by Joe Moran
“Good crowd.”
“Aye, fine crowd.”
“So.”
“So so.”
“Well, well.”
“Well, well.”
If anyone heard an opinion they did not agree with, they relied on what Goffman called “terminative echoes,” ways of ending the conversation civilly: “There’s something in what you say.” “I dinna kin.” “It’s past spaekin about.”10
Unst had several people with deformed faces or cleft lips and palates, whom the other islanders found it hard to talk to without being distracted by their looks. These people kept out of sight and were described as “shy,” but Goffman thought they had sacrificed themselves for the community’s sake, withdrawing from situations in which they might cause embarrassment and disrupt the smoothness of social occasions. The islanders also had a ready supply of ruses to get around their shyness: icebreakers such as guess-the-weight competitions, whist, and musical chairs, and foolproof conversational topics such as the birth of lambs and foals or the catch of the island’s two fishing boats. The most reliable antidote to shyness, brewed in nearly every home, was beer.
Goffman’s fieldwork, written up as his PhD thesis for the University of Chicago, “Communication Conduct in an Island Community,” formed the basis for his research on embarrassment, which took up much of the rest of his life. Embarrassment, he argued, grew out of “unfulfilled expectations.” Any social encounter consisted of people projecting claims to be an acceptable public self—someone reasonably courteous, coherent, presentable, and aware of social codes—and having those claims verified by others. Embarrassment occurred when something threw doubt on those claims and the encounter was shipwrecked on assumptions that no longer held. The person who regularly failed to convince peers in this way, Goffman wrote, “truly wears the leper’s bell.”11
The physical symptoms of embarrassment—blushing, blanching, stuttering, sweating, blinking, shaking, and even fainting—were bad enough. But embarrassment was a social calamity as well, since it was evidence of low status, moral shame, and other unwelcome traits—hence the frantic efforts to conceal it with false smiles, fake laughter, and averted gazes. Goffman thought that embarrassment was alarming because it exposed the precariousness of the social order. Since everyone had to verify whether everyone else had an acceptable social self, embarrassment was contagious, spreading out in ever-widening circles of unease. Oddly, it was only the minor shame of embarrassment that was infectious; witnessing others suffer more serious humiliations inspired no more than schadenfreude.
Goffman revealed little about himself. Even after he emerged as an academic star, he seldom spoke at conferences, gave interviews, or allowed his publishers to release his photo. One rare biographical morsel he served up was that his interest in human interaction stemmed from his shyness as a young man, which was aggravated by his being only five foot four. At the local dance hall in Dauphin, Manitoba, he would stand in the doorway between the bar and the dance floor, unable to afford another drink and too embarrassed to ask a girl to dance.12 Here, on the edge of things, his career as a watcher of social rituals began.
Goffman seems to have felt rather at home among the shy Shetlanders of Unst, cutting peat for winter fires and joining in at the community hall socials, where he was admired for being able to take the ultrastrong homemade beer, which the men nipped outside to swig. But mostly he kept his distance. “My real aim,” he wrote on the first page of his PhD thesis, “was to be an observant participant, rather than a participating observer.” Perhaps it was Goffman’s shyness that led him to avoid the direct interviewing most sociologists did and to rely instead on overheard conversations and discreet surveillance. This suited the islanders, who felt inhibited by people taking notes on their conversations and did not like touching on personal issues. Goffman’s thesis records that he did only a few interviews on matters that the islanders “felt were proper subjects for interviews.”13 After returning to the United States, he was never again so at ease with strangers. His later books appear to have involved no fieldwork at all, other than reading other people’s work.
The world according to Goffman, where an embarrassed person had to be avoided like a plague victim to save others from the stain of awkwardness, sounded bleak. But it was also a world in which people colluded sweetly to shield one another from ridicule. Our collective investment in the polite fictions of social life can be a torment but can also inspire a touching solidarity. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin tells the story of a shy and nervous man who had a dinner held in his honor. When he rose to give his speech, which he had learned by rote, he said not a word but behaved as if he were speaking animatedly and clearly believed that he was. His friends “loudly applauded the imaginary bursts of eloquence, whenever his gestures indicated a pause, and the man never discovered that he had remained the whole time completely silent.”14 Darwin could see, like Goffman, that we are bundles of insecurity, serial appeasers, joined in a benign conspiracy with the rest of the human race not to discomfort each other.
We will go to ornate lengths not to embarrass ourselves and those around us, often inadvertently embarrassing ourselves more in the process. Indeed, embarrassment is such an abysmal fate that people will die to avoid it. The American doctor Henry J. Heimlich, in his description of the rescue maneuver named after him, observed that “sometimes, a victim of choking becomes embarrassed by his predicament and succeeds in getting up and leaving the eating area unnoticed. In a nearby room, he loses consciousness and, if unattended, he will die or suffer permanent brain damage within seconds.”15
It is sometimes supposed that embarrassment is a recently acquired condition, a product of our excessively civilized and thus anxiety-inducing modern societies. Our sense of the word “embarrassment”—emotional discomfort arising from social awkwardness or self-consciousness, as opposed to its original meaning of a hindrance or impediment—did not find itself called for in English until the middle of the eighteenth century.
In Humiliation (1994), William Ian Miller, a scholar of saga-era Iceland, argues that in premodern cultures, shame was less an inner feeling than a social condition, as conspicuous as a physical deformity. In the world of the Icelandic sagas shame is so tangible that men will kill and maim each other in response to the smallest refusal to show respect. No one is shy in such a world, for everyone knows and agrees what shame looks like, so there is no need to agonize over it in some tortuous interior monologue. In Njál’s Saga, Kol, after having his leg hacked off by Kolskegg, looks calmly at the stump and says, “That’s what I get for not having a shield.” In Egil’s Saga the eponymous warrior comes close to killing a young poet, Einar, for having the cheek to present him with an overly valuable gift. The difference today, Miller writes, is that shame has receded and embarrassment has grown. Although we are more able to retain our self-respect in the face of others’ disdain, we are also more likely to feel ashamed when others might see no reason for us to be.16
The German British sociologist Norbert Elias has argued that until the past few hundred years, life was essentially lived in public. Families would eat and sleep in the same room, strangers would happily share a bed, and people urinated and defecated in full view of others. Then, in the sixteenth century, a “civilizing process” began to take hold across Europe. The medieval code of manners, called “courtesy” because it was practiced by court nobility, morphed into “civility,” meant to be practiced by everyone. Rules about eating in company, spitting, nose blowing, and going to the toilet became more demanding and self-constraining. Elias finds evidence for this shift in the publication of new guides to manners, such as Erasmus’s On Civility in Children (1530). Erasmus’s standards seem fairly relaxed by today’s lights. A young man, he wrote, need not suppress his farts, for “in doing so he might, under the appearance of urbanity, contract an illness,” and in the absence of a cloth, he should blow out his snot and tread it into the floor.17 But in these modest b
eginnings Elias sees the start of a process by which bodily functions and uncouth behavior became gradually invisible in polite society.
Elias suggests that a key factor was the rise of the nation-state and its claiming of a monopoly on the use of violence. In private life, evenness of temper thus came to be prized over physical coercion. As social life became less dangerous, and feasting and dancing became less likely to end in arguments and fighting, what Elias calls the “shame-threshold” advanced.18 Physical and psychological barriers grew up around people, especially among strangers in public, and there were more opportunities for awkwardness over when these boundaries could be crossed. People came to fear losing love and respect if they crossed this shame-threshold, and they internalized what they imagined to be the negative judgments of others. The shame-threshold advanced into our hearts and minds.
This account sounds persuasive. But Goffman’s work on Unst casts doubt on Elias’s idea that embarrassment is a recent invention and that people intermingled less inhibitedly in small-scale, premodern societies. On the contrary, the smallness of Unst seemed to have cultivated a claustrophobic social awkwardness. Everyone knew everyone else too well. They lived much of their lives in public, watched and judged by those around them, which made them cling tenaciously to their little pockets of privacy.
Perhaps the truth is more that embarrassment is endlessly omnivorous and adaptable. It can thrive in the austere communal life of remote Scottish islands and in the social worlds that have traveled furthest along what Elias called the civilizing process. Over-evolved gentility and airless formality are also great incubators of shared awkwardness.
One of the sharpest observers of this kind of social world was—while Goffman was studying shyness in Unst—living quietly among the English middle classes. The novelist Elizabeth Taylor was Alan Turing’s exact contemporary, born just a week apart from him in the summer of 1912. Instead of going to Cambridge University as he did, in the early 1930s she went to work for the code breaker Dilly Knox as the governess of his seven-year-old son, Oliver. Oliver Knox, who ended up working at Bletchley Park like his father, remembered Taylor as “walking decisively, if with the suggestion of a stoop, this being (as I now think) perhaps symbolic—her diffidence the thinnest of veils covering a decisiveness, a positiveness, even a detached sort of cruelty.”19 In 1936, Taylor married a prosperous businessman from High Wycombe, and they moved to the Buckinghamshire village of Penn. An impeccably mannered woman of her generation and class, she rarely strayed from writing about life in these nicely kept villages, with their neat little geranium urns, flagpoles, and weeping copper beeches.
In Taylor’s excruciating story “The Letter-Writers” a shy, single woman, Emily, has been writing to an expatriate novelist, Edmund Fabry, for a decade. Gathering up news and tidying it into sentences for him takes up most of her life. Now he has arrived in England from Rome and has arranged to come to her village. The meeting is calamitous. The cat eats the lobster she has prepared for lunch, she gets nervously drunk, and a neighbor who is a comical busybody in the letters turns out in real life to be merely tedious. The breezy façade Emily has made out of ink and paper is revealed to be just that, and all conversation peters out. The story ends with her sitting down to write Edmund another letter after he has left, as if nothing had happened.
Emily’s relationship with Edmund mirrored Taylor’s own correspondence with the writer Robert Liddell, who lived a safe distance away, in Athens (although they did meet a few times, quite successfully). It lasted from 1948 to 1975, a month before she died, when she was too ill to pick up a pen. Writing letters was Taylor’s way of coping with her shyness, which had worsened when, as a young woman, she was badly burned by a firework that stuck in her coat collar. It left scars on her neck that were barely visible but that made her, in company, clasp her hands together to stop herself from hiding her face.
All through history, letter writing has offered salvation for the shy. A key moment for shy letter writers in Britain came in the 1840s, when the government assumed a postal monopoly and introduced three things—prepaid stamps, sealed envelopes, and mailboxes on the street—that guaranteed the privacy of the mail and ended the tradition of the postmaster or postmistress being the main source of local gossip. The London middle classes soon began chiseling little rectangular openings in their front doors so they could receive letters without even having to talk to the postman. By the 1930s, when Taylor began her letter-writing life, the Royal Mail had a national next-day delivery service that was a logistical miracle, with its night mail trains crisscrossing the country and its red Morris Minor bullnose vans rolling along every British street.
A correspondence via the Royal Mail had the potential for slow-growing intimacy, enhanced by a deliciously expectant wait between sending and receiving, which e-mail and text messages have since destroyed. Taylor’s own epistolary friendships progressed by these careful increments. As she came to know her correspondent better, she replaced the surname with the forename, then “yours sincerely” became “with love,” and finally “dear” became “dearest.” Women especially seemed to thrive in the ripening closeness of this kind of relationship. “A great many of the most accomplished letter writers have been women,” argue Frank and Anita Kermode in the preface to their Oxford Book of Letters (1995). “It is in the business of such easy, delicate self-exposures that women seem to succeed best.” In Taylor’s story Edmund Fabry similarly notes that letter-writing is an art “at which Englishwomen have excelled.”20
For years Taylor visited a rather grand and intimidating older writer, Ivy Compton-Burnett, at her flat in Braemar Mansions, South Kensington, always asking taxi drivers to drop her off a few streets away so she could ensure she was not too early. Each luncheon was an awkward and wooden occasion, with Taylor fretting about the flaky pastry from her Banbury cake cascading onto her knees, the shakiness of her hand as she helped herself to raspberry fool, or the superannuated cheese her host liked to serve, which made her guests fear that the apartment’s ailing drains had finally given up the ghost. At the end Compton-Burnett would whisper, “Would you like to . . .?” and Taylor would say no before saying good-bye and hurrying to the restroom at the Harvey Nichols department store in Knightsbridge.21
The only thing that helped her through these occasions was the thought that she could tell Liddell about them later, in letters written from notes made on the train back from London’s Euston station to High Wycombe. Liddell and Taylor agreed that what they most envied about children was their ability to cry, or be sick, when they were bored by or upset with other people. Deprived of this outlet by shyness and social convention, Taylor used letter writing to cathartically dissect her social embarrassments. When another of her pen friends, the interior designer Herman Schrijver, died, she said how much she missed telling him things and wished “one could write letters to the dead.”22
In the early spring of 1946, Taylor went to see a film that affected her deeply. It was Brief Encounter, in which Celia Johnson played the role of Laura Jesson, a suburban wife so restrained she pretends to listen to a tiresome acquaintance rather than say a last farewell to her lover. As Laura in voiceover begins her confession of her chaste affair with Alec Harvey, the camera zooms in on Dolly Messiter, who becomes a grotesque, Beckettian mouth droning on, oblivious to the distress she is causing. The film is about being shy in a world where conversation is a face-saving ritual, where people cover up their awkwardness by talking at each other about things that don’t matter. Laura and Alec’s relationship begins with this sort of nontalk: “How kind it was of you to take so much trouble.” “It’s clearing up, I think.” “Yes, it’s going to be nice.” “Well, I must be getting along to the hospital.” “Now, I must be getting along to the grocers!”
In a 1953 essay the film critic Roger Manvell wrote that filmmakers from Britain faced a particular dilemma: the reserve of its people tended to veil strong emotions. Relying as all filmmakers did on self-revelatory speech a
nd action to tell a story, they had the delicate task of “stripping the mask of shyness from our brows and revealing the warmth and the tenderness, the strengths and the weaknesses beneath.” In Brief Encounter the director, David Lean, achieved this by filtering emotion through “eloquent silences” and the “clichés of accepted behaviour.” The film’s emotions were all muted, suggested through crushed hand-kerchiefs and quivering mouths. Such understatement was, for Manvell, “as indigenous as our green, sweet and rain-quenched landscapes.”23
“I believe we would all behave quite differently if we lived in a warm, sunny climate all the time,” Laura says in the film. “We wouldn’t be so withdrawn and shy and difficult.” Alec tells her he has fallen in love with her shyness, but her own feelings for him compete with her embarrassment at feeling them, and mostly her feelings lose. When she realizes she is in love, on the train home, she scans the carriage and sees a vicar looking straight at her, blushes, opens her library book, and pretends to read.
Brief Encounter is like Anna Karenina strained through the fine sieve of English shyness. Unlike in Leo Tolstoy’s novel, the affair is unconsummated, the heroine stops just short of throwing herself under an express train, and she goes back to her husband and children. The uninitiated could find this English middle-class restraint ludicrous. When the film was previewed in Rochester, a largely working-class audience laughed at the love scenes and shouted, “Isn’t ‘e ever goin’ to ’ave it orf with ’er?” German audiences greeted the film with boos and catcalls. A British Military Government report from Berlin stated that they “profess total inability to understand the moral scruples on which the plot hinges.”24
