CHAPTER & VERSE — Quiet

Rufus McCrae: Evening, all, and welcome to Chapter and Verse, my reading group down the pub. Tonight, for once, we're talking about the people who'd rather we didn't. I'm Rufus McCrae. Round the table: Iris Marchetti, our psychologist, who has been quietly diagnosing this table since the first round and is far too polite to share the results. Doc Sullivan, our science man, who has brought his peer-reviewed objections in a carrier bag. Arthur Nightingale, who took the quiz at the front of this book, scored as introverted as a person can get, and was thrilled to finally have the paperwork. And Murray Kessler, our money man, the loudest voice in every room he has ever stood in, who, God help us, brought the book. It's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain. And up in the balcony, two men who have practised quiet strength by refusing to buy a round since nineteen eighty-seven: Humphrey Thwaite and Mortimer Finch.

Humphrey Thwaite: Quiet strength. I've sat here in silence for forty years and nobody's ever written a book about me.

Mortimer Finch: They've written complaints, Humphrey.

Humphrey Thwaite: Bound copies, some of them.

Mortimer Finch: And for the record, I bought a round in nineteen ninety-four. There were witnesses. Most of them are dead.

Rufus McCrae: Right. Murray Kessler. This is a man who once called a library 'a waste of good floor space' to my face. And you've brought a book called Quiet. Explain yourself, son.

Murray Kessler: My business partner left it on my desk with a sticky note on the cover. I won't tell you what the note said. It had a swear in it. So I read it on a flight to Frankfurt, and somewhere over Belgium I realised that every quiet person I've ever talked over in a meeting was probably right. Expensive realisation, that. Thirty years of it.

Rufus McCrae: So what's she actually arguing? For the folk at home who've not had the pleasure.

Murray Kessler: That we've built the whole Western world around the bloke who talks first and loudest: school, office, boardroom. She calls it the Extrovert Ideal. Then she hits you with a number that stopped me cold: 'a third to a half of Americans are introverts—in other words, one out of every two or three people you know.' Half the room, Rufus. And we design everything for the other half.

Mortimer Finch: Half the room. Right. So which half are you, Murray?

Murray Kessler: I'm the half that's still talking, Mortimer.

Mortimer Finch: Ha! Self-awareness! From a man in a gilet! Somebody write the date down.

Rufus McCrae: Iris, you're the one at this table who actually knows what goes on inside people's heads. Is 'introvert' even a real thing, or is it a star sign for people who don't like parties?

Iris Marchetti: It's real, but it isn't what most people think. It isn't shyness, and Cain is careful about that. Shyness is the fear of being judged. Introversion is about how much stimulation suits you and where you get your energy back. You can be an introvert who gives a cracking speech and then needs a dark room for an hour.

Arthur Nightingale: That's me at every wedding. Lovely toast. Then forty minutes alone in the car park.

Rufus McCrae: With the engine running, Arthur?

Arthur Nightingale: With the radio off. That's the whole point.

Rufus McCrae: Here's what gets me about Susan Cain. You'd picture a librarian in a cardigan. No. Princeton, Harvard Law, then years as a corporate lawyer on Wall Street, then a negotiation consultant, teaching people how to bargain. The quietest woman in the building, making her living in the loudest rooms in New York. Doc, what do you make of that?

Doc Sullivan: It's the whole argument in one CV. She could do the extrovert performance perfectly well. She just paid for every minute of it.

Rufus McCrae: So she packs it in and spends seven years writing this. Seven years! And the story that makes it for me, she tells it in her TED talk. She's nine, off to summer camp for the first time, and her mum packs her a suitcase full of books, because that's what her family did of an evening. Sat in the same room, everyone reading their own book. Lovely. She thinks camp's going to be that, only with trees.

Iris Marchetti: And it isn't.

Rufus McCrae: It is not, Iris. The counsellor has them all doing a cheer. R, O, W, D, I, E, that's the way we spell rowdie. And little Susan puts the books under her bunk, and there they stay.

Mortimer Finch: That's the saddest thing I've heard in this pub, and I've heard Humphrey sing.

Humphrey Thwaite: I was in excellent voice.

Mortimer Finch: You were in the gents.

Humphrey Thwaite: The best thing in the book isn't psychology at all, it's history. She borrows from a cultural historian, Warren Susman, who said America swapped a Culture of Character for a Culture of Personality around the turn of the last century. Before, the question was: are you good? After, it was: are you impressive? And who turns up to sell the change? Dale Carnegie, a farm boy from Missouri, teaching public speaking at the YMCA. She opens the first chapter with him.

Mortimer Finch: Humphrey, have you read this entire book?

Humphrey Thwaite: I skimmed it.

Mortimer Finch: He's annotated it. In two colours. I've seen the tabs.

Rufus McCrae: And then the TED talk goes up in twenty twelve, gets watched by tens of millions of people, and the book camps out on the bestseller lists for years. Which makes her the most famous introvert on the planet. That must be her own personal idea of hell. Doc. You're the science man. Is there anything under the bonnet here, or is it all vibes and TED talks?

Doc Sullivan: There's real machinery, Rufus. A lot of it rests on Jerome Kagan, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. He brought in four-month-old babies, showed them new things like mobiles, strange voices, a whiff of alcohol on a cotton swab, and watched. About one in five hollered and thrashed about. He called them high-reactive. Years later, those were the babies most likely to grow into careful, quiet children. Not timid, not dim. Their nervous systems simply take more in. For them, the world is already turned up loud.

Iris Marchetti: And then there's the part I'd paint on every school gate. Cain writes about what's been called the orchid hypothesis. Most children are dandelions. They'll grow anywhere, even in a crack in the pavement. Some are orchids. In a harsh environment they wilt worse than anyone. But in a good one—

Doc Sullivan: —they don't just cope. They outgrow the dandelions.

Iris Marchetti: The very sensitivity everyone was worried about is what makes them bloom. It's the same trait. It isn't a flaw with a silver lining. It is the lining.

Mortimer Finch: ...Well. That's every quiet kid at the back of every classroom, isn't it.

Rufus McCrae: ...Yeah. Give that a second, Mortimer. Murray, you've run companies. She has a proper go at your lot. The open-plan office, the brainstorm, the whiteboard with the felt tips.

Murray Kessler: Gutted me, that chapter. Brainstorming was dreamed up by an advertising man, Alex Osborn, back in the middle of the last century. Get everyone in a room, shout ideas, nobody's allowed to criticise. And the research she cites says people brainstorming in a group come up with fewer good ideas than the same people working alone and pooling them afterwards. Decades of studies. I have personally paid for about four hundred brainstorms.

Humphrey Thwaite: And how many good ideas came out of them?

Murray Kessler: One. Lunch.

Rufus McCrae: Tell them about Wozniak.

Murray Kessler: Steve Wozniak, the other Steve, the one who actually built the first Apple computer. Cain describes him working on it alone in his cubicle at Hewlett-Packard, early mornings and late nights. Only then does he take it to the Homebrew Computer Club to show it off. The solitude comes first and the club comes after. Then there's research by Adam Grant and colleagues on leadership, where teams fold T-shirts—

Mortimer Finch: T-shirts?

Murray Kessler: T-shirts, Mortimer. Science. When the team was proactive and bursting with ideas, the quieter leader got better results, because he actually let them talk. The loud leader flattened them.

Mortimer Finch: I've been flattened by Humphrey for forty years and I've never folded a T-shirt in my life.

Humphrey Thwaite: That's evident from the shirt.

Rufus McCrae: Right, the people's court. Millions of readers, and the one-star pile on Goodreads is lively. I'll give you the gist straight, the three complaints that keep coming up. One: it's too long and repeats itself. She makes the point by chapter three, then makes it again for another couple of hundred pages. Two: it's a mirror for introverts to admire themselves in. Quiet people deep, loud people shallow. Three: it's very American. Harvard Business School, a Tony Robbins seminar, a megachurch in California. Arthur, you look wounded. Defend her.

Arthur Nightingale: I'll take the second one, because it's the unfair one. She doesn't say extroverts are shallow. There's a whole chapter on an introvert and an extrovert who love each other and keep rowing about dinner parties, and she treats both of them tenderly. The book says we need both. It just says one of them has been shouting the other down for a century.

Doc Sullivan: And I'll take the first, because it's the fair one. It is long. In places it's a magazine argument wearing a book's clothes.

Humphrey Thwaite: Every American non-fiction book is a magazine article that met a publisher at a party.

Mortimer Finch: And never left the party.

Rufus McCrae: The irony being, Humphrey, that the party's the one thing she'd tell you to leave. Iris, the American thing. Does that one stick?

Iris Marchetti: Partly. She does have a chapter on Asian-American students in Cupertino, where quiet is prized rather than pitied, and it's one of the most interesting things in the book. But mostly it's America looking in the mirror. Mind you, so is America.

Murray Kessler: And it isn't only them. Go to a British sales conference. Nobody's quiet there. They've all been on the course.

Rufus McCrae: I want a proper row now. Doc, you've been twitching since the crisps.

Doc Sullivan: Because there's a line in the introduction I couldn't get past. She writes: 'Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man's world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are.' And I'm sorry, but no. Nobody was ever denied the vote for preferring a quiet night in.

Arthur Nightingale: She isn't saying it's the same oppression, Doc. She's saying it's the same mechanism. You're marked down for something you didn't choose and can't change.

Doc Sullivan: Then there's the other problem. She writes as if it's a box you live in, introvert or extrovert. In the actual science it's a dial, and most of us sit somewhere in the middle. She mentions ambiverts, then largely forgets them, because a book needs two teams.

Iris Marchetti: That's not fair, Doc. She brings in Brian Little's free trait theory: you can act out of character for something you love. Little himself is the example, a quiet professor who's electric in the lecture hall and then hides away afterwards to recover. That isn't a box. It's a dial with a price tag on it.

Doc Sullivan: Then why is it called The Power of Introverts and not The Power of Having a Dial?

Murray Kessler: Because nobody buys The Power of Having a Dial, Doc. I've seen the numbers. The title sells the book. The book sells the nuance.

Mortimer Finch: Can I say something? I've sat here while you lot argue boxes and dials. My Jean. Forty-one years. Never once raised her voice. And she ran everything. Everything. That's not a box and it's not a dial. That's a woman you underestimated the whole time... while she let you. ...She also did the bins. Anyway.

Rufus McCrae: Here's what converted me, and it's the very first page. She opens on Rosa Parks. Not the speech, not the march. The woman on the bus. And she points out that Parks was remembered as soft-spoken, gentle, small. When Parks wrote her own book, she called it Quiet Strength.

Arthur Nightingale: And Martin Luther King did the talking. She's good on the pair of them. You need the one who won't get up and the one who'll get up on the stage. Neither of them changes the world on their own.

Humphrey Thwaite: Which is the answer to Doc, frankly. Two teams. Same side.

Doc Sullivan: I'll allow it. Grudgingly. Put it on my tab.

Rufus McCrae: Everything goes on your tab, Doc. Arthur, you've had a page folded down all night and you keep touching it like a lucky coin. Go on.

Arthur Nightingale: It's from the very end, the conclusion. She stops arguing and just tells you how to live. ... 'The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some it's a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers—of persistence, concentration, insight, and sensitivity—to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems, make art, think deeply.'

Rufus McCrae: ... Humphrey. You've gone quiet. Even for you.

Humphrey Thwaite: A lamplit desk. She's described my entire life in three words and made it sound like a choice.

Rufus McCrae: One thing each to carry out the door. Murray, you brought it. What's the money man walking out with?

Murray Kessler: Next meeting, the agenda goes out a day early so the thinkers can actually think. And I keep my mouth shut for the first ten minutes.

Doc Sullivan: I'll believe that when it's peer-reviewed.

Murray Kessler: Five minutes, then.

Rufus McCrae: Doc, you've grumbled all night. Did any of it land?

Doc Sullivan: One line. 'Love is essential; gregariousness is optional.' Take nothing else from the book and that'll still see you right. The rest is a seminar. That line is a life.

Rufus McCrae: Gentlemen, what's the view from the balcony tonight? Humphrey?

Humphrey Thwaite: Hmph. It's a self-help book with footnotes. ... There's a Dickinson poem I've carried since I was a boy. 'The Soul selects her own Society — Then — shuts the Door —'. I always thought it was a sad poem. A door shutting. My brother Frank was like that. Couldn't bear a crowd. Sat on the back step at every family do with a book, and we all thought it a pity. Teased him for it every Christmas for sixty years. ... He wasn't missing the party. He'd chosen his company. ... I'd have liked to tell him I knew that.

Mortimer Finch: ...Well, he'd have shut the door on you, Humphrey. Rightly. ... Mine's simpler. Next time someone at this table goes quiet, I won't fill it. I'll wait. Because the quiet ones are usually just deciding whether you're worth it.

Humphrey Thwaite: And?

Mortimer Finch: Jury's out, Humphrey. Forty years, and the jury's still out.

Rufus McCrae: Here's mine. Quiet is a magazine argument that got lucky and became a movement. It's long, it's American, and it leans on its stories. Read it anyway. I've sat at the end of a bar my whole life, and the bloke who talks the most is never the one who's read the most. It's the fella in the corner with half a bitter, the one you've walked past for ten years. This book is a pint bought for him. Read it if you were the kid with the books under the bunk. Read it twice if you were the one who made them put the books there. And to whoever's sat quiet in the corner tonight: we see you. Take your time. Read the actual book, though. Don't just listen to us bang on about it. That's Chapter and Verse. See you next week.