science, for Cawley it was about following leads and hunches, a way of listening to and telling stories that helped people to make some sense of their lives. He wrote later that Frame had taught him about the “evanescent nature of the arbitrary boundaries between knowledge and imagination, and art and science.”25 She remained similarly grateful to him all her life, believing that he had saved her just as surely as the psychiatrist who had canceled her lobotomy.
One Friday in February 1963, in the worst month of the worst English winter of the century, Frame arrived at a large Victorian semi-detached house in Heaton Moor, a suburb of Stockport, near Manchester. She had been invited to stay for the weekend by the Guardian writer Geoffrey Moorhouse, who lived there with his New Zealand wife and their two small children. A few months earlier Frame had given Moorhouse her first press interview, an experience that she found distressing and, over the remaining forty-one years of her life, repeated rarely. Moorhouse described her as “a shortish woman with a great halo of frizzy, gingery hair, very quietly spoken, and she smiled a lot to fill in pauses between speech, which could be quite disconcerting.”26
Frame’s novel Towards Another Summer, written immediately after this weekend but not published until after her death, throws the slenderest veil of fiction over it. Grace Cleave, an excruciatingly shy writer with brittle mental health and a mass of untamable hair, has rashly accepted Philip Thirkettle’s invitation to stay for the weekend in Winchley with his wife, Anne, and their two small children. Grace finds the weekend torture. Although Philip is a solicitous host, she is disconcerted by the keenness of his questions and the way he pounces on her answers. When he pauses and waits for her to speak, she buckles under the weight of expectation, and her words “scuttle to the sheltering foliage of incoherence.”27
Frame loved her typewriter, feeling as orphaned without it as today’s teenagers when unglued from their smartphones. It was the prosthetic limb that connected her with the world. “I have so little confidence . . . in the area beyond my desk and my typewriter,” she wrote to an agent.29 Being allowed use of her typewriter in New Zealand mental hospitals was a hard-won concession that earned her a reputation for being high-maintenance. She loved the sensuality of typing: that click of the ratchet as you fed the paper in, the ping of the carriage return bell, the final whoosh as you pulled the paper out.