Waiting for the Barbarians

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  The books are, so to speak, just the tip of the iceberg. Between 1912 and 1913 more than a hundred songs about the Titanic were published. A scant month after the sinking, a one-reel movie called Saved from the Titanic was released, featuring Dorothy Gibson, an actress who had been a passenger in first class. It established a formula—a love story wrapped around the real-life catastrophe—that has resurfaced again and again, notably in a 1953 tearjerker starring Barbara Stanwyck and in James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster, which, when it was released, was both the most expensive and the highest-grossing film of all time. (The film was rereleased during the week of the centenary, after an $18 million conversion to 3D.) There have been a host of television treatments: the most recent is a four-part miniseries by Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey. And that’s just the English-language output. German dramatizations include a Nazi propaganda film set aboard the ship—not the same movie as the Leni Riefenstahl Titanic movie. A French entry, The Chambermaid on the Titanic (1997), based on a novel, fleshes out the story with erotic reveries.

  The inexhaustible interest suggests that the Titanic’s story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters. The explosion of the Hindenberg, for instance, and even the torpedoing, just three years after the Titanic sank, of the Lusitania, another great liner whose passenger list boasted the rich and the famous, were calamities that shocked the world but have failed to generate an obsessive preoccupation. The aura of significance that surrounds the Titanic’s fate was the subject of another, belated headline, which appeared in a special publication of the satirical newspaper The Onion in 1999, stomping across the page in dire block letters:

  WORLD’S LARGEST METAPHOR HITS ICE-BERG

  The “news” was accompanied by an archival image of the ship’s famous four-funneled profile. The subhead pressed the joke: “TITANIC, REPRESENTATION OF MAN’S HUBRIS, SINKS IN NORTH ATLANTIC. 1,500 DEAD IN SYMBOLIC TRAGEDY.”

  The Onion’s spoof gets to the heart of the matter: unlike other disasters, the Titanic seems to be about something. But what? For some, it’s a parable about the scope, and limits, of technology: a 1997 Broadway musical admonished us that “in every age mankind attempts / to fabricate great works at once / magnificent and impossible.” For others, it’s a morality tale about class, or a foreshadowing of World War I—the marker of the end of a more innocent era. Academic historians dismiss this notion as mere nostalgia; for them, the disaster is less a historical dividing line than a screen on which early-twentieth-century society projected its anxieties about race, gender, class, and immigration.

  All these interpretations are legitimate, even provocative; and yet none, somehow, seems wholly satisfying. If the Titanic has gripped our imagination so forcefully for the past century, it must be because of something bigger than any fact of social or political or cultural history. To get to the bottom of why we can’t forget it, you have to turn away from the facts and consider the realm to which the Titanic and its story properly belong: myth.

  If the facts are so well known by now that they seem more like memory than history, it’s thanks to Walter Lord. More than fifty years after its publication, A Night to Remember (1955) remains the definitive account; it has never gone out of print. In just under 150 pages, the author crisply lays out a story that, he rightly intuited, needs no added drama. He begins virtually at the moment of impact. “High in the crow’s nest” of the sumptuous new ship—the largest ever built, widely admired for its triple-propeller design, and declared by the press to be “unsinkable”—two lookouts peering out at the unusually calm North Atlantic suddenly sight an iceberg “right ahead.” Within a couple of pages, the ship’s fate is sealed: Lord gives us the agonizing thirty-seven seconds that elapsed between the sighting and the collision, and then the eerily understated moment of impact, the “faint grinding jar” felt by so many passengers and crew. (“If I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled,” one survivor recalled.) Only then does he fill in what led up to that moment—not least the decision to speed through waters known to be strewn with icebergs—and what followed.

  Until Lord’s book, what most people had read about the Titanic came from the initial news stories, and then, as the years passed, from articles and interviews published on anniversaries of the sinking. Lord was the first writer to put it all together from a more distanced perspective. The unhurried detachment of his account nicely mirrors the odd calm that, according to so many survivors’ accounts, long prevailed aboard the stricken liner. “And so it went,” Lord wrote. “No bells or sirens, no general alarm.” His account has no bells or sirens, either; the catastrophe unfolds almost dreamily. There are the nonchalant reactions of passengers and crew, many of whom felt the sinking ship was a better bet than the tiny lifeboats. (“We are safer here than in that little boat,” J. J. Astor declared; he drowned.) There are the oddly revealing decisions: one socialite left his cabin, then went back and, ignoring the $300,000 in stocks and bonds that he had stashed in a tin box, grabbed a good-luck charm and three oranges. There is the growing realization that there weren’t enough lifeboats; of those, many were lowered half full. There are the rockets fired off in distress, which one passenger recalled as paling against the dazzling starlight. And then the shattering end, marked by the din of the ship’s giant boilers, torn loose from their housings, hurtling downward toward the submerged bows.

  There are iconic moments of panache and devotion, and of cowardice. Benjamin Guggenheim really did trade in his life jacket for white tie and tails. Mrs. Isidor Straus really did refuse to leave her husband, a co-owner of Macy’s: “Where you go, I go,” she was heard to say. Among the songs written after the sinking was one in Yiddish, celebrating the couple’s devotion. And—an anecdote that has been repeated in everything from a poison-pen letter sent soon after the sinking to an episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery—a woman in a lifeboat turned out not to be a woman at all. It was just a terrified Irish youth wrapped in a shawl.

  Lord had access to many survivors, and the details that had lodged in their memories have the persuasive oddness of truth. One provides an unsettling soundtrack to the dreadful hour and a half between the sinking, at 2:20 in the morning, and the appearance of a rescue ship. Jack Thayer, a teenage passenger from Philadelphia’s Main Line, who was one of only a handful of people picked out of the water by lifeboats, later recalled that the sound made by the many hundreds of people flailing in the twenty-eight-degree water, drowning or freezing to death, was like the noise of locusts buzzing in the Pennsylvania countryside on a summer night.

  The closest that A Night to Remember comes to engineering drama is an account, shrewdly spliced into the larger narrative, of the doings of two ships that would become intimately associated with the disaster. One was the little Cunard liner Carpathia, eastbound that night en route from New York to the Mediterranean. Fifty-eight miles away from the Titanic when it picked up her first distress calls, it was the only ship to hasten to the big liner’s rescue, reversing its course and shutting off heat and hot water in an attempt to maximize fuel efficiency. The other was the Californian, a small steamer that had stopped about ten miles from the Titanic—unlike the doomed ship, it had heeded the ice warnings—and sat there all through that terrible night, disregarding the Titanic’s frantic signaling, by wireless, Morse lamp, and, finally, rockets. Not all of this was as inexplicable as it seems: the Californian didn’t have a nighttime wireless operator. (All passenger ships were subsequently required by law to have around-the-clock wireless.) But no one has ever sufficiently explained why the Californian’s captain, officers, and crew failed to respond to what seemed like obvious signs of distress. The second officer merely thought it strange that a ship would be firing rockets at night. If Lord had been given to large interpretations, he might have seen in the one ship a symbol of the urgent force of human striving and, in the other, the immovable resistance of sheer stupidity.

&nbs
p; About halfway through A Night to Remember—this is just after the ship has gone under, and an English socialite in a lifeboat turns to her secretary and sighs, “There is your beautiful nightdress gone”—Lord interrupts his narrative for a few pages of musings about what it all means. The themes he finds are characterized by an appealing combination of nostalgia and skepticism. One notion is that the sinking marked “the end of the old days” of nineteenth-century technological confidence, as well as of “noblesse oblige”; another is a sense that people behaved better back then, whether noblesse, steerage, or crew. When one officer was finally picked up from his lifeboat, he carefully stowed the sails and the mast before climbing aboard the rescue ship.

  But overshadowing everything is the problem of money and class. The Titanic’s story irresistibly reads as a parable about a gilded age in which death was anything but democratic, as was made clear by a notorious statistic: of the men in first class—who paid as much as $4,350 for a one-way fare at a time when the average annual household income in the U.S. was $1,800—the percentage of survivors was roughly the same as that of children in third class. For all his sentimentality about gentlemanly chivalry, Lord doesn’t shy away from what the sinking and its aftermath revealed about the era’s privileges and prejudices. “Even the passengers’ dogs were glamorous,” begins a tongue-in-cheek catalog in A Night to Remember that includes a Pekingese called Sun Yat-sen—part of the entourage of Henry Harper, of the publishing family, who, Lord laconically reports, had also picked up an Egyptian dragoman during his preembarkation travels, “as a sort of joke.” The book traces a damning arc from the special treatment enjoyed by the pets to the way in which third-class passengers were, at the end, “ignored, neglected, forgotten.”

  Even so, Lord kept his sermonizing to a minimum. His book ends on a grace note: the seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer climbing into a bunk on the Carpathia, which saved 706 of the Titanic’s 2,223 souls, and falling asleep after swallowing his first-ever glass of brandy. A Night to Remember left the love stories, stolen diamonds, handcuffs, axes, and underwater lock-picking to others.

  One sign of how efficiently Lord did his job is the air of embarrassment that hangs over the latest studies. John Maxtone-Graham, whose fond and thoroughgoing The Only Way to Cross, published in 1972, is considered a classic history of the ocean-liner era, interrupts his Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost Liner halfway through in order to admit that he’d spent a long time trying to avoid the subject altogether. John Welshman’s Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town aims to “both build upon and challenge ‘A Night to Remember.’ ” His subtitle is a phrase borrowed from Lord’s book.

  Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there seems to be no shortage of new angles. Because the allegedly unsinkable ship sank, its design and construction, as well as the number and disposition of the lifeboats, have often been the subject of debate. But Maxtone-Graham shifts the technological focus, by pointing up the crucial role of wireless communication. The Titanic was one of the first ships in history to issue an SOS. (“Send SOS,” the twenty-two-year-old Harold Bride, the Titanic’s junior wireless operator, who survived, told the twenty-five-year-old Jack Phillips, the senior officer, who died. “It’s the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it.”) And the sinking was among the first global news stories to be reported, thanks to wireless radio, more or less simultaneously with the events. One of the early headlines, which appeared as the rescue ship carried survivors to New York—“WATCHERS ANGERED BY CARPATHIA’S SILENCE”—suggests how fast we became accustomed to an accelerating news cycle. The book winningly portrays the wireless boys of a hundred years ago as the computer geeks of their day, from their extreme youth to their strikingly familiar lingo. “WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH U?” came one response to the Titanic’s distress call.

  In Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town, Welshman works hard to “re-balance” another narrative—the one about privilege. There’s a scene in a not at all bad 1979 TV movie about the sinking, SOS Titanic, in which a pair of second-class passengers standing on deck observe the struttings of the first-class neighbors to one side and the antics of some steerage passengers on the other. “This is a funny place to be,” one of them, an American schoolteacher played by Susan Saint James, remarks to the other, a British schoolmaster with whom she’s been flirting. “We’re in the middle.” Indeed. In his new book, Welshman persuasively argues that narratives about second-class passengers have tended to be neglected, lacking as they do the glamour of first class or the extreme pathos of steerage. Drawing in particular on the published memoirs of a British science master named Lawrence Beasley (he’s the character in the TV movie who gets a crush on Susan Saint James), the author shines welcome light on this overlooked corner of Titanic history. His technique of providing little biographies of characters in all classes probably tests the limits of the human-interest approach (“the export of butter from Finland was growing rapidly”), but it pays off in some wonderfully idiosyncratic details. Beasley felt an odd “sense of security” once the ship came to a stop, “like standing on a large rock in the middle of the ocean”; another survivor, a boy of nine at the time, realized long after settling with his family in the Midwest that he couldn’t bring himself to go to Detroit Tigers games because the noise that greeted home runs reminded him of the cries of the dying.

  The impulse to reappraise is not new. The best dissection of Titanic mythmaking is Steven Biel’s Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster, first published in 1996 and now updated for the centenary. Biel, a Harvard historian, showed how the Titanic’s story has been made to serve the purposes of everyone from antisuffragettes to the labor movement to Republicans. He argues that, while the sinking was “neither catalyst nor cause,” it “did expose and come to represent anxieties about modernity.” One of these was race: an assault on one of the wireless operators during the ship’s final minutes was blamed on a nonexistent “Negro” crew member. Another was the influx of “new,” non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants. Reports by crew members and coverage in the press revealed a prejudice against southern Europeans so pervasive that the Italian ambassador to the United States was moved to make a formal complaint.

  Sometimes, the fancy critical frameworks get out of hand: Welshman’s eagerness to talk about “the lifeboat as metaphor” seems a bit grotesque, in this case. One reason that the Titanic grips the imagination even today is, if anything, that it poses the big, enduring questions we associate with much larger historical events: as Nathaniel Philbrick writes in the introduction to a new edition of Lord’s book, “Who will survive?” and “What would I have done?” These hover over Frances Wilson’s How to Survive the Titanic; or, The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay, a biography of one of the most controversial figures in this story: the man who was the managing director of the company that owned the ship. Ismay was widely reviled for having entered a lifeboat rather than going down with his ship; worse, perhaps, it seems to have been he who pressed the Titanic’s experienced captain, E. J. Smith, to maintain a relatively high speed even though the ship had been receiving ice warnings.

  Twining Ismay’s story around a series of reflections on Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, a novel about a ship’s mate who abandons his vessel, Wilson at once confirms and undercuts the familiar cartoon of Ismay. To be sure, there are the sense of entitlement and the convenient ethics. “I cannot feel I have done anything wrong and cannot blame myself for the disaster,” he wrote to the widow of one drowned passenger. And yet Wilson deftly evokes the often startling emotional complexities beneath. Drawing on an unpublished correspondence, she reveals that, during the voyage, Ismay fell in love with young Jack Thayer’s mother, Marian, and paid her epistolary court after the sinking left her a widow. Even here, though, a self-serving coldness prevailed. When Marian asked for help with her insurance claim, Ismay replied, “I am deeply sorry for the loss you have sustained and of course I know any claim you put in would be absolutely right, but you must agree with
me that all claims must be dealt with on the same basis now don’t you?”

  If you were writing a morality play about class privilege, you couldn’t do better than to dream up a glamorous ship of fools and load it with everyone from the A-list to immigrants coming to America for a better life. The class issue is, indeed, one major reason the Titanic disaster has always been so ripe for dramatization. And yet the way we tell the story often reveals more about us than it does about what happened. If the indignant depictions of the class system in so many Titanic dramas coexist uneasily with their adoring depictions of upper-crust privilege, that, too, is part of the appeal: it allows us to demonstrate our liberalism even as we indulge our consumerism. In Cameron’s movie, you root for the steerage passenger who improbably pauses, during a last dash for a boat, to make a sardonic comment about the band as it famously played on (“Music to drown by—now I know I’m in first class”), but you’re also happy to lounge with Kate Winslet on a sunbathed private promenade deck while a uniformed maid cleans up on her hands and knees after breakfast.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, the strongest treatment of this issue was the 1958 film of Lord’s book, made in Britain—which is to say, by people who had a better feel for class distinctions than Lord (an American) did, and who were working at a time when the class system was under tremendous strain, and was the object of relentless examination in literature and theater. It says something that the only star in the film (the popular actor Kenneth More) played a comparatively lowly, though heroic, character—Second Officer Herbert Lightoller, who managed to keep thirty men alive while they all stood on an overturned lifeboat. The film, like the book, depends for its effectiveness on a straightforward presentation of information and an accumulation of damning detail. A short scene in which a group of Irish steerage passengers breaks through a metal gate as they make their way to the lifeboats—they suddenly find themselves in the first-class dining room, set for the next morning’s breakfast, and at first can barely bring themselves to penetrate this sacred space—tells you more about the class system than Cameron’s cruder populism does.