When she appeared in a New York court on Monday, author JK Rowling invoked a time-honoured, if largely mythical, notion of British reserve. ”I really don’t want to cry,” she said, ”because I’m British.” In this one utterance she managed to honour and breach the custom simultaneously. The whole point of the stiff upper lip is that you’re not supposed to let on that you even feel like crying. In fact, Rowling has a history of tearfulness.
She admitted to crying when she killed off one of her characters, and also when she finished the final Harry Potter book. She cried when she visited the flat where she wrote the first book. For those of us who have few problems that a personal fortune of £545-million wouldn’t fix, the thought of her bravely fighting back the tears while she and Warner Bros join forces to sue a tiny publishing house is less than edifying.
The point is not that she cries a lot; it’s that she still sees her tears as unrepresentative of her true character because she is British. The British still hate the idea that they cry. They even apologise when they cry, as if they are putting you out somehow. When Princess Diana cried during a television interview, the London-based Spectator magazine bemoaned the erosion of British reserve, asking: ”Do we want our children to grow up endlessly to emote?” It’s a question seemingly constructed to suggest that a true Briton would no more cry than split an infinitive, even in circumstances where it was clearly warranted.
The traditional idea of British reserve — which excludes the Welsh, who are meant to be downright weepy — is based on two falsehoods, the first being that British people rarely display emotion. The second is that in other places, notably the United States, people never do anything else.
This vision of the US is largely predicated on its televisual output, wherein people are usually so busy wailing that they often forget to gnash their teeth. Crying is fascinating at this remove precisely because it is embarrassing in person, and the United Kingdom has picked up the US’s reality TV habit with enthusiasm. But this is scripted emotion, for the cameras only, and while it is routinely displayed by actors, politicians, preachers and plaintiffs, it isn’t real and it doesn’t count. Americans aren’t weeping in the streets.
As an American I have probably cried more frequently since I moved to Britain, although I would put the increase down to two factors: having children and stepping on plugs. What I haven’t noticed, generally speaking, is an overmeasure of reserve. Within months of my arrival I saw Gazza crying on national television, followed by Margaret Thatcher. If I didn’t quite understand the circumstances of the former, I never thought I’d see the latter.
I witnessed firsthand the weird and disturbing outpouring of emotion that followed Diana’s death, although ostensibly my reason for being in that part of London was that I needed more fax paper. I have seen public tears from the likes of David Beckham, London mayor Ken Livingstone and comic Les Dennis. I have also had to endure the spectacle of American Hillary Clinton crying at exactly the point when it looked as though a few tears might do her some good, but it struck me that, of the weepers listed above, it was she who looked most like she could do with some lessons.
The stiff upper lip is an image that Britain has of itself, which it perceives as something the rest of the world admires. What we actually like is the understatement — heroic British pilot lands flaming plane, saves hundreds of lives and then tells the press that it was a bit of a close shave — and the rest of us could use more of that. The emotional constipation is harder to warm to, especially as an aspiration, especially when it isn’t true. — Â