By Stuart Mitchner

…my first love, my darling.

—Isambard Kingdom Brunel on the Clifton Suspension Bridge

Born April 9, 1806, British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel once claimed that the “most wonderful feat” he ever performed was producing “unanimity among 15 men who were all quarrelling about that most ticklish subject — taste.” He was referring to the panel of experts that approved his ambitious design for the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, the longest in the world at the time of its construction in 1831.

In a 2002 BBC Poll of the “100 Greatest Britons,” Brunel came in second to Winston Churchill and ahead of Princess Diana, Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare, Sir Isaac Newton, Elizabeth I, and John Lennon. While his contributions to English life were no more than bridges and tunnels, the Great Western Railway, Paddington Station, and numerous steamships, Brunel somehow managed to outrank William Blake (38); Charles Dickens (41); Florence Nightingale (52); Freddie Mercury (58); Charlie Chaplin (66); Tony Blair (67); Jane Austen (70); Geoffrey Chaucer (81); Richard III (82); J.R.R. Tolkien (92); Richard Burton the actor, not the explorer (96); and David Livingstone the explorer (98). The world-makers Blake, Chaucer, and Shakespeare aside, where are the poets? Don’t ask. Milton, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, among numerous others, didn’t make the list.

What does a poll that places Margaret Thatcher (16) ahead of Queen Victoria (18) and Queen Elizabeth II (24) say about the state of that “ticklish subject taste” in England two years this side of the millennium? You can find the full list at geni.com (“Home of the world’s largest family tree”). Although I’m not here to praise the U.K. or to bury it, only to celebrate a bridge and its builder, my impression of the extremes on the list suggest a possible explanation for Mad Merry Old England’s fling with Brexit 14 years later.

Brunel’s Unfinished Symphony

One way to rationalize the implicit disservice the poll does to many of England’s greatest poets is the physical enormity of Brunel’s total creation, plus the poetical imagination behind what he calls his “first love,” as an unsurpassable fact of life. Like Coleridge dreaming and writing the vision of “Kubla Khan,” Brunel dreamed the poem of the bridge, wrote it down, and sold it to a dazzled panel of experts. And given the ways of the world, he died in 1859, five years before construction of the Clifton Suspension Bridge was finally completed.

Keeping in mind the poetical idea, imagine submitting the equivalent of an epic masterpiece to a publisher who eventually lacks the funds to publish it due to a series of unforeseen misadventures, notably the 1831 Bristol riots, which frightened off investors until 1836, when construction began only to be interrupted in 1843, again by lack of funds. Two decades before work was completed in 1864 as a monument to Brunel, a Bristol guidebook was already displaying an image of the “finished” bridge as if it were already there to be seen by tourists standing on the Clifton side of the Avon Gorge and staring out over the unbridged vastness in which jackdaws and seagulls swooped, darted, circled through the “dark unbottomed infinite abyss” of the “palpable obscure.”

The Miltonic borrowings suggest how much the bridge’s splendor depends on the illusory vastness of the space it spans. Whether you peer down from mid-span or from St. Vincent’s Rocks on the Clifton side, the bridge is as much a monument to the view as to the mortal who envisioned it. Seen from that dizzying height, the Avon is a mere stream, and when the tide is out the river simply vanishes. As for what borders the view, on the Clifton side there are sheer cliffs, a rockface challenge for climbers; on the Leigh Woods side, Paradise Lost again (minus the linebreaks):

Gazing on the “summit of heaven,” Satan viewed “the champaign head of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides with thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, access denied; and overhead up grew insuperable height of loftiest shade, cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, a sylvan scene, and, as the ranks ascend, shade above shade, a woody theatre of stateliest view.”

There It Is

Let’s say you’ve just moved into a flat in the Clifton section of Bristol, a city whose name means “place of the bridge,” except that no one has told you about Brunel’s bridge. Less than a block from what will be your home for the next half year, you cross a small green and turn right down a walkway with no particular destination in mind, just strolling, happy to be in an attractive, atmospheric neighborhood of Georgian houses — when looming at the end of the walkway is a graystone tower like an enormous letter A, and next thing you know you’re walking into a storybook, the giant “A” like the first letter of the first sentence of a Tale of the Avon Gorge.

Peering down and out into the view you feel a confusion of euphoria and vertigo. Although a single car just passed by, there’s no traffic to speak of on this grandiose exit from one of England’s largest cities because the bridge leads into a forest, a place called Nightingale Valley, part of Leigh Woods. There’s little traffic coming into Clifton because few cars enter the city on this route. As you pass the posted Samaritans notice referring to a suicide hotline, the euphoria tilts closer to vertigo you hastily reimagine as a poet’s dream of vertigophoria leaving you reeling on the brink, drawn by the proximity of the fall, the dive, Satan’s flight.

Suicides

In fact, between 1974, when we were living in Bristol, and 1993, 127 people jumped or fell to their deaths from the bridge. After suicide barriers were constructed in 1998, the suicide rate dropped from eight to four deaths per annum, apparently too late for the wife of rock star George Fame, Nicolette Powell, formerly the Marchioness of Londonderry, who jumped to her death on August 13, 1993.

Bristol’s Cary Grant

Speaking of the 100 Greatest Britons poll, Bristol native Cary Grant would surely have made the list if he hadn’t moved to California and a Hollywood career that led to worldwide renown. And for anyone foolhardy enough to conduct a 100 Greatest Americans poll, Cary should be there.

In one of my favorite photographs of the bridge, there he is smiling and gesturing toward Brunel’s wonder from a balcony of the Avon Gorge Hotel. Grant was celebrating his 69th birthday. The photo ran with my January 2012 birthday column on the man David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film called “the best and most important actor in the history of cinema.” The more I see of it, the more Cary’s smile hints at Thomson’s clue to the secret of his greatness: “the fact that he can be attractive and unattractive simultaneously; there is a light and dark side to him, but, whatever is dominant, the other creeps into view.” In other words, watching Grant in films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion is like walking across the Clifton Suspension bridge, a feeling of euphoria and a touch of vertigo.

You can see the ambiguity in the photograph, creeping into view in his half-charming, half-teasing smile, as if he were thinking of the excitement Hitchcock could have created with a life-or-death scene on that bridge: like Cary and Eva Marie Saint hanging from the edge of Mt. Rushmore in North by Northwest as James Mason prepares to stomp on their hands, until the Miltonic wind blows him down, down, down. Or else Grant might be smiling at the thought of the Bristol barmaid who jumped from the bridge in May 1855 after a lovers quarrel with a porter on Brunel’s Great Western Railway. Witnesses described the billowing effect of the updraft beneath her crinoline dress slowing her fall and depositing her safely on the muddy banks of the Avon (she lived to be 85).

Dorothea’s “Bridging”

A Princeton English Department remembrance of Dorothea von Moltke, co-owner of Labyrinth Books, who died on March 23, includes this statement from English professor Susan Wolfson: Dorothea was “as genial as she was erudite, as welcoming as she was elegant. Her introductions to a wide range of speakers and their books always reflected her engaged reading and her talent for bridging to an audience who may not yet have read the work that has drawn them to the occasion.” Staff members of Town Topics and Princeton Magazine have fond memories of the 2009 party at the store that launched the magazine, with a performance by Princeton professors Paul Muldoon and Nigel Smith’s band Rackett. Smith remembers Dorothea’s “good humor even under duress,” as well as the “polite horror of the staff as we burst through the load-in rear door with the amps and the PA system.”