Cliffhanger

BOOK REVIEW: “Cliffs of Despair: Journeys to the Edge”, Tom Hunt, 2006

When his brother-in-law, Conrad, a long-suffering schizophrenic, fatally shot himself in the head, Tom Hunt, an English teacher in a Connecticut boys’ private school, floundered in the waves of his bafflement and distress until the day he sensed a way out. In other words, a way through.

After reading a newspaper article on the grisly mystique of Beachy Head, a four-mile-long, 530 foot tall chalk cliff on the south coast of Sussex, England, that ranks as the third most popular suicide site in the world, he crossed the Atlantic on a personal mission. He was determined to understand the siren-like pull of the cliff edge and glimpse the inner states of suicidal strangers – not to mention his own compulsion to plunge into oblivion, a feeling he came by honestly as the “sensitive, introverted son of a melancholy father.”

On a cab ride across the undulating green pastures of Sussex Downs, dotted with rabbit holes and flocks of sheep, Tom arrived at the Beachy Head, a pub standing in a stiff wind 100 yards from the edge of the cliff, more than twice the height of Niagara Falls, his ears ringing with the last words of his driver:

“Ride the cabs and you’ll have enough Beachy Head stories to fill a book.”

Like the born teacher he is, fill a book he will, and a damn good one: Cliffs of Despair: Journeys to the Edge. Dare I say it: it’s a cliffhanger. And much more.

Chatting up the bartender, Tom learned the locals have dubbed the place The Last Stop Pub even though historically the Beachy Head peninsula has served as a first stop against foreign invaders, jutting into the English Channel like Churchill’s bulldog jaw facing down the Nazi threat. The typical jumpers tend to brood alone in a corner of the pub, plying themselves with one last pint of Dutch courage, looking…jumpy. The last line of defence falls to the friendly publican, offering The Suspect the kind gesture, the simple acts of humanity that cabbies and barkeeps have down cold; occasionally the making of just enough warm, old-fashioned emotional room allows a lucky few to dodge a rough end mere steps away. As a local writer put it: “This beautiful place openly invites you to die.”

Such is how Tom kicked off a campaign of dozens of in-depth interviews: cops, cabbies, bartenders, rescue and recovery workers, and families of the victims, his sensitivity, compassion and withholding of judgment unleashing a flood of stories from the poignant to gruesome. Tom knows: everybody is a potential book in search of an audience.

Mostly volunteers, veterans of hundreds of rescues and recoveries bent his ear, brave blokes risking their own skins, facing down fear, week after week, year after year, the catalogue of slaughter captured in the ink of the local police blotter. At least once a week, a some body or a no body goes over, or tries to, from the humble low to the high and mighty; even Princess Di tried, until shifted by thoughts of her two boys playing with their toys. Most choose a favoured spot between the pub and the lighthouse, the highest half mile stretch of the cliff; if persuasive words fail, constables are called in to tackle the culprits, often too late.

Twice awarded for bravery, PC Gary Keating unfolded for Tom a typical day at the office. Spotting a body with a thermal imaging device, the helicopter pilot radios its location to the ground crew. Next comes the staking of the steel cables to a tripod at the cliff edge, the looping of the cable to the rear of the land rover and the unrolling of the rope ladder. Flush with an adrenal rush, Gary ties off the safety line and rappels down the sheer face, radio and binoculars slung round his neck, towing a lightweight stretcher, and as his toes push off the cliff every few yards, he is scratched by the bramble and pummeled by porous, chalk boulders. To a surreal soundtrack of howling winds, crashing waves, squawking seabirds and whirling chopper blades, he unzips the body bag with rubber gloves and begins his grim, grunting game of fetch, gathering up the deadweight, maggot-ridden stiff, reeking of piss and shit, the strewn intestines and shorn limbs, the flattened skull and oozing, yolk-like brain no longer feeling the pain. Catching the drift of the stench, the workers above crank the winch as bystanders gawk and flinch and retch.

More bodies hang up on ledges than reach the rocky beach; once Gary found a woman 100 feet down, still alive, her back broken, begging him to push her off. Lifted into a helicopter, she disappeared into the sky, never seen again. Then there was the time he found a German woman screwed headfirst in the beach like an ostrich. A pathologist, as only pathologists can, typified the Beachy Head dead as “slabs of cellophane-wrapped peanut brittle dropped on concrete.” Such radical self-hatred the volunteers struggle to grasp: surely no one who knows love would inflict this horror on themselves or others. But as Karl Menninger reminds us: “There’s a little murder and a little suicide in everybody’s heart.”

Most make it easy to identify the corpse, leaving a momento atop the cliff: a wallet, a passport, a handbag or a shoe with rings tucked inside, or a terse note. A 72 year old mother to her daughter: “At least you won’t have to visit the cancer ward.” A heartbroken young man of 22 to a woman he loved: “Congratulations on getting married. I hope you are really happy together.” A 34 year old mother of two: “I can’t bring them up properly. They will be better off with someone else. I am not stable or decisive enough.” Except, of course, for her final decision.

Gary confessed to Tom that only a single case rattled him when in June, 1990, Elizabeth Kentish, 39, a former airline stewardess and the third wife of an upper crust racehorse owner, went over in her car with her two daughters, five and two; she thought she was being persecuted by other mothers at her daughter’s private girls’ school. During the complex recovery operation, strong winds flipped the offshore lifeboat, throwing four crewmen into the sea. Recalling how he stuffed a teddy bear in the body bag, Gary admitted: “Emotionally, that’s the only job that ever affected me.” But most workers feel little or nothing for the victims, reserving the off-chance of the verklempt for the hubbub of the evening pub; some indulge in gallows humour, both a defense and expression of contempt, and here Tom finds room for the stringent philosophical strains of David Hume: “The life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”

Tom learns that clustered suicides are generally imitative and usually found in confined spaces like prisons, colleges, barracks and hospitals, but at Beachy Head workers often discover four or five people who jumped consecutively from the same spot, bodies upon bodies, each unknown to the other. Then the mysterious cluster stops and moves elsewhere. Fridays in summer seem to be favoured over Mondays in winter.

Tom wonders if he is encountering the phenomenon of “morphic resonance”, when animals of the same breed communicate without direct contact. Or is there any truth to the idea that Beachy Head sits atop a pagan fault line of untold occult power, running south from Stonehenge, its ley lines of intersecting negative energy luring the vulnerable? If we swallow seventh century folklore, humans were sacrificed off the cliffs to placate the gods and ensure a healthy harvest; even the level-headed, 21st century New England Yankee Tom Hunt admits to feeling the pagan pull of the British stiff upper cliff like the force of an addiction, a strange wind instrument plucking our life and death wishes, the imp of the perverse driving the logic of self-preservation into reverse, reclaiming for a brief, sufficient moment in the self-sacrificing act “a self that once knew clarity and purpose.”

In 1992, the Samaritans, a suicide prevention group, erected a public telephone box on a grassy knoll near the Beachy Head pub and a large sign: “Samaritans. Always there. Day or Night.” Still, they live by a laissez-faire philosophy: “We don’t try to talk people out of jumping. We listen. We don’t take away their self determination.” Then there are suicides who mislead police for the sake of their beneficiaries. British insurance companies will not pay off for suicides, but if a coroner rules an open verdict, they must cough up, giving insured jumpers an incentive. In 2018, the local city council banned Beachy Head shrines and crosses left by families, perhaps due to their sheer volume. The following year, Great Britain appointed a Minister of Loneliness, one hell of a lonely job. (“I say, Nigel, depression is now the number one cause of death and disability globally. Have a go, like a good chap, and report back to us.”)

Few believe that fencing off the cliff would make any difference -- too impractical, too easy to vault over. Besides, a man-made barrier will soon meet its own end with the steady erosion of the cliff, not unlike the steady erosion of the cohort of young men -- single, divorced, unemployed, addicted, war traumatized -- an increasingly sick demographic riding a rising tide of self-destruction as they watch young women passing them the socio-economic ladder.

Some conclude suicide is the coward’s way out, believing it takes far more courage to face up to life. But Tom’s brother-in-law Conrad, trapped in the shell of a schizophrenic hell, had to do what he had to do; who are we to suppose we understand another’s person’s uniquely tortured, psychic web of grief, guilt, longing, emptiness, rage and revenge -- let alone pushing “help” that in the end only prolongs unspeakable, intractable suffering? Or as W.B. Yeats put it: “The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.”

On his journey, Tom slowly earned something close to an absolute truth: “Suicide is too complex for absolutes.” But at rock bottom, he found it tempting to conclude it’s all about unrequited love, loving hard carrying the risk of falling hard, even falling in love with death. “It’s probably true,” he discerns, “that for every good man or woman who would choose death over dishonour, there are scores who could bear a tarnished reputation more easily than a loveless life.”

According to the gospel of the English pediatrician Donald Winnicott, when infants experience consistent “emotional holding” from their parents, they receive, like a natural booster shot, a lasting feeling of womb-like, Edenic safety and protection, the sine qua non of a sane, stable, adult life based on self-confidence and a capacity for risk. When the holding never happens, or collapses, the baby stops turning to others and twists inward; feeling dropped, she is susceptible to the experience of falling forever into a terrifying, bottomless void. Under an illusory coat of stable self-determination, most westerners, conditioned by our hyper-individualistic, capitalistic culture, carry around inside a subtle dream-feeling of not having been carried enough. It’s downright biblical: The Fall of Man.

As the author of an investigation into my own suicidal family history, naturally I strongly identified with Tom’s journey. Neither of our books are bestsellers, understandable so; as T.S. Eliot reminds us, “Humankind cannot bear too much reality.” But over the years I have discovered the hard way that there are untold spiritual rewards found in the tenacious uncovering of repressed truths that set us free, or freer than ever before. From Socrates to Shakespeare, the tragedy and taboo of self-murder finds its most creative challengers and interpreters in the wisdom of visual art, literature and film. In our post-modern world seemingly hell bent on mass extinction, we need to generate as much consciousness-raising as humanly possible, and profound art has as much to tell us about potential deliverance from our darker selves as “objective” science — if not more.

Think of the enduring popularity of The Catcher in the Rye, the story of a depressed adolescent trying to prevent small children, his symbolic younger self, from tumbling off a cliff. Off the top of my head, I can rhyme off a host of books and films that have cushioned my own rocky path, identifying with the characters in the darkened cinema with bursts of emotional catharsis: Sophie’s Choice, The Hours, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, On the Beach, The Big Chill, Dead Poets Society, The Deer Hunter, Dr. Strangelove, Jules and Jim, Harold and Maude, Last Tango in Paris, MASH, Jude, Leaving Las Vegas, All My Puny Sorrows, Coming Home…

In my case, at least, the healing power of storytelling – and listening -- supplanted Prozac.

Recently I re-watched the 1979 film Quadrophenia. The last scene shows a sweeping, helicopter-eye view of Beachy Head, viewable on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB-NeLyzmFc An angry young man, Jimmy, rages up and down the edge of the cliffs on a “Mod” Vespa motorbike, as The Who sing “Love Reign Over Me.” Finally he stops, backs up and takes a run at the precipice, but all we see is the trajectory of bike crashing on the rocks below – no sign of the young man. Did he jump off the bike at the last moment? Was he saved by the hope of love? I realized that in my dark emotional state back in 1979, I chose to assume the worst: that despite the ambiguity of the scene, the character of Jimmy, bearing my name of James, perished on the rocks. Like Tom, I was “the sensitive, introverted son of a melancholy father”, prone to a gloomy fatalism.

After a failed love affair in 1983, I surrendered to a lengthy, in-depth psychotherapy that slowly turned my life around. On my second viewing of Quadrophenia over 40 years later, Pete Townshend’s song imagery of rain, tears, grief and healing now seemed to suggest redemption (unlike the downer finale of Thelma and Louise). I now saw the crashing of the bike as Jimmy’s rejection of his violent Mod lifestyle, and a rebirth. Sometimes we do come to see the forest for the trees.

In the final pages of his courageous act of public service journalism, Tom reflected on his “journey to the edge”, emerging stronger and wiser, held by a soulful pledge. Echoing his opening scene talking with the bartender in the Beachy Head and his tales of the shipwrecked spirits huddled alone in a corner, fortifying themselves with a last pint, Tom returned to the pub for a last look. As he scanned the faces of the happy families, he knew he was a man transformed and transforming, for in his heart he knew he was lucky to be loved in the land of the living; in the end, your destiny need not equal your fate.

“I’m no longer looking for the suspicious ones,” he realized. “I’m looking for a wife and daughter who remind me of my own.”