Shrinking Violets

by Joe Moran

  Taylor wrote her own story of an unconsummated affair, A Game of Hide and Seek, after seeing Brief Encounter. The novel’s romance unfolds in the same furtive places as does the romance in the film: railway station diners, park benches, and streets, in “the darkest place between two lamps.”25 The film’s daylight locations—lending libraries, cafés, cinemas—were the housewifely world Taylor knew so well. She felt linked to Celia Johnson, whom she even looked rather like, because much of the film was shot in Beaconsfield, where she had her hair done and went shopping and where Johnson was seen coming out of the grocer’s shop and café she frequented.

  Taylor spent days just walking round Thames Valley towns on her own, sitting in the Tudor tearooms and public gardens and browsing in the antique shops her characters might visit. She took boat trips along the Thames and gazed at the houses whose shaved lawns went right down to the riverbank and caught snatches of conversation coming from verandahs. At a time when it was rare for a woman to do so, she went to pubs on her own and, while nursing a gin and tonic, listened in to conversations, the Erving Goffman of middle England.

  In 1961 the author Elizabeth Jane Howard interviewed her on a new BBC TV program called Something to Read. The interview was scheduled to last eight minutes; erring on the side of caution, Howard prepared thirty questions. She was not cautious enough, as it turned out. The interview was over in a minute and a half, because Taylor, looking to her interrogator “like a trapped and rather beautiful owl,” answered yes or no to all of them.26 Afterward, as the two women sat in the BBC canteen in Manchester sipping from cardboard cups of instant coffee, Howard, a fellow shyness sufferer, failed to breach Taylor’s high wall of reserve.

  “I just wanted to see my novels in print, because I felt they weren’t there until they were printed,” Taylor said in one of her very rare interviews. “I want to make a world that doesn’t exist, a world for people to look at.” But she found the process of sending her books out into the world horribly embarrassing. Her daughter Joanna only found out about her mother’s first novel from a friend at school. “My hands become ice at the thought of my book being published,” Taylor wrote to the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, “and I do hope that, like silicosis, it is an occupational disease.”27

  She poured into her novels all her dislike of simulated sociability. Awkwardness and embarrassment are, Meg and Patrick in The Soul of Kindness decide, “under-rated forms of suffering.” “I never think embarrassment is a trivial emotion,” agrees Beatrice in Taylor’s story “Hester Lilly.” Her women, like Laura Jesson, live lives of stockbrokerish comfort and silent anguish, baking sponges for coffee mornings, hosting bridge evenings, and enduring formula luncheons that start with sherry and end with fool. One of her opening sentences beautifully condenses the way that people steel themselves to join in these rituals: “In the morning, Charles went down the garden to practise calling for three cheers.”28

  She dreaded reviews, because if they were unkind, she felt embarrassed seeing people afterward, even if they were unlikely to have read them. She was an epic blusher. She blushed at the thought of discarded drafts of her work that no one had seen and that she had long since thrown away. She blushed when men, mistaking her for Elizabeth Taylor the film star, wrote asking for pictures of her in a bikini. She blushed at parties when people said that they had read her books. She blushed at the thought of the letters she had written even after she had ensured that they were burned, since she did not wish to be posthumously mortified by her gossipy self. “I do not think I am modest,” she said in her last interview. “I am just terribly embarrassed.”29

  Taylor’s story “The Blush” ends with the main character “glad that she was alone, for she could feel her face, her throat, even the tops of her arms burning, and she went over to a looking-glass and studied with great interest this strange phenomenon.”30 Blushing is a sign that our bodies will not always do our minds’ bidding and can even become less compliant the more we try to control them. Somewhere at the heart of embarrassment seems to lie this fear that our bodies may let us down at any moment and reveal us to be nothing more than animals ruled by our biological urges.

  In the tribal communities of the Mount Hagen area of Papua New Guinea, those who suffer the “big shame” (pipil mam) of being caught defecating or having sex can be driven to suicide. To atone for their shame they must sacrifice a pig and pray to the ghosts. Such shame about being seen copulating, even with one’s spouse, occurs throughout Melanesia. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, conducting fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands in the western Pacific in 1915, heard of one man so ashamed of being caught having sex in his garden that he killed himself with derris root fish poison.31 These acts seem to be shaming not because one has been discovered doing something immoral but because the self has been exposed in its natural, animal-like state.

  We are human because we can be humiliated. Civilization is a slim veneer that can quickly peel away to reveal the shitting, pissing, puking animals that we are. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz once suggested that the Balinese term lek, usually translated as “shame,” would be better rendered as “stage fright,” because the Balinese are terrified of being stripped of their social roles. When their public persona is breached, they become “suddenly and unwillingly creatural, locked in mutual embarrassment, as though they had happened upon each other’s nakedness.”32

  Embarrassment can be felt by everyone, but we do not all think and talk about it in the same way. Every culture has its own rich emotional lexicon, its subtly different words and senses for that universal feeling. Many Southeast Asian languages have a single word conflating shame, shyness, and embarrassment while not being quite synonymous with any of them. It suggests a shyness that is both a feeling and an ethos, an attitude deliberately assumed to show respect for and deference to others. The Malayan word malu, for instance, signifies a kind of virtuous embarrassment that needs to be instilled in children by their elders so they understand civilized behavior. A Malay word for the genitals is kemaluan, which uses the root malu and means “thing or object of shame.” Male elders will tease toddler boys until they expose their penises. When they do, the elders laugh at them for having no malu, and a lesson is learned.

  Michael Young, who conducted anthropological fieldwork in the village of Kalauna, on Goodenough Island, Papua New Guinea, in the late 1960s, noted that the tribal word wowomumu covered a wide spectrum from shyness to mild embarrassment to deep shame. In Kalauna courtship was a nervous affair that required a young man to chew betel nut with his girlfriend one or two nights a week in her father’s house while he waited for her to propose to him. Even after they were married, the couple were shy around each other. Although the wife would cook for her husband from the time she came to join him in his parents’ hamlet, they would eat separately for several months, as embarrassed about eating together as sleeping together. To have a child during the first year of marriage was shameful, for this was a sign of a wanton sexual appetite, as was a wife who laughed too much. A man’s relations with his wife’s family, however warm they became, were never entirely free of wowomumu.33

  If something is of great significance within a culture, that culture develops a fertile and refined vocabulary around it. Common Ground, the British organization that celebrates local distinctiveness, once listed the many different Welsh words for rain. These included dafnu (spotting), brasfrwrw (big spaced drops), hegar law (fierce rain), lluwchlaw (sheets of rain), chwipio bwrw (whiplash rain), pistyllio (fountain rain), and piso (pissing down).34 The Welsh have many words for rain for the same reason that the Bedouin have many words for camels: the phenom-ena are so common that a nuanced language emerged to account for minute variations. Perhaps the intensity of embarrassment varies similarly, leading to the proliferation of words with subtly distinct meanings in the parts of the world where it is felt most potently.

  The Nordic countries rival Southeast Asian ones in the subtlety of their language of embarrassment. A shy Fin
nish historian I met once told me all the different Finnish synonyms for “embarrassed.” Nolo, the most common word, had a negative sense—for instance, in the phrase “Vähän noloa!” (How embarrassing!). “Nobody wants to be nolo,” he said, “because it also connotes being pitiful.” But there were other words, he added, that roughly tallied with embarrassment—kiusaantunut, vaivaantunut, hämillinen, hämmentynyt—which evoked a more general sense of confusion or discomfort and had a neutral or even positive meaning. Another word, myötähäpeä, the vicarious embarrassment one feels for others, was schadenfreude’s kinder cousin. He told me that a common explanation for the Finnish embrace of the tango, which became a national passion after Argentine musicians brought it to Europe in the 1910s, is that it gave Finns a license to touch and to communicate feelings they were too embarrassed to form into words.

  In 1964 the American psychiatrist Herbert Hendin, studying suicide in Scandinavia, reported that the Swedes he interviewed were peculiarly prone to embarrassment. Interviewed for a second time, Swedish women would often be embarrassed at having revealed so much about themselves previously. They blushed spectacularly, from hairline to neck, when required to discuss their emotions. Swedish men were even more embarrassed when talking about their feelings and in defense assumed “an attitude of intellectual curiosity rather than emotional involvement.”35

  In studying the country’s collective mentality the Swedish ethnologist Åke Daun observed a similar sheepishness. Many Swedes, he noted, would rather take the stairs than share a lift with a slight acquaintance, for fear of being unable to think of anything to say. They found it hard to make eye contact during conversations. They rarely gave speeches without reading them aloud from prepared texts and often joked that being asked to deliver the customary vote of thanks to the host for a meal made them instantly lose their appetite. The Swedes’ embarrassability extended to their most extreme life experiences. Women giving birth tried to scream quietly. Afterward they would ask the midwife if they had made much noise and were pleased if they were told they had not. At funerals it was acceptable to snivel a bit if you were a woman, but “cries of despair are embarrassing and are remembered long afterwards.”36

  The film director Ingmar Bergman, the son of a Lutheran minister, attended many Swedish funerals as a boy and noticed that no one ever cried, even when the coffin was taken away. He was so intrigued by the decorousness of these rituals of mourning that pretend funerals became his favorite game. When the prime minister Olof Palme was shot dead on a Stockholm street in 1986, many Swedish observers pointed out how unusual it was to see their compatriots weeping in public at the news. And yet, according to a poll conducted by Gunnel Gustafson of the University of Umeå, first-generation immigrants in Sweden admitted to crying at Palme’s death far more than native Swedes did (44 percent compared to 24 percent). Gustafson’s study was based on a similar one conducted in Chicago after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, when 53 percent of Americans said they cried.37

  Perhaps one day a cartographer of shyness will be able to trace enclaves of extreme embarrassment by designing a color-coded map using those big-data visualization tools that can map everything from voting patterns to cancer rates. Deep red would naturally be used for the most chronic cases of embarrassment, and it would shade incrementally into embarrassment-free yellow near the Mediterranean. When the writer Susan Sontag lived in Sweden in the late 1960s, she charted a gradual dilution within the country itself: the farther south from Stockholm, the more outgoing the people. The citizens of the southernmost province of Skåne, she discovered, were known to Swedes as “reserve Danes,” famous for their “positively Latin jollity.”38

  Erving Goffman sailed four thousand miles to Unst to study embarrassment, but he could as easily have driven a few hundred miles from Chicago into the plains of the upper Midwest and found abundant research material. As in Shetland, the shyness of the people of this region is often accounted for by their Nordic and northern European origins. When the homesteaders arrived there in the late nineteenth century, men outnumbered women ten to one, and bachelor farmers worked alone, fighting locusts, prairie fires, and blizzards. The Norwegian American writer Ole Rølvaag, in his bleak tales of plains winters, immortalized the gallant reticence of these male settlers, who were too busy “proving up”—gaining title to their land within the five-year period of the Homestead Act by working on it and building a home—to learn social niceties or find a wife. The phrase “Minnesota nice” came to denote this Unst-like inclination toward emotional restraint, the propensity to nod politely and truncate conversations with terminative echoes like “not too bad” or “you betcha,” delivered in the singsong intonation of the Nordic languages.

  In my last years at primary school my favorite reading matter was, I now realize, a masterly distillation of this kind of upper Midwest stoicism: Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strips, then available in dozens of cheap paperbacks, whose pages, as coarse as blotting paper, I made dog-eared through rereading. I also loved the animated Charlie Brown television specials that were shown in the daytime during the school holidays, with their minor-key Vince Guaraldi jazz soundtracks and their eschewal of canned laughter, which seemed to cast a Linus blanket of melancholy over the proceedings. Peter Robbins, who provided Charlie Brown’s voice, said his lines with an unaffected clarity of feeling. He sounded not like the precocious stage-school children who seemed to populate other American television shows but like a boy with real failures and frustrations. Through Peanuts I learned of the American tradition of grade-school children exchanging Valentine cards openly with their classmates instead of shyly and anonymously, as in Britain. This barefaced bartering in the stock exchange of social approval, and Charlie Brown’s futile wait for a card from the Little Red-Haired Girl to whom he was too shy to speak, seemed crueler than the most gothic fairy tale.

  At high school in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the 1930s, Charles Schulz had suffered that familiar shy seesawing between feeling horribly invisible most of the time and horribly visible some of the time. He found it painful even to greet a classmate in the corridor. As a young man, he was deeply self-conscious when traveling to Chicago to sell his comic strips to syndicates, because his sample panels were drawn on huge rectangular boards, the size of which provoked comments from fellow passengers. Even after he became famous, trips away from home filled him with terror, and he often did not show up for public engagements. Sometimes his wife, Jeannie, would drop him off at the airport only to find that he had beaten her home in a taxi.39

  Charlie Brown is Schulz’s shyness in cartoon form. As a boy, Schulz thought his face so bland that, were he to bump into a classmate away from school, in downtown Saint Paul, the classmate would not recognize him. This train of thought was what inspired Charlie Brown’s anonymous round head, its only mark a squiggle on his brow that is either a wisp of hair or an eternal worm of worry. Schulz’s virtuosic twist was to give him a dog, Snoopy, who is a charismatic, wordless communicator with his eyes, ears, and body—quite unlike the boy who supplies his meals and whom he calls “that round-headed kid.” In Peanuts, Charlie Brown receives constant reminders of his insignificance, and not just from his dog. In one of the surreal extended storylines that Schulz specialized in, his hero, not wanting to appear at summer camp with a rash, wears a brown paper bag over his head. His bag-wearing self makes more impact than his normal self and is elected camp president.

  Schulz came to believe, in a classically Minnesotan form of self-laceration, that his own inhibitions were upended narcissism. “Shyness,” he wrote, “is the overtly self-conscious thinking that you are the only person in the world; that how you look and what you do is of any importance.”40 But the lesson of Peanuts is quite the opposite. Who, after all, is a better model of humanity: Lucy van Pelt, who shouts at the world with bone-shuddering conviction, or Charlie Brown, whose shyness has made him a gentle, fair-minded stoic?

  When Peanuts appeared on a page of noisy comic strips all jostling
for attention, it drew the eye with its clean lines and white spaces, the boldness with which it had so little going on. In the winter months, when the arctic winds blow down from Manitoba, Minnesota’s many lakes and ponds are covered with ice thick enough to support skating and ice fishing huts. The mood music of Minnesotan weather in Peanuts—the softly falling snowflakes, the frozen ponds on which the characters skate silently, and the stone-faced snowmen they build and befriend, only for them to melt away—is part of an ambience of quiet and stillness.

  In Peanuts problems remain unresolved and words remain unspoken. The signature note is the bathetic non-ending, a final panel with Charlie Brown exhaling a sigh, smiling wonkily with sweat beads shooting off his face, or blushing in a way that fills his head with diagonal lines. Schulz knew that shyness has no narrative arc: the shy have to carry on being shy. A daily comic strip was his way of carrying on. He communicated with the world remotely for nearly half a century by creating his own world with a few bold pen strokes in four little boxes and signing his name at the end.

  Growing up in the suburbs of Minneapolis–Saint Paul in the 1950s, a gangly, awkward boy called Gary Keillor, with “a powerful wish to be invisible,” read and loved Peanuts.41 A Minnesotan stoic like Charlie Brown, he had the added problem that his family were members of the Exclusive Brethren, a fundamentalist subsect of the Plymouth Brethren, which meant that he was not allowed to invite friends into his house. As well as frowning upon parties, dancing, and alcohol, the Keillors had no television set, for the word of the Bible was all, and temptation came via sight. So Gary sought solace in the invention that had also consoled the young Charles Schulz in the 1930s: radio. He commandeered the handle of a vacuum cleaner as a microphone and imagined he was speaking to millions of listeners.