Shrinking Violets

by Joe Moran

  7

  The War against Shyness

  On January 22, 1959, a twenty-one-year-old soccer player for Manchester United, Bobby Charlton, appeared on ITV’s quiz show Double Your Money. Contestants began with a £1 question and, if they answered correctly, doubled the potential prize or quit until, if they kept answering correctly, they won £1,000. With its showbiz feel and its smarmy host, Hughie Green, it was an odd program for the introverted Charlton to be appearing on. In a studio only three hundred yards away from the Wembley pitch where he had played nervelessly for England, he was petrified, and became more so as he kept answering questions correctly over the next two shows. He started shaking as soon as he entered the soundproof booth where he had to answer the questions, and was barely able to put on his earphones.

  But he was good at quizzes and got every question right until he reached the £500 mark. Now, needing just one more correct answer to win the jackpot, he lost his nerve and refused to enter the soundproof booth. His claustrophobia had worsened after being in a plane crash a year earlier at Munich airport, when twenty-three passengers, including eight of his teammates, had died. After some panic, the producers bent the rules to let Charlton stay on the stage to answer the question, and he won the jackpot. With the money he bought his father, a Northumberland miner, a car.

  When he arrived at Manchester United as a fifteen-year-old apprentice in 1953, Charlton’s homesickness, and the locals’ failure to decipher his Northumbrian accent, had aggravated his natural shyness. Around the time of his Double Your Money appearance, the journalist Arthur Hopcraft interviewed him on the doorstep of his lodgings. The blushing interviewee held onto the door handle nervously and kept leaving sentences unfinished and words hanging in the air. Munich had further deepened his reserve. Before it, he had been known to croon Frank Sinatra songs on the training ground; after it, never.

  In July 1961 another talented teenage footballer arrived at United, from Belfast’s Protestant, working-class Cregagh estate. George Best was also crippled by shyness, the kind that meant he would never challenge a shopkeeper who shortchanged him. When Hopcraft interviewed him as an eighteen-year-old, Best’s voice was shaky and barely broken, and he bit his lower lip and looked at his interviewer’s breast pocket or over his head. When he got the bus traveling from his landlady’s house to the training ground, he made sure he had the exact change, because he had the same problem as Charlton: the conductors couldn’t fathom his accent.

  Once the United manager, Matt Busby, who lived nearby, pulled up at Best’s bus stop in his Jaguar and offered him a lift. Busby was a charismatic boss, mostly kind and fatherly but able to invest a mere sigh or stare with a hint of steel. When Arthur Hopcraft asked Busby if he thought his players were shy of him, he conceded, apparently unaware of his own magnetism, that the apprentices were “often nervous and speechless when they first joined the club.”1 Best was so tongue-tied in Busby’s car that from then on, he would hide in the bus queue if he saw it coming. Busby noted his discomfiture and contrived not to see him.

  As soon as Charlton and Best crossed over the white-lime line that marked the edge of the field, though, they left their shyness behind, gloriously fulfilling Busby’s ideal of soccer as a game of both passion and grace. Charlton said later that the younger players were so shy of their manager that they could only speak to him indirectly, on the pitch. “His presence seemed to electrify all of us,” he recalled. “We would tear into the game like lions. It was the only way, in a sense, that we could communicate with him.”2 Charlton marauded through the midfield, thundering in shots from thirty yards out. Best was a matador, tormenting lolloping defenders with his vast repertoire of shimmies and swerves. His boyhood hero had been Zorro, the Spanish nobleman who discombobulated his opponents while hiding his identity behind a black sackcloth mask. Best would beckon defenders toward him, daring them to tackle him, once even taking off a boot and passing the ball with his besocked foot. Back in the dressing room, he took off his Zorro mask and was mild-mannered and mumbling again.

  A strain in working-class British culture tolerated, even esteemed, shyness in its men. In the early twentieth century, the historian Deborah Cohen has argued, the respectable working classes began to prize a trait that had been associated with the Victorian middle class—reticence—as a way of dissociating themselves from the brashness and bluntness of those below them in the social scale.3 This soft spot for shyness accounts partly for the popularity of music-hall characters such as George Formby Sr.’s innocent, henpecked “Silly John Willie” and Jack Pleasants, billed as “The Bashful Limit,” whose signature song was “I’m Shy, Mary Ellen, I’m Shy.” In his films George Formby Jr. essentially reprised his father’s character, that of a gauche Lancashire lad with a nervous laugh who bashfully woos an upper-class heroine and sings songs like “I’m Shy” and “Why Don’t Women Like Me?” Shy working-class men found solace in solitary hobbies like pigeon-fancying, fishing, gardening, and pottering around in sheds.

  The nonverbal rituals of ballroom dancing, and of rowdier communal dances like the Lambeth Walk and the hokey-cokey, which did not even require individuals to request the pleasure of a dance, were popular, according to Mass Observation, because they broke down the barriers of “shyness and stranger-feeling.” Studying the protocol in a Bolton dance hall filled mostly with young mill workers in 1938, Tom Harrisson, Mass Observation’s co-founder, noticed that a young man would ask a woman for a dance simply by touching her on the elbow and waiting for her to fall into his arms. A couple thus created might dance the whole night saying nothing to each other and then go their separate ways, without the man even escorting the woman off the dance floor. At the end of the night the sexes would re-form into their original separate groups around the door. Just to make double sure that these inhibitions remained, no dance hall was licensed to sell alcohol, and kissing was often banned. Harrisson noted that, for those who found even these settings too daunting, the dancing schools had “developed a special secondary role, as shelters for shy, quiet, clumsy, crowd-hating or inferior-feeling people, who are able, as perpetual learners, to contact the opposite sex and dance, without the selective scramble or public display of the full-size dance-hall.”4

  A decade and a war later, in May 1948, in a report titled “Awkward Moments,” Mass Observation relayed the responses to a question it had asked its panel of volunteers: “What are the main things that embarrass you?” It received a wide range of answers: visiting a strange house and not being able to make the toilet flush at first pull; hearing someone recite poetry a few feet away; being caught looking at your face in a mirror; discovering your fly was undone; being told you had “had a bad shave this morning”; being seen going in or out of a public toilet; having people say “Aaah!” when a dog came on the screen at the pictures; having your companion talk too loudly on the bus; overhearing dirty jokes; hearing other people saying “cheerio,” “chin-chin,” or “wizard.”5 The enforced communality of wartime seemed to have done little to break down shyness and “stranger-feeling”; awkwardness still extended deep into British social life.

  Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, conducting a sociological survey of the nation’s cultural and spiritual life in 1947 and 1948, found some heartbreaking examples of shyness. Mr. R., a nineteen-year-old office clerk, had hardly ever spoken to a girl except at Christmas parties. He liked watching soccer but had never played it, since his parents thought that boys who did were common, and he went to the pictures only because he “enjoys the darkness of a cinema because people cannot look at him.” Mrs. F., a fifty-year-old widow, did many small kindly acts for neighbors but, as soon as they were done, “scuttle[d] away again to her lonely dwelling,” and she had stopped going to church because she could not bear being seen by so many people. Mr. R., a forty-year-old bachelor, had been engaged twice, but both his fiancées had broken it off, “repelled by a shyness which they mistook for coldness.”6 In Rowntree and Lavers’s account, infused with a la
rge measure of the former’s late Victorian puritanism, innate English reserve had found a new haven in the pagan, solitary anesthetics of gambling, drink, and the cinema.

  The playwright Alan Bennett, a teenager in the late 1940s, had inherited from his mother a sense that shyness stood for sensitivity and refinement. For her, it was a burdensome virtue, one you might prefer not to have, but which did at least save you from being “common,” an antithetical state to shyness with “a degree of groundless pushing yourself forward.” Bennett’s family had just upgraded from boarding houses to hotels for their holidays, although they found them “theatres of humiliation” and considered eating in public “every bit as fraught with risk and shame as taking your clothes off.”7 This instilled in Bennett a sense of life as a quagmire of social awkwardness and turned him later into a keen student of Erving Goffman.

  In fact, Bennett was intrigued to discover that, just as he was first navigating hotels as a teenager, Goffman’s theories of social embarrassment were being incubated in a very similar kind of establishment: the tourist hotel in Baltasound, Unst, where Goffman worked in the scullery as second dishwasher while conducting his doctoral fieldwork. The need to keep up a genteel pretense with guests from beyond the island turned the Baltasound hotel into a stage set. The maids would watch new arrivals through the kitchen window, differences in light intensity allowing them to be unseen, rather like actors peeking through the stage curtain at the assembling audience. In the hotel kitchen, mold would be scraped off the soup, pats of half-used butter retouched and recycled, and dirty glasses given just a quick wipe.

  Goffman’s time at the Baltasound hotel inspired his first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), in which he divided social life into two areas. In front regions people kept up a constant act, while in back regions those who knew each other well took off their social makeup and “lapsed into an associable mood of sullen, silent irritability.”8 For Bennett’s family, hotels were front regions that demanded pitch-perfect performances not just from the people who worked there but from guests as well. After his father had awkwardly tipped the porter, they breathed a sigh of relief at having their hotel room to themselves, as if they had bluffed their way into an enemy camp.

  In Exploring English Character (1955) the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer made a suspiciously confident generalization: “most English people are shy and afraid of strangers, and consequently very lonely.” Just over half of those in Gorer’s survey thought themselves “exceptionally shy.” But, perhaps in a sign of shifting attitudes, only a quarter thought their shyness to be a good thing, and four-fifths thought themselves less shy than they used to be.9 This is the story Britons began to tell themselves in the postwar years and especially as the 1960s wore on. Class distinctions were blurring, people were less cowed in the presence of their “betters,” the worst types of social stuffiness were dissolving, and the icy exterior of English reserve was melting away.

  By the mid-1960s the personality gulf between George Best and Bobby Charlton, born just nine years apart, seemed to signify this shift. When he became a senior pro at United, Charlton’s teammates came to construe his shyness as aloofness, few of them noticing that, as he puffed on his half-time cigarette, his hands were shaking. Best went the opposite way. With his tailored suits, pointed shoes, and collar-length hair, he was English football’s first pop idol. He liked seeing his name in the papers and was endlessly obliging, happy to stand on his head if a photographer requested it. In 1966 he opened his first fashion boutique in Manchester, calling it the “mod shop for the extrovert male.”10

  The stars who were the new models of working-class British masculinity in the 1960s—Terence Stamp, Michael Caine, David Bailey, George Best, the Beatles—were likely lads, chancers, men about town. The 1960s youth cult had little sympathy for the circumlocutions and periphrases of English reserve. As Jonathan Aitken put it in his 1967 book about swinging youth, The Young Meteors, “Publicity has become the modern vice anglais.”11

  In fact, although George Best seemed to have shaken off his shyness to become the most famous Lothario of his era, he now relied on what psychologists call “liquid extroversion.” When sober, he was still so shy he couldn’t ring up a restaurant to book a table and would cross the road rather than pass a bus-stop queue. He developed a habit of skipping training or a big match and catching a plane to anywhere. Once he missed the train to a match against Chelsea and was discovered by the media holed up in the Islington flat of the actor Sinéad Cusack; another time he refused to come out of the bedroom of his house. In May 1972 he failed to report for the Northern Ireland squad and decamped to a Marbella hotel, where he told a reporter that he had retired from soccer. He did play on and off for United and other clubs again, but the same pattern of no-shows repeated itself. The problem was not just drink; it was whatever the drink was meant to drown out. Years later, in his autobiography, Best wrote, “I’ve never really got over my shyness.”12

  Shyness turned out to be as resilient as all the other things the swinging 1960s were supposed to have swept away, such as class snobbery, sexual hypocrisy, and middle-aged complacency. The playwright Terence Rattigan had built a whole career out of exploring English reticence, lonely stoicism, and well-meant evasion. But by the early 1970s he had spent nearly two decades in a theatrical climate in which emotional intensity and social indignation were embraced and his interest in formality and repression was thought passé. Even on the other side of the 1960s, though, he had not changed his mind about the nature of the English problem, whatever Jonathan Aitken and his swinging young meteors might have thought. “Do you know what ‘le vice anglais’—the English vice—really is?” asks Sebastian Cruttwell in his 1973 play, In Praise of Love. “Not flagellation, not pederasty—whatever the French believe it to be. It’s our refusal to admit our emotions.”

  In a BBC documentary he made about the Crown Hotel in Harrogate in 1988, Alan Bennett also reflected on the strange non-death of English diffidence. He certainly found less of the awkwardnesses of his youth in the new world of the business away day and the minibreak, a world transformed by American consumer openness and the Thatcherite free market’s aversion to old snobbery. “Class isn’t what it was; or nowadays perhaps people’s embarrassments are differently located,” he reflected on camera. And yet Bennett’s writing, like Philip Larkin’s poem about sexual intercourse beginning in 1963, betrays a nagging sense that while the world has changed, human nature is constant. His parents thought that social ease came by way of the education they didn’t have, but they couldn’t see, Bennett said, that “what disqualified them was temperament, just as, though educated up to the hilt, it disqualifies me. What keeps us in our place is embarrassment.”13

  Bennett’s own fear of embarrassment meant that he passed up the chance to have dinner with Jackie Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson with the rest of the cast of Beyond the Fringe in New York in 1963 and to have lunch with his hero Cyril Connolly, pretending not to have received the card inviting him. “I clung far too long to the notion that shyness was a virtue,” he wrote forty years later, “and not, as I came too late to see, a bore.”14

  Shyness persists for Bennett’s characters as well, whether they are, like Graham Whittaker in A Chip in the Sugar, a lonely middle-aged bachelor still living with his mother or, like the young Andy in Getting On, a virginal teenager whose father mistakenly believes he is living in a “haze of pot and cheap fellowship.” Life, impatient of their fears and hesitancies, is leaving them behind. Not only had the death of shyness been exaggerated, but its sufferers were living in a new era in which it was no longer the ambiguous virtue it had been to Bennett’s mother, nor the immutable condition the Victorians called “constitutional shyness.” It was now a disability that it was your duty to overcome.

  The first real skirmish in the war against shyness took place in a New York brownstone a block and a half from Central Park. In 1965 the psychiatrist Albert Ellis began a free Friday evening workshop th
ere, at his newly established Institute for Rational Living. In each session, dispensing dramatically with the tradition of the silent psychoanalyst listening to the couch-lying patient, he would publicly analyze two or three volunteers using a kind of therapy he called “disputing.” In front of an audience, Ellis told his patients in a loud, nasal voice to stop being so irrational. Freud’s ideas, he told them, were “horseshit from start to finish,” and most people were “out of their fucking minds.”15

  As a young man growing up in the Bronx, Ellis had been achingly shy—and had tried to cure his affliction during daily visits to the Botanical Gardens by setting himself the task of talking to the women who sat alone on the stone benches eating their packed lunches. After a month he declared this exercise a success because—although 30 of the 130 women he had approached had walked off without speaking and the one woman he had arranged a date with never showed up—“nobody vomited and ran away.”16 He had discovered that social rejection, the great fear of the shy, was bearable.

  Ellis began prescribing “shame-attacking exercises” for his patients, which resembled the strategies of the ancient Stoic and Cynic philosophers he had read while growing up, who tried to shame their pupils and then convince them they had no reason to be ashamed. A shame-attacking exercise was a piece of outlandish behavior that was embarrassing to yourself but harmless to others, such as loudly announcing the time in a department store (“10.30 a.m. and all’s well!”), stopping a stranger in the street and saying, “I just got out of the loony bin. What month is it?,” walking a banana on a leash along a busy street, or buying several packs of condoms in a pharmacy and asking for a bulk discount. The lesson of Ellis’s work, which formed the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy, was that we have negative reactions not to events but to our beliefs about them. If we stopped nurturing our shyness by avoiding social situations, we would realize our anxieties are misplaced.