There’s something about writers and shyness. Fortunately, writers are willing to write extensively about their shyness and that creates clarity; it even gives some allure to the phenomenon. It’s no longer as if the shyness is a problem that needs to be removed: it instead becomes a strength that you can brazenly boast about because it looks like a weakness.
When Joan Didion died, in December 2021, many newspapers quoted the preface she wrote in 1968 to her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem† She wasn’t really suited to writing such literary essays, she warned. She was useless at interviewing people. She didn’t want to end up in situations where she had to talk to someone’s agent. She hardly dared to phone.
“My only advantage,” Didion wrote, and many obituaries have quoted this, “my only advantage is that I am so small physically, so inconspicuous in my temperament, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence is in conflict with their interests. Which is always the case. It’s one thing to remember: writers always put someone on sale.”
Here she got to the heart of the phenomenon. Even two cores. There is that unintelligibility or inarticulateness of the shy writer. So ‘neurotically inarticulate‘ are that you are almost absent. And then there is that inexorable presence that parasitizes the outspokenness of others. While the writer is silent, those who speak are always at a disadvantage.
A few years ago, writer Patrick Gale founded the North Cornwall Book Festival especially for shy writers. In The Guardian he wrote that most novelists are on the introverted end of the personality spectrum. “Cunning spectators of life instead of noisy pawns of it.” In the current festival culture they have been forced to provide themselves with a stage personality, but behind it the cunning spectator can simply ‘lurk’ as usual.
The festival in Cornwall was kept small and intimate, tailored to the sweet part of this story, the part where the writer is delicate and needs nursing. There was a bar and an abundance of homemade cakes. If smoking hadn’t been so horribly unhealthy, cigarettes and cigars would probably have been lined up for the performers in the performers’ lounge; because smoking, writes Mirjam van Hengel in de Volkskrant at the death of Remco Campert, just like drinking is ‘a nice handhold for a shy silent person’.
I imagine that in the wings there were also assistants who ensured that the writers were offered cake if they did not dare to ask for it themselves. The widow of AL Snijders recently said in an interview that the writer struggled with hospitality industry fear. “If he ordered steak and got fish, he didn’t dare say anything about it.” Nothing but pure shyness, she said. Calling the waiter, asking for the bill: he didn’t dare.
Perhaps that’s why the assistants should first pick up the writers at home to be sure. To cheer myself up, I like to quote at literary gatherings the story I once heard about Campert, who, arriving at the station in the city in which he was supposed to perform, turned round out of sheer embarrassment and went home.
Anyway, with all this necessary care, the cake, the bar, the grip, you would almost forget what Didion confessed about the presence of the writer. That it is always in conflict with the interests of others. That the writer is a cunning spectator, to quote festival organizer Patrick Gale, who watches the people in the area. Being shy, writer David Foster Wallace has said in a documentary, means being so preoccupied with yourself that it becomes difficult to be around others.
There therefore seems to be good reason not to protect the writer, but rather the reader. If anyone needs cake, it’s the one who is being watched and spied on, who is in danger of being drained, exploited, sold out, completely ignored at worst. If anyone is vulnerable and frail, it is the reader.
Courage is the writer’s first requirement, the writers say. For every sentence, you have to recreate your confidence. For, oh, the inadequacy of language and, alas, the realization of never being fully understood. But as much daring as it takes to write, it doesn’t come close to the encouragement needed to read, and you’d like to wish the reader a lot of cake and a foothold.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of 9 July 2022