Shrinking Violets
Page 6
Tennant died in February 1987, a few weeks before The Enigma of Arrival was published. His house was sold to an American businessman, and all its contents were auctioned off in a marquee on the lawn. Everything in what Sotheby’s billed as “an English eccentric’s dream house” went under the hammer, from the zebra-skin puffs to the garden statuary that the auction house’s director, Christopher King, had rescued after hours of thrashing through the undergrowth. Sylvia Blandford, Tennant’s housekeeper-cum-nurse in his last years, expressed her relief that he was not alive to see all this, since “he was such a private person, he didn’t like anyone touching his belongings.”47
Not everyone believed Tennant was so protective of his privacy. V. S. Naipaul’s friend Paul Theroux had been irritated by this “idle, silly queen,” who had led a meritless life but had convinced everyone he was “eccentric”—the word the English always gave to “wealthy lunatics.” An American in long-term residence in London, Theroux had his own droll take on English reserve, that blend of “shyness and suspicion . . . wary curiosity and frugal kindness” that could, in severe cases like Tennant’s, become a set of well-rehearsed, self-dramatizing clichés.48 To Theroux, Tennant’s yin-and-yang of emotional incontinence and retiring self-consciousness belonged to a vanishing age in which cosseted members of the upper and middle classes had their neuroses indulged by their loyal retinues.
Afflicted by English reserve myself, I am inclined to be a little more generous about it. Extreme shyness can seem attention-seeking, which has always tended to arouse distrust in the unshy. To an unfriendly observer it can look like inside-out narcissism, self-absorption masquerading as modesty. Since shyness rarely explains itself, it becomes a tabula rasa on which others can write their own meanings. The psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips suggests that it has a bad reputation “among the more glibly suspicious—among, that is, the psychologically-minded”—because “the ways in which shyness seeks and controls attention are always more vivid than whatever else the shy are so privately struggling with.”49 While we happily live with our own contradictory personality traits, we find other people’s contradictions harder to accept, even though we should know by now that consistency is a rare human quality.
In our increasingly confessional age, with its cult of sincerity and authenticity, it does feel that people are becoming more suspicious of those who hold back, as if diffidence must be in some way fraudulent or cheapened by ulterior motives. A colleague of mine told me that he had given Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca to a friend, who had come back to him irritated and affronted by the unnamed narrator’s shyness, which he dismissed as “arrogance in low heels.” Shyness now often inspires such impatience, my colleague reflected, for it has “lost its virtuous glow in a tell-all age.”
It is true that shyness can coexist with self-absorption. It is based, after all, on feeling different from the crowd. However hedged around that is by self-doubt, it can amount to an inflated sense of one’s own worth—a low-heeled arrogance. But being aware of this hazard never helped me to avoid it. Nor do I think we can ever know enough about others to dismiss their shyness, or indeed any other part of their personality, as a sham. Separating social performances from authentic feelings is rarely straightforward, especially given the boundless human capacity for self-delusion.
Every self contains multitudes: we are all an amalgam of public and private versions of ourselves. A public self is also, in its way, real. Perhaps it is even more real than a private self, given the enormous effort we invest in its realization. What a suffocatingly earnest world it would be if we all had to be an open book to everyone. There should surely be room in the gene pool for behavior that is awkward or mulish or that invites accusations of pretension or artifice—even if it involves ignoring passers-by in the desert or taking our scent bottles to bed with us for thirty years. English reserve has its histrionic and affected aspects and must seem like a put-on to those annoyed by it. But who really knows where a performance begins and ends? Genuine shyness, that odd state of mind, comes in many disguises.
3
How Embarrassing
In the first years of the Second World War, a man known as the Prof stalked the corridors of Bletchley Park mansion wearing an air of deep unease. He could not bring himself to look at people he knew as they passed by; his gaze stayed fixed on the nearest wall, which he touched lightly with his fingers as if wanting to cling to something. The new Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley, north of London, was an industrial operation, as busy as a small town, with hundreds of secretaries and code breakers scuttling between the prefab huts and the teleprinters in the main building. For the first time in his life the Prof was confronted by large numbers of women. “I once offered him a cup of tea but he shrank back with fear,” recalled Sarah Norton, who worked nearby, in Hut 4. He coped with the young women in corridors, she said, by “shambling down to the canteen in a curious sideways step, his eyes fixed to the ground.”1
Alan Turing was cursed with that peculiarly middle-class English talent for social embarrassment. You would not guess it from photographs, which reveal a boyish face turned in matinee-idol half-profile, his hair neatly gelled, but if you met him in the flesh, Turing looked eternally awkward. He was covered in ink stains, his fingernails were bitten raw, his tie was badly knotted, his jacket buttons were in the wrong holes, and his hair stood on end. It was as if he saw his body as an encumbrance to lug round to service his enormous brain. For while this body was uncoordinated and embarrassing, his brilliant mind worked as reliably as a computer—that machine he hadn’t got around to inventing yet.
According to his mother, Sara, Turing was a vivacious boy who became, at the age of ten, remote and withdrawn. She blamed the change on their painful partings: when he was dropped off at boarding school at the start of a new term, he would rush down the drive in pursuit of his parents’ retreating car. “He appears self-contained and is apt to be solitary,” wrote Turing’s housemaster at Sherborne School. “This is not due to moroseness, but simply I think a shy disposition.” This disposition was presumably aggravated when, during an initiation rite in his first year there, he was forced into a wastepaper basket and kicked across the common room by the other boys, who also liked to trap him under the floorboards. Sherborne, like many English public schools saturated with the Victorian ideals of muscular Christianity, believed it better to be a good mixer than a diligent scholar, especially a scholar who excelled in the philistine sciences. In one report Turing’s headmaster accused him of having no “esprit de corps” and cautioned that “if he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School.”2
As a young man, Turing’s ability to turn his forensic mind to dissecting his own awkwardness made him a skillful semiotician of the social life to which he was so ill suited, a code breaker of human behavior. When studying at Princeton in the mid-1930s, he tried to decrypt American manners. The American habit of saying “aha” while listening to someone else, because they thought silence might be rude, unnerved him—as did the startlingly informal tradespeople, such as the laundry-van man who put his arm on Turing’s shoulder while speaking to him. “Whenever you thank them for anything, they say ‘You’re welcome,’” he wrote to his mother. “I rather liked it at first, thinking I was welcome, but now I find it comes back like a ball thrown against a wall, and become positively apprehensive.”3
While at Princeton, Turing published a classic paper, “On Computable Numbers,” the first attempt to describe what a computer might look like. Just a dozen years later, in June 1948, when he was back in England, his small team at Manchester University persuaded such a machine to work. Turing became a fervent proselytizer for artificial intelligence, believing that a “mechanical brain” would one day compete on equal terms with a human brain. He even thought it would be able to write sonnets as well as Shakespeare, although he conceded that the comparison was a little unfair because a sonnet written by a machine would b
e better appreciated by another machine.4
In 1952 he and his colleague Christopher Strachey created a computer program that could write love letters using sentence-building algorithms and synonyms from Roget’s Thesaurus. “Darling Sweetheart,” went one, “You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns to your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking. Yours beautifully.”5 This bit of whimsy had a poignant undertow. Turing could never write such a love letter himself—not just because he was shy but because he was gay. Homosexuality was illegal, and a letter to a lover might have incriminated him.
Computer code relies on a formal logic that allows it, for example, to make algebraic calculations or follow the unchanging rules of chess. For this type of thinking a machine, even a primitive 1940s one, could outstrip our feeble brains, as Turing showed. But humans are not automatons solving problems by algorithm. They have inherited that peculiar offshoot of human evolution—self-consciousness—which allows them to imagine what others might be thinking of them and to dream up embarrassing scenarios that might not even be close to happening. A computer is unembarrassable. Although it may be hyperintelligent, it is too rational to care what a person, or indeed another computer, thinks of it. A computer cannot be shy.
If anyone offered proof of the human brain’s chaotic noncomputability, it was Alan Turing. Early one morning in the autumn of 1950 his colleague Max Newman’s young son discovered him on the doorstep of their house in his jogging clothes. Turing explained that he had set out on a run and on the way decided to invite the Newmans for dinner. Not wishing to disturb them and not having paper on hand, he was trying to scratch his invitation on a rhododendron leaf with a twig.6 No computer could ever have replicated such a stupid-brilliant intuitive leap.
Unlike computers, people are both intelligent and unintelligent; they are prone to irrational thought patterns that create the very situations they want to avoid. Turing’s efforts to escape attention succeeded only in attracting it and making him more embarrassed. His contorted efforts to avoid eye contact in corridors just made him more noticeable. He sought solitude in running, but, dressed in a pair of ancient flannel trousers tied at the waist with rope, sometimes with an alarm clock attached, he could not have been more conspicuous. He carried the alarm clock on trains in lieu of a wristwatch, startling everyone in the carriage, including himself, when it went off.
Mathematics offered Turing a possible escape. In A Mathematician’s Apology, written in 1940, the Cambridge University mathematics professor G. H. Hardy celebrated the remote and beautiful uselessness of numbers and expressed the hope that his discipline of study would remain “gentle and clean” and play no part in the war. Turing attended Hardy’s lectures at Cambridge and knew him slightly at Princeton, but their mutual reserve ensured that they were never friends. Hardy’s shyness was similarly cultivated in rough public-school life—in his case, at Winchester. Like Turing, he would pass acquaintances in the street without acknowledging them and loathed having his picture taken. He had no mirror in his rooms, not even a shaving mirror, and on entering a hotel room the first thing he did was to cover up the mirrors with towels—even though, as his friend C. P. Snow pointed out, “all his life he was good-looking quite out of the ordinary.”7
Turing was certainly drawn to Hardy’s idea that mathematics was a consolingly parallel universe of abstract relationships, a refuge from the baffling social conventions that blighted his relations with others. But, in the end, he was far too interested in the real world and in other people to be Hardy’s true disciple. Turing’s shyness, like so many people’s, was erratic. He could be nervy and confident, shy and sociable, serious and witty, embarrassed and unembarrassable, depending on the setting.
Turing’s work reflected his conflicted personality, being highly abstract and theoretical yet also directed out at the world. His interest in combining pure mathematical logic with practical problem-solving turned out to be a perfect preparation for code breaking. And so, to G. H. Hardy’s chagrin perhaps, mathematics ended up having a decisive effect on the war after all. Because of Bletchley the Nazi war machine found itself outflanked by a motley band of math whizzes, chess champions, and crossword fanatics, with Turing as their reluctant front man, stalking the corridors looking down at his shoes.
Turing believed that a computer’s mechanical brain, interacting rationally with the world by ticking through its algorithms and dispensing intelligence like a vending machine, was not so very different from a human one. But just as he was predicting that computers would one day think like us, another highly original mind was beginning its own very different soundings into the inimitable strangeness of human self-consciousness. A few days before Christmas, 1949, a young doctoral student, Erving Goffman, arrived by boat on the small Shetland island of Unst. He stayed for the next year and a half, claiming to be an American studying the economics of crofting. In fact, he was a Canadian studying people.
Unst was the most northerly inhabited island in Britain. Goffman settled in the main village of Baltasound, first in the hotel and then in a tiny cottage he bought from a local crofter. The island’s population of about a thousand was an enclosed community, with outsiders kept at a distance. Visiting seamen were offered no more than a brief nod or a word about the weather, and tourists found themselves cut out of conversations by a private code of gestures and dialect words.
But the standoffishness was not just reserved for visitors. The islanders were also shy of each other and so self-effacing that they rarely used the word “I” in conversation. If a woman received a compliment, she would either cast her head down in discomfiture or rush at the perpetrator with waving arms. When the island’s young men sailed off for the mainland or left to join merchant navy or whaling expeditions, there were no tears, nor were any shed at funerals. The only time the island’s women cried was in the darkened community hall during film showings by the Highland and Islands Film Guild. The shyest islanders of all were the children. When the primary school had visitors, the pupils would cover their faces with their hands, scrutinizing the strangers through their fingers. They thought they could make themselves invisible by making others invisible to them. “Shetlanders take some knowing,” wrote W. P. Livingstone in his 1947 guide Shetland and the Shetlanders. “It is the children who defeat one; well-behaved, they are excessively shy, and it is a triumph if you get a word from them.”8
The shyness of Shetlanders was sometimes explained by their Nordic ancestry: the islands were under Norse rule until 1472, and Unst is closer to Bergen than to Aberdeen. Nordic people have a reputation for shyness—a product, perhaps, of a Calvinist Protestant tradition that shunned brazenness and ostentation, the freezing temperatures that necessitated taciturnity when outdoors, and the ethnic homogeneity that allowed shared experiences and feelings to be implied rather than said out loud. The playwright Henrik Ibsen, who drank heavily to cure his own shyness, described the people of his hometown of Skien in Norway as “afraid openly to surrender to a mood or to let themselves be carried away; they suffer from shyness of the soul.”9 The Shetland character, it was said, retained a similar Viking reticence nursed in the cold, dark winters and unpeopled wilds of Ultima Thule.
A more specific cause of their shyness, which Goffman alighted on, was the historical relationship between the crofters and the laird. Until the 1895 crofting act, the landlord could hike rents without warning. Crofters feared that any show of wealth on their part might lead to a rent increase, so they hid any evidence of how much they owned and, more generally, of what they thought and felt. Their behavior at auctions was symptomatic. Household furnishings were worth a lot secondhand on Unst because of high shipping charges from the mainland, so auctions were big events. But bidders risked showing their neighbors how much money they had, or they might find themselves competing with a friend for the same lot. So they used unobtrusive signals meant to be seen only by the auctioneer, such as lifting a hand halfwa
y out of a pocket or catching his eye with an equivocal look. This obscure secrecy meant that the auctioneer often made mistakes and that people were sold things they had no idea they had bid for.
Goffman wondered if the self-consciousness he observed might also be due, paradoxically, to the lack of privacy on Unst. The island, just twelve miles long and five miles wide, was mostly low-lying peat moorland, with little vegetation and no trees, so crofters could easily see the state of each other’s crops and live-stock, as well as any mistakes they made when farming them. Since islanders did not like having visitors without advance warning, they would look out of the kitchen window every quarter of an hour or so, or when they heard the croft collies barking, to see if anyone was approaching. Then they deployed a tool everyone on the island owned: a pocket telescope.
One situation, though, demanded sociability. Since Unst’s roads were never crowded, when people crossed paths they could not convincingly pretend not to have seen each other. The solution was to exchange a few innocuous words.
“Ae, ae.”
“Ae, ae.”
“Foine day.”
“Foine day.”
“Voo is du?”
“Nae sae bad.”
Only two groups were excused from having to acknowledge others like this on Unst’s roads: children under the age of fourteen and anyone inside one of Unst’s fourteen motor cars. Motorists were obliged simply to lift one hand off the wheel and smile when they passed by. This was the only occasion on Unst, Goffman noted, when men smiled in greeting. Similar exchanges occurred if people found themselves sitting next to each other at social events in the community hall.