CAROL REED'S great film The Third Manhas a blackly comic scene in which dime-store novelist Holly Martins thinks himself kidnapped and about to be killed. The car he assumed to be a taxi is hurtling recklessly through the night-time streets of occupied, post-war Vienna, driven by a sinister driver who ignores his every word. When they reach their destination, Martins starts to run for it.
Then a door swings open and he is effusively welcomed by Mr Crabbin, secretary of the propagandist “Cultural Re-education Section”, who sent the car. Ushered inside to applause from a well-heeled audience, Martins remembers an earlier commitment – forgotten as soon as made – to address the group’s latest meeting. Instead of being murdered by Viennese penicillin racketeers, he merely has to make a speech (on “the crisis of faith in the modern novel”) for which he has not prepared.
The scene subverts a well-known, and often repeated, survey finding in which the prospect of public speaking is said to beat death as the greatest fear of those surveyed.
I’ve never quite believed that statistic. If death and a public speaking event were equally proximate, I suspect most people would choose to live, even if it involved delivering an impromptu lecture. But it’s true that, in those fraught hours before an important speaking engagement, death can seem by comparison to be a comforting abstraction.
The issue has a certain urgency for me at the moment because, even as I write this, I am also preparing to give a talk somewhere and still have no idea what to say. Nerves have been gnawing my stomach for the past 24 hours; I had trouble sleeping last night; and I have now reached the stage of cursing the alacrity with which, many months ago, I accepted the invitation.
This is how it happens. You agree to speak at a time when it is still only a distant prospect: cheerfully mortgaging your future self’s peace of mind to your present self’s inability to say no.
You may even have commented facetiously then that there was a sporting chance you’d be run over by a bus before having to deliver on the promise.
But now the dreaded day is here. The bus is nowhere to be seen. And neither is the cheerful moron who accepted the invitation.
I can’t honestly say that, were a greatest-fear researcher to approach me even today, I would rank public speaking ahead of death. The prospect of some non-fatal but temporarily incapacitating injury suddenly seems attractive, however. And I certainly wouldn’t mind being kidnapped and driven at speed through war-time Vienna, at least long enough to miss the speech.
Many famous speakers have suffered from the fear, some very badly. Dale Carnegie of How to Win Friends and Influence Peopleused to cite Charles Stewart Parnell as a reassuring example.
The young Parnell was so nervous a speaker, he wrote, “that he frequently clenched his fists until his fingernails sank into his flesh and his palms bled”.
Indeed, according to a later biographer, FSL Lyons, Parnell’s first big political speech – at Dublin’s Rotunda in 1874 – was a “total disaster”.
He was “visibly nervous, his voice did not carry [. . .] and he seemed incapable of stringing two sentences together”. Even a few years years later, at a public meeting in Liverpool, he was still so constantly stuck for words that others on the platform kept making suggestions, to alleviate everyone’s misery; only for Parnell to ignore the prompts and wait, fists clenched and shaking, until the right word came.
Which is where Parnell ceases to be any comfort, in my opinion. That refusal of help, not to mention the bleeding palms, suggests the superhuman determination that drove him. He may have had to dig deep inside himself, but at least he knew he’d find something. In the same circumstances, most of us would accept the prompts, however inadequate.
The relationship between mortality and public speaking is recognised by actors and comedians when they speak of “dying” on stage. Usually this only happens in the figurative sense. But in severe cases, a struggling speaker might welcome the sight in the audience of the Grim Reaper himself, with his trademark heckle: “Get off!”
In The Third Man, this almost happens to Holly Martins. The film spares us his actual lecture. But a masterly piece of before-and-after editing shows that it has drained all the atmosphere out of the room, like an industrial suction pump. The follow-up Q and A session ("Where would you put Mr James Joyce?") only serves to sign his metaphorical death certificate.
Then a dark figure turns up at the back of the audience and saves him. It is Popescu, a member of the penicillin ring, who starts asking double-edged questions about the author’s latest project (“fact or fiction?”), allowing Martins finally to sound witty (“It’s a murder story. I’ve just started it”).
After which, our hero exits the stage in a hurry, pursued by homicidal goons.
We should all be so lucky in the circumstances.