Suicide: The Final Word

When the great British comedian, Tony Hancock, alone in Sydney and befuddled by booze and barbiturates, committed suicide in 1968 he left behind two suicide notes--he was, after all, a perfectionist.

The first note--by far the more concise--is a classic of poignancy and pertinence; it reads simply, 'Things seemed to go wrong too many times.' There is art in that note. In the end, it succeeds in doing what many of Hancock's other final performances did not: it shows what an artist and premature loss Tony Hancock (at the age of 44) was.

However, Hancock is not alone. Many of the world's greatest artists have saved their greatest work for their suicides--whether in the manner of the act or in their note explaining it. Hemingway did it spectacularly though rather prosaically with a shotgun in his Ketchum (Idaho) kitchen; Brutus, after sticking the knife into Caesar, then did it to himself; Sylvia Path characteristically took the artistic route with her 'Dying is an art like everything else. I do it exceptionally well'; and Curt Cobain certainly gave credence to the claim that suicide is the ultimate expression of self-criticism when he wrote, "I hate myself, and I want to die."

But, where is all this heading? Well, a friend and I were the other day discussing the idea of irony. Irony, being in part: 'the use of language with one meaning for the privileged few and another for those addressed or concerned' (Oxford Dictionary of Current English), is of course a Fryday fundamental. However, my friend drew my attention to an article in New Yorker magazine that celebrates irony better than I have yet managed to do. The article, by Tad Friend, discusses the propensity of people to use San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge as a jumping off place.

It seems that this stately structure has literally and figuratively been a bridge to another world for all of its 66 years. On average, somebody jumps off the Golden Gate every fortnight and it is the world's leading suicide location. The first jumper did it three months after it opened in 1936, 1200 others have done it since. Where the irony comes in is the care that is often taken. For example, the Golden Gate has a sister bridge, the Bay Bridge, but nobody has jumped off that--it is too ugly, apparently.

But the far-from-final irony is that not everybody succeeds. The incidences of surviving a leap from the bridge are quite high (forgive the irony in that statement).Numbers are not exact, because some survivors have simply swum away, but many have jumped, survived, recovered, and then recorded what they then thought were their final thoughts (a leap from the bridge takes 4 seconds). One of those, Ken Baldwin, who jumped in 1985, later made the following magical statement and in doing so reinforced my belief--clung to--that there is always a better way. That he also managed to say it in such a humorous and ironic way adds to its power as a salutary lesson. As he fell, Baldwin recalls, 'I instantly realized that everything in my life I'd thought was unfixable was totally fixable--except for having just jumped.'

Now, that's irony! Hancock would have liked that.


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