A Q&A with Frances Wilson, author of
HOW TO SURVIVE THE TITANIC, OR THE SINKING OF J. BRUCE ISMAY (Harper/HarperCollins Publishers; on-sale: October 11, 2011)
Q.: How did the idea for your book originate?
A. The book began as a short piece I was asked to submit to a newly formed publishing house called Notting Hill Editions, who specialize in 30,000 essays. At that point my subject was the survivors’ responses to the Titanic as she went down – how mesmerized by her beauty everyone was, despite the fact that it represented the death of their husbands, fathers, sons, and the loss of everything they owned. J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman and managing director of the White Star Line of steamships and the owner of the Titanic, was the only one in the lifeboats not to watch as the ship went down, and I was struck by the man who kept his back to the scene and reminded of the many myths and tales in which characters are told not to look behind them or something bad will happen. I then became interested in the idea of having an experience which cannot be turned into a narrative, which is too overwhelming to be absorbed into consciousness. At this point I realized that I was not writing an essay, but something bigger – closer to a case study, although even then I wasn’t entirely sure, until Conrad came into the picture, what sort of book was emerging.
Q.: Your book is the only history of the Titanic that focuses on J. Bruce Ismay – what made you decide to make his story so prominent? And, how else is your book different from others?
A. The story of the Titanic is the story of J. Bruce Ismay. Ismay was the owner of the Titanic and the man whose decision it had been to provide 20 lifeboats for 2, 800 people. ‘Why clutter the decks’, he argued at planning meetings, ‘when the ship is herself a lifeboat?’ Minutes before she sank on the night of 14th April 1912, Ismay jumped into one of the last boats to leave; by the time the Titanic survivors had reached New York, he had become, as one headline put it, ‘The most talked of man in all the world’, How to Survive the Titanic examines Ismay’s life up to, and immediately after, the moment he left the ship, giving detailed attention to his interrogations at the US and British Inquiries.
Ismay was one of only 300 men to survive the Titanic, most of whom were crew. Why, when 1,200 other male passengers were lighting up their last cigarettes and preparing to die as heroes, did he decide to take his chances with the women and children? By way of exploring Ismay’s sense of lost honor, I refer to the rarely discussed essays on the Titanic by Joseph Conrad, and also to Conrad’s novel, Lord Jim, in which Ismay’s story is uncannily anticipated. So rather than using fact to help explain fiction, I use fiction to throw light on fact.
I was helped in my research by the Ismay family themselves, particularly his granddaughter Pauline Matarasso (now in her eighties), to whom the book is dedicated. The family gave me access to archives of manuscripts and photographs, none of which have been seen by any other Titanic historian, and I was also given access to a cache of previously unseen love letters written by Ismay to one of the female passengers on the Titanic, who he had met in the days prior to the collision.
Q.: How long have you been at work on this book? Did the book involve special research?
A.: It took two and a half years to research and write. The reason why I wrote the book so quickly (it would normally take me between three and four years to produce a book) is probably because I have been thinking about the Titanic for most of my life; I remember being fascinated as a child by the strange beauty of the sinking, and the hellishness of being a survivor. Even so, I was astonishing by the way in which the writing took over me. I have never written about a man before, and certainly never written about a ship, but found it easier to enter Ismay’s world than I did the world of Dorothy Wordsworth or some of the other women whose lives I have researched. I felt strongly that Ismay was Everyman.
As I am very much a literary writer - I tend to write about people who have already written about themselves in the form of memoirs, diaries, and letters – I felt that the best way to approach Ismay was through his own voice in the enquiry proceedings. What struck me was his inability to find words for his experience, the fact that he was the only survivor who didn’t have a story to tell. It was his silence which then became my subject, and by way of unlocking his narrative I tried to imagine what Conrad’s hero Marlow would do with Ismay, and soon I realized that Lord Jim was the heart of the book. So the research involved both archival work and literary criticism; I needed to get the facts absolutely right and then put Ismay into a context which made sense psychologically.
I relied a good deal on the Titanic community – who exist on-line – and Conrad scholars, who I would meet over lunch in London. Both groups were enormously helpful, and I made friends who I will certainly keep in touch with for the rest of my life.
Chance also played a significant part in the writing process, which is ironic considering that chance is one of the book’s themes. I had been working on the book for a year when I discovered, chatting to a woman at a party in Oxford which I almost didn’t go to, that Ismay had fallen in love with one of the Titanic’s prominent first class passengers, Mrs. Marian Thayer. The woman I was talking to was married to Marian Thayer’s great grandson, and told me about the letters which Ismay had written to Mrs. Thayer. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. That conversation changed the direction of the book. Not only do the letters tell a tale of thwarted love, but they also give direct insight into the mind of a man held responsible for the death of 1,500 people in his care.
Q. Why do you think the Titanic is such an enduringly fascinating subject for some many people? There have been many horrific ship wrecks and other major disasters over the years – why does this one stand out and last in the public’s consciousness?
A. All of us are on the Titanic. We are currently watching Rupert Murdoch's own Titanic moment (the phone hacking allegations are, the media tell us, ‘the tip of the iceberg’) just as we were all on board when the world economy hit its own iceberg last year. Italy’s Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti has just warned other European governments of the fallout of the Euro crisis: ‘There should be no illusions about who will be saved. Like on the Titanic, the first class passengers won't be able to save themselves’, he said, referring to the Germans. ‘Either we move forward or we go down’. It is the proximity we each have to total destruction at the moment of greatest glory which keeps us so attached to the tale of the biggest and most beautiful ship ever built: as the satirical magazine, The Onion, put it in a spoof headline: ‘World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg’, and whether the Titanic is read as a tale of hubris, of art versus nature, or of the end of an era, the metaphor of the ‘unsinkable’ ship driving herself into a random block of ice is inexhaustible in its possibilities. The reason we cannot stop talking about the Titanic is because the Titanic is about everything. She is a model of the psyche: with her three separate levels - steerage, second- and first-class – the Titanic recalls Freud’s description of the human subject as composed of an id, ego and super-ego. The id is the pleasure-seeking, irresponsible, all demanding child in us; the ego is the rational adult, balancing the needs of the id with the demands of reality, the super-ego is the moral and ethical overlord, the internal headmistress. Those in steerage tend to be represented in the Titanic films as the primitive and partying Irish who need guidance in a crisis, second-class passengers are seen as responding in the ‘decent’ way of obedient citizens, while the first class males, who put on their dinner jackets and went down like gentlemen, provided the model of leadership, of ‘how to be’.
The ship’s tiered structure also makes it a microcosm of the Edwardian social class system. But with the suggestion that billionaires and stowaways stood shoulder to shoulder on the deck before lying side by side on the sea bed, the Titanic soon became an image of a fairer society.
But the main reason we remain obsessed by the Titanic rather than by other ship wrecks is because she gave us our last moment of sublimity. With her excessive size, her excessive splendour, the excessive number of people who died (1,503), the enormity of the horror of it all and extraordinary and excessive climatic circumstances of her death, the life and death of the Titanic are described by those who survived her in terms of the sublime rather than the beautiful. When the Titanic went down, we experienced for the last time the sensation described by Freud as ‘that Oceanic feeling,’ the thrill of realising our own littleness. Today, it is everything else that is little. The Brobdingnanian world of the Edwardians has shrunk to the size of iPods and memory sticks, things we can put in our ears or our pockets. It is no longer the sublime but the beautiful we seek to consume: while the Eighteenth century searched the landscape, concert halls and galleries for experiences that were raw and boundless and contained terror at their centre, it is now smallness we want. Cathedrals are sublime and churches are beautiful. The Titanic was a cathedral; she was the St Peter’s of ships.
Q.: Can you talk about the connection between Ismay and Joseph Conrad – Conrad’s writing, his personality/persona and own personal history, their parallel stories, the Lord Jim book and how it parlays with Ismay’s own story? How did all of this come to be in your book? Did you start out with this in mind, or not?
A. The Titanic was carrying the manuscript of one of Conrad’s stories, ‘Karain: A Memory’, when she went down. ‘Karain’ was the precursor to Conrad’s great novel Lord Jim, in which Ismay’s fate is anticipated, and this is one of many coincidental connections between the two men. Born five years apart, both lived lives which broke in half in the middle - they each spent the first part of their lives at sea and the second part on land, recovering. They both had breakdowns, they were both outsiders, they both lived in exile.
As a former mariner, Conrad knew precisely what the sea did to the psyches of those who made their living by her and he had long felt disillusioned by the replacement of sail by monstrous steam gin-palaces. He wrote four articles about the Titanic (two of which are lost) in which he expressed sympathy for Ismay and horror at his treatment in the Inquiries. What is striking, however, is that Conrad never mentioned the uncanny resemblance between Ismay’ story and that of Lord Jim: the connection was noted only by the journalist for the New York Times who wrote Ismay’s obituary in 1937. It was the relation between Ismay and Lord Jim which inspired my book - without Conrad's commentary on Jim’s loss of honour I would not have been able to find my way into Ismay’s own heart of darkness. I realised that Ismay needed a Marlow figure (Conrad’s psychoanalytic-mariner, who appears as the narrator in four novels) in whom he could confide and that as his biographer. I needed to be that person – I had to do for Ismay what Conrad did for Jim. The book is as much about Conrad as it is about Ismay. When Ismay jumped from the Titanic, he fell into Conrad’s world of fugitives and loners, and it is through Conrad's eyes that I try to see him. The phrase Marlow uses of Jim, is that same as the one I use of Ismay: he is ‘one of us’.
Q.: If you could construct an interview for yourself about your book, what other questions would you want to be asked?
A.: Here are a few potential interview questions that I think would make for some interesting discussion: 1. What would you do, if you were on a sinking ship with hundreds of panicking people and there was one place left in the last lifeboat? 2. Is it possible to write well about a figure towards whom you feel no sympathy? 3. Should women and children go first?