Shrinking Violets

by Joe Moran

  When he began radio announcing at the University of Minnesota, now renamed Garrison Keillor, he found that his voice had acquired, from years of osmotic radio listening, a mellifluous timbre with a pleasing dying fall, one that made him sought out ever after for voice-over work. He discovered that a low-key, moseying-along voice worked better on radio than a boomingly oratorical one. Tongue-tied in real life, he became proficient at radio’s synthetic spontaneity, dropping well-timed “y’ knows” and “kindas” into the middle of his sentences.

  He found in this practiced artlessness a way of turning himself into someone else, a man who could speak without being interrupted or worrying about people yawning or looking at their watches. For radio, like Cicero’s letter to Lucius Lucceius, is a medium without blushes. Carried through the air on invisible electromagnetic waves, it combines a reassuring anonymity with the intimacy of one voice talking to another. In 1969, when Keillor took over the morning show at Minnesota Educational Radio, he found he enjoyed this virtual, faceless relationship with his listeners, feeling like “the shepherd of lovely but temporarily unhappy people.”42

  The following year he had the most joyous breakthrough of his professional life, one that was to be as significant as his radio career in the semi-surmounting of his shyness. He got his first acceptance letter from the New Yorker, the magazine he had unearthed as a teenager in the periodicals room of Minneapolis Public Library. It was for a four-hundred-word fake newspaper article he had written about a sixteen-year-old boy whose parents were so worried about his shyness that they moved in a local prostitute.

  The New Yorker was edited by the surpassingly shy William Shawn, who worked at the magazine for fifty-four years and ensured that his name never once appeared in it. When, in 1965, Tom Wolfe wrote a notorious attack on the magazine for the New York Herald Tribune, he made fun of Shawn’s inability even to say hello in the corridor and his habit of inviting writers to lunch and saying nothing, and implied that the New Yorker’s dullness and ponderousness mirrored its editor’s personality. But many shy writers, including Elizabeth Taylor and Garrison Keillor, had cause to be grateful for Shawn’s diligent reading of unsolicited stories and his careful editing. He erased excitable words and added commas that—in the words of another acutely shy New Yorker writer, E. B. White—fell “with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.”43

  White’s own rules about good writing, which had a decisive influence on New Yorker style and which Keillor keenly endorsed, were formalized in his classic The Elements of Style, the handbook he based on an earlier model written by Will Strunk, his old professor at Cornell, which he saw as an essay on the “nature and beauty of brevity.” Good writing did not present the writer’s opinions gratuitously, The Elements of Style ruled, because doing so implied that “the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case.” For White, the best prose combined simplicity and self-concealment and was “both a mask and an unveiling,” particularly for the personal essayist, “who must take his trousers off without showing his genitals.”44 A writer’s voice was a vehicle for disguised egotism, and vital elements in the disguise were tact and taste. This thinking was embodied in a magazine that, from its elegant calligraphic lines to its tinder-dry wit, was all about subsuming the awkward and inept individual into an anonymous, collective urbanity. The New Yorker was a prophylactic against embarrassment.

  On July 6, 1974, Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, a parody of the live variety shows he had listened to as a boy, began on Minnesota Public Radio. Not until the end of the decade, by which time half a million Minnesotans were tuning in, was the show’s most famous element installed: Lake Wobegon. “It’s been a quiet week here in Lake Wobegon, on the edge of the prairie,” Keillor would always begin, before launching into a shaggy, scriptless yarn about an imaginary prairie town northwest of Minneapolis. This town was full of shy people and, like Goffman’s Unst, was a place where embarrassment arose not from stranger anxiety but from long acquaintance. Even close friends stood an arm’s length apart; romantic passion was voiced as mild interest; the Fearmonger’s Shoppe had been serving “all your phobia needs since 1954”; and the town’s timidest citizens were the Norwegian bachelor farmers, who ate shy-busting Powdermilk Biscuits and hung out at one end of the town’s only bar, like “perpetually disgruntled, elderly teenagers leaning against a wall.”45

  A Prairie Home Companion became a national cult, with millions of Americans sitting beside their radios at 5 p.m. central time each Saturday to hear Keillor begin the show with a husky rendition of the Hank Snow song “Hello Love.” Duetting with musical guests and performing his own monologues, he seemed to have left embarrassment behind. Those watching in the audience as the show was broadcast would have seen him dressed in his trademark outfit of tuxedo, sneakers, and loud red tie, but only some might have noticed his habit of staring down at his socks.

  It is hard to unlearn a childhood aptitude for embarrassment, whatever adult reassurances we receive and however much credit we accumulate in the bank of sangfroid, for it takes only one embarrassing episode for us to be suddenly and hopelessly overdrawn again. One day Keillor was with his massage therapist and felt his speech slurring and his mouth growing numb. Not wishing to make a fuss, like Heimlich’s embarrassed man choking to death, he drove to the hospital on his own. “To pick up a phone and call 911 for an ambulance would be, well . . . it seemed not quite justifiable to me,” he said later.46 When he reached the emergency room, he waited in line to be seen, a true Minnesotan, too embarrassed to say he was having a stroke.

  Unlike Scandinavians or Southeast Asians, Americans have no carefully calibrated language for describing different kinds of embarrassment. They have a reputation for seeing shyness as un-American. Their cultural heroes are seemingly self-sufficient, outdoorsy types: pioneers, backwoodsmen, cowboys, baseball players—men living what Theodore Roosevelt called “the strenuous life.” But does this make them any less likely to be embarrassed? Some of America’s most illustrious citizens, and not simply those from Minnesota, have been unable to look another human in the eye. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who left the road for the surrounding fields if he saw anyone approaching, diagnosed himself as “mild, shy, gentle, melancholic . . . hiding his blushes under an assumed name.” Emily Dickinson addressed her visitors from behind a half-closed bedroom door. Ralph Waldo Emerson, convinced of his own “porcupine impossibility of contact with men,” identified a strain in his country’s culture that bred “eternal loneliness . . . how insular & pathetically solitary, are all the people we know!”47

  Whether or not the same tendency toward pathetic solitariness was the cause, a century later America gave birth to that now-thriving subspecies of the shy: the nerd. “In Detroit, someone who once would be called a drip or a square is now, regrettably, a nerd,” declared Newsweek in 1951, at a time when Alan Turing, who certainly fit the profile, was inaugurating the computer age.48 But nerds did not properly emerge as members of a socially awkward, techno-literate subculture for another two decades. On March 5, 1975, just as the übercool Fonz was popularizing “nerd” as a term of opprobrium in Happy Days, about thirty people gathered in a garage in the southern Californian suburb of Menlo Park for the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club. In the same way that Nordic embarrassment thrived in the subarctic chill, nerds required a supportive ecosystem. And Menlo Park was in the middle of the Santa Clara Valley, which was steadily replacing its orchards and market gardens with microchip factories and electronics firms.

  Each session of the Homebrew Computer Club had a “random access period,” when anyone could say anything to the group. One of its members, Steve Wozniak, looked at first glance like a familiar type: the American science-fair kid made to feel suddenly invisible in sixth grade as the harsh rituals of adolescent dating began. Too shy to speak even in the congenial company in the garage, he communicated by demonstrating his models and sharing his designs. But while he might have seemed solitary and sh
y, his instincts, like Turing’s before him, were basically social. At a time when computers communicated only through punch cards and flashing lights, he wanted to make them of wider benefit to humanity. His way of being noticed by others was to create something that would be useful to them: he would give away his expertise as a gift. Later that year, after building the first-ever computer with a keyboard and a monitor, he photocopied the design of what became the Apple Computer and gave it to his fellow Homebrewers for free—at least until his friend Steve Jobs came up with a different business model.

  In the early 1980s, by which time the home computer that Wozniak had more or less invented had found its way into millions of teenage bedrooms, the word “nerd” finally entered the common idiom, along with related phrases such as “nerd pack,” which referred to both the plastic pocket protectors that stopped pens from marking clothes and the groups of uncool kids in American high schools who carried them in their shirt pockets. The nerd diaspora spread out from the Santa Clara Valley, now renamed Silicon Valley. In the 1990s, as more people learned HTML and turned the Internet into a global common room, the word was recovered as a badge of pride. Bands such as Weezer, They Might Be Giants, and Nerf Herder were grouped together as “nerd pop,” and “nerdcore” arose as a subset of hiphop. A T-shirt declared the wearer, in confident slab serif, to be a GEEK or a NERD.

  Nerds became cool—and, often, very rich—because their antisocial pursuits turned out to answer a human need to share information without the embarrassment of meeting face-to-face. Since nerds were the few people who could understand the computer code that enabled this to happen, they were as useful in the new world of the microchip as Turing had been at Bletchley. The difference was that they were writing code, not deciphering it. Computers are hardly any closer to Turing’s ideal of being able to think like people. But we can now set them to work as virtual Cyrano de Bergeracs, surrogate selves to whom we outsource our most awkward encounters. Our modern cure-all for embarrassment is technology. The multitasking minicomputers we still call “phones” keep us in constant touch with each other, but they also allow us to regulate our sociability like a thermostat.

  Texting, which the Finnish company Nokia introduced into its phones in the mid-1990s almost as an afterthought to replace the old-fashioned and not very popular system of paging, is a primitive technology. It uses that basic primate attribute, the opposable thumb, and is essentially a time-consuming and energy-inefficient substitute for talking. But texting took off among taciturn young Finnish men because it was a way of talking to others, especially girls, without the signals being scrambled by blushing faces or tied tongues. In a country with 85 percent membership in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the cellphone became the favorite confirmation present for fifteenyear-olds. Two sociologists from the University of Tampere found that a Finnish boy would rarely tell a girl he loved her, but would text loving messages, taking up to half an hour to edit and redraft them and writing in English because he found it easier to express strong feelings in another language.49

  Other scholars of cellphone culture have shown that text messages performed a similar role in the Philippines, which quickly took over from Finland as the texting capital of the world. Cellphones arrived in the Philippines around 1996, and within five years the number of handsets had grown to seven million and the country was accounting for 10 percent of the world’s text messages.50 In part this was because the Philippines was a poor country, landlines were rare, and texting was cheap. But it probably also had something to do with what Filipinos call hiya, another of those Southeast Asian words that combine shyness and embarrassment without quite meaning either.

  Filipino courtship rituals are traditionally coy and convoluted. The man, who is meant to do all the running while the woman plays hard to get (pakipot) in order to preserve her honor, is often torpe, too sheepish to admit his feelings. So elaborate, hedge-betting rituals have evolved. The man might begin with a harana, the Spanish-influenced serenade of courtship sung beneath a beloved’s window on a tropical night, with his friends brought along for moral support as well as close harmonies. Things might then move on to “teasing” (tuksuhan) by mutual friends or to using a “human bridge” (tulay) between the likely lovers until such time as they could be persuaded to go out together on their own. The cellphone has allowed young Filipinos to circumvent these face-saving routines and instead test the waters by text.

  So it is the world over: texting lets those of us more dexterous with thumbs than tongues be more intrepid than in real life. That ping or whistle announcing a text’s arrival is less insistent than a phone ring. It does not catch us by surprise or demand that we answer it instantly. It lends us space to digest and ponder a response. Kisses added to the end of a text can be quickly recanted if they fall on flinty ground. The Japanese have even improvised a menu of shy or embarrassed-looking emoticons, using asterisks and semicolons to make blushing cheeks or sweat drops. A short text message can encompass a cosmos of nuance. Blending intimacy with artifice, it lets us say the things that embarrass us face-to-face and to experiment with suaver versions of ourselves.

  When I overhear unguarded conversations in train carriages, cellphone user to unseen hearer, or see someone barking at a hands-free phone set in the street, for all the world like a lunatic shouting at an imaginary foe, I wonder whether the cellphone has destroyed the division between private and public life and whether embarrassment is now extinct. But then I see young people slyly texting in their laps or under tables, their faces flickering minutely at confidences passed on via the glowing screen. And it occurs to me that for all this yattering away in public, human ingenuity has conjured up the cellphone to solve a simple and eternal problem. We want to say what we think and feel to people’s faces, to open our hearts to them. But we are all just really embarrassed.

  4

  Tongue-Tied

  One day in March 1918, toward the end of his period of anthropological fieldwork in Melanesia, Bronislaw Malinowski joined a boat trip to Gumawana village, at the southeast edge of the Amphlett Islands, off the coast of Papua New Guinea. On these islands he encountered a people who were “shy, yet arrogant to anyone who has any dealings with them.”1 They could grow very little on their rocky soil, so the women made decorative clay pots and the men exchanged them with neighboring islanders for pigs, sago, and betel nuts.

  When Malinowski’s boat anchored, men approached in their canoes, proffering pots. But when his party waded ashore, the islanders panicked. The young women fled and hid in the bush beyond the village, and even the “old hags,” as Malinowski charmingly described them, hid in their huts. To lure the women out to make pots, his party had to bribe them with tobacco. Meanwhile, the men “sat dully on stones, independent, sulky, unfriendly—true islanders!”2 Malinowski found that all strangers, not just white Europeans, inspired shyness in the Amphlettans.

  During his time in Melanesia, Malinowski came to think that all humans were prone to shyness and had evolved ways of alleviating it. In his classic essay “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages” he identified a genre of informationally empty talk among non-intimates that was as commonly used by island tribespeople as by occupants of an English drawing room. He called it “phatic communion”: “phatic” from the Greek phanein, “to show oneself,” and “communion” because he saw the talk as establishing an initial bond that could later be consummated by the breaking of bread.

  Having learned enough of the local languages to take notes on conversations, Malinowski was surprised how much of the talk he overheard was a seemingly pointless flow of words. The stock Melanesian phrase “whence comest thou?” was strikingly akin to the English “how do you do?” in being said to fill the disagreeable silence at the start of a conversation. These opening gambits soon dissolved into expressions of preference or dislike, accounts of trivial events, or statements of the obvious. In phatic communion, words served as a social glue to bind speakers briefly together, for all humans, said
Malinowski, seem to find it unnerving when a pall of silence falls between them, the unspeaking stranger being the special enemy of “savage tribesmen” and “our own uneducated classes.”3

  Many years later the anthropologist Robin Dunbar found hard evidence for Malinowski’s theories. He and his graduate students at the University of Liverpool listened to conversations in cafeterias, trains, pubs, and crowds milling round during fire drills and found that two-thirds of the talk was neither intellectual nor practical, but gossip about other people. Dunbar suggested that, just as monkeys groom each other to preserve alliances and pecking orders, so language was a sort of “vocal grooming,” suitable for the larger, more scattered groups in which humans lived.4 Human speech did not evolve, as most people had thought, to exchange useful information about how to spear mammoths or start fires. It was a form of soothing human contact, made of words instead of arms and warm bodies.

  In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin noted a similar discomfort with silence among other social animals, such as wild horses and cattle, who would stop their contact calls—the random grunts, or whinnies they make while foraging and eating—to alert the group to danger. More recently, the ethnomusicologist Joseph Jordania has suggested that early humans used humming as a contact call. That supportive “hmmm” we deploy when listening to someone else may be an evolutionary hangover from its associations with this kind of reassuring noisemaking.5

  Cultures with a reputation for fostering shyness, such as the Nordic, seem to have a higher tolerance for silence than most. The Swedish ethnologist Annick Sjögren, raised in France, noticed that in her adoptive country the spoken word “weighs lightly” and is no sooner dispensed than it will “vanish into thin air.” French conversation is a rhetorical performance, detached from oneself, so one can say things without thinking, simply to enjoy the sound of the syllables on one’s tongue, without being afraid that one will be called to account for it. In Sweden, by contrast, what one says is a personal marker, and words are pondered for their meaning. Small talk is kallprata, “cold talk,” and Swedish words for the talkative, such as pratkvarnar (chatterboxes), pladdermajor (babblers), and frasmakare (phrasemongers), convey a suspicious attitude toward talking for its own sake. “Talking apparently never ceases to be a problem for the Swedes: a lean across an abyss,” reflected Susan Sontag after living in Stockholm at the end of the 1960s. “Conversations are always in danger of running out of gas, both from the imperative of secretiveness and from the positive lure of silence. Silence is the Swedish national vice.”6