Society
I have never cried over being sacked, but I do weep over the Beatles, Tchaikovsky or Judy Garland
Published 09 August 1999
Is there something about becoming middle-aged that makes you - me, that is - cry more? I don't mean that I break down in the street or when people shout at me down the phone. That's one of the great benefits of being a freelance writer, sitting alone at home. People can't shout at you in person.
I read an article about how people are now being fired by fax and e-mail and how horrible it was - a sign of bad and cowardly management. It probably is, but the really horrible thing is being sacked, and I'm not sure that being sacked "sensitively" is an improvement. In my career in journalism I've been sacked face to face, by post, by answering-machine message and by almost every other form of communication apart from carrier pigeon, and there wasn't much to choose between them. There was supposedly a saying among black jazz musicians, tired of being plagiarised by white players, about why bebop was so difficult: "If they can't play it, then they can't steal it." My own version was, "If they can't reach you, then they can't fire you." But they usually catch up with you in the end.
However, unlike Peregrine Worsthorne, who wrote about blubbing over his breakfast egg at the Savoy while being sacked as editor of the Sunday Telegraph by Conrad Black, I never cried about it.
Two verses about crying come to mind. One is the beginning of a poem by Kingsley Amis that goes something like: "Only women, children and queers cry when things go wrong." Is it real or have I dreamt it? That's all I can remember of it and, if it is authentic, I'd like to think it goes on to be sensitive and inoffensive, but I wouldn't put money on it. The other is a line from Lee Marvin's terrible hit song "Wandering Star", about how the sun can burn your eye but only people make you cry. Not me. Only books, movies, plays and music make me cry.
Recently it's been children's books, mostly. My wife and I read quite a lot to the children, more for our benefit than theirs, I suspect. Many children's books are about the passing of childhood and, though that doesn't seem to bother the children too much, it means that we normally finish books such as the last Pippi Longstocking or The Lord of the Rings spluttering and sobbing, like Richard Attenborough making an acceptance speech.
This summer we reached our nadir of lachrymosity in the final pages of Tove Jansson's perfectly amiable book Finn Family Moomintroll. It's about a golden summer and it ends - at dawn, after a party, with Moomintroll walking home through a breeze blowing off the sea - with the following sentence:
"It is autumn in Moomin Valley, for how else can spring come back again?"
Maybe you had to be there, but the two of us had attempts at articulating the words and both did a Gwyneth Paltrow. The children were just embarrassed, as you are, perhaps, but there it is.
I cry at ridiculous moments in films as well, and for examples I'll restrict myself to the films of Michael Curtiz (which saves me any awkward confessions about Lassie Come Home). I suppose everybody sheds a tear at the bit in Casablanca when Paul Henreid leads the orchestra in a rendition of the "Marseillaise", but I also cry at the moment in the Errol Flynn Robin Hood when the crusaders reveal themselves to Robin Hood, the outlaws kneel and Richard says: "These alone have remained loyal." (I'd defend myself by arguing that, in both films, refugees from Europe were evoking the spirit of resistance to the Nazis.)
And then there's music. The last ten minutes of Abbey Road always have me pretending there's something in my eye as the Beatles bid farewell to being Beatles. And there's the end of Wagner's Die Walkure, in which Wotan punishes the daughter he loves by putting her to sleep on top of a mountain and surrounding her with a ring of fire. Can a piece of instrumental music be a tear-jerker? Try the first movement of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings.
Perhaps a definition of the very greatest works of art is that they don't stoop to anything as crude as making you cry. You cry at the end of Cyrano de Bergerac, not at the end of King Lear. The characters may cry, but you don't. But sometimes you are more in the mood for Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" to Margaret O'Brien in Meet Me in St Louis. There we are, I've set myself off again.
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