Men do cry … Andy Murray wipes away a tear. Photograph: Colorsport/CorbisPeople who know Andy Murray only through television, which is almost all of us, grew fonder of him when they saw him cry after Roger Federer defeated him in last year's Wimbledon final, and fonder again when he cried during last week's BBC documentary. The first happened as he tried make the gallant loser's speech; the second when his interviewer, Sue Barker, nudged him gently towards the events in his Dunblane primary school on 13 March, 1996, when a gunman murdered 16 children and their teacher in the gymnasium. Murray began to talk and then the recollection overwhelmed him; looking for comfort and distraction, he leaned forward to nuzzle one of his dogs. Crying sequences in television interviews can often seem unnecessary and voyeuristic – "Look, we made her cry" – but Murray's somehow ennobled him, or at least established him as fully human among those unimaginative people who previously doubted it.
Ours has been almost an 18th-century reaction. "When we cry deeply, we are closer to our natural and to our divine state," Rousseau wrote approvingly, believing tears to be evidence of sincere and deep emotion on the crier's part, as opposed to the shallow verbal interplay of polite society. But it was also a cult, just as much as the periwig: perhaps there has never been a more intentionally tearful century. Among the fashionable gentry, blubbing indicated fine morals and exceptional sensitivity. According to Tom Lutz's book on the subject (Crying: the Natural and Cultural History of Tears), the primary goal of dramatists, actors, poets and novelists was inducing "abundant and pleasurable tears" in their audiences, which as a result, burst into fits of what Lutz calls "moral weeping" or, less visibly, felt a heightening of their sexual urges. Tearful eroticism became part of courtship. In Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, the hero and his companion Lotte read odes together as they touch and weep. Three years earlier, in a novel called The Man of Feeling by an Edinburgh lawyer, Henry Mackenzie, the protagonist wept at the drop of a hat – or rather between kisses, at the news of a dog's death, and on hearing the "romantic melancholy" of a?shepherd's horn.
This would hardly have been recognised as typical or desirable Scottish behaviour in the centuries that followed. Like many children, I grew up believing that only children cried – that tears could be represented by a falling graph that began with squalling infants in prams and fell steadily towards the silent, dry-eyed stoicism of adults, or at least British adults, in war films. Later I accepted that women cried as well, though why I should is mysterious when I never saw my mother cry – not once in more than half a century, though she had more than her share of things to cry about – and must have its roots in conventional belief rather than personal observation. On the other hand, I saw my father disobey male convention and cry after his sister's funeral, or rather start to cry and then quickly check himself. It was such a remarkable event, or seemed so to me at age 25, that I?remember the details of where he sat in my cousin's house and the story he was telling about another funeral – that of his first child nearly 40 years before – where he'd pretended not to like tinned pears because there weren't enough at the funeral tea to go round, when in fact he liked tinned pears very much. A strange, wry little story, but suddenly his eyes were moist and he couldn't manage the words. My cousin reached across to put her hand on his arm. "There, there, Uncle Harry, there, there."
I saw the same stifled tears twice more, when he attempted a speech at his golden wedding, and as he lay dying. Each time he found himself overwhelmed by what Lutz nicely calls the "surplus of feeling over thinking" that cancels articulate speech and substitutes the physical gesture of tears. The traditional explanation, popular since the ancient Greeks, is that tears are cathartic and offer a "release", but Lutz is persuasive when he speculates that, rather than releasing emotions, tears redirect them by shifting our attention from the mental to the physical: a?diversionary tactic providing temporary relief from psychic pain.
How common crying was among British men of my father's generation is hard to know. The 20th-century wasn't as keen on sentimental display as the 18th, and though we think of the 19th as addicted to mourning, it was quick to find comedy in affected tears. The death of Little Nell may have raised a gusher in every eye that read it – the critic Francis Jeffrey said he sobbed through a night and a morning – but at the same time Dickens could write of Mrs Bumble's tears that they were not "the things to find their way to Mr Bumble's soul; his heart was waterproof". By the time Oscar Wilde pronounced his famous verdict that Little Nell's passing could provoke only "tears … of laughter", manly weeping, with real as opposed to fictional causes, had also become unfashionable – something that in fact "unmanned" men and needed to be avoided. In 1950, a survey of British film audiences showed that men would go to the far horizons of euphemism rather than admit to crying at a film. "I have on occasion been moved to a wet eye," said one man. "I do not cry as a woman does," said another. As late as the 1980s, 45% of American men said they never cried, as opposed to 6% of women.
Between the ages of 10 and 40, I can't remember crying except for twice out of self-pity in my teens: first when I failed some exams spectacularly, and second, when a gang beat me up and threw me over a hedge. They were otherwise dry years that ended one night in a cinema when I found tears pouring down my cheeks at the Turkish film Yol – I have no idea why, other than that some combination of image and music had touched something. It happened more and more, sometimes prompted by occasions that were indisputably and profoundly sad, such as Kathleen Ferrier singing Mahler, and sometimes not. In the cinema, I?sometimes look away from a film to break its hold so as not to be mistaken for one of those people who enjoy the pleasure of tears, like the teenagers who saw James Cameron's Titanic 10 times, or the mourners for Diana, Princess of Wales, or the man next to me at Les Miserables whose shoulders never stopped heaving. These people, too, represent the 18th century and its less attractive habit of recreational grieving.
Age may be a factor. I have noticed that old men, when recounting a perfectly ordinary scene from their youth, will sometimes choke just a little on this detail or that person, as though describing them has unexpectedly flooded the teller with emotion. Whatever the case, I took care to look away when Andy Murray cried in his documentary because, having shared none of his terrible experience, it was worth making the effort not to join him.
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