How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  PART II

  On Land

  And as the smart ship grew

  In stature, grace, and hue,

  In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

  Alien they seemed to be;

  No mortal eye could see

  The intimate welding of their later history,

  Or sign that they were bent

  By paths coincident

  On being anon twin halves of one august event,

  Till the Spinner of the Years

  Said ‘Now!’And each one hears,

  And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

  Thomas Hardy, ‘The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the Loss of the Titanic)’

  Chapter 5

  THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

  I had jumped… it seems…

  Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

  If we each have an author who is perfectly equipped to tell our tale, Joseph Conrad would be Ismay’s, and for a brief moment he was. Surrounded by newspapers in his house near Ashford in Kent, Conrad watched ‘the luckless Yamsi’, as he called him, begin his long descent. ‘This affair of the Titanic has upset me,’ he told his agent, ‘on general grounds, but also personally. I am not doing well.’ Conrad loathed the ‘festive’ air of the press as they celebrated the ‘heroism’ of the dead, and the satisfaction of the Americans that ‘this fatal mishap should strike the prestige of the greatest Merchant Service of the world’. But, with the loss of the manuscript of his story ‘Karain: A Memory’, which he was selling to John Quinn, the American collector of modernist writing, part of Conrad’s own life too had gone down with the ship. Because he had not insured the package, Conrad was now £40 out of pocket. ‘I depended on that sum,’ he complained.1

  Twelve years earlier in October 1899 — the month before Ismay took over the chairmanship of White Star Line — Conrad had written a despairing letter to Ted Sanderson, the son of the Reverend Lancelot Sanderson, Ismay’s former headmaster at Elstree.

  My dear Ted, You have much to forgive me: but try to imagine yourself trying your hardest to save the School (God forefend) from downfall, annihilation, and disaster: and the thing going on and on endlessly. That’s exactly how I am situated: and the worst is that the menace (in my case) does not seem to come from outside but from within: that the menace and danger or weakness are in me — in myself alone… I fear! I fear!… I am now trying to finish a story which began in the Oct. No. of Blackwood. I am at it day after day, and I want all day, every minute of a day, to produce a beggarly tale of words or perhaps to produce nothing at all. And when that is finished… I must go on, even go on at once and drag out of myself another 20,000 words, if the boy is to have his milk and I my beer (this is a figure of speech — I don’t drink beer, I drink weak tea, and yearn after dry champagne) and if the world is not absolutely to come to an end.2

  Being menaced by an internal danger or weakness — they are the same thing for Conrad — is his recurring theme, and again and again his writing reduces him to this condition of anguish. What he is forcing out of himself is a tale of a man who jumps from a sinking ship and lives on with ‘the acute consciousness of lost honour’.

  Jim, the son of a country parson, has a sense of maritime heroism born from ‘a course of light holiday literature’. He immerses himself in yarns of pirates and poop decks, crow’s nests and compasses, sailing ships and savages. He dreams of the ancient chivalry of the sea, he yearns for the endlessness of the horizon. He joins the Mercantile Marine where he proves himself ‘gentlemanly, steady, tractable’, and then takes a berth as chief mate on the Patna, a rusty Chinese-owned, Arab-chartered steamer, ‘worse than a condemned water tank’, carrying 800 pilgrims across the Indian Ocean from Singapore to Mecca.

  Jim’s world has become a ship, and he is the hero of his own adventure. Standing on the bridge of the Patna he watches the night descend ‘like a benediction’; he marvels at the ‘assurance of everlasting security’, the unbounded safety and peace shed from the rays of the stars. In the excess of his wellbeing, he knows there is no noble deed he will not do, no challenge he cannot face. Then, inexplicably, there is an accident of some sort. A faint noise, less than a sound, no more than a vibration, passes slowly beneath the steamer like a rumble of distant thunder and the ship quivers in response: ‘suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brink of yawning destruction.’ At the subsequent inquiry Jim will say, ‘She went over whatever it was as easy as a snake crawling over a stick.’

  The Patna begins to lean; 800 passengers are sleeping: on mats, on prayer carpets, on rough blankets, on bare planks, on decks, in dark corners all over the ship which the crew now believe will sink. There are only seven lifeboats; it is not possible to save everyone and so the Captain, a vulgar and obese German, decides to abandon ship with three of his equally shoddy officers, leaving the human cargo to their fate. The sea is as ‘still as a pond, deadly still, more still than ever sea was before’; the conditions are ‘rare enough to resemble a special arrangement of malevolent providence’ and the crew are struggling like lunatics to release the lifeboat without waking the pilgrims.

  Standing apart from them all, Jim has not yet been tested ‘by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man’. The crew are animals, he has always known that — ‘those men did not belong to the world of heroic adventure’. Jim has always seen himself as separate, as singular; he recognises his superiority. The time has now come to prove himself the man of predestined courage he feels himself to be. This is the moment he has been preparing for since he was a child. But instead of rising to the well-rehearsed occasion, instead of taking the situation in hand, Jim does nothing, says nothing, he has no idea what to do: instead he stands stock-still in a daze on the starboard side of the bridge while the crew struggle with the lifeboat on the port side, expecting at any moment the sea to submerge them all. Should he cut down the other lifeboats so they can float off the ship when she eventually founders, giving some of the passengers a chance to live? Should he wake the pilgrims to tell them that they are about to die? ‘Where was the kindness in making crazy with fright all those people I could not save single-handed — that nothing could save?’ he reasons. Jim delays acting; he is paralysed: all he can think is ‘eight hundred people, seven boats and not enough time, eight hundred people, seven boats and not enough time’. ‘You think me a cur for standing there, but what would you have done?’ he later asks.

  The renegade lifeboat is dropping down to the water and the absconding crew, in their sleep suits, are shouting up not for Jim, but for their friend George to join them. George, on the deck, falls down dead from a heart attack. The men in the boat below are calling ‘Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!’ It is pitch black, there is a squall approaching; the Patna starts to plunge, and suddenly Jim moves. ‘Something had started him off at last, but of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility, he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low.’ What happens next is against his conscious volition. ‘I had jumped… it seems,’ he recalls. He jumps from a height he can never scale again, he jumps into ‘an everlasting deep hole’, and as he jumps he begins to unravel.

  Whatever pushes him off the Patna, Jim now knows that he is not and never will be the man who ‘saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through surf with a line… always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book’. As the lifeboat pulls away, he listens for the cries of 800 people being ‘pounced upon in the night by a sudden and violent death’, but hears nothing. There is nothing but silence coming from the wreck, and it is too dark to see it go down. It is too dark for the crew to see that it is not George sitting with them in the lifeboat but Jim, and when they realise their friend has been replaced — they do not yet know that George is dead — they accuse Jim of being a coward, and ‘
too much of a bloomin’ gentleman’ to help to lower the lifeboat which has now saved his life. ‘Come out of your trance did you?’ one of the engineers mocks, ‘to sneak in? I wonder you had pluck enough to jump. You ain’t wanted here.’ Nor does Jim want to be there; he is not one of them. He thinks about jumping again, this time off the lifeboat and swimming back to the site of the ship to drown alongside the pilgrims, but calms himself with the thought that it will be too late. Around him the crew discuss what they have just done ‘as though they had left behind them nothing but an empty ship’.

  A ‘mysterious cable message’ then arrives in Bombay. It contains an ‘ugly fact’, a ghastly joke: by some extraordinary chance, the Patna did not go down but was rescued and towed by a French gunboat to Aden with all her passengers alive, by which point the crew, now on shore, have reported that she ‘sank like lead’. The result is a maritime scandal, and the story will become legendary, a topic of debate in every port and harbour for years to come.

  The official inquiry into the case of the Patna is held in August 1883 in a police court in Bombay. Because the Captain and the crew have once again fled, Jim is the only one left to appear in the witness box. ‘I might jump,’ he says, ‘but I don’t run away’, and he stands there defiant; he has done nothing, he tells himself, of which to be ashamed. Crowds fill the courtroom, spellbound by the tall, young, white man; everyone connected with the sea is here, no one has talked of anything but the Patna since the incident became known. They have turned up today not to discover how the ship was damaged; no one is interested in the ship herself — it is assumed that she went over some submerged wreck. They are here to see someone ‘trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be’.

  The inquiry is the first time Jim has spoken since his jump, and when he answers the questions put to him, questions aiming at facts — ‘as if facts could explain anything!’ — the words he utters appear meaningless to him. Jim feels that he will never speak again. He is tempted to cry out: ‘What’s the good of this, what’s the good!’ when, amongst the myriad faces on the benches below, he catches the intelligent, interested gaze of Captain Marlow, who alone seems aware of the young man’s struggle. Marlow asks him to dinner at the Malabar Hotel that night where, over coffee and cigars, Jim exclaims: ‘I would like somebody to understand — somebody — one person at least! You! Why not you?’ He can never go home now, Jim says; the scandal will have been in all the papers and his father, who has high ideals and fixed moral standards, will not understand. A few days before he boarded the Patna, Jim had received a letter from his father instructing him, from the ‘inviolable shelter of his book-lined, faded and comfortable study’, not to give way to temptation, never ‘do anything which you believe to be wrong’. The parson’s quiet corner of England is as clear and innocent as a child’s gaze. Jim has for ever exiled himself but he cares nothing for that. He is obsessed, Marlow realises, not by what he has lost but by the immensity of what he would have gained had he stayed on board the Patna and become the hero of the hour: ‘Ah! what a chance missed!’ Jim cries, ‘My God! What a chance missed!’

  While Jim wants only to get away from his wretched story, Marlow’s interest in his case has just begun. Jim is the loneliest man in the world but he is also, Marlow sees, ‘symbolic’, and he closes in on Jim’s consciousness like a surgeon with a scalpel. He subjects it to the last analysis, he turns it around and around and inside out, he holds it upside down, he takes it apart, he approaches it head on, askance, up close, from a distance; he looks at Jim’s lost opportunity from every possible angle, examines Jim’s future prospects in every available light, wrings out each emotion, gathers alternative perspectives. He weighs to the last scruple Jim’s noble intentions and balances them against his feeble performance, he weeds out what has lain below, unwatched and half-suspected ‘like a snake beneath a stone’, and envelops the whole in a language of exquisite subtlety and precision. Marlow alone sees that when Jim jumps from the Patna he confronts, for the first time, himself. ‘I had jumped… it seems’, Jim says; his jump is a non-jump: a movement of a muscle took place but Jim was not aware of it. It was George and not Jim who was supposed to jump but George had dropped down dead, and for an instant Jim identified himself with the dead man and did what he would have done. Something inside him had jumped, while Jim himself remained still. For the rest of his life, and for the rest of the book, Jim is exorcising, while Marlow examines, this stranger within.

  Lord Jim, as Conrad finally called his tale, began life in April 1898 as ‘Jim: A Sketch’. It was based on an incident which became the focus of interest in Singapore in 1880: the SS Jeddah, carrying 950 pilgrims to Mecca, sprang a leak and was abandoned by her crew. The officers reported the ship lost, to then hear that she had been towed to Aden with all her passengers alive. The scandal became the subject of an inquiry in Aden and a debate in the Singapore Legislative Assembly. The Straits Times reported in September 1880 that ‘public excitement has risen to fever pitch’ in ‘surveying the conduct’ of the Jeddahs captain and crew. The story was also vividly and extensively covered in the English newspapers read by Conrad in London as he was waiting for a passage to Sydney. ‘DREADFUL DISASTER AT SEA: LOSS OF NEARLY 1,000 LIVES’, ran the Globes headline when it was still believed that the Jeddah had sunk. ‘We trust that no Englishman was among the boatload of cowards who left the Jeddah and her thousand passengers to fend for herself,’ wrote the Daily Chronicle when the truth was revealed. The crew, Conrad believed, had betrayed ‘a tradition… as imperative as any guide on earth could be’. But it was the possibility of betrayal, the proximity we all have to failure by which he was fascinated.

  ‘I always suspected’, Conrad said, that ‘I might be no good.’ He took as his model for Jim the Jeddahs chief mate, Augustine Podmore Williams, the strapping young son of an English country parson who had, like Jim, started as a cadet on a training ship. Williams, who claimed that he did not jump but was ‘thrown overboard’ by the pilgrims, was severely condemned by the inquiry but stayed in the East and ‘worked out his salvation’ as a water clerk, marrying a sixteen-year-old Singaporean and fathering sixteen children. He faced out his crime as a gentleman should, and it was the manner of his living on which interested Conrad as much as the loss of his honour. In his preface to Lord Jim, Conrad writes that ‘one sunny morning, in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead’, he saw Augustine Podmore Williams ‘pass by — appealing — significant — under a cloud — perfectly silent. Which is as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was “one of us”.’ The biographer Norman Sherry is convinced that Conrad not only saw but spoke to Williams, and ‘heard his history from the man himself. I feel certain that it was his intimate knowledge of Williams’s life and character, in fact, which led Conrad “to seek fit words for his meaning” with all the sympathy of which he was capable.’3

  Conrad had been working as a writer for four years when he began his sketch of Jim, which was to be a short story of 20,000 words and completed, he anticipated, by April 1899. But he wrote Heart of Darkness that year instead, and when the April deadline passed for the Jim story the submission date shifted to July, and then August. ‘I am utterly weary of thinking, of writing, of seeing, of feeling, of living,’ Conrad complained to John Galsworthy in September. The first four chapters of Lord Jim were published that October in the literary monthly Blackwood’s and Conrad thought that maybe another four instalments would be enough to round the thing off. But in November he revised his opinion: the book would be complete in five instalments; it would be twelve chapters long and ready by the end of December. The New Year dawned and Conrad had now written eighteen chapters; he would finish by the end of the month. By February he had completed twenty chapters and was no longer forcing the words out of himself. ‘It comes! it comes’, Conrad cried; the writing was taking him over, the book was writing him. He had thrown himself down
a building with no ground floor. A 20,000-word story had doubled in length, then doubled again, then again. It was changing shape daily; Conrad was describing, as the reviewer for the New York Times Book Review put it, everything in three dimensions. He was greedy for words, he piled them high and stretched them out, he loaded the sentences down, stuffing them to the limit like bags which had to be got across the room before they burst apart. In April 1900 he believed he had reached the end but the writing kept on coming and in May he sent off chapter thirty-one.

  On 9 July, he announced that he had finished; he announced it again on 12 July, and then, on 14 July, he sent his wife, Jessie, and young son, Borys, to London before sitting down at 9 a.m. to write for twenty-one hours. Ink splattered across page after page, paper fell in piles to the floor, the room was a fug of smoke, the sun rose and then sank, and he put down his pen only when he had drained from Jim’s jump the last drop of meaning. ‘And that’s the end,’ Conrad wrote as he completed chapter forty-five. ‘He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.’

  As Conrad gathered the pages together there came over the house a great silence. This is how he described the scene to John Galsworthy: ‘Cigarette ends growing into a mound similar to a cairn over a dead hero. Moon rose over the barn, looked in at the window and climbed out of sight. Dawn broke, brightened. I put the lamp out and went on, with the morning breeze blowing the sheets of MS all over the room. Sun rose. I wrote the last word and went into the dining room. Six o’clock I shared a piece of cold chicken with Escamillo [the dog] (who was very miserable and in want of sympathy, having missed the child dreadfully all day). Felt very well, only sleepy; had a bath at seven and at 1.30 was on my way to London.’4 Lord Jim was published three months later to a mixture of astonished and exasperated reviews. Like Conrad’s other novels and stories, it walked a tightrope between high modernism and light reading, the existential and the ripping yarn. It appealed to schoolboys who read nothing but the Boy’s Own Paper and professors who placed it alongside their copies of Henry James.