Shrinking Violets

by Joe Moran

  The English word “solitude” derives from the Latin sōlitūdo, which, as the classicist Kinglake would certainly have known, also means “desert.” Sinai was the unpeopled biblical wilderness where God spoke to Elijah in that “still small voice,” where the Israelites wandered for forty years, and where Moses received the Ten Commandments. Kinglake confessed that it was a desire to be alone in this fabled place of silence and retreat that drove him, that he was one of those wandering Englishmen for whom injured pride had “made the lone places more tolerable than ball rooms.”13

  For several days Kinglake and his tiny party worked their way through the sand dunes and wadis without meeting another soul. From morning to evening they sat aloft on their camels, their shoulders aching from the dual-swing rocking motion of the camels’ stride, their heads wrapped against the scorching sun. Then Kinglake noticed a shimmering speck on the horizon through the heat haze. Three camels were approaching, two of them with riders. Eventually he identified an English gentleman in a shooting jacket, accompanied by his servant and two Bedouin guides. As they approached, Kinglake realized he felt “shy and indolent” and had no wish “to stop and talk like a morning visitor, in the midst of those broad solitudes.” His compatriot evidently felt likewise, for they touched their hats and carried on “as if we had passed in Bond Street.” Their plan to ignore each other was thwarted by their servants, who insisted on stopping. The stranger turned out to be a soldier returning to England overland from India. Clearly anxious to avoid the impression that he had stopped through “civilian-like love of vain talk,” he offered Kinglake an account of the plague in Cairo. Kinglake went on his way thinking this fellow “manly and intelligent.”14

  If two Englishmen chance to meet somewhere on the other side of the earth, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (1840), they will “first stare at each other with much curiosity, and a kind of secret uneasiness,” even if they are surrounded by strangers whose language and manners they do not understand. If one insists on accosting the other, “they will take care only to converse with a constrained and absent air, upon very unimportant subjects.”15 It was as if de Tocqueville had been there in the Sinai, witnessing the awkward encounter of Kinglake and the soldier whose name he never learned but in whom he was delighted to find his own English qualities mirrored.

  On returning to England in 1835, Kinglake began a book about his travels. He proved as diffident an author as he was a human being, spending several years writing it, abandoning it twice, and, when it was finished, failing to find a publisher. Then, in 1844, he walked into the publishing house of John Ollivier on Pall Mall and presented it to him for free, even paying £50 to cover losses. The book was published the following year, anonymously, as Eothen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East. The author’s shyness even infected the folding plate for the frontispiece, a group portrait of Kinglake and his traveling entourage, which he had painted himself: he had pictured them all from a distance so that it was unclear which was Kinglake. In the other colored plate a viewer could see, according to his biographer, the Victorian clergyman William Tuckwell, only the “booted leg of Kinglake, who modestly hid his figure by a tree, but exposed his foot, of which he was very proud.”16

  There was nothing unassuming about the writing, though, which had a verve and swagger wholly absent in its author’s person. One of the book’s supposedly comic conceits is that Kinglake’s desire for solitude is constantly thwarted by the excitable natives he meets. “His common talk is a series of piercing screams and cries,” he writes of the Bedouin, “more painful to the ear than the most excruciating fine music.” To become an Arab, the reader had merely to “take one of those small, shabby houses in May Fair, and shut yourself up in it with forty or fifty shrill cousins for a couple of weeks in July.”17 Kinglake offered no evidence for the noisiness of Arabs, other than that people often sound discordant when talking animatedly in a strange language. But he was reworking in whimsy a common trope in the literature of travel and empire: the contrast between the mature self-control of the white English rulers and the childish volatility of their colonial subjects.

  For all Kinglake’s insistence in Eothen that he is searching for monastic self-erasure, the personality that comes clattering through its pages is his own. He is that familiar figure, the Englishman abroad, building a high wall of hauteur around himself while letting in the odd light-shaft of self-deprecating humor. He is a very modern travel writer in his desire to detail his own thoughts and sensations rather than the landscape or antiquities he encounters. What matters to him, he concedes, is less what the silent Sinai or the sacred Holy Land is like than that “I (the eternal Ego that I am!)—I had lived to see, and I saw them.”18

  Eothen was a hit, and John Ollivier could hardly keep up with the demand for reprints. But Kinglake made no attempt to capitalize on his literary triumph or, indeed, to make people aware that he was its author. In his mid-forties, when people started to twig that he had written Eothen, he began to be invited to balls and parties at London’s great houses, but those who expected the effervescent company he offered on the page were soon disabused. Being short, short-sighted, and shy, he found these events torture. He hated hearing his name proclaimed by masters of ceremonies as he entered ballrooms, thinking “Mr. Kinglake” sounded flat against “his excellency” or “his lordship” and assuming the women were rebuffing him by only perfunctorily raising their fans.19

  In 1857, Kinglake was elected Liberal MP for Bridgwater in Somerset. While delivering his maiden speech, in front of only a few dozen fellow members of Parliament, he broke down and had to abandon it. On the few occasions when he spoke after that, his weak voice made little impact. The MP Sir Robert Peel, son of the former prime minister, admitted that a well-received speech he made attacking the French emperor Napoleon III had been plagiarized from the preceding speech by Kinglake, which he had heard because he was sitting on the same bench but which the press gallery had not heard. Kinglake would write to the Times asking them to correct their faulty reports of what he had said in the Commons, with a ferocity he never displayed when there. “I did not say that ‘the Emperor of the French was bent forward like some mere dumb animal,’” he wrote in one letter, “I said that she (France) was led forward like some mere dumb animal who had been taught to pull a trigger and fire a musket without knowing why or wherefore except that she was under the orders of her master.”20

  Inarticulate and inaudible oratory was, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a fine English tradition. In English Traits (1856), in which he claimed to be able to trace the national reputation for taciturnity back seven hundred years, Emerson noted a perverted pride in bad public speaking in the House of Commons. The chamber seemed to be full of mumblers whose voices sank into their throats, with no one around them brave enough to ask them to speak up. It was, he wrote of the members, “as if they were willing to show that they do not live by their tongues, or thought they spoke well enough if they had the tone of gentlemen.”21

  The historian David Vincent claims that the idea of English reserve crystallized in the middle of the nineteenth century as a way of justifying how British government worked. The elite public schools and universities nurtured the habit of saying one thing and feeling or knowing something else, which created a culture of “honourable secrecy” that permeated government as its bureaucracy expanded. Important messages were not to be delivered in rousing speeches but whispered in the corridors of power or behind closed doors. According to Vincent, this notion of honourable secrecy served as a convenient alibi for the civil service’s parsimony with information and the growing power of the state, allowing these to be explained away as part of a “gentlemanly distaste for unnecessary noise of any sort.”22

  When the journalist Michael McCarthy shadowed the Department of the Environment in the late 1980s, he found that British civil servants were still using this esoteric code. Its key quality, he felt, was “dynamic understatement.” Words that might
seem bland to the uninitiated became charged with meaning if you were “gentlemanly” enough—that is, had been educated at the right schools—to be able to decode them. Hence the highest accolade was to say that something was “rather impressive,” but woe betide the official whose contributions were regarded as “unhelpful” or “unfortunate,” or, on rare and heinous occasions, “most unfortunate.” Even today, senior civil servants deploy a variant of this evasive vocabulary, with its suggestion that excessive keenness or candor is gauche and undignified. “I am reluctant to support,” “I haven’t formed a view yet,” and “I am happy to discuss” all signify dissent, while “I’m open to this line of thinking” means “yes.”23

  But this explanation for English reserve does not quite account for the protean character that was Alexander Kinglake’s. He may have been buttoned up, but he was also a late Romantic, a lover of Byron who loathed the airless respectability of English life, and a maverick backbencher, with no aspiration to hold high office or keep official secrets. His reserve suggested something stranger and more conflicted than establishment caginess. When the French philosopher Hippolyte Taine visited England in the summer of 1860, he noticed a shyness among its citizens that seemed similarly fine-grained in its emotional texture. As he observed in Notes sur l’Angleterre (1872), this led to odd inconsistencies. “There are men well-educated, even learned, having travelled, knowing several languages, who are embarrassed in company,” he wrote. “I know one of them who stammers in a drawing-room, and who on the following day has addressed eight meetings with great eloquence.”24

  Unlike many of his compatriots, Taine did not think English reserve was the result of an obsession with rank and class that had constipated their emotional lives. It was rather, he felt, that they were brimful of feelings, which were all the more affecting for so rarely bubbling up to the surface to disturb dead-calm waters. The English expressed their passions in ways overlooked by the inattentive, but those who watched carefully could see “the emotions pass over these complexions, as one sees the colours change upon their meadows.”25

  Kinglake once told a few close friends of a dream he had had years earlier, while he was a Cambridge undergraduate, in which he was attending an anatomical lecture in one of the lower-school rooms at his alma mater, Eton. Seated as he was on the highest row of benches, it took him a while to realize that it was his own body being dissected by the professor. He was annoyed at being so far from the front that he could not see or hear very well. Kinglake thought it odd that, in a dream, “a man may conceive himself to be in perfect possession of his identity, whilst separated from his own body by a distance of several feet.”26 Kinglake’s unconscious, at least, was giving his social fears an outlet. In his dreams the self he presented to the world was being mercilessly dismembered by others while his private self, feeling left out and ignored, looked helplessly on.

  Kinglake spent his last three decades as a virtual recluse, completing a little-read multivolume history of the Crimean War. Toward the end of his life, in 1884, he declined an artist’s request to sit for a portrait. “I have all my life suffered from constitutional shyness,” he replied. “I have never done more than overrule it, so to speak, for the time, without being able to conquer it.”27

  This was how the Victorians saw shyness: as an unwavering disposition, a force one could never defeat, as fixed and as little one’s fault as a tendency to suffer from gout or piles. In an age like ours, where we believe in endless therapeutic experiments to remake the self, it is hard to get inside the head of a Victorian, who saw shyness as God-given and never to be overridden. A shyness deemed “constitutional” could not be remedied, even when it insisted on leading its sufferer down the oddest avenues of behavior. The paradox of English reserve is that its exaggerated civility and emotional mutedness seem designed to distance its practitioners from their more bestial selves, and perhaps from the more feral classes and races they deem beneath them. And yet it can also speak to a basic animal instinct, to hunker down and hide away from everything. Shyness may have its roots in human self-consciousness, but it leaves us at the mercy of our animal emotions—making us, in extremis, shake with fear, run away, and hide.

  To the Victorians, one animal seemed to embody this kind of shyness in enthrallingly human form. When the first orangutans arrived at the London Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park in the late 1830s, many, including Darwin, were fascinated by these creatures, which seemed so like humans and yet so unfathomable. Wearing looks of settled sadness on their hairless, humanoid faces, they looked like depressive versions of ourselves. Alfred Russel Wallace, who encountered them during a trip to Sarawak in 1854 and even tried to raise a baby orang after he had shot its mother, thought them eerily similar to people, and they fueled his sense that apes and humans shared an ancestry.

  Orangutans were rarely spotted in the wild and were even more rarely seen in groups. Two or three might join up to pick a particularly rich crop of fruit, but they displayed none of the affable greetings and mutual grooming habits that more sociable apes did, and they returned to their solitude without farewells or signs of regret. The males, like reserved English gentlemen with no social skills, often inspired fear and repulsion in the females they sought to attract. Except when mating or rearing children, they led lonely lives, spending much of their time breaking off branches to build themselves platforms high in the trees.

  There were in fact good evolutionary reasons for the orangutan’s shyness. The Bornean and Sumatran rainforests where the orangutans lived were dominated by the tall hardwood trees known as dipterocarps, which have inedible fruits, so they had to disperse and forage alone among the widely scattered fruit trees, which could only bear the weight of one bulky ape at a time. The local people living on the edges of the forest, however, tended to anthropomorphize the orangutan’s solitariness just as the Victorian English did. One creation myth had it that the orangs were all descended from a single tribesman who, shamed by some misdemeanor, had fled the village for the forest and never came back.

  Those who saw orangutans in zoos also remarked on their shyness, which seemed to be of that especially English variety that cohabited with crankiness. An orangutan exhibited at the Royal Aquarium in Westminster in the 1880s was said to be “fond of retirement, and when an opportunity offers will envelop himself from head to foot in his blanket, any attempt to remove which arouses a speedy retreat on the part of the offending person . . . Although somewhat shy, he does not absolutely shun the public gaze, but generally looks straight before him over the heads of the crowd, as though searching for some object familiar to him.”28

  In contrast to the orangutans, the chimpanzees who arrived at London zoo around the same time seemed to channel our more garrulous tendencies. The common idea that chimps were the most sociable of our ape cousins led to them starring in what became the zoo’s most popular attraction, the chimpanzee tea party, dressed in their Sunday best and managing a rough approximation of table manners. And yet this was deceptive: the chimps were mercurial, and the females in particular could be as shy and morose as orangutans. A century of chimp research has since tried to decipher their grunts and squeals or to teach them human sign language, but our closest evolutionary cousins remain almost as remote to us as the orangutans.

  If you had been wandering around London zoo one Thursday afternoon in July 1914, a month before the start of the First World War, you might have seen these two species, shy ape and shy Englishman, eyeing each other. A young poet, Siegfried Sassoon, was in the monkey house, staring dejectedly through the bars at the chimps and orangutans. One of them looked at him as if about to say something, he wrote later, but then “sighed and looked away.” The others stared back with “motionless morosity.”29

  Perhaps those sullen-looking apes were thinking that this stranger also had the pitiful mien of a caged animal. Sassoon had that quality of English reserve that Taine identified, the sense of an emotional life both bottled up and brimming over. His friends
often characterized his shyness as slightly wild and creatural. The journalist and critic Robbie Ross likened him to a “shy and offended deerhound.” Lady Ottoline Morrell thought only a French word would do: farouche, which comes from the Latin forasticus, “out of doors,” and means both timid and savage, like a wild animal.30 His comrades in the trenches later nicknamed him Kangaroo. His cricket friends likened him to a heron or crane, for he lifted his thin legs up high as he languidly retrieved the ball.

  Sassoon’s trip to London zoo inspired a sonnet, “Sporting Acquaintances,” which records his futile attempt to converse with the chimps and orangutans through wordless stares. The poem’s true inspiration, though, was his failed conversation not with an ape but with another human. He had gone to the zoo to brood, after a stilted breakfast meeting with a more famous and glamorous poet, Rupert Brooke. Sassoon was almost unknown at the time, in part because he published his early poems under only his initials. Looking elegantly rumpled and still wearing a Tahiti suntan, the beautiful and confident Brooke inspired in Sassoon a resentful admiration, making him feel like “one more in the procession of people who were more interested in him [Brooke] than he was in them.”31 A shy man typically flattened in the force field of a charismatic, Sassoon imagined Brooke sighing with relief as they said good-bye and he went back to being his unrestrained self. Brooke, it seems, was polite enough and hardly to blame because people kept falling in love with him. By the time Sassoon’s gently barbed account of their meeting was written, he could not answer back, having died of blood poisoning in the Aegean on a ship bound for the Dardanelles.