There's a new anthology out shortly, called Poems That Make Grown Men Cry. Now, poems provide easy pickings in the sob stakes – Dover Beach, Ode to Immortality, Donal Og, The River Merchant's Wife. But what about books? Not whole books, but moments in books that make you come up short, lines that perhaps make you think some dust got in your eye.
Sometimes they're desolating, sometimes uplifting, so here are some of both, with due respect for context and non-spoilering, and trying to keep each to a couple of sentences.
The most celebrated big hitter in terms of desolation is the final line of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock.
She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.
But is it not over-the-top, a piece of blatant reader manipulation? For nuance, the last line I prefer is from Henry James's Wings of a Dove:
But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "We shall never be again as we were!"
It's worth all the 400-plus pages and the over-complex dictated sentences that have led up to it.
And Greene himself wrote this genuinely heart-rending thought in The End of the Affair, with its wonderful evocation of Blitzed and blacked-out London:
Death never mattered at those times – in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the watching her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.
It's far more real than Brighton Rock, expressing a feeling you think someone might actually have had.
Love will do it every time: think of poor Swann in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, making this flat, heartbreaking statement:
To think that I've wasted years of my life, that I've longed to die, that I've experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn't appeal to me, who wasn't even my type.
Rose Macaulay's Crewe Train is a very structured satire, but as the main couple misunderstand each other yet again, she comes up with this yearning line:
Blind and crying, their love groped for a door of entry, and turned away defeated.
Edith Wharton's Lily Bart, at the end of The House of Mirth, sees what is missing when it's too late:
All the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance: her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening.
Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping has this Biblical sentence as a family gives up on the struggle, and shatters:
Now truly we were cast out to wander, and there was an end to housekeeping.
Some sad scenes, however, are also Uplifting. The last lines of Wuthering Heights do exactly what is intended: show peace after storm.
I lingered round [the three graves], under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
In James Joyce's short story The Dead, the last page or so would have you in floods. Though it's hard to pick anything out, the last few words are:
He heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
This is Scout walking home with Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee:
He gently released my hand, opened the door, went inside, and shut the door behind him. I never saw him again.
And this is from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling:
She walked away from him and, as he watched her go, he found that the terrible weight in his stomach seemed to have lessened slightly.
Luna – treated badly, even bullied, at school, but taking it calmly – has made the distraught Harry (to whom even worse things have happened) feel better, in a way that is both inexplicable and recognizable. Comfort coming from small things.
One more last line for closure, with a proper sense of urgency: at the end of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, Cassandra is scribbling on the final page of her diary:
"Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you."
Your turn now – make your strong fellow-commentators cry with your favourite sad moment from a book.
