Shrinking Violets

by Joe Moran

Sassoon’s personality, meanwhile, was said to have been transformed by his time as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. His anger at the death of his beloved comrade, Second Lieutenant David Thomas, in March 1916 had apparently turned him into “Mad Jack.” But Sassoon never saw it this way; he thought of his shyness as a constant that followed him from boyhood to old age. There was something shy even about his bravery as a soldier, which took the form of patrolling the mine craters or cutting wires in no-man’s-land on his own, without telling his superiors.

  In July 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, Sassoon single-handedly attacked a German trench in Mametz Wood an hour before zero, peppering it with hand grenades and scattering dozens of Germans. But having secured the trench, he sat and read from a book of poems he had in his pocket, and his platoon failed to secure the advantage. He was recommended for a Victoria Cross for this but failed to win one, probably because his gallantry was not conspicuous enough. Even Sassoon’s account of the antiwar protest in which he threw his Military Cross ribbon into the Mersey River was subdued. “The poor little thing fell weakly on to the water and floated away as though aware of its own futility,” he wrote.32

  Sassoon’s denunciation of the war led him to meet another paragon of English reserve: W. H. R. Rivers, a renowned scholar and psychiatrist, who treated Sassoon at Craiglockhart War Hospital, near Edinburgh, for his diplomatically diagnosed “shell shock.” Rivers was shy and stammering and a dreadful public speaker. His friend and fellow doctor Walter Langdon-Brown recalled that he once gave a lecture on the subject of “Fatigue,” and “before he had finished, his title was writ large on the faces of his audience.”33

  Rivers’s shyness could not be dismissed as class hauteur nor—although he had pioneered the practice of anthropological fieldwork while living among the Toda people of southern India—as the neurotically overcivilized reserve cultivated by the imperial Englishman abroad. Rather, shyness had bred in him a loathing for snobbery and social façades. At Craiglockhart he rarely carried his swagger stick or returned salutes. Once, when he caught Sassoon using a visitor’s hat as a makeshift football, Rivers fixed him with a benevolent half-smile and “the half-shy look of a middle-aged person intruding on the segregative amusements of the young.” Rivers’s shyness had given birth to a calmness and stoicism that few who knew him forgot, even long after he had died. All his life Sassoon had a compelling image of him in his mind, pulling his glasses up onto his head, wrapping his hands round his knee, and listening intently to his patient. Sassoon was puzzled by this “intense survival of his human integrity,” the aura that someone so unassertive could retain even after death.34

  Brooke had been instantly magnetic; Rivers was so by slow increments. He made Sassoon see that shyness did not always have to be an inadequacy but could be a positive quality—something you were rather than something that stopped you from being who you were. Shyness’s energies are often reactive and damage-limiting: fearing that others will share our own disapproving thoughts about ourselves, our goal is often to not make a mistake, to avoid censure rather than go after praise. But not always, as Sassoon found in Rivers. If you can somehow prevent your shyness from clotting into neurotic risk aversion, it can help you face the world with an added layer of gentleness and curiosity.

  And yet Sassoon was also aware that shyness could begin as an unaffected feeling of fear and awkwardness and become a sincere performance, a stage-managed retreat. The military hero and writer T. E. Lawrence once said that if he were asked to “export the ideal Englishman to an international exhibition,” he would choose Sassoon.35 Born and raised in the Kentish Weald, educated at Marlborough and Cambridge, a country gentleman and foxhunter, Sassoon certainly looked the part. But he was also homosexual, and a Jew, of Persian ancestry, who converted to Catholicism late in life. He wanted desperately to belong but, like many shy people, extracted a certain masochistic pride out of not belonging. For all his self-involvement, Sassoon also had a writer’s fascination with other people and the poses they struck. While he seemed to others like the epitome of the reserved English gentleman, he was a careful dissector of the contradictions in this English identity, the way that it could bring shyness and self-regard together in a surreal, half-acted personality.

  Many in Sassoon’s social circle were afflicted by this kind of English reserve—and like him they still seemed to enjoy a glittering social life, mixing in that upper-middle-class sphere where high society met the arts. The artist Rex Whistler managed to be taken up by fashionable London hostesses and have many men and women fall in love with him, even though he said hardly anything, never replied to letters or answered the telephone, and lost or forgot to cash many of the checks he received for his work. Another of Sassoon’s friends, the composer and artist Lord Berners, suffered from an extreme reserve that made him blink incessantly and laugh in a strangulated way like a blocked sneeze. Stories about his shyness, probably apocryphal, accumulated: he was rumored to wear a mask when out driving his Rolls-Royce and to affect having scarlet fever to keep a railway carriage to himself. Sassoon’s friend T. E. Lawrence, meanwhile, managed to be both extravagantly reclusive and sociable. He was an Olympic-class networker who was always, Berners said, “backing into the limelight.”36

  Sassoon seemed to have made it his life’s work to learn how to be an Englishman by observing others performing the role. “I wish I could understand why I enjoy adapting the attitude of a sort of social and slightly sinister Enoch Arden,” he confided to his diary in 1925. In Tennyson’s poem, Enoch Arden returns from sea after ten years of being presumed dead and never reveals to his wife that he is alive, because he loves her too much to spoil her new happiness with another man. He dies of a broken heart. All his adult life Sassoon talked of his “Enoch Arden complex”: his desire to stand back and watch others unseen, like a ghost.37

  In 1927, Sassoon briefly abandoned his habit of looking on from the edges and did something reckless: he began an affair with a beautiful young aristocrat, Stephen Tennant. Tennant had been earmarked for artistic greatness by his mother, Pamela, Lady Glenconner, a bohemian soul keen to distance herself from the family’s fortune, earned from the manufacture of powdered bleach. She had published her eleven-year-old son’s utterings in a book, The Sayings of the Children. At thirteen he had his line-and-wash drawings displayed in a solo exhibition at a South Kensington gallery and reviewed kindly by strategically placed art critics. In his early twenties he wrote imperious style notes for the Daily Mail: “Do not beam fatuously or leave a smile on your face or look breathlessly enthusiastic like a dog with its tongue out—it’s a question of poise, not pose.”38 His hair was waved and sprinkled with gold dust; he wore magenta lipstick, mascara, and gold earrings. At the family home, Wilsford Manor in Wiltshire, he and his fellow Bright Young Things held pajama parties and staged masques on the lawn dressed as nuns and shepherds. Someone less like Sassoon it seems hard to imagine.

  And yet they were not so unalike. As a student at the Slade School of Art, Tennant had skipped life classes because he could not face his fellow students, and had formed an amitié amoureuse with Rex Whistler. Evelyn Waugh later used Tennant and Whistler as his models for the shy Charles Ryder and the flamboyant Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited (1945). For all his charm, Sebastian is the one who says he wants to run away from his family and who ends his days as a recluse, a depressed alcoholic slowly dying in a Tunisian monastery.

  Tennant had the same knack for combining outrageous behavior with profound inhibition. In Vile Bodies (1930), Waugh had captured the polarizing private slang of the Bright Young Things, in which everything was either “divine” or socially mortifying: “too, too shaming,” “perfectly sheepish,” “shy-making.” Tennant lived by these extremes. The great moment of his life, he said, was when a coachload of tourists in Saint Moritz applauded him for being so beautiful. And yet he would hide in the toilets at The Ivy because he did not want to go into the restaurant before his friends had arrived. He lov
ed Wilsford Manor because, hidden in a mist-prone hollow in the Wiltshire Downs and hedged in by yews and oaks, it let him shut out the world. By 1929, Sassoon was virtually a live-in carer there, Tennant having taken to his bed, first with tuberculosis and then with an unspecific illness diagnosed as neurasthenia, that catchall term for early twentieth-century melancholia.

  In 1933, a year after Tennant ended their affair by refusing to see him, Sassoon married Hester Gatty and found his own retreat about thirty miles away at Heytesbury House, a Georgian mansion near Warminster. The marriage soon faltered, but Sassoon came to love the remoteness of this place and the solitude of its woods. As a young boy in the late 1940s, Ferdinand Mount met the “Hermit of Heytesbury” when he and his father were invited for tea. They wandered around to the back of the house trying doors, finding their way eventually into an unlit drawing room that seemed empty, Mount recalled, “until our eyes focused enough to see the celebrated gaunt hawk’s profile outlined against the dying light.” Sassoon “pushed a plate of dry cucumber sandwiches at us and began to talk in a shy undertone.”39

  All the stories about visiting Sassoon are like this. He invited almost everyone he met to tea, with the same grumble that no one ever came to see him. If they rang to confirm, he sounded edgy and regretful of having made the invitation but told them to come anyway. At the appointed time they found the lodge unpeopled, and no one answered the door at the big house. They gained entry at the back and eventually discovered Sassoon in one of the rooms. At the start of any such encounter his shyness made him a bundle of self-concern with, according to his nun friend Dame Felicitas Corrigan, “the emaciated face of an El Greco saint and the pent-up energy of a hydrogen bomb.”40 He would, without saying hello or looking at his guests, start talking into his lap or over their heads about poetry, the servant problem, cricket, or himself—as if he had been lecturing the air and they had just happened to catch him at it. His sentences were contorted and unfinished, and accompanied by nervous spasms and claspings of his face.

  Those who made return visits learned that the trick was to catch his eye after an hour or so and then swiftly interject a word so that conversation of a kind could occur. His friend Haro Hodson compared this indirect approach to gentling and bridling a horse. The adjective “shy” first entered the English language in the thirteenth century to describe horses that were skittish, high-mettled, or startled by strange noises and fast-moving objects. The word did not migrate from horses to people until the early seventeenth century, when Shakespeare used it twice in Measure for Measure: “A shy fellow was the Duke . . . as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute, as Angelo.” Residual associations of shyness with the flightiness and stubbornness of horses remained until at least the end of the nineteenth century. According to an 1891 source cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, “The wind is said to be shy when it will barely allow a vessel to sail on her course.”

  Horse handlers still talk of “head shyness,” which can make brushing or bridling a battle of wills. As soon as you pick up the reins, a shy horse will toss its head in circles or stretch it high and away from you—rather, in fact, like Sassoon jerking his head around, as if he did not want people to settle on any aspect of his face for long. Canny horse handlers will hold the bridle behind their backs until the horse lowers its head and then seize it by the nose so that it opens its jaw in annoyance or surprise, and the bit can quickly be slipped into the mouth.

  Eventually, like a halter-broken mare, Sassoon calmed down. The jerky movements receded, his sentences began to join up coherently—indeed, he became astonishingly articulate, as if he were reciting perfectly turned sentences learned by heart—and he became blithely unaware of the darkening room, the ringing telephone, the kettle he had boiled half an hour ago. One of the Benedictine teacher-monks at Downside School, Dom Hubert Van Zeller, took some boys to visit him, and Sassoon became so entranced with his own monologue that he went on pouring tea into a cup long after it was full. Another time, while signing a book for one of the boys, he wrote “To Siegfried . . . from Siegfried Siegfried.”41 Oddly, his diaries reveal that even in the middle of these torrents of self-preoccupied speech he was listening to each question he ignored and picking up every movement of his guests in the corner of his eye.

  In his latter years his social life amounted mainly to playing cricket for Heytesbury village alongside his estate workers and the local farmhands. His hapless batting was tactfully hidden well down in the batting order, but he insisted on fielding in the exposed position of mid-on, where he would let the approaching ball hit him hard on the shins before slowly picking it up. Since it was his land and since he let the cricket club use it for free, no one could stop him from leaving the pitch to lean on the fence or even from walking off in the middle of a game if he got bored.42

  The emphasis on good form, on the things that were unsayable or did not need to be said, made cricket a sport that might have been devised especially for the reserved Englishman. A cricket match had a general air of calmness and quiet and unfolded slowly. It was enjoyed not for orgasmic moments like goals or tries but for its longueurs and its subtle shifts in the balance of power as two teams felt their way to an advantage to ripples of polite applause. On a cricket field, nicely spaced out from the other fielders, Sassoon had just the right amount of solitude. In the after-match teas at the Angel Inn, he could handle the undemanding conversational currency that dealt in Somerset cricketers’ batting averages and misty-eyed remembrances of old village matches. Anyone who tried to talk to him about deeper matters was quickly cut off.

  Stephen Tennant, who dropped in on Sassoon sporadically in his early years at Heytesbury, had long since stopped calling. He was now in the grip of a shyness that had begun as a pose but had turned painfully real. He had taken to his bed and there, propped up by pillows and surrounded by scent bottles and powder boxes, wrote exquisitely illustrated letters, which one recipient, Stephen Spender, thought of as “the essence of English retention—objects for private consumption, deluxe samizdats.” When Christopher Isherwood visited Tennant in June 1961, he described his strewing of books, clothes, and jewelry all over the floors and furniture as “partly like arrangements for still-life painting, partly like drunken unpacking.”43 Tennant had stopped looking in mirrors but would caress his once-admired cheekbones to be assured they were still there. Wilsford’s garden was now a weedy wilderness; a barricade of dock and nettles cut the house off from the nearby Avon River; and the trees had died, throttled by the ivy the master of the house had ordered never to be cut.

  At the end of 1970 the novelist V. S. Naipaul and his wife, Pat, became tenants of Teasel Cottage, a bungalow in the manor grounds. Naipaul’s patron, Christopher Tennant, Lord Glenconner, had renovated the cottage for Stephen, his younger brother, because he thought living at Wilsford an extravagance for a single man with no income. Stephen had refused even to enter the cottage. But he liked having an author as a neighbor and would send him, via his servants, John and Mary Skull, the odd painting or poem. In the fifteen years Naipaul lived there, he never met Tennant but he did acquire “an immense sympathy” for him—partly, he conceded, because he remained a phantasm, so he had no need to cater to his high-maintenance oddnesses.44

  In Naipaul’s lightly fictionalized novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987), Tennant becomes a symbol for a country going quietly to seed. Like Naipaul, the book’s unnamed narrator comes from Trinidad, goes to Oxford, becomes a writer, and settles down in an emblematically English setting with his (also unnamed) landlord living in a nearby, semi-ruined manor. In 1949 or 1950 his landlord had withdrawn from the world, suffering from a malaise that the narrator sees as “something like accidia, the monk’s torpor or disease of the Middle Ages.” Naipaul’s wife is erased from the narrative, which leaves the landlord and the narrator entwined in silent solitude, each as eager to be unseen as the other. Even though the landlord’s fortune derives from Trinidadian plantations, the narrator feels kindly disposed and connected
to him through the empire. For the narrator, too, is shy, which he ascribes to the “rawness of my colonial’s nerves,” which have remained even after all the usual anxieties about social gaucherie, sexual inhibition, and unripe talent have faded with the end of youth.45

  The Enigma of Arrival contains very little dialogue, and the writing is hypnotically slow and self-conversing. The narrator measures out the seasons and agricultural rhythms in this melancholy, empty landscape in which, like the rural darkness that can cover the land in an instant, “big things could happen almost secretly.” With no actual meeting with his landlord to cloud the issue, the narrator begins to see the landlord’s shyness as symbolic of this setting, and his slow decline as mirroring the death of the old rural ways in a new era of mechanized farming and urban living. He catches a glimpse of him only twice, once as a flash of thigh being sunbathed by its owner in his garden and once, in the passenger seat of a passing car, as a bald head with thin strands of hair combed over it, a face with a benign expression, and a hand giving a slow wave. In that wave, just his fingertips making an arc above the dashboard, the narrator sees “the shyness that went at the same time with a great vanity . . . that wasn’t so much a wish not to be seen as a wish to be applauded on sight.”46

  Tennant, even during his deepest hibernations, would make the occasional trip into nearby Wilton or Salisbury in an instantly noticeable outfit of tight pink shorts and camel coat. Having retreated from the world because it would not adjust to his exalted sense of himself, he could not stop his shyness from segueing into showmanship. But shyness can be an implement of passive-aggressive willfulness and still be honestly arrived at. Tennant seems to have fallen for a common self-deception: he was unable to stop nurturing his unhappiness because he thought it was what made him who he was. If his shyness was an act, it was one he believed in and kept up for years at a high emotional cost. It was a word- and note-perfect piece of method acting of which Konstantin Stanislavski or Lee Strasberg would have been proud. Like many other virtuosos of English reserve, he must have felt snared by his own shyness, but he could not shake it off. The mask had stuck to his face.